‘Yes I thought about it.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘I wanted to, but I was pregnant and you’d have run a mile when you found out wouldn’t you?’
‘I . . yeah maybe.’
‘Well there you are then, I thought it was better to cut it short and just leave it at that.’
‘I suppose so, but I couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong and I was sure you’d call, but you didn’t.’
‘I’m sorry, I . .’
‘I know, I get it. I suppose it would have been a bit . .’
‘Exactly.’
We watched the row boat disappear round the bend of the river and continued walking slowly along the footpath, both silent, both thinking.
‘How do you feel about it?’ I asked, my mouth moving all of its own accord without my brains permission. I mean if what little of my brain was left had, had any say in it at all I’d never have asked such a stupid leading question. But the words were out there now, and I held my breath waiting for the reply, expecting a cynical ‘nothing to do with me’ or even a derisive ‘hah not my problem’.
For about thirty seconds, that felt like a couple of millennia, Rob didn’t answer and just stared in front of him as we continued walking. Then he said ‘well I was a bit . . not shocked exactly but surprised I suppose at first, and a bit angry if you want the truth, and of course there was the Chippendale’s understudy James, hanging around all the time and I thought he . . but after I found out he wasn’t, and after the scan and how scared you were and . . I don’t know it’s different now.’
I thought about that. Different? What does that mean, different? Always engage brain with mouth, I reminded myself, but it was too late I couldn’t stop myself, I had to know. ‘Different good, or different bad?’ I said.
‘Good I think, I don’t know after seeing your scan it sort of changed how I thought about everything, about you.’
‘And?’
‘And it’s okay, I mean it’s a baby, your baby, and I know it’s stupid but I’m sort of looking forward to seeing the real thing.’
‘Oh.’ So it was the baby he was interested in.
‘And you.’ He added quietly.
And you? Was that an awkward I really mean you but I’m totally mucking up what I’m saying and how I’m saying it ‘and you’, or was it a how interesting this baby business all is and I suppose that includes you?
‘I mean seeing you.’ He said elaborating on the ambiguous ‘and you’.
‘But you see me every day.’ I said stupidly.
We stopped walking and he turned to look at me, his eyes piercing through my stupid fuddled head, and boring their way to the back of it where the real me lives. ‘I mean seeing you Judy’ he said emphasising the seeing bit.
‘Oh.’ I said my legs turning to jelly.
He pulled me close and kissed me. This was no seven this was more like a fifteen and a half. I kissed him back, I mean like I had any choice, of course I kissed him back, I couldn’t not have even if my life had depended on it.
We pulled apart and he looked at me grinning, and I grinned back, then we held hands and carried on walking as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
28
13th November – Week 24
Since last Sunday that had turned out to be a proper date after all, no maybe’s about it, I’d been on cloud . . well I’d had to stop counting in clouds I was way up in the stratosphere far beyond any cloud counting. After that kiss on the riverbank Rob and I had walked and talked, and kissed again, then gone back to The Willow Tree for another drink and didn’t get home until about eight o’clock and then Rob came to mine for a coffee, and no it wasn’t the ‘do you want to come in for a coffee’ synonym for ‘do you want to have sex?’, it was an actual cup of coffee. After he’d gone I wondered about the whole subject of sex, I mean Rob knowing I was pregnant, and even seeing my bump when I’d had the scan was one thing, but sex . . the how and the if of it? Well that was just a big question mark in my mind, and probably Rob’s too.
I couldn’t sleep that night, hardly surprising under the circs, but at least it gave me a chance to finish off Norman’s sons accounts. I found my error, a small detail of putting the decimal point in the wrong place, and the final taxman figures showed a net profit of six hundred and eighty nine pounds fifty. Pretty good going I thought for an actual profit of over three thousand down to just under seven hundred quid. Norman would be pleased, at least I hoped so.
