Two Weddings and a Baby (13 page)

‘Now, now, girls,’ Laura said to her daughters. ‘It really is about time you let that incident go, Keira. Tamsyn, let me have a look at that little darling there. Come on, stop hogging the baby.’

‘You do know we can’t keep her, don’t you, Mum?’ Tamsyn said as Laura hungrily took hold of Mo, cooing at the poor child and pressing several kisses on her forehead, which Tamsyn thought belatedly was a nice thing to do. She didn’t suppose that Mo had been kissed as much as a baby should be in her first hours of life. Even so, this would be the prelude to some inevitable variation of the ‘I don’t think you’re happy in life’ discussion that her mother seemed to try to have with her whenever they were in the same room. ‘She’s not a stray kitten. At some point someone in charge will come and take her away, you know.’

The baby, sensing the change in her situation, opened one dark eye and flushed a deep red.

‘Oh, someone’s having a poo,’ Laura said cheerfully. ‘Are you having a poo? Are you having a little baby poo? Shall Aunty Tamsyn change your little botty-bots?
Shall
she?
Shall
she?’

‘Mum, she’s a baby, not an idiot,’ Tamsyn said. ‘And anyway, I’ve already changed her.’

‘You do know you have to do it more than once, right?’ Laura asked her.

‘Well, you were the one who was so keen to get hold of her. Surely there’s a rule that whoever it is who’s holding her when she poos has to be the one to change her. Isn’t that a rule? That should be a rule. Like the last person to use the bath always has to clean it. Or whoever smelt it, dealt it. That one.’

‘Oh, for goodness sake, I’ll change her,’ Keira said, taking a nappy from the packet that Cordelia had brought up with her and holding her arms out for Mo. ‘Oh, look how tiny she is; it makes me feel broody. Doesn’t she make you feel broody, Tamsyn?’

‘I don’t know,’ Tamsyn said. ‘Is broody like a sort of low-level sensation of exhaustion, anxiety and grief over your long-lost suitcase? If so, then yes.’

‘They are asleep,’ Cordelia said when she came back. ‘And amazingly all in a bed, although not the beds they started out in, but still, I’m counting that as a victory.’ She looked Tamsyn up and down. ‘Have you seen yourself, Tam? You look like you just escaped from a trailer park.’

‘A rude but accurate assessment,’ Tamsyn was forced to concede. ‘These belonged to Lucy, apparently, but I’ve seen her taste in clothes and it’s definitely not this. I think this came out of the lost-property box in the pub. These are the sort of clothes that a person has to be drunk to wear. Have you got something I can borrow, sis?’

‘Well, what do you give a bedraggled fashion designer, who smells faintly of baby sick, to wear at nearly two in the morning?’ Cordelia mused cheerfully.

‘Literally anything but this,’ Tamsyn pleaded. ‘And I forgot about the baby sick. She’s going to need a feed in a minute and … oh God, I had a go at the vicar, smelling of baby sick!’

‘You had a go at Jed?’ Cordelia said. ‘What did you say to him? What could you possibly have a go at Jed about? He is, like, the goodest person I know. He’s like, one step down from Jesus, really.’

‘I may have slightly accused him of secretly being Mo’s father,’ Tamsyn mumbled, cringing as she remembered that she had genuinely made the ridiculous accusation, and out loud, too.

‘Oh my God, Tamsyn!’ Laura gasped. ‘I’ve raised you better than that. Only just, I know, but still.’

‘I know, but it all made sense to me at the time.’ Tamsyn sat on the edge of her bed and pulled her cloud of candyfloss hair over her face, just like she had when she was a little girl in maths class and was doing her best to avoid getting noticed by the teacher. ‘And then he was all noble and heartfelt and “How could you even think such a thing” and I felt awful. And I must have smelt of sick and looked like I’d escaped from an eighties Australian soap …’

‘He wouldn’t care what you looked like,’ Cordelia said primly. ‘
He’s
not that shallow.’

‘But why would you even think like that?’ Keira said. ‘You should have talked to Cordelia first. Cordelia thinks the vicar might even be gay. Although her evidence for that fact is mainly that he doesn’t seem to fancy her.’

‘That’s not what I said, what I said was, he didn’t look at me in the way that most men do, which is from the chest up.’

‘He’s not gay,’ Tamsyn said, perhaps a little too quickly.

‘How do you know, and why do you care?’ Keira raised an eyebrow.

‘I don’t know,’ Tamsyn said. ‘I just … I don’t think he is, that’s all. He talked about wanting to get married someday, to a woman. And he’s had intimate relations in the past, before he was a vicar.’

