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  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  The following summer…

  Also by Sue Margolis

  Don’t miss Sue Margolis’s other novels:

  Preview of Breakfast at Stephanie’s

  Preview of Original Cyn

  Copyright Page

  For my husband, Jonathan,

  who’s always there when things go wrong for me.

  The man’s a bloody jinx.

  Chapter 1

  Ruby Silverman shuffled down the gynecologist’s table and maneuvered her feet into the stirrups. As she gazed steadfastly at the ceiling and listened for the tart snap of the doctor’s rubber gloves, she tried to take her mind off what was happening by returning to the game she had been playing in her head—seeing how many words she could find in speculum.

  So far she had six—cup, mule, plum, clue, lumps and slump. Her seventh, eulum, wasn’t a real word, of course, but she’d decided to allow it, since it sounded to her like some obscure body part prone to enlargement or inflammation.

  “Any tenderness here?” the doctor asked crisply, pressing down on one side of her abdomen. He had yet to reach the internal part of the examination, but it could be no more than seconds away.

  “No. Nothing.”

  Pus! That made seven.

  The doctor, whose name she’d forgotten, although she knew it was hyphenated, was the archetypal English hospital consultant: late fifties, unkempt eyebrows in urgent need of a trim, expensive but conservative gray suit, ditto the tie, precious little by way of bedside manner.

  Usually Ruby placed great value in a doctor’s bedside manner, but on this occasion, the lack of it didn’t bother her. In fact she saw it as a bonus. The idea of a nonboyfriend man—even one who was a gynecologist—having access to all areas of her body was bad enough; one who was overly charming—or, God forbid, young and good-looking—would have had her making a bolt for the door.

  Because of her reservations about male gynecologists, the doctor she usually saw for her annual nether region checkup was a woman. Dr. Jane Anderson was a forty-something, easy-to-talk-to, mothering soul with untameable hair and a comforting lack of fashion sense. Ruby wouldn’t go so far as to say she enjoyed their encounters, but she always felt reasonably comfortable with Dr. Jane. Today, though, she was off sick and Dr. Double Barrel was filling in for her.

  “Periods regular?” It was more of a command than a question.

  “Yes.”

  “Urination?”

  “Fine.”

  “Bowels moving?”

  She thought about trying to lighten the atmosphere by replying: “Yes, to East Grinstead actually.” She decided against it, as Double Barrel didn’t appear to be overendowed in the humor department. Instead she just nodded.

  “Any STDs in the last year?”

  “What? No. Absolutely not.”

  As Double Barrel carried on prodding and pushing, Ruby abandoned her speculum word game for a minute to consider how odd it was that despite St. Luke’s being the trendiest, most progressive private maternity hospital and well-woman clinic in London, its male doctors—or at least this one—were as distant and aloof as in any ordinary hospital. She couldn’t imagine chatting away to DB the way she did to Dr. Jane. On the other hand, maybe male gynecologists kept their distance on purpose because they were aware that affability might be misinterpreted.

  Whether Double Barrel was the exception or the rule, his manner wasn’t stopping women flocking to St. Luke’s in Holland Park for all their ob-gyn needs. Since it opened five years ago, it was forever being extolled in the broadsheets and upmarket glossies as the “Bentley of birth centers.” The upshot was that the number of patients on the hospital’s books was growing almost daily.

  The maternity unit in particular was hugely popular. Women who wanted natural childbirth instead of being pumped with drugs, along with those who preferred to wander—obstetrically speaking—even farther off the beaten track by opting for the £10,000 birthing pool, doula and champagne breakfast package, were falling over themselves to get into St. Luke’s. Because the competition for rooms was so fierce, most women picked up the phone to the admissions department the moment the pregnancy testing stick registered positive.

  The way Ruby saw it, St. Luke’s patients fell into three categories. First there was the megarich Kabbalah and crystals brigade—the ditzy, enlightenment-seeking British celebs and Hollywood stars living in London who hired shamans (along with the doulas) to be present at the birth and ate their placentas—although Ruby secretly believed they hired the shamans to eat the placentas.

  Then there were the middle-class, organic-vegetable-consuming, Guardian-reading women who liked the idea of St. Luke’s being a center of medical excellence as well as progressive. At the same time, though, they felt that paying for medical treatment severely compromised their left-wing principles. They got over this by going to St. Luke’s and then writing long, guilt-ridden, but ultimately self-justifying articles in The Guardian.

  Finally, there were the ordinary women who didn’t have much money to spare, but saved what they could and went without holidays so that they could have their babies at St. Luke’s. These were the women who had decided they’d had it up to here with public hospitals and clinics where they were forced to sit for hours on end in grubby green waiting rooms, TV blaring in the corner, carrying a wire supermarket basket containing their underwear, only to be seen by some disinterested junior doctor who barely looked up from his notes and addressed them as if their IQ were lower than their dress size.

