The upside to Henry having been up four times in the night was that he slept most of the morning. Naomi was collecting Jenny at 1.30 p.m., which gave her time to research some other parenting blogs.

There were tons of them out there. The writers seemed to span a wide range of types. There were the worthy-hipster-organic ones, the scatty-messy-funny ones and the perfect-crafty-baking ones. Were there any mothers not blogging about their daily life? Jenny took heart from the fact that no one seemed to have her ‘lost in a foreign land’ angle and, she reminded herself, she wasn't competing for best blogger; she just needed to sell Eva on the idea of a magazine column. Surely the number of blogs out there added weight to her case? 

Another reason for staying glued to her laptop screen was that she was trying not to succumb to watching daytime TV. Somehow, she’d managed to pick up a minor addiction to watching posh people looking around huge houses in the country. Thankfully, she hadn't slipped into watching poorer people taking chunks out of each other live to the nation, but that was merely a flick of the remote control away. 

---

When Naomi arrived, she had Daisy in the car. Jenny felt the colour drain from her face. Even if Naomi hadn't been googling ‘Bereaved parents – what to say’ the night before as Jenny had, surely she realised you didn’t take a baby to visit someone who had just lost theirs?

She did. They dropped Daisy to Naomi’s mother-in-law, who had her front door open as soon as they pulled up.

Naomi jumped out. ‘I won’t be long.’

Jenny watched Naomi with John’s mother through her peripheral vision. Dan always said she was nosy, but Jenny preferred to see it as taking an interest in other people. ‘You're not actually listening to me at all,’ Dan would say, as she tried to catch the conversation of a couple at the table next to them in a restaurant, or behind them in a queue. Once, there had been a mother and daughter having such an interesting conversation about an affair that Jenny had surreptitiously followed them around Marks & Spencer for about fifteen minutes. ‘I’m a writer,’ she would argue. ‘You never know when you might hear a good story.’

Naomi was back in the car within four minutes. She closed the car door hard and they drove the next five minutes in stony silence. Jenny had to say something.

‘All okay? Daisy settled?’

Naomi tapped the steering wheel irritably. ‘Yep.’

Jenny tried again. ‘John’s mum looks nice.’

‘Does she?’ Naomi continued to tap the wheel. ‘She’ll be in a different outfit by now.’

‘John’s mum?’ She had looked perfectly presentable. A cream twinset was a classic for a woman of her age.

‘Daisy. She will have changed Daisy into something pink and covered in disgusting nylon frills the minute I turned the corner.’

Dan’s mum was like that about putting vests on Henry. Even when it was about a hundred degrees.

‘I hate clothes like that, too,’ Jenny said. ‘And tops with cartoon characters. Still, if it makes her happy, what’s the harm? She probably enjoys dressing a baby girl.’ Jenny was often envious of the rows of baby girl’s clothes. There was so much more choice.

Naomi wasn’t listening. ‘Last time we left Daisy with her, she said that she wouldn’t take my expressed breast milk and tried to give her formula. Formula!’ She spat out the word ‘formula’ as if it were ‘whisky’ or ‘arsenic’.

For most people, Jenny knew, this wouldn’t be a huge issue. But Naomi was practically a breastfeeding evangelist.

‘She didn’t drink it, of course. Refused it completely.’ Naomi sounded proud. ‘But that’s not the point.’

‘Of course, of course,’ Jenny soothed. ‘But you know what grandmothers are like.’

‘She wouldn’t be a grandmother if it weren’t for me. I was the one who made that decision. She should be grateful.’

What decision? Hadn’t Naomi said she got pregnant by accident? But one glance at Naomi’s face confirmed that now wasn’t the time to ask.

---

Ruth and David lived on a new estate of executive homes in a tall town house. The kitchen took up the whole of the ground floor and they sat there, at a large round table, with their tea and a plate of homemade cake.

Ruth looked well. Tired, but well. She’d had her thick, dark red hair cut into a short, blunt bob and it suited her. She’d lost some weight (well, of course, they’d all lost weight since they’d last seen each other) and it showed in her face. She wore a little make-up, a navy striped top and jeans. She looked good.

Ruth pushed a plate towards them. ‘Please, take more cake – I’ve made enough for twenty visitors and David has eaten quite enough lately.’ She hadn’t eaten any herself.

Jenny plunged straight in. ‘We’re all so sorry, Ruth. I don’t know what to say to you. It’s just so unfair.’

Ruth nodded. ‘Yeah. You know, I’d really begun to think that we might actually get to be parents this time. Should never have given in to the hope.’ She gave them a watery smile and then shook her head as if to remove her thoughts. ‘Anyway, it’s good to see you both. It’s been really quiet around here since David went back to work. All my closest friends and family are about three hours away.’

