The Baby Group

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘What do you mean quality time for just me?’ Meg asked her.

  ‘I mean that you need to take some time to peel off all those cardies and get back in touch with your inner sexual being,’ Natalie replied.

  Meg looked worried.

  ‘I reckon,’ Natalie continued, ‘that when Robert got in last night he was very tired and already in a filthy mood. He took it out on you, which sucks but it doesn’t mean that he’s spent today filing for divorce or that your whole life is over. I bet you when he gets in tonight he will be feeling really guilty and really sorry.’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Meg asked her. She looked so hopeful that for a moment Natalie wondered if she was on the right track; what if her plan wasn’t enough to fix things? But she had to try to help her friend, and this was all she could come up with.

  ‘I do think so,’ Natalie replied without a hint of caution. ‘And when he does I want you to capitalise on that guilt, maximise his bad feelings. Take the moral high ground. Be sweet and understanding and then demand that he makes a date with you for Saturday night. Make him promise to keep it free for you. I’m sure Frances will look after the kids.’

  ‘Robert’s very hard to demand things from . . .’ Meg said uncertainly.

  ‘It’ll be fine!’ Natalie said, dismissing the worry with a waft of her hand. ‘And when he sees you tomorrow evening it won’t be downtrodden dowdy old Meg that’s waiting for him . . .’

  ‘Dowdy?’ Meg asked her.

  Natalie patted her hand.

  ‘Figure of speech – it will be glamorous, sex-kitten, hot-stuff Meg draped over this very table in the finest lingerie that money can buy, except in this case you’ll be getting a freebie from me.’

  ‘What?’ Meg looked confused.

  ‘I’m going to take you into work tomorrow and sort you out with some sexy knickers!’

  ‘Ohhh,’ Meg said, as the extent of Natalie’s plan dawned on her. ‘Oh. I don’t know, Natalie. I’m not sure.’

  ‘What do you mean you’re not sure? Of course you’re sure. We are talking about free shopping here!’

  ‘But will it work?’ Meg was disappointingly dubious.

  ‘Of course it will work. Men are not complicated beings. There is no straight man alive on this planet or any other that doesn’t go wild for a push-up corset and stockings. God only knows why, but they do, and what’s more it will make you feel empowered.’ A thought occurred to Natalie. ‘In fact, while I’m at it I’ll get Jess to come too – there’s another girl who needs empowering.’

  Natalie was enjoying her latest role as lifestyle guru, not that the irony wasn’t lost on her, merely filed away in a mental drawer labelled ‘Facts I don’t want to face thank you very much’.

  ‘Are you’re really saying that silky pants can solve everything?’ Meg asked her, the load of worry on her face lightened by the hint of a smile.

  ‘I am,’ Natalie told her triumphantly.

  ‘There’s just one more thing,’ Meg added.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I won’t have to wear a thong, will I?’ Meg lowered her voice. ‘I’ve had terrible trouble with haemorrhoids since Iris was born.’

  Chapter Ten

  With the arrival of her mother looming, Natalie found a long list of things to do after she left Meg’s that would delay her having to go home and face up to that particular reality.

  First of all she went to see Jess, woke her up to be precise, and asked her if she would like to come with her on her mission to cheer up Meg in the morning, not mentioning that it was also a mission to cheer up Jess too. Natalie had waited guiltily in Jess’s baby-clothes-strewn living room while Jess had gone to wash her face and wake herself up.

  ‘God, I’m sorry,’ Natalie said when Jess finally returned. ‘I can’t believe how inconsiderate I am to barge in unannounced. You must think I’m a thoughtless cow. I am a thoughtless cow, clearly.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Jess said, pushing a pile of clothes off what was, it turned out, a stylish azure blue sofa and gesturing for Natalie to sit down. ‘Sorry about the mess. Funny thing is that I am not an untidy person. The flat is quite small and normally I like it to be neat, but every now and then I have a sort of go-slow and it all piles up until I can’t stand it any more and I have to tidy up in a frenzy.’

