by Lucy Dillon
‘But I’ve got more in common with Owen than with the lads at school,’ said Becca. ‘They’re so fixated on stupid stuff. Owen’s done things. He’s got his own ideas, not just a load of band T-shirts. I could lie there and just talk to him for hours and hours.’
Lie there. The dreamy way she said it made one question flash into Anna’s mind, and she couldn’t not ask. Men like Owen didn’t lie around for hours just talking. Not for long.
‘Becca, are you . . . ?’ This wasn’t in the parenting books either. But Owen had a flat of his own and no revision timetable, unlike Josh the oboe boy. Phil wouldn’t ask. She had to struggle on. ‘Are you sleeping together?’
Becca turned red. ‘Anna! No.’
‘Right,’ said Anna. That sounded more like a ‘not yet’ than a ‘no’. Becca’s body language was more forthcoming. Now she had the information she’d wanted, Anna wasn’t sure it made her feel any happier.
‘Are you going to tell Dad?’ Becca asked, and the blissful look left her face. ‘It’s just . . . You remember what he was like with Josh. That horrendous dinner. I don’t want Owen to get the “What are your intentions?” speech. Not yet. Not until he isn’t going to go off me because my family are a bunch of loons.’
‘No,’ said Anna. ‘No one wants that.’ She struggled internally, trying to balance the trust Becca had just put in her with her own responsibility to Phil. The trouble was, it was so tempting to promise that, yes, she’d keep their secret. It felt like the first proper stepmother thing she’d done.
‘Please don’t tell him yet,’ Becca begged, seeing her waver.
‘OK.’ She was going to have to talk to Michelle, though. Like that conversation was going to be any less awkward. ‘How about you tell him, once you’re sure Owen won’t mind coming to dinner? You can ask him over. Maybe Michelle can come too, make it seem less of an interview?’ If Owen was nice, and he liked talking as much as Becca said he did, that wouldn’t be too long, she argued to herself.
Becca seemed happy. ‘Fair enough.’
‘But soon, Becca,’ Anna warned her. ‘It’d be awful if he found out from someone else.’
There was another blast of singing from across the landing, as if someone had opened a bedroom door to make a loud point.
‘. . . I stole her jeans AND THEY’RE STRETCHY, hope her BOYFRIEND don’t mind it . . . A baggy ARSE, a baggy KNEE . . .’
Becca narrowed her eyes. ‘Promise me you’ll cut the plug off that thing while we’re away?’
‘Bring me some Whitestrips from Duane Reade,’ said Anna, ‘and it can be arranged.’
They shook on it.
Later that night, when Anna was going through her diary at the kitchen table, blocking out the next few weeks with work and Reading Aloud sessions, she noticed something she’d been too busy to notice before.
Her period should have started two days ago.
She flicked backwards through the squares of dance classes, bookshop shifts and supermarket deliveries, and frowned. No, she’d definitely had her last period on the fifth – she’d taken so many painkillers for her terrible cramps that she’d read the same page of Right Ho, Jeeves three times over at Butterfields before one of the old dears had pointed it out to her.
‘This is rubbish,’ Chloe announced from the sofa. The girls and Phil were watching Britain’s Got Talent, and marking everyone harshly out of ten. ‘I cannot believe these morons got through the auditions and we didn’t.’
‘You should have trained Pongo to dance with you,’ said Lily, who was allowed to stay up to join in the criticism. Pongo was on the sofa next to her, draping himself equally over her and Chloe, his head resting lovingly in Lily’s lap. ‘Then you’d have won.’
‘They’d have put Pongo through and not the Apricotz,’ said Becca. ‘That’s if they could have told the singing apart.’
‘Anna? Don’t you think they’re crap?’ demanded Chloe, over her shoulder.
‘At least you can hear what they’re singing. And don’t say “crap”,’ admonished Phil. ‘Say something more intelligent.’
‘Don’t you think they’re bollocks? What? That’s Chaucer. Anna, tell him how bad they are. He’s too old to realise, poor old man.’
Anna carried on staring at her diary. Was this real? Had she got it wrong? No, it added up. Her heart hammered in her chest. Was she actually pregnant? Without noticing? Was that even possible?
