by Maeve Haran
And in half an hour she would know with almost complete accuracy whether or not she was going to have David’s baby.
CHAPTER 19
By the time David slipped his plastic ID card into Canary Wharf’s elaborate security system and parked his Mercedes estate, knee-deep in crisp packets and discarded mini-juice boxes, nexttoBritt’s immaculate red Porsche, hehad convinced himself that she was bound to see his point of view.
For the last two hours, as he drove fast through the dark beauty of the winter night, he’d been able to think of nothing but how much he wanted to slot into that battered old chair by Liz’s fireside and play snap until he dropped drowsily into bed beside her. Far from finding the picture of domesticity she’d created threatening, he’d been taken aback by the strength of his reaction to it. He wanted to be part of it.
Surely Britt would see that far from being in a relationship they had both chosen willingly, theirs was really an affair that had gone wrong. After all, they had never intended anything permanent. If Liz had walked into any other restaurant in London they wouldn’t be together today.
Britt and he had thought they were soulmates but really they had mistaken the bond of their shared background for something deeper. At first he’d thought Britt understood him as Liz never could, that the yawning gulf of class, the years of tennis club parties and skiing holidays with Mummy and Daddy, the social confidence Liz had inherited along with the silver spoon, would always separate them. But sitting by the fireside with her yesterday he realized he felt more at home with her than he ever had with Britt.
For David had made a discovery about Britt in the last few months. They might share the same background but they didn’t share their values, not really. Of course he wanted success and power and status, all the things no one from Kettley had, but he didn’t want them like Britt wanted them, and he wasn’t prepared to sacrifice everything for them. Sitting in the peace and tranquillity of the cottage David had finally understood why Liz had been prepared to risk so much. She’d seen, as he had not, that sometimes success can be the enemy of happiness. It wasn’t a philosophy Britt would have much time for.
But surely even she would see that the real key to their affair had been sex, pure and simple, or in Britt’s case, low-down and dirty and dangerously exciting. She must realize that it wasn’t the basis for a lifetime together. After all, Britt had always fought shy of settling down with anyone, had said she was more huntress than home-maker, her proud boast the number of men she’d taken to bed. She was probably getting bored herself and wondering when he’d move out so that she could stalk her next powerful, unattainable catch.
Feeling encouraged he remembered that a couple of times recently he’d caught her looking at him as though she was assessing his suitability for something – possibly the privilege of going on living with her – and it hadn’t been a look of love, more cool appraisal. She was probably asking herself when she could decently persuade him to move out.
Pushing open the door of the lift, David started to feel more optimistic. And by the time his key turned in the door he had almost persuaded himself that Britt was bound to agree that it was time for them to part.
At first David thought the flat was empty and yet the door hadn’t been double-locked and the burglar alarm wasn’t on. Security was one of Britt’s preoccupations and he couldn’t picture her going out leaving the flat open for some other less deserving champion of the consumer society to come in and nick her CDs.
The sitting room was empty. So was the kitchen, though David noticed a half-full cafetière that was still warm to the touch. Swiftly he checked the study. It would be just like Britt to try and slip another sliver of work into her twenty-five-hour day. But for once the computer didn’t wink its little green eyes at him.
Finally he found her in the bedroom, even though it was only nine-thirty, propped against a mountain of snowy cushions wearing an uncharacteristically maidenly white nightdress. Instead of her usual glass of wine she was ostentatiously sipping Evian water.
David felt a sudden chill of foreboding. What the hell was she up to? Britt loved to stage-manage seductions and if he’d come back to find her leather-clad and bound to the bed with studded thongs he wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow. But there was something unnerving in the atmosphere tonight that made his palms sweat and his neck prickle. And then he realized what it was. For once it wasn’t the whore Britt was playing, but the madonna.
Slowly she looked up at him. Reaching out for a small transparent phial by the side of the bed, she picked up a tiny test tube and held it towards him.
