Chapter Text
March 1978
Her baby's head is covered all over in downy, jet-black hair.
"You're wearing your seatbelt, aren't you?" she questions her husband from the backseat of the Rolls Royce, where she is safely buckled in next to her little boy's basket. She could look up and check for herself, but that would require her to tear her gaze from the baby, and to tear her gaze from the baby would be tantamount to sticking herself with pins.
He was never supposed to be here, and might vanish if she looks away.
That's not a logical fear, but it's where her mind keeps returning.
"Yes, my love," Fleamont dutifully replies.
Giving birth to her son in a well-reputed maternity hospital, where immediate, specialised care and modern equipment was on hand in case of any complications, was a fine idea until the time came to leave. Now it has become clear that all manner of dangers and potential catastrophes are clamouring to befall them on the drive back home.
Euphemia never used to wear a seatbelt in the car before. It isn't enforced by law, and they are a mild discomfort, so she'd never bothered.
That seems so terribly stupid now.
"That song you like is still at number 1," her husband remarks after a handful of minutes have passed. Kate Bush is playing on the radio, but quietly, so as not to disturb James, who has dozed off in his basket, rocked by the motion of the car.
Euphemia tilts her head to one side, marvelling at the shape of his little nose. How, she wonders, could such a perfect creature have been formed within a body that she had long been assured was unable for the task? How is he here, when he was never supposed to be? "Let's hope it's not a bad omen."
"What kind of bad omen could it be?"
"I just don't want him to grow up and be a cruel brute like Heathcliff, that's all."
"Ah, but wasn't Heathcliff raised rather brutally himself?" Fleamont points out, always the logical voice of reason. All is well in the world for him today, not a solitary ripple in his pond. His life is a picture of perfect completeness, no more does he desire. "There's no fear of us exposing this little man to anything of that sort."
"That's true," Euphemia owns, though it doesn't suppress the surge of need within her to protect, to shield, to tear limb from limb if needed. To scratch and claw and maim, if it will keep her child safe. He wasn't supposed to be here. She won't let him be snatched away. "As for any Cathys who might be lurking around in the future, I'll know exactly what to do with them."
"You'll be more than a match for the cattiest of Cathys," Fleamont chuckles. "My wife, the warrior."
"They do say you married a character."
"I did," he agrees. "What a lucky little boy he is."
Euphemia is often described as a character—which here means an unusual, eccentric, memorable sort of person—by those who meet her, for reasons good or bad, depending on who provides the description.
Every version of Euphemia Potter, and there have been many over the years, has been a character.
She has been a fashion model with razor-arched brows and cut-glass cheekbones, sharing the pages of British Vogue with the likes of Barbara Goalen and Peggy Wilcox—or Barb and Peg, as she has always called them, though Euphemia cannot bear to be nicknamed herself.
She has been a chef, and trained at Le Cordon Bleu alongside men who pinched her backside and frequently wondered aloud as to why she was there, embittered by her refusal to entertain their flirting or flutter her lashes in their direction.
She has been, and remains, a celebrated restaurateur since 1972.
In each of her commercial ventures, success has followed closely; her own glimmering, golden shadow, concealing the agony of repeated personal losses from public knowledge. Such feats are unheard of for most women, but particularly for the penniless girl of eighteen who audaciously left a post-war Crete in search of her wildest imaginings, determined to become the heroine of her story, and fell in love with a dreamy-eyed, scatterbrained genius not weeks after her feet touched English soil. She and Fleamont were married within a fortnight of meeting, stupid and reckless and poor as church mice, but deliriously happy with one another in their squalid Stepney flat, which she remembers clearly, though two decades have passed since they lived there.
She and Fleamont remain happy with one another, which has been a balm to her soul in the very worst of moments.
At forty-four, she has been wealthy for almost as long as she was poor, and credits her accomplishments to her courage, for she has never been a meek and mild woman. Euphemia always knows what she wants and goes after it with steely determination. She does not recognise terror. She refuses to let fear have a seat at her table.
She's been a bride at eighteen, a bonne vivant at twenty-one, a self-made millionaire's wife at twenty-seven and the recipient of a coveted Michelin star at thirty-nine.
At forty-four, she is a mother.
At forty-four, terror has finally come to claim her for its own.
Her whole heart is lying next to her in a frilly white Moses basket.
It will never return to her chest.
He will never be allowed to forget it.
*
"She's had the baby at last," says Carol, her voice raised so as to carry above the clattering and clanging that is going on in the kitchen behind her. "It's a boy, seven pounds and eight ounces, and they've named him James."
"Is he healthy?
"As a horse, from the sounds of it."
