Babyville Page 0,128

They pretend to be sweet and innocent when you meet them, then they turn into these madwomen once you've married them.”

“Charming,” Jill laughs. “Remind me to leave you at home the next time we go out for dinner.” She raises an eyebrow. “They always says you should look at someone's friends before you marry them, that you can always tell a person by the company they keep, and I'm sure you can tell a lot about a man by his mother. Maybe I should have thought a bit harder back then.”

Dan starts to look pissed off, and Jill backs down. “Sorry, sorry. I didn't mean it, my darling, I was just winding you up.” She kisses him on the cheek and he visibly unclenches, while Sam feels like she's about to cry at this display of familiarity.

“I'm just going to the loo,” she says, standing up from the table and almost running to the loo. She stands in front of the mirror for what feels like an age, looking at herself, her mind completely blank, and then the thoughts come flooding in.

What are you thinking of? He's a happily married man. Why didn't he push her away when she tried to kiss him? But she is his wife, for God's sake. It doesn't mean he's not thinking about you. It doesn't mean he didn't want you to kiss him. Look how much you have in common. Think about his thigh touching yours. Think how he maneuvered it so he was sitting next to you in the cinema. Yes. He definitely feels the same way about you too.

She walks back to the table calmly, a smile on her face, her serenity restored.

If I don't see any red cars for the next twenty seconds, Dan loves me.

If I avoid all the cracks in the pavement up to the next roadside, Dan and I are meant to be together.

If George sleeps for at least one and a half hours, Dan is sitting there thinking about me too.

This is beginning to get ridiculous.

For the last three days all Sam has thought about is Dan. She wakes up in the morning to George's crying, picks him up and puts him in his high chair in a daze, thinking about Dan.

She dreamily spoons Weetabix into his mouth, and all over his face, thinking about Dan.

She pushes George up and down the hills on the Heath, all the while fantasizing about her future with Dan.

Sam is more certain now than she was before. She saw the way he smiled at her, the way he focused on her so intensely when she was talking. Jill and Chris had ended up talking animatedly about interiors with Jill giving Chris some ideas about marketing and PR, and Sam had ended up, as she knew she would, with Dan.

Dan had stared deep into her eyes and softly—out of the others' earshot—asked her question after question about herself. He had asked her about her childhood, her mother, her tearaway teenage years. He had asked about her work, her aims, her fears. And most of all he had asked about Chris. About how they had met, what she had thought, whether she had made the right choice.

His questions had been far more intimate than you might expect from someone whom you had met just twice. And the way in which he asked them, the way he concentrated on Sam until everything else in the room disappeared, had flattered, excited, and exhausted her. Particularly the questions about her marriage.

She felt he was trying to find out everything about her, to see into her very soul. And why would he be doing that unless he too knew that she was the love of his life? But she had to play it carefully. She couldn't tell him her marriage was in ruins, not while Chris was there, and not yet, but she could infer through short sentences, resigned shrugs, an unwillingness to answer.

She couldn't blame Chris, couldn't say a bad word against him, couldn't, above all, show herself in a bad light, but what she wanted to do most was pose those very same questions to Dan, take her cue from him. If he had said his marriage was over, she would have agreed and said the same thing. If he had said he loved Jill but was no longer in love with her, she would have said she felt the same way. If he had said he was thinking of leaving her, Sam would have