The Baby Group

by Rowan Coleman

  Natalie had barely spoken to her dinner guest when just before ten the baby monitor crackled into life and Freddie began to cry.

  ‘He probably needs feeding,’ she said as she pushed her chair out from the table. She was surprised to find that her one largish glass of wine had gone immediately to her head and somewhere in the general locations of her knees. For a moment the corners of the room dilated and then contracted back into right angles as she sat down again unsteadily.

  ‘Bit of a dizzy spell,’ she said to Gary and Sandy who were watching her.

  ‘You stay put, love, get your sea legs back. He might just need a cuddle and a bit of a rock,’ Sandy said, brandishing the cigarette she had been threatening to light for the last five minutes. ‘Oh go on, darling, let Nana Sandy have a go.’

  ‘Nana Sandy?’ Natalie blinked. ‘Good God.’ She exchanged a smile with Gary, who seemed relieved that the glare of Sandy’s attention was no longer focused on him. ‘I suppose you can have a go, but just for the record if you take that thing,’ she jabbed her fork at Sandy’s cigarette, ‘within five miles of my son you will be on the first flight back to Spain. No smoking ANYWHERE in my house, understood?’

  To Natalie’s surprise, having half expected her mother to choose nicotine over her grandson, Sandy placed the offending article regretfully on the table.

  ‘I’ll call you up if he won’t go back down,’ she said, turning the volume down on the monitor as she went out of the door. ‘After all, this is why I’m here, darling, isn’t it? To give you a break.’

  ‘Breakdown more like,’ Natalie mumbled as Sandy left the room.

  ‘Your mother certainly is a force of nature,’ Gary said with a small smile.

  ‘Trust me, there is nothing natural about that woman,’ Natalie told him bluntly.

  ‘You two always like that with each other?’ he asked her, lifting one eyebrow rather rakishly, Natalie thought. Gary was quite attractive after a glass of wine. Possibly even before it if you liked solidly built, capable-looking men who were a little shorter than average. It would certainly be hard to find a man who was more different from Jack. Whereas Jack was long-legged and lean, Gary was possibly only two or three inches taller than her, with broad shoulders and a muscular torso. He must be little bit vain, Natalie decided, otherwise he wouldn’t wear his T-shirts quite so tight, but in Gary she found it quite a charming quality. Jack had a surprisingly fair complexion despite his dark hair and eyes, while Gary’s skin was darker, a lightly tanned tone that contrasted well with his light grey eyes. As Natalie’s wine swilled around her momentarily empty head she decided she liked the look of Gary. He could be the perfect antidote to almost thin, stringy Jack – a broad, well-muscled, uncomplicated antidote.

  ‘I suppose we are,’ she answered with a one-shouldered shrug. ‘I haven’t really seen her that much since I was old enough to be able to escape her. It was because of Tiffany that I rang her. She made me realise that there was a vague possibility that I didn’t have the worst mother on the planet after all. Do you know how Tiff got on with the social worker today, by the way?’

  ‘She’s getting it all sorted, I think,’ Gary said. ‘But it’s a lot for her to manage on her own. She says she’s coping, but how can she be when she’s just a kid herself? Actually, I was thinking that maybe you could keep an eye on her if she needs an older woman to talk to?’

  Natalie was surprised and rather touched that Gary had thought to ask her to watch out for Tiffany, even if he did take the edge off with the ‘older woman’ comment.

  ‘Of course I will,’ she said. ‘The alarming thing is that technically I am actually old enough to be her mother.’

  ‘You don’t look it,’ Gary said quietly, instantly redeeming himself from his previous minor indiscretion. ‘You look really great.’

  Natalie couldn’t help but beam at the compliment.

  ‘Well, I think I’m doing quite well as long I remember not to turn into her.’ She nodded at the silenced baby monitor.

  ‘I quite like your mother in a way.’ Gary, who had visibly relaxed since Sandy had left the room, leaned back in the chair and stretched his arms over his head, not like the rather formal and shy man she was used to at all. ‘She’s very . . . ah . . . friendly,’ he added, pulling one corner of his mouth down on the last word. Natalie laughed.

