The Secret Life of a Slummy Mummy by Fiona Neill

dressed.’
    And I smile to myself because this reminds me of an evening a decade ago, when I came home from work late one night to find Tom fully dressed in bed. Caught in the raptures of a deep sleep, he lay on his back, with his white shirt and the buttons of his jeans completely open. I ran my hand from his neck down to an area below his belly button, still tanned from the summer, and then down inside his jeans. This was back in the days when there was no need to stoke the fires of passion with anything more than a lingering glance. Even in his sleep the quality of his breathing changed. I tried to work out whether he had fallen asleep with his clothes on or whether he was dressed, ready to catch an early train to Edinburgh the following morning for a site visit.
    Then I saw a note on the pillow on my side of the bed telling me that he had found my credit card in the fridge. This was a period of our relationship when there was a gratifying harmony between my losses and Tom’s searches, as though it was a sign of our essential compatibility.
    But I knew that I had examined the fridge thoroughly for my credit card before I went to work in the morning and it hadn’t been there. I wondered momentarily whether he was hiding things so that he could please me by finding them, so I went to the kitchen to investigate. The fridge was a little fuller than whenI left it that morning, but on its own, on a shelf at the bottom, was a large plump chocolate cake. It looked handmade. I got it out of the fridge, and when I switched on the kitchen light saw that in the middle there was a silver ring with four tiny stones in different colours. And beside the ring a message written in icing that said, ‘wake me up if the answer is yes.’ I licked the ring free of chocolate, put it on, and it fitted perfectly.
    Tom was standing by the kitchen door, watching my face. ‘It took a lot of willpower to resist you upstairs,’ he said.
    ‘Lucy, Lucy, you’ve gone all dreamy again,’ Cathy says, nudging Emma. ‘She must be thinking about Sexy Domesticated Dad.’
    ‘Oh no, I was thinking about when Tom asked me to marry him,’ I explain.
    ‘That’s good,’ says Cathy. ‘I was reading just the other day that the lines that define infidelity have become much more blurred, and that even having a flirty friendship with another man constitutes betrayal. Anyway, you and Tom are the most solid couple that I know, and this is the most comforting household. It’s like visiting my parents. There can’t be anything wrong, otherwise I would notice. What would we do if you split up or even went through a bad patch?’
    But shouldn’t it be about me? I think to myself.
    ‘Well, there’s been no impropriety,’ I say imperiously. ‘It’s just a harmless thing going on in my head. A welcome distraction. He clearly adores his wife anyway.’
    ‘How do you know that?’ asks Emma
    ‘Because he had told her about the pyjama thing and the knickers thing.’
    ‘What’s the knickers thing?’ So I give the abbreviated versionand they laugh so much that any tension is diffused.
    ‘You’ll probably end up being really good friends,’ says Cathy.
    She is interrupted by the beeping of my own mobile phone. I eye it suspiciously, because receiving a text is still somewhat of a novelty for me. But before I can open it, Cathy has picked it up and is reading the message. It’s from Sexy Domesticated Dad. He must have got my mobile phone number from the class list. Class rep election next Monday evening, it reads. She punches in a few letters, holds it up for me to read, but before I can protest, presses send. And then what? she has written. Within minutes the phone beeps again. This time I grab it quickly. How about a drink? Sexy Domesticated Dad writes back. I switch off the phone in awe.
    ‘Cathy, what have you done?’ says Emma.

6
    ‘Nothing is certain but death and taxes’
    WE ARE ABOUT to go out for dinner in Islington with Cathy and an