Page 15 of Meet Me Under the Mistletoe
“I will.”
Jeremy gave her the briefest smile and disappeared out the door. Nory made her way over to Pippa and Ameerah, who had left Charles and Dev playing a duet—Dev was a surprisingly good pianist. Jenna was still being stared at by Camille and grilled for celebrity gossip by Guy.
“Thank god there’s only an hour’s time difference,” Pippa said, nodding toward the door left ajar by Jeremy’s exit. “I’m not sure he would cope if they were living in completely opposite time zones. Poor chap.”
Jeremy was an entomologist and had worked with universities all over the world. His wife, Katie, was six months pregnant with their first child and currently working in a chimpanzee sanctuary in Sierra Leone. Katie was due to fly back for the wedding and would then remain in England for the rest of her pregnancy; it was clear that for Jeremy it couldn’t come soon enough.
“It’s sweet, isn’t it?” said Ameerah. “But then Jez always was an absolute darling.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever have the energy to worry about another person so intensely,” said Pippa.
“Wait till you have children of your own,” said Nory, smiling mischievously, waiting for Pippa to bite.
“Nory, you’re making my smoked salmon blinis repeat on me,” Pippa replied.
“Just because you hate babies...” Ameerah winked at Nory as she said this.
“I don’t hate babies!” Pippa exclaimed, right on cue. “I fucking love babies. I fucking love all small people. I simply don’t want one of my own. I don’t want a fish either, it doesn’t mean I hate all fish.”
Ameerah laughed. “Wow, Pip, your baby antenna gets more sensitive every year!”
Pippa screwed her face up and narrowed her eyes, but she was smiling. “Biatch,” she said. “Anyway, what about you? Are you going to get your man-Barbie to impregnate you?”
“No,” Ameerah mused. “He’s purely for my personal pleasure. I’ll be taking him back to the store after the wedding.”
“You two sound so jaded,” said Nory.
“I’m not jaded,” said Pippa. “I’ve just spent the last ten years explaining on an almost daily basis why I don’t want children. I’m tired of having to excuse myself. I shouldn’t have to. And it’s only getting worse the older I get because now every bugger seems to think they can hear my biological clock ticking. Someone asked me the other day if I’d considered freezing my eggs because I might change my mind! I don’t know what makes everyone feel, A: that they have shares in my uterus; and B: that I don’t know my own mind.”
“I’ll tell you this much: If I do end up having kids, I won’t be packing them off to boarding school for the entirety of their childhood,” said Ameerah. “They’ll go to private school, obviously, but they won’t board.”
“Somehow I can’t picture you as a stay-at-home mummy,” said Pippa.
“I didn’t say I’d give up work; I’ll have a nanny, or a stay-at-home husband. But my children and I will always share the same postcode.”
“How very new-age hippie of you,” said Pippa dryly.
Jenna extracted herself from Guy’s probing conversation and came over. “Doesn’t everyone look lovely,” she said. “I’m so pleased everyone made the effort to dress up.”
“I feel like a tightly packed sausage,” Nory complained. “If I get any hotter someone better prick me so that I don’t burst.”
“She’s not getting on with the Spanx,” Ameerah stage-whispered.
“It’s all right for you, you don’t need to wear them,” Nory hissed back.
“Everyone wears them, darling,” said Jenna. “If you gathered up all the hidden spandex on the red carpet you could make a trampoline the size of the Shetland Islands. I should know.”
“They make them for men too, you know. My father wears them for formal occasions,” Pippa added.
Nory tried and failed to imagine Pippa’s dad in hold-you-in pants.
“Speaking of formal occasions,” Jenna began. “One of my cousins is getting a divorce... and he’ll be at the wedding!”
She beamed at Nory as she said this, and Nory recognized the glint in her eye.
“Your poor cousin,” she replied, ignoring the inference. “I expect he’ll need time to recover from his marriage breakdown.”
Jenna completely ignored her. “He’s forty, very fit, always at the gym. No children. Works in finance.”
