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illustrations from a
Sunday Times Style
article about mummies, right down to their Acne Pistol boots, as opposed to the exhausted creatures in suits splodged with baby sick that Rosie used to bump into outside Happy Tots in Neasden. But in Neasden everyone was a working mum and the nursery – open from seven a.m. to six p.m. – was their lifeline.
    Wendy’s, on the other hand, with its three-hour morning sessions, existed clearly in order to allow mothers a window in which to shop, have facials or torrid sex with the gardener.
    Rosie missed her Happy Tots posse. Parvaneh, who’d been her best friend at uni, who’d turned up, living just down the road, who always cracked open the wine during play dates (for them not the children), and Nola, who lived two doors down, whose kids reassuringly always slept even worse, ate worse and behaved worse than Rosie’s – though Nola was moving to the countryside anyway, so wouldn’t have been around for much longer.
    They’d forged a lifelong bond, navigating the trenches of early motherhood together. After maternity leave, she hadn’t seen as much of them as she’d have liked but
they were always there for her at weekends when Jake had been away filming or appearing in a fringe play in Lancaster.
    They’d gone to the pub to bid Rosie farewell and drunkenly promised stay in touch forever. But they all privately knew they wouldn’t. It was a question of geography. Before Rosie was a mum she had friends all over London. In the evenings and at weekends, they all jumped on tubes and met up in Soho and caught night buses home, but now it would only have been marginally tougher to trek to the South Pole than to cross the capital and back with two small boys, who needed to go to bed at around seven. Rosie’s horizons had narrowed to the surrounding streets and she needed to comb them for buddies. The party would be a start.
    So now it was Saturday, ten to three. Two junior science kits had been ineptly wrapped (Rosie hoped the Brazilian heiress would note she’d given both boys a present, rather than measly joint one – an educational yet fun present too, she thought), and the boys were in their only smart trousers, which Rosie had actually ironed – so eager was she to make the right impression.
    She was in a gingham sundress with a huge flared skirt that she’d bought for an enormous sum in Selfridges a couple of days before she finished at Tapper-Green, when she was at the height of her
Mad Men
fixation. Rosie wasn’t much of a one for dresses, wasn’t much of a one for fancy clothes generally, let alone hairdos and elaborate make-up – she was too cack-handed to do
any of that properly and, anyway, dolling herself up brought back queasy memories of her own mother doing the same before disappearing all night with whoever the latest boyfriend was. But the Betty Draper dress seemed the kind of thing mums in the Village would wear, though when she put it on she found she moved more carefully than normal and was more reluctant to have the boys wipe their sticky faces against her.
    ‘Have fun!’ yelled Jake, who was slumped on the sofa watching the cricket, delighted to discover he had the afternoon off.
    ‘Sure you don’t want to come?’
    ‘Positive. A load of mums saying “Not on
my
patio.” No, thanks. I’ll be just fine here, drinking beer on my lonesome ownsome and suffering the Test match.’
    The Conifers was a ten-minute walk away on the other side of the Green, surrounded by high whitewashed walls like those of an enlightened Norwegian prison. The gates, with a unicorn crest woven into the metalwork, were decorated with fat silver balloons. They stepped through them on to the drive of a house that made Rosie and Jake’s place look like a cottage and which was jammed with shiny four-by-fours. Little girls in smocked party dresses with little ankle socks and patent Mary Janes. Boys in chinos. All staggering under huge, clearly professionally wrapped parcels.