Larger Than Life

by Adele Parks

  ‘Ha, isn’t it obvious?’ I pointed towards my huge stomach.

  ‘But you’re more feminine now than ever!’ she gasped.

  Apparently, I suit baby blue, indigo and the lightest tones of purple. I should wear mint in the summer (which I’m finding a bit hard to swallow) and when I have serious meetings where I want to influence I ought to wear jade. Which is what I’m wearing today. I haven’t gone for the full-on jade suit – in fact I’m still in a long white dress (it hides a multitude of sins), but I am wearing a jade scarf around my bump, à la Nicole Appleton, and carrying a funky little green handbag. I thought I looked rather swish; Julia clearly believes that this is another aberration driven by my hormones.

  She pops her head back into my office. I wait for her to continue her tirade on black being the only appropriate colour for an agency, and certainly for a client meeting, but she surprises me. ‘Here, if you are serious about this we might as well go the whole hog.’ She holds out a bottle of emerald-green nail varnish, ‘Give me a shout when you want your toes done. I assume you’ll need some help as you can’t reach them any more,’ she grins.

  I used to spend hours, literally hours, drifting around beauty counters. My idea of Elysian Fields definitely was spending unending Saturday afternoons with my fingers in pots of buttery creams, or testing shimmery powders on the back of my hand. If Anna Sui had a new body paint out then I’d have tried it even before it was reviewed in Vogue. If Urban Decay brought out a new test tube of lilac glisteny stuff and a dinky puff to go with, no questions asked, I’d whip out my plastic. I can fall in love with well-presented and packaged beauty products sat in delightful tempting rows as easily as other women fall in love with Brad Pitt. Boots is, unquestionably, the grown-up girl’s candy store. Yet, whilst I really enjoyed playing ‘girl’s world’ with Cecilia and Julia (for the record I did ‘influence’ the meeting today, in so much as I persuaded the boys that a sushi bar was not a great venue for lunch), I realize that make-up is not the reason I was born to be female.

  That thing Cecilia said about me being more feminine now than ever – I think she’s right. I lie awake at night and rest my hand on my stomach. On my baby, and it doesn’t feel ugly. It isn’t just a protruding mass of fatness. It feels entirely womanly and breathtakingly beautiful. And I know, absolutely know, that this is the most important thing I can ever do. At the risk of sounding too American, it’s a privilege that a baby is growing in my body.

  I think I might dissolve with excitement.

  June

  38

  Suddenly in June as I hit month seven I become Herculean. I brim with energy and anticipation. And whilst I have shaken off my lethargy, I know I am still being held to ransom by my hormones. Instead of avidly consuming Campaign and Marketing, or even shopping, I decide that the most useful way to channel my energy is to wash skirting boards, paint walls and polish floors. Then I start to plant window boxes, grow herbs, and hoover behind the settee. Libby is delighted. She insists I’m ‘nesting’.

  I dismiss this as the idiocy that it surely is. ‘I am not nesting,’ I yell. ‘I simply want everything to be clean and comfortable and… ready.’

  ‘You’re right. How could I have muddled that up with nesting?’ she asks with a grin.

  ‘I’m simply doing it to avoid being seen in public,’ I defend, taking care to cross my fingers.

  It’s eight o’clock in the evening, I am bent double over a steaming bucket of water, plunging my rubber-gloved hands into the mass of soap suds when, suddenly, I catch my reflection in the long bathroom mirror. Except it can’t be me. Can it? Because the woman scrubbing floors, well, for a start she’s scrubbing floors, secondly she’s wearing paint-splattered non-designer jeans, which aren’t fastened but held up with a scarf. Her hair has dark roots showing through, it needs a wash and so is pulled back into a severe knot. She’s rotund. More alarming yet, she is half-smiling to herself as though she is gaining some satisfaction out of scrubbing floors and being inventive enough to use the small scouring pad to really get at the dirt in the grout between the tiles. Surely that isn’t my reflection. That woman looks familiar, but she doesn’t look like me… she looks more like… Penny or Becca. I peel off my rubber gloves and cast them aside. They slap against the bucket and the scourer.

