“People have been great. Frances’s parents live in the Midlands. They offered to move here but it was too much to ask of them. They need to stay near their friends in Frances’s childhood home—I mean, they lost a daughter.” He shakes his head. “Her sister, Paula, has been very good. A big help. She’s North London.” People think losing a child is the worst thing that can happen in the world. I glance at the young boys—who are absorbed in trailing Lego cars through apple juice puddles and therefore not listening to our snatched and whispered conversations—and wonder if the worst thing in the world is losing your mother. I suppose it depends on the age of the person who dies. It isn’t a competition. Grief seeps everywhere. “Her friends from the various baby groups have been very kind. They’ve done a lot of pickups and drop-offs but there comes a point when everyone has to get back to their own lives.” He shrugged. Not self-pitying. Just a fact. He dug out a pea that Seb was trying to put up his nose, he reached for the kitchen roll, mopped up the apple juice, refilled Oli’s water glass. “Tell me about you? What do management consultants do exactly?”
I realized he needed a change of subject. Talking about death is exhausting, even for the bereaved. I started to tell him about efficient supply chain management, integrated IT systems and maximizing efficiency with human resource. He laughed and told me I sounded like a corporate brochure, but he wasn’t mocking, he was kindly, interested. “Tell me exactly what your day looks like. Talk me through it.”
So I did. Blow by blow. Each telephone conversation, the endless research behind the presentations, which I sometimes don’t get to present anyhow because someone more senior takes the credit. I told him about the long hours and weeks being sent away from your home. I told him how intense it gets with the people on your team, how we’re like a family for a few short months, living in one another’s pockets, but then, when we are seconded elsewhere, we might never speak again. I confessed that it is a little lonely, working in this nomadic way.
Mark listened carefully, asking the type of questions that proved as much. “Wow, I’m so impressed. I just couldn’t work in an office. I’d go mad. But I’m always so in awe of people who get their heads around business stuff,” he laughed, good-naturedly. It was refreshing. Often, I have to play down my work because some men are threatened by a woman with a higher earning capacity than theirs. “Do you enjoy it?” Mark asked, as though this was all that mattered.
“I do, on the whole. It is stimulating. It pays well, which is great because it means I can treat my mum to the odd holiday. We grew up just the two of us, so I still sort of feel responsible for her happiness a lot of the time. And her bills. Earning well goes some way toward helping with that.”
I don’t know what made me admit this. Normally I go out of my way to hide my mother’s neediness. Mark just nodded. “That’s kind of you. Do you travel abroad at all with work?”
“No, mostly in the UK. There are opportunities to transfer to overseas offices, but that’s never appealed to me. Well, again, my mum.” I shrugged. “UK travel is disruptive enough. I haven’t bought my own place. I suppose I could afford something but it’s more of a question of where do I put down my roots?” I realized that I might just have confessed to waiting to find the right man to help me make the decision about the right place and so I hurried on. “I’m gunning for a senior manager role at the end of this year. If that promotion happens, a decade of hard graft will have been worth it.” I wanted to ask what Frances did for a living, if she worked out of the house, that is, but there is no reason to assume she would because she had two young boys. I held back because I thought it might seem impertinent.
“Frances was a teacher,” said Mark, as though he had read my mind. “Although her career was a bit stop-start. Interrupted by two maternity leaves, two bouts of cancer.”
After tea Mark and Oli kicked a football around the garden. Seb wanted to join in, but Mark was being cautious because of his wound. Seb started to cry with tiredness and frustration. I instinctively picked him up, hitched him onto my hip and he rewarded my boldness by immediately settling, nuzzling into my neck. Mark looked relieved, grateful. I left just before the boys’ bath time.
The second time I went around for tea, we had lasagna and a glass of wine.
“Are you dating him?” Fiona wanted to know.
“No.”
“But you want to?”
“Yes,” I muttered. I didn’t want to look as though I was dissatisfied with our friendship, because I wasn’t. Not exactly. I was enjoying what Mark was able to offer, I couldn’t expect more. “But it’s not like that. He’s grieving. I’m—”
“Handy.”
I scowled at Fiona.
“Well, you are. Let’s be honest, an extra pair of hands at bath time and bedtime. Least the kids’ bedtime,” she added with a wink, letting me know she didn’t want to cause offense, she was just looking out for me.
“We’re friends and I’m fine with that. I like going to the swimming baths and the park with them at the weekend. It feels really comfortable being around them all.”
“Just don’t let yourself be friend-zoned. Mark is really hot and there aren’t many hot men around. All these nonsexual playdates where you play happy families might be sending out the wrong message.”
After two months of “playdates,” Mark kissed me. We had been to Legoland and the boys had fallen asleep in the back of the car on the journey home. We put them to bed clothed, not bothering to wake them to clean their teeth.
“Stay for a glass of wine.” I couldn’t tell from his tone whether it was a question or an instruction. It didn’t matter, I wasn’t going to say no. He got the wine out of the fridge but before he even opened the bottle, he marched over to me, put one of his hands on the back of my head and pulled my lips onto his. It was intense, explosive. The sort of kiss that oozes energy, purpose. In seconds I was bent over the breakfast bar, my knickers around my ankles. It was the right side of rough. It was fast, dirty, exciting.
Not friend-zoned then.
5
Leigh
“Mark is a good man, one of the best.” My mother’s voice oozes approval and relief. I smile, also relieved to have pleased her. Passed the test that neither of us thought I was ever going to get to sit. A man wants to marry me, a good man. I will be a wife. I’ve made it. “You are so lucky,” she adds, a hint of wistfulness in her voice. I take a deep breath; the room has no oxygen. Never before has my mother called me lucky. I’ve longed for her to but the pronouncement, now it has come, seems bitter.
For as long as I can remember my mother has firmly asserted that we are unlucky. She and I. She said it often when I was growing up. Repeatedly. Small inconveniences would weigh on her disproportionately, but at the same time she seemed to expect and certainly accept the bothers, upsets and troubles, never challenging them or offering solutions, because she considered us unlucky. It was just the way it was. Not something to be contested, or even resented, something I ought to accept. My unluckiness. Goods arriving through the post, faulty or damaged, never got returned, she didn’t trust the retailer to send a refund so she would make do with whatever she’d received. When she discovered dampness or insufferably noisy neighbors in a rental, she didn’t question landlords but instead shrugged and just complained of endless chest infections that she said were expected—and indeed they were under those conditions. I did not get into the outstanding comprehensive school in my catchment area but had to get on a bus to travel to a much bigger, rougher one several miles away; however, she didn’t appeal the decision, the way some mothers successfully did, instead she just accepted it.