‘Honestly, Yvonne,’ whispered Hope, ‘you’ve a one-track mind.’
‘Yeah, one track and it’s a dirt track,’ giggled Yvonne, flicking back a bit of jet-black poker-straight hair.
Three customers arrived all at once and Hope managed to put Yvonne’s suggestion out of her mind. It wasn’t that she was contemplating wearing sexy underwear and surprising Matt. She was uncomfortably aware of the fact that Matt would probably be much happier with a new tie and a decent bottle of wine.
Two hours later, she’d braved the traffic going out of the city towards Bristol and was turning into Maltings Lane. One of the more modern streets in Bath, it was a winding road of pretty houses built in the fifties with honey-coloured Cotswold stone. Because the houses were small and reasonably priced, the street was full of young, professional couples with small children, two cars and no time for doing their handkerchief-sized gardens.
When they’d moved in five years ago, Hope had had great plans for becoming a gardening expert and had bought a gardening encyclopaedia along with a book dedicated to creating a haven from a small suburban plot. These books were currently jammed into the bookcase on the landing, alongside the home decorating book she’d got in a jumble sale. Hope rarely even looked at their patch with its overgrown sliver of lawn and weed-encrusted rockery where four stunted conifers sat huddled together in tight misery and refused to grow taller than six inches. Hope didn’t look at the garden tonight either: she was too late even for her usual guilt-laden ‘I wish I had time to do something with the garden this weekend’.
Marta would be furious if she picked the kids up after six fifteen. Marta ran Your Little Treasures, the nursery where Toby and Millie spent every week day. The nursery was so well-run and well-staffed that Hope couldn’t afford to voice the opinion that Marta herself was a bad-tempered bitch when it came to dealing with her charges’ parents. There was such fierce competition for places in YLT that she daren’t risk antagonizing her. If Hope’s children left the nursery, there would be thirty families queuing up to fill their places. ‘Marta is definitely short for martinet,’ joked Matt every time Hope came home on the verge of tears because of a dressing down from Marta for being late. Matt didn’t understand how Hope hated those confrontations.
The nursery closed at six fifteen and any parent who arrived a second later was treated to a lecture of the ‘if you think I’m going to be taken advantage of, you’ve got another think coming’ variety.
Hope couldn’t imagine a single person who’d dare take advantage of Marta. Pity.
She unpacked the shopping from the Metro’s boot. Next door’s cat sat plaintively on Hope’s doorstep, sheltering from the icy late September wind and generally giving the impression that he was a candidate for an animal shelter despite being so fat that he no longer fitted through his cat flap and had to be let in through the windows. Hope dragged the shopping to the door, hoping that a few hours in the locker at work hadn’t made the milk go off.
‘You can’t come in, Fatso,’ Hope told the cat, trying to open the door and insinuate herself inside without letting him in. She managed it, dumped the shopping on the kitchen floor and looked at her watch.
Six o’clock on the nail. She wasn’t going to be late. Relieved, she shoved the milk into the fridge and raced out of the house.
She hurried round the corner to the nursery which was, as usual, surrounded by double-parked cars, weary parents and cross toddlers. Hope had found it was easier to walk there instead of spending ten minutes trying to park.
‘Hello,’ she said with false cheeriness to Marta, who stood like a rottweiler at the door, grimly working out whom to bite and whom to suck up to. ‘Cool isn’t it?’
‘It is nearly October,’ Marta snapped, gypsy earrings rattling furiously.
Hope grinned inanely and then hated herself for it. If only she had the guts to tell Marta where she could stuff her sarcastic remarks. Not for the first time, Hope indulged in her favourite daydream: where she and Matt had won the lottery, thereby allowing her to give up work and devote herself to the children full time. In her fantasy dream world, being a full time mum included help from a cleaning lady, an ironing lady and someone to trail round the supermarket doing the grocery shopping. It also meant being able to tell Marta to take a running jump because Hope wouldn’t need the nursery any more. She’d look after her children herself, thank you very much. She’d be able to spend hours every day with them, doing finger painting, making up stories and doing things with cooking chocolate and Rice Krispies when the children could help stir the mixture without her shuddering at the thought of cleaning bits of cereal and slivers of chocolate off the kitchen floor for hours afterwards. She’d get to serve wonderful home-cooked food instead of making do with convenience stuff, she’d learn needlecraft and the garden would be a riot of beautifully tended plants. Bliss.
In the main section of the nursery, a bright cheery room decorated in warm colours and with plenty of toddler-sized furniture, Millie and Toby were waiting for her, clad in their padded coats and looking like baby Eskimos. Dark-haired Millie, as impatient as her father, had an outraged expression on her rosy-cheeked face. Her brown eyes flashed at the indignity of being made to wait in a restricting coat when she could have been in the play corner wreaking havoc with the bouncy cubes. Toby, pale like his mother, stood quietly with his hat in his hand. When he spotted Hope, a great smile opened up his chubby little face.
‘Mummy, got a star,’ he said delightedly.
‘No you didn’t,’ said Millie indignantly. Even at four, she had a perfect command of the English language. ‘I got a star.’
Toby’s face fell.
‘Millie,’ said her mother reprovingly. ‘Be nice to your little brother.’
‘He’s a baby,’ sniffed Millie, wrinkling up her snub nose.
‘He’s your brother,’ Hope said. ‘You have to look after him, not be unkind to him.’
Millie took Toby’s fat little hand in hers and looked up at her mother expecting praise.
Despite herself, Hope grinned. Millie was as bright as a button.
She said goodbye to Marta, who was hovering with intent outside the door, jangling her keys like a warder.
Holding hands, the family walked slowly home: Millie chattering away happily, Toby silent. It was the same every evening. Toby was very quiet for about half an hour, then, as if he’d been frozen and finally thawed out in the warmth of his own, safe home, he began to talk and laugh, playing with his favourite toy, currently a violently purple plastic train with endless carriages that were always getting lost under the furniture. It worried Hope. She was afraid that he hated the nursery, yet she was just as afraid of asking him in case he clung to her and begged her not to send him every morning.
One of the women at work had gone through two horrific months of her small daughter doing just that, sobbing her little heart out every day, begging her mother to ‘stay, Mummy, stay, please!’ until she was hiccuping with anguish.
The mothers with young children had all sat in silent guilt when they heard that story in the canteen.
‘I hate leaving my son,’ a single mother from accounting had said tonelessly.
‘Men just don’t feel it the same way,’ added an investment advisor who was also a mother-of-three.
They had all nodded miserably, united in agreement.
After that, Hope had spent weeks anxiously scanning Toby’s face every morning for signs that he was about to cry. If he did, she knew she’d have told the building society to stuff their job and told Matt they’d have to manage the mortgage some other way, because she couldn’t bear to go out to work when her darling little boy was sobbing