Cate

“SO THE SECOND RULE OF MUM CLUB IS . . .”

“What?”

“We have to do something that scares us.”

They are sitting on a bench in the cathedral gardens, or rather, a flint-walled, secret garden in the grounds of the cathedral. Dea had asked Cate to meet her at a small parking lot on Broad Street, where a small booth was cut into a thick wall, behind which a man waited, and Dea had flashed her university card and the guard waved them through. And it is quiet here, the walls crenellated and fortress-thick, as though the city outside with its traffic and its buses and its shopping and parking lots and tourists has momentarily ceased to exist. It is cold, but the sun is out and the sky is blue and clear.

“OK,” says Cate. “So, what scares you, Dea?”

“Having sex with my wife.”

Cate laughs out loud, and an elderly couple on the adjacent bench turn their heads towards them.

“Don’t laugh. I’m talking scared on all levels. I’m talking X-rated horror. I’m practically incontinent.” Dea grins. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Any incontinence?”

Cate laughs. “Caesarean, so no, not really.”

“Aha, bits intact?”

“Something like that.”

“So, sex then?”

“Not much, no. I haven’t been up for it lately.”

“And how’s that going down? With your husband?”

“Um. I think Sam might be finding it hard.”

“Tell me about him,” says Dea.

Cate turns to her. “Who, Sam?”

“Yeah. How long have you been together?”

“Not long. A year and a half.”

“Where did you meet?”

A small hesitation and then, “Online,” says Cate.

“Go on,” says Dea. “I love a good origin myth. What was it you fell for?”

“He’s funny. Or he can be. He’s talented. He’s a chef. For our second date he invited me to his studio. He cooked for me there.”

“Nice. What did he cook?”

“Chicken,” she says, “roasted in cinnamon. He made his own flatbreads.” She smiles. “That was pretty much the clincher. No one had made me a flatbread before.”

Dea gives a low whistle. “Me neither. I might have turned, for a homemade flatbread.”

“Yeah, well, they were pretty good. And then he took me to Marseille—he’d lived there for years—and I sort of loved that, the way he knew his way around the city . . . the way he spoke French. And not long after that I was pregnant.” The look on his face when she told him. The unsullied joy. How disarmingly cellular her own response. “He asked me to marry him, and I said yes.”

“Blimey, quick work. How was it?”

“Which part?”

“The wedding?”