‘Not now, Tills, I’m telling off Uncle Max.’
‘I don’t feel well, Mummy.’
That got her attention. She looked down at her daughter and gasped in sudden horror. Tilly’s face was bright red.
‘What’s happened?’ she said, kneeling down in front of her. ‘Are you hot?’
‘Really hot,’ nodded Tilly. ‘It’s like my skin’s made of lava.’
Amy gently put a hand on Tilly’s face, and they both flinched, Tilly from the pain and Amy from the heat. The little girl was burning up.
‘I think she’s caught the sun,’ said Max, looking at her warily.
Amy’s stomach turned over. Oh God. In her rush to get the girls out onto the lawn, she hadn’t made them put on any sunscreen – and they’d been in the pool all morning, washing off any protection they might have had. No wonder Tilly looked like a lobster.
Claire rushed across holding her daughter by the hand. Mercifully Hettie and Alex looked relatively unscathed. ‘We should of been wearing hats,’ she said piously, then looked up at her mother for approval. ‘We do that at school.’
‘Oh darling, does it hurt?’ Claire looked at Tilly in horror.
‘Yes, and I feel a bit sicky too. Can I have some ice cream?’
‘Maybe later,’ said Amy as David strode over. ‘First we need to cool you down and put on some suncream.’
‘It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?’ snapped David, taking Tilly by the shoulders and leading her away. Amy noted that he didn’t look in her direction. He didn’t need to.
‘Is Tilly going to get cancer?’ asked Hettie. ‘That’s what Miss Baker at school said. She said if you don’t wear hats and cream you die of cancer.’
‘No, Hettie,’ said Claire. ‘Tilly’s just a bit burnt. She’ll be fine.’
Amy mouthed ‘sorry’ to Claire, then turned towards the house, walking quickly so no one could see the tears running down her face.
Chapter 13
Tilly was finally asleep, breathing gently in and out, one arm thrown around Mr Lion, today’s favourite toy. Cool towels draped over her face and forearms had lowered her temperature, and the cream from Max and Claire’s huge medicine cabinet had taken most of the sting from the burns. Alain, Max’s driver, had been in the medical corps in the French military, and his gentle bedside manner – plus his prognosis that Tilly would peel a little but would otherwise be fine in a few days – had calmed both the little girl and her parents. Well, Amy at least. David was fuming, and this time, Amy couldn’t really blame him.
She reached across and pulled the sheet a little higher. Without the pink skin, Tilly would have been perfect, and this moment – mother and daughter at the end of a long, warm day – would ha
ve been perfect too. It was Amy’s favourite time of day, no question. Working mums got precious little time with their kids, and what they did get was concentrated at either end of the day, compressed like a handful of multicoloured Plasticine. Each moment with Tilly was a bubble of intense joy although it was often accompanied by a sense of exhaustion or the nagging feeling that she had to shoot off to do something
Today was no different, so there was both relief and sadness when Tilly had finally flaked out. Amy sat there on the edge of the bed, stroking her daughter’s perfect head, trying to hold the image in her head like an overexposed photograph. She was painfully aware that her time with Tilly was slipping through her fingers. Where had that tiny baby gone, the toddler with the golden hair and the single tooth? Disappeared already, passed into memory while she was fretting about cover lines and captions. She bent her head, listening. Air in, air out. Right now, it was all she asked.
She tugged the sheet over Tilly’s shoulder and dropped a kiss on her forehead, then got up and went back to her own room. As she closed the door behind her, she heard a splash from outside, the slap and ripple as someone entered the water. She walked to the window and looked out. There were lights strung between the trees and underwater lighting in the pool, and she could see Josie diving beneath the surface, her body distorted, stretched by refraction, the green water churning as she surfaced and stroked effortlessly one end to the other – a tumble turn, then back again.
Where had she learned that? wondered Amy. Not at the Mermaid, surely, the crappy municipal leisure centre on the outskirts of Westmead, all cracked tiles and veruccas. You couldn’t move for kids bombing and dunking each other most weekends; certainly no room to perfect a decent crawl. But then Amy hadn’t been back to the estate in years; the sporting facilities in the area could have come on in leaps and bounds for all she knew. She stood watching Josie’s sleek body cutting through the water – swish, swish, duck, swish, swish – and felt unsettled. There was no sense to it, no reason to suspect anything about her. But still there was that nagging sensation.
There was a click and David stepped into the room.
‘She’s so lovely, isn’t she?’ he said.
Amy’s brow clouded. ‘Josie?’
‘Josie?’ said David with surprise. ‘I’m talking about Tilly. I’ve just been in to check on her.’
‘Oh,’ said Amy, looking down at the pool.
He walked across, glancing over her shoulder. Just a peek and a grunt: no interest. But then he would do that, wouldn’t he?
‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘Out with it. What’s wrong?’