Women with small children should just hang up a sign saying, ‘Hello, I am a formerly interesting lively person who has been subsumed by my children. See you in ten years!’

Samantha Smythe has her hands full with three active young sons, an au-pair who eats all the food in the fridge and an absent husband who’s drinking champagne for breakfast in London. And she’s tying herself in knots trying for a longed-for baby girl …

And then out of the blue, Samantha’s old friend Naomi turns up and deposits her daughter with her. Samantha finds she just can’t say no, either to Naomi, or to the glamorous but rackety former footballer who runs over her dog.

Can Samantha continue to be everything to everyone or is she finally going to have to put her foot down and just say no for once?

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A Stormy Day

For the first time in his life, Edward is wearing clothes on the beach. I am watching him from where I’m perched on a sand dune. I’m trying to pretend I’m not looking at him as I know he will be cross if he thinks I am: now, aged ten, ‘or nearly eleven’, as he puts it, he has become aware of his body. I see him looking at himself in the bathroom mirror. He has hugely long legs and dangling arms. Sometimes he smells a bit and I have to remind him that he needs to use soap.

‘Why?’ he’ll say truculently.

‘Because when you start getting older and you play more sport, you start to sweat and when you sweat you –’

‘But you don’t need to use soap for sweat,’ Edward usually chips in. ‘I asked Robert and he told me that if you leave your body alone, it looks after itself.’

‘Who told him that?’

‘Auntie Julia did.’

‘Well, I think she was referring to hair. Some people say that if you leave your hair long enough it’ll replenish its own oils and –’

‘No, Robert said Auntie Julia told him your whole body can clean itself so I’m not going to use soap.’

‘Right,’ I’ll say firmly. ‘If you don’t use soap, you won’t be able to play on your computer at the weekend.’

He’ll glower at me a bit. ‘Where is the soap, then?’ he’ll say accusingly, as if I’ve hidden it. ‘There isn’t any!’

‘Yes, there is.’ I’ll point to his younger brother’s soap dispenser, a plastic frog that squirts out something that smells of a chemical version of strawberries.

‘Not that soap. That’s for babies. Where’s the sort big boys use?’

Over the past few months we have had many such encounters and now I have had to accept that, on top of hating baths, Edward feels he has to cover himself when I’m around. When he was younger, and I was a single parent, after his father, John the First, had upped and left, he discarded his clothes anywhere and everywhere. On a visit to London Zoo on a hot summer’s afternoon it occurred to him, aged three, that he would like to be as free and unfettered as the caged monkeys. ‘I wanna be like a monkey, Mama,’ he said, as he pulled his T-shirt off over his head. ‘Yes, Edward,’ I said, ‘but you are not a monkey. You are a small boy and small boys keep their clothes on.’

He also had a very exciting time in TGI Friday’s, where the loos had some spraying mechanism so he came back soaking wet and utterly naked, having drenched everything else in sight as well, including the loo rolls and the hand towels.

‘Sorry,’ said Edward, looking very sorrowful. ‘I just can’t help it.’

So, nudity is not alien to Edward. His brothers, Bennie and baby Jamie, the children I have had with my current husband John the Second, are happy to be naked. I always think of them as cherubs in the sky, looking down on us, tooting their horns, held aloft on golden wings. Maybe that’s what babies are, cherubs waiting to come to earth, watching us from above and picking out the mothers and families they like – although God knows why anyone would pick me. When Edward was a tiny baby he cried all the time, especially when I was trying to bath him (see? Thinking about it now, he’s never liked having a bath). One day, my mother found me crying with him.

‘What on earth’s the matter?’ she said. ‘Why are you both crying?’

‘He doesn’t like me,’ I wailed. ‘Everything I do is wrong. I tried to give him a bath and he threw his arms out and looked terrified and –’ I wailed some more. ‘He hates me!’

My mother made me a cup of tea and sat me down, picked up Edward and held him. ‘You need to support his head when you bath him,’ she said, wedging Edward firmly in the crook of her arm. ‘Maybe he doesn’t feel properly supported. That’s why most babies panic.’ She took him to the bath, put him in and swooshed him around. He cooed happily. ‘You see?’ she said. ‘He’s a perfectly affable little chap.’ Then she looked at me. ‘Babies choose their parents, you know, so, believe it or not, Edward chose you. I’d get on with it and stop feeling sorry for yourself.’

Now I know two things. First, Edward isn’t really an affable chap. He’s amazing and magnificent, and probably the love of my life, but he’s not affable. He’s odd and scratchy and sensitive. He knows this, too, and I think it bothers him. His brow furrows when children in the playground tell him he’s weird, which, according to Edward, they do quite often.

‘Am I weird?’ he’ll ask, and I’ll do that thing my mother used to do, which irritated me beyond measure, and reply, ‘Well, Edward, it takes all sorts of people to make a world.’

Edward will think about this. Then his face will clear and he’ll say, ‘Yes, it does, doesn’t it, Mummy?’

I also know that Edward and I probably did choose each other. We’re two units that have become a whole. I like being with him more, perhaps than I like being with anyone else. Maybe this is why his father left all those years ago.

Today, on the beach, Edward is going to extreme lengths not to be seen. He is wrapping himself in a towel, taking off his T-shirt, clutching the towel round his waist, then trying to wriggle out of his underpants.

‘Do you want help, Edward?’ I call.

He glowers at me.

‘Do you want me to hold the towel?’ I say.

‘No,’ says Edward. He looks around for his swimming trunks. He can’t see them. Of course not. I have them – because I have everything. I always have everything. I have packed the boot of the hire car with all the things we might need and among all the things we might need, Edward’s swimming trunks are in one of the bags I have brought down to the beach. Now I can see that Edward is a little panicked. He looks confused, then turns to me and it’s as if sunlight has shone across his face. He smiles at me as he always used to do.

‘Mummy,’ he says, ‘do you know where my swimming trunks are?’

For a moment I wonder if I should say, ‘No. Didn’t you pack them?’ After all, I spend hours moaning to John that I feel taken for granted, that my children are too dependent on me, why can’t they pack their own bags and make their own tea and clean their own teeth? John points out patiently to me that, yes, that’s all very well for Edward but what about Bennie, who is four, and Jamie, who is two? Then I wonder why John can’t do the packing. Why is it my job? Then again, he did try to help pack for this holiday – he put in raincoats, and some tiny nappies, which Jamie grew out of at least a year ago.