Five Winters(23)

I fixed a smile on my face and took Rosie’s arm in mine. “I’m fine, honestly. Aren’t your parents lucky with the weather? What a fabulous afternoon.”

If Rosie gave me a look because I was talking to her about the weather like some old biddy on a bus, she let it go and led me over to talk to Giorgio. Giorgio, being the charmer he was, soon had me laughing, and I sincerely hoped my friend knew how lucky she was to have found him.

A little while later, I found myself standing next to Grace again.

“How is your family, Grace?” I asked, deciding to try to have a proper conversation with her.

She shrugged. “They’re okay. My sister’s pregnant with baby number three. Mum and Dad are over the moon, of course.”

Had there been a slight edge in Grace’s voice as she said that? I looked at her, but there was no clue in her face, so I pressed on.

“That is good news. And how about your grandmother? How’s she?”

Now there was a definite change in Grace’s expression. She looked quickly away, over at the flower border. “Oh, Nanna had to go into a care home recently,” she said, her tone carefully casual. “Everything suddenly got a bit much for her.”

I remembered the smile on Grace’s grandmother’s face as Mark spoke to her at the wedding and was genuinely sorry. She’d seemed like a real sweetheart. “I’m so sorry to hear that.”

When Grace looked at me again, her expression was back in neutral. “Well, Mum did choose the best home she could find. More like a hotel than a home, really. I visit her there often.”

I nodded, disappointed to be faced with Grace’s force field. Again. How she really felt about her grandmother being in a care home was anyone’s guess, though surely nobody would be exactly pleased about it, would they? But Grace’s stilted sentences were designed to shut me down rather than to invite follow-up questions.

“Well,” I said lamely, “just as long as she seems happy.”

“She certainly wasn’t happy at home. It distressed her—not being able to cope with things. As Mum says, at least at Kenwood Place she has delicious meals cooked for her.”

I wondered whether Grace had clashed with her mother about her grandmother going into a home. I also wondered why the name of the care home seemed familiar to me. But then I was distracted by the sound of a child’s excited laughter and looked over to see Mark playing with the children of Richard and Sylvia’s neighbour—hide-and-seek, by the look of it. The garden was quite large and divided into different sections with lots of shrubs and trees, so it was perfect.

I smiled, remembering umpteen games of hide-and-seek during my childhood.

“Hide-and-seek was one of Mark’s favourite games when we were kids,” I told Grace and laughed. “I remember one time he hid behind some stacked sheets of wood—it wasn’t here, it was in the house in London. Anyway, it took me and Rosie ages to find him. And then, when it was his turn to hide again, he hid in the exact same place.” I laughed again. “Rosie and I didn’t think to look there because he’d hidden there the last time.”

I could still remember Rosie’s frustration at not being able to find her brother and our joint disbelief when we discovered him behind the wood sheets for the second time. The smile from the memory was still on my face when I turned to look at Grace. Only Grace wasn’t smiling. Not at all. In fact, she looked . . . well, resentful. As if she hated me having a shared history with Mark. Was it possible that I made Grace insecure? Surely not. She always seemed so strong and together.

“It was a very long time ago,” I said, but before I could say anything else, Josie, Richard and Sylvia’s neighbour—the mother of the boys—joined us and spoke to Grace.

“That husband of yours will make an excellent father one day.”

I returned my attention to Mark and saw he was running after the boys now, making them squeal delightedly as they tried to evade capture.

A familiar pang constricted my chest. Josie was right. Mark would make an excellent father. But I’d always known that, hadn’t I? He was the sort of man who would read his kids bedtime stories even if he was tired after work. Stand in the rain to watch them play football. Get stuck in with the nighttime feeds and the nappy changes. It was all too easy to imagine Mark carrying a sleepy child up to bed, their arms curled trustingly around his neck. Or giving a child a piggyback ride, galumphing along like a crazed pantomime horse.

As I watched, Sylvia joined Mark and the boys, holding out a box of something to them—sweets or chocolates, judging by the enthusiastic way the boys thrust their hands inside it.

The neighbour shook her head. “Sylvia spoils my boys something rotten. She’s longing to be a grandmother herself, I suppose. Anyway, excuse me; I’d better step in before they gorge themselves silly.”

When she left, it was just me and Grace again, the atmosphere so brittle it was in danger of snapping. I sneaked a look at her, surprising a complicated expression on her face. She looked . . . well, pretty much how I felt myself. I recognised a fellow child craver when I saw one. Or at least I thought I did. Were she and Mark having trouble conceiving? Surely not. They hadn’t been married long. It was far too early for them to be having problems like that. But I knew that even if they were, Grace wouldn’t dream of telling me about it. Personal confidences came with friendship, and Grace had made it clear on Christmas Day that she didn’t want to be my friend.