The Mother-in-Law by Sally Hepworth

Author:Sally Hepworth
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Pan Macmillan Australia
Published: 2019-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

25

LUCY

The past . . .

I have two kids strapped into the back of the car, one of them wailing (Harriet), the other (Archie) trying to stick a grape up his nose. We’re stopped at a busy roundabout while the woman in the black SUV in front of us hands a tennis racket through the window to her sullen-looking teenage son and then proceeds to start a conversation with him with no regard for the growing line of cars behind her.

Harriet lets out another wail.

This kind of thing is rife in Diana’s neighbourhood. We’re headed to Diana’s now—on Tuesdays I drive them to her house at 10 am, where they stay until 2 pm when I pick them up again. We’ve moved out of our workers cottage to a bigger rental house in Hampton for more space, and one of the upsides is that it’s just a short drive to Tom and Diana’s place. Harriet is six months old now, and while I loathe the process of strapping both kids into the car, driving them there and doing the reverse journey again a few hours later, I am not so pig-headed as to refuse free childcare. Even from my impossible mother-in-law.

‘Archie, can you put Harriet’s dummy in?’ I say, glancing in the rear-view mirror. The dummy is in his mouth and the grape is nowhere to be seen. ‘What happened to the grape?’

‘I ate it,’ he says, taking the dummy from his mouth and pushing it right into Harriet’s mouth. I try not to think about the streaming cold he has now almost certainly passed on to Harriet. It’s some consolation that she stops crying immediately.

‘Are we at Dido’s house yet?’

‘Nearly,’ I say, and he settles down. As irritating as it is, he loves his grandmother. She’s good with him in her own Diana sort of way. She doesn’t marvel over his artwork or beg for cuddles, but she does other things that seem to rank highly with kids . . . like looking him directly in the eye, challenging him, turning the television off and playing with him. And, of course, there’s the packet of Tim Tams on her kitchen counter that is always full when he arrives and empty when he leaves.

It’s a few minutes to ten when I pull into Diana and Tom’s pebblestone driveway (which I hate because Archie stuffs the pebbles into his pockets and they end up all over my house). There’s a battered yellow Volvo parked by the front door. One of the cleaners, I decide. I park behind it and hoist Harriet’s baby seat out of the car. Archie unclicks himself and launches out of the car, immediately grabbing a fistful of pebbles. I walk up the steps and set the baby carrier down on the landing. The front door is ajar and an unfamiliar male voice comes from somewhere nearby.

‘We have an expression in Afghanistan: “In an ant colony, dew is a flood.” It means . . . a small misfortune is not small for one in need.

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