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  Amy, who was now transferring the pastries onto a large stainless-steel platter, paused for a moment.

  “While we’re on the subject of dumping people, I gave Duncan the heave-ho.”

  “You’re kidding. You really had the hots for him.”

  She brought him up to speed on the previous night’s events. “He actually used the word ‘kennels.’ I couldn’t believe it. Hearing him talk about Charlie that way … it was awful.”

  Brian grimaced. “What a piece of work. You’re well rid of him.”

  “I know, but …” Her voice trailed off.

  “Come on, Ames, there is somebody out there for you. I promise. You just have to hang in there.” Amy’s boss, who had also been her friend for fifteen years, abandoned the espresso machine to give her a hug.

  “Bri,” she said when they’d finished hugging.

  “What?”

  “You know, sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing, bringing Charlie into the world the way I did.”

  “You knew it was never going to be ideal, but what choice did you have?”

  “I could have taken my chances.”

  By that she meant that she could have gambled on not starting menopause at thirty-two as her mother had. Val hadn’t been too troubled by her early menopause, an event that her doctors had told her was rare but by no means unheard of. By then she had Victoria and Amy and wasn’t planning any more children. Val’s sister, Penelope, who had started her menopause even earlier, at thirty, wasn’t so lucky. She didn’t marry until her late twenties, and by the time she started trying for children, it was too late. Her husband divorced her a few years later and went on to father four children. Auntie Pen fell into a deep depression and never recovered.

  The image of a sobbing Auntie Pen being comforted by Val after her husband had walked out never left Amy.

  By the time she reached her teens, she was absolutely certain that she wanted to become a mother one day. By her midtwenties, the pressure was on to fall in love, marry, and get pregnant. Victoria, who was five years older, didn’t share her sister’s anxiety. After leaving Oxford with a first in economics, she’d walked into a job at the treasury. Determined that one day she would rise to permanent undersecretary, she lived and breathed her job and hadn’t the remotest interest in having children.

  At twenty-nine and with another commitmentphobe on the way out, Amy made an appointment with a fertility specialist. He confirmed what her mother had told her, that because of her family history there was a good chance she, too, might go into early menopause. Since Amy had pretty much known this for years, she’d had time to come to terms with it. Val, on the other hand, shed a few tears and said how guilty she felt about this being her legacy to her daughters.

  The specialist said there were two options. Amy could freeze some of her eggs or get pregnant while she still could. Freezing her eggs made the most sense, but she was petrified that something might go wrong. What if the eggs deteriorated for some reason? Suppose the lab where they were being stored burned down and her eggs were destroyed? In the end she decided to get pregnant. She supposed she should have frozen some eggs as a backup, in case she wanted a second child, but she couldn’t think beyond this first pregnancy.

  She and Bel spent weeks going through sperm donor catalogues looking for the perfect father. “Ooh, what about this one?” Bel would pipe up as if she were in Mac choosing a new shade of lippy. “He sounds megabright. Ph.D. in engineering. Member of Mensa. School spelling bee champion. Hobbies include Sudoku, cryptic crosswords, and trying to solve the Riemann zeta math hypothesis.”

  “I’m picturing a science nerd with one of those Amish beards with no mustache who probably has advanced Asperger’s … Next.”

  In the end, Amy must have read a hundred profiles. Nobody seemed to possess the genes she wanted for her child. There were the sports jocks (big heads), the wannabe literary novelists (even bigger heads), the trainee corporate lawyers (money heads). The more profiles she read and rejected, the more frustrated she became. She didn’t want to be choosing sperm donors from catalogues. What she wanted was to meet a man, fall in love, set up a home, and in time make babies the way normal people did. She didn’t want to select her child’s father on the basis of his health records, vital statistics, and CV. But that was all she had.