Jenny felt terrible that they hadn’t been to visit Ruth before now; she had assumed that they would be ensconced in a private family huddle. ‘We would have come sooner if we’d known you didn’t have people around.’

‘They all came down when they heard. And they were great at sorting stuff out. Like sending the lovely pram back.’ Ruth bit her lip and Jenny’s heart flinched for her. ‘But since they went home, it’s been pretty much the two of us, barring a visit from the girls I work with. Honestly, it’s fine.’ Ruth waved a hand as Jenny tried to apologise again. ‘Anyway, it’s given us some time to get on with the job in hand – getting ourselves pregnant again.’

Jenny could tell from Naomi’s face that she was as surprised as Jenny was.

‘You’re trying for another baby?’

Ruth scooped a few crumbs from the table and dropped them onto her empty tea plate. ‘It takes us a long time just to get pregnant, so if we want a baby we can’t be hanging about.’

‘Are you restarting IVF?’ That seemed a lot to be putting herself through having just lost a baby.

‘No.’ Ruth shook her head. ‘They wouldn’t even consider us at the moment. No.’ She sighed and sat back in her chair. ‘We’re hoping that having carried a pregnancy to term will make us more likely to fall pregnant naturally a second time.’

The clinical way Ruth phrased this seemed to come straight from the mouth of one of her doctors. There was also something in her tone which didn’t sound convincing. What was she holding back?

---

Before they left, Naomi went to the bathroom and Ruth started to wrap up some of the cake for them to take home to Dan and John.

‘Dan will be very grateful. In fact, this might end up being his dinner.’ Jenny collected their cake plates and put them on the kitchen counter. ‘What are your plans for next week? Maybe you could come to me for lunch one day, if you’re at a loose end?’

‘That would be nice. But, be warned, I am a bit weepy at the best of times. The sight of Henry might make me sob.’

‘You can sob whenever you want. There’s a high chance I might even join you.’ Jenny paused. ‘How’s David?’

‘He’s okay. We’re both getting there. Trying to focus on the future.’ Ruth gave what Jenny’s nan would have called a ‘brave soldier’ smile.

Jenny squeezed her hand. ‘I appreciate we don’t know each other that well, Ruth, but I’m pretty good at eating cake and listening. You can talk to me if you need to. Any time. About anything.’ Her journalistic instinct was twitching. Obviously she wasn’t going to write about Ruth’s terribly traumatic experience, but she wanted to be her friend. And there seemed to be something unspoken behind her words. What wasn’t she telling them?

Ruth gave her a furtive glance and lowered her voice as they heard Naomi coming back down the stairs. ‘I’ll come and see you as soon as I feel ready. We’ll talk then.’

---

Because Jenny’s mum and dad were away, Claire had looked after Henry. Stupidly, she told her sister all about Ruth.

Claire was sympathetic. ‘It makes you so grateful, doesn’t it?’

‘It really does. I can’t imagine how it would feel to lose Henry.’ Since she’d been back, Jenny had already squeezed him about twenty times.

‘And yet you’re planning on going back to work and leaving him.’

How had she not seen that coming?

‘You don’t miss a trick, do you?’

Claire held up her hands. ‘I just think you’ve waited a long time to have a baby. Why not take the time out of your career to enjoy him?’

Waited a long time? Did her sister think she’d been merely marking time as a writer whilst secretly pining for a husband and children all these years?

‘I’m not you, you know, Claire.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Claire could give it, but she couldn’t take it. ‘I have a rather good life, I think. My children have certainly never wanted for anything.’

She was right there. In the motherhood business, Claire was a professional. Organic meals, cakes for the PTA, school project creations of which Michelangelo would be proud. Claire was the Usain Bolt of the mothering world: no one else came close.

‘You’re a fantastic mother. Really, I admire you. I honestly do. It’s just… I mean… Don’t you ever get a bit… bored?’

‘Bored?’ Claire looked at Jenny as if she were speaking Swahili. ‘How could you be bored watching their first steps, hearing their first words? I don’t think you realise what you might miss out on.’

Jenny gave up. There was no point having this conversation with Claire – she’d never had a career that she loved; she just wouldn’t understand. Whilst her sister had stayed home surrounded by papier mâché and cupcake cases, Jenny had been out meeting people and visiting great places. It was a lot to give up.

---

But when Jenny went to bed that night, Claire’s voice was in her head. You will miss out on so much. She had stopped listening to her sister about twenty years ago, but her warnings now made Jenny feel uneasy. What if she was right?

She dug Dan in the ribs, but he mumbled and rolled over. There’d be no point asking him, anyway – he’d just say that she should do whatever she wanted to. And she knew what she wanted to do. She wanted to write. And to be with Henry.

She would just have to do whatever it took at that advertisers’ lunch to prove to Eva that The Undercover Mother would work. It had to.