Husband Material (London Calling #2)(17)

“This is going to involve you lot needing my truck again, isn’t it,”

said Priya, helping herself to what was left of the Toblerone.

Liz—a small, blond woman who was currently not wearing a dog collar, presumably because she was off duty—leaned back against the wall. “I don’t think driving around London without a plan is necessarily going to be the most useful thing to do.”

“Do you think we should just leave it to God?” asked Priya.

“In my experience,” Liz replied, “God really hates being taken for granted.”

James Royce-Royce was gently swaying for what I presumed were baby-related reasons. “Come on, Baby J. We have to help Auntie Bridget.”

Priya watched this little routine with visible incredulity. “He can’t speak or walk. What help is he going to be?”

“He’s providing moral support,” put in Bridge loyally, “by being adorable.”

“What’s that, Baby J?” James Royce-Royce made a theatrical listening gesture. “He’s wondering, Bridget darling, if you’ve spoken to Tom’s friends? One of them is bound to have seen him.”

I think it said everything about Bridge that, even in the middle of a personal crisis, she didn’t want Baby J to feel left out of the conversation. “Well, that’s a good idea, Baby J. But I don’t quite know what I’d say to them. I can’t just ring them up and go, ‘Can you tell me where Tom is? I think he’s cheating on me.’”

“How about,” suggested Priya, “‘Can you tell me where Tom is?

I’m his fucking fiancée.’”

“Maybe just a schooch”—James Royce-Royce held his thumb and forefinger together in the universal gesture for tiny—“less sweary than that? Also, not in front of the baby.”

Priya gave him a cold look. “He’s a fucking baby, James. He’s not going to be offended.”

“Yes, but if it’s all the same to you, I don’t want my beautiful son’s first words to be”—he put his hands gently over Baby J’s ears —“go fuck yourself.”

“Be honest,” Priya told him. “It’s more interesting than ‘dadda.’”

“You know”—once he’d gone full baby, it was hard to recalibrate James Royce-Royce—“I think he almost said ‘dadda’ the other day.

Well, it was more sort of a…bluh, but he’s getting there.”

Mercifully, my phone buzzed with an update from James Royce-Royce. If Liz saw him in Harrow, the woman probably lives locally.

Followed by: That means your best chance of catching them would be around lunchtime or rush hour, in that area. Then: If you want a more solid plan, I’ll need more information.

I looked up. “James suggests we check out Harrow around lunchtime, which is kind of now.”

Bridget winced. “But what if I find something I don’t want to find?”

“Then you’ll have all your friends around you,” I said, hoping I sounded reassuring as opposed to platitudey. “Well, a lot of your friends.”

At that moment the intercom went off and another of the bridesmaids stumbled up. Her name was Melanie, and she’d been working with Bridge for years.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said, dropping her handbag onto the floor.

“Couldn’t get away from work. Huge crisis. We’re just about to launch an adorable children’s book by a very promising new writer about an adventurous puppy who loses his favourite bone, but somebody on the art team has only this second realised that in the final illustration of the book, where the puppy has recovered his bone and it’s framed very nicely against the sunset so it’s sort of silhouetted—”

“It looks like he’s got an enormous erection?” asked Priya.

“How did you guess?”

“Sixth sense.”

Melanie crossed the living room and gave Bridge a lingering hug. “I’m so sorry, babe,” she said. “We’ll get this sorted out, you’ll see.”

“I think”—Bridge relaxed into the hug—“I think we have to sort it out by going to Harrow?”

Priya gave a long-suffering sigh. “Fine. Get in my truck.

Someday, one of you bastards is going to have to buy a car.”

We all dashed outside to the truck and piled in like clowns in reverse, only to immediately have to pile out again because James Royce-Royce needed to fit a car seat. Or at least transform his stroller into a car seat. Because obviously the James Royce-Royces hadn’t just bought a stroller. They’d brought a multifunctional infant transportation device that looked like a spaceship. It was a weird folding contraption with wheels and a pod and a kind of padded area that you could tuck a baby into like Superman being blasted off from Krypton. There was a lot of clunking and a lot of moving parts that didn’t seem to be moving quite right and a loud yelp as James Royce-Royce closed his finger in something that really wasn’t designed to have fingers closed in it.

“Perhaps,” Priya suggested, “it’d be easier if you didn’t have a baby strapped to your chest?”

“No.” James Royce-Royce flapped his injured hand. “No, I can do this. It’s just we’ve never used the car-seat function because we’re normally walking or taking the Tube.”