  In the end she chose a six-foot blond, blue-eyed, rock music– and comedy-loving marathon runner who was studying for a Ph.D. in political science. She guessed he seemed to tick all the boxes. He was tall and athletic, which meant he was healthy. According to his medical notes, his family had no history of inherited diseases. He was pursuing a Ph.D., which meant he was smart. It was in political science, which meant he thought about the world and had views on how it was run. Of course he could be a fascist Holocaust denier, but that was the chance she took. She hoped that since he was into rock music and comedy, he was pretty gregarious. On the other hand, he could be a sad loner who lived with his parents and spent his free time in his childhood bedroom playing air guitar and watching Mork & Mindy reruns. There was so little to go on. It was impossible to know this person. What sort of mother didn’t know her child’s father? There were times when what she was planning seemed like the height of irresponsibility. Maybe she was being selfish, putting her need to be a mother over her child’s right to have a father—or at the very least to know his identity. What emotional problems was she storing up for him or her? She’d often heard it argued that people didn’t have the God-given right to a child. Maybe they didn’t.

  Whatever the rights or wrongs, her mind was made up. She was being driven by her body, her biology, her hormones. She needed to parent a child.

  Her mum and dad supported her decision but fretted about how she was going to manage as a single parent.

  On the day of the insemination, Bel came to the clinic with her. The whole thing was over in a few minutes. Bel suggested to the male doctor that the least he could do was offer Amy a cigarette. He rolled his eyes—but not without humor. He’d clearly heard it a thousand times before. As Amy lay on the bed with her legs raised “to help the sperm along,” the first twinge of excitement hit her. “Omigod, Bel. Do you realize that I might have just made a baby?”

  She had. Forty-two weeks later, Charles Alfred Walker came into the world, sucking the middle fingers on his left hand. By the time he was three, he was asking Amy why he didn’t have a father.

  When Amy explained about the mummy’s “baby-making egg” getting mixed with the daddy’s “baby-making seed” he was clearly confused.

  “But I don’t have a daddy.”

  “I know, poppet. That’s because the daddy is usually the mummy’s husband. I don’t have a husband. Instead, a very good and kind man gave me his baby-making seeds and they helped to make you.”

  “So I do have a daddy.”

  “Yes, but not one who is part of our family.”

  “Why didn’t he want to be part of our family? Were you nasty to him?”

  “Oh, no, darling. I wasn’t nasty, and nor was he. Like I said, the man who helped make you was a very kind man. He gave away his seed to help me become a mummy, but he has his own family.”

  “Will he ever come and visit?”

  “No, darling. He won’t.”

  “But I want to show him my drawings. He wouldn’t have to stay. He could go home again. I wouldn’t mind.”

  Hearing him say this always reduced her to tears. Then she would kneel down and hug him. “I know you wouldn’t, sweetie, but seed-giver daddies don’t visit. That’s just the way it is.”

  During those conversations Charlie became thoughtful and sad, but only for a few minutes. Being six, he was easily distracted. Amy knew this wouldn’t last. The day would come when he would turn on her and blame her for not providing him with a proper father.

  BACK IN the café, Brian was kissing Amy’s forehead. “Okay, here’s an idea. How’s about we make one of those pacts where we agree to marry if we’re still single
at forty? I mean, you’re a beautiful woman. I could do a lot worse.”

  She gave his arm a playful slap. “Idiot. You’d run a mile if I said yes, and you only suggested it because you know full well I never would.”

  He turned down the corners of his mouth and pretended to be hurt. Then he grabbed a pain au chocolat off the tray and bit off a massive chunk.

  Although Amy had worked at Café Mozart only since Charlie had started school, she’d known Brian since university. They’d both majored in English at Sussex and had shared a grotty student house with three others in Brighton just off Lewes Road. One night during the first term, finding themselves alone in the house, they’d gotten drunk and ended up naked on the sofa. Despite being young, good-looking, and horny as hell, their activities fell short of penetration. It wasn’t simply that Brian had been too pissed to rise to the occasion. Deep down, they both knew that although they clicked personalitywise, there was no real sexual chemistry between them and that they were destined to become friends rather than lovers.