Grace Evans breathes a sigh of relief, the plastic covered curls of the phone cord twisted around her fingers.
She's not sure why she cares so much.
The feeling embarrasses her a little.
A good, common, working-class girl like herself shouldn't feel so much concern for a woman who could buy her stuffy little terraced house a hundred times over without so much as breaking a sweat. Euphemia Potter was always going to have the best doctors and the best care that money could buy. No National Health Service or cramped public wards for her. She and her husband are worth millions, while Grace is a ten-a-penny waitress of no real consequence, and though Euphemia is a good and fair employer, she doubts the woman ever lost a wink of sleep over either of her little girls.
But it was a complicated, difficult pregnancy. Everyone knew that.
Grace has also heard rumours at work; whispers of many other fraught, futile, failed attempts to bear a child.
She can't help but empathise.
She's a mother too.
"Thanks for letting me know," she breathes. "You're a pet. Is there a card going around at work for her?"
"I'm off tomorrow so I can drop 'round and bring it with me for you to sign, if you're about?"
Grace laughs, and reckons she does a good job at leeching the bitterness from it first. Putting a good face on things is her only real talent. "Where else would I be?"
"I just don't want to disturb you, love."
"You wouldn't be disturbing me." She does not add that she's desperate to speak to another adult who isn't her generous, hard-nosed, perennially judgemental mother. "Come over whenever you want."
"Well, I will, then," Carol cheerfully declares. "It'll be around lunchtime, so I'll bring some coffee cake with me. You know I'm just dying to meet that little girl of yours and give her a cuddle. How has she been getting on?"
"Oh, god, Carol, she's too clever for me," says Grace, laughing, and once again it's a smokescreen, a joke that hides the truth of how frightened that very fact makes her. "You should see how alert she is, eyes on everything all the time. And her hair." Lily was born with the most beautiful red hair which, at only eight weeks old, is already starting to grow thick. Her mother keeps insisting that she'll be terribly bullied for it when she goes to school, which makes Grace cry when she gets a moment to herself in the toilet. "It's gorgeous. I don't know where it all came from. Petunia was bald as a snooker ball until she was two."
"Must be the milkman's daughter," Carol quips, though it doesn't hurt the way it had when Andy made the same joke. "Listen, my break's almost over and I still have to give Maureen a ring and tell her the news, so I have to run, but I'll see you tomorrow."
"See you tomorrow, love."
The call disconnects and Grace is left alone in the house, save for her children, which still equates to being alone, when your only company is under four years old.
Petunia is upstairs sleeping soundly, having gone to bed without a fuss, but Lily is awake, strapped into her bouncer with wiggling legs, diligently examining her own fists by the light of the telly. She gurgles and smiles at Grace when she draws close, triggering a jumble of feelings that are bone deep and intense.
Love and guilt. Pride and fear. Happiness and pain.
Andy is at the pub.
He's always at the pub. If he's not at work, selling double glazing door-to-door, he's at the Eagle with the lads. It closes at eleven, but the landlord will have a lock-in and Andy won't be home until the wee hours of the morning. There's always a lock-in, and he's always home after midnight, even on Mondays, when it should be reasonable for a woman to expect her husband to stop at home after work for longer than it takes to eat his dinner and head back out.
Andy doesn't like her working either—it's not right for her to work outside of the home when she has a husband and two children, he says—but they can't afford to live without Grace's income, so she'll be going back to the restaurant soon, and her mother will watch the girls four evenings a week.
Such is the burden of women.
She thinks Lily might know.
She thinks Lily might see through her.
It's a stupid idea for a grown woman to worry over, but one that prevails regardless. The little mite is only eight weeks old, but her eyes look as if she comprehends it all somehow, as if her bright, curious gaze has settled neatly upon the ugliest shades of truth—on all the loneliness, on the shame, and the daily, burning resentment towards that selfish, stupid prick of a man that churns like caustic acid in the pit of her stomach.
She thinks Lily might know that Grace has failed her.
She should have picked a better father for her. For them both.
Grace should leave him, but she knows she never will. She doesn't have the money, and she can't move herself and the girls into Bridie's maisonette, can't spend her life ensnared within the jagged barbs of her mother's despair at having had such a sinful child—a child who would walk out on her husband with no thought as to how it would reflect upon her family. She will stay because she has no other option, and Lily and Petunia will grow up victims of their parents' joyless, empty marriage.
Her greatest fear is that her sweet little girls will accept that their fates are to follow her example.
"I wish for so much better for you," she whispers to her daughter, and bends to press a gentle kiss to her chubby little fist.
It's the best that she can do.