Read Online Her by Harriet Lane - Free Book Online Page B

handfuls. I pull the curtains against the black night.
    ‘She’s fine,’ he says in a low comforting voice. ‘It’s normal. It’s what they do, teenagers. School’s OK, isn’t it?’
    ‘As far as I know. No, nothing to worry about there. All on track.’ I find it hard to put it into words, this sense that I’m losing her, that she’s moving away from me, into a room that I can’t see clearly, as it’s badly lit or full of smoke. A place where anything might happen.
    What am I scared of? Perhaps it’s a car. A dark street. A drink briefly left unattended. A careless boy or an older man. The usual horrors. Or it could be something more prosaic, more everyday. Perhaps I’m frightened that she no longer needs me in quite the same way. That my authority is being diminished, and I can do nothing about it.
    ‘She’s a sensible girl, more sensible than Jess was at her age,’ Charles says, as he always does, and thinking of Jess – the fast druggy crowd I’ve been told she fell in with at school, her job at English Heritage, her window boxes and stew-making – I laugh a little and switch on the TV and watch the last half-hour of a spy thriller.
    Upstairs, Sophie moves from her bedroom to the bathroom and back again, and finally shuts her door for the night.

Emma
    It could have happened to anyone. So easily done, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Anyway, it’s all fine, people behaved as you hope they will, with kindness and decency – after all, the world is full of good people, we need to remember this – and Christopher has already forgotten about it. He hasn’t mentioned it since.
    Just one of those things.
    Everyone agrees it’s not my fault: Ben, Lucy, the Monkey Music mothers, as we sit cross-legged on the carpet in between ‘Wheels on the Bus’ and ‘Mary Mary’, the children’s raincoats piled on a chair at the edge of the community hall. The other mothers make offerings of their own stories: Ruth’s Max ran off at London Zoo; Miranda came this close to leaving Jimmy in Sainsbury’s car park; when Fran was away for an uncle’s funeral, Luke forgot to pick up Ruby from the childminder (‘I came out of the wake and there were six messages from her on the phone. It was seven-thirty!’).
    People couldn’t be sweeter, more understanding, more sympathetic. But I know what they’re thinking. I don’t blame them. I’d be thinking the same thing, in their shoes.
    During the very earliest weeks of my first pregnancy I had a dream about motherhood. I dreamed that I had a newborn baby of my own, the size of a thimble or a larva, a tiny mewing scrap of dependency that I kept in a walnut-shell cradle. I can’t remember if it was a boy or a girl, blond, dark or a redhead: the key thing was, I was forever losing it. The dream was one long desperate ransacking of cutlery drawers and recycling boxes and laundry baskets. When I woke up I told Ben the dream, gratefully turning it into a joke, a riff on my own entirely appropriate anxieties (the phrase ‘elderly primagravida’, boldly scrawled across my hospital notes, did not fill me with confidence); but even as we laughed, I was still feeling the cold sickening buzz of panic in my blood. I’m not sure that sensation has ever really left me.
    An afternoon in the park. Early spring, the long wet paths gleaming in thrilling bursts of sunshine, buds punctuating the chestnut branches to mark the end of winter. I have lifted Cecily out of the buggy and I’ve wedged her into the little swing in the babies’ playground. It’s the first time I’ve bothered to do this, and at first she’s terrified, hating it, her mittened fists flailing, unable to fathom the pendulum rhythm; and then suddenly the penny drops, and she starts to enjoy herself, her mouth open in a great astonished O of delight. Christopher is on his Christmas micro scooter, racing up and down along the flat stretch between the playground and the park gate, sailing through and around puddles