Stop the Clock

by Alison Mercer

  She would have liked to tell Natalie, and Lucy too, but she could hardly go to her friends before she’d brought herself to disclose her pregnancy to her parents or her former lovers. She felt bad about keeping a bit of a distance from them, given that Natalie was trying to adjust to life with her new baby, and Lucy was having an awful time, with Adam gone and her mother in a nursing home. But right now, she needed to focus on looking after herself . . . and although she felt very sorry for Lucy, she still hadn’t quite got over the show down over her column back in the spring. You’re on your own, you haven’t got a man, and you’re running out of time. She was glad they’d patched things up, but the words couldn’t be unsaid.

  It hadn’t actually been all that difficult to avoid her friends – so many people were away in July and August, or expected you to be. And somehow, so far, she had got away with it. She’d gone out with Megan Morton, her actress pal, but Megan had been too busy going on about her planned reality TV debut, and checking to see if anyone had recognized her, to join the dots between Tina’s virgin Bloody Mary and mystery weight gain. A weekend with Lucilla Gordon in Norfolk would have been trickier to manage, but at the last minute Lucilla’s baby came down with chicken pox and Tina was able to stay home with a clear conscience.

  Her parents had been more of a problem. After getting through her dad’s seventieth back in May, she’d felt she’d earned a couple of months’ reprieve. But Cecily had had other ideas, and Tina had been obliged to make a string of excuses to get out of going home: deadlines, summer flu, press trips, friends who needed her support. She’d just about managed to wriggle out of going down to Cornwall for the August Bank Holiday weekend, as she was due to work on the Monday. But actually, saying no had made her feel sad. It was more than a year since she’d stayed in the Old Schoolhouse, and she missed it. Now, more than ever, it would be good to be reminded that her childhood was not just an increasingly distant memory, and that the scene of all those long-ago summer holidays was still essentially unchanged, and could be revisited any time she was free to go.

  Even before she got her own column, Tina had noticed that the articles she wrote were umbilically connected to how she felt about whatever was going on in her private life. After she’d started seeing Justin she had found herself writing repeatedly about political mistresses, and middle-class career girls who were apparently respectable but nursed dark secrets, such as heroin or cocaine habits, which they somehow fitted in round office hours and funded with weekend lap dancing.

  In the last few months just about everything seemed to have been about mothers and babies. Her latest assignment was a feature about women’s experiences of childbirth, which she suspected was not going to be reassuring.

  She did the first case study interview with the editorial administrator, an unflappable, pragmatic woman who was currently on maternity leave, and who, under cover of anonymity, spoke candidly about her desire to suffer as little as possible, and how it came to be thwarted.

  They said to me, Have you made a birth plan? I said I’d like an epidural please, and the ventouse. They said you can’t have that, it’s too stressful for the baby. I said, Well, if you’re going to tell me I can’t have what I want, what’s the point of me making a plan?

  When Tina reviewed her notes after finishing their phone conversation, she decided she wouldn’t bother with a birth plan either. Going by Natalie’s experience, they seemed to be pretty pointless, except as a psychological sop. Anyway, it would be fitting for an accidental conception to be followed by an unplanned birth.

  She looked up to see Julia approaching her. God, she was slim! Admittedly it was quite a nasty pinstriped shirt she was wearing, but at least she had a waist.

  Julia came to a halt at a slight distance from Tina’s desk. She looked rather upset – bad day, perhaps. Julia’s boss, Rowena Fix, was a hardened marathon runner who was known to expect similar feats of endurance from her underlings, so it wouldn’t be surprising.

  Tina attempted a smile, and Julia’s lips twitched in what might have passed for a friendly response, if she hadn’t looked quite so miserable.

  Julia said, ‘I just picked up a call from reception for you. There’s a woman down there who says she’s your mother,’ and hurried off.

  It was a quarter to one. Lunch, or at least a brief conversation, was unavoidable. Tina shouldered her handbag, took a deep breath, and went downstairs to meet her maker.

  Cecily was sitting in one of the modish armchairs provided for waiting visitors, just in front of the framed and wall-mounted front cover that warned women not to wait to have babies: ‘Scientists reveal fresh insights into the fertility time bomb’. She was flicking through a complimentary copy of the Post, and for a moment Tina was able to see her as a stranger might: as a conscientious, comfortable older woman who cared about appearances, and was doing her best to keep the ravages of time at bay.

  Cecily’s skin had a buffed, healthy sheen suggestive of regular exercise, good lunches and quality moisturizer, and her immaculately bobbed hair was tinted blonde, a shade or two lighter than Tina’s own. She was dressed in a cotton blazer, T-shirt, slacks and pumps in shades of white, cream and beige, with a narrow scarf in copper and bronze silk wound round her neck – to disguise lines and droop, perhaps, or to add a dash of panache, or both. Somewhere under the scarf, Tina knew, was the small gold cross that Cecily always wore.

  Then Cecily looked up, and Tina was reminded that her mother’s face was softer and rounder – more motherly, in fact – than her own, which had her father’s sharpness.

