Perfect Blend: A Novel by Sue Margolis Page B

her the names of people she could speak to about doing the odd shift. She e-mailed and left voice mail messages, but nobody got back to her.
    OF COURSE, it was the mothers who kept Café Mozart going. Without Richmansworth’s stay-at-home mummies, Brian couldn’t have survived. They arrived each morning, after the school run, in small posses. Some would be minus children, having deposited their entire brood at the school gates. Others were accompanied by babies and toddlers. The toddlers always made a dash for the play area in the corner, which Amy had created and filled with books, puzzles, paper, and crayons. Part of the wall had even been covered in blackboard. Brian had needed a good deal of persuading to give up a table for six and turn over the space to children, but he didn’t regret it. The play area had proved so popular that the mothers stayed longer and spent more money.
    As the women chatted and fed pastries to their squawking offspring, they rearranged the furniture to make room for more mothers, nannies, and their buggies. Pretty soon—courtesy of the buggies, tricycles, and dolls’ prams—it was practically impossible for Amy and Zelma to squeeze between the tables. They had to wait until everybody was gone before clearing all the coffee mugs, plates of half-eaten croissants, and plastic water and fruit smoothie bottles—not to mention the bits of baby detritus that got left behind: beakers, feeding bottles, dummies, barf-covered muslins.
    The mothers and babies were gone by just after eleven. Then Brian would put something soothing on the DVD player—Greig, maybe, or Tchaikovsky. Cue the arrival of arty media types. There was another rush at lunchtime, followed by a brief lull. Then, just after half past three, the mothers were back. This time, though, they were accompanied not only by babies and toddlers but by their irritable school-age children in desperate need of a sugar fix in the form of hot chocolate and a piece of cake.
    It was then that Amy missed Charlie even though she knew that at that very minute he was probably blissfully happy watching Nickelodeon with Ned and Flora and stuffing his face with Ruby’s homemade brownies.
    AMY KNEW most of the mothers by sight and often got to chatting with them while she was taking orders or clearing tables. To look at, Richmansworth mothers weren’t much different from the women she’d made friends with since moving to Debtford. They tended to be the type of nicely brought up English girls who had been taught that it was vulgar to flaunt one’s money. To that end they wore the same Gap jeans, T-shirts, and Converse sneakers as Debtford mothers. It took a second glance to spot the clues to their wealth: a Tiffany diamond heart necklace here, a Burberry tote there, a Joseph cashmere poncho, albeit bobbly and covered in baby barf. Their hair might be in need of a wash and scragged back into a ponytail, but a closer look confirmed that the blond highlights were subtle and expensive-looking. Their Ugg boots were always genuine and never cheap imitations.
    Their conversation was another clue. They chatted about summer holidays, which were taken in rented villas in Brittany or Tuscany. They skied at Easter. Their vehicle of choice was a seven-seater SUV. They all knew these vehicles used too much fuel and discharged filth, but hello—how else were they going to get the whole family plus luggage down to the Devon manor house they were renting for the school holidays? They attempted to make up for their yeti-sized carbon footprint by using organic cotton shopping bags that declared “I Am Not a Plastic Bag.”
    In Amy’s part of South London, there wasn’t much money and Tiffany was just a girl’s name. Anyone conducting a social survey outside Charlie’s school would have found young single mums living on state benefits, unemployed dads, and young professional couples, many of them working in lower-paid public sector jobs such as nursing and social