“… what on earth it is you’re doing,” Vanessa is saying.
She’s also staring at me, I realize, like she’s just been reading my every thought.
“I wasn’t doing anything!” Shit. She thought she’d just hired a caterer, but now it’s dawning on her that she may have inadvertently invited a psycho baby-snatcher into her home. “I was only holding her …”
“Well, whatever it is you’re not doing, please keep on doing it.” She gives me a brief flash of a smile and nods at Esme, who—I now notice—has stopped howling and is just gurgling and sighing a bit, and gazing up at me with her huge gray eyes.
Ohhhh. So that’s what Vanessa meant. That I’m good with babies. Not that I’m a psycho baby-snatcher.
At least, I hope to God I’m not a psycho baby-snatcher. Because you wouldn’t know, would you, if you actually were? You’d think you were just a normal, kindhearted, baby-loving person, like me. Someone who isn’t able to have a baby of her own, like me.
“Oh, Christ, more people,” Vanessa is saying as we both hear the doorbell ring, for about the twentieth time so far tonight. “Alasdair will be too busy waffling about house prices to hear the bloody thing. Can I leave Esme with you for a moment while the milk heats? I know you said something about some Gruyère tarts, but …”
“They can wait.” Anything to snatch—fuck, no, sorry, to get—a few more minutes alone with the divine Esme. “You go.”
And Vanessa goes.
Esme is closing her eyes now, making it almost unnecessary for me to rock her gently, and croon at her, but I do it anyway, the way that’s come naturally to me all my life. I’ve always had a bit of a knack for settling them down, even when I was as little as five or six, and Polly was a baby. Needs must, I suppose: Polly was a screamer; Mum was 40 percent useless and 60 percent disinterested; and Brian meant well but was mostly committed, as a dad, to perfecting the perfect blend of pureed vegetables. So if I wanted to get any peace and quiet, or even if I just wanted to spend time with my exciting new baby sister without being deafened, I had to work out ways of getting her to stop crying. I was too little to hold her much at that point, but silly songs were always a winner, as were the endless hours I spent pushing her in her buggy up and down the back garden …
“Bells. Oh, my God. I knew it was you.”
I look up to see—I don’t believe this—that Dev is standing in the kitchen doorway.
Bella
Tuesday, December 15
“As soon as I tasted the quiche lorraine, I knew it had to be you doing the food!” Dev is saying. “Only you and Brian make pastry as light as that. And then I asked that blonde you’ve got organizing things up there, and she confirmed my suspicions. But hang on—you’re nannying as well?”
“No, no, just …” Thinking up ways to steal one of Vanessa’s babies. “… just helping out while Vanessa gets the door.” I wave him over to me so I can go up on tiptoes and give him a kiss on the cheek. “More to the point, what are you doing here?”
“I work with Vanessa at St. George’s. Well, we’re in different departments—she’s ENT—but our paths cross a good deal on cleft palate surgeries. Wow,” he says suddenly, reaching to squeeze my shoulder, and in a tone of voice that suggests this has taken him by surprise, “I can’t tell you how great it is to see you, Bella.”
I believe that he’s pleased to see me, but he doesn’t look it. He looks, in fact, absolutely terrible. There are lines around his eyes that weren’t there the last time I saw him, furrows in his forehead, and a brand-new patch of light gray in his brown hair at the left temple. He looks ten years older than he did the last time I saw him. Barely a month ago.
“Dev … look, I’m so sorry I haven’t called you back these past couple of weeks. I know I said I would, but I’ve been trying to work on Polly, find out what it is she’s got herself all confused about …”
Though now, of course, that it looks like she’s a lesbian, it’s fairly obvious what she’s confused about. And if I’m honest, that might be part of the reason that I haven’t plucked up the courage to call Dev these past couple of weeks. I wanted to call him back with good news, with hope that things were still going to work out between him and Polly. Ringing him to say that his best chance of winning Polly back is to book himself in for painful and lengthy gender-reassignment treatment isn’t exactly the triumph I was after.
