The Baby Group

by Rowan Coleman

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  About the Author

  Praise for Rowan Coleman

  Also by Rowan Coleman

  The Baby Group

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Conception

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Sneak Peek

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Rowan Coleman lives with her husband, and five children in a very full house in Hertfordshire. She juggles writing novels with raising her family which includes a very lively set of toddler twins whose main hobby is going in the opposite directions. When she gets the chance, Rowan enjoys sleeping, sitting and loves watching films; she is also attempting to learn how to bake.

  Rowan has written eleven novels, some of which include The Memory Book, The Accidental Mother and the award-winning Dearest Rose, which led her to become an active supporter of Refuge, the charity against domestic abuse. She is donating 100% of royalties from the ebook publication of her novella Woman Walks Into a Bar to the charity.

  Rowan does not have time for ironing.

  www.rowancoleman.co.uk

  @rowancoleman

  Praise for Rowan Coleman:

  ‘Painfully real and utterly heartbreaking, every page will leave you an emotional wreck but, ultimately, this is a wonderfully uplifting novel about mothers and daughters’ Lisa Jewell

  ‘I can’t tell you how much I loved this book. It did make me cry but it also made me laugh. Like Me Before You by Jojo Moyes, I couldn’t put it down. A tender testament to maternal love’ Katie Fforde

  ‘Written with great tenderness, The Memory Book manages to be heartbreakingly sad yet uplifting too. You’ll hold your loved ones that little bit closer after reading this novel. I absolutely loved it!’ Lucy Diamond

  ‘The Memory Book is warm, sad, and life-affirming, with an unforgettable heroine who will make you laugh and cry. It’s a tender book about treasuring the past and living fully in the present; you’ll finish it and immediately go give your loved ones a hug’ Julie Cohen

  ‘Warm, funny and totally heartbreaking, The Memory Book is a wonderful read’ Polly Williams

  ‘. . . just stunning . . . incredibly beautiful . . . the story took me on a journey that was at turns, devastating and then so uplifting. It made my heart soar at the strength of the human spirit and how capable human beings are of true, selfless love. An unforgettable and courageous story . . . This story has the ingredients to capture the world’ Katy Regan

  ‘A heart-breaking story that will stay with you long after you’ve finished the book’ Carole Matthews

  ‘. . . terrific . . . incredibly moving but also witty and warm’ Kate Harrison

  ‘. . . breath-takingly gut-wrenchingly heart-breakingly wonderful. Exquisitely crafted and with huge emotional depth . . . extraordinary’ Veronica Henry

  ‘An absolutely beautiful, stunningly written story - you HAVE to read The Memory Book by Rowan Coleman!’ Miranda Dickinson

  ‘Heartbreakingly good stuff – just be sure to stock up on tissues’ Fabulous Magazine, The Sun on Sunday

  ‘This is a heart-rending story, but it’s also completely absorbing, uplifting, tender, sad and wise’ Sunday Mirror

  Also by Rowan Coleman:

  The Memory Book

  Dearest Rose

  Lessons in Laughing Out Loud

  The Happy Home for Broken Hearts

  The Baby Group

  Woman Walks Into A Bar

  River Deep

  After Ever After

  Growing Up Twice

  The Accidental Mother

  The Accidental Wife

  The Accidental Family

  Writing as Scarlett Bailey:

  Just For Christmas

  Married by Christmas

  Santa Maybe (digital short)

  The Night Before Christmas

  THE BABY GROUP

  Rowan Coleman

  For Kate, Steve and their son Oscar

  Born 11 August 2006

  Acknowledgements

  I consider myself extremely lucky to have two wonderful editors working on my books and I want to say thank you so much to Georgina Hawtrey-Woore who has been so supportive and dedicated during the writing of The Baby Group and to Kate Elton whose early input was so important to the book. Georgina and Kate, I hope you know how highly I value you both.

  Thank you to all of Random House, and especially my heroes in the sales, marketing and publicity departments who have done such sterling work on my behalf for which I am truly grateful.

  Thank you also to my agent and good friend Lizzy Kremer, who is a constant source of support, ideas and most importantly laughs – she always keeps me sane.

  To my stalwart friends who are always there even if I don’t see them often enough: Jenny Mathews (Mrs Basquille), Clare Winter, Lynne Smith, Sarah Boswell, Cathy Carter, Rosie Wooley. Thanks for generating the sales, girls! I miss all of you.

  Very many thanks to the dear friends I see every day and who have given me so much support over the last year: Margi Harris, Kirstie Seaman and Catherine Ashley.

  My mum has always been extremely supportive of my career and I don’t think I have ever thanked her enough for everything she’s done for me over the years, so thank you mum. I love you.

  Finally, thank you to Erol, who always makes me smile and laugh and whose dedication as a husband and father I learned to truly appreciate when trying to imagine life without him. It’s something I never want to have to experience for real! And to my darling little girl Lily who is a constant source of inspiration and ideas and who lights up every day.

