The Baby Group

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘Who was that, your dealer?’ Natalie asked her, only mildly interested.

  ‘Just a friend . . . from Spain who is watering my plants while I’m away,’ Sandy said slowly, as if she were considering telling Natalie more.

  ‘And?’ Natalie asked her.

  Sandy thought for a moment and then shook her head. ‘And I’ve asked them to drop the crack off at the back door, is that all right with you?’ she quipped with a sunny smile.

  ‘Ha, ha,’ Natalie said mirthlessly, and then a frown slotted between her eyebrows. ‘You are joking aren’t you, Mum?’

  Sandy tipped her head on one side and examined her daughter. ‘You look well,’ she said as Natalie poured herself a coffee.

  Natalie took a deep breath and counted from ten backwards and then forwards for good measure. But still she could not stop herself from asking the inevitable question, ‘What do you mean, well ?’

  Sandy looked perplexed. ‘I mean you look . . . well,’ she said, gesturing with her unlit cigarette as she sipped her coffee. ‘What else would I mean?’

  ‘You couldn’t just say “nice”, could you.’ Natalie felt her insides wind up a notch tighter with every word. ‘Or even “good”. You have to say something cruel.’

  The rational part of Natalie’s brain was telling her that she was being a little hypersensitive, not to mention a touch unreasonable but when it came to her mother Natalie seldom heard the rational part of her brain.

  ‘I’m sorry, dear.’ Sandy spoke gently, as if Natalie was still about six years old. ‘I really don’t see how “you look well” is cruel. I mean it’s not as if I told you you look fat is it?’

  ‘Well thank you very much!’ Natalie bellowed at her mother.

  ‘What have I done?’ Sandy said guilelessly. ‘And anyway, I thought you said your weight problem never bothered you,’ she added.

  Natalie sat down on a kitchen chair with a thump and began counting backwards from one hundred until she realised there was no number high enough to calm her fury.

  ‘Right,’ she said bitterly. ‘That’s it. I can’t go now.’

  Sandy looked deeply perplexed.

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’ she said. ‘Honestly, Natalie, what kind of mother are you going to be if you can’t take a joke – you are far too highly strung for your own good . . .’

  ‘Joke!’ Natalie spluttered in amazement. ‘And anyway I am NOT highly strung.’ She forced herself to keep her potentially hysterical tone in check. ‘In any case I am not going out and leaving my infant son with you. It would be like leaving a bunny rabbit in a cage with a crocodile. I’m going to give Freddie the chances you didn’t give me and one of those is the chance to grow up without being totally messed up by you!’

  Sandy took a deep drag on her cigarette before remembering it wasn’t lit and dropping it on the table.

  ‘You are being ridiculous,’ she told Natalie. ‘And I know why – you are under a lot of pressure, love. Hasn’t it occurred to you that I of all people might be able to understand what you are going through? We are a lot alike, you and I . . .’

  ‘We are not alike,’ Natalie said, her voice so low with barely restrained fury that Sandy did not register it.

  ‘You’re frustrated being stuck in here day after day!’ Natalie’s mother went on. ‘Go out and have a break. After all, I brought you up, I’m sure I can manage a baby for a couple of hours.’

  ‘Brought me up!’ Natalie exclaimed. ‘Well, yes, if you call checking me in and out of a record number of hotels, schools and caravan parks for fifteen years bringing me up – then I suppose you did!’

  ‘Not this again.’ Sandy sank back in her chair and dropped her head.

  ‘I’m not having you do the same thing to Freddie as you did to me,’ Natalie said, slamming her palms down so hard on the table that they stung for several seconds.

  ‘I don’t know what you think I did to you, Natalie,’ Sandy said, leaning across the table. ‘But I can tell you that what I did do was my very best. I was only a kid when your dad got me pregnant. A single mother back then didn’t have a lot of options – not like today – but at least I kept you. At least I didn’t put you up for adoption.’

  ‘I wish you had,’ Natalie said under her breath.

  ‘Well . . .’ Sandy bit her lip, and waved her hand across her face, unable to find anything to say. Natalie knew she had got under her mum’s usually impenetrable defences and at once felt a mixture of triumph and guilt.