  Because her parents had struggled financially when she was growing up, Ruby liked to think of herself as “one of the people” and therefore part of the last group, but these days—even though she wasn’t remotely obsessive about reading the Guardian or buying organic food—she knew that she had more in common with the second.

  RUBY HAD ONLY agreed to see Dr. Double Barrel after the receptionist explained that Dr. Jane was off with a serious virus and she wasn’t sure when she would be back. Since Ruby’s checkup was already overdue because of her summer holiday, she decided to try and overcome her hangup about male gynecologists and take the appointment with DB. Maybe she was wrong about them and they got no more pleasure looking up a vagina than a car mechanic did looking down into an engine through the cylinder head.

  Since Double Barrel was seeing Dr. Jane’s patients as well as his own, he was running late and Ruby had been forced to wait over an hour.

  In that time she’d drunk three cups of strong black coffee, which had made her feel even more jittery. It had also made her want to pee every twenty minutes. When she went to the loo the last time, there was no paper left and she’d had to go rooting around in her bag for tissue.

  She also read Hello! magazine. Twice. Like many intelligent women she tried to convince herself that her interest in celebrity gossip was strictly ironic. The truth was she devoured it. Seeing who was pregnant, who had lost or gained weight, cellulite or wrinkles, or who had turned up to a film premiere done up not even like the dog’s dinner, but worse—as the dog’s doggy bag—nourished her the way chocolate did before her period. A candid snap of Kate’s orange peel thighs, a shot of Gwyneth’s eye bags—even if i
t was a trick of the light—could set her up for a whole week.

  Ruby’s fascination with celebrities, however, extended beyond mere curiosity. She had a professional interest. One of the reasons she was especially curious about who had just got pregnant or had a baby was because like St. Luke’s, much of Ruby’s clientele was made up of celebrity mothers.

  Ruby ran and part-owned Les Sprogs, the exclusive mother and baby shop in Notting Hill. British and American stars, along with all the trust-fund mummies, came for the designer maternity and baby wear (Ruby had just taken delivery of her first consignment of Baby Gucci, which was flying off the shelves), the old-fashioned Silver Cross Balmoral prams at nearly £1,000 a pop, the all-terrain buggies and the cute sterling-silver egg containers for “my first curl.”

  As she flicked through Hello!, she came across a small piece about the Hollywood actress Claudia Planchette. The headline read: “Claudia Expecting Special Christmas Delivery.” The article was accompanied by one of those snatched paparazzi-style shots—clearly reproduced from one of the tabloids—of her striding away briskly from St. Luke’s prenatal department, her head down, her nauseatingly neat bump encased in tight Lycra. So, Ruby thought, unlike the first time she gave birth, Claudia wasn’t going back to L.A. That meant Les Sprogs could be about to acquire yet another wealthy, high-profile customer.

  Ruby had always possessed a head for business. Nobody in her family knew where it came from. It certainly wasn’t her parents. Her mother, Ronnie—short for Rhona—was a well-regarded artist. Once a year she would have an exhibition at a trendy gallery in the East End. She might sell three or four paintings and make a few thousand pounds. Sometimes she sold none.

  Ruby’s dad, Phil, was a freelance commercial artist. He and Ronnie had met at art school, during Ronnie’s first term. Phil was four years older and in his final year. It was an odd coupling, Ruby always thought—the hippie-dippy fine art student and the commercial artist. Ronnie always explained it by saying it had been lust at first sight. It was only as the relationship developed that they realized how they complemented and completed each other. She was the young, contemplative idealist, while he was more grounded and practical.

  A few months after they met, Ronnie discovered she was pregnant. There was no question for either of them of not keeping the baby. Instead they got married in a civil ceremony, to which only Ronnie’s sister, Sylvia, and a handful of their friends from art school were invited.

  After Ruby arrived, Ronnie dropped out of art school to become a full-time mother. The three of them lived in a tiny rented flat in Balham, where the only bedroom served as sleeping quarters, nursery and study. It was here that Phil designed artwork for soap powder boxes and cereal packs.

  Thirty years on, he was still doing it. He had always been reasonably successful and in demand, but it wasn’t until the last ten years or so that he’d hit the Kellogg’s, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble league. Until then, the companies that employed him were very much at the lower end of the market. His creations were strictly Happy Shopper. He must have done their custard creams and dishcloth packets for twenty years.

  Throughout her childhood, her parents lived from one Spar or Happy Shopper check to the next. What made it worse was that because of the feast-or-famine nature of their lives, they could never afford to set money aside for taxes. The upshot was that her parents were constantly in debt as one cash flow crisis segued into the next.

  Although Ruby was always aware that her dad worried incessantly about money, her mother never seemed that bothered. At heart Ronnie was a bit of an art school hippie who insisted it was vital to keep one’s eye on the “big picture”—the demolition of the rain forests, the destruction of the ozone layer, globalization—rather than worry about a few late payments to the Inland Revenue.

