‘The manual doesn’t include what to do when Abbie refuses to eat dinner because one of her noodles wriggled like a worm, or how to stop them arguing over every single, little, infinitesimal thing. Or why Hannah won’t stop trying to climb out of the pushchair. Or a reminder to check the washing machine for foreign objects before you put the kids’ clothes in there and rip them to shreds.’
‘Hannah wants her rabbit.’
‘What?’
‘She’s crying for her rabbit. Well, she probably wants her mum, but Rabbit is better than nothing.’
Adam, having reached his front path, stopped and looked at me. ‘I am a terrible father.’
‘Yep.’
‘I can’t believe you knew that, and I didn’t.’
I didn’t ask if he meant Rabbit, or being a rubbish dad.
‘It’s not hard to believe, considering how little time you spend with your family.’
‘I thought Kiko enjoyed it. Shewantedthree kids. Shechosenot to work…’
‘Areyoumanaging to get much work doneandlook after them, with absolutely no help from a partner? Can you imagine what her life would be like if she tried to work on top of this? Do you think she would enjoy it then?’
He rocked the pushchair, face drooping.
‘There are women who do it – and men – spend all the time they’ve got, wearing themselves to the bone working and looking after kids, being there for them, providing love and affection and time as well as hot dinners and clean clothes and all the other ten million practical things it takes to raise a family. Always, always putting themselves last, with hardly a thanks or a well done. Let alone a hot cup of tea or a foot-rub. Those people are called single parents. When was the last time you made Kiko feel cherished, precious? Beautiful? Didn’t you make a vow about that once?’
He ran a hand over his stricken face. ‘It’s just, my job, it’s so important and…’
‘And your family isn’t?’ I pointed at him, just about shaking with rage. ‘You can train people to do your job, give them some of your hours. Presumably the charity hasn’t ground to a halt now you’re taking some time off? You are the only husband and father they have. Well. At the moment you are.’
His face crumpled. ‘What do I do? How can I make this right?’
‘Number one, man up.’ I looked at him for a long moment. Did he really expect me to give him the answers? ‘That’s it. Just be a bloody man and make the right decision.’
I spun on the heels of my trainers and strode off, straight to Sarah’s for a koala doughnut and a smoothie. Adam was an idiot. He’d made some giant mistakes, but I didn’t thinkhewas a mistake. He’d lost his way, but for all their sakes I prayed he could find his way back. I texted the number Kiko had left us and offered to have a look through Maddie’s old uniform and see what I could find to fit his girls.
He replied five minutes later:Thanks, but I think they deserve something new.
* * *
The notebooks were dry. I had planned to get started on them straight away, but now, feeling twitchy and stressed, I instead logged onto SquashHarris.com. Seven new comments. Six of them made me smile. The seventh made me screw up my nose and hit delete. After another couple of hours figuring out how to get a spam filter on the website, I felt so stressed I was ready to look at the notebooks just to change the subject.
I gingerly placed one on a clean tea towel. Taking a deep breath, I opened the first page:
1 January 1962
Charlotte Meadows’ diary.
My hand shook so hard as I turned the next page, it ripped right down the middle.
Charlotte Meadows was a woman in love with the minutiae of everyday housewifery. Her diary, far from consisting of amusing anecdotes, an outpouring of her deepest feelings or the antics of a young newly-wed, was 90 per cent lists, 10 per cent footnotes about the lists.
Shopping, meals, housework, money spent, people she’d seen, snails on the cabbages, hours and minutes spent each day doing nothing of any interest whatsoever. And yet to her, all of it was wonderful. Some pages were unreadable, the ink having run into a giant smudge, others torn to shreds when I tried to open them. I didn’t feel as if I was missing out on much.
But I kept going. This was the kind of boring, ordinary stuff that other people got to find out about their grandparents just through seeing them from time to time. I learnt her favourite recipes, that she’d knitted her husband a cap for his birthday, had once enjoyed a social life:
Harvest Supper. Brought two apple and raspberry crumbles.
A life emerged from the pages as I pressed on – a woman, with little time and not a spare ha’penny, but determined to enjoy what she did have. Strong, hardworking, competent.
