by Anna Maxted
‘He cares about you, you daft cow. He despises most of the world, but if he respects you, he’ll stick by you. He is a good bloke. You were very sweet to him when he split with Marylou, he’s never forgotten that. He still mentions it. A lot of his friends sided with her, presumably because she’s on the telly. Did he tell you the latest on that score? Suddenly, now he’s star of the show, she wants to meet him for a cappy. I said the filthy girl! He said she meant a cappuccino. My God. She’s even more of a luvvie than he is! I’m surprised they stood each other as long as they did. How their egos fit in that two-bed flat! You know, techically, they’re still married?’
I pouted. ‘I hope he doesn’t meet her for a cappy or anything else. She treated him horribly.’
Claw shrugged. ‘Right now he’s getting his adrenalin kicks from elsewhere. He shouldn’t need her.’
We were nodding sagely, when Issy returned with a caffeine tower. ‘Okay,’ I said, wanting to do justice to their faith in me. ‘To business! And in the interests of not wasting time, I suggest we speak unashamedly with our mouths full.’
Cue, an enjoyable morning of discussing Glamour articles, filing applications and spitting crumbs. What, I thought to myself, would you be doing, if not this? At 1 p.m., Claw and Issy both skedaddled (my sisters take their statutory rights extremely seriously). At five past one, there was a knock on the door. Instinctively – and this doesn’t say much for my instincts – I snatched up a pencil.
‘Who is it?’ I snarled, brandishing my weapon.
‘Delivery for Holly Appleton,’ said a male voice that wasn’t Stuart’s. I opened the door an inch, still wielding the pencil. A young guy in sloppy jeans thrust a huge bouquet at me and fled.
‘Thanks,’ I shouted after him, feeling sheepish. I sniffed the flowers. They were mostly red and purple, clashing beautifully. I opened the card, hands trembling. What would it say this time? See you in court? The message was in untidy handwriting as familiar to me as my own.
For the mother of my child, xx N.
I squirmed, part pleasure, part embarrassment. You think you want old-style romance, but when it comes, it feels icky. Well, he’d changed his tune. My heart began a faster beat. This was a highly significant statement. On a level with ‘Britain is now at war with Germany’. Well, not quite. What I mean is that those six words, to me, were life-changing. They spoke the difference between single parenthood and a cosy family unit.
Five seconds later, the phone rang. ‘’S’me!’
I practically purred. How would, for instance, Audrey Hepburn say it? ‘The father of my child?’
‘Oh Christ – Hol – listen – you got the flowers, yeah? – I’m sorry – about last night – I’m thrilled – it’s a blessing – it was a lot to take in – a lot, that’s all – I wasn’t expecting it – but I’m ecstatic – it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me – the best thing – I’ve hardly slept – I’m so excited – really – a kid – our own baby – wow – it’s fate – it is – for it to happen now – it’s got to be!’
I beamed down the phone. I couldn’t have put it better myself. But Nick (breathless with delayed joy) hadn’t finished.
‘Hol – are you free tonight? – because – I want you to come with me – I have a very special evening arranged – yeah? – please say yes – cancel whatever you’ve got on – dress up – not too dressy – but nice – special – I’ll pick you up from home – okay? – seven, alright? – don’t want to be late – a surprise – you’ll never guess – okay, great – see you at seven – be ready – okay – love you – bye!’
I replaced the receiver, shaking my head in wonder. ‘Love you, too,’ I said, aloud. One thing for sure, I’d never be bored again. I rested my hand on my stomach. There was something restful about being pregnant. In a dim corner of my mind, a thought loitered that I wasn’t quite ready to welcome into the light. That I could stop trying with my happiness and concentrate on the baby’s. All over the world, people used their offspring as a reason to stop making an effort. Stop going out. Stop looking after their appearance. Stop bothering. Because then they didn’t have to think about their own failed lives. They could legitimately distract themselves with someone else’s.
I’m not saying that’s what I decided. But it was nice to have the option.
The afternoon dragged by, and I sent Claw and Issy home on the dot, creeping off myself moments later. Nick arrived bang on seven. He looked like he’d bathed in electricity. He gave my outfit a critical once-over. ‘Will I do?’ I said, half-indignantly.
He laughed and kissed me. Then he knelt and kissed my stomach. ‘I can feel a bulge!’
