Free Freeing Grace by Charity Norman

passes out. You name it, Pertwell Party Solutions will provide it.’
    ‘Goodness.’
    ‘She’s flat out. I don’t know whether Freya and Charlie have ever actually met her, but she buys them stuff instead.’
    Leila paused, brow creased, hands resting in the grey warmth of the water. Why bother? Why turn them out like biscuits, and then palm them off on a nanny?
    Elizabeth paused in front of the fridge, looking at the same photographs which had intrigued Jacinta. ‘Are these your parents, on the London Eye?’
    Leila gazed affectionately at the faces in the picture. Fola and Ayotunde, waving from their bubble, surrounded by their dynasty. Leila and David were just visible at the back of the group.
    ‘Ah, that was fun. We took them up for Dad’s seventieth.’
    Elizabeth bent closer to the picture. ‘They look so young. What did they say when you first brought David home?’
    ‘A white boyfriend?’ Leila shrugged. ‘Race wasn’t allowed to be an issue in our household. We were always proud of our heritage, but never to the exclusion of others’. The first time David came home he talked football with my brothers and African literature with my parents, and he’s been one of the family ever since.’
    ‘They know a good thing when they see one.’
    ‘They do.’ Leila smiled. ‘Once—just once—Dad got all serious and warned us to expect hostility as a mixed race couple. And he was right, but it’s been nothing we can’t handle.’
    Another silence. The draining board was almost empty before Leila spoke again. ‘Actually, childlessness can be a greater barrier than race.’
    Elizabeth was absent for a short time, pewter helmet bent over a wineglass. She seemed to be deep in some memory of her own.
    ‘I know what you mean.’ She ran her cloth carefully around the stem.
    Leila tugged at the plug, watching the foamy water as it spiralled away. The hope had trickled away, just like the water: round, and round, and down the plughole. Glug.
    ‘It’s my fault, you know,’ she said. ‘It’s an inescapable fact.’
    Elizabeth had the sense not to protest at this.
    Leila held out her arms. ‘What’s the point in having childbearing hips and page-three knockers if you can’t deliver? Mind you . . .’ She hesitated, eyeing her friend’s calm features, and then put a finger to her lips. ‘Shh, don’t say anything to David . . . I’m pretty hopeful, at this moment.’
    ‘Because?’
    The sitting-room door swung open, and Hilda was in the hall: first her footsteps and then her curiosity. ‘Have you two been kidnapped?’
    Swiftly, Leila crossed the kitchen and switched on the kettle. ‘No, no. Just making the coffee!’
    Once Hilda was safely out of earshot again, Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. ‘Because?’
    Leila’s eyes gleamed. ‘I’m a day or two late and I feel . . . well, you know.’
    ‘Do I?’
    ‘Different. Very, very different. They told us it wasn’t completely impossible, just increasingly unlikely as I grow older. We stopped actively trying ages ago.’
    Elizabeth dried her hands, her keen gaze fixed upon the younger woman’s face. ‘Have you done a test?’
    Unsmiling, sober, Leila rubbed her hands together. It was a gesture of anxiety, of longing, of terror. ‘I’ve got one. I’ll do it tonight, after David’s asleep. Ooh! It would be unbelievable, after all this time. Unbelievable!’
    The kettle began to sigh and gurgle. Frantically, as if wounded, Leila screwed up her eyes and squeezed the back of a kitchen chair.
    ‘Touch wood. Touch wood. Maybe there is a God, after all.’

Chapter five
    Matt sat down at the dinner table without a word and started shovelling it in as though he’d just escaped from a health farm. Perry poured me a glass of wine and asked about New Zealand. He seemed to be going out of his way to be nice to me.
    ‘I gather you’re not planning on going back for a while?’
    ‘Probably not.’
    ‘D’you call home often? Feel free to use our