Someone to Watch Over Me by Madeleine Reiss Read Free Book Online Page B

was keen to have children, she found herself curiously reluctant to start the process.
    â€˜Couldn’t we just have a couple more years enjoying being together?’ she asked. ‘Besides which, it wouldn’t be a good time to get pregnant at the moment, with the school getting ready for an Ofsted inspection.’
    Rupert’s answer was to take the pills from the sponge bag that she kept by the bed and to pop them down the sink, pushing through the foil and firing each one down the plug hole as if they were tiny missiles, then pulling her down on the bed to perform his own ‘Ofsted inspection’ on her. He was so charmingly eager, so attentive to her every need from the first moment that the subject came up, that Molly quickly came to see her reluctance as simply a lack of confidence in her own readiness, in her ability to be a good mother. He set himself assiduously to the task of making a baby, reading about optimum times and recommended diets, researching a theory that if the man ate a high proportion of smoked foods he was more likely to produce a son.
    â€˜I’d like a son,’ he said, as if the matter was decided. ‘Girls are too complicated. Just look at the convoluted way
your
mind works … In any case you are the Queen of the House. You don’t want any rivals for Daddy’s affection now, do you?’ and he set about preparing salads with smoked bacon and smoked salmon and looking into the benefits of water births.
    She knew exactly when she conceived Max. Always a light sleeper, she had been woken that morning by the sound of clamorous birds and lay for a moment watching the muslin curtain at a half-opened window swaying in the breeze. Rupert had his back to her and she smoothed her hands along his spine and then moved over him, touching him gently so that he was still half asleep as she straddled him and guided him into her. Afterwards, she lay very still, feeling the air on her body, careful with herself as the very beginnings of her baby attached himself firmly inside her. Three weeks later the test confirmed what she already knew. She held the knowledge to herself for a couple of days, wanting, just for a while, for it to be something for only the two of them. Rupert, when he was told the news with candlelight and due ceremony, was delighted, and set about big plans for a nursery with an underwater theme, complete with circling sharks and lampshades shaped like jellyfish.
    Three months after Molly fell pregnant, her mother developed terminal breast cancer. For once Molly ignored the fact that Rupert didn’t like her going out without him and went to her parents’ house as much as she could. Molly and her mother had never been demonstrative with each other and her mother’s illness didn’t change the reserve between them, but it did provoke in Molly memories of her own childhood she thought she had forgotten. She remembered how her mother used to leave secret messages around the house for Molly to find when she returned from school; a tiny scarf knitted for her toy monkey, a jigsaw puzzle stealthily completed, her pyjamas spread over the warm radiator. There was a doll called Beth, her favourite, who always went missing and which she would find eventually somewhere in the house or garden, mid adventure. Once she had been discovered halfway up a tree; another time, Beth had been in the fridge, her plastic fingers dipped into a pot of strawberry yogurt. The postman even delivered the doll one day with a stamp attached to its chest. Moving the doll around and giving it its own secret narrative was her mother’s way of telling her the stories that she seldom spoke out loud.
    Max was born in the last weeks of Molly’s mother’s life and on one strength-sapping summer afternoon, after Molly had brushed her mother’s hair and pinned it up on her head in an attempt to keep her cool, she had placed Max in her mother’s arms. He lay there,