‘Hello, Daddy,’ she smiled. ‘Welcome home.’
David sat down in the dark of the vast sitting room and switched on the television. Newsfilm of a battle somewhere the other side of the world flashed images of death and destruction which washed over him unseen.
Britt was pregnant. Somewhere deep inside the sleek, exercised body a tiny embryo, complete with the genetic code he and Britt had already given it had started its passage, slow, sure and life-changing, towards the moment of its birth. And he was its father. He knew there was no question about that.
He wondered for the first time why he had never considered the possibility of Britt becoming pregnant, why he had never, from the moment of their first frenetic lovemaking, even asked her about protection. He had simply assumed that it was unthinkable for a woman like Britt, who was so completely in control of her life, to fall prey the way shopgirls and factory workers and unlucky schoolgirls did, to accidental pregnancy.
And he found himself wondering if it was an accident. Had he, caught up with his need for sex and reassurance, failed to see that when he whispered endearments in bed Britt simply heard the ticking of the biological clock.
And now there was to be a baby. His baby. Bad Timing Baby. For a fraction of a second he felt an immeasurable sorrow for this small creature whose timing, through no fault of its own, was so disastrous.
And the stark reality of Britt’s pregnancy reminded him of a harsh truth he had never faced before: he had betrayed Liz and his children and now he was trying to betray Britt. And would he also betray that tiny being too, who hadn’t chosen its mother or its father, and who knew nothing of the emotional turmoil which awaited it in nine months’ time when it arrived kicking and screaming, demanding the automatic love of a mother and father that every baby was entitled to. Would Britt be there, alone, resenting this small reminder of a dead relationship, maybe unable to love it at all because of him?
As the scenes of violence and murder flickered in front of him on the silent TV screen, David saw another truth which both comforted and wounded him. Liz didn’t want him back. In the hours they had spent together today she had given him not the smallest sign that she gave a damn what he did.
Somehow it made doing the decent thing easier. He couldn’t leave Britt and the baby. He had to stay with her and try and make it work.
Once he’d made that admission he expected to feel relief, to be able to bask in the moral glow of duty done. Instead he could only think of the miraculous day they had heard that Liz was pregnant with Jamie. For months they’d desperately wanted a child and yet nothing had happened, no matter how often they made love. He smiled, remembering how the doctor had said maybe they were doing it too much, that they should only do it every other day.
But still nothing happened. And each month his heart had gone out to Liz as she slipped unobtrusively to the bathroom to see if her period had come, and wept quietly each time it did. And he’d been struck by the irony of how women even now are still ruled by their period – no wonder they called it the Curse! – as teenagers they were terrified of it not coming, and as grown women desperate for a child, they wept every time it did.
And then the tests had begun. Starting with the dreaded sperm count. It had been nine a.m. on a freezing February morning when he’d turned up at the hospital and been shown to a tiny cubicle and required to produce ‘a sample’. He’d never felt
less like masturbating in his life. Even a Penthouse centrefold might have made things easier, but the brisk nurse wasn’t offering even Reader’s Digest. He was on his own.
And then, when the report came through announcing that he had a particularly high count, that his sperm were beyond reproach, in fact could probably swim the Atlantic, he’d felt ludicrously proud, as though he’d won some kind of award.
So the doctor had told them to start taking Liz’s temperature and make all the little dots on a chart so that they would know the right moment to make love. Their friends had laughed at them and said How can you screw to order, and he’d found it hard to explain that it wasn’t like that. Bonking for Babies. It was rather like Digging for Victory. It made you feel the whole thing was part of a grand enterprise.
But still nothing happened. Until the day when they were almost at the point of giving up and out of the blue Liz missed her period. Not daring to believe the home-testing kit they’d bought, they had gone together to the hospital, sick with anticipation, for a blood test. And the genial hospital doctor, more used to bringing bad news to the infertile, or telling unwilling teenagers that they had fallen pregnant again, advised them to go out to lunch and celebrate. They were going to have a baby.
