The Ullswater Undertaking by Rebecca Tope (read dune .TXT) 📕

smiled insincerely and said that of course breast was best. Except when … and proceeded to list numerous instances where salvation lay in a bottle. Simmy did not possess a bottle and had no intention of getting one. She knew that it would represent a malign temptation, not very different from how a litre of Jack Daniel’s would to a recovering alcoholic. It was all her mother’s doing of course. Angie had conceived a burning passion for breastfeeding forty years before and clung to it ever since. And nobody would lightly flout Angie Straw’s edicts.

Fortunately, Robin was on her side. When she changed his nappy, the old one was heavy with wee. There was obviously plenty of fluid going through his system. Anyone could have a wakeful night without causing panic. ‘He’ll probably sleep all morning now,’ she murmured, suspecting that Christopher had gone back to sleep.

Nobody stirred again until eight, when Christopher emerged from sleep in a panic, remembering that he was going back to work that day. Simmy never got her morning tea, and breakfast dwindled to a slightly overdone slice of toast. ‘I need to eat more than this,’ she complained.

‘You can get yourself a bowl of cereal, can’t you?’ was the unsympathetic answer. ‘You’re not an invalid.’

He was right, of course. ‘We’re running low on bread,’ he went on. ‘And a few other things.’

‘I could do a supermarket order and get them to deliver,’ she said doubtfully. Neither of them really liked this means of provisioning themselves. It made more traffic on the winding lanes and removed any interest or pleasure from the shopping process. ‘Or maybe I should pop down to the shop in Troutbeck. They’ve got the basics, at least.’

‘Blasphemy,’ he quipped. ‘How dare you consider anything other than St Tesco or Sainsbury?’

‘I want to go there anyway,’ she said. ‘I thought the Mortal Man would be nice for our post-wedding bun fight. Troutbeck’s fairly easy to get to, and I do have sentimental feelings about it.’

‘It would be perfect,’ he said slowly, savouring the suggestion. ‘That’s a brilliant idea.’

After he had gone, she indulged in twenty minutes of mindless domestic ease, the baby asleep, birds singing outside, no builders yet arrived and no really crucial need to be anywhere.

And then she remembered Ben, and the lack of bread, and the pressing urgency of the wedding plans, and Robin’s abandonment of a perfectly fine routine, and went upstairs to get herself dressed.

At ten she phoned Ben and said she could probably be with him by eleven, with luck – rather later than they had agreed the evening before. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘Today’s a bit disorganised, and everything’s later than it should be. But I can’t come tomorrow because it’s the baby clinic.’

‘Does that take all day?’ he asked as if that really might be a possibility.

‘No, but it’s going to be traumatic for both of us. We won’t want to do anything else.’

‘Well, there does seem to be a lot to discuss,’ he said diffidently. ‘That’s if you want to stay involved. I mean – you could just drop the whole thing, I guess.’

‘I don’t think I could. Fabian Crick isn’t a person you can just drop. He’s sort of sticky – like chewing gum on your shoe, if that isn’t outrageously rude. It’s all far too close to us to be avoided. And I did like Uncle Ambrose,’ she added inconsequentially.

‘Good. Well, Bonnie’s going to miss the fun again. Although she and I went over everything last night. She had some good ideas.’

‘She always does,’ said Simmy warmly.

‘So I’ll see you about eleven, then?’ He paused. ‘Why is the baby clinic traumatic?’

‘Don’t worry about it. I couldn’t possibly explain. It’ll be our first one, so I really don’t know what’ll happen. Just fear of the unknown, I expect.’ But she knew there would be talk of vaccinations and contraception and sleeping arrangements and the ever-daunting business of the infant’s weight. None of it appealed to her in the slightest.

‘Is it compulsory?’ Ben wondered.

‘Probably,’ she said miserably.

Robin was sleepily unco-operative when she tried to give him a feed before setting out for Bowness. Then, when she strapped him into his car seat, he woke up and complained vociferously. ‘Stop it,’ she told him. ‘You had your chance.’ An automatic calculation told her he had taken almost no sustenance for over five hours. ‘Just let’s get to Ben’s, okay? Shouldn’t be long.’

It was twenty-five minutes in total, the baby screaming the entire way. There was a bottleneck on the road into Windermere for no obvious reason, and again on the final stretch before turning into Helm Road where the Harknesses lived. Even two minutes in a stationary car with a howling baby was a whole new kind of torture, Simmy discovered.

The only parking space she could find was a hundred yards further down the road. Without bothering to release the seat, she unbuckled the baby and cantered up to Ben’s front door with Robin under her arm. ‘Sorry,’ she panted, when Ben appeared. ‘I’ll have to feed him before anything else.’

‘No problem,’ he said calmly. ‘I can see I’ll soon be getting used to this.’

Robin quickly redeemed himself, feeding composedly while Simmy tried to relax. ‘It’s a complete tyranny,’ she said, ‘I never properly realised that before. He has all the power. If I dared to try to cross him, I’d definitely get the worst of it.’

‘Survival,’ nodded Ben. ‘Stands to reason when you think about it.’

‘Well, it’s quite a shock to the system, I can tell you.’ She exhaled exaggeratedly. ‘So let’s get down to business.’

‘Yes, let’s. Just look what I found!’ He laid out a page of notes and another covered with one of his typical diagrams. ‘Aunt Hilda was quite a girl.’

Simmy made no attempt to decipher the handwriting. ‘Just tell me,’ she ordered.

‘Okay. Well, in 1962, when she was in her thirties, she made a paternity claim against the son of a very famous man. A member of a