  Conception

  Natalie Curzon had been stuck on the Northern line in the half dark on the day she met the man who would completely change her life in the most unexpected way.

  She had been feeling sticky, hot and mildly anxious on that unseasonably warm April morning because she knew that she was going to be late for her meeting with the lingerie buyer at Selfridges, a meeting it had taken her and her business partner Alice months to arrange. Natalie didn’t want to be late for that meeting; who knew how long it would take to rearrange it?

  Firstly she noticed the man looking at her, or rather she felt his gaze as she read over her presentation notes again. For a second or two she kept looking down at the words without reading them and then as she looked up he looked down again, rattling his newspaper to smooth out the pages. Natalie saw him shift slightly in his seat as he studied his paper with infinite care.

  Natalie wondered if he had been admiring her. It would be nice if he had, but she remembered only too well the time she had thought that the whole world was admiring her because everybody she passed was staring and smiling at her. In fact, it had tur
ned out that her wrap dress had slipped open at the front revealing a grey and much machine-washed bra to the public at large. The incident had caused her considerable embarrassment and her friends and colleagues much hilarity not least because she was the co-director of a sexy lingerie company. She had never again gone out in public in anything less than her finest underwear.

  After giving herself a quick once-over to check that she was fully dressed, Natalie decided she could let herself think he was admiring her. He probably wasn’t, he was probably scrutinising the Tube map over her left shoulder. Still, even the possibility gave her a small inner glow. She would have let the moment pass without incident, taking enough satisfaction in a potential unknown admirer and never given him a second thought. But as she looked back down at her notes she sensed the man watching her again.

  The second time she looked up he did not look away. Hesitantly, Natalie glanced over her shoulder to see if he really was looking at something else. When she looked back he was still watching her, and this time he smiled. Natalie returned the smile instinctively. He was about her age – perhaps a little older – dressed in a good, dark blue tailored suit. His left hand was bare and there were no telltale tan marks on his ring finger. He wasn’t handsome exactly, but he had something about him, a kind of mobility in his face that made him interesting to look at, with his closely shaven pale skin and slightly ruddy cheeks. He had thick, dark, longish hair that curled over his collar and as he held Natalie’s gaze she noticed he had very dark eyes, almost black.

  ‘This is a nightmare,’ he said lightly, gesturing generally at their predicament. His skin glistened with a light sheen of perspiration that made Natalie worry that her nose was shiny.

  ‘It is dreadful,’ she replied with a resigned shrug.

  ‘That’s my whole afternoon blown now,’ he said, before adding decisively, ‘You know, now I come to think of it, what’s the point in me going back to the office at all? I’m going to take the rest of the day off.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Natalie replied, thinking he must be someone quite important if he could just take time off like that. She thought about her missed meeting; it had taken her and Alice weeks and weeks of persuasion to get Selfridges to even think about stocking their lingerie range in-store. She looked at the man and wondered if he was going to continue this conversation or let them both slip back into the silence of strangers.

  ‘I might as well take the rest of the day off,’ he repeated, almost to himself. He shifted in his seat restlessly, looking as if he couldn’t stand to spend another second stuck on the underground train. Natalie sympathised.

  ‘Lucky you,’ she said, a touch wistfully. She glanced at the woman sitting to her right who was quite obviously eavesdropping on their conversation to pass the time. Natalie couldn’t work out if the man was chatting her up or not. Maybe he was just being friendly, because if he was chatting her up he wasn’t being very obvious about it. If she wanted to know for sure, and frankly she did – then she had to try to think of something to say that would elicit a reaction from him that would make his intentions clear.

  ‘I should get back,’ she said. It wasn’t exactly the alluring and inviting sentence she was reaching for, but it was the only one that came out. She tried again. ‘I run my own design company called Mystery is Power with my business partner and best friend, Alice. Lingerie, sexy but very high-class, you know the kind of thing. We’re really busy at the moment, but I must admit on a day like this and after being stuck in here it would be nice to be out in the fresh air . . .’

  The man looked impressed but not embarrassed or intimidated by the word ‘lingerie’, and he didn’t snigger like a schoolboy. Natalie liked that about him, because it was surprising the amount of fully grown men who did snigger or blush when confronted with the posh word for pants.

  ‘Then don’t go back,’ he said, smiling with one corner of his mouth. He had a very nice mouth and a pleasant smile.

  Natalie sat back in her seat. She wished she could be sure whether or not he was chatting her up. The ambiguity annoyed her slightly. The thing was, she liked him, or liked the look of him at least. She liked the fact that he talked to strangers on a train, that he seemed impulsive and in control of his own life. Of course, that could mean that she was trying to establish a flirtation with a psychopath, but at least that made him more interesting than the average man. She was trying to think of something else to say when he spoke again.

  ‘Come to lunch with me,’ he almost commanded, before adding with a tad less certainty, ‘if you like, I mean. I know a really nice little Italian quite near to this station.’