“It’s OK, Bells.” Dev pulls back his lips in imitation of a smile. It might work, except for the fact that I’ve never seen anyone look less smiley in my life. “It was good to talk to you that day anyway. And I thought it would take you some time to make headway on—what did you call the situation with me and Polly?—the blip.”
OK, big mistake calling it a blip.
“So …” He leans against the wall, deliberately casual. “How is she?”
“She’s OK.” I avoid his eyes. “I don’t really know. She’s not talking to me very much at the moment.”
“Oh?”
“We’ve had words. I don’t approve of the way she’s handling things with you. She doesn’t approve of the way I’m handling things with Jamie. And, you know, the adoption.”
As if on cue, Esme suddenly lets out an extremely loud and satisfied burp. I laugh—I can’t help it—but Dev just stares down at her, a weird spasm crossing his face.
“God, she’s gorgeous, isn’t she?”
“Yes. She is.”
He looks up and stares rather bleakly around the kitchen. “You know, I was so sure this was where me and Poll were heading.”
I’m confused. “Fulham?”
“No. This.” He nods down at Esme, who—not really caring about her audience—burps once again. “Babies. Two or three of them. Four, even, if we were lucky. A family. But the more I think about it, the more I think … I think that’s the thing that’s driven Polly away.”
Oh, God.
Though in one sense, I suppose, he’s absolutely right. If she really is a big old lesbian, then Polly probably isn’t all that keen on the idea of having babies. Not the old-fashioned way, I mean. Not that she mightn’t be up for it with some kind of artificial insemination … Shit. That reminds me, now that I think about it, of the way Polly spoke about Jamie that night we had our row. The way she seemed to think of him as nothing but a means of insemination. Which would be, wouldn’t it, exactly the kind of view of men that a lesbian might take?
“I mean, do you remember what I told you, Bells, at the airport?” Dev is carrying on. “The first time she started getting all distant was when I began emailing her all the pictures of the houses I was looking at. And I kept pointing out how we needed lots of bedrooms for our kids, whenever they came along, and I kept insisting on a big garden, so they’d have somewhere to play …” He stares, bleakly again, into midair, as if seeing the myriad bedrooms and the big garden floating before his eyes. “I should never have gone on about it. I should never have placed that pressure on her.”
“Dev, I honestly don’t think …”
“But I’d give it all up—children, I mean—if it meant that she’d take me back. Honest to God. Having children used to mean the world to me, but having Poll would mean more. I mean, you know what it’s like, don’t you, Bells? Not having kids. It’s something you can completely deal with, as long as everything else in your life is happy … Oh, Vanessa! Hi there,” he says, putting back on his doctor’s face as Vanessa reappears at the kitchen doorway. “I must apologize for keeping Bella chatting and slowing down the production of her incredible food!”
Vanessa’s eyes narrow. Obviously she doesn’t like The Staff consorting with The Guests. “You know her?”
“We’re old friends,” I say swiftly, because I don’t know if Dev has told his colleagues about his messy personal life, and he’s looking like he hasn’t the faintest clue how to answer Vanessa’s question. Not that she seems all that interested in the answer.
“Right. Well, I would appreciate it, Bella, if you could carry on
getting the food out,” she says as though she hasn’t just left me babysitting for the past ten minutes. “And Dev, why don’t you go on back to the party? Alasdair has been dying to talk to you about the new place you’ve bought in Wimbledon. Just, for the love of God, tell him it cost a hundred grand less than it actually did. I’ll take Esme now, thank you,” she adds, chivvying an obedient Dev out the door behind her and then stalking over to take Esme from my arms. “Still, you got her to sleep, I suppose. You must have a knack for infants.” She casts her eyes over my soft, paunchy body, built for childbearing. “You obviously have one or two of your own.”
I don’t say anything. I can’t say anything.
I just turn away and start loading a fresh batch of Gruyère tarts into the oven.