‘Anything else you covered during this conversation?’ Cordelia asked her. ‘Like what sort of underwear he wears, favourite cheese, that sort of thing?’

‘Look, it’s been a very strange day and I am very tired,’ Tamsyn said. ‘You know, I came here for my brother’s – who I am not really talking to – wedding, not to get caught up in a hurricane and find a baby and meet a s … s … erious vicar.’

Keira and Cordelia exchanged a look that Tamsyn knew only too well, and her heart sank like a lead balloon.

‘You were going to say “sexy”, weren’t you?’ Cordelia said.

‘No.’ Tamsyn crossed her arms and her sisters shrieked with glee.

‘Girls, we’ve just got the boys off to sleep, and this little one doesn’t need you lot shouting in her ears – settle down,’ Laura told her daughters, although the look on her face showed she’d been here a million times before and knew exactly how it was about to play out, and settling down wasn’t going to have anything to do with it.

‘You were,’ Cordelia pointed at Tamsyn. ‘You were going to say I met a sexy vicar and I fancy him, you love the sexy vicar,
you love the sexy vicar
! Tamsyn and Jed, sitting in a tree …’

‘I do
not
love him!’ Tamsyn protested. ‘But you have to admit, he is quite attractive. I mean, it’s his fault, really, that I accused him of fathering an illicit love child. If he looked like a vicar was supposed to look, then it never would have occurred to me.’

‘Tamsyn Isobel Thorne,’ Laura said. ‘I thought I’d brought you up not to judge a book by its cover.’

‘She doesn’t want to judge his cover, Mum,’ Cordelia smirked.

‘No, she wants to rip it off,’ Keira added, and her sisters cackled like a pair of little fiends.

‘Girls!’ Laura shushed, tutting loudly. ‘Well, you are going to have to go and apologise,’ she told Tamsyn. ‘Reverend Hayward is officiating at your brother’s wedding in a couple of days. We can’t have you standing at the front in your bridesmaid’s dress with this accusation hanging between you.’

‘It’s not an accusation she wishes was hanging between them,’ Keira said, making Cordelia stuff a pillow into her mouth to stop her howls of laughter.

‘Oh, shut up!’ Tamsyn told her sisters. ‘And, fine, I will apologise to him. In the morning. Or maybe when I’m back in Paris, by letter. Everyone likes to get a letter.’

‘You will go and do it now,’ Laura said. ‘I brought you up properly. You may have ignored me, most of the time, but I still did it. Go and say sorry.’

‘I smell of baby sick!’ Tamsyn pleaded.

‘She can’t go and tell him she loves him smelling of baby sick,’ Keira said.

‘Fine, go and have a shower, and then come back and Cordelia will sort you out some fresh clothes, and then it will be time for Mo’s feed and you can go downstairs and get the bottle and say sorry at the same time. You have ten minutes.’

‘Can I straighten my …?’

‘Now!’ Recognising her mother’s don’t-mess-with-me tone, Tamsyn grabbed a towel from the hook on the back of the door and hurried down a level of twisting stairs to the bathroom opposite Meadow’s bedroom. She shut the door and stood there for several seconds, getting the distinct feeling that she had forgotten something. And then she realised. It was the weight of Mo in her arms that she was missing.

Tamsyn stood outside the kitchen a little after two a.m. and listened to the sound of voices. There were fewer now; she could only hear her brother and Alex. And Jed. Just the three of them in there, only two of whom she had mortally offended. Which was pretty good for her: most of the times she walked into a room she could be reasonably sure that at least seventy-five per cent of the people in there hated her. Actually, now she came to think of it, she realised that two out of three was almost seventy-five per cent. This wasn’t fair; Ruan had his reasons, but Jed, he was supposed to be all about forgiveness and love and … not that sort of love. Nice love, sensible love. Love that could take a wild accusation of loose morals and move on, no big deal.

It would have been better if she wasn’t preparing to make her entrance in a black and white onesie in a cat design – complete with a hood that had little pointy ears. There was also a tail.

Her sisters had been unable to contain their delight when she’d returned from her shower to find Mo fretting on her mother’s shoulder as she paced up and down on the limited floor space. Then they’d showed her the outfit they had found for her.

‘Tell me that’s not all you have for me to wear,’ Tamsyn said. ‘Mum, tell me that you’re not going to let them do this to me.’

‘It’s all I can find,’ Cordelia said. ‘I mean, it’s two in the morning nearly, and I’ve got three extra beds in my room, in front of the wardrobe. What do you want from me? A Tamsyn Thorne original?

