Natalie felt Jack’s gaze on her as she watched the sun setting behind St Mark’s Basilica. Jack had reserved them a table on the terrace at Cip’s Club, at the Hotel Cipriani, situated on an island just across from St Mark’s Square. He spoke to all the waiters in Italian. He could have been discussing the waterbus timetable for all Natalie knew, but the rhythm and the tone of the language was certainly beguiling. The animation and sheer joy in his face as he spoke his second language lit him up from the inside.
‘This is marvellous,’ Natalie said, tearing her eyes away from the impossibly beautiful view to look at Jack, whose skin glowed in the golden light of the setting sun. ‘You are a very lucky man to have this place in your life.’
Jack looked thoughtful for a moment, dipping his head.
‘It’s almost too much,’ he said, without looking at her. ‘The more joy or beauty there is in your life, the more you have to lose.’
Natalie didn’t respond for a moment. Just as she thought she had this man figured out, he would do or say something to throw her. In that second he looked so intensely sad that she thought he might even shed a tear.
‘I’d rather have happiness for a little while than never at all,’ she said softly.
Then his hand reached across the table, his fingertips stopping a few millimetres from hers. They still hadn’t touched each other, not since they’d shaken hands on the Tube. The anticipation tingled between them like a promise. Which was why Natalie put the slight tension she noticed in his jaw and shoulders down to his nervous English genes kicking in.
‘Natalie,’ Jack said. ‘I have to tell you something.’
Natalie felt her own muscles contract. That was the kind of line that usually prefaced a break-up. It would be a record even by her own standards to get dumped in Venice by a man she had only just met. The terrible thought occurred to her that it might be her, and the awful mistake of bringing her here, that had made him feel so low a moment ago.
‘You do?’ she said cautiously.
‘I don’t want you to think that I’m this kind of man,’ Jack said, gesturing around him with his wine glass.
‘What kind of man?’ Natalie asked him.
‘I don’t usually bring women I hardly know to five-star hotels on the Continent for dinner. I don’t want you to think I’m a . . . a cad, I suppose.’
‘A cad?’ Natalie had to choke back laughter.
‘Don’t laugh.’ Jack smiled ruefully, looking down into his wine glass.
‘I don’t get you, Jack,’ Natalie said. ‘But I like you. I really like you.’
When Jack looked back up at her his expression was intense.
‘You must know that I very much want to take you to bed,’ he said. ‘But I don’t expect it. If you like I can get you a water taxi back to the airport and you’ll be home before dawn.’ A hint of that smile lightened his mouth once again. ‘Or you could stay here with me for the weekend. Like I say, I don’t expect it. But I want it. I want you.’
As Natalie steadied herself in an attempt to prevent herself from climbing over the table and throwing herself at him right then and there, a sharp breeze swept in from the sea and rippled through the awning over the terrace, making it clatter like an army of tiny feet racing towards them.
‘I’d love to stay here with you,’ she said eventually, closing the slight distance left between their fingers. ‘But you already knew that, didn’t you?’
And when Jack smiled at her it was with a genuine delight that was utterly irresistible.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
When Natalie woke early on Monday morning, she could hear the rumble and burr of something mechanical. It took her a moment to realise where she was, and then she felt a lovely ache in the muscles of her legs and the tingling between them. She smiled and rolled over, enjoying a luxurious stretch. The last few days had been perfect. That was really the only way to describe her time with Jack. Perfect weather, an incredible city, wonderful food – and Jack. It had seemed that from the moment he had asked her to stay the weekend with him, the tension had drained out of his face and body leaving him totally relaxed. And Natalie allowed herself to be flattered by the thought that perhaps all the contradictions in his character up until that point had been due to the nerves and longing she might inspire in him.