  Natalie looked around the room; it was modern and light with full-length windows. It was a nice apartment, a proper first home for a young family. The kind of place that made Natalie wonder how, and more importantly why, she’d acquired her big old place just for herself until Freddie came along. Yes, her house was quite grand now she had renovated it and she was very proud of it, but somehow this flat, this home, bought together by two hopeful people looking towards the future seemed far more appealing than her place just then.

  ‘Oh, I don’t care about mess,’ she told Jess, shrugging off the sensation of jealousy. ‘I’m far more interested in getting you to come out on an adventure with me and Meg!’

  But like Meg, Jess had not been instantly enthusiastic about the project, which had surprised and disappointed Natalie. She couldn’t believe that any red-blooded woman with a pulse would pass up a chance at free shopping, not to mention hot sex. But Jess had looked hesitant and non-committal.

  ‘It will be fun!’ Natalie said, feeling her attempt at rousing enthusiasm drop like a lead balloon. ‘Remember fun?’ she asked Jess.

  Jess’s smile was wistful.

  ‘I want to come,’ she said, her words elongated on a yawn. ‘But what about Jacob?’

  ‘What about Jacob’s dad?’ Natalie replied instantly. ‘It’s Saturday tomorrow. He’ll be at home, won’t he?’

  ‘I haven’t left him before,’ Jess said.

  ‘I haven’t left Freddie before either, but we all need a bit of time away from them and any mothers that might be coming to stay. It’s not wrong, you know, to have a break. And it will do Lee good to see exactly what you have to cope with on your own all day. Come on, Jess, you need a pick-me-up!’

  ‘You’re right,’ Jess said, seeming to steel herself at the prospect. ‘Of course you are right.’

  Technically Jess’s flat was on Natalie’s way home, but she walked right past her own house and on into Stoke Newington without even a sideways glance.

  It was almost dark by the time she headed into the bookshop on the high street, remembering the title of the book that Alice had told her she simply must read several months ago, and deciding that now was the very time to finally buy it. And for a moment on the way back she even considered taking Freddie for a twilight walk around the park, but then decided that no matter how much she wanted to delay going home and seeing her mother she was not prepared to brave muggers and druggies to do it. After all, she would have to go home sometime. Even if she booked her and Freddie into the Ritz for the night Sandy would still be there in the morning, waiting like some shadowy old blinged-up spider.

  Natalie chided herself as she walked home; perhaps she was being too harsh on her mother. The woman she had spoken to last night had seemed different. Not too judgemental and even quite motherly at one point. Perhaps it was possible that in the months since Natalie had last seen Sandy she would have grown out the brassy gold highlights, toned down the tan and begun to realise that cleavage is much less alluring when your skin looks like an aged orange crocodile’s. It was possible that Sandy might have realised that the years she’d spent dragging Natalie from town to town and school to school as if she were an inconvenient piece of luggage that got in the way of her social life, and telling anyone who cared to listen how hard it was being a young widow on her own, had been a terrible mistake. Perhaps Sandy was planning to try to rectify her failings as a mother before she died of lung cancer or skin cancer or liver failure, or all three. Just maybe, Natalie dared to hope as she put her key in the door of her house, the woman who was waiting for her might be wearing a twinset and letting the grey grow through her hair and chewing Nicorette gum.

 
After all, if there was a chance she could get Meg into a pair of camiknickers then anything was possible.

  ‘Hello?’ Natalie called out as she pushed the door open and eased the buggy over the front step. The hallway was quiet and empty except for Gary’s tools which were neatly stacked just to the left of the door, his collection of dust sheets carefully folded beside them. It looked like he had finished early for the day, but then if he had why was his stuff still here waiting to be loaded onto the van?

  ‘Hello?’ Natalie went to the bottom of the stairs and looked up.

  ‘We’re up here, darling!’ The sound of Sandy’s voice echoed down the stairwell. ‘Your gorgeous electrician is helping me with my luggage.’

  Her hopes plummeting, Natalie scooped Freddie out of the buggy and hurried up the stairs to the peals of her mum’s flirtatious laughter.

  Poor Gary was standing by Natalie’s bedroom door, the palm of his hand on the back of his neck, looking like a fly caught in a web, utterly powerless to flee.

