A Traitor to Memory

JILL FOSTER WAS grunting through the final series of pelvic tilts with her antenatal trainer counting them when Richard came into the flat. He looked more haggard than she'd expected, and she didn't like the way this made her feel. He'd been divorced from Eugenie for sixteen years. As far as she could see, the identification of his former wife's body should merely be an inconvenient exercise undertaken as a helpful member of society doing his duty to assist the police.

Gladys, the antenatal trainer whom Jill had come to think of as a cross between an Olympic athlete and a fitness Nazi, said, “Ten more, Jill. Come along, now. You'll thank me when you're in labour, luv.”

Jill grunted, “Can't.”

“Nonsense. Take your mind off exhaustion. Think of that dress instead. You'll thank me at the end of the day. Do ten more.”

The dress in question was a wedding gown, a Knightsbridge creation that had cost a small fortune and that hung from the sitting room door, where Jill had placed it to give her inspiration when the hungries came upon her and when the fitness Nazi was taking her through her sweating, miserable, and embarrassing paces. “I'm sending you Gladys Smiley, darling,” Jill's mother had announced upon being told of the grandchild to come. “She's the best antenatal specialist in the south and that's including London, mind you. She's generally booked up, but she'll fit you in for me. Exercise is crucial. Exercise and diet, of course.”

Jill had cooperated with her mother, not because Dora Foster was her mother but because she'd delivered five hundred babies at five hundred successful home births. So she knew what she was talking about.

Gladys counted down from ten. Jill was sweating like a race horse and feeling like a sow, but she managed a glowing smile for Richard. He'd argued against what he'd called “the unique absurdity” of Gladys Smiley from the first, and he was still standing firm against the idea of Dora Foster delivering her first granddaughter at the family home in Wiltshire. But since Jill had compromised on the wedding—agreeing to the more modern approach of postnatal connubiality rather than what she would have preferred: engagement, marriage, and childbirth in that order—she knew that Richard was ultimately going to have to give in to her desires. She was the one giving birth, after all. And if she wanted her mother to deliver her—her mother with thirty years of experience doing just that—then that's the way it was going to be. “You're not my husband yet, darling,” Jill informed him pleasantly each time he protested. “I haven't yet said a word in front of anyone about loving, honouring, and obeying you.”

She had him there, and she knew it. So did he. Which was why she was going to have her way in the end.

“Four … three … two … one … yes!” Gladys cried. “Excellent work. You keep this up and that little one'll slide right out of you. See if she doesn't.” She handed Jill a towel and nodded at Richard, where he stood in the doorway, looking grey round his mouth. “Settled on a name, then, have you?”

“Catherine Ann,” Jill said firmly as Richard said just as firmly, “Cara Ann.”

Gladys looked from one to the other, saying, “Yes. Well. Keep up the good work, Jilly. I'll see you day after tomorrow, yes? Same time?”

“Hmm.” Jill remained on the floor as Richard saw Gladys out of the flat. She was still there—feeling like a beached whale—when he came back into the sitting room. She said, “Darling, there is no way on earth that I'm naming a child Cara. I'd be the laughing stock of every one of my friends. Cara indeed. Honestly, Richard. She's a child, not a character in a romance novel.”

In the normal course of events, he'd have argued. He'd have said, “Catherine is far too ordinary, so if it's not to be Cara, then it's not to be Catherine, and we'll have to compromise on something else.”

Which was what they'd been doing since the day that they'd met when she'd found herself going head-to-head with the man during a documentary the BBC had been filming about his son. “You may speak to Gideon about his music,” Richard Davies had informed her during the contract negotiations. “You may question him about the violin. But my son does not discuss his personal life or his history with the media, and I insist upon making that perfectly clear.”

Because he doesn't have a personal life, Jill thought now. And what went for his history could have been summed up in four syllables: the violin. Gideon was music and music was Gideon. So it had been and always would be.