‘You don’t need to tell me twice.’ Katie plonked herself down on the picnic blanket and helped George to pluck the containers of food from the tote bag.
‘There’s enough here to feed an army,’ Frankie said after container after container was removed from the bag and placed on the blanket.
‘Luckily, I’m as hungry as an entire army.’ Katie placed the final container on the blanket while George pulled out the bottle of sparkling flavoured water.
‘Dig in!’ George indicated the array of tubs before she started to pour the drinks. She could feel herself glowing from within as food was tasted and murmurs of appreciation filled their little space.
‘This is amazing.’ Katie held up a skewer, stripped of all but the final honey and mustard prawn. ‘Do you cook for a living?’
George shook her head, her cheeks warming at the compliment. ‘I’m a cleaner. But I did used to be in charge of the kitchen of a teashop, years and years ago. And I’d been to catering college before that.’
‘What made you give it up?’ Katie pulled the prawn off the skewer and popped it into her mouth, closing her eyes to savour the flavours.
‘It was only supposed to be temporary. I loved my job but when my granny got ill and needed help in her haberdashery shop, I had to step in.’ George shrugged. ‘I knew nothing about haberdashery, but my granny’s shop meant the world to her. She left it to me when she died, but she never wanted me to run it myself. I was supposed to sell up and follow my own dreams. Which I did, just not the dream my granny was thinking of at the time.’
Frankie helped herself to the potato salad, forking a generous helping onto her plate. ‘What was your dream?’
George opened the zip of her coat slightly. They may have been enjoying a picnic on the beach, but a coat was still necessary. ‘I wanted to run my own catering business. I loved my job at the teashop, but I wanted something that was mine, that I could really put my heart and soul into.’ She smiled and gave a little sigh. ‘But then I suppose I achieved all of that anyway.’
Katie popped a couple of the chicken wings onto her plate and started to attack one immediately. ‘What did you do instead?’
George could feel the corners of her mouth tugging into a full-on beam and she didn’t fight it. ‘I had Thomas.’ She placed a plastic cup of sparkling water in front of Katie before filling another for Frankie. ‘I always meant to start up my own business after I’d sold the shop, but other things kept getting in the way, like buying my first house and planning a wedding. I was with my fiancé for nine years, and we’d always planned on having children – when the time was right. Except the time was never right for him. I reached the age of thirty, then thirty-five, and he still kept saying one day… Until one day, a few months before the wedding, he dropped the bombshell that he’d changed his mind. He liked the way his life was. Liked the freedom.’ She sighed. ‘He didn’t want children after all. It came between us in the end – there’s no compromise in that situation – and we split up. We sold our house and went our separate ways. I couldn’t waste any more time finding the perfect man again – and, if I’m honest, I couldn’t face looking – so I finally used my granny’s money to fund three rounds of IVF.’
‘Wow.’ Frankie accepted the cup of sparkling water from George. ‘That was a brave decision.’
There was that glow again, warming George up from the inside.
‘So it really is just the two of you,’ Katie said. ‘That must be tough.’
George poured herself a drink. ‘None of us have it easy.’ She looked from Katie, who was finding her feet as a single mum after all these years to Frankie, who had somehow pulled herself together after the death of her partner to raise twins all by herself.
Katie nodded. ‘I guess we have that in common.’
‘It’s good that we can learn from each other,’ George said, but Katie sniggered.
‘I wouldn’t hold your breath on learning anything from me. I’m barely treading water here.’
‘I’m sure that isn’t true,’ Frankie said. ‘You’ve got further in this parenting thing than the two of us combined.’
George raised her hand. ‘I actually have a question for you, Katie.’ She dropped her gaze to the blanket and fiddled with the fringed edging. ‘Does it get easier dropping them off at school? Because it’s killing me at the moment. I want to cling onto Thomas and run all the way home with him.’
Frankie bobbed her head up and down. ‘I’m the same with Finn. Skye’s fine – she’s Miss Independent and walks away without a backwards glance, but my poor boy… It breaks my heart having to leave him at nursery.’
‘Oh, don’t worry.’ Katie took a sip of her drink to mask a smile. ‘It gets easier, believe me.’
‘Really?’ George’s eyes were wide, pleading.
‘Believe me. Give it time and you’ll be counting down the hours until you drop them off again. And don’t get me started on the school holidays…’
George wasn’t sure whether to take comfort from needing a time out from her son or not, but surely it was better than the anguish she felt every morning as Thomas disappeared into the school.
‘I’ve got one for you, George.’ Katie shifted into a more comfortable position. ‘You’ve been single for a while, right?’ George nodded while mentally preparing herself to impart wisdom onto her new friend. ‘Do you ever stop missing the sex?’
Frankie
The three women learned a lot about each other as they chatted over the picnic. Katie was thirty-eight (so close to forty – how the hell did that happen and why didn’t anyone warn her that it crept up so quickly?), an unemployed (but not unemployable, George insisted when Katie suggested so) bookkeeper, and she’d lived in Clifton-on-Sea since her parents moved into their house close to the harbour when she was seven.
‘I rent the house out as a holiday let at the moment,’ Katie told her new friends. ‘But it looks like I’m going to have to sell it and give half the proceeds to Rob.’
Frankie gasped. ‘Can he make you do that?’
Katie nodded. ‘Apparently so, unless I can buy him out, which I can’t.’
‘That really sucks.’ Frankie frowned. ‘I’m so sorry.’
George was the oldest of the trio at forty-three. She’d been single for the past seven years and was happy enough with the status quo. Her time for romance had passed (nonsense, the others had insisted, but George had simply shrugged and taken a bite out of a lemon drizzle cupcake. And yes, she’d broken the news to Katie, you did stop missing the sex, though George still sometimes craved the closeness of a partner). George had been born in Clifton-on-Sea (in the front bedroom of the flat above her paternal grandmother’s haberdashery shop near the station, to be exact. She’d taken fifty-two hours and the use of forceps to be born and George’s father had said he hadn’t been able to look at a pair salad tongs in the same way since. George was ninety-nine percent sure he was kidding).
Frankie, the youngest of the women at thirty-three, was a freelance brand designer. She loved her work, even if she was struggling to keep up with her projects after a sluggish couple of weeks modelling blobs of playdough, finger-painting and watching CBeebies with the twins. Frankie had moved to Clifton-on-Sea a year ago for a fresh start, away from the painful memories of Bradley’s death.
‘Bradley killed himself.’ It was still so hard to say the words out loud, but she wanted to get it out there, in the beginning, so she didn’t feel like she was keeping a shameful secret from her new friends. ‘The twins were just a