  ‘Whatever you think of me as your mother,’ Sandy managed to say after a while, ‘you have to acknowledge that even I can’t ruin a baby’s life in the few hours you’ll be out.’

  Natalie stared at her until she felt the glare of her anger dull a little. Was it possible that her mum was actually trying to be nice? On this occasion perhaps had she jumped the gun just a fraction?

  ‘I haven’t left him before,’ she said awkwardly, not sure how to climb down from her habitual attack mode.

  ‘He will be fine,’ Sandy reassured her on a deep breath. ‘He was up so much of last night that I doubt he’ll wake up before you get back but if he does, nappies and creams are on his change table, there’s a bottle of milk in the fridge, to be warmed to room temperature, and I’ve got your mobile number.’ She offered a conciliatory smile. ‘And I’m not taking him out so the chances of me forgetting where I’ve left him are really small. It will be OK, Natalie. Please trust me. If you won’t let me help you, then what’s the point of me being here at all? I want to help, please let me do this for you.’

  Natalie looked at her mother for a long time. In the morning light, without the benefit of her potions and make-up she looked old, almost frail. The dark roots at the base of her hair had begun to show through, and the shadows under her eyes looked deeply ingrained in the paper-thin skin. She had a smoker’s mouth, circled with an aurora of tiny radiating lines, and jowls that had given up the fight against gravity long ago.

  She was fading, Natalie suddenly realised with a shock. Her mother wasn’t immortal after all.

  She had hoped that the point of Sandy being here might be that the two of them would reach some understanding at last, find that connection a mother and daughter should surely have. But perhaps her mother was right. Perhaps Sandy’s sole useful purpose could be to give her a few hours off here and there. Maybe expecting anything more was asking more of her than she was capable of giving. And then at least they would have something between them.

  ‘You’ll take care of him properly, won’t you?’ Natalie asked her mother seriously.

  ‘Of course I will,’ Sandy said. And for once, Natalie was surprised to find, she believed her.

  It was clear to Natalie that Meg and Jess hadn’t spent quite so long agonising over what to wear on their shopping trip as she had. Meg, because she was wearing what she always wore, a baggy old skirt and shapeless jumper, and Jess because in her jeans and jacket it was plain as day that she had shed any extra baby pounds she might have had quite quickly. Natalie tried hard not to feel jealous of Jess, concluding rather churlishly that it was only because Jess worried too much and didn’t eat nearly enough cake.

  ‘You managed to persuade Robert to spend a bit of quality time with the kids then?’ Natalie asked Meg as they stood at the bus stop on Newington Green. She was scanning the horizon for a black cab on its way to the West End to begin a day’s work, in the hope of being able to avoid travelling on a bus.

  ‘Well, no actually, I didn’t.’ Meg grimaced. ‘He said if I wanted him to be home by seven tonight then he had to go to the office for the morning.’ She didn’t mention that that morning’s short and stilted conversation was more or less the only communication they had had since he had said . . . what he had said. Meg had found it absurdly nerve-wracking enough to pluck up the courage to ask her own husband if he might be able to keep Saturday evening free for them to spend together, but the fear he might repeat those cruel words to her had almost prevented her from approaching him
at all. And then she made herself remember, she was his wife. They loved each other. What she needed to do was to remind him of that, and that would be impossible if she couldn’t even speak to him. He had looked surprised when she asked him to be home by seven, telling him she had a special night planned for them. Some other expression had passed fleetingly over his shadowed features, one that Meg had been unable to read. But he had told her he would be back for dinner, he had promised.

  So Meg was putting her faith wholly in Natalie’s conviction that a pair of sheer camiknickers would sort the whole thing out, and was hoping for the very best. It was exactly how she was going to reveal her sexy new look to Robert that was worrying. She’d never been especially good at being seductive. Still, she’d cross that bridge when she came to it and pray that Natalie was right about those pants.

  ‘Who’s got the kids then?’ Jess asked.