  ‘Sorry,’ Natalie said, hurrying past him into the room. Sandy was laying her clothes out on the bed.

  ‘You’ll need to move some of the stuff out of this wardrobe,’ she told her daughter without looking up. ‘I’ll never fit all my things in.’

  Natalie looked at the size of her mum’s suitcase with dumb horror. It was not an overnight bag.

  ‘Mum, this is my bedroom,’ she exclaimed, all too aware that she sounded like a petulant teen. ‘You are going in the guest room.’

  For the first time since she had arrived Sandy looked up at her daughter.

  ‘There he is!’ Sandy dropped an armful of clothes with a clatter of coat hangers. ‘There’s my very firstborn grandson.’ She rushed around the bed and before Natalie knew it she had Freddie in her arms.

  ‘Oh look at him, isn’t he handsome? He must take after his father – if only we could get a look at his father.’

  ‘Mum!’ Natalie hissed. ‘Don’t be so stupid.’

  ‘I’ll be off then,’ Gary said, looking longingly down the stairs.

  ‘No you won’t, will he, Natalie?’ Sandy’s commanding tone stopped him in his tracks. ‘You’ll stay for dinner, won’t you, Gary? Let me thank you for all your help. The cabbie wouldn’t take euros, Natalie, and as my own daughter wasn’t here to greet me I had to rely on the kindness of strangers to get me out of a fix. You owe Gary forty-eight pounds and seventy pence plus tip.’

  ‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’ Natalie looked apologetically at Gary. ‘I’ll get that for you right now.’

  ‘No you won’t because Gary isn’t leaving now, Gary is staying for dinner,’ Sandy insisted, flashing him a capped-tooth smile. ‘I’m going to cook paella and bring a little Spanish sunshine into this gloomy old mausoleum my daughter insists on living in, Gary. And you absolutely have to stay because if you leave me alone with Natalie we shall fight and fall out before midnight. It’s guaranteed, isn’t it, dear?’

  ‘Is it any wonder?’ Natalie mumbled, glancing up at Gary. ‘Mum, it’s Friday night, Gary’s probably got something on haven’t you, Gary?’ she said, surprising herself by the sudden hope that he hadn’t. Anything, even sitting through her mother’s attempts to cop off with him, would be better than being alone with her.

  ‘Um.’ It was obvious that Gary was trying to make up an excuse, but he delayed too long to sound convincing and eventually had to concede that he hadn’t. ‘Just telly and a takeaway,’ he admitted.

  ‘Then you’ll stay won’t you, Gary?’ Sandy all but shouted. ‘Dinner with two beautiful women over a quiet night in – there’s no contest is there?

  ‘Um,’ Gary said again uncomfortably, clearly caught between the desire to be polite and the urge to run several hundred miles away. ‘Well . . .’

  ‘Good, that’s settled then,’ Sandy said, stitching Gary up with the flourish of an expert. ‘It’s so nice to have a man at a dinner table. It gives cooking real meaning, I always think.’

  ‘Right.’ Gary looked down the stairs at his neatly stacked tools. ‘I’ll just go and tidy up.’ And he was gone.

  It took Natalie quite some time to persuade her mother to move out of her bedroom and into the guest room. In actual fact she didn’t bother to try to persuade her. As Sandy hung things up in her wardrobe Natalie took them out again and relocated them to the other room. Finally, Sandy realised what was happening and admitting defeat wheeled her gigantic suitcase across the hall.

  As Natalie sat on a chair in the corner of the spare room with Freddie, watching but not listening to the constant stream of sound that came out of Sandy’s mouth, she realised that she should have known that seeing her mother again was always going to be the same, devoid of all emotion or sentiment. But despite everything that Natalie had experienced in her relationship with her mother she felt disappointed, which in turn made her feel like an idiot for expecting anything about Sandy to be different. For some reason, after years of parting and then reacquainting herself with the woman, she still half expected a reunion with her mother to involve hugs or kisses, or at least some sign that the two of them were emotionally connected to each other in some way. Instead, Sandy was acting as if they had last seen each other only yesterday, and that the grandson she had only just found out existed was merely a pleasant diversion. Natalie had no idea who the kindly and concerned-sounding woman she had spoken to on the phone yesterday was, but it was not this woman, not her mother.