After all, since then he had been a wonderfully easy person to be with. So easy, in fact, that it made Natalie realise exactly how much hard work it was to be with some other people. With Jack she felt she could be the rarest of things – herself. No über-flirt mode, no false confidence, no guarded game-playing. For those few days she had felt closer to this man than possibly anyone, excepting Alice, in her whole life. This must be it, Natalie thought, I’m falling in love and it’s happening to me here, in Venice. It was almost stupidly perfect and comically romantic, but just then she didn’t care, because every single cynical or guarded bone in her body had been melted by Jack and by Venice.
With her eyes still closed she felt Jack’s weight on the edge of the bed and his hand on the curve of her waist. She opened her eyes and smiled at him.
‘I’m running us a jacuzzi,’ he told her. ‘Breakfast won’t be here for another half an hour yet. I want to make the most of the last few hours I have until you go back to London.’
‘A jacuzzi?’ Natalie yawned as he pulled her into a sitting position and then, with one arm around her waist and the other under her legs, he lifted her from the bed.
‘I want to make love to you in the water,’ he told her as he carried her towards the marble bathroom. ‘I’ve been thinking about it the whole time you were asleep.’
‘Have I had any sleep?’ Natalie asked, laughing.
‘Too much,’ Jack assured her. He set her down in the bathroom, then slipping his dressing gown off, he entered the deep, bubbling bath. He held out a hand to her. Natalie took it and stepped in, feeling the warm water rush and churn around her calves as he kissed her thighs.
‘I want you now,’ he said, pulling her down into the water. He turned her around and pulled her bottom towards him and for a brief, fleeting moment Natalie thought about the packet of condoms that were still resting on the table beside the bed. But only for a second, because the next thing she knew Jack was moving inside her and she wasn’t sure where she ended and the water began.
Jack Newhouse.
Natalie would reflect on his name several times in the following weeks and months, after it quickly became clear that he had vanished just as suddenly from her life as he had appeared in it.
It was quite poetic really, because when you translated his surname into Italian it seemed to make a lot more sense.
Casanova.
Chapter One
‘You could phone your mum,’ Alice suggested tentatively, and only because she was safely on the other end of a phone line and she knew that Natalie couldn’t throw something at her.
‘I am not going to phone my mum,’ Natalie told her sharply, pressing the palm of her hand against her forehead as she spoke. ‘I would rather pull out my own fingernails with my teeth than contact my mother and tell her that not only have I just had a baby when she didn’t even know I was pregnant, but I am also unmarried and not in any kind of relationship. I am definitely not asking her for any help. She’d be so happy she’d probably drop dead from joy on the spot.’ Natalie paused for a moment. ‘Actually, perhaps I will call,’ she said.
‘Natalie!’ Alice didn’t like it when Natalie made jokes about wishing her mother’s demise, which was principally why Natalie made them. She was very fond of her friend and business partner, but the two women could not have been more different. They were like chalk and cheese or perhaps more appropriately, considering their business, like soft chiffon camiknickers versus a red lacy thong with diamanté detail. Natalie was well aware that she was the thong; often showy, trying too hard to be sexy and sometimes quite uncomfortable to be around. At least, that was what she had been like before Jack.
If My
stery is Power produced giant pants made out of wee-absorbent paper then that would probably be more her these days.
‘You see, Alice,’ Natalie went on, ‘you don’t understand because your mother is a nice normal woman who would be interested in her grandchild. My mother wasn’t even interested in me when I was a baby. Plus, she would be so smug. So I’m not contacting her. It’s not that desperate yet. It would have to get really desperate for me to contact her, and seeing as I don’t even count a giant asteroid about to hit the earth and wipe out humanity for ever as a good reason, I don’t think it will ever come to that.’
Natalie glanced out of the window at the leaden March sky that churned over the rooftops of the houses across the street. Winter this year seemed to be dragging on for an eternity and she was counting the days until the clocks changed and the evenings became light again and then finally her aged and cantankerous heating system wouldn’t have to struggle to keep the house slightly warmer than the Artic Circle any more.
‘She phones the office, you know,’ Alice remarked a little bleakly. Alice hated lying, she was terrible at it, whereas Natalie had practically made it her speciality over the years. ‘Since you got that caller display she phones the office because you never pick up at home.’
