Friend Request(34)

‘Hello?’

‘Louise? It’s Esther. Esther Harcourt.’

I stand very still, feeling my heart beating close to my skin. The toast pops up but I ignore it. Is it a coincidence that she has phoned the day after I receive another message from Maria? I’ve been thinking about Esther, and the fear that I saw on her face when I told her about the Facebook message. She seemed genuinely shocked, but that could have been merely because she wasn’t expecting me to turn up on her doorstep. Hearing her voice, I realise how much I’ve wanted to see her again, but I’m so used to deceiving myself that I can’t tell why. Is it because I think she might be the one sending the messages? Or do I need to be with someone who understands, even if she doesn’t know the whole story?

‘I’ve been thinking,’ she says. ‘There is something I haven’t told you, but I don’t know if it’s relevant to what’s happened.’

‘What? What is it?’

‘I’m meeting a friend in London today. We’re spending the afternoon together and then having an early dinner, but we should be finished by eight at the latest. Do you… could we possibly meet afterwards? We could talk about it properly.’

I am glad to have a real excuse to get away early from my date tonight, so we arrange to meet at 8.30pm in a pub near Seven Dials. I always feel more at ease in a proper pub as opposed to a fancy wine bar, and I sense that Esther feels the same, despite her expensive suits and general high-powered-ness.

I stick some more bread in the toaster for Henry and scrape butter onto the cold toast, the knife unwieldy in my hand. I stand at the counter eating it, staring mindlessly out of the French windows. A pigeon struts around the garden, pecking at unseen crumbs on the patio and I wonder vaguely what he could be eating.

I call Henry into the kitchen for his toast, and he comes ambling out holding Manky. One piece of his hair is sticking straight up from his head like a horn and his pyjamas are inside out and back to front. My heart swells with love for him.

‘Thank you very much for my toast, Mummy,’ he says gravely as he sits down, placing Manky carefully on the chair beside him. They’ve been talking about manners at school and, as in everything he does, he has taken it very seriously.

‘You’re welcome, Henry,’ I reply, equally seriously. I wonder briefly, as I sometimes do, how different this scene would be if I had a brood of unruly children, pulling cereal boxes from the cupboard and knocking their drinks over, fighting with each other and answering me back. We had wanted to give Henry a sibling (as a pair of only children, neither of us wanted the same fate for him), but it had taken us so much time and money and heartache to conceive Henry, the thought of starting that journey again had been daunting, like finishing a marathon and then being told you’ve got to run another one straight away. My inability to grow a baby in my womb had made me feel like a failure. The one thing women are supposed to be able to do effortlessly, and I couldn’t do it. When you first learn about sex, and pregnancy, all they tell you is how easy it is to fall pregnant. Nobody ever talks about when it’s hard. Sam tried not to blame me, but I knew he secretly did. How could he not, when month after month there was no line, no big fat blue cross?

Now though, I love our tight little unit, the two of us against the world. Wherever we go, Henry holds tightly to my hand, as if to stop me from slipping away. If we’re at the park, or soft play, he’ll go and play with his friends but every now and then he’ll come back to tell me he loves me.

I wasn’t sure, before he was born, what sort of a mother I was going to make. Although things changed once it became apparent that we were going to struggle to conceive, prior to that I had never particularly wanted children, never felt that overwhelming biological urge that I’ve read about. But when he was born I surprised myself with my patience and my instinct, the way that, in spite of my inexperience, I knew what he needed and how to soothe him. The love that I feared wouldn’t come consumed me entirely.

Perhaps I went too far in fact, subsuming my needs and Sam’s in favour of Henry’s. Sam certainly thought so. He wanted more of me than ever after Henry was born, but I didn’t have much left for him. I don’t know why he couldn’t see that we were adults, we could look after ourselves; it didn’t matter whether we were happy or not. All that mattered was that Henry was OK. That’s still all that matters to me.

‘Do you want to go and get dressed then?’ I ask, smoothing down the sticking-up bit of hair. ‘Then we’ve got a bit of time to play trains before I take you to Daddy’s.’

His face lights up. ‘Have we got time to make a really big track?’

‘A huge one,’ I say, smiling. He hugs me, and I don’t mind that his sticky fingers are entwined in my hair. I just hold him very tight, the thought of leaving him at Sam’s later sitting heavily on me, weighing me down like rocks in my pockets.

Whilst he’s getting dressed, I pick up my phone with a heavy heart and scroll through the contacts until I find Phoebe’s mobile number.

‘Hi, Louise.’ She sounds pleased and surprised to hear from me. I don’t think I’ve ever called her before, although sometimes we chat on text.

‘Hi, Phoebs. How are you?’

‘I’m OK,’ she says cautiously.

‘Did Mum tell you I might call?’