  ‘Well, Gary, if I can promise you one thing about my mum it is that at some point before you finish working here she will ask you to have sex with her. That’s a given. You are exactly her type: younger, broad, strong and good-looking . . .’ Natalie trailed off as she realised her list of compliments had caused Gary’s shyness to return.

  Natalie was warming rather dangerously to Gary. She hadn’t noticed any of those things about him before tonight – in fact, if anyone had asked what she thought about him she would have told them he was nice-looking, in that he looked ‘nice’. Nothing more than that. But now as she looked at him she found herself imagining the weight and mass of him under her hands.

  ‘The thing is,’ Natalie continued, ‘I don’t think Mum sees her prey as younger. I worked out a few years ago that she somehow got mentally stuck at her peak, somewhere in her forties I think. And since then whenever she looks in the mirror she still sees that woman, not the wizened old crone she is in reality.’

  ‘She looks all right for her age!’ Gary said gallantly.

  ‘Careful, Gary,’ Natalie teased him. ‘She’ll lure you into her boudoir yet!’

  The pair of them laughed and Natalie felt quite floaty and mellow. Quite confident and womanly again. She had almost forgotten the still-sore place where her stitches had been, and the fact she was still wearing her stretch, wide-legged trousers from the gym that did absolutely nothing to restrain her failing tummy muscles. In fact, she felt quite good about herself when Gary Fisher smiled at her, and the spectre of Jack Newhouse that had haunted her all this time briefly diminished.

  ‘It’s nice that you stayed,’ she told Gary, hearing the drop in the tone of her voice, feeling the flutter of her unmade-up lashes and sensing that she was perilously close to flirt mode. ‘Thank you.’

  Gary looked down at the table top.

  ‘Thanks for having me,’ he said, apparently enormously interested in his place mat. ‘Besides, although I’m quite a good cook it’s nice to be cooked for now and again. And it would have been a shame if you and your mum had fallen out on her first night here.’

  ‘Oh, there’s still time,’ Natalie said, glancing at the clock and then back at Gary. The two of them looked at each other across the table, and Natalie thought she must really be drunk because she felt the irresistible desire to lean across the table and kiss her electrician – with tongues and everything.

  ‘So when will you be finished?’ she said instead, forcing herself to sit back in her chair and wondering if Gary had noticed her moment of desire for him.

  ‘Another week and a half ?’ Gary hazarded a guess. ‘Maybe even a bit sooner.’

  ‘Oh really?’ Natalie was surprised. ‘That soon?’

  ‘I’ll miss coming here,’ Gary told her, tipping his near empty wine glass around and around so that the remnants of the liquid inside circled the bottom of the glass.

  ‘You will?’ Natalie said smoothly, almost flirtatiously, finding herself on the edge of that now so familiar precipice, the one she always seemed to climb just before she flung herself into some new, needless complication.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll miss this lovely old house. I hardly ever get to work on places like this. It’s really great that you’ve kept it as a house. If a developer had got his hands on it . . .’

  And then all at once Natalie was free-falling again, plummeting downwards without any hope of reversing the action she was about to take, even though she knew in the seconds before she spoke that it was doomed to fail.

  ‘But the real question is,’ she said, hearing her soft purring voice as if it were an entity entirely detached from her brain, ‘will you miss me
?’

  And then she leaned across the table, put her hand on the back of Gary’s neck and tried to pull his head, his lips, towards hers.

  Gary, eyes wide with fearful mortification, resisted, his neck and shoulders resolutely rigid with horror.

  Two or perhaps three seconds of excruciatingly perfect embarrassment passed as Natalie gradually came to her senses and realised too late what it was that she had done. It seemed to take an age for her to remove her hands from Gary’s person and sit back down in her chair.

  For the first time in her adult life she was glad to see Sandy walking through the door.

  ‘No, it’s no good, he needs feeding,’ her mother said, stopping short as she entered the room as if she could somehow smell the atmosphere.

  Natalie blinked to clear her vision and saw the look of naked terror still frozen on poor Gary’s face. She saw her mum trying very hard to stifle a giggle.

