Dinner at Rose's by Danielle Hawkins Read Free Book Online

you’re determined to be miserable, go right ahead.’
    ‘Thank you. I will.’
    ‘Now, Josie, you mustn’t worry,’ said Hazel. ‘You’re certainly not too old to find someone really lovely and have a family of your own.’
    ‘My aunt had her first baby at thirty-eight,’ Cilla added helpfully.
    These comforting words nearly had me crawling sobbing under the table – there is nothing more depressing than receiving condolences over something you’ve resolved firmly not to worry about.
    Matt grinned, not unsympathetically, and reached across the table to refill my wine glass to the very top.

    AFTER DINNER KIM dragged out a selection of old photo albums. ‘I thought you might like to see some pictures of Matt,’ she said, plonking down beside Cilla on the sofa.
    Looking somewhat surprised at this apparently unprecedented display of friendliness, Cilla smiled. She really was a very pretty girl. ‘I’d like that,’ she said.
    ‘It’ll give you some idea of what your children will look like,’ said Kim. ‘Just kidding.’ She flicked rapidly through the pages. ‘Bloody hell, Mum, that’s the most hideous outfit I’ve ever seen!’
    I leant over the back of the sofa to look. Said picture was of an extremely pregnant Hazel dressed in a voluminous orange smock, with her hair in a long plait down her back. She looked very young – but then, of course, she had been. She was nineteen when Matt was born.
    ‘Fashions change,’ Rose said. ‘In twenty years you might even look back at those shorts and wonder what possessed you.’
    ‘There’s Matt,’ said Kim, pointing at a plump infant with a disturbingly vacant expression sitting on his father’s knee.
    ‘You’ve improved,’ Cilla murmured, looking over at Matt with a fetching grin. ‘Is that your dad?’
    ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘I think his shorts were even shorter than Kim’s.’
    ‘You’re very like him.’
    ‘Here we are,’ said Kim. ‘Matt on the tractor, Matt in the bath, Matt in the bath again, Matt with no trousers on . . .’
    ‘That’s right,’ Rose put in from the armchair across the room. ‘Couldn’t keep clothes on the child. We used to find little pairs of pants all over the farm.’
    Kim turned the page. ‘Matt and Josie both in the bath,’ she said.
    The picture must have been taken at Rose’s because I recognised the pink tiles on the bathroom wall. My fringe had apparently been cut by my mother with her eyes shut and I was busily wresting a rubber duck from Matt’s fat little hands. His face was purple and his mouth open in a roar of fury.
    ‘We were the ugliest children in the country,’ said Matt.
    ‘You were not ,’ said his mother. ‘You were beautiful.’
    ‘She’s your mother; she’s obliged to think that,’ I said.
    Rose laughed. ‘Somewhere there should be that picture of Matthew you entered in a baby contest, Hazel. I think he’s lying on a sheepskin.’
    ‘Here’s one,’ said Kim. ‘With no hair, in a little pair of green dungarees.’
    ‘That’s it,’ said Rose. ‘He didn’t make it past the first round.’
    ‘I’m not at all surprised,’ I said. ‘He looks like a fat white grub.’
    My childhood friend gave me a really first-class dead arm in response to this comment.
    ‘Ow-w!’ I made a grab for his ear, but missed.
    ‘Stop it!’ said Hazel sharply. ‘Not in my living room.’
    ‘Yes, what will Cilla think?’ said Kim, turning another page. ‘Did you guys ever wear trousers?’ She was looking at two small people dressed only in T-shirts and gumboots bent with rapt interest over something on the lawn, bottoms gleaming in the sun.
    ‘Apparently not,’ Matt said.
    ‘Well, it was the eighties,’ I pointed out. ‘No farmer had any money. Dad used to make us eat rabbit and duck once a week to save money.’
    ‘God, that’s right,’ said Matt. ‘Your mother used to make duck chow mein.’
    ‘It was revolting,’ I said nostalgically.
    ‘This can’t be very interesting for