‘Er, they’re not very good,’ she said, without thinking. ‘Definitely not as good as the Apricotz.’
Pregnant. For once words seemed inadequate, too detached from what was happening right now inside her. Anna had never been pregnant before. She had no idea what it was supposed to feel like, beyond the swooning, rampant vomiting, or luminous blooming of fictional mothers-to-be, which she presumed was a bit exaggerated.
Although, now she thought about it, she did feel faintly . . . nauseous. Nauseous, and excited.
‘Vote them off !’ roared Chloe from the sofa. ‘It’s a NNNGGGHHH from me!’
‘And it’s a NNNGGGHHH from me too!’ said Lily.
‘Anna, why don’t you come and watch this with us?’ Phil looked round from his La-Z-Boy chair, one of the pair he’d bought when it was just the two of them. ‘I need some intellectual commentary to counterbalance this honking.’
‘Um, yeah, in a minute.’
Anna checked the dates again, and again, and when the pages started swimming in front of her eyes she made herself walk over to the sofa. It felt like walking on clouds, or on the moon, her knees light and insubstantial in her legs.
I’m pregnant, she kept thinking. Over and over. I’m pregnant.
She managed to get through bath and bedtime, and a chapter of Lily’s new story, and then chivvying Chloe upstairs, before she finally got Phil on his own.
‘Phil, there’s something we need to talk about,’ she said, watching his back as he loaded the dishwasher.
‘If it’s letting Chloe audition for Britain’s Got Talent, the answer’s still no. Not even if she trains Pongo to do the paso doble with her.’
‘No, it’s . . .’ Anna swallowed, watching him ram the pasta pan in the wrong section of the rack. What was the right way to do this? In her imagination over the years she’d gone for all sorts of cutesy tactics: the bootee in the cake box, the positive pregnancy test under his pillow. When it came to it now, she just wanted to blurt it out. ‘It’s not Chloe. It’s me.’
Phil seemed to sense her jitteriness, and put down the tea towel. ‘What? Is it something the girls have done?’
‘No! No, they’re fine. It’s . . .’
Phil looked up, then saw the strain mingling with excitement on her face. ‘Anna?’
‘Sit down,’ she said, gesturing at the table. ‘I know, it’s an awful cliché, but I’d prefer it if we were sitting down.’
He pulled out a chair and slid onto it. The crease between his brows had deepened now. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Please don’t tell me you want to leave. I have literally no idea how anything works in this house. I’m sorry, whatever it is I’ve done.’
‘What? No!’ Anna nearly laughed at how wrong he was. She sat down and reached for his hands, and when he curled his fingers round hers, she said quietly, ‘Phil, my period’s late. It’s never late.’
‘How late?’
‘Two days.’
He said nothing for a few long seconds, then asked, ‘Have you done a test?’ A muscle in his neck twitched.
‘Not yet,’ said Anna. She smiled, she couldn’t help it. ‘I didn’t want to tempt fate.’
‘How? It’s not really up to fate, is it? I mean, you’re either pregnant or you’re not, it’s not like you can . . . Sorry.’ He wiped a hand across his face. ‘Sorry, that’s not the right thing to say.’
‘No,’ said Anna. ‘It’s not.’ She sat back in her chair and looked at him.
This wasn’t the reaction she’d expected. She hadn’t been banking on euphoria, given the things he’d said the othe
r day about babies being stinky and exhausting. But excitement, definitely. Pretend disappointment that the shed was off the agenda for a while, possibly. Not this. Not . . . annoyance.
‘Are you sure?’ he said, starting again. ‘It’s just that two days is quite early. You’ve been pretty stressed lately, that can affect your period.’
‘I know I’m not as expert as you, but I can count,’ Anna began, but he held up his hands to stop her.
‘Sorry. It’s just that . . . well, I’ve been through a few false alarms, let’s say.’
