When I Ran Away by Ilona Bannister (best books to read now .TXT) 📗

nightmare instead of you? If you’re worried about your own children then work that out for yourselves, because what I do for my family is none of your concern.”

Silence. Imogen and Bitchy/Tamsin have overstepped, but so has Sukie. That’s always how this conversation goes. Each mother tears the other mother down, maximizing the other woman’s guilt and minimizing her sacrifice. Bitchy/Tamsin brings an end to it. “You’re right. It’s not. I’m sure it will be wonderful for you, Sukie. Shall we get the bill? I have to get back to the office.”

Imogen and Bitchy leave the table, but I look over my shoulder and see that Sukie didn’t go with them. My choices are: a) keep my back turned until I know she’s gone so that she never has to know that I just heard all of that; b) wait for her to go to the bathroom, then make my escape; or c) get my stuff and get ready to leave in such a way that she sees my profile and then she has to be the one to say hello first. Then I pretend I didn’t realize she was here even though Bitchy might as well have been screaming “Sukie!” through a bullhorn.

I decide on option b), until I hear her say to the waiter, “May I have a large glass of rosé, please?” Then I hear the muffled crying. She’s crying. Shit.

I bite the bullet and turn around. “Hey, hey, Sukie?” She looks up, red eyes, tears she’s trying to hide but can’t.

“Oh, yes, hello. I didn’t see you there. How are you?”

“I’m fine. You OK?” I ask, pulling Rocky out of the high chair and onto my lap, shifting over to sit at her table before she can object.

“Oh, yes, I’m fine.”

Her wine arrives and I say, “Could I get the same, please? You don’t mind if I join you, do you? Actually, even if you do mind, I have a policy about not leaving crying women to drink alone.” She gives me a faint smile. She needs a friend, whether she wants one or not.

She says, “I’m sorry, it’s my sisters. I’ve just had an upsetting conversation.”

“Yeah, I know, uh, I was sitting right there, and, well, if you don’t mind me saying, I think they were really hard on you.”

There’s a momentary silence and then she says, “They were really hard on me, weren’t they?” She feels validated now. “They’re my older sisters, Imogen and Tamsin. They’re both very successful. They think I’m making a mistake leaving work.”

“You’re leaving your job for good?”

“Well, sort of. My plan was to go back at six months, which is now, and I’ve asked for a further three for the moment but I’m almost certain that I’m not going back at all. I know we have twelve months legally but I don’t want to get caught up in having to repay any maternity pay or anything like that so Gareth and I have been talking. I’m pretty sure that’s what I want. And they don’t want me back anyway. I thought it would be straightforward. Have the baby. Go back to work. But, then…it’s not how you think it will be…”

“Yeah, it’s harder than it looks. It was really hard when I was working and I had Johnny on my own. It’s not easy.”

She looks off in the distance. I shouldn’t have interrupted. There’s a long pause, a silence I don’t know how to interpret, space I don’t know how to fill. This happens to me a lot. My speech has a different rhythm, a beat too fast but a thought behind, or sometimes ahead, but either way I get cues wrong for when it’s my turn to talk. So I wait. I think she needs me to just sit here.

I have a little exchange with Rocky. A single tear makes a slow march down her face. She says, quietly, “We couldn’t conceive and then when we did, they didn’t survive. One went early on and one at twenty-two weeks. And then one day I was thirty-seven, then thirty-eight and it had been years and no baby. We started IVF. It was brutal. I couldn’t focus. I fumbled and made mistakes. Cost the firm money. I was signed off for a while and then came back again but then another round of treatments failed. I couldn’t cope. When we finally were pregnant with Humphrey, I rebounded. Redeemed myself. But it was all a bit too late by then.” I lean forward to touch her hand but then pull back because that’s not the right thing to do. That’s not what she wants. She takes a long drink.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t know. You never said anything at tea when Becky talked about her fertility stuff.” I bounce Rocky on my knee and pretend to fuss with his clothes while I wait for her to speak. I try not to look at her directly because she’s skittish; like a bird that you want to see up close but if you move too quick she’ll fly away. She doesn’t like being so personal.

“Well, it’s private, isn’t it? I can’t bear the way Becky goes on about it. It was painful and horrid for me. It brought me Humphrey but everything I went through…” She waves a hand like she can’t bring herself to say the words. We both take another drink, contemplate our glasses. All these months I thought her life was a page in the Boden catalogue. A slim thirty-something woman leaping from the curb onto the street in coral heels swinging an azure, leather shoulder bag on her way to buy flowers at the market. She has that white British skin that thirty years from now will be thin as paper, but her wrinkles will be pleasant, symmetrical. She’s pretty. But if you look at her long enough the sadness of losing her babies is there, in the faint lines at the edge of each eye. Poor Sukie. I