On Monday morning, I handed in my homework at least that’s kind of how it felt, except of course I was going to be paid for it, and Norman was pleased, not only at the results but at how quickly I’d managed to do it. I accepted his cheque with an uncomfortable good grace, but inside I was jumping up and down and over the moon with excitement. In another reality I’d have kept the cheque had it framed and hung it over the fireplace, if I’d had one. But as it was I nipped out at lunchtime to bank it, with plans of using the money to buy a pushchair at the weekend.
I’d floated along all week in my little bubble of euphoria, double euphoria really, what with taking my first lucrative step towards self employment, and the fairy tale Rob situation.
I planned not to tell Shelley about ‘seeing’ Rob, not yet, didn’t want to jinx it in any way, but by Wednesday I was desperate to talk to someone about him. I mean this was a big deal. Not only that I, the anti-serious relationship champion, was actually serious about someone, but it was Rob, the drop dead gorgeous, one in a million guy Rob. She just laughed when I told her, apparently her and Nick had, had a bet on how long it would be before Rob and I started going out together, based on how we’d behaved toward each other the previous Saturday when we went to see their new flat. I didn’t think we’d behaved in any particular sort of a way, just friends I thought, but evidently there were signs. She flatly refused to tell me what the signs were, even though I asked and asked, but they were there she said, laughing all over again at my ignorance and annoyance at not being given an explanation.
Of course after I put the phone down I worried for the rest of the day that I had jinxed it, but when I got home Wednesday night Rob had finished giving the living room its final coat of paint and met me at the top of the stairs as eager to see me as I’d been to see him all day, and had ordered a takeaway for us both. Then we’d spent the evening watching a film, so it turned out there was no jinxing going on to worry about.
It was check-up week again, but this week it had been switched to a Friday instead of the usual Tuesday that I’d got used to, and it was a different nurse which suited me fine, the Tuesday nurse had an uncanny resemblance to Mary Poppins about her that set my teeth on edge and made me feel about five. Everything was fine, sample pee, blood pressure, weight, all the usual stuff. My ankles apparently were a bit swollen but the Friday nurse said ‘at this stage it was only to be expected’. See what I mean Mary Poppins would have tutted and given me a lecture about putting my feet up and not resting enough, and made it sound like it was my fault, or that I’d managed to get swollen ankles on purpose.
All week everything was wonderful, only one small cloud on the horizon of my otherwise perfect blue sky, and that was the immanent visit from my mum due today. But I’d had a bit of a brainwave on that score, I phoned Mum Friday night and said Rob had to go away again, more lies but needs must I justified to myself, and I was fed up with staring at the same four walls I said and feeling a bit down, so would it be alright if I came to hers this time instead, and anyway I said, I wanted to pick up a couple of my old teddy’s, including Care Bear, to put in the baby’s room. After some initial reluctance, it wasn’t that she didn’t want me at home it was more a case of she liked to check up on me, and for her there was still the issue of meeting Rob properly and being able to interrogate him as only Mum could, but the teddy’s did it. She switched tack from disappointed reluctance to the bossy mother I knew and loved and being able to make sure I had a decent meal for once, and in my mother�
��s head that meant meat and two veg, probably liver, yuk, because it was full of the iron that I needed now I was pregnant, and no doubt a heap of broccoli, so good for you I could hear her saying in my head.
Much as I could have done without seeing her at all, never mind forcing down a dinner that was ‘good for me’, I knew it was inevitable, and at least this way I’d manage to avoid her meeting Rob, or worse him meeting her. And I’d rather cleverly side stepped having to face the big issue which had escalated somewhat of telling Mum the truth about Rob. The need for inventing a reason for him leaving me having disappeared with the event of us ‘seeing’ each other. It was either that or having to tell Rob the truth that I’d told Mum he was the father of my baby and the scary fact that now Mum expected us to get married. I cringed away from either option, but what choice did I have, it had to be one or the other. So rather than face it I buried my head in the sand again and delayed choosing between the inescapable rock and a hard place, and prolonged the lies I was telling Mum for another month.
