by Maeve Haran
Claudia leaned towards her and dropped her voice until it was guaranteed to rivet every shopper in the room. ‘About the baby.’
Liz looked at Claudia for the first time. What the hell was she on about? ‘What baby?’
‘Their baby. Britt and David’s. It’s due in August.’
Liz felt the blood rush from her face. Britt’s baby. Britt and David’s baby. It couldn’t be true. Britt loathed children. The idea was ludicrous. Claudia must have got it wrong.
‘She’s been telling everybody. I saw her yesterday at the exercise class. The teacher congratulated her and said she was going to be the fittest mother in London.’
For a moment Liz thought she might faint. Only the sight of Jamie three feet away pulled her out of the black hole sucking at her feet.
‘Liz?’ For a brief moment Claudia looked repentant. ‘Liz, you did know didn’t you?’
CHAPTER 20
Liz leaned against the door of the cubicle and tried to fight back the tears. Only the thought that the other side of the thin plywood door, Jamie was waiting for her, unsuspecting and happy, kept her from breaking down.
She couldn’t believe how much it hurt – more than walking into that restaurant, more even than splitting up with David. And for the first time she had to admit why. Until five minutes ago, in some deep, unconscious part of her mind, she had believed they would get back together.
Ever since she’d been a child she would sometimes wake and feel unaccountably happy without knowing why. It would take seconds, sometimes minutes of fishing round in her mind and memory until she found the reason: the piece of good news, the promised treat, the compliment, stored away but still powerful enough to make her glow with unexpected pleasure. And leaning on the door of Harrods’ Powder Room, trying not to picture the queue of Christmas shoppers piling up the other side, she saw that it was this belief that David would come back, unfaced, disapproved of even by her conscious mind, that had lain deep inside her, beaming out hope and the promise of happiness regained into her darkest moments. And now it was lost for ever. With a mute cry of pain she saw that she was just a cliché, the discarded wife who can’t accept the reality of the split in the face of overwhelming evidence.
And yet, had she been so deluded? She had felt this secret glow only last week when David came to the cottage. He had seemed so different, almost grateful to be there, as though in some important part of himself he had come home. Despite the tension between them and her anger over Britt, his presence had seemed like the lost and missing piece in the jigsaw of her new life.
When there was a knock on the door, she jumped as though a tank had burst in to the toilet cubicle.
‘Mum, Mum. Are you all right?’
She heard the anxiety in Jamie’s voice. She must pull herself together. With his sensitivity he would guess in seconds that something was terribly wrong. She mustn’t lean on him, tempting though it was, she was the grown-up, the protector. He was just a child. She had to be strong.
She rustled the lavatory paper and noisily flushed the toilet. Delving into her bag for her Quickies and small mirror, she wiped away the worst of the tears.
‘Yes, Jamie, I’m fine.’
The truth was she had thought David loved her again. Well, she had been wrong. David had just rubbed out his old life and started a new one. Whether she liked it or not, she had to face the truth: babies meant commitment. Babies meant beginnings.
‘You’re not going to breastfeed surely?’ Less than one hundred yards away from Harrods in the trendy Brasserie St Quentin, Britt’s friend Carla put down her forkful of monkfish and mangetout terrine and gaped in horror.
‘Of course not,’ Britt reproved her as though Carla had suggested some weird and disgusting sexual deviation, ‘I couldn’t go straight back to work if I did.’
‘How long are you taking off?’
‘I don’t know. Three weeks?’
‘That long?’ Carla’s tone implied that three weeks was more than a shade self-indulgent. ‘Laura Wells was back at TV North in two and my friend Ari Green, the film producer, only took ten days. What I always say’ – Carla, consciously childfree, patted Britt’s hand and sipped her Sauvignon –‘is Watch Out. The waters close over you and you get forgotten so quickly in television.’
David listened in disbelief as Britt and Carla compiled their list of high-powered new mothers, each outdoing the others in how short a time they were prepared to sacrifice to the minor inconvenience of giving birth.