At first they had just looked at each other, unable to even speak. Then David had kissed her and picked her up and carried her out of the hospital like a bride and run whooping with joy out into the street, startling all the commuters trying to eat their sandwiches on the hospital steps. And people had turned and smiled at them, their joy cheering everyone.
And then the celebrating had started. Liz always said the baby would be a champagne addict from the womb.
With a flash of guilt, he realized he hadn’t really congratulated Britt. He strode over to the fridge to discover that there was one bottle left from the stock Britt had mysteriously got in a few weeks ago. He took it out and, reaching for two glasses, carried it to the bedroom.
‘To the baby!’ he smiled, leaning down and kissing her tummy in its broderie anglaise wrapping.
‘No thanks, darling.’ Britt put up her hand to ward off the drink as though it were something Lucretia Borgia had just knocked up in a cocktail shaker. ‘It’s bad for the baby’s development.’
Liz checked the train timetable and began to damp down the log fire. London would be hell so near Christmas but she’d promised faithfully that she would get Jamie a new bike, and he was insisting on coming with her, convinced that unless accompanied by a responsible person under eight she was bound to get the wrong thing and come back with an improving book or an educational video. Thank heavens Ginny had taken Daisy off for the day. Unconsciously she began to wonder what to get for David, and realized with a shock that Britt would be getting his present this year. What would it be? Not the boring socks and knickers he usually asked her for. She couldn’t picture Britt in Marks & Sparks knicker department and she didn’t suppose Ralph Lauren made Y-fronts.
Smiling in spite of herself she thought of the gifts she usually got from David: one year it had been a silk basque, two sizes too small, which she had been flattered by but failed to get into; the next year a set of red satin briefs with matching underwired bra and suspender belt whose vulgarity would have shamed a hooker and which she instantly swapped for a nice sensible Snoopy nightshirt.
Taking her Russian coat off the hook in the hall, Liz sighed. Maybe if there had been more satin and less Snoopy in their marriage they’d still be together today. Briskly she pulled herself together. What kind of a thought was that?
As she shouted upstairs for Jamie, Liz caught sight of the chair David had been sitting in only a few days ago and she looked deliberately away. He’d seemed so different on this visit, so relaxed and happy to be with the children, so eager to please and such fun that she’d had to try very hard to stop herself thinking about him all the time since.
Finally, after much badgering, Jamie appeared and she zipped up his anorak and double-locked the door. And as they walked over the crunchy frost-white ground to the car she couldn’t help wondering for the tenth time what it was David had wanted to ask her, that was so important he couldn’t say it in front of the children.
She slotted neatly into the car park next to Lewes station with fifteen minutes to spare, just time to get a magazine for herself and a comic for Jamie.
In the bookstall she saw that the new edition of Country Living was in and she reached over to get it, dislodging an out-of-date edition of TV Week which slid to the floor. As she bent to pick it up she saw the face of Claudia staring up at her under the headline METRO TV’S NEW IRON LADY.
For a moment or two she debated whether to buy it and read Claudia’s thoughts on how criminally Metro had been run up till now. But it would only ruin her day. Instead she bought a Mars Bar and a copy of Vogue. After all, it was the season of good cheer.
Fighting her way through the crowds in the toy department Liz realized her mistake in coming to Harrods at lunchtime two shopping days before Christmas. The place was packed with killer shoppers, armed to the teeth with credit cards and clearly dangerous, each trying to do all their Christmas shopping in one day or die in the attempt.
When they reached the bikes’ area, Liz looked round in amazement. There was model after model, all with names like RoadRacer and Speedreamer and Spiderbike. But Jamie knew exactly which one he wanted. A black Trackzapper with red speedlines and a hydraulic saddle which could be tipped up for doing wheelies. With mounting horror Liz saw that there was only one left. And it was being test driven by a seven-year-old whose Daddy looked like he could afford the whole shop and still have change left over.