‘Well, I haven’t,’ she said, hurt. ‘So bear with me if I’m feeling a bit excited. Phil, I might be having a baby. Doesn’t that make you feel . . . thrilled?’ She paused. He didn’t look very thrilled. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Well, half of me would be pretty impressed that everything was still working,’ Phil replied, with a half-laugh. ‘But then the other half of me would be a bit scared.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘And I’d be on the phone to the surgery, wondering who we could sue about the Pill. Isn’t it meant to be ninety-nine per cent effective? What happened? Were you sick? Did you miss one?’
This was it. The point on the tracks where their marriage could go one way or another. Anna couldn’t understand how it had gone from fizzy excitement to panic in a matter of seconds.
‘It is pretty reliable, yes,’ she said. ‘If you’re taking it. But I’m not.’
‘What?’ He stared at her. ‘You’re joking, right?’
‘No. You knew I’d stopped. I stopped after our anniversary, like we agreed when we got married. Don’t pretend you’d forgotten that?’
Phil said nothing, and Anna’s heart hung in her chest. Everything felt like it was hanging – for this second, he was still her handsome, reliable husband, her dream man, her complicated-but-worth-it family. In the next moment, all that could be crushed. She knew it sounded melodramatic – she could hear the screechiness of her inner voice – but that was how tightly wound she was. So tightly she hadn’t even considered any other reactions.
‘I hadn’t forgotten,’ said Phil slowly, his voice low, ‘but I didn’t think you’d go ahead and do something as serious for all of us as stop using contraception without discussing it first.’
‘We discussed it in the car,’ said Anna. ‘On the way to the airport.’
‘That wasn’t a discussion, that was just a general chat about families! Did you actually say, oh by the way, just so you know, from now on every time we have sex, you might get an early Christmas present? No!’ Phil barked, then swallowed to control his temper. ‘Anna. Did you listen to anything I said about the girls being unsettled by Sarah buggering off and leaving them here? Or about how I’d quite like some time to ourselves? Some time off from parenting?’
‘I heard all that.’ Anna was struggling to keep the tears out of her own voice. ‘But did you hear me telling you how much I want a baby? Not just then, but for the last four years? I don’t see why this is such a bad time. Sarah’s coming back in a year, and the longer we leave it, the bigger the gap will be between Lily and another baby, and the older we’ll be.’
‘And the exams that the kids have got coming up?’
‘We don’t have to tell them yet. When are pregnancies supposed to be safe to announce? Three months? That’s way after their exams finish.’
‘You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?’ he said, and there was a forced levity in his voice that made Anna flinch. ‘How long have you been thinking about this, without bothering to talk to me?’
‘This isn’t something I did on a whim,’ she said, angry that he seemed to be making out she’d tricked him into it. ‘You knew I wanted a big family. It’s all I’ve been thinking about for the past year. Our baby. Our family.’ Anna could feel the tears coming up her throat, a tidal wave of hormones running riot through her body, soaking the tiny bundle of cells in all the essential emotions. Stress. Family politics. Her own all-embracing love for it.
Somewhere deep inside herself she knew she was being irrational and unfair, that she’d let the powerful cocktail of hormones and fermenting broodiness sweep over her usual common sense. She was ashamed of her selfishness but at the same time she wasn’t. This wasn’t about her, it was about someone else. Something else that relied on her to make it happen.
Phil had his head in his hands. ‘I, I, I . . . For God’s sake, Anna. The whole point about being a parent is that nothing is about you any more,’ he spluttered unhappily, but then he looked up and saw how shell-shocked she was at his reaction.
Anna was finding it hard to breathe.
At once he pushed his chair away from the table and was kneeling by her side in an instant, his arms around her. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. It’s not that I don’t want us to have a baby, it’s just that . . .’
‘Don’t say it.’
He was silent for a few moments, rocking her backwards and forwards in his arms while Anna tried to sort out what she thought.
It doesn’t matter what you think, said a voice in her head. Or what he thinks. If the baby’s here, it’s here.
‘We’ll be OK,’ she said, stroking Phil’s head. ‘It’s going to be OK.’
Anna wasn’t sure who she was talking to – Phil, the swirling cells inside her, or herself, but Phil’s only response was to squeeze her tightly and to say nothing, and that wasn’t the reaction she was after either.