Bless his innocence. ‘I’m afraid that’s just podge,’ I said, lowering myself into his car. ‘In the last couple of weeks I’ve been stockpiling. So, are you going to tell me where we’re going?’
Nick grinned at me from the driver’s seat. ‘You kind of gave me the impetus to do it,’ he said. ‘This morning, I called my birth mother.’
‘What! You spoke to her?’
He was off. ‘For an hour . . .’
Meanly, I thought to myself, that’s nothing. We’ve spoken for three hours on the phone before.
‘Pamela Fidgett warned me to be careful – she said she prefers to make initial contact – but I wanted it to be me – and it was great, Holly, great – amazing – her voice – it was creepily familiar – she answered the phone – when I said it was me, she screamed.’
Screamed? I thought. Burst into tears, surely?
‘She wanted to see me straight away – she said she always hoped I’d get in touch.’
But you say that to a casual acquaintance.
‘And she asked about my life – and she told me about hers – I have a half-brother called Russell – he’s twenty-three – he’s in retail – she lost touch with my father – it was a fling – not that I mind – well – it would have been too much to hope for – I suppose – but her husband knows about me – he doesn’t mind – but he’s not in tonight anyway – Russell might be there though – she works in a hairdresser – A Cut Above the Rest – which is fine – I told her I work in the entertainment business – I didn’t want her to be disappointed – she couldn’t believe how smart I sounded – I told her about you – and the baby – she wanted to meet you both—’
‘Nick,’ I yelped. ‘You’re meeting your mother for the first t—’
‘Second time, Holly. She gave birth to me. In a way, we are intimately acquainted.’
‘Of course, yes, sorry. What I mean is, are you sure I won’t be in the way? Won’t you two want to be alone?’
‘I want to have you there. You’re my family.’
I was beginning to understand his thinking and it didn’t make me feel comfortable. We drove the rest of the way in silence, the excitement buzzing off him. He raced down narrow roads at forty, and I suspected that – even if he’d merely sat in his car peering at her darkened windows – this wasn’t his first visit to his birth mother’s home. He rolled to a quiet halt a few doors up from an unremarkable suburban end of terrace. There was nothing to distinguish it from a thousand other houses in a thousand other streets.
‘There,’ he said, pointing. He looked rapt. But he didn’t move from his seat.
‘When is she expecting you?’
I half imagined that he’d reply, ‘She’s been expecting me for the last thirty years,’ but he said, ‘Seven forty-five.’
We were very early. Nick stared at the house. So did I. I wanted to ask a lot of petty questions. Was she making us dinner? (Already, with half an inch of baby inside me, I suspected I was going to be the kind of mother who encouraged people to eat at gunpoint.) Why wasn’t she gazing out of the window? I would have been. This had to go well. I glanced at my watch as the minutes ticked by. At a quarter to eight precisely, Nick checked his (immaculate) hair in the rear-view mirror. I wondered why there weren’t more lights on in the house. Was she trying to save money?
&
nbsp; Nick unclicked his seatbelt. He looked at me, pale as milk. ‘Ready?’ he said.
Chapter 34
WE PADDED UP the garden path and I felt like a bloodhound, sensitive to every detail. The uneven paving stones. The weeds run riot in the flowerbeds. The paint cracking off the squeaky gate. The greyed net curtains hung limply in the bald windows. I glanced at Nick. He had a glazed look, as if he was taking in none of it. Don’t be such a snob, I told myself. Only one thing matters here.
He turned and grinned at me, awkwardly, and rang the bell. Ding dong! He stepped back. He held a sorry-looking bunch of flowers in front of him, with both hands like a knight wielding a sword. I crossed my fingers. Please let her be wonderful. Why didn’t she open the door immediately? What was she doing, playing it cool? This is not a time to play it cool, I growled inside my head, as the door swung open. And there stood Nick’s biological mother.
