my back; you’ve just never given her a look-in. It’s nice to finally have a sister I can talk to. There’s no bond like a sisterly one, you know.’ She flung a hand to her mouth, remembering what had happened to the sister Karen had had once upon a time. ‘Oh shit, sorry, hun.’
Karen smiled, but her mouth was a tight line that made it look like more of a grimace. ‘It’s okay, you don’t have to apologise for loving your sister. And I’m glad you’re getting on better with Fran, honestly.’
She smiled properly this time, and lifted her mug. ‘Okay, Eleanor wins again this week. To your shitty life.’
Bea followed suit, raising her mug above the table and clinking it with Karen’s. Eleanor lifted her own mug and sighed.
‘To my shitty life.’
‘So gym mum says to working mum, “Oh no, I’m just surprised you had the time to …”’ She stopped and looked from Bea to Karen and back again. ‘Oh God, I’m boring, aren’t I?’ She hid her face in her hands. ‘You can leave if you want to. I’ll look away and you can just sneak out.’
Bea laughed. ‘No, seriously, I really wanted to know what gym mummy said to that other one … vegan mummy?’
Eleanor groaned. ‘All right, all right. But you should know that those sixteen minutes of adult interaction during the school pick-up are all I get most days. I’m not sat in an office gossiping about who stole whose turkey sandwich, or fixing people’s heads. Feuding mums are all I have.’
‘Have you thought about when you’ll go back to work?’ Bea saw the crestfallen look on her friend’s face and immediately regretted asking the question.
‘Adam thinks I should take some time out. Just until Noah goes to school. What with childcare costs being so high, he thinks I may as well spend the time with the boys while they’re young. And it’s not as if we can’t afford to live on his wage.’
‘And what do you think?’ Karen probed gently. Eleanor let out another sigh.
‘I think I don’t want to be a middle-class arsehole moaning about having the chance to actually bring up my own children when there are a ton of women who don’t have any choice but to go back to work who would kill to be in my position.’
‘Okaaaay,’ Bea replied, digging her fork into the carrot cake left over on Karen’s plate. ‘But what do you think when your friends don’t care that you’re a middle-class arsehole?’
‘I think I’ll go crazy if I don’t do something that makes me feel like me again. I’m too selfish to devote my every waking moment to being someone’s mummy or someone’s wife.’
‘You could set up your own business,’ Karen suggested. ‘Then you get to be mummy and super-businesswoman. Noah could go to nursery a couple of mornings a week – he’d benefit from the interaction with other babies, and you could network. I have some contacts I could put you in touch with; I know a lot of mums who have done the same thing.’
Eleanor looked as though she was rolling the idea over in her mind, poking at it to find the holes.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, but underneath the words Bea could see there was a spark of interest that she hadn’t seen in Eleanor since she’d taken maternity leave from her advertising job. ‘I mean, at Fresh I had a pretty stable client base. This would mean starting from scratch. It would be a lot of work … I’ll think about it. Beats going back to my old job and having to pump my boobs in the disabled loos.’
‘I thought you’d practically stopped breastfeeding?’
‘I practically have, but the bastards – sorry, Karen – won’t stop filling up. I wake up in a puddle of milk every morning.’
Bea screwed up her face. ‘Ew.’
‘Oh Bea, one day … when you have kids …’
Bea pretended to shudder. ‘Jesus, I can’t have kids. For one thing, I have a cream sofa.’
Eleanor laughed. ‘You will. You know you will. I knew this woman who—’
‘Seriously, Eleanor,’ Bea cut in. ‘If you tell me one more time about Moira at work who had her first child at forty-two, I’m going to throw up.’
A hurt look briefly crossed Eleanor’s face, then she broke into a grin. ‘Well she did! So it’s never too late.’
‘Absolutely. In fact I think I’ll start right away. The very next bloke I sleep with, I’ll give him a questionnaire about his family