  In panic I call Sam to ask her if I’m turning into Becca. I can ask this, safe in the knowledge that Sam would rather lie to me than hurt my feelings and therefore will deny it vociferously, making us both feel good.

  Surprisingly, she’s in.

  ‘At last, we speak,’ I say. Our answering-machine-message trail has continued recently and besides grabbing a quick coffee last month I haven’t seen her since we went to Wales. The coffee meeting was unsatisfactory. Sam was glowing and giggly one moment and then took a call from her seamstress. There was some problem about veil length that totally broke the mood. Sam became distracted and jittery. I don’t think she’s eating enough.

  ‘I’m desperate to see you,’ she says.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’re free now, are you?’

  ‘Yes, brilliant, I’ll come over.’

  I pause and look around the flat; it’s in an amazing state of disarray. Before I started scrubbing the floor I had been tidying my wardrobes. I’d just got to the point of emptying the entire contents – jackets, suits, tops, trousers, handbags, shoes, hat boxes and false boobs (which look a bit like chicken giblets) – on to every available surface, when I noticed that the bathroom floor needed scrubbing. I’ve had the Klimt posters reframed. They look better in gold frames after all, but I haven’t had a chance to hang them in the bedroom so they are propped against the skirting board in the living room. I went to Tesco’s yesterday and did a big shop, only half of which has been unpacked. I can see about three piles of ironing and any remaining floor space is decorated with open maternity books and magazines. My flat looks like Libby’s home. It’s light years away from the serene, feng shuied abode that I used to keep.

  ‘No, let’s go out. I’m a bit stir-crazy myself.’

  Sam is more successful than she’d have you believe. You have to be very tough and very good to be a management consultant, and she’s an exemplary management consultant. She’s accustomed to fancy restaurants as she dines with clients most lunchtimes and evenings. I’ve arrived at the restaurant before her, and from my seat I watch her as she efficiently drops off her jacket, expertly touches up her lipstick and orders vodka before she sits down. As the crisp white napkin is settling on her lap I ask, ‘so what news?’ This question comes at enormous personal expense, as I put my own concerns on hold (Am I turning into Becca? And names – does she like Jack or Toby if it’s a boy? Ellen, if it’s a girl?).

  I allow Sam to dive in first. ‘Oh, nothing special. I just thought it would be nice to meet up, just the two of us,’ she mutters. I’m not convinced for a nano-second. Sam’s vodka and orange arrives with surprising speed and she drinks it equally smartly, then she orders another. I can spot them at a hundred-mile radius; Sam is a woman on a mission.

  ‘I’ll have a still mineral water with a twist of lime,’ I instruct the waiter loudly. Recently, I’ve revelled in my virtue and no longer hanker after a glass of champagne. ‘so, how are the wedding plans?’ Over the last five months I’ve started every conversation I’ve had with Sam like this. Indeed, I occasionally used it as conversational filler with her even before she’d met Gilbert.

  Normally her response is both enthusiastic and verbose; today she is surprisingly reticent. ‘Fine.’

  ‘That’s it? Fine?’

  ‘Yes. What else do you want me to say?’

  ‘Well, isn’t there some minor catastrophe? Like being unable to match the ribbons on the bridesmaids’ dresses with the exact shade of the roses in the church floral displays? Or maybe something really serious is happening, like you’ve timed the car route from your flat to the church three times, and now have to decide how to find an average journey length. Should it be the me
an, the mode or the medium?’

  ‘Oh, it’s all one big laugh to you, isn’t it?’ snaps Sam.

  This is absolutely unprecedented. I have never, ever, in all the years I’ve known Sam, heard her snap at anyone. She is the absolute epitome of kindness, appeasement and tact. She would rather walk a tightrope without a safety net than appear confrontational. I’ve often wondered how this gentleness and occasionally giddy attitude accomplished anything at work. But it does.

  ‘I’m a big laugh, a big joke,’ she hisses, downing her second vodka and immediately ordering a bottle of Chablis.