  Cecily’s expression was tense and anxious. For a moment, for the split second in which she spotted Tina coming towards her, the fretfulness gave way to unthinking pleasure, only to be replaced, in rapid succession, by conjecture and assessment, diagnosis, shock and dismay. From the sudden tight set of Cecily’s mouth Tina deduced a suppressed question that would almost certainly spill out before very much longer: So what about the father?

  Cecily looked away first. She tucked the free copy of the Post into a John Lewis carrier bag – she must have been shopping round the corner, as a pretext for popping in – and got to her feet. Even though Tina had the advantage of an extra couple of inches, she suddenly felt very small, and she was sure that she was blushing.

  She knew the natural thing to do – the behaviour the receptionist would expect – was to attempt some sort of embrace, and peck her mother on the cheek. But somehow this was not possible.

  ‘Well,’ she said, and her voice sounded unexpectedly shrill and nervous, ‘this is a surprise.’

  ‘It is,’ Cecily agreed.

  ‘You should have told me you were coming.’

  ‘If I had, I imagine you wouldn’t be here,’ Cecily said. ‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’

  That night Tina did not sleep well. She worked herself up into an impotent fury with Cecily for being so judgemental . . . so resolutely undelighted . . . so ashamed. For heaven’s sake, it was the twenty-first century! Tina had every right to bring a child into the world on her own if she wanted to. Perhaps some of Cecily’s more devout friends would disapprove, or be pitying, as if Tina had let the family down, but damn it, this was a new life, a first grandchild – surely it wasn’t really something to pull such a long face about?

  OK, so perhaps Tina hadn’t handled it very well. She should have taken control, managed the disclosure, faced both her parents down at a time of her choosing. The truth was, she hadn’t told them because she’d been scared of how they would react. Oh, she knew they would come round, especially when the baby arrived; she knew she should give them time to adjust, and make allowances for their beliefs about family life, according to which there was a right way to do these things, which involved matrimony, and a wrong way, which was everything else. They might manage to love the baby, but they would never ditch the beliefs, which meant that, in their eyes, she was a failure.

  Even if something good – something worth cherishing – came out of he
r shortcomings, it would always be qualified; her child would never be a straightforward cause of celebration. She knew that both her parents would behave as if they had something to forgive, as if their acceptance of her son was a badge of virtue; but love provided with such reservations would be mortifying. She thought that outright rejection, unmixed with goodwill, would be less disheartening.

  As the night wore on her resentment turned to misery, and she cried for the child that even she had not entirely wanted. Eventually, sometime after 2 a.m., she turned on the light and read a bit of a history of women’s lives in seventeenth-century England. That did the trick; things could have been worse – had been, in the past. She was woken after what seemed like a couple of minutes’ sleep by the alarm and the recollection that she’d promised to break the news to her father.

  ‘I think it ought to come from you,’ Cecily had said, firmly but kindly, and probably she was right; Tina was a grown-up, she shouldn’t need Cecily to intercede on her behalf. But then Cecily’s parting words had been, ‘Goodness only knows what Daddy’s going to say. I’m afraid he’s going to feel rather let down,’ and Tina had realized that, as usual, the tough love, the real chastisement, was going to be left to her father to deliver. And she didn’t want to accept it. Cecily being wounded was one thing, but Robert being outraged was quite another.

  The prospect of ringing home, and Robert answering the phone, and the conversation that would follow, was just too appalling to contemplate.

  ‘No, it’s actually you I wanted . . . I’ve got something to tell you . . . No, I’m not involved with the baby’s father, and no, I don’t actually know for sure who he is, and he, whoever he is, knows even less than I do.’

  No. She couldn’t submit to that. She had to go down fighting. There had to be another way.

  That was when the idea popped into her head, and it was so mischievous, so disrespectful, so downright naughty, that her initial response was incredulity at her own devilishness.

  Then she started to laugh.

  Why not? Why shouldn’t she explain herself? She had the chance to justify what she’d done, and why she’d done it, on a grand scale. Presented with such an opportunity for vindication, who could resist?

  She was going to have to tell work sometime in the next couple of weeks. So why not kill two birds with one stone? Anyway, she was clean out of ideas for this week’s column? what the hell else was she going to write about?

  Maybe it was only a temporary reprieve, but for now, at least, the guilt and regret Cecily had prompted had completely disappeared.

  When she got into work the next morning she saw Dan, as usual, waiting by the lift. He was on his own, and no one else was in earshot.

  It wasn’t really a conscious decision. She’d got out of the habit of taking the stairs anyway – didn’t have the energy any more. Somehow she found herself standing next to him.

  The lift doors opened and he stood back to let her go in first. The doors closed and the lift started to ascend, and she said, ‘How are you? How are things with the lovely Julia?’

  ‘Oh . . . didn’t you know? We broke up.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said.

  He glanced at her. ‘So are you going to start talking to me again now?’

  ‘Me? You were the one who wasn’t talking to me.’

  He sighed. ‘Well . . . whoever started it, I think we can agree that we’ve been pretty silent lately.’

  The lift hit the third floor. The doors opened, but nobody got in. Tina hit the button, the doors closed, and they went up again.

  It was now or never.