Anna is still heady with the joys of her attack of “pregnancy” sickness when I drop her at home at almost one o’clock in the morning. Then I carry on the short distance to my flat and park the van right outside.
I can tell, before I even get my keys out of my bag to put them in the door, that we have company.
There is a cacophony of noise coming from the direction of the living room: ridiculous West Coast rap, excitable male voices, and a smidgen of boozy sing-song.
The Boys are back in town.
And Jamie appears to have invited a dozen of them over to drink, smoke, and find new ways to trash my flat and annoy my neighbors.
Sure enough, as I open the front door, a wave of testosterone engulfs me. There’s whatisname, Sean Something-or-other, propping himself up against my newly polished hallway mirror, and Thingy—is it Mike?—splashing a can of Guinness around my carpet. They both hail me, happily but confusedly (I can’t be certain they’d know exactly who I am if they were stone-cold sober; pissed as a pair of newts, there’s no chance), but I don’t hang about to chat. Jamie is my target, and I suspect he’ll be in the living room, engrossed in Wii football.
Jamie is in the living room, engrossed in Wii football.
I’m not exactly dropping dead from shock here.
“Babe!” he greets me, handing his upchuckers to one of The Boys who’s next to him on the sofa (Kev? Ken?) and getting up to give me a big, smoochy, proprietorial kiss. “Talk about a sight for sore eyes.”
There’s no sign of Liam, apart from a crack of light coming from beneath his closed bedroom door.
I’ve no idea why—Jamie isn’t his responsibility, after all—but I’m suddenly furious that he should have shut himself away in his bedroom while chaos and mayhem reign in my flat. My flat, that he’s so conveniently staying in. Before I know what I’m doing, I’ve shoved open his bedroom door without knocking.
“Well, thanks a bloody …” I stop. Liam is sitting on his bed, a laptop open on his knees and a silly, daffy grin on his face. What the hell am I interrupting? “When you’ve quite finished,” I say pointedly. “You know, this is not the kind of thing I want going on in my spare bedroom!”
“What kind of thing?”
I gesture at his lap and his laptop. “That.”
“Video chat, you mean?”
“What?”
“I’m just finishing up speaking to my daughters.” Totally unembarrassed—as well he might be, given that I’m the idiot who’s just blundered in and accused him of … well, you know—he turns the computer around to show me a brief flash of two sweet little faces. Both are dark-haired and rather sleepy looking, not to mention a bit bewildered by my sudden appearance in their daddy’s bedroom. “They’ve been out late tonight caroling with their cousins, and they wanted to tell me all about it before bed. Bed which is long overdue!” he suddenly says, loudly but cheerfully, into the laptop. I can hear giggles in reply. It’s the happiest I’ve seen him look in the entire time he’s been here. “Mind if I finish up so they can get off to sleep?”
“Oh, God, no, absolutely,” I mumble before backing out of the room as fast as my exhausted legs will carry me.
I back right into a large, boozy-smelling figure who turns out, as he throws his arms around me, to be Jamie.
“J,” I say in a low voice as soon as I can extricate myself from his grip, “you didn’t tell me you were having people over.”
“Ah, that’s because these aren’t people.” He’s talking in a very un-low voice himself, the way he does when he’s drunk. OK, the way he does when he’s really drunk. Jamie has all kinds of stages of drunkenness. I sometimes think of them as ranging from DEFCON 1 (sweetly tipsy) to DEFCON 5 (belligerent and semiconscious). Right now, I’d say we were holding steady at DEFCON 4. “It’s just the boys. You don’t need me to tell you when it’s just the boys coming over, Bells.”
“Actually, Jamie, I do. I’ve had a really difficult night, and …”
“Three-nil!” comes a sudden yell from the living room, which is Jamie’s cue to lumber back there, throw himself back down on the sofa beside Kev/Ken, wrestle the upchuckers from his grip, and launch himself back into the parallel Wii universe.
I head in the direction of the kitchen. Though actually, and despite the cries of Any chance of a bacon sandwich, love? floating after me, the kitchen itself isn’t where I’m headed.