  I cautiously sip my mineral water and, on putting it down, I reach across the table and squeeze Sam’s hand. ‘You are not a joke, Babes. I never laugh at you.’ And whilst this isn’t absolutely 100 per cent truthful, it is the reassurance Sam needs. ‘Have I done something wrong?’ I ask.

  ‘No, this is nothing to do with you.’

  Relieved, I encourage Sam to look at the menu. However, I notice that whilst I mentally devour every dish and get an enormous amount of entertainment just imagining what everything will taste like, Sam can’t seem to concentrate on the delicacies that ought to tempt her. For all the interest she takes in red peppers stuffed with codfish mousse, or the creamed gazpacho with cured ham, we might as well have been at McDonald’s and ordered two cheeseburgers with fries. I order an oriental salad with delights such as crispy duck and an orange and cashew nut dressing, then baked turbot with calamari. I ask the waiter to replenish the bread basket and comment to Sam that I think I’ll have room for pudding. She’s in a bad way – she doesn’t show even a flicker of surprise at the amount I’m ordering. I’m in a bad way. I think that even after eating this lot I could still happily devour a cheeseburger and fries. Sam looks desperate and can’t seem to make a choice. I presume she’s still on a calorie-, fat- and taste-control diet for the wedding, so I point out a couple of the least artery-hardening options; after all, this used to be one of the most essential dinner-party skills I possessed. She nods, mutely accepting my suggestions; obviously she couldn’t care less what she eats.

  I wonder what can be throwing her equilibrium so completely.

  ‘I’ve kissed James.’

  Ah.

  ‘With tongues, and I enjoyed it,’ she confesses in a rush. I don’t know if she’s expecting to be struck by lightning or handed a cigar.

  ‘James, as in…’

  ‘My future brother-in-law, yes,’ she adds impatiently.

  With depressing regularity in the past, Sam and a number of my other friends have come to me with confessions of this kind. Normally, I defuse the situation by yelling out something flip like, ‘scores out of ten?’ because that’s what girl friends are born for. Today I’m wary of saying anything before I’ve had a chance to weigh up exactly what this means.

  ‘Just the once?’ I try to establish the extent of the indiscretion.

  Sam nods ferociously, but then after a couple of whole-hearted declarations of, ‘Yes, of course, just the once’, the nod dissolves into a shake.

  ‘Twice?’

  Shake of the head.

  ‘On an on-going basis?’

  Nodding again.

  Ah.

  ‘Sober?’

  More nodding.

  ‘Just kissed him?’

  Shaking head again. I feel like a Victorian dentist trying to extract teeth with a cumbersome and painful pair of four-foot-long tweezers.

  ‘We’re having an’ – she pauses and checks who is sitting at the tables nearby – ‘an affair, for want of a better word,’ and then more bravely and firmly she repeats, ‘We’re having an affair.’

  I check my reflection in the mirror on the wall; I’m searching for something priestly in my face that prompts or demands confessions such as these. I try and fail to appear unfazed. An affair, Sam! Sam, an affair! What’s the world coming to? I grab another roll covered in pumpkin seeds and start to butter it vigorously.

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since Wales.’

  Now that I count my life in weeks I’m quickly able to calculate. ‘this has been going on for fourteen weeks, over three months?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you’ve been so happy in the past few months.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I thought it was Gilbert making you happy, and the wedding preparations.’

  ‘No.’

  Sam is in agony. It’s obvious. I quickly try to assess the situation. James is fun, extremely charming, intelligent, and he has a quite overwhelming physical presence. He is definitely a horn, even I noticed as much in my near-eunuch state.

  ‘Is it just sex?’ And I almost want her answer to be in the affirmative. It will be easier for her in the long run.

  But she shakes her head. ‘I think I’m in love with him. I didn’t want it to happen, but the moment I met him I knew it was going to. He’s all the things I like about Gilbert except that he’s younger and spunkier and more’ – she searches for the word in the bottom of her wine glass –’more alive. At first I thought it was just sex. It is true to say that there is an unprecedented sexual attraction between us. The air was crackling on the drive down to Wales, I was certain that Gilbert would pick up, but he didn’t.’