  The bus stop was nearest to her flat and every few seconds she glanced up at her kitchen window and thought about going back. From the moment that Natalie had persuaded her to come out with her and Meg she had been looking forward to a few free hours, imagining that somehow they would be hours free of the constant gnawing fear she held so tightly in the pit of her stomach. But if anything that feeling had intensified from the moment she left Jacob in Lee’s arms at the front door, both of them looking as if they hadn’t got a care in the world. It was that that Jess found difficult to accept. In her mind’s eye she could see the appropriate level of parental anxiety stretched out between her and Lee on a sliding scale of percentages. She thought that the right balance would be for both of them to worry about Jacob equally, fifty per cent each. But instead, Jess felt as if she were obliged to take on the worry almost a hundred per cent. It was bizarre to admit, but true, that if Lee could even just look like he wasn’t coping quite so wonderfully then she would have instantly felt better. But he never did, instead he always looked so easy and natural with Jacob, and Jess was sure she never looked that way, because she rarely – if ever – felt it.

  ‘The kids are with Frances,’ Meg said. ‘Poor little beggars. But the worst thing is I had to tell her this massive lie so that she wouldn’t feel left out. You know what she’s like.’

  Natalie and Jess exchanged glances – they were starting to know.

  ‘What was the lie?’ Jess asked.

  ‘I told her I had women’s problems!’ Meg said, partially covering her mouth with her hand like a naughty child. ‘That I was seeing a private gynaecologist.’

  ‘Well, it’s halfway true,’ Natalie said, spotting a black cab approaching from the other side of the green, and waving her arm frantically to catch the driver’s attention. ‘You do have women’s problems. Woman’s biggest problem, in fact – man.’

  ‘Now,’ Natalie told the others as they stood outside the Soho-based head office of Mystery is Power. ‘We should be all right, there shouldn’t be anyone in the office. My partner, Alice, has got this big thing about work-life balance. No one is allowed to get into work before nine or to stay after six, and especially not at weekends. So just in case anyone sees us, we’re dropping by to pick up a . . . book I left in my desk drawer.’

  ‘But why, if there was someone there it would be all right, wouldn’t it?’ Jess asked Natalie, looking sceptical. ‘I mean, you are the boss, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Natalie said. ‘Yes I am. It’s just that Alice is slightly more of a boss than me, and besides I promised not to come near the office until Freddie was six months old. Alice takes this work-life balance thing very seriously. She’d murder me if she caught me.’

  The others looked a little bemused and not surprisingly, Natalie thought.

  What they didn’t know was that Alice blamed her divorce on the business. In recent months she had come to the conclusion that she would rather have the business than her husband, but still she knew that if she and Natalie had not been working twenty-hour days in the start-up period of Mystery is Power, she would probably still be married to Frank. She sometimes told Natalie that she was relieved it was just a business she had created and not a baby, because she was certain that Frank would have been as jealous and resentful of a child as he had been of her career. But whether or not the divorce had been the right thing in the end for Alice, she was determined that the business would not be responsible for anybody else’s family problems. As a result she and Natalie made sure that all employees divided their home and work life equally, and Natalie had to admit that creativity and productivity seemed to be running at peak capacity because of that policy. One of the things that Alice was most strict about was maternity leave. She insisted that new mothers concentrate wholly on their child without having to worry about what was happening at work, safe in the knowledge that they would have a job to come back to. Natalie was no exception.

  Alice would also want to know if she’d spoken to Jack, and might wonder where her imaginary husband had come from, Natalie thought, but she didn’t share that with her blissfully ignorant friends.

  ‘Goodness,’ Meg said. Natalie and Jess looked at her. She was transfixed by the mannequin in the studio’s display window who was posed on all fours, presenting her behind in one of Mystery is Power’s more risqué numbers. ‘Oh dear – I’m not entirely sure . . .’ Meg began.

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly, I wasn’t going to get you to try on anything like that,’ Natalie lied. She slid her key into the front door of the office and turned it. ‘Now, follow me, ladies,’ she said. ‘Your journey of awakening begins here.’

  ‘Well, that’s very nice,’ Meg replied tartly as she followed Natalie. ‘As long as it doesn’t involve anything with tassels.’

  ‘Come on, Meg, come out!’ Natalie coaxed. ‘It’s only us girls here. Come and give us a twirl!’