‘You know what to tell her when she phones,’ Natalie said. Her baby stirred in the carrycot at her feet and she held her breath as she waited for him to break out into the full-blown crying that she had come to know so well over the last ten weeks, but then his face relaxed again and he slept on.
‘She doesn’t believe that you’ve been on a fact-finding mission in China for six months,’ Alice said. ‘And I hate lying to her, I feel sorry for her.’
‘You see, she preys on souls like you, innocents who think the best of people,’ Natalie said darkly. ‘Feeling sorry for her is exactly what she wants, that’s how she draws you in.’ She glanced down at her baby son. He looked an awful lot like his father, which was interesting because she had almost forgotten what Jack Newhouse looked like until she’d given birth to his son. Or at least she had tried to forget, very hard.
‘And it’s not really Freddie I need help with,’ she said, an unexpected smile creeping into her voice. ‘It’s hard and scary and I never exactly know what I’m doing, but somehow we’re muddling through. It’s more that I need someone to look after me now and again. If there was someone to mind him while I had a bath, or watch him while I popped to the shops. If I could brush my hair now and again and put some make-up on I might feel a bit more like me. I need to put on some make-up, Alice, I look like crap. I’m fat and shiny and my boobs have gone all enormous and I’ve got stretch marks. I haven’t waxed anywhere in God knows how long. I’m so hairy that if someone caught sight of me naked, God forbid, they might think I was the missing link somehow brought back to life after several million years frozen inside a glacier. Or at least they would do if they hadn’t already dropped dead from the hideous sight of my mutated body.’ Natalie gave a resigned sigh. ‘I know now that I will never have sex again, which is just as well because trust me you don’t want to see my . . . well, let’s just say it’s like Frankenstein’s fanny down there. I should have had an elective Caesarean. That midwife who told me natural birth was best for mother and child was so totally lying. I reckon you could drive a juggernaut up there now I wouldn’t know it.’
There was a long silence at the end of the phone, and Natalie knew that Alice was mortified.
‘Too much information, Natalie,’ Alice said eventually.
‘Sorry,’ Natalie apologised lightly. ‘It’s just that I’ve got no one else to talk to. I haven’t seen anyone since the day after Freddie was born, except you. No one has visited, not Suze or Phyllis – none of the old crowd. And I know why. They all think I’m mad for keeping him. None of them know why on earth I kept the baby of a man I spent one weekend with and . . . never saw again.’
‘What I don’t understand is why you didn’t want to even tell him,’ Alice said. ‘If you’d told him things might be easier. You might not be so on your own.’
Natalie knew her determination not to tell Jack Newhouse that he was now a father had worried Alice from the start. But Alice’s speciality was preparing for the future. It was Alice who had a five-year plan, Alice who understood the mechanics of achieving year-on-year growth for the business and Alice who pictured the day when Freddie would want to know about his father. Natalie, on the other hand, was barely capable of making a five-minute plan, and she found it hard to imagine what the future might hold for her in the next half-hour. Especially when it came to her personal life and particularly when it came to how her son was conceived. The thought of any future encounter that might or might not occur between some distant version of her son and his father was simply unimaginable. It was a tactic, in her opinion, that made her new life so much simpler. And it was an opinion that she and Alice fundamentally disagreed on.
‘Trust me. He’s not the kind of man who wants a baby foisted on him,’ Natalie told Alice for the millionth or so time. ‘All we would have got from him is money and we don’t need that.’ She stifled a yawn. ‘Alice, the man was a professional philanderer, he had to be. What other kind of man would go to all the trouble of picking me up on the Tube and acting all wonderful and lovely and then whisk me off to Venice for incredible sex?’ Natalie paused. Whenever she said out loud what had happened between her and Jack Newhouse it always took her a second or two to believe that it was her that it had happened to, and not some true-life article she’d read in a gossip magazine. ‘Anyway, that was all there was in it for him: a conquest, a challenge. And so there would be no point in telling him about Freddie. He didn’t call me once after that weekend and I didn’t know where to find him. So he’s not going to want to know about us now, is he, even if I could get hold of him? And anyway, Freddie’s got nothing to do with him. I didn’t have Freddie because I’m secretly in love with his dad, or because I’m thirty-six and my biological clock was ticking or any of that nonsense!’
