The only consolation is that her new friend will surely not look any better in his swimming costume.

She remembers him sitting across from her in the coffee shop. He was very…wide, reflects Margie. His body sort of kept on going and going.

Although, of course, a fat man isn’t nearly as pathetic as a fat woman.

Her new friend’s name is Ron. This is a coincidence that Margie should have exclaimed over the moment he introduced himself. ‘Fancy! That’s my husband’s name!’ she should have said, but she didn’t for some reason. She avoided talking about her Ron at all. Instead she’d concentrated on Fat Ron and his ‘proposal’.

Not Fat Ron, she decides. That’s cruel. Rotund Ron. That’s nice. Like a jolly character in a fairytale.

‘I think it will be a laugh,’ Rotund Ron had said, ‘if nothing else.’

‘It will be a hoot,’ Margie had said in her new confident American-sounding voice. Then she’d amazed herself by reaching over to shake his hand. Initiating a handshake. She’d never initiated a handshake. She was becoming a women’s libber!

Well, it will be a hoot, thinks Margie, taking off her glasses so that the fat lady in the mirror is blurred.

And maybe, just maybe, I’ll show them all.

29

‘I’ll be very, very sad if you go and live on the moon,’ said Melly the Music Box Dancer, looking rather glum.

Gublet felt angry. ‘Don’t make me feel guilty, you frilly pink bitch!’

Melly started to cry. ‘You hurt my feelings very, very badly!’ She stood up on her pointy toes and twirled around in circles so fast that her tears splashed off her face just like a garden sprinkler.

Gublet stamped his foot. ‘Oh, f**k it!’ Then he had a clever thought. He would find a NEW best friend for Melly so she wouldn’t be lonely when he went to live on the moon. It was SUCH a clever thought!

The baby has got the hang of smiling after Sophie’s visit. Grace has taken digital photos of him grinning gummily up at his father and emailed them to friends and family. She has also printed off thirty copies of one of these photos and turned them into charming thank you cards for all the gifts they’ve received. Grace has never done such a thing before; it seems like the sort of sweet girly motherly thing someone like Sophie would do. She has written a personal message on each card. Your rattle is Jake’s favourite toy! Jake looks so sweet in your outfit! Your teddy is Jake’s favourite toy! She has addressed, stamped and posted the envelopes. The effort to do all this was so colossal that when she let them slide into the post-box she felt the weak-kneed relief of someone who has finished writing a thesis or running a marathon. ‘Good God, hand-made cards!’ said a friend the next day, breezily bitchy. ‘Talk about a superwoman! You don’t always have to be so perfect, you know, Grace. Give the rest of us ordinary mortals a chance.’ Grace hung up and threw the portable phone against the wall, screaming, ‘Oh f**k it, f**k it, f**k it.’ There was a mark on the wall. It took half a tub of her mother’s Gumption to scrub it away.

Today, Grace sits at the kitchen table paying bills over the phone, while Jake lies in his bouncinette that Aunt Margie gave to Grace. ‘Deborah didn’t want it for Lily,’ Margie had confided to Grace when she brought it around. ‘I didn’t want to sound like an interfering mother-in-law, so I just said, “Well, dear, your own husband used to gurgle away for hours on this very bouncinette, kicking his fat little legs.” Oh dear, it’s a terrible thing to say, but I did prefer Sophie to Deborah.’

Grace rocks the bouncinette with one foot while she pays bills, dutifully pressing numbers followed by the hash key as instructed by the robotic lady.

Jake frowns as he experiments with a new sound: a low, humming gurgle. He smiles radiantly up at her as he gurgles. ‘Did you hear that?’

He is adorable. She can see that. She just can’t feel it. She looks at him and it seems so evil, so dirty, that she feels nothing for this cooing, gurgling child. She can’t even smile back at him. Even when she makes a tremendous effort, tries to squeeze out a loving feeling, pushing as hard as when she was pushing him out of her body, she feels nothing. In fact, the harder she tries, the less she feels.

Grace thinks about the day Sophie came to visit. She stood in the doorway holding the platter, watching Callum lean over Sophie to see Jake smile for the first time. Sophie was pulling a funny face. Callum had his hand on Sophie’s shoulder. They were both so natural. Proper, real, feeling people. When she’d made herself walk in, Grace felt like she used to feel on the dance floor as a teenager, surrounded by gyrating figures, her cheek muscles hurting from her fake smile, her body like marble. She’d always known she was a bit unnatural. Now it was proven. Her emotional responses were somehow never quite right. When she met Callum she thought he’d saved her, but obviously it was only temporary.

Everyone would be better off without her. There would be a lot more laughing. The problem is that Callum wouldn’t think so. Mystifyingly, he still loves her. He genuinely seems to miss her if she goes away for one night. He might fall apart. Callum is, at heart, an old-fashioned family man. He loves saying ‘My wife’. After they got married he couldn’t stop saying it. He needs a wife; and the baby needs a mother, otherwise who would take care of him while Callum was at work? He’d have to put the baby in day-care. Callum would be stressed and he’d eat badly and the house would be a pigsty and Jake would catch colds from all the other children and, no, it wouldn’t do.

Grace needs to have a replacement woman waiting in the wings, an understudy, someone who is already like part of the family, someone who wants the role, someone better qualified for it in the first place.

Sophie Honeywell is such a perfect, obvious candidate, it’s like it’s meant to be.

The vague half-thought Grace had at the funeral begins to solidify into a sensible, logical plan. When she’d seen Sophie looking so longingly at Callum and Jake she’d felt an overwhelming desire to just give them both to her, to see her face light up. Here you go. They’re yours. No, really. You can keep them. They’d look better on you.

It was quite obvious that Sophie liked Callum, and it seemed from the way that they were chatting at lunch that Callum liked her. Grace just needed to fan that spark of attraction into something more. If Sophie and Callum have begun falling in love, Grace can leave them without feeling guilty. She can erase herself.