A Hidden Life by Adèle Geras Page B

smack him across his smug face. He was helping himself to the cream Phyl had provided to go with the apple cake and looking as though he’d like to jump into the jug and swim about in it. Bathing in cream would be, Nessa felt sure, no more than he thought he deserved. Well, I’ve not finished with him. She decided to talk to Justin on his own very soon. He probably wouldn’t change his tune but she wasn’t quite ready to give up just yet.
    *
    â€˜I could have done the night shift,’ Phyl said. She’d come into Poppy’s room while Lou was changing her daughter’s nappy. It was two o’clock in the morning. Nessa and Justin had both driven off after the meal and the house seemed to settle into a kind of peace as soon as they’d gone. Phyl went on, ‘In fact, if Poppy wakes up again, I’ll do it. You go to bed now and sleep in in the morning, too – you don’t have to rush off first thing, do you?’
    â€˜That’s nice of you, Mum,’ said Lou, fastening the sticky tapes of the nappy across Poppy’s stomach and replacing her feet in the baby sleeping bag. ‘I’ll take you up on that offer. Ta.’
    â€˜D’you want to go off to bed now and let me take over?’
    â€˜No, that’s okay. Next time’ll do fine.’ She picked Poppy up and held her close. ‘She usually sleeps much better than this. It’s the strange cot. She’s not used to it.’ The fragrance of clean baby skin and Johnson’s baby wipes that filled her nostrils made her weak with a mixture of love and fear … the old fear that somehow she wasn’t going to be up to it, wouldn’t be able to do everything she was supposed to do in the way it was meant to be done and then … what then? Poppy would suffer.
    â€˜You know …’ Mum sounded tentative. She was whispering so quietly because of Poppy that Lou could hardly hear her.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜We could look after her for a bit – just for a few weeks. To give you a break. I’d love it, Lou, honestly. I’m sure your dad would too. We’d take such good care of her. You wouldn’t have to worry about her for a single second. And you could come and see her every weekend. Think about it, please, Lou. Think carefully. You look washed out, darling. I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but it’s true. This – this row about Constance and the will is the last straw, right? After – well, after everything else.’
    Lou rocked backwards and forwards in a motion that she hoped very much would lull Poppy back into a deep sleep. She thought: I can just give her to Mum. I can leave Poppy here. I don’t have to get up in the night. I don’t have to take her to nursery. I can save some money. I don’t have to have her in the flat. For a second, an image of how peaceful everything would be without a baby around swam in front of Lou’s eyes and she found herself longing for it – longing for silence and freedom from worry and the permission to be completely selfish that vanished the minute you had a child. Mum was offering her a kind of salvation and she opened her mouth to say
yes, of course. Take her. I’ll see her when she’s five
 … and was then overcome by a wave of guilt so strong that tears sprang into her eyes. How could she think like that? What kind of monster mother was she? Anyone would think she didn’t love Poppy. But I do. God, I do. I can’t. Ican’t let her be here when I’m in London. I’d be thinking about her all the time. It’s not as though I’ve got a proper job that takes me out of the house or that I need to be doing. I can’t be reading things for Cinnamon Hill more than a couple of days a week.
    â€˜I will think about it, Mum,’ she said, and Phyl nodded and slipped out of the room. Lou held her breath as she leaned forward to put