It had taken Liz precisely two and a half hours to get there and it would probably take her another hour and a half to get to Hamleys or Selfridges. Drastic action was clearly merited.
‘Can I have it, Dad, please?’ asked the test driver.
‘Look, Jamie, isn’t that a Trackzapper?’ Liz enquired in a loud whisper. ‘Now what was it they said about it on that consumer programme?’ She pretended to be racking her brains. ‘Oh yes. Looks flashy but nothing like as safe cornering as the RoadRacer?’
She winked conspiratorially and pointed to the rival bike. Jamie understood the game at once. ‘Ben’s got one. He fell off his and his Dad’s sending it back.’
To Liz’s eternal relief Moneybags père looked horrified and dragged his son off in the direction of the safer models.
And Liz waited a barely decent interval before quietly wheeling probably the last Trackzapper in London to the nearest sales desk.
Ginny put the phone down and stared out of the window at the Christmas shoppers in the street below. And as she listened to the rattle of collection boxes and the tinny sound of carols coming from the loudspeaker on the Town Hall she allowed another sliver of worry to penetrate her optimism. It wasn’t that WomanPower hadn’t got the business this time – the devastating combination of holiday that office-workers hadn’t taken and would lose after January plus the days off from hangovers after companies’ annual bashes, meant they had more work than they could handle.
There was one small problem. Most of the women on their books didn’t want to work over Christmas. Maybe she should start praying. The first instalment on their bank loan would be due in six months and so far there weren’t enough funds to meet it.
She swept her papers into a pile. There was no point getting depressed. It was Christmas after all. Something would turn up.
Liz sat down in the coffee shop with a cappuccino and watched Jamie devour his slice of Sacher Torte. He had got his metabolism from his father, thank God, and could live on Big Macs and still look like a string-bean. Fortified by the cake, a Coca Cola, and the foam from her coffee, he finally consented to leave.
They had half an hour to kill before setting off for Victoria Station and Liz intended to spend it looking at the clothes she couldn’t afford in the British Designer Room. As Liz browsed through the glorious, wildly expensive fro
cks, Jamie contented himself with twirling the rails and avoiding the sales lady’s disapproving eye.
She was just holding up a Victor Edelstein ballgown worth about the same amount as her cottage when she heard a familiar voice shout her name and swung round to find herself looking into the catlike features of Metro Television’s new Iron Lady.
‘How are you? I was so sorry to hear about everything.’ Liz noticed that Claudia sounded anything but sorry. ‘We really felt for you. I sometimes think that if we women could only see what bastards men really are, we’d be a lot happier.’
Realizing that Jamie might pick something up at any moment, she sent him off to talk to the uniformed major-domo about how the lifts work.
‘Of course I saw it coming that night she came to the Metro party. If it hadn’t been David she got her claws into it would have been Conrad. I know her type. Ambitious little slut who’d open her legs for anyone if she thought it’d get her up the ladder.’
Liz suppressed a grin at this almost exact description of Claudia herself and racked her brain for excuses to get away. The last thing she wanted to do was discuss her husband’s affair in Harrods’ Designer Room in front of a fascinated audience of Christmas shoppers.
‘Claudia, it’s lovely seeing you but I’m afraid Jamie and I have a train to catch.’
Claudia looked stricken. She clearly felt there was a good half-hour in this one. Picking up her shopping Liz started signalling furiously to Jamie. But Claudia wasn’t letting her off the hook so easily.
‘Poor Lizzie. It must have been so awful for you to hear their news. We go to the same exercise class and she told everyone on Monday.’
With a sense of relief Liz could see Jamie coming back at last, in another few seconds they could get away.
‘What news is that?’ she asked abstractedly, rolling her eyes to heaven as Jamie stopped to chat with a small boy next to the escalators.