All went well. I didn’t plan to stay too long, couple of hours I thought, mainly because Rob actually was going away tomorrow to do the Newcastle job and I wanted to spend time with him before he went, so I hadn’t really lied that much to Mum, just exaggerated the truth a bit. I was tempted when I got there to walk round my old home in a pompous manner criticising this and that and everything I set eyes on, just to get my own back on Mum and let her know what it felt like, but I didn’t.
Of course because we weren’t at my place I avoided the usual should have done this, or why haven’t you done that lecture about my housekeeping skills, but I still got an ‘isn’t it about time you got your hair trimmed’ but that was about as bad as it got. I was right about the good for me lunch, but thankfully it wasn’t liver, we had homemade lasagne and a side salad with spinach leaves, so Mum still managed to get my iron intake boosted. And I still had to endure the ‘you don’t know how I suffer’ monologue, there’s no way of avoiding that no matter what’s going on or who’s house we were meeting at.
I told Mum about Rob’s trip to Newcastle, but she was less than impressed, I mean Newcastle’s hardly in the same league as Bangkok is it, so I did sort of see her point, even though I knew it was a fictitious one. And I said Rob had been painting the living room for me, to which she said don’t you mean us, and I said guiltily ‘oh yes us, of course I meant us’, anyway after that minor slip up I went on to say how nice it all looked now it was all cream. Course being as it was my idea to have it all cream, and Mum being Mum, she wanted to know was I sure I wanted everything cream and wasn’t that a bit boring. I couldn’t win no matter what I did or said, don’t know why I still kept trying really.
We retrieved the two teddy’s I’d wanted from the loft, Mum climbing the ladder with a non-stop diatribe about how it wasn’t good for her to be exerting herself like this and did I know she’d always suffered with the symptoms of vertigo, and then we had another cup of tea while she presented me with the gift she’d bought for the baby that was more baby clothes, I now had enough to open a shop of my own, but it was nice of her to get me, or rather the baby something, and I knew that under that extremely annoying exterior she really did care about me in her own aggravating way.
I left soon after and we semi arranged the next visit and Mum said she’d phone me in the week. She was phoning more often now getting updates on my pregnant state, and I suspect the whole Rob scenario and whether I was going to be getting married anytime soon, preferably before the baby arrived, but I wasn’t complaining, a phone call was a lot easier to deal with than a visit.
As it turned out I didn’t get to see much of Rob, there was some mix up about where he was going to be staying and he was on the phone for a lot of the evening trying to sort it out, and Mac was going away again tomorrow as well, so he came up to say goodbye and ended up staying for half an hour, so one way and another I didn’t get to have the romantic evening I’d planned in my head. But I kept telling myself it was only going to be until Friday, and I could survive until Friday couldn’t I?
29
28th November – week 26 + 1 Day
Rob had stayed in Newcastle for a few days longer than he’d originally planned, apparently the lighting was all wrong or something, anyway the first lot of shots hadn’t come out quite as expected and he’d had to do them again but with a different shutter speed or something like that. So I’d spent the following weekend on my own, well not actually on my own, just Rob-less. What I actually did was spend Saturday night with Marsha, she was a bit down anyway what with it being Mac’s first weekend away, so we pooled our aloneness state and tried to cheer each other up, which we managed quite successfully with the help of a thousand calories a slice chocolate fudge cake and a good old fashioned girly night in watching chick flicks, and moaning in general about how we never got to watch decent films when a bloke was around.
Marsha was getting a buzz at the thought of Rob and I being an item, and let slip that he’d mooned about for days after that night I’d met him at Zee Zee’s, which of course was balm to my love-sick soul, and I let myself begin to think again in terms of ‘the one’. I was a-gonna and no two ways about it.
James came round on the Tuesday after Rob had gone away, just turned up on the off chance he said that I wasn’t busy. Course I wasn’t busy, and under the circumstances I thought it only fair that I tell him I was seeing Rob. He went very quiet and didn’t say much, I said I was sorry and I was in a way, but it really didn’t help him. He only stayed for about half an hour and left looking like a lost puppy, and I felt terrible. Then on Wednesday he texted me he still liked me and when Rob and I split up I could call him, as a friend he added. Then I felt even more terrible.