17
‘Poor Mrs Pepperpot has an unfortunate habit of shrinking at the most inconvenient times – and then has to puzzle her way out of her scrapes using only her considerable wits. We’ve all been there.’
Anna McQueen
Anna woke up the next morning expecting the world to feel different, but she felt disappointingly normal. Pongo still barked at exactly twenty to seven to be let out; and Chloe still took twenty-five minutes in the bathroom while everyone stacked up outside like circling planes. The only real hum of excitement was that it was the beginning of the girls’ holiday, and the start of her own week off.
This time, the girls were taking a night flight out to New York to see Sarah, so instead of the usual bleary-eyed rush to the airport with Becca hustling and panicking all the way, it was a semi-normal Saturday. Phil took Lily to her swimming lesson, and Chloe went off to get shopping lists from Tyra and Paige, now reinstated as an Apricot, thanks to her family’s investment in a Powerplate. Becca insisted on doing her shift at the bookshop, even though Anna had assumed she’d be taking the morning off.
‘I don’t mind, honestly,’ she said, already at the door with her denim jacket on when Anna grabbed her own bag to go.
‘But you’ve got the house to yourself.’ Anna couldn’t believe that Becca would pass up the chance of a quiet hour or two. ‘Stay in. Watch telly. Get your stuff out of Chloe’s bag while she’s not here. You need to relax, Becca. You’ve been revising so hard.’
Becca didn’t deny that; she’d been working late every night. ‘If I stay here I’ll just feel I should be revising.’ She paused and gave Anna a nudge. ‘I like your shop. I’d be hanging out there even if I didn’t have a job. Come on, let’s walk over via the mobile coffee van and get a pastry.’
‘OK,’ said Anna, touched that Becca was choosing to spend some time with her of her own volition. She’d been planning to go to the shop via Boots to get a pregnancy test, but it could wait. She didn’t mind spinning out that excitement a little longer; she wanted to give herself as much chance of a positive as possible.
They set off towards the town centre, chatting about Becca’s exam timetable and Chloe’s irritating new habit of talking about herself in the third person as if she was narrating her own reality show. Becca was interested in Lily’s bedtime reading, and offered to keep it up while they were in New York, something that made Anna’s heart glow with happiness. It was a warm spring day, and her whole body felt light and full of possibilities. She could almost feel the hormones surging through her system like the multi-coloured chocolate pipes on the
old Willy Wonka book jacket.
‘It’s funny how one thing leads to another, isn’t it?’ said Becca, running her hands through the honeysuckle climbing along the park railings. ‘If you hadn’t met Michelle in the café with Pongo, you wouldn’t have been friends, and she wouldn’t have asked you to run the bookshop, and you wouldn’t have got me a job, and I wouldn’t have met Owen . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Anna ironically. ‘It’s all down to me.’
‘I mean it,’ replied Becca. She looked happy, and it struck Anna that she hadn’t seen Becca this happy in a while. Revision stress had put a crease between her eyes that was still visible even now. ‘I think I’ve already got my ideal job.’
‘Well, you can put it on hold for a while when the exams really get going,’ said Anna. ‘You’ll need that time off for relaxation.’
Becca didn’t say anything. She bounced her palm along the railing tops.
‘And just tell me if there’s anything I can do to help, won’t you?’ Anna went on. Even now she felt a flood of relief that she’d never have to sit another exam; she still had anxiety dreams about writing essays about Hamlet’s inner demons in the nude, under a giant clock. ‘My mum used to bring me tea every ninety minutes to stop my brain dehydrating. By the time I sat my exams I practically had tannin poisoning.’
‘Did your parents go to university?’ asked Becca.
Anna shook her head. ‘No, I was the first one in the family. My dad was a builder like his dad, and Mum was a nurse. She went straight to training college, but these days she’d probably have been encouraged to do a proper medical degree.’
‘So it was quite a big deal, you going.’
‘I suppose so.’ Anna remembered the look on her parents’ faces when her results arrived. As if they were proud and scared of her at the same time. Five As. Their daughter, ‘the brainbox’. ‘They wanted me to do all the things they didn’t. But that’s what parents do – they want the world for you.’