  ‘We need to talk,’ she said. ‘Properly, not like this. Are you free for lunch?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so, but—’

  ‘How about one o’clock, in the café in John Lewis?’

  ‘Why there? Nobody ever goes there. Isn’t that where all the mums and babies go?’

  Fourth floor. The bell rang.

  ‘Please,’ Tina said as the doors opened.

  She stepped out and round Monty Delamere, the rotund parliamentary sketch writer, who was waiting, cigs in hand, to go down for his first smoker’s break of the day.

  Monty brandished his cigarettes at them and declared, ‘It’s no good. I shall never give up. I just can’t make a start without them.’

  Monty was known for his booming voice, which was echoed in the hectoring tone of his writing. Tina only just heard Dan say, ‘OK.’

  When she got to the café at lunchtime Dan was already there.

  ‘Aren’t you going to have anything to eat?’ she asked him, setting her tray down on the table – she was starving.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Too nervous,’ he said. ‘So . . . what did you want to talk about?’

  She got a single sheet of paper out of her handbag, pushed it across the table towards him, and tucked in to her chilli con carne while he read.

  The Vixen Letters

  A secret too big to keep to myself

  Nobody’s perfect, according to the famous final quip from Some Like It Hot – but some are more imperfect than others, and some inflict their imperfections on their offspring and drag the whole lot of us down into the gutter. This is the lot of the single mother, or so many of the political class and my fellow columnists in the media would have you believe.

  Single mothers have a lot to answer for, don’t they? Street crime, social breakdown, happy slapping, pretty much any petty act of violence perpetrated by hoodie-wearing thugs . . . Who’d have thought that a bunch of mostly middle-aged women (the average single mother is thirty-seven), who are by definition lumbered with sole responsibility for looking after at least one child, and therefore likely to be somewhat preoccupied, would have the energy to generate so much restless violence? It’s phenomenal, isn’t it? I’ve always had a lot of respect for the resourcefulness of my gender, but this supposed ability to change nappies with one hand and lay waste to civilization with the other strikes me as truly incredible.

  Time for me to declare a vested interest: I’m five months pregnant, and well on the way to becoming a single mother myself.

  Accidents happen, and who knows how many of us wouldn’t be here if they didn’t? Sometimes accidents are blessings in disguise. I am very happy that I am having a baby; scared, honoured, intimidated, but mainly happy.

  Some will take the view that my interesting condition is a moral and social failure, and if I wasn’t relatively well off financially, many more might be inclined to agree with them. But then, a couple of hundred years ago, many of our forebears genuinely believed in witches, and thought it was quite proper to prosecute them with the full force of the law. We’re never as far ahead of our ancestors as we’d like to think, and however we try to move forward, the bad old desire to find a scapegoat will always pull us back. And so we keep finding ourselves in the gutter, and looking for someone convenient to blame.

  Dan read it, then read it again. She finished eating and watched him and waited.

  Finally he looked up. His face was stiff with shock and discomfort, as if he’d just sucked on something horribly sour, and couldn’t get over the taste of it.

  ‘Am I the father?’ he asked.

  ‘I can’t be sure. There was someone else. We’ll have to wait until after the birth to find out.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that. I can’t tell anyone that.’

  There were smile lines around his eyes, which were a clear bright blue, the colour, she’d once read, most likely to be deemed trustworthy. He wasn’t smiling now. He was contemplating her with such forensic attention that she was suddenly acutely self-conscious, and felt herself beginning to itch.

  Finally he asked, ‘Has anybody else seen this?’

  She shook her head. ‘I haven’t filed it yet.’

  ‘Why are you showing it to me? Are you warning me, or asking me for my permission?’

  ‘I think I’m asking for your blessing.’ />
  ‘Can you keep my name out of it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘I never told Julia what happened between us,’ he said. ‘She kept asking, though. People might figure it out.’

  ‘I can live with that,’ she told him, ‘but I’d prefer to leave them guessing for as long as possible.’

  ‘Then let’s,’ he agreed. ‘But go ahead, do your thing. I don’t want to censor you. It’s not for me to give you permission, anyway.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About . . . putting you in this position. Springing it on you like this.’

  He swallowed. ‘Well . . . It’s a new life, Tina. That’s what matters, in the end, isn’t it? So I guess congratulations are in order.’

  She opened up her handbag, and he said, ‘Oh God, you haven’t got another column in there, have you?’

  ‘No, something much better,’ she said. She got her wallet out and found the scan picture and passed it to him.

  He gazed at it for a while, and then passed it back. The expression on his face was quite unfamiliar, and it took her a moment to see it for what it was: a kind of awe.

  She was due to file her column by noon on the following day, for publication on Bank Holiday Monday. She saved it in Jeremy’s copy folder at ten to, and rewarded herself by making a cup of camomile tea. (To her astonishment, she had managed to give up caffeine.)

  When she was back at her desk, her phone rang. It was Jeremy.

  ‘Well well,’ he said. ‘I must admit, I thought you’d been looking a bit porky lately.’

  ‘I wouldn’t make that kind of comment if I were you. I might get terribly hormonal and upset.’ She looked around to check who was in earshot, and then remembered that everyone was going to know soon anyway.