At least I did until I got another text on the Thursday, and another on the Friday, and a phone call on the Saturday morning, all chatty and my best friend and not mentioning Rob at all. It felt like I was being stalked, but I couldn’t really get angry with him, I mean he hadn’t actually done anything wrong, or said anything wrong, except for that ‘Babe’ comment of course. What could I do, I wanted to let him down easy, so I was careful not to say anything that would encourage him, but apart from that I didn’t do anything much. By the time Rob came back, James was only texting or phoning every other day and I figured my lack of encouragement was working, and in time he’d just give up altogether.
With Rob back, the bottling plant in Newcastle pictures finally turning out okay, we’d spent most of this last weekend together. On Saturday morning he’d come with me to choose a pushchair. Marsha had told me to go for one that wasn’t too hard to fold up with one hand, I couldn’t see why at first until she explained that quite often I’d have a baby in the other arm so I’d need to be able to fold it up with one hand, unless I wanted to put the baby on the floor, or always have a spare person with me to dump the baby on.
‘Those things can be difficult enough to manage at the best of times, and if you’re holding the baby at the same time well . . . the best thing is to practice in the shop, try them out while you’re holding a baby sized teddy or something, see if you can manage with just one hand.’ She said.
So that’s what I did, and she was right, some of them were downright pretty-nigh impossible to fold up with two hands never mind if you were trying to hold a baby at the same time. Rob was amused at first, watching me struggle in the shop and inevitably dropping the teddy on its head a couple of times. But then his problem solving man brain kicked in and he got all serious and couldn’t rest until we’d found a pushchair that fitted the one handed criteria.
The one I chose in the end not only folded up easily, well relatively easily, but the actual chair bit could be unclipped to face either towards me or away from me so the baby could see where it was going, and it could recline to a virtually laying down position. I was feeling quite pleased with myself, course Rob had helped a bit in the choosing, but still I’d been the one doing the actual testing if you see what I mean
, and more than that I’d worked hard to earn the money to pay for it.
While we were having a take-away coffee from MacDonald’s, well I had tea as usual, that we drank sitting in the car out of the wind, Rob said I should try it out.
‘I don’t think I could fit into it.’ I said all quipy.
‘No I mean push it somewhere, you know take it for a test run.’
‘Okay but won’t it look a bit stupid wheeling round an empty pushchair?’
‘Maybe a bit, but you could have just dropped the baby off somewhere and now you’re wheeling the empty pushchair home again, who’s gonna know?’
To tell the truth I really liked the idea and was itching to try the pushchair out and see what it felt like. I mean after it had cost so much and everything I’d be crazy not to make sure it worked properly.
We drove to the park and Rob made me get it out of the boot and unfold it all by myself and said ‘the more you do it the better you’ll get at it, and you should really get used to the mechanics of it before the baby arrives’, which was probably true.
I struggled a bit but managed it in the end, but hey it wasn’t all me being thumbs and pathetic, it was still a bit stiff and new. Rob wheeled it about two yards and said I needed a bit of weight in it to get the real feel of it, so we checked in the car looking for something heavy to put in the seat. All we managed to find was his car manual that probably weighed two pounds at least, and a couple of heavy tools he had in the boot.
For the next forty minutes or so we took the tools and the car manual for a walk, and I didn’t feel stupid at all . . yeah right. But it did give me a chance to give it a test drive, which was surprisingly harder than you’d have thought. For one thing it had these swivel wheels for easy cornering, but the problem was the cornering was a bit too easy, so much so that it kept cornering all on its own without any prompting from me, and after I’d tipped the car manual out on what would have been its head Rob said I definitely needed more practise, and good job I hadn’t left it until there was a real baby sitting in it. So I made him have a go and he was almost as bad at it as I was, which made me laugh at him for a change, and after that he wasn’t quite such a know-it-all.
39 Weeks Page 21