  Amy’s thoughts returned to Maddy. “You know, Bri, you can’t go on like this. You’ve dumped four women in as many months. Each time it’s the same story. One minute you’re telling the world you’ve found the love of your life; the next you’re ending it because she has a mole or big nostrils.”

  “I know,” Brian said, clearly exasperated by his own behavior. “You think I don’t get it? I mean, it’s not like I’m exactly God’s gift.” He ran his hand over what had lately become a noticeable gut.

  “Oh, behave,” Amy chided gently. “You are a great-looking bloke. You just need to lay off the pain au chocolat and spend some money on yourself, that’s all.”

  At that point they both joined in with what had become a familiar chorus: “All my money goes back into the business.”

  If Brian found it hard to understand what women saw in him, Amy didn’t. Despite plumping up ever so slightly, he could still pass for a decade younger than his thirty-six years. His round fresh face, brown puppy dog eyes, and hamster nest hair made him appear boyish and vulnerable. There was a certain type of woman who loved to mother him.

  Brian adored being adored. He made no secret of it. These days he was in therapy, and he had come to understand that his neediness was tied up with his parents’ deaths. They had been killed in a car crash when he was thirteen. Brian’s father had been driving them to their accountant’s office in Greenwich. They had been called in for urgent talks about their printing business, which was about to go bust. Friends and relatives suggested that they committed suicide, but the police reports ruled that out. Their deaths had been an accident. Brian received a decent insurance payout but no inheritance.

  He admitted to Amy that his parents’ screwing up their business and failing to provide for him had left him angry but determined to succeed.

  Amy suspected that it was the loss of his mother that had affected him the most. Even though he was now a grown man, in some ways he was still a boy looking for his lost mother. It occurred to Amy that this might be one of the reasons his sartorial choices hadn’t changed as he’d gotten older and he still dressed like a grungy teenager. Today, for example, he was wearing his usual uniform of low-slung jeans, tatty Converse with fluorescent green laces, and a zip-up hoodie over a Vandelay Industries T-shirt. Years after the series had ended, Brian remained a Seinfeld nut and had all the shows on DVD. One of a handful of people in Britain who had taken to the series, he had spent the whole of 1997 tagging “giddy-up” to the end of his sentences and perfecting Kramer’s style, skidding to a stop at room entrances and demonstrating his moves to his baffled friends.

  Some women loved Brian’s style. Lucy—two girlfriends ago (continuous eyebrow)—confessed how much she loved smelling Brian’s hair and running her fingers through it. In Amy’s opinion—not that she had shared it with Brian for fear of upsetting him—his sweet-scented thicket needed thinning and layering by somebody other than Jack Dash of Tooting Broadway (police informant slash coiffeur), who charged clients a tenner for a cut and finish. When she looked at Brian’s locks, it was clear that Jack always got called away on police informant business before actually finishing his hair.

  Having unpacked and arranged all the pastries on platters, Amy began slicing one of the lemon drizzle cakes. She swallowed as her taste buds responded to the citrus aroma. At the other end of the counter, Brian had just picked up another coffee-making apparatus: the tamper. This was a metal disk with a red-painted handle. Amy watched him press down on the coffee in the portafilter. Thirty pounds was the requisite pressure. He had practiced this maneuver so many times that she would have put money on it being precisely the correct pressure. Apparently, tamping eliminated any “voids in the coffee bed.” Amy had learned that there was a debate among baristas about whether to tap the side of the portafilter between tamps. Some believed it had the beneficial effect of dislodging a few coffee grains that may have gotten stuck to the sides. Brian, on the other hand, believed tapping could break the seal between the coffee and the portafilter. He was an impassioned nontapper and made no apology for it.

  Ever since Amy had known Brian, he’d been a man of enthusiasms and passions. While other students were merely “in to” Karl Marx, Brian became totally immersed. Late into the night, Pink Floyd blasting from his room, he read and reread Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto. He could quote lengthy sections with the zeal of a Bible-bashing evangelist. “‘Capital,’” he would proclaim to his housemates, who were usually sprawled out in the living room watching daytime soaps, “‘is dead labor, which, vampirelike, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more the more labor it sucks.’ It’s so simple. I can’t believe I never saw it before.” When he failed to get his friends’ attention beyond “Shuddup, Quincy’s just getting to a good bit,” he would stomp off, muttering, “Lackeys of the bourgeoisie,” as he went.