  Meg had been in the changing cubicle the fitting models used for a good five minutes longer than was necessary to put on something so skimpy.

  ‘I’m really not sure,’ Meg said dubiously.

  ‘This has got to be the one,’ Natalie told her through the curtain. ‘I hand-picked this for you with my expert eye – I know it will make you look and feel like a sex bomb!’

  ‘Well . . .’ Meg said hesitantly. ‘It certainly is better than that PVC number you tried to force me into, I think a layer of my skin came off with that one.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that,’ Natalie said cheerfully. ‘I always think it’s best to start with the totally outrageous and that way you might be brave enough to try something much more risqué than usual. You see, I knew that the red bra with the nipple holes I gave you to try wasn’t really you.’ She winked at Jess. ‘But it pushed your envelope, so to speak, and actually, come to think of it, it could be very handy for breastfeeding. I’ll have to get Alice to flag that up in the marketing material: the multifunctional nipple-hole bra – genius.’

  ‘Please let us see, Meg?’ Jess said. She was a little tipsy from the champagne that Natalie had managed to root out of Alice’s office, and she was hopping up and down in a full-length, ivory, lace negligee set designed for brides on their wedding nights. It was a full-blown affair with yards of chiffon and handmade lace that made Jess look a little bit like a child playing at dressing up, particularly as when she had told Natalie and Meg that wearing it was probably the nearest she’d ever get to wearing an actual wedding dress, Natalie had fashioned her a veil out of some netting they used for window dressing and attached it to Jess’s head with a blue-trimmed garter.

  ‘If only Lee could see me now,’ Jess had said as she looked in the mirror, her eyes bright with laughter. ‘He’d run about two millions miles. God I look a sight!’ But still, she had yet to take it off.

  ‘Come on, Meg.’ Natalie tried to catch a glimpse of the woman through the crack in the changing-room curtain. ‘Reveal yourself to us. We are your friends. You can trust us. And just remember you are woman, alluring enticing woman full of mystery – and what is mystery?’

  ‘Power!’ Jess called out obligingly, her garter headd
ress slightly askew.

  ‘Exactly, mystery is power but only if you reveal your hidden delights eventually otherwise it sort of loses its edge, what with all the waiting around. What are you doing in there?’

  ‘I’m thinking,’ Meg said. She looked at her reflection in the mirror, trying to work out if the expression on her face was more horror or amazement, because she was feeling both. It was as if someone had taken her head – the head of a careworn middle-aged mother of four – and stuck it on the body of a nineteenth-century Parisian prostitute, the kind that would be having a bath in a painting by Renoir. Her body, she thought in astonishment, actually looked pretty good: soft and voluptuous and potentially even quite inviting. That stunned her, but on the other hand she had never thought when she married Robert that the sensible-shoe-wearing, fresh-faced girl she was then would have to get up like a hooker only a few years later to try to attract the attention of her husband. That was the part that horrified her, the part she wasn’t quite sure she could reconcile herself to. What if Robert took one look at her and thought she just looked like a sluttish piece of mutton dressed up like a tarty lamb? Or worse still, a fetid hunk of sheep carcass masquerading as mutton?

  But then again he had said that the normal her, the everyday her wasn’t the kind of wife he wanted to come home to. That was exactly what he had said, as clear as day. And when he’d said she wasn’t the kind of wife he wanted to come home to, he hadn’t been merely attacking her domestic skills. What he had meant to say, but had not been either brave or cruel enough to put into words, was that she was not the woman he wanted any more. There was not a single atom of her being that he still wanted to be near.

  Meg stared hard at her reflection. So was this the sort of wife he wished for, she wondered? Would this packed-in, pushed-up flesh be enough to make everything good again? It seemed impossible.

  ‘Please come out,’ Jess begged. Meg smiled at the sound of her. Jess might have been a little tipsy but even so she had looked truly happy and genuinely relaxed for the first time since Meg had known her, as she watched her trying on the pretty baby blue gingham matching set that Natalie had found for her and the rather more racy crimson number she would also be taking home. It was as if the underwear had brought her out of herself; maybe Natalie was right about pants holding the key to everything. That was until it was her turn and Natalie had handed her the PVC basque and the nipple-hole bra.