id="u254cdcc7-451b-5533-afca-79c31d084e3c">
BABY LOVE
The Angeline Gower Trilogy
Louisa Young
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
Published by The Borough Press 2015
First published by Flamingo, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1997
Copyright © Louisa Young 1997
Louisa Young asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007577989
Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007397006
Version: 2015-09-07
Praise for The Angeline Gower Trilogy:
‘Funny, sexy and tender’ ESTHER FREUD
‘A stylishly literate thriller’ Marie Claire
‘You will keep coming back to this book when you should be doing something else’ LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES
‘Exciting, compelling and tense’ Time Out
‘Funny and scary. In writing honestly and unsentimentally, Young celebrates the unequivocal nature of parental love with verve and style’ Mail on Sunday
‘Wry, perky, entertaining’ Observer
‘Engaging, wise-cracking, likeable, brilliantly sustained … funny, humane and utterly readable’ Good Housekeeping
For Yaw Adomakoh, the good father
Contents
Copyright
Praise
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter One: An Argument
Chapter Two: In the Pub with Ben
Chapter Three: Us Then
Chapter Four: Tea with Jim
Chapter Five: In the Park with Harry
Chapter Six: Harry in His Showroom
Chapter Seven: Eddie’s House
Chapter Eight: Dinner with Eddie
Chapter Nine: Lunch with Harry
Chapter Ten: Looking after Lily
Chapter Eleven: Learning
Chapter Twelve: Flowers from Eddie
Chapter Thirteen: Janie’s Tea-chest
Chapter Fourteen: Unsettling
Chapter Fifteen: Eddie Again
Chapter Sixteen: Out
Chapter Seventeen: Showtime
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Louisa Young
About the Publisher
I wrote these novels a long time ago. I spent my days correcting the grammar at the Sunday Times, and my nights writing. I could no longer travel the world doing features about born-again Christian bike gangs in New Jersey, or women salt-miners in Gujarat, or the Mr and Mrs Perfect Couple of America Pageant in Galveston, Texas, which was the sort of thing I had been doing up until then. I had to stay still. I had a baby. Babies focus the mind admirably: any speck of time free has to be made the most of.
I had £300 saved up, so I put the baby and the manuscript in the back of a small car and drove to Italy, where we lived in some rooms attached to a tiny church in a village which was largely abandoned, other than for some horses and some aristocrats. A nice girl groom took the baby to the sea each day in my car while I stared at the pages thinking: ‘If I don’t demonstrate some belief in this whole notion of novels, and me as a novelist, then why should anyone else?’
Re-reading these books now, I think, ‘Christ! Such energy!’ I was so young – so full of beans. I described the plot to my father, who wrote novels and was briefly, in his day, the new Virginia Woolf. After about five minutes he said, ‘Yes, that all sounds good’ – and I said, ‘Dad, that’s just chapter one’.
It was only about twenty years ago, and a different world. Answerphones not mobiles, no internet. Tickets and conductors on the bus. And it was before 9/11, and the mass collapse of international innocence which 9/11 and George Bush’s reaction to it dragged in their miserable, brutalising wake. Could I write a story now, where an English girl and her Egyptian lover meet at the surface of the water? Yes, of course – but it could not be this story.
Anyway, I have grown up too thoughtful to write like this now. I exhaust myself even reading it.
I see too that these, my first novels, were the first pressing of thoughts and obsessions which have cropped up again and again in things I’ve written since. It seems I only really care about love and death and surgery and history and motorbikes and music and damage and babies, and the man I was in love with most of my life, who has appeared in various guises in every book I have ever written. I realise I continue to plagiarise myself all the time, emotionally and subject-wise. And I see the roots of other patterns – Baby Love, my first novel, turned into a trilogy all of its own accord. Since then, I’ve written another two novels that accidentally turned into trilogies – and one of those trilogies is showing