  On the way down to the kitchen Natalie paused on the stairs and looked back at her mother. ‘By the way, Gary thinks I’m married to Freddie’s dad who works abroad,’ she told her bluntly.

  ‘If you say so,’ Sandy said simply, and Natalie knew in this one respect she could trust Sandy. After all, her mum was a woman who built almost her entire life on a series of what Sandy called ‘little white lies’, from her real age to how much she had in the bank. Natalie knew that Sandy – the original mistress of disguising the truth – wouldn’t blow her cover story or even bother to ask why she had one in the first place.

  Why, Natalie found herself wondering as she lowered Freddie into his cot, had she invented a cover story in the first place? What exactly was wrong with the bare facts of her life? She was a woman on her own who’d had a brief affair that had resulted in a baby. She lived in the twenty-first century. Nobody really cared about her circumstances, so why did she feel this subterfuge was necessary? Natalie had a stack of reasons and excuses she could trot out blithely to anyone who asked, but the reality was that she was concealing a deeper truth. She had never been very sure, not even when she was a tiny girl, that the real her was good or interesting enough to be loved by anyone, certainly not her father and possibly even her mother. Maybe even especially her mother.

  Dinner was amazingly pain-free.

  Natalie’s mother had been right. With Gary there they did not fight, principally because Sandy was far more interested in Gary than she was in her daughter. All Natalie had to do was to sit back and let her single allotted glass of wine numb her nerve endings while Sandy flirted with Gary. Or rather at him.

  Occasionally Natalie considered rescuing the poor man from Sandy’s barrage of compliments and innuendo. But it was a dog-eat-dog world and frankly she’d rather not focus her mother’s attention back on her. Instead, Natalie used the time to try to collect herself. She felt as if she had been blown in a million different directions and couldn’t quite remember where it was she had started out.

  This gradually increasing sensation of slipping out of control of her own life had begun the minute that Alice had called her to tell her that Jack was back in town, Natalie decided. Until that moment she had been keeping a tight lid on top of all the unresolved issues and emotions she had concerning Jack, even in the face of Alice’s relentless questioning. But it now seemed that Jack was back and there was a very real threat that she wouldn’t be able to control what happened next. It was too much.

  Natalie could cope with the electrics being ripped out, she almos
t enjoyed her long nights sitting up with Freddie. She welcomed her tentatively new relationship with the baby group members, and even her mother was manageable as long as she was preoccupied with Gary and half-cut. But the thought of seeing and speaking to Jack made her want to run away and hide in the airing cupboard. She was terrified of seeing him, almost as afraid as she was of not seeing him.

  It wouldn’t be so bad if she had any idea what he was really like or who he really was. Instead, all she knew about him seemed to be based on lies, on some kind of elaborate performance. He wasn’t that sometimes shy, sometimes eccentric man determined to act on uncharacteristic impulse to spend time with Natalie. He couldn’t be that man she had talked to more honestly about herself than she had ever done with anyone, let alone any man, before. Because if he was that man, then he wouldn’t have disappeared without even bothering to call and apologise. The man she had such trouble forgetting didn’t really exist. And yet it was that man that Natalie couldn’t stop thinking about.

  And what galled her the most was that she, a veritable expert in changing the person she was to fit all circumstances, had been fooled by someone playing exactly the same game whilst she – for once in her chameleon-like life – had been simply herself.

  If only, Natalie wished, there was some way she could find out what Jack was really like before she had to tell him about his son. If she could just see him again, give herself a chance to let the scales fall from her eyes and examine his true identity, she was sure she would be able to manage her mixed feelings for him. The problem was that she knew, because all the evidence pointed that way, that he was no good, not for her and probably not for any of the many women he must approach on a regular basis, she knew that. But she didn’t feel it yet, because her overriding memory of him was entirely different. It was a memory of a man she thought she could have fallen for, given the chance.