Sheshouldtell them that actually she was going to wheel Daniel around until he went to sleep and then carry the buggy into the pub and have fun with her friends while he slept next to her. Except what if someone said something about Declan or sleep and she cried or something? Yep, no, she was going back to the house.
‘Bye. Happy New Year!’ She blew kisses at her friends, determined not to look miserable. Shewasn’tmiserable, apart from about Declan. Daniel was beyond wonderful. Motherhood was also wonderful. Just a little bit tiring and occasionally a little bit lonely, that was all.
‘Love you, Pops,’ they all chorused.
‘Love you all.’ And, eek. Her voice had actually wobbled there. She’d better go quickly.
By the time she’d got over the cobbles without mishap and had negotiated the un-buggy-friendly village green (backwards: a lot easier than forwards over rough terrain), she had her tears pushed firmly back down.
Declan was in his office when she and Daniel got inside. Poppy hesitated and then decided not to go and tell him they were back, in case he was in one of his distracted moods again. Recently, he’d just seemed… well, not quitepresent. As though, while he was with her in body, he was somewhere else in mind. And she didn’t want to assume bad things but she just really felt as though he was thinking about someone else.
Like yesterday, just before she’d gone to the pub, she’d inadvertently been standing behind him while he was at his laptop and he’d closed it really fast and almost snapped at her, and Declanneversnapped. It had been like he felt guilty about what was on the screen. And then five minutes later he’d beensoloving and kind as she went out, almost weirdly so. Like he felt guilty. That was part of the reason she’d made the mistake of having so much to drink last night; she’d been drowning her sorrows because she really was beginning to think that it seemed very likely that he’d gone down the clichéd have-an-affair-when-your-wife’s-just-had-a-baby route.
A month ago she would never have believed that Declan of all people would do that, but probably a lot of cheated-on new mothers thought that.
An image of him suddenly pushed into her mind, of him sitting in their home office sexting or sex-mailing or whatever it was people did when they had affairs.
She felt tears rise again and sniffed hard, shaking her head and forcing a huge smile for Daniel. She was notgoing to give in to this misery.IfDeclan was having an affair, she was going to find out, she was going to kick him out and she was going to make an amazing life for her son.
And right now, this afternoon, she wasn’t going to think about it any more.
She started singing ‘The Wheels on the Bus’ to Daniel again as she carried him in the direction of the stairs. Such a sexist song.The mummies on the bus go chatter, chatter, chatter. Why was she even singing it? Well, because she was too tired to remember the words of anyother nursery rhyme except for ‘Three Blind Mice’ and that one wasn’t exactly child-friendly when you thought about it. What had beenwrongwith all the nursery-rhyme composers of yore?
‘Hello, darling,’ Declan called.
Poppy stopped walking and waited, despising herself for the fact that, despite her suspicions, she still got a little heart-rush just from the sound of his voice.
And… No. He didn’t bother to come and say hello and give her a kiss like he always used to until they’d come back to the UK.
Funny how – even when you still fancied them rotten like you always had and hankered so much after the good times (wonderfultimes) you used to have together – you could really start to almost dislike someone you used to love.
Fatherhood was a lot easier than motherhood. You got to have your gorgeous, perfect baby but you didn’t have to get fat, shove the baby out of your vagina, have stitches, breastfeed it, never sleep, stay fat and spend your maternity leave bored out of your mindandseemingly lose your husband in the process.
Maybe she’d just pop into the kitchen once Daniel was down for his nap and have a sneaky little Tunnock’s Caramel. It wasn’tlike breaking a resolution was up there with breaking wedding vows, and, yes, Declan, looking at you.
‘Fire!’ Poppy tried to scream but she couldn’t get the sound out. Then she realised that she must have nodded off in the armchair in the corner of the kitchen. There was something wrong with the washing machine and she’d been trying to find a YouTube video to see if she could fix it herself, and had decided just to have a two-second sit-down before she carried on.
She’d obviously been dreaming about a fire.
Except… She sniffed. Smoke. Her eyes pinged open and she blinked.
On the other side of the room, Declan, wearing his previously-unworn-and-unwanted-Christmas-present butcher’s apron and covered (apron, face and arms) in red, brown, green and yellow splodges, was manically looking between Daniel, who was trying to pull himself up to standing on a kitchen chair, and the hob, where he was wafting a tea towel above flames, feeding them rather than putting them out.
Poppy leapt out of her chair, dodged round the table, grabbed another apron from the back of the kitchen door, elbowed Declan out of the way, and smothered the fire with the apron. And then she ran a jugful of water and chucked it on top for good measure.
‘Oh, thank God for that,’ Declan said. ‘You’re a genius.’
Poppy nodded slowly as she looked around the insanely messy kitchen. ‘Apparently I am. Or you’re the worst cook ever born.’
‘I mean, maybe a bit of both.’ Declan grinned at her and, despite everything she’d been thinking recently, she foundherself smiling back at him. He pointed upwards and said with incredulity, ‘I got it on the ceiling.’
‘Yep.’
‘Sorry.’ Declan was still looking at her, into her eyes. His expression grew gradually more serious as he continued to gaze at her, for all the world as though he had eyes only for her. A silence, a kind of loaded one, like a maybe-we-kiss moment, grew between them. The moment lengthened and Poppy bit her lip, wondering what she wanted to happen next, and Declan leaned a little closer to her. She was holding her breath, she realised. Was he, were they…
They hadn’t kissed a lot since Daniel was born – she’d had a bad birth and the thought of sex had been utterly terrifying initially – and then recently, just as she’d thought that now they were back in England and things might get better for her having her mum and friends nearby, and they might start having sex regularly again, Declan had just been soodd with her that she hadn’t been able to bring herself to give in to any temptation to get at all intimate.
He reached his hand round her waist and pulled her gently against him and she felt the same thrill that she always did at his touch and the way he was looking intently into her eyes. Was he really having an affair? Could he really be this duplicitous? Would he really look at her like that if he was seeing someone else? Maybe shecould…
