She’s wired and Eddy knows she’ll have spent the early hours going over and over her arguments. He feels weak and unprepared, so he nods to show he accepts everything she’s said. Anna kisses him and says, bouncy again, ‘I’m going to get in the shower.’
Eddy leans over for his tea and, as he sips, acknowledges that he’s not feeling good. Not feeling good at all.
In their en suite, he hears Anna turn the shower on. He shared too much last night and now he’s hungover from too much honesty; his thoughts feel like scuttling mice in his head. Did he really have to tell Anna everything? He loves her – of course he does – but she isn’t known for her discretion and, besides, her loyalty lies more with Rosie than with Seb. But shouldn’t Eddy’s loyalty also be with Rosie? After all, Seb has acted and is acting like an absolute idiot. Last night, he felt so connected to Anna, good about himself, but now, in the cool, blue morning light, the revelations feel too real, too grubby, the consequences too big to comprehend. Next to him, on the duvet, Anna’s phone starts to ring. Eddy looks at the screen, the letter ‘V’ illuminated, covered in hearts. With a groan, he pulls the duvet over his head and waits for the noise to end.
Chapter 7
It’s raining again, so everyone’s hurrying, not wanting to stop and chat, when Abi goes to pick up Margot from school. It’s sad – the community she once yearned for while living in London is now something she’s actively hiding from.
After the incident at Rosie’s house, and Anna’s stiff voice-note telling her that she no longer needs Abi to take Albie home after school, she wonders if she’s someone who could ever feel like they belong in a community like Waverly. Anna who had only the other day been overly matey and keen to be friends, now sounded like she was firing a nanny. Abi replied simply with a thumbs-up.
Why should she care about Anna’s opinion of her, anyway? It was odd, Anna asking for help when their kids aren’t even in the same year. It felt more like a ploy to get inside Abi’s house, a chance to get the scoop on the newcomer. She finds Anna uneasy, nosy in a way that feels untrustworthy.
But still, Abi spent the whole of yesterday afternoon cleaning the maisonette ahead of the visit, scrubbing the mouldy grout around the kitchen units with an old toothbrush. She even hammered a few framed prints on to the walls, including her favourite, a poster advertising a Picasso exhibition from the 1960s. While the flat will never be beautiful, it is at least clean and warm. It’s as good as she can manage. Better, she reminds herself, than anything she ever had growing up.
Margot takes the news about Albie with surprising stoicism, when Abi tells her by the school gates. She’d been so excited about having someone over, something she’d never been able to do when they lived in London. But Margot simply thinks for a few seconds, before shrugging her little shoulders and asking practically, ‘Can you do my shop with me, then?’
At home, she peels off her raincoat and school shoes in the tiny hall and thunders up the thin stairs to the cardboard shopfront she painted this morning, while Abi makes a start on the fish pie she’s planned for dinner. ‘Shop’s open, Mum!’
Abi spends the next hour carefully being instructed on exactly what to say when buying imaginary vegetables and being told off by Margot when she gets it wrong. When Abi was younger, being ‘nice’ was the most important thing and it meant being quiet and doing whatever someone else wanted. Abi learnt to play on her own, so she could make her own rules. She didn’t know then, of course, that these were skills she’d depend on as an adult.