The Last Goodbye by Caroline Finnerty Page B

you won’t,” said Gill.
“Eh, why not?”
“Women who are pregnant always say that but then when their little bundles arrive they are usually too in love to miss drink any more.”
“Hmmh, well, we’ll see.” I put two wineglasses and a corkscrew down on to the coffee table.
The others read the menu and then I ordered the food.
“Any word from Pete?” Nat said, turning to Gill while we were waiting on our food to arrive.
“No.” She sighed heavily.
“Who’s Pete? Your boyfriend?”
She nodded.
“Gill was let down at the last minute, weren’t you, darling?” Nat said.
“Yeah, he has to baby-sit his kids – his wife had to go to visit someone in hospital at the last minute.”
Ah, it was one of those ‘friends’, one of Nat’s mistress friends. I had been wondering why I had never met her before. Gill was attractive, mid-thirties, well kept, trim figure – probably from not having had children yet, brown glossy hair, nice tan – probably from using sun beds. It was easy to see why a middle-aged married man going through a midlife crisis would be attracted to her.
“Well, you don’t ‘baby-sit’ your own kids,” I said.
Nat shot me a look. “Oh, you know what she means, Kate,” she said wearily.
“I’m just saying . . .”
Gill looked a bit scared of me so I said no more about it after that.
The food arrived and we all tucked in. I was dying to ask her why she put up with the limitations of being in a relationship with a married man but I knew Nat would probably kill me. Just like Nat she seemed ordinary – there was no obvious childhood traumas or apparent lack of self-worth – but I didn’t understand why two beautiful women would sell themselves so short.
The girls called a cab after eleven and I headed up to bed myself but I was woken up after four by Ben’s loud snoring. He always snored when he had been drinking. He had himself wrapped up in the duvet and I only had an inch to cover me. I yanked it back out of his arms and turned over again.
The next morning I opened the window to let the smell of stale air out of the room. I left Ben to sleep it off and went out and started cleaning up the flat. We were rapidly outgrowing it – there just wasn’t enough room for all our stuff. I was a regular in IKEA, snapping up all their latest storage gadgets but I now needed somewhere to store all the storage. What was it going to be like when Pip arrived? Everyone knew that babies came with contraptions and all sorts of bulky equipment.
Ben finally roused from his slumber after eleven. I was sitting with my feet up on the sofa flicking through a magazine.
“It’s awake! How was last night?” I said, putting the magazine down.
“Good, I feel rough,” he croaked. He sat down at the kitchen table. “Have we any painkillers?”
“Yeah, hang on a sec.” I got up and rooted around the presses and popped out two tablets for him with a glass of water. I sat down at the table beside him.
“Thanks. It must have been a dirty glass.”
“And nothing to do with the ten pints you sculled back of course.”
“Leave me alone, I’m dying.”
“Rate it on the scale.”
When we had first moved into the flat we had thrown a house-warming party involving Mediterranean quantities of red wine. We had been horribly hungover for days afterwards. It was full on – the shakes and reactions slower than the last hour of work on a Friday evening. We felt dire for three days straight. That party was our gold-standard scale for hangovers ever since – we now rated all of our hangovers against it.
“Eight point five.”
“Wow, that is bad. My poor Ben!” I said, stroking his head.
“ Ouch , that hurts!”
I laughed.
“It’s not funny, Kate!”
“Oh, I don’t miss hangovers. That’s definitely one of the pluses to this pregnancy business.”
I made him a cup of strong coffee and then threw sausages, rashers and eggs into the frying pan to make a big fry-up breakfast. Normally Ben was so health-conscious