The Other Woman’s House by Sophie Hannah Page A

waiting to be asked questions, I glance out of the window at the swing, slide, climbing-frame, treehouse, free-standing sandpit and two trampolines in my parents’ back garden: Benji’s private playground. Kit calls it ‘Neverland’.
    â€˜Ow,’ Mum says again, making a big show of examining the red skin on her hand. She’s wasting her time with Fran and Anton; she ought to know that the ordeal of Benji’s supper has driven away all other thoughts, as well as their normal powers of observation.
    â€˜All right, two chocolate fingers,’ says Fran wearily. ‘Sorry about this, everybody. Come on, though, Benji – eat this first.’ She takes the fork from his hand, impales the broccoli on it and holds it in front of his mouth, so that it’s touching his lips.
    He yanks his head away, spitting, and nearly falls off his chair. Together, like anxious cheerleaders, Fran and Anton yell, ‘Don’t fall off your chair!’
    â€˜I hate broccoli! It looks like a yucky lumpy snot tree!’
    Privately, Kit and I refer to him as Benjamin Rigby. Kit started it, and, after a few cursory protests, I went along with it. His full name is Benji Duncan Geoffrey Rigby-Monk. ‘You’re joking,’ Kit said, when I first told him. ‘
Benji
? Not even Benjamin?’ Duncan and Geoffrey are his two grandads’names – both unglamorous and old-dufferish, in Kit’s view, and not worth inflicting on a new generation – and Rigby-Monk is a fusion of Fran’s surname and Anton’s. ‘As far as I’m concerned, he’s Benjamin Rigby,’ said Kit, after the first time we met him. ‘He seems like a decent baby and he deserves a decent name. Not that his father’s got one, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.’ Kit thinks it’s only acceptable to ‘go around calling yourself Anton’, as he puts it, if you’re Spanish, Mexican or Colombian, or if you’re a hairdresser or a professional ice-skater.
    He tells me I ought to be grateful for my family, and pleased to live so near to them, and then he mocks them mercilessly in front of me, and avoids seeing them whenever he can, sending me round here on my own instead. I never complain; I feel guilty for entangling him. I would hate to marry someone with a family as overwhelming and ever-present as mine.
    â€˜Leave the poor child alone, Fran,’ says my mum. ‘It’s not worth the effort, for one measly floret of broccoli. I’ll make him ch—’
    â€˜Don’t!’ Fran cuts her off with a frantic wave of the arm, before the fatal words ‘chicken nuggets and chips’ are spoken aloud. ‘We’re fine, aren’t we, Benj? You’re going to eat your nice yummy healthy greens, aren’t you, darling? You want to grow big and strong, don’t you?’
    â€˜Like Daddy,’ Anton adds, flexing his muscles. He used to be a personal trainer at Waterfront, but gave up his job when Benji was born. Now he lifts weights and hones his biceps, or sinews, or whatever fit people call the parts of their body that need honing, on various odd-looking machines in his and Fran’s garage, which he’s turned into a home gym. ‘Daddy ate all his greens when he was little, and look at him now!’
    At this point my father would normally pipe up with, ‘The only way to turn children into good eaters is to present them with a simple choice: they eat what everyone else is eating, or nothing at all. That soon teaches them. It worked with you two. You’ll eat anything, both of you. You’d eat your mother if she was on the plate!’ He’s said that, or a version of it, at least fifty times. Even when Fran hasn’t been there, he still says ‘you two’ rather than ‘you and Fran’, because he’s so used to all of us being together in this room, exactly as we are now: him sitting at the rickety