‘If anyone’s interested in what I, the mere father, think, three weeks sounds far too long to me.’
Britt and Carla looked at him in surprise.
‘Why don’t you just squat over your briefcase and send it home in a taxi? You wouldn’t even have to break up the meeting.’
‘If men got pregnant there’d be a birthing pool in the Gents!’ snapped Britt and she and Carla went on with their conversation.
‘As I was saying, three weeks off at the outside, otherwise I’ll come back and find no one’s even answered the phone.’ Britt looked relieved that everything was settled. ‘Did you know,’ she confided to Carla, ‘that there are these wonderful things called maternity nurses who take over the baby as soon as you get out of hospital and do all the getting up in the night and feeding it?’
‘Great.’ Carla tried to keep the sympathy out of her voice and failed. Poor Britt. Getting pregnant. What a terrible thing to have happened. ‘So you won’t have to change the shitty nappies or anything?’
‘Only at weekends. But I’m looking into getting a weekend nanny to cover.’
As he sat, on his second martini of the day, David felt the familiar depression returning. When Jamie had been born he and Liz hadn’t seen it as a brief intrusion into their busy schedules. It had been, quite simply, the best day of their lives.
The birth had been a difficult one, and by the time the midwife asked if they would like to see the head come out Liz was too exhausted to care whether she was having a baby or a gorilla. So he witnessed that incredible moment alone. After all that struggle, Jamie finally slid out like toothpaste from a tube, and as he did, he turned his head and gazed around, calm and collected as though he was looking for a waiter to ask for the bill.
Then they had put him into Liz’s arms, and she’d cried with joy and relief and David had sat on the edge of the bed and held them, his family. It had felt like a miracle.
What had happened to all that love, that feeling that now they were a family anything was possible, that the world belonged to them?
David was jolted back to the present by Carla’s next question.
‘Aren’t you terrified of becoming the size of a house?’
‘I don’t intend to. No bread. No biscuits. No pasta. And definitely no alcohol. I reckon I don’t need to put on a pound till six months, and maybe a couple more in the final term.’
So that was why she wouldn’t drink his champagne, not because of the baby’s development, but because of her own bloody figure! He looked back at Britt and Carla who were discussing how Yasmin Le Bon was back on the catwalk almost before she’d left the hospital and realized he’d had enough. Thank God he had to go and phone Bert at the News about Suzan’s police exposé which was finally coming to the boil and might break at any moment.
He found the phone at the back of the restaurant, tucked out of sight behind a floral screen next to the Ladies. Infuriatingly Bert was unavailable, which probably meant he’d slipped over the road to the Dog and Firkin for a swift half. He thought for a moment about ringing the Dog and Firkin direct, but the story was too sensitive to discuss in a pub. He’d just have to call him later. On the spur of the moment he tried Suzan’s own number and was greeted with an irritating electronic voice repeating ‘Thank you for calling. We are trying to connect you.’ Then the message suddenly switched for no apparent reason to a robotic ‘Sorrrry. We are unable to connect you. Please try later.’
He was about to put the phone down when he
saw Britt and Carla walking towards him. But they weren’t looking for him, just the Ladies. He was about to jump out at them with a cry of ‘It’s your friendly neighbourhood flasher!’ but he knew Britt wouldn’t think it was funny and he could just hear enough of their conversation to be riveted to the spot.
‘So when did you realize you were in the club?’
‘Last week.’
‘Weren’t you amazed? I’d be gobsmacked. No, make that suicidal.’
‘Only that it took six fucks. I thought we might do it in one. My family’s very fertile. We only have to look at a prick and it’s hello abortion clinic.’
‘What do you mean, it took six fucks. How on earth do you know?’
For a moment David thought they were going to disappear into the loo and leave him there dangling like coitus interruptus, but Carla had clutched Britt’s arm and pulled her to a halt.
Britt dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘Come on Carla, you don’t think it was an accident, do you? I’m the world’s most efficient person.’