There’s a huge window, on one side of the tiny utility room, that opens out onto the world’s smallest terrace. Actually, let’s just call it a balcony. And a cramped one at that. It’s one of the things that made me practically bankrupt myself to buy this flat when I first saw it five years ago, but in reality it’s not something I use very often. There’s barely room for the ancient cast-iron garden chair I keep out here, and even in the height of summer it manages to be chilly, positioned as it seems to be in its own unique microclimate that gets very little sun and an awful lot of wind.
But it’s private, and nobody will know I’m out here. And I can sit on my freezing cast-iron chair and mop away the dampness in my eyes without any of my unexpected guests noticing and assuming I’m tearful about the result of last week’s shock loss to Arsenal.
And maybe the icy wind will blow away the sticky, toxic debris of my evening at Vanessa’s house. Anna, Dev, Esme, and all.
Please, God. Especially Esme.
But I only get about thirty seconds of cleansing air before I hear the kitchen window creak farther open behind me and turn to see a huge shape looming out of it. It’s like something out of a bad horror movie.
It’s Liam.
“You all right out here?” he asks.
“What? Yes.” Go away. “I’m … uh … sorry about before.”
“Don’t worry about it.” There’s a brief silence. “It’s pretty cold.”
“You don’t say.”
There’s a longer silence. “Might get snow for Christmas.”
For fuck’s sake. The last thing I want right now—apart from a posse of sweaty, sizzled men trashing my flat—is a festive meteorological discussion with my unwanted lodger.
“Course, I won’t be here for Christmas, you’ll probably be thrilled to hear. I’ll be headed back to Cork to spend it with my girls.”
“Oh, right.” I aim for basic politeness, which is probably the least I can do given that I just interrupted his video chat. “Must be hard for you to be without them in the run-up to Christmas.”
He nods soulfully. “Which is why I’m going to spoil them when I do get home. All the presents I can afford in the morning, big roast turkey for lunch, drag them out for the traditional Dempsey family walk along a freezing, rainy beach in the afternoon …” He can’t hide the pleasure in his voice. “Anyway, I’ll be out of your hair, for a change.”
I surreptitiously dab away a stray, blobby tear. “Mm. Look, Liam, I don’t want to be rude, but I actually wanted a moment or two alone.”
“Yeah, I know.”
But he doesn’t move. In fact, he settles himself down half-in-half-out of the window, resting on the ledge, with an air of a man who isn’t planning on going anywhere.
Whether this is because he’s concerned about me or because he’s an oblivious ignoram
us, it’s impossible to tell. And I’m not exactly sure how to respond. So we sit in silence for a moment or two until he lets out a long, slow breath. I can see it condense in the icy night air.
“It’s nice out here.”
“Yes. It is.”
“I really hope I’m not keeping you from doing anything you were planning to do out here. Anything, you know, personal and embarrassing.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Bleaching any part of your anatomy … pleasuring yourself with a wide array of sex toys …”
I’ve no idea where my laugh comes from, especially seeing as it comes along with a much less unexpected sob.
“Fuck. You’re not all right, are you?”
“No, I am … I mean, I’m not, really, but I will be. It was just … a difficult night.”
“Like you told Jamie.”
“Like I told Jamie.”
He lets out another of those condensing breaths. “Anything I can do to help?”
This idea is so absurd that I laugh out loud again, but bitterly this time. “Well, let me see. Can you do anything about the fact that my best friend is accidentally making me want a baby all over again, when I’ve spent the past ten years willing myself not to want one? Can you do anything about the fact that I wish actual harm on women who have the audacity to have not just one plump, perfect, snuggly, beautiful baby, but two? Can you do anything about the fact that I wish actual harm on my sister for having that chance and for throwing it all away—as if those things mean nothing—just because she’s decided to pretend to be a lesbian for a bit? Can you do anything about any of that, Liam, because if you can …”
There Goes the Bride Page 24