Free The Yummy Mummy by Polly Williams Page B

health. Now, another glass . . .”
    “I suppose Amy should have mine,” Annabel says reluctantly. “Doctor Marhajessh would kill me if she knew.” She swirls the glass gently, sluicing the sides. “Still, it is only
one
teeny tiny glass, my first glass of wine all week.”
    “It’s Monday!” Blythe blows out crossly.
    “If you got pregnant for the fourth time you’d need a drink, too.” Annabel huffs, filling half of her glass with fizzy mineral water. “Look, a spritzer! Happy?” Annabel turns to me and grins. “Blythe thinks we’re a nation of alcoholics.”
    “Now, where’s that waiter?” tuts Alice, waving at a model-type who looks like he resents waiting tables. “Er, where were we before Amy arrived?”
    “
Divorce
Envy,” Blythe says, slamming her hand on the table. She has a diamond the size of one of Evie’s pram beads on her engagement finger.
    “Come on, you’ve got lovely, sexy, and rich, very rich husbands. Me and Jasmine struggle away with single motherhood . . . ,” Alice says archly.
    “Hardly, Miss Footloose,” declares Annabel. “I would love, LOVE, to hand my kids to their father for the weekend and get them delivered back on Monday morning. Like an Ocado shop. Gosh, how fabulous.” Her bump judders beneath her dress. “Imagine . . . lovers and a permanent babysitter in the form of their father to dispel any abandonment guilt.”
    I snigger self-consciously and curl my badly trainered feet around the chair legs in the hope that no one will see them. There is a pause.
    Blythe nods to me. “And you?” she asks.
    “Er . . .” I’m not entirely sure how to answer this. Is Joe my “partner”? Sounds so ridiculously politically correct. We haven’t established our new labels yet. “On maternity leave. Joe . . . my boyfriend . . .”
    Blythe looks interested for the first time and interrupts. “Oh, what do you do?”
    I try and reclaim a bit of my old identity, a bit of status. “I work, worked, in PR, Nest PR. Er, home stuff mainly. I work with companies that make watering cans, linen, scented candles, that sort of thing.” Work seems like another life. Am I the same person? Can I still care about a raffia cushion?
    “Really?” Blythe brightens. I’m more interesting company now. “I worked in PR in New York City a couple of years back, beauty products. Great freebies. Never had to pay for any treatments. I’ll be mighty tempted to return when we go home. Will you go back to work?”
    “Um, not sure. They keep the job open for a year. I’ve got a bit of time.”
    Blythe’s mouth slacks. “A year! Jesus! If pregnant New York girls knew that, you’d have planeloads smuggling themselves across the Atlantic in Louis Vuitton trunks, claiming asylum. But, then again . . .” Blythe shudders. “They wouldn’t want to risk your hospitals.”
    “You get three years’ maternity leave in Estonia,” I add, unnecessarily.
    Blythe looks at me as if I’ve just recited a train timetable backward.
    “Not going back five days a week are you, Amy?” asks Annabel, rubbing her belly in a circular motion like a window-cleaner. The question feels loaded.
    “Not sure.”
    “Do you want my opinion?”
    “She’s going to give it anyway,” Alice says, face down, texting a message into her mobile phone. “Annabel doesn’t approve of work.”
    “You’ll find it bloody hard. No picnic. And it’s tough, really tough on little babies. God, Alice, do you remember Tess’s Zach? That poor little boy.” She pauses, swirls her spritzer. “Tess went back to her job as a fashion journalist, Sunday newspaper. Left at eight in the morning, didn’t get back until eight at night, on a good day. And that’s when she wasn’t off comparing front row shoes in Milan or Paris. That poor little boy . . .”
    “What happened to him?”
    “Got the most terrible separation anxiety. Took far longer to walk than my Finn and Cosmo. Couldn’t be potty trained until he was four! Shat under