The Stepmothers’ Support Group. Sam Baker

mean, this might sound odd to you…but, Vince and I, it’s just not that kind of relationship. If he’d gone straight from first date to “meet my kid” I would have run a mile. I’ve so had it with big romantic gestures…’ She paused. ‘Vince is nothing like my ex. Thank God. We just like each other’s company. So I guess I can understand.’

      ‘That’s all very well,’ Clare said and Eve winced, knowing her friend was about to punch right to the heart of the matter. ‘But didn’t he have any photos of her? Of his daughter?’

      ‘Um,’ Melanie looked uncomfortable. ‘He might do. I mean, yes…yes, I’m sure he does but usually we hang out at mine. It’s not much, just a couple of rooms. But it’s above work, so it’s easy. I’ve only been to his place once and it was, late. You know…’ Her voice trailed off.

      The others smiled to show they knew. Well, Eve did. She’d only set foot in Ian’s house once so far. But it was a long time since Clare had been anywhere else with anyone else. Late, or otherwise.

      The Tube to Finchley took even longer than usual. The Northern Line was sweltering, not just from that day’s heat but from decades of muggy, smoggy summers, the memory of which seemed to have lingered in the tunnels, just waiting to burst out at the slightest rise in temperature above ground. Why was it, Clare wondered, leaning her head against the murky glass, that seventy degrees above ground translated into ninety degrees below?

      ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for the delay,’ came the driver’s voice over a tannoy. ‘We are being held in the tunnel and hope to be on the move again shortly.’

      Clare sighed as her watch reached and then passed nine.

      Damn it, there went another seven pounds.

      She’d been hoping to make it back in time to sneak under the wire of three hours. But 9.05 might as well be 9.55 where babysitters were concerned. Even the, supposedly cheaper, teenage variety. Like traffic wardens, they showed no mercy. A minute was as good as an hour.

      Perhaps Lou was right, Clare thought, totting up the cost of that evening’s meeting and feeling nausea rise as the sums approached forty pounds. Forty? How could four hours out of the house and a couple of cups of coffee set her back forty quid? Maybe Lou had a point. Perhaps she was old enough to stay home alone. Her daughter was now fourteen after all, and if the girl was to be believed, all her friends were allowed to stay home without a sitter.

      Mind you, if Lou was to be believed, her friends were allowed to do a lot of things she wasn’t. Staying home alone was just the tip of the iceberg.

      The train lurched, then lurched again. As it gained momentum a through-breeze temporarily relieved the cloying heat.

      It was tempting, Clare had to admit. Lou got the appearance of freedom and Clare would be twenty, even thirty, pounds richer; and maybe the concession would buy Clare a reprieve. Not to mention a little more time to decide what to do about the many other things that Lou’s friends had that she didn’t. Those grenades Lou lobbed willy-nilly at Clare when they had one of their few, but increasingly ferocious, rows.

      Well, ferocious on Lou’s part, at least.

      Recent grenades included, in no particular order: a dad (always a direct hit, that one), a family (obviously Clare didn’t qualify), grandparents (not granny, proper ones, two sets, they came in pairs, apparently), an iPod, a TV in her room, cousins, free run of Topshop, a Saturday job, a holiday…

      The orange glow of streetlights made Clare blink as the Tube train clattered out of the tunnel on its approach to East Finchley station.

      Nearly home.

      Clare knew the storm was coming. She’d felt the clouds on the horizon as Lou banged around their tiny kitchen picking holes in everything her mother suggested she eat for supper. Pasta was boring. Fish fingers and chips were for kids. Jacket potato was too slow because we don’t even have a microwave. And no, she wasn’t interested in the remains of a moussaka Clare had soothed herself cooking for last night’s supper.

      Nothing was right.

      Nothing was good enough.

      Everything was crap.

      ‘Don’t say crap,’ Clare said instinctively, earning herself a scowl from her daughter. The signs were familiar. Blissfully rare, at least to date, but Clare had seen enough to know they heralded a fight. What she couldn’t work out was what this one was going to be about.

      ‘Why not?’ Lou shouted, giving the fridge door a slam. ‘It is crap. My. Life. Is. Total. Crap.’

      Clare opened her mouth to rebuke Louisa, and shut it again. The storm was coming, she might as well get it over with.

      ‘Everybody else goes on holiday,’ Lou had yelled. ‘You don’t have to listen to them talking at school. Bridget’s going to Ibiza. Her mum and dad have rented a villa for a month. A WHOLE MONTH. Madeleine’s mum and dad are taking her to Crete. And they’re letting her take Callie with her. And Charlie’s going to Turks and Caicos.’

      Clare was pretty sure Lou didn’t even know where Turks and Caicos was, but that didn’t lessen her daughter’s frustration.

      ‘Amy’s going to her mum and dad’s cottage in Norfolk for the whole summer…’ she continued. ‘The whole summer, Mum! All my friends are going somewhere. And I’m stuck here!’

      Groaning audibly, Clare wondered if she’d be able to get away without telling Lou that Auntie Eve was going to Cornwall with her boyfriend and his children, to stay in their grandparents’ holiday house. Lou would find so many faults with that sentence Clare could hardly bear to think about it.

      The words echoed inside Clare’s head as the Tube doors finally opened and she stepped off the train into a balmy north London night. The venom with which Lou had spat her resentment at the comforts she didn’t have that her friends did…And unspoken, the words that had sent Clare fleeing from their flat for fear of hearing them, knowing she couldn’t bear it if she did. Knowing that if she let Lou say those words, the words she knew her daughter was thinking, things would change for ever between them. ‘And I’m stuck here,’ Lou had screamed before her bedroom door slammed shut behind her.

       With you.

       EIGHT

      ‘This it, love?’

      Eve peered from the taxi’s window across a gravel drive littered with dusty four by fours and expensive but lowkey cars to a solid farmhouse built from weather-beaten Cornish granite. Above the screech of seagulls she could hear the squeals of small children.

      ‘Sounds like it,’ she said, pushing a ten pound note and some loose change into the driver’s hand as she took the case he hauled from the boot.

      It looked like it too. Eve wheeled her case between a Subaru and a Lexus, and narrowly avoided squashing a Power Ranger standing guard on a manhole cover. She bent to collect it, then stopped. Alfie was here, it said. He might not thank her for moving it.

      The front door was on the latch for late arrivals and opened at first push. Dragging her case across a flagstoned hall, she lent it against a wall and slipped Hannah’s birthday card and present (Topshop vouchers—no chances this time) from her handbag, then folded her jacket—creased from the heat, the journey and being clutched too tightly—and dumped it on top of the case beside her handbag. There was no doubt the house itself was empty; but the shrieks of children and low-level murmur of adult conversation was louder now. Eve took a deep breath.

      She was in no doubt what a big deal this was, not just for Ian and his children, but for his entire family. For more than two years since Caroline’s death, there had been nothing and no one in his life but the children, and getting them from one day to the next. And now, here was Eve…

      Although,