‘Could I take her?’ I ask doubtfully. Kate’s face is blank.
‘Shit, I never thought of Freya. Hang on.’ She gets her phone out, and I peer over her shoulder as she brings up the school website, and clicks on the ‘alumnae’ tab.
‘Dinner … dinner … here we are. FAQs … tickets for guests … oh crap.’
I read aloud over her shoulder: ‘Partners and older children are welcome, but we regret this formal event is not suitable for babies or children under ten. We can supply a list of local sitters, or B&Bs with babysitting facilities upon request.’
‘Great.’
‘I’m sorry, Isa. But there’s half a dozen girls in the village who’d come out.’
I bite back the remark that it’s not that simple. Freya has never taken bottles well, and besides, even if she did, I don’t have any feeding equipment with me.
I could blame it on the bottles, but it would be a kind of lie, because the bigger truth is that I simply don’t want to leave her.
‘I’ll have to try to get her down before they come,’ I say reluctantly. ‘There’s no way she’ll go down for a stranger, she won’t sleep for Owen let alone someone she’s never met. What time does it start?’
‘Eight,’ Kate says.
Shit. It will be touch and go. Freya is sometimes asleep by seven, sometimes she’s awake and chirruping at nine. But there’s no way around this.
‘Give me a number,’ I say to Kate. ‘I’ll call. It’s better if I talk to them direct, make sure they’re reasonably savvy about babies.’
Kate nods.
‘Sorry, Isa.’
‘She’ll be fine,’ Fatima says sympathetically. She puts a hand on my shoulder, squeezes gently. ‘The first time is always the hardest.’
I feel a wave of irritation. She doesn’t mean to pull the ‘experienced mother’ card, but she can’t help it, and the worst of it is, I know she’s right, she has two children and a vast amount more experience than I have, she has been here before and knows what it’s like. But she doesn’t know Freya, and even if she thinks she remembers the edgy nervousness of the first time she left her baby with a stranger, she doesn’t really, not with the visceral immediacy that I am feeling in this moment.
I’ve left Freya with Owen a few times. But never like this – never with someone I don’t know from Adam.
What if something happens?
‘Give me the numbers,’ I say to Kate again, ignoring Fatima, shrugging her hand off my shoulder, and I pick Freya up and we go upstairs, the list of numbers clutched in my hot fist, trying not to give way to tears.
IT IS LATE. The sun is dipping in the sky, the shadows over the Reach are lengthening, and Freya is nodding at my breast, her hand still clutched around the fragile necklace of twisted silver wire that I rarely wear any more, for fear she’ll tug it and snap the links.
I can hear the others conversing downstairs. They’ve been ready for ages, while I try and fail to get Freya to sleep. But she’s picked up on my nerves, wrinkled her face disgustedly at the unaccustomed smell of the perfume I’ve dabbed behind my ears, batted angry hands at the slippery black silk of a too-tight sheath dress borrowed from Kate. Everything is wrong – the strange room, the strange cot, the light slanting through the too-thin curtains.
Every time I lower her to the mattress of the cot she jumps and flails and snatches at me, her angry wail rising like a siren above the noise of the river and the low voices downstairs.
But now … now she seems really and truly asleep, her mouth gaping, a little trickle of milk oozing from the side of her lips.
I catch it with the muslin before it can stain the borrowed dress, and then rise, very stealthily, and edge my way to the cot in the corner.
Lower … lower … I bend over, feeling my back twinge and complain, and then at last she’s on the mattress, my hand firm on her belly, trying to merge the moment of my being there into the moment of my not being there so smoothly that it passes unnoticed.
Eventually I stand, holding my breath.
‘Isa!’ comes a whispered hiss up the stairs, and I grit my teeth, screaming shut up! inside my head, but not daring to say it.
But Freya slumbers on, and I tiptoe as silently as possible towards the corridor, and down the rickety stairs, my finger to my lips as the others raise a muted cheer, and then hastily hush at the sight of my face.
They are standing, huddled together at the bottom of the stairs, their eyes upturned to mine. Fatima is dressed in a stunningly beautiful jewelled shalwar kameez in ruby silk that she somehow found in a formal-wear shop in Hampton’s Lee this afternoon. Thea has refused to bow to the dictates of the black-tie invitation and is wearing her usual skinny jeans and a spaghetti-strap top that starts out gold at the bottom hem, and deepens into midnight black at the neck, and it reminds me so much of the hair she used to have as a girl that my breath catches in my throat. Kate is wearing a rose-pink handkerchief dress that looks like it could have cost either pence, or hundreds of pounds, and her hair is loose around her shoulders and damp from the shower.
There is a lump in my throat as I come to the foot of the stairs – and I don’t even know why. Perhaps it’s the sudden, heart-shattering realisation of how much I love them, or the way they have grown from girls to women in the space of a heartbeat. Perhaps it’s the way their faces in the evening sunlight are overlaid by the memory of the girls they once were – they are polished, a little wary, eyes a little tired, but more beautiful than I ever remember them being as girls, and yet at the same time they are clear-skinned, hopeful, poised like birds to take flight into an unknown future.
I think of Luc, and his anger in the shop, the veiled threats, and I feel a sudden clenching fury – I cannot bear for them to be hurt. Any of them.
‘Ready?’ Kate says with a smile, but before I can nod, there is a cough in the corner, and I turn to see Liz, the girl from the village who has come to take care of Freya, standing by the dresser.
She is horrifyingly young – that was the first thing I thought when she arrived, knocking on the door with a tentative rap. She said on the phone she was sixteen but I don’t know if I believe it now I’ve seen her – and she has pale brown hair and a broad, blank face that is hard to read, but looks anxious.
Thea looks at her phone. ‘We need to go.’
‘Wait,’ I say, and I begin again the speech that I’ve run through twice already – the cup of expressed milk in the fridge, the comforter she doesn’t like but I keep hoping she’ll take to, where the nappies are, what to do if she won’t settle.
‘You’ve got my number,’ I say for maybe the twentieth time, as Fatima shifts from one foot to the other and Thea sighs. ‘Right?’
‘Right here.’ Liz pats the pad on the dresser, next to the pile of tenners that is her fee for the night.