  As an armchair Buddhist—that is to say she read books on the subject, but never went so far as to join a group—she also believed that “the universe” would provide. Every time the bank threatened to withdraw their overdraft, she used to “chant for a check.” Occasionally the universe provided. More often than not, it didn’t. When it didn’t, Ronnie would phone her gallery owner buddies and beg some wall space.

  Ruby remembered one occasion when she was about fifteen when her parents’ sole source of credit was their Ikea store card. For a month the only sustenance to be found in the deep freeze was Swedish meatballs, Johanssen’s Delight and vodka.

  Ruby only became aware of her parents’ impoverished, boho existence when she was about ten or eleven. Until then she thought everybody came from homes where the wooden floors were splattered in oil paint, the sofas were beaten up and broken beds were propped up on piles of telephone directories. Slowly it began to dawn on her that most of her friends came from homes with carpets and that when you went into the kitchen, it didn’t smell of turpentine because there were paintbrushes soaking in the sink alongside piles of dishes. Nor were there charcoal marks on all the paintwork and half-finished canvasses propped up on nearly every wall.

  None of her friends had mothers with wild red hair who only ever wore workmen’s dungarees covered in paint. They certainly didn’t have mothers who picked them up from school in a fluorescent orange VW camper covered in Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament stickers and then sang along—very loudly and very badly—to Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” all the way home.

  Most teenagers are embarrassed by their parents and some might say that Ruby had more reason to be embarrassed by hers than most. But her friends really liked Ronnie and Phil and enjoyed coming to the house. The whole disheveled hippie thing appealed to the kind of kids who were scolded for getting a speck on the cream linen sofa. Since her friends seemed to think her mum and dad were the coolest in the neighborhood, Ruby saw no need to rebel—at least not in the conventional way.

  She didn’t shout much or have tantrums. What she did was develop a passion at high school for business studies. Her dad’s state of constant distress over money left its mark, and after the Ikea card incident, she was determined that she would never experience the financial insecurities she’d known growing up.

  Even during her university vacations she was busy building her first business. Although she lacked her parents’ artistic talent, she had inherited some of their creativity. She had an eye for jewelry and bric-a-brac, which she started buying and selling at antiques fairs. Her profits built slowly but steadily. After university—having discovered that it was the ethnicky pieces that attracted people most—she rented a large Transit van, which she and her then boyfriend, Dan, drove to Marrakesh and loaded up with Moroccan lamps, bowls, rugs, candleholders, jewelry and embroidered kaftans. When she got back she took a stall at Camden Market and shifted the lot in a few weeks. The business took off and pretty soon she was going on solo buying trips to Morocco while Dan minded the stall.

  Then she and Dan broke up. He’d wanted to get married and although she loved him she felt that at twenty-two they were too young. Soon after the split, all the trendy interiors shops started getting into the Moroccan thing and prices at the local markets rocketed. She battled on for a few months, but eventually she was priced out.

  Then by pure chance, the week before she was due to give up the stall, she found herself sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, flicking through an old National Geographic. A picture of Guatemalan peasant children caught her eye, although it wasn’t so much the children—beautiful as they were—that struck her. It was the clothes they were wearing: the glorious multicolored jackets, skirts and dresses. The brilliant pinks, oranges and greens clashed and yet worked spectacularly at the same time.

  Two days later she was on a plane. A week after that she found a small village clothes-manufacturing cooperative and figured she could offer the workers double what the profit-hungry U.S. importers paid them and still have a decent income.

  As the business took off, Ruby realized that once again she had found a gap in the market—albeit in children’s fashion rather than in int
eriors. On top of that she was doing her bit for fair trade.

  Trendy, slightly whole-grain young couples in strange vegetarian shoes and rainbow sweaters couldn’t get enough of the Guatemalan outfits—particularly the baby romper suits, which Ruby had specially commissioned because she thought the fabrics looked just as stunning on newborns as they did on older children. As well as clothes, Ruby sold glass dream catchers and embroidered bags, which she had adapted so that they came with compartments for baby bottles, nappies and packets of wipes.

  She wasn’t sure why, but selling baby wear gave her enormous pleasure. Ever since she used to babysit for neighbors’ children when she was at school she knew she loved kids, but there was more to it than that. She suspected it had something to do with all the excitement, the sense of hope and new beginnings, that surrounded pregnancy and childbirth.

  Ruby had always longed for a baby brother or sister, but despite desperately wanting more children, Ronnie had only managed to produce Ruby. After a year or so of trying for a second child, the doctors discovered she had seriously blocked fallopian tubes, which couldn’t be cleared by surgery. It was long before the days when IVF was commonplace, so Ronnie was sent home and told to be grateful to have conceived one “little miracle.” Ronnie’s sister, Sylvia, who was four years older, suffered from the same condition, but for her there would never be a miracle and she remained childless.

  As a child, Ruby was a precociously reflective little soul. Not only did she feel sad for herself that she had no brothers or sisters, but she also felt sad for her mother. These days she couldn’t help wondering if there was something about working at Les Sprogs, where she was constantly surrounded by pregnant women and babies, that filled an emotional gap and reminded her of life’s possibilities.