  In the third year, the didgeridoo arrived. Brian had spent the previous summer backpacking in Australia and claimed that the three-foot-long wind instrument made from the hollowed-out wood of a eucalyptus tree had been conferred upon him by an aged, leather-skinned Aboriginal wise man whose family had used it for generations to summon up the healing spirit of the Light Dreaming Man. It wasn’t until years later that Brian confessed to having bought it at the airport gift shop.

  Not only was he overcome with the desire to play the instrument, he wanted to play it like an Aboriginal. Among other things, this meant perfecting “circular breathing,” which enabled him to make a continuous sound without giving any indication of having taken a breath. Brian went to great lengths to find books on didgeridoo playing and spent his last year at university, when he should have been studying for his finals, honing his skills. The low blasts could be heard from the street. Passersby must have thought somebody was keeping a farting hippopotamus in the house. Brian always ignored his housemates’ pleas to pipe down. They got back at him by regularly going into Brian’s room when he was out and confiscating the didgeridoo. On his return, he would be reduced to hunting for it under beds and on top of kitchen units like a truculent five-year-old who’d been punished for vrooming his toy cars too loudly.

  “My shrink says I have intimacy issues,” Brian continued now, alluding to his decision to dump Maddy. He reached for another pastry. Amy attempted to slap his hand, but he dodged her and grabbed a prune Danish. “She reckons that my parents dying when I was so young means that I’m reluctant to get close to women in case they abandon me. Instead of hanging around to see what happens, I find an excuse to end it before they leave me.”

  “But your gran brought you up after you lost your mum and dad. She never abandoned you.”

  “No, not until she died last year.” He took a bite of the Danish and started chewing. “As an adult it’s really hard telling people that you’re pissed off with your poor, sick old gran for dying, but I was furious with her.”

  Amy nodded. “I can understand that,” she said gently. “So that w
ould explain why your problem with women began so recently.” She paused. “Okay, how about this for an idea? Now that you know what’s causing you to end relationships before they even start, maybe you should try going on a few more dates with Maddy and see if you can get over these feelings.”

  Brian swallowed. “That’s what my shrink said.”

  “I think she’s right.”

  “But they’re such powerful feelings. Do you really think it’s possible to overcome them?”

  “Who knows? But I think you should at least give it a try.”

  He wrinkled his face and shoved what remained of the pastry into his mouth. “I dunno …”

  “Oh, come on. You’re being asked to spend a few more hours in the woman’s company. Nobody’s suggesting you marry her.”

  He shrugged. “Okay. Why not? I’ll give it a try. I’ll carry on seeing Maddy and see how I feel in a couple of weeks.”

  “Great. You won’t regret this.”

  “I wish I had your confidence,” he said, latching the portafilter onto the espresso machine and switching on the pump. After a few seconds, dark viscous droplets of coffee were falling into two tiny cups.

  “Just look at it … the color of a monk’s robe.”

  Now he was examining the crema and smiling with approval. It appeared that the hallmark of a great espresso was as it should be: a light golden foam. He cut through it with a spoon, and it immediately came back together. He handed Amy one of the white porcelain espresso cups, optimum storage temperature forty degrees Celsius. “Taste that,” he said, triumph in his voice. “What do you think? Tell me honestly.”

  She took a sip. “Um, well, it’s definitely very coffee-flavored.”

  “Omigod, eight months under my impeccable tutelage and the woman still has the palate of a plankton. How am I ever going to make a barista out of you?” He brought his cup to his lips and closed his eyes. Amy watched as he swirled the liquid around in his mouth before swallowing. “Full, velvety, smooth texture, slightly acidic. No bitter aftertaste … a flavor that lingers. Truly magnificent.”