  ‘Oh well, thanks for trying, Mum,’ she said quickly, getting up from the table with a little stagger. ‘I’ll settle him.’

  Gary stood up too.

  ‘And I’d better be going. Thanks for dinner, Mrs . . .’

  ‘Sandy, darling, and please – stay for coffee. I could use some company.’

  Natalie was horrified to hear her mother use almost exactly the same tone with Gary as she just had. Sort of drunken and lecherous with a definite edge of needy desperation.

  ‘Ah no, I really have to go and feed the . . . fish. I’ve got fish.’ Natalie heard Gary mumble a succession of hurried and worried excuses as she left the heat of the kitchen and felt the cool sobering air of the hallway soothe her blazing cheeks.

  ‘I can’t believe that I’ve just made a pass at the help,’ she said to Freddie as she lifted him out of his cot. ‘I mean, he’s not even my type really. I don’t even fancy him and he certainly wouldn’t fancy me at the moment. The Blob from the Fat Lagoon, that’s what I am, little man.’ She unhooked her nursing bra and put Freddie to her breast, desperately wishing that she could somehow undo the last few minutes of her life.

  What had she been thinking? She had not been thinking clearly at all, that was the problem. The wine had temporarily magnified her unresolved feelings about Jack, and for a minute or two there she had wanted somebody, anybody who was not Jack, to want her. It couldn’t have backfired worse. When she had touched him Gary had looked as if the thought of her advances had shrivelled his manhood entirely.

  ‘Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as I think,’ Natalie muttered, settling back in the feeding chair. ‘I mean, perhaps I didn’t come off as a sleazy desperado, just as a friendly employer.’ She remembered her hand on the back of Gary’s neck and the mortified look on his face.

  ‘Oh, who am I kidding,’ she said to Freddie. ‘It wasn’t as bad as it looked. It was worse. It’s my mother’s fault. She’s only been here five minutes and already she’s turning me into her. She’s a witch, Freddie. Your “Nana Sandy” is a witch.’

  Natalie looked down at her son who had stopped suckling and was fast asleep, his tiny mouth a newly opened rosebud. ‘This has got to stop. I’m not just me any more. It actually does matter now what sort of trouble I get myself into. I might not feel like a grown-up but I have to act like one.’

  Natalie put the palm of her right hand over her heart. ‘From now on I, Natalie Louise Curzon, absolutely promise you, Freddie . . . um . . . Mercury Curzon, here and now, that I will not turn into my mother and I will break free from the cycle. I will be the kind of mother you are not ashamed to have pick you up from school. I will buy a faux-fur gilet and a polo-neck top. I will never either have sex or attempt to have sex ever, ever again. And . . .’ Natalie took a deep breath. ‘I will deal with Jack Newhouse in a mature and rational way for your sake. I will be a good mother to you, Freddie Mercury Curzon, this I solemnly do swear. I absolutely will be the very best mother you can possibly have, considering you’ve got me.’

  Natalie raised Freddie’s forehead to her lips and kissed him gently, breathing in his scent as she did so and finding that small oasis of peace that was always present whenever she and Freddie were alone and relaxed like this.

  ‘What I’ll do is just go downstairs,’ she told her son in a whisper as she laid him neatly back in the cot. ‘And act as if nothing happened. Like that time I accidentally had sex with the silk salesman in the stockroom. Then we can both forget about it and everything will all be fine again.’

  But just as Natalie was at the top of the stairs she heard the front door gently closing as Gary made his escape.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Sandy said, appearing at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘I can see that,’ Natalie said irritably.

  ‘The thing is, darling,’ her mother called up as Natalie turned on her heel, deciding that now was a good time for the oblivion of sleep, ‘if you’re going to have a fake husband it’s probably not a good idea to try to get off with your real-life electrician. Do you see?’

  Natalie would have happily slammed her bedroom door shut, except for the fear of waking Freddie.

  Somehow a really quiet and careful push did not achieve nearly the same satisfaction.