‘No one is happier than me that you are enjoying being a mother so much,’ Alice said, without bothering to disguise her incredulity. ‘But I must admit I was surprised you went through with the pregnancy – it just didn’t seem like you.’
‘Then you don’t know me as well as you think,’ Natalie said. It was true that when she had realised her period was late she had thought, ‘Right, if I am pregnant I’ll just deal with it. I’ll get a termination.’ And even on the way to the chemist’s she was planning who to call, how to pay for it, which credit card to use. During the three minutes she was waiting for the test to show a result she was totally sure she knew exactly what needed to be done. And then when Natalie saw that blue line and knew for sure that there was a baby growing – living – inside her, she suddenly felt as if she didn’t have any options any more. She didn’t have to decide to keep him, because there wasn’t any decision to make. She just knew she was going to have the baby.
‘I am glad you’re happy,’ Alice repeated warmly. ‘And you’re right, I did underestimate you. You’re a really great mother.’
‘And I am happy,’ Natalie reiterated restlessly. ‘Of course I am, but I’m just a tiny bit bored and lonely, so I was thinking, I might be able to work on the Christmas ranges or something. I could even . . . oh I don’t know . . . bring Freddie in to the next marketing meeting?’
‘Nope,’ Alice said quite firmly. ‘No you won’t. You told me that on no account was I allowed to let you do any work during the first six months. You made me promise, Natalie . . .’
‘Yes, but . . .’
‘You said that no matter how much you begged and pleaded I had to keep you off.’
‘But I didn’t mean it . . .’ Natalie pleaded.
‘You said you’d say that. You said to ignore you.’ Alice was adamant.
‘Alice!’ Natalie heard another phone ringing in the background.
‘Oh,’ Alice said breezily. ‘The caller display is showi
ng a call from abroad – perhaps it’s your mum. Now, if you want to stay in China then I suggest you go and put your feet up.’
‘But I’m bored and lonely!’ Natalie protested pitifully.
‘Go and join a mother and baby group or something,’ Alice said and the line went dead.
Natalie looked down at Freddie. A mother and baby group she thought, wrinkling up her nose. She couldn’t think of anything worse than sitting around with a bunch of brain-dead housewives going on about married bliss and family life endlessly.
‘Fancy game of poker then?’ she suggested to her baby.
He didn’t seem too keen.
Natalie woke up with a start when Freddie started crying. The house was dark and gloomy and when she looked at the clock she saw it was almost five. She must have fallen asleep where she had been sitting after speaking to Alice, because the phone was still in her lap. That was something she was still trying to get used to: impromptu napping. The health visitor said that she was lucky to be able to nap at the drop of a hat when Freddie was sleeping, and that too many new mums tried to spend all night and all day staying awake. But Natalie didn’t like it. It reminded her of the days when she used to drink too much and wake up in places where she didn’t remember going to sleep.
Natalie’s twenties had been tumultuous, to say the least. It had been a decade filled with a catalogue of terrible decisions that she had then attributed to living life to the full. Living life like an idiot, more like it. Things had improved as soon as she and Alice had become unlikely friends. Alice was the sales rep for a large lingerie company and Natalie was the junior buyer for a small chain of budget-clothing stores based in and around London. They had nothing and everything in common and after several months of talking about every subject in their meetings except for the pedestrian garments that Alice was supposed to be selling, they decided to form a partnership and launch their own lingerie company. It should have failed, two half strangers throwing all their savings and hopes into a business together. But it had worked better than either of them had imagined, because by some amazing piece of good luck Alice and Natalie brought out the best in each other, pushing themselves to peaks of inspiration and hard work that they had never thought possible in their previous incarnations.
The Baby Group Page 2