  Natalie looked back up at him. Now was not the time to be enigmatic.

  ‘Are you asking me on a date?’

  ‘I am,’ he said, as if he had only just decided himself. ‘Do you mind?’

  She smiled at him; he was a strangely appealing mixture of confidence and vulnerability.

  ‘Why not,’ she replied, deciding that Alice would approve of her seizing the moment, even if it meant several hundred apologies and an extensive period of grovelling.

  ‘I’m Natalie, by the way.’ She held out her hand for him to shake.

  ‘Jack Newhouse,’ the man said, taking her hand. His fingers were strong and warm. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘I’m pleased to meet you too,’ she said.

  And then the train moaned into life and began to ease slowly into the tunnel.

  There was no way Natalie couldn’t have known that from that moment on, her life was about to take a new and very different course.

  Lunch had been good.

  Once they were out of the Tube and in the sunshine he relaxed a little more, talking to her easily. He was very charming and there was a spark about him, as if he was brimming with life and energy, that was very compelling.

  ‘This place isn’t at all glamorous,’ he told her as they made their way into the small restaurant, its walls thick with Artexing and tiny red glass lanterns hanging from the fishing nets that adorned the ceiling. ‘But it serves excellent, honest food.’

  ‘I love Italian food,’ Natalie said as they ate. ‘Well, to be honest, I love food full stop. But especially Italian – somehow I’ve never quite managed to go to Italy. I keep meaning to, but being self-employed makes taking holiday so difficult.’

  Jack looked almost personally affronted.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ he said. ‘You must go, you have to. Italy is the most beautiful, most wonderful, warm, fabulous country in the world. The best food, the best culture, the best-looking people – mostly.’

  Natalie laughed at his enthusiasm. She liked the way he approached life, as if he were open to any eventuality. He had an indefinable air about him she couldn’t quite quantify. It seemed that, despite his boldness earlier, he wasn’t used to seducing women, because unlike some he didn’t trot out a parade of hackneyed phrases and clichéd lines. He was very easy to be with and talk to. The conversation flowed so comfortably that they might have known each other for much longer than just under an hour. And the more relaxed with her he felt, the more attracted to him Natalie was.

  ‘My mother is Italian,’ Jack said. He paused for a second as if he had just remembered something rather troubling, but then his smile returned and he went on. ‘She’s a genuine Venetian, would you believe? All my childhood holidays were spent there and my mum and dad live just outside Venice now, they retired there. In fact, I am one of the few men entitled to be a gondolier because you have to be born there to be one, and I was.’ He paused again and then added regretfully, ‘When I was a boy all I wanted to be was a gondolier.’

  ‘So why aren’t you?’ Natalie said, smiling at the thought of Jack in a stripy top and straw hat. ‘I bet you do a great “O Sole Mio”.’

  ‘Who knows, I might be one day,’ Jack said and they both laughed, their eyes locking. It was Natalie who, disconcerted by the sudden intensity in his eyes, had to look away first.

  ‘I
t is an incredible place,’ he told her. ‘You never tire of just looking at it; even the grubbiest back alley is a work of art.’

  ‘It sounds wonderful,’ Natalie said, thinking briefly of her own far less appealing girlhood.

  Jack watched her over a small vase of three red carnations, tapping his forefinger impatiently on the table top. He glanced at his watch and Natalie wondered if he had somewhere else he had to be. As much as he seemed to be enjoying her company, he also seemed to find it impossible to be still.

  ‘You’re an impulsive kind of woman aren’t you, Natalie?’ he asked her.

  Natalie shrugged. ‘I suppose I must be,’ she said, feeling the thrill of the unknown bubble in the pit of her stomach. ‘I’m having lunch with a virtual stranger after all, and a pretty strange stranger at that.’

  Jack laughed.

  ‘Have dinner with me this evening.’ Once again it was more like a command than a request, but this time there was no uncertainty at all in his tone.

  ‘Dinner?’ Natalie raised an eyebrow; that wasn’t exactly her idea of impulsive.

  ‘In Venice,’ Jack added, his voice light but his eyes crackling with raw energy. ‘Naturally.’

  Natalie held his dark-eyed gaze for a long moment and knew without question that as soon as she had caught his eye on the Tube he’d been planning to ask her that question. What she most wanted to know was why. Why had he singled her out?

  ‘Why not?’ she said instead, being very careful not to let her nerves show. ‘Why ever not?’

  Alice would kill her. She could be very reasonable about delayed trains and hectic schedules and even unplanned lunches with attractive strangers, but she would not be amused by Natalie taking off for the weekend with said attractive stranger. It would be the ‘stranger’ part that would upset Alice, causing her to lecture Natalie at length about potential serial killers and con men and to remind Natalie that she had promised not to get herself into any more silly scrapes after the Paris incident.

  But somehow, whatever Alice’s warnings and remonstrations might be, Natalie knew she had to go to Venice with Jack Newhouse.