  Chapter Eleven

  It had taken Natalie a long time to leave the house the next morning. It wasn’t because she wasn’t ready in time. Despite only getting to sleep just before three, she was up at seven again and in the shower shaving her legs, plucking her eyebrows and washing her hair with enjoyable thoroughness, knowing that there was somebody else in the house to see to Freddie should he wake early after his busy night. Natalie decided that today was going to be fun because it was the first day she had been out anywhere without Freddie since his birth, and as much as she loved him she knew she would relish her few hours of freedom. Indeed, she thought, as the first signs of spring seemed to take the edge of the cold, she felt like a butterfly escaping from its grungy cocoon and spreading its glorious wings in the sunlight.

  Dressing had not been quite so freeing, though, and she had approached her wardrobe with considerable trepidation. After all, today was a Saturday shopping trip to town. Such an expedition was not to be undertaken in jogging bottoms or milk-stained sweatshirts. She had to wear proper clothes, clothes with seams not necessarily containing Lycra. But would any of her proper clothes still fit her? That was the question that had threatened to dent her determination to enjoy the shiny new day, that and the prospect of having to buy clothes one, possibly even two, sizes bigger than she was accustomed to.

  It was possible, Natalie supposed, that her pre-baby figure had not been as magnificent as she remembered it, but even if she was looking back with rose-tinted spectacles she was still finding it hard to feel quite the same love for her physical self these days. No wonder poor Gary wanted to run a mile from her literally heavy-handed advances.

  As the thought popped unbidden into her head, a wave of excruciating embarrassment passed over Natalie. Still, she had vowed to herself and to Freddie that she was going to put the incident behind her, move on and be a proper adult. And this time she was determined to do it.

  She had been here before, well not exactly – she’d never made a freakish rebound-from-a-relationship-that-barely-even-happened pass at a handyman before – but she certainly had embarrassed herself now and then at wholly inappropriate moments. Like when two years ago at the funeral of a long and trusted warehouse employee she had (fraught with grief, she later argued) asked a slightly younger but extremely good-looking man back to her place for drinks and perhaps a little fooling around.

  Yes, it had been embarrassing that the young man had turned out to be Bob’s grandson, and yes, the whole of the warehouse staff were scandalised for several months, even if they all laughed about it now at Natalie’s expense. She had accepted it with good grace, knowing her punishment for such a heinous crime was that she was doomed to be teased about the incident until the end of time itself or when Bob’s grandson turned twenty-one – whichever came first.

  That surely h
ad to be worse than lunging at Gary. Except that unbelievably her motives weren’t quite as honourable as they had been with Bob’s grandson. Because it wasn’t so much that she wanted Gary – or at least she didn’t think it was – no, she was certain that it had a lot more to do with the fact that she wanted to forget the spectre of Jack Newhouse.

  Natalie forced herself to remember her promise to Freddie again. She might want to forget Jack but she could not. She had to face him. Just not today. Today was going to be a fun day, she reminded herself, even if it killed her.

  She opened her wardrobe doors and looked at the row of neatly hanging clothes from another lifetime and wondered which of them might possibly fit her. She was determined to pre-select exactly the right garment. She was resolute that she would not try on anything that she would have to take off again because she could not get it over her thighs. Subsequently it took her several minutes to select, perhaps optimistically, a pair of wide-legged trousers and a top that didn’t have buttons with the potential to gape over her cleavage. She held her breath as she gingerly pulled on the trousers, and discovered after the brief celebration of doing them up that it was probably a good idea to try not to breathe out ever again. The stretch top was better; Natalie was pleased to see that her deepened cleavage actually looked quite fetching in it. A hip-covering long jacket followed and then she examined herself in her full-length mirror. On the highly unlikely off chance that she might meet the love of her life whilst out on her mission to save the sexual lives of Jess and Meg, she thought she would not scare him off completely. At least not with her clothes on, anyway, and as she had sworn to never ever take them off in front of a man again she didn’t have to worry about that.

  So she was feeling relatively good about herself by the time she found her mother in the kitchen.

  It all went downhill from there.

  As she walked in Sandy hung up the phone quickly without bothering to say goodbye to the person on the other end of the line.