She looks old compared to Lavinia, was my first thought. And despite working at a hairdresser’s (did she work at one or was she one? I couldn’t recall), her hair was strange. It was different from her wedding picture: bobbed, brown and fine – well, thin to be exact – and had been sprayed into shape to give it the appearance of body. Her pale skin might have once been an asset but was now smoked and worried into wrinkles. It seemed as if she had tossed her make-up into the air and walked through it, as proper ladies are supposed to walk through their perfume. Despite all this, she was pretty, even if it was a faded prettiness. If you asked me, Nick’s looks were more than a credit to her, they were a jackpot. Her eyes, brown, like his, didn’t rest. They darted from him, through me, to him again. She fanned the air around her mouth, and quite right – I could smell the cigarettes from here. And then she flung her arms around him.
Nick dropped the flowers on the porch as he hugged her. As she held him tight, I watched her face. She cried enough. And her eyes were squeezed shut. I guessed she was genuine. The two of them stayed fixed in that hug for ages. She kept wheezing something I couldn’t quite catch. Then I realised it was the name she had given him. His name is Nick, I thought stiffly. But he didn’t correct her. I assessed her clothing. A black and beige patterned jumper with a round neck, the sort of item a great-aunt might pick up in Woolworths. Flat black shoes and beige trousers, which emphasised her barrel shape. Nick really must have taken after his father.
I never used to make snap judgments about people, but that had changed. I decided she wasn’t a relaxing person. She radiated tension. Nor was she what I’d call warm. I tried to separate her from the situation and surroundings. The ordinariness of her house wasn’t in her favour, but then, my parents’ home was the definition of ordinary, and it had no effect on their aura of contentment. But maybe I was being defensive. She was ushering in Nick, never taking her eyes off him, touching his hair, his face. As for him, he didn’t speak. Then he did an odd thing. He leaned in close to her neck and sniffed it. A dreamy look came over him and he sank his head in his hands and his whole body shook.
‘Holly,’ he signalled, waving a hand vaguely in my direction. ‘My girlfriend. We’re having a baby.’
Mrs Nick – well, that’s how I thought of her – smiled vacantly and said, ‘Hello.’ Suddenly her smile took on strength and she added, ‘I’m going to be a grandmother!’
She led us through a dark corridor and into a kitchen. It was big, but plainly hadn’t been redecorated since the fifties. None too clean, either. If I let loose Gloria in here, her teeth would itch. ‘Sit down,’ cried Mrs Nick, pressing her new-found son into a chair. She fumbled for her Lambert & Butler, stuck one between her lips and waved the packet at us, ‘Smoke?’ she said, making the cigarette in her mouth jump. We shook our heads, although I could sense Nick not wanting to refuse her anything.
‘Tea, I’ll make you tea – and there’s cake, and biscuits – and bread – and pickled cucumbers – cheddar cheese . . .’
She ransacked through the fridge and cupboards as she spoke, the cigarette in her mouth bobbing up and down as she did so. Bit by bit, she piled the random edible contents of her kitchen onto the table in front of us. She reminded me of a dog digging a hole to find a bone, kicking the earth into a mound. I fought to keep my mouth in a smile. This is two-star treatment, why didn’t you go shopping specially? I beamed cheesily at Nick, but he didn’t notice. She clanked down plates and knives, and Nick tucked in immediately, although I noticed he chewed each mouthful of sandwich fifty times. I ate a slightly soft chocolate biscuit – I didn’t feel like taking my chances with her cutlery.
‘It’s incredible, to see you,’ he hesitated, ‘again.’
Her eyes narrowed as if she didn’t understand. ‘Again!’ she cried finally. ‘Yes, incredible!’
She lit another cigarette as the old one smouldered. ‘It was different then,’ she blurted. ‘More of a stigma. I didn’t know what to do. I was eighteen. Mum and Dad wanted me to go to secretarial school, make something of myself. You obeyed your parents in them days. It was difficult. I cried for weeks. It was a difficult time. Rumours went round, even though we kept it quiet. Everyone knew, pretended they didn’t. I say it was only the swinging sixties if you swung but was careful about it, left no trace. I never finished secretarial school anyways, I met Malcolm, and he was happy to take me on. Mum said I couldn’t afford to be choosy, not after. We’re still together though, he’s stuck by me, and I’ve stuck by him. I’ve thought about you, over the years, growing up, wondering how your life turned out, if it was for the best. It was difficult, as I say I cried a lot, but as Malcolm says, these things happen, it’s no one’s fault, you’ve got to get on, you can’t brood on what might have been.’