‘That’s why I thought it had to be an accident. You mean you did it deliberately?’
‘Of course I did it deliberately. Do you think I’d ever get up the spout by mistake? All it took was a couple of bottles of Bollinger and a Janet Reger teddy!’
‘And it worked?’
‘Like clockwork.’
‘But why did you want to get pregnant, for God’s sake?’
‘Because David’s still pining for his brats and I reckoned the only way I could stop him going back to them was giving him one of our own.’
For a moment David stood rooted to the spot as Carla and Britt continued their giggling progress into the Ladies. Then he walked very calmly over to their table and waited till she came back.
Liz had intended to take advantage of a rare visit to Harrods to get a present for Ginny, some Penhaligon’s Victorian Posy toilet water perhaps or something by Crabtree & Evelyn. She loved Penhaligon’s with its pretty nostalgic packaging. She remembered how one Christmas she’d stood in the queue and watched the man in front buy the entire Penhaligon’s range – perfume, toilet water, moisturizer, foam bath, soaps in their little painted three-drawer box, face scrub, dusting powder, and all in antique glass bottles with a silver stopper, packed into a huge old-fashioned leather lady’s dressing case that came straight out of Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer.
Someone’s going to have a happy Christmas, she’d thought, but she hadn’t really minded, had been glad for this lucky lady’s good fortune and hoped she appreciated it, knowing she’d be having a happy Christmas herself with David and the children – just the four of them. And they had. One of the best Christmases she could ever remember. She stopped for a moment, almost counting on the fingers of her hand in her amazement. Could it really have only been last year?
Even though there were only two or three people in the queue Liz knew she couldn’t wait any longer. She had to get home, to the safety of her cottage with its hideous welcome wreath, to do the old familiar things that would give her comfort: lighting a fire from the logs they’d gathered in the woods, making tea, pulling the curtains and trying to pretend that everything in their cosy little world was fine.
As they joined the long queue of cold and exhausted shoppers waiting for taxis in Knightsbridge, Liz felt a small hand find hers and hold it. Gratefully she returned its pressure and looked down and smiled.
And she saw that, no matter how she tried to hide it, as usual Jamie somehow understood the fact that something was wrong and wanted to do what he could to comfort her.
By the time Britt and Carla got back to their table David had already ordered the bill.
‘But we haven’t even looked at the dessert menu,’ Britt pointed out in amazement.
‘I thought you were worried about putting on weight.’ Britt missed the stinging irony in David’s voice. ‘I’m getting the bill because we’re leaving.’
‘You may be. I’m not.’
‘Suit yourself. In that case you’ll have an audience for something I’d rather say in private.’
Britt grinned teasingly, confident she could handle whatever was coming. He’d probably had bad news from Bert at the paper. Maybe they’d given his job to the copy boy while he was out at lunch.
‘I’m leaving, Britt. I’ve had enough.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you’re not. We’re going to Harrods to shop for our first Christmas together.’
But David’s face was stony and unsmiling. What on earth was the matter with him?
‘I heard what you told Carla.’
The smile slipped comically from Britt’s face.
‘I might have known this pregnancy was one of your schemes. Do you even fart spontaneously? No, you don’t even fart at all, do you?’
Slowly he stood up and leaned for a moment on the back of his chair. ‘I’m sorry if this is difficult for you. Of course I’ll give you any financial help you need, but I can’t stand this ludicrous charade any longer. This baby means nothing to you. You have no idea of what loving a child means.’
‘Like you love your children, you mean?’ For once Britt didn’t think before she spoke. ‘You’ve only seen them once in three months.’
David’s face closed in on itself with pain and anger.
Realizing she was blowing it, Britt tried to retract. ‘David, I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry –’
‘Of course you meant it.’ David’s voice cut through her apology. ‘You meant to hurt me and you succeeded. As you pointed out, you never do anything by accident. Goodbye, Britt. Don’t worry about my things. You can send them on later.’