  Poor trusting Gilbert.

  Silly sod Gilbert.

  ‘After the rounders game and the fish pie—’

  ‘A well-known aphrodisiac’

  ‘It seemed inevitable. We went walking in the woods—’

  ‘In the dead of night?’ She nods reluctantly. ‘Oh, Sam you went for a PISS!’ I’m not referring to the bodily function here, but to a Potential Illicit Snog Situation. Sam nods unwillingly. After all, you don’t just happen to find yourself in a situation like that, you have to put yourself there. Sometimes you go for a PISS with no intention of letting things get out of hand, and sometimes you desperately want them to.

  ‘And there was this moment. You know, The Moment. When you know you are going to kiss each other and you know you shouldn’t, but you know you are going to anyway. You look at the floor and then at his eyes and then back at the floor again.’

  ‘Sam, no one does that except in films.’

  ‘I do. I did. He’s not like a film, George, everyone else was but he’s not.’

  And despite my gruffness I do know. I remember that moment exactly. She’s talking about the sort of moment when Hugh and I first kissed in the limo. I, too, had put myself in a Potential Illicit Snog Situation; in fact I’d been putting myself in one for years, and eventually Hugh noticed he was there too. I drag myself back to Sam.

  ‘And did you have sex with him then and there in the woods?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Sam’s shocked at my presumption, which is unfair. After all, she’s the one that’s shagging her brother-in-law to be. It’s not so odd that I should inquire whether there was a bit of action in the woods a la Titania and Bottom.

  ‘We’ve been seeing each other and trying not to sleep with each other ever since.’

  Oh, that old one.

  ‘Until last week.’

  ‘When I presume…’

  ‘You presume correctly. You told me to be nice,’ she justifies.

  ‘Do you sleep with every man you are nice to? Don’t answer that.’

  Our food arrives. Sam leaves hers untouched and, whilst I know I am running the risk of looking insensitive, I am thirty-one weeks pregnant, nearly full-term, so I dive in.

  ‘Go on.’ I encourage her to finish her story, not least because it gives me the opportunity to eat my food uninterrupted.

  Sam doesn’t need much prompting. ‘He’s it. He’s the One. My teapot’s lid.’

  How romantic. Despite the seriousness of the situation, it takes every ounce of my will-power to suppress my giggles.

  ‘He makes me feel I can be entirely myself. He makes me feel that I can be more than I am. He is potential. He’s realization. I’m in love with him.’ She smiles so broadly I think her face will s
plit. Her huge brown eyes radiate unreserved delight. ‘He is the first man that I have ever been with where I feel I can confidently be me. You know what I mean.’

  Of course I do.

  I think I do.

  I should do. I stay silent and allow her to fall into a stream of gibberish.

  ‘I don’t have to adapt myself, edit, mould or change myself in any way. I don’t have to fake an interest in his hobbies or quash any passions of my own. We can talk about anything, our childhood, work, ambitions, travel and friends. And he listens to me. It’s not just me doing all the polite inquiring and sympathetic nodding of the head. He doesn’t seem to need me as an emotional crutch or as a hostess or for money, like all the other men I’ve dated have done, but he does seem to really want me.’

  I think it’s time I injected a bit of caution, a smattering of reality. ‘sam, you have said similar stuff before.’

  ‘I know,’ she admits. I’ve said it before because I’ve wanted it to be true. But this really is different. He really is different.’

  I’ve heard this before, too.

  ‘What should I do?’

  I sigh. ‘What do you want me to say, Sam? Do you want me to tell you to call it all off, draw a halt? Or full steam ahead?’ In my experience these confessions are never shared in the hope that the story teller will get some genuine advice, but more so they can tell you what they are going to do and square it with their own conscience. Sam looks at me with fear and despair, and love and hope, but she doesn’t answer my question. ‘How does James feel?’