‘Well, we did also find you this,’ Keira said, producing a red, lace-edged basque from under her pillow. ‘But we thought that, given the sexy vicar’s horror at your accusations, you’d better wait for the second date to wear it.’

‘Oh my God, Mu-um!’ Tamsyn wailed, but Laura only looked resigned, busy as she was comforting the increasingly fed-up baby, jiggling her up and down.

‘Go on,’ Keira said. ‘Put on your jammies and then go and find your new boyfriend. Tell him you’re purrrrrrrfect for him.’

Cordelia snorted with unbridled and undignified joy.

‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ Tamsyn had said. ‘I already have a boyfriend, actually! We’ve been together for nearly a year.’

The bombshell had worked to a certain extent, in that it had made her two sisters stop tormenting her and stare at each other, open-mouthed. Only now she knew that when she got back from apologising to Jed, she would have to explain to her family why she had kept Bernard a secret for so long, which was going to be hard to do, because all the reasons that seemed to make perfect sense to her when she was with him made her feel distinctly uncomfortable now.

Still, one humiliating, self-abasing thing at a time, Tamsyn told herself, although her feet still refused to move. It was Mo who, fed up of waiting for her next feed, made her mind up for her and howled, a cry that was answered at once by Buoy on the other side of the door.

‘What are you doing out here?’ her brother asked her, opening the kitchen door.

‘Um, coming to get a feed for Mo,’ Tamsyn said, shuffling past him, hoping that he wouldn’t notice that her pyjamas had cat feet.

‘Why are you wearing a massive Babygro? Are you trying to make sure that Mo doesn’t feel like the odd one out?’

‘Ha, ha, very funny,’ Tamsyn said, although she smiled at him. It was good to hear that old familiar warmth in his voice, albeit sarcastic, older-brother warmth. He looked surprisingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, despite it being two in the morning and after all he and the other lifeboat volunteers had been through already. That must be what love does for you.

‘Just watch yourself around Buoy,’ Ruan warned her. ‘He does like to terrorise cats. The bigger the better, in his opinion.’

‘Evening,’ Tamsyn said to Alex, who was sitting on the old armchair in the corner, or at least Tamsyn was fairly sure she was there. It was hard to tell because at some point during the evening Buoy had transferred himself from in front of the fire in the snug to curled up on Alex’s lap. Except, because he was a dog of considerable size, it was more than her lap he was covering, and his head was resting on her shoulder. Skipper was sitting at Alex’s feet chewing cheerfully on the toe of her Timberland boot. Alex smiled at her through Buoy’s fur.

‘How’s Mo doing?’

‘Well, her lungs are healthy,’ Tamsyn said, having to speak up to be heard over them as she hastily retrieved a bottle from the fridge. She went purposefully over to the bottle warmer and looked at it. It wasn’t rocket science, she told herself. She’d organised runway shows that involved choreographing thirty models, so she should certainly be able to work out a bottle warmer. But the more she looked at it, and the simple dial, and the numbers, and the friendly baby-blue and white plastic, the less of a clue she had about how to make it work.

‘You need to put water in it,’ Jed said. ‘But not too much, otherwise it will flood over the top when you put the bottle in. Here …’ Tamsyn watched while he filled a mug from the tap and poured a little into the bottom of the warmer, taking the bottle out of her hand while Mo wailed in abject misery in her ear.

‘God certainly made sure babies knew how to tell everyone they were hungry,’ Tamsyn said, smiling hopefully. Jed smiled in return, but it wasn’t the same smile, the one he’d greeted her with in the graveyard, or the one he’d treated her to when he’d been showing her how to button up a Babygro (which had come in useful when she’d been forced into the crime against fashion that she was currently wearing). It was a polite smile – it was a vicar-shaking-hands-after-the-Sunday-service smile. No, it wasn’t even that, because Tamsyn had no doubt that Jed smiled at his parishioners with a good deal more warmth than this.

‘Let me take her for a moment,’ Jed said, holding his arms out for the squalling infant.

‘There’s no need.’ Tamsyn found herself swaying from side to side as if she were aboard a boat on a rough sea. ‘I’m not totally useless, you know.’

‘I didn’t say you were,’ Jed replied, his tone calm and soothing.

‘Don’t talk to me like I’m a toddler,’ Tamsyn said, realising belatedly that she’d stamped a fluffy foot as she said it. Taking a deep breath, she tried a new manoeuvre, a sort of side-to-side jiggle, which seemed to calm the baby for a few moments.