Weighing up her options Britt decided her best course was to play it cool. There was nothing more guaranteed to turn a man off than a begging woman. Besides he wouldn’t really leave. Not now. He was angry, that was all. She could have kicked herself about shooting her mouth off to Carla. But he’d cool down in a couple of hours.
Calmly she turned away from him and ordered a cappuccino. Without saying another word David walked out of the restaurant and headed up Knightsbridge towards Harrods.
Britt looked at Carla’s horrified face. ‘Don’t worry, I know him. He’ll be back later. Loaded down with guilt and Christmas presents.’
Liz looked out of the train window as Jamie slept, warm and trusting with his head in her lap. And as he lay there somehow his weakness and dependency revived her like a strong drink. She glanced down at his small face, the dark hair sticking up as usual, short on top but with one single curl of long hair at the nape of the neck, an affectation she had started herself when he was two and which he had stuck to firmly, a badge of his individuality, refusing every time she had tried to cut it. She had feared teasing at school but the other children seemed to accept it and now it was part of Jamie. And as she stroked his hair she knew that whatever happened to her she could survive because of him and Daisy. Her love for them would always pull her through.
She might be terrified of facing life knowing that now David really had gone for ever and that she might always be alone, but still she had to be strong for their sake. And suddenly she understood all those women who smiled bleakly from newspaper photos after their husbands had been drowned or killed in mine accidents. Even though you were screaming inside you had to be calm for the children. But it couldn’t stop the pain and as she looked out at the darkening countryside and thought of how David might, even now, be shopping for Britt and the baby, she closed her eyes for a moment and tried to blot out the agony.
And as her train pulled in at Lewes Station she realized she didn’t want to go home after all. The house would be dark and empty and she would still picture David sitting by the fire playing snap with Jamie. Instead she would pick the car up from the car park, go and buy the biggest Christmas tree they could find, and then fetch Daisy from Ginny’s. They would stay at Ginny’s for tea and bathtime. Then they would go home and decorate it together. She loved decorating Christmas trees. It was just
the kind of treat she needed.
Humming ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’, she and Jamie marched in step towards the car park, feeling that perhaps life wasn’t so bad after all.
David swiftly walked the hundred yards from Harrods to the underground car park in Hans Crescent and filled the boot of the Mercedes with presents. For a moment he sat in the dark silence and debated with himself. Then, finally, he turned on the engine and started to drive. When he came to the traffic lights at the top of Sloane Street he hesitated, glanced at the road to Trafalgar Square which, if he turned east on to the Embankment, would eventually take him to Canary Wharf and Britt’s flat.
Instead he turned left along the Brompton Road and out towards the M4 motorway, which would eventually meet up with the M25, the first leg on the journey down to Sussex and to Liz.
As Liz’s train ploughed its way through the cold of late afternoon David glanced at the clock on the dashboard. Only another twenty minutes and he would be in Seamington. And as he put his foot down, eager not to waste another moment, he felt an intuition that everything would be all right so strong it made him laugh out loud, so that the other drivers watching him thought he was mad or drunk and for once kept to the braking distance required by the Highway Code.
For the first time in months David felt he was waking from an unpleasant and frightening dream in which he was lost and could see no way out, every way being barred, no light being visible, no road to happiness clear. But now at last he could see the answer. It had all been a terrible mistake and it had been his fault. His place was with Liz and his family and he was going to make her see that.
For a moment he allowed himself to imagine the scene that waited for him at Crossways. There would be a roaring fire, of wood not coal, and the house would be warm and aromatic with the scents of fir and apple logs and maybe even mince pies. There would be a Christmas tree. He would knock on the door and Liz would open it with Jamie and Daisy beside her, and somehow, no matter how much she protested he would persuade her that he was desperately sorry, and that she must take him back. Won over by the arguments he had not yet formulated she would open her arms and forgive him, and they would have a happy family Christmas together. Impatient to be there, he started to drive even faster.