Fiona Gibson - The Great Escape - The laugh-out-loud romantic comedy from the summer bestseller

Sadie strides on, hoping that the buggy’s steady motion will soothe her son, and also that Hannah is okay. Of course she is. Her life seems to be going spectacularly well at the moment. She has a great job, having risen through the ranks at Catfish to become head of the entire creative department. She has a gorgeous, caring and enviably grown-up man who loves her to pieces and writes adverts for – actually, Sadie can’t remember who Ryan writes ads for. Hannah has told her several times but it whooshed in through one ear and out the other, as most things do these days. Sadie wonders what’s now occupying the space in her head where her brain used to be. Teddy bear stuffing, or stale air, like the inside of a neglected fridge? Only this morning it took her fifteen minutes to locate her keys before she could leave the house. She couldn’t find the boys’ soft leather baby shoes either, so they’re each wearing two pairs of thick baby socks. Supposedly simple tasks have become virtually insurmountable. Sadie can’t fathom how women manage to hold down paid jobs as well as look after their children, bake cakes and fashion ‘amusing’ toddler meals where the cannelloni look like little people sleeping under a blanket.

‘It’s okay, sweetie,’ she murmurs, parking the buggy next to the café that hasn’t even opened yet, and bobbing down to try and soothe Dylan. A young girl is in the café – Sadie thinks she’s Polish – placing small vases of flowers on each table. Milo, apparently unconcerned by his brother’s anguish, is studying the spindly weathervane on the café’s roof. Sadie unclips Dylan’s buggy restraints, picks him up and cradles him close to her chest.

Rocking him gently, she absent-mindedly jiggles the buggy with her free hand. A ruddy-faced woman, her round cheeks accentuated by a short, choppy hairstyle, is striding along the path towards her. Hannah knows without doubt that this woman will stop and talk to her; it’s what people in Little Hissingham do. As well as motherhood, Sadie is also trying to get to grips with village life where everyone seems to know her as ‘the one with the twins’, even though she hasn’t the foggiest idea who most of these people are.

‘Oooh, you’re the one with the twins,’ the woman exclaims unnecessarily, cocking her head to one side as she fixes her gaze on Dylan’s tear-blotched face.

‘That’s right,’ Sadie says, pulling her lips into a smile.

‘What’ve you got again? Boy and a girl?’

‘No. Two boys.’

‘Aw, shame! Were you awfully disappointed?’

No, of course I bloody wasn’t, Sadie thinks angrily. ‘No, not at all,’ she says firmly. That’s better. She’s managed to wrestle her thoughts under control instead of having to restrain herself from slapping the woman.

‘Well, you got more than you bargained for there,’ the woman chuckles.

Sadie places Dylan, who’s calmed down a little now, back into the buggy. ‘Well, yes, it is pretty busy. Keeps me out of trouble, you know.’

‘IVF?’

‘Sorry?’ Sadie laughs involuntarily.

‘I mean, are they IVF babies?’

‘Er … no … why d’you say that?’ Sadie feels her heart quickening as, for a split second, she wishes Barney were here to tell the woman to mind her own damn business. Even if they had had fertility treatment – which they hadn’t – why would she wish to discuss it with a stranger in the park?

‘’Cause my sister,’ the woman continues, scratching her chin, ‘she and her fella tried for years, the old ovulation kit with the menstrual cycle and all that. Nothing happened. Took all the romance out of it, you know? Became, like … mechanical . Not romantic at all.’ Sadie is jamming her molars together so hard, she fears they might start to crumble. When did she start needing Barney to protect her in situations like this?

‘So it was twins they had,’ the woman rants on, ‘and God, they’re hard work, aren’t they? Not a second to yourself. You’ll know all about that, haha!’ She peers down at the buggy. ‘Don’t they have any shoes?’

‘Er, yes, but I couldn’t find …’

‘It’s a cold day,’ the woman scolds her. ‘Their little tootsies’ll be freezing …’

Phone bloody social services then , Sadie wants to scream. Or make a sodding citizen’s arrest. ‘Sorry, I’m in a hurry,’ she blurts out, charging off with the buggy, and wondering where she can go that’s not the inside of her soul-crushing house – sorry, cottage – but also where that woman won’t find her and start interrogating her on her sex life.

Both the children are crying now, signalling that feeding time is upon them. Sadie is still breastfeeding the babies, although they do, mercifully, also have bottles of formula, jars of food and her home-made concoctions. Determined to up her parenting grade – she’s awarded herself a D-minus so far – she bought a vast array of vegetables yesterday which she chopped at midnight and simmered until 1 am when Barney (and probably the entire Western hemisphere) was sleeping soundly, only to realise that the damn stuff couldn’t be frozen in ice cube trays until it had cooled properly. She found herself blowing on the vatful of steamy mush, then worried that she was breathing stinky adult germs on it and would infect her children with gastro-enteritis. It was too smooth as well – she’d overdone the mushing. By eight months her children should be managing lumps, finger food, great saddles of lamb, probably. Sadie finally staggered to bed at 2.30 am, cursing Barney for the sole reason that he had the audacity to be asleep, precisely ninety minutes before the babies woke up, eyes pinging open to full alertness, ready for their first feed of the day.

Is Sadie feeding them too much, too little or too often? She has no idea. She’s read so many baby manuals that they’ve all merged into one fat, hectoring tome. When she presented her hastily defrosted home-made baby food this morning – realising she needn’t have frozen it after all – Milo and Dylan spat it all out onto their white towelling Monday bibs.

Who could blame them? she thinks now, pushing the double buggy at a determined speed. What’s wrong with shop-bought baby food anyway? It’s made by experts – people whose lives are dedicated to formulating stuff packed with nutrients that babies will actually enjoy and not spit out. Sadie can’t compete with that.

Catching her breath, she heads for the rose garden where she knows there are benches, and which is shielded from the rest of the park by dense, square-cut hedges. For someone who was once body-confident, pouring her luscious curves into corseted lingerie which she constructed herself, Sadie is incredibly self-conscious about breast-feeding in public. She and Barney pored over soft pencil illustrations of possible feeding positions in Twins: Your Essential Survival Guide . It’s okay for the women in those drawings, she thinks now. They don’t have to sit on damp park benches with a baby clamped to each bosom and spot a teenage boy glancing through a gap in the hedge, looking completely appalled. Plus, the women’s breasts in those illustrations don’t overproduce milk until it seeps through their breast pads, making their gargantuan nursing bras wet and smelly (no boned, hand-stitched underwear for Sadie these days). She has never felt more aware of being a mammal in her entire life.

She’s just sat down, and is lifting an agitated Milo from his buggy, when her mobile trills into life again. Clasping him tightly to her lap, she fishes the phone from her bag, quickly enough to take the call this time.

‘Sadie?’ comes Hannah’s voice. ‘Are you okay to talk for a minute?’