I sat through this whirlwind of self-justification and repressed emotion, my hands tucked under my sizeable bottom to prevent them from slapping her face. What was it? Had she been bullied into believing this pap, or was she just . . . not that bright?
I glanced at Nick. ‘You cried,’ he repeated. ‘You thought about me. You didn’t want to give me up. They made you.’
‘That’s right,’ she gasped, shaking her head, rubbing her eyes. I rubbed mine too, the smoke was stinging them. ‘They made me. You do understand that, don’t you? It was different in them days. You did what your parents told you. My father was a strict man, religious strict.’
Those days, I wanted to thunder. Those days! I shovelled another soft biscuit into my mouth to keep it occupied. And then I smiled, and tried not to fidget while Nick and his birth mother talked. I noticed that she talked a lot about her life, her disappointments, less about his. She listened while he spoke, and she did ask questions, but she fidgeted and smoked as if to hurry him up. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I can usually, but that evening I couldn’t. Only that he seemed to be filtering the unwelcome information and clinging to the positive.
At ten thirty, her fidgeting took on a new urgency. ‘Malcolm’ll be home soon. He’s on the late shift. No earthly idea where Russell’s got to. He said he’d be here. You never know with him, up to no good I expect, ah, kids, what can you do, eh?’ She laughed sadly.
You can set your children a good example, I thought. That’s what you can do. No wonder Russell was a loser, with this limp lettuce leaf of a parent. God only knew what her husband was like. An eternal discontent, I imagined. A man who watched Bernard Manning rant about wives and mothers-in-law and agreed. She was nervous of this Malcolm, didn’t want Nick to be in her kitchen when he got home. Thank heaven that boy had been adopted, I thought, he’d have been wretched, stuck in this house, with these unimaginative people, they wouldn’t have understood him, appreciated him, he would have been so, understimulated.
I hardly dared look at him as we scurried up the garden path. ‘Here,’ she’d said, as Nick had stumbled out. She’d snatched a green ceramic frog off the windowsill and pressed it into his hands. ‘Have this!’ As though he’d asked for it. He didn’t speak, started the car, still not a word. Halfway up the hill, I could bear it no longer. ‘How, ho
w did you think it went?’ I whispered.
He nodded, dumbly. ‘Incredible,’ he replied. ‘Indescribable.’ He touched the frog, which was resting in his lap, mussed his hair over his eyes. ‘Possibly the most amazing three hours of my life.’
I stared at him, alert for the sarcasm of bitter disappointment. But no, not a trace. His face was aglow with beatific wonder. Already, this ineffectual little woman was seen as a lifeline. Oh shit.
I invited him in, as there was no way I was letting him drive home alone in this post-alien-abduction state of mind. He allowed himself to be led into the kitchen. Gloria had been – I could only tell because she stuck cryptic Post-it notes here and there – ‘more Flash Holly’, ‘bleach run out’ – that kind of thing. She’d propped a crisp white envelope addressed to me against the toaster. It must have been there when I’d come in from work, but in my rush to scrub up for Nick, I hadn’t noticed it. I ripped it open without a thought. The officious typeface loomed from the page. I made a choking sound. It snapped Nick out of his trance.
‘What?’
I flapped the paper at him in disbelief. ‘It’s a writ from the High Court. Stuart is suing me for defamation.’ I felt self-control whoosh from me in a rush. Stuart sticking pins in my new airtight life. I crumpled the paper into a tight ball and screamed, ‘I HAAAAATE HIM, I FUCKING WANT HIM TO DIIIIIIIIIIIEEEE, HOW DARE HE DOOOO THIS TO MEEEEE, I HAAAAAAATE HIM!’ That was the gist, I screamed it over and over, screaming ‘AAAAAAAAARRR’ when I ran out of words. Nick jumped up and tried to calm me, but I batted him off, I was so angry I couldn’t be touched. I was too angry to be scared. I screamed until I turned hoarse and then I curled over, raucous sobs tearing out of me. Nick grabbed hold of my hands and this time I let him. I felt myself slide towards madness, gibbering, ‘I’ll kill him, I’m going to kill him, he’s going to die, I mean it, I want to burn his house down.’
This struck me as the perfect solution and I stood up straight. ‘I’m going to burn his house down,’ I announced. I scowled at Nick, daring him to defy me. ‘I’m going to burn it down. Now.’