It would be perfectly normal for Melody to feed her toddler, Joy. Which she does. She just happens to also like to feed her five-year-old, who’s not even sitting in her mother’s lap. She’s got her own chair. Her feet nearly touch the floor.
‘Because it’s such a huge favour to care for his own child,’ Samantha throws in.
I’m not the only one who thinks that nearly school-age children really ought to be drinking milk from cups. Samantha doesn’t bother trying to hide her eye roll. Melody doesn’t bother pretending to ignore it. Samantha won’t say anything with Melody’s daughter here, though. She may be one of the toughest women I’ve ever met, but she’s never cruel.
‘Well, that’s not really fair,’ Emerald points out, brushing a non-existent speck of something from her pristine top. Not that a crumb could have come from any of the food on the table. She never eats the buttery croissants or packets of biscuits that the rest of us scoff. ‘The men do work all day.’
I wince at her terrible choice of words. What is it that we’re doing all day – and night – if not working? But Garnet, Emerald’s sister, nods, adding, ‘My Michael works late into the night sometimes.’
‘Boo hoo,’ Samantha bites back.
‘Not to mention weekends.’ Emerald ignores Samantha’s dig at her sister. ‘Anthony’s a workhorse too.’
When Emerald and Garnet sit beside each other they look like someone has taken the same drawing and just coloured them in differently. Their eyes are almond shaped and they have identical long slender noses, angular faces and full lips. But Garnet’s got nearly black eyes and her thick straight shoulder-length hair is cut in a heavy blunt fringe and coloured a russet red. Emerald has the same haircut but her colour is even darker than mine – almost a true black – and her eyes are nearly black too. It’s very striking against her pale skin.
‘Poor Michael has even had to cancel holidays,’ says Garnet.
Melody covers her daughter’s ears when she catches the look on Samantha’s face. Samantha doesn’t disappoint. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, at least they get holidays,’ she replies. ‘Not to mention sick days and bonuses and at least some bloody idea about all the hours they’ll have to work. I’d trade places in a heartbeat. They’re not sitting around with their friends feeling sorry for us, are they?’
When I first met Samantha in antenatal class I mistook her abruptness for rudeness, but she’s just very honest and efficient. She used to be a high-powered consultant before having her first child and she never really lost the drive. It was her job to go into companies and restructure them (efficiently, of course). Now she hasn’t got anywhere for all that energy to go so she channels it into everyday life and her marathon yoga sessions. The rest of us might dress to camouflage the baby tummies we haven’t quite lost yet. Samantha’s got thighs that could crack walnuts.
Naturally, it gets Samantha’s back up when Garnet and Emerald try excusing their husbands, which happens a lot.
It’s not just Samantha’s lack of employment that frustrates her. It doesn’t sound like her husband appreciates her thighs, walnut-cracking or not, any more than all the work she does. Like I said, she channels a lot into yoga.
And Garnet and Emerald are very nice women once you get used to their rivalry. They only ever turn it on each other and have a long-running disagreement over which precious stone their parents think is more precious. That sums them up, really.
Not only were their first babies due within days of each other, but their husbands work for the same bank and their houses are one road away from one another. Both think theirs is the better neighbourhood. And the better husband.
Garnet was over-the-top smug about getting to the finishing line first in the maternity ward, pushing out her ten-pound daughter a day and a half before Emerald. But Emerald had the better time when her son was born in under six hours, and they’ve been competitively parenting ever since.
The sisters are closest in age to me, twenty-seven and twenty-eight, and both think they’re the perfect age. Samantha is in her mid-thirties and Melody’s age is anyone’s guess, so of course we all do. I think she’s well over forty because of her long frizzy brown and grey hair, but since I’ve got a few greys too (thanks to Mum for pointing those out), maybe she is younger.
‘It will be all right, you know,’ Melody says, fixing me with her pale blue, wide-set eyes. Combined with a longish face and big-toothed smile, they make her look a bit like a goat. I don’t mean that in an insulting way. It’s just so you can picture her. Because her hair is salt-and-pepper, though, instead of goat-coloured, the resemblance ends there.
Melody is even more of a tree-hugging yogurt-knitter than I thought when we first met, the kind of person who makes her own baby food and sews up holes in socks even though there’s usually an uncomfortable lump in your shoe after, instead of just buying another pack of twenty for a fiver.
You won’t be surprised to know that she gave birth to her daughter in an inflatable paddling pool in her lounge, with the sound of wind chimes and whale noises for pain relief. All her friends were there to see it and it sounds like it was a bit of a party between contractions. She claims it was the most magical three days of her life, especially when her then four-year-old cut the umbilical cord and her husband made an afterbirth smoothie for Melody. I imagine the other guests stuck to the hummus and kale chips.
I wouldn’t have been much of a hostess at my own birth party. I cried through most of my labour because, holy hell, it hurt. Daniel did too, come to think of it, in solidarity and helplessness at seeing me. We were basically that nightmare couple in labour for the first time. But anyone who tells you it’s not that bad is either lying or has had their memory erased by those post-birth hormones.
‘I hate to be the one to break this up,’ Samantha says, ‘but I’ve got to pick up Dougie. It’s been fun as always. Same time next week at my house?’
She doesn’t need to ask because I wouldn’t miss these get-togethers even if I ended up in hospital with appendicitis. I’d crawl on all fours with tubes hanging off me and a packet of biscuits clenched in my teeth. And to think that when I first had the babies I thought I didn’t need the mums I’d met in antenatal class. Naïve, deluded Emma.
‘Thanks for coming,’ I say. ‘Sorry we were out of milk.’
Everyone starts to shift as Samantha perfects her lipstick without looking and pulls out her hairbrush to give her chestnut tresses a swipe. Which reminds me that I forgot to brush mine this morning. At least I cleaned my teeth. I’m a winner.
‘We should be going too,’ Garnet says to her sister.
Their toddlers are already in day care, though that’s not what they call it. ‘It’s pre-Montessori, like Eton is a feeder for Oxbridge,’ they explain.
‘I bet you’ll be excited to start school in the autumn, Eva,’ I tell Melody’s five-year-old, who is busy drawing orange trees on her sketch pad. She’s got her mum’s clear blue eyes and long face.
‘I can’t wait for school!’ Eva says, but Melody looks troubled. I’m not sure what she’ll do then. Will she turn up at snack time in her nursing bra?
Talk about putting the cart before the horse. Or the staff before the café, in this case. My glance falls on the stack of boxes leaning precariously