Babyville Page 0,119

seven and a half?” Sam nods. “Seven-and-a-half-month-old baby, you're looking gorgeous. How on earth do you do it?”

From anyone else, Sam might have questioned this statement. Would almost certainly have assumed it was sarcastic, but Jill has been there, and Jill knows what she needs to hear when she is still feeling fat and exhausted, and there is nothing but sincerity in her voice, and even as she speaks she sees Sam slowly unfurl.

“You are joking!” Sam laughs, but her smile is genuine. “I'm huge. Look! Enormous!”

“You're not,” Jill says. “You're gorgeous.”

“What about you? Lily's fourteen months and you look like you've just stepped off a catwalk.”

“I knew I'd like you, Sam!” Jill gives Sam's arm a squeeze and goes off to the kitchen to get tea ready.

“What shall I do with George?” Chris puts George on the floor, where he sits rather like a small chubby beanbag, slumped forward examining the pattern on the Persian rug. He falls on to one side and rolls over, moving his face closer to the pattern before slowly lowering his open mouth to try to eat a particularly appetizing red swirl.

“Oh George,” Sam says, scooping him up and covering him with kisses, “you cheeky little monkey,” and Chris smiles as he watches them. He can see that Jill has instantly put Sam at ease, and seeing her like this reminds him of the good times.

“Chris!” Jill calls from the kitchen. “Come and see the table. It's in here.”

Sam perches on the edge of the sofa as Dan walks back into the room. She pulls in her stomach, then lets it out, thinking how ridiculous she is being. She is a married woman, not to mention a mother, not to mention overweight.

She pulls her stomach in again.

Dan collapses next to her on the sofa, putting his feet on the coffee table, and she is instantly very aware of his proximity. His right leg is casually brushing her ample thigh, but he hasn't seemed to notice.

It is all she can think of.

“Lily is the light of my life,” he sighs, stretching lazily and resting one arm along the back of the sofa, “but what I wouldn't give to have a holiday right now.”

“God, tell me about it,” Sam says, in a voice that sounds, even to her, self-conscious. Go away, she is thinking. I cannot cope with such a dangerously attractive man so close to me who is making me think unsafe thoughts. Don't go, she is thinking. Stay to remind me of this feeling, to remind me that it is still possible, that I am not too old and boring to feel passion.

“Okay.” Dan smiles, taking her words literally as she turns to look at him. “Right now I would like to be lying on a hammock strung between a couple of palm trees on a deserted island in the Caribbean.”

“Glass of rum punch brought out to you by a besuited waiter?” Sam smiles, enjoying skipping small talk, enjoying the false intimacy this line of conversation is creating.

“Good idea!” he laughs. “What about you?”

“White sand. Turquoise water. Hot, hot, hot. I would be in a bikini, having lost all my pregnancy weight finally”—she didn't mean to say that, but she needed him to know she didn't always look like this—“and I would be lying in the surf to cool down.”

“If that's pregnancy weight you should keep it,” Dan says, and even though she knows he's just being nice, a part of her hopes it's more, hopes he might be flirting with her. “It suits you.”

She flushes.

“And what are you two up to?” Jill walks into the living room, carrying a tray of tea, biscuits, and cakes, none of which, Sam suddenly decides, she will be eating.

“Nothing much.” Dan stretches again as Sam tries to will the heat out of her cheeks. “Just sharing fantasies. You wouldn't be interested.”

Chris raises an eyebrow. He doesn't say anything at all.

26

Chris is delighted. The morose Sam of these past few months has been transformed in the last few days. It started when they went to Jill and Dan's for tea, where Sam seemed to bask in Jill's warmth, as Chris knew she would.

The four of them had hit it off, had said they would get together again very soon, and Dan had then suggested supper and a movie one night. He said he had some tickets to a sneak preview of Castaway with Tom Hanks. Chris had looked at Sam, expecting her to do as she always did,