The Baby Group

by Rowan Coleman

  Natalie was right about one thing, though: after those two ensembles, this corset with a layer of black chiffon silk slicked over baby-pink satin seemed much more her style than she could have ever imagined.

  Meg took a deep breath and opened the curtain.

  ‘Wow,’ Natalie said, and she didn’t appear to be laughing. ‘You are hot.’

  ‘Is it really wow or is it desperately sad?’ Meg asked her. Natalie drew back the curtain for Jess to see, and Meg had to resist the impulse to cower in the corner. She hated feeling so exposed.

  ‘Flipping Nora!’ Jess said. ‘You look incredible. You’ve had four kids and you look like . . .’

  ‘Like a ripe peach,’ Natalie said thoughtfully.

  ‘Or a rose in full bloom,’ Jess added, her head tipped to one side.

  ‘Bloody gorgeous,’ a male voice said from the doorway.

  All three women shrieked and the one in her pants raced back into the cubicle and dragged the curtain shut. Natalie turned round to find Gregory, their head designer, standing there, looking like Christmas had come early.

  ‘I keep telling you we need models like that,’ he said. ‘Real, sexy women, and anyway what are you doing here?’

  ‘Gregory!’ Natalie yelped happily, momentarily forgetting poor Meg. She rushed over to kiss him, calling out over her shoulder, ‘Don’t worry, Meg, it’s only Gregory and he sees half-naked women every day of the week. He’s become immune to it, a bit like a doctor really, haven’t you, Gregory?’ She nodded enthusiastically at him.

  ‘Yes,’ Gregory said loudly as he disentangled himself from Natalie’s embrace. ‘You’ve seen one half-naked woman, you’ve seen them all.’ Then, lowering his voice, he added, ‘I think that’s the woman I’ve been looking for all these years, can you get me her number?’

  Natalie smiled indulgently at him.

  ‘She is fabulous, isn’t she?’ she said. ‘But that’s not the point. That woman is married with four children.’

  ‘Not necessarily a deal-breaker,’ Gregory said, smiling at Jess. ‘This one looks as if she’s about to get married.’

  ‘I’m Jess,’ Jess told him, sticking out a lace-garnished wrist. ‘I am not married. I live in sin.’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’ Gregory said with a shrug. ‘Any chance of some of that champagne?’

  Eventually Meg re-emerged fully clothed, if a very bright shade of pink. She even managed to shake hands with Gregory although she could not look him in the eye, and he could not stop looking at her with that predatory fixation that had lured more than one model into his lair. Natalie considered telling him to lay off her friend, that Meg was far too good and decent for an old Lothario like him, but she decided not to. It was good for Meg to feel the full heat of another man’s desire for her. It would remind her that she was actually very desirable.

  ‘Let’s open Alice’s last bottle of champagne and celebrate,’ Natalie said, already easing the cork from the bottle.

  ‘Celebrate what?’ Jess asked, holding out her glass.

  ‘Womanhood, of course. And a night of unbridled, more or less married passion ahead of you two ladies, courtesy of Mystery is Power.’

  ‘You are so sweet, Natalie,’ Jess said. It was a compliment that wasn’t often, if ever, aimed at Natalie. ‘Here you are fixing us up – it must really make you miss your . . .’

  ‘Anyway, why are you even here, Greg?’ Natalie asked the designer, hoping Jess would see her interruption as a kind of ‘I don’t want to talk about it’ reaction and leave the subject of absent husbands alone.

  Greg smiled steadily at Meg.

  ‘It must have been fate,’ he said. ‘That and because Alice wanted to meet me here and go over our winter collection before the big presentation on Monday. Believe it or not, we do miss you being around. It turns out you really do make a positive contribution to the company after all!’

  ‘Oh ha, ha. Who says men can’t be bitchy,’ Natalie said and then she realised what Greg had said. ‘Hold on, Alice told you to meet her . . .’

  ‘Here,’ Alice said, appearing in the doorway, her arms crossed.

  ‘Now, Alice, I can explain . . .’ Natalie began bracing herself for the full stay-away-from-work lecture.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot,’ Alice said. ‘I’m not cross, you dummy – it’s great to see you and you’ve brought some friends!’ She smiled unquestioningly at Jess, still in her bride’s nightie, and shook Meg’s hand.

  ‘Actually I’ve seen you before,’ Jess hiccuped as she took Alice’s hand. ‘I was on Natalie’s ward when she had Freddie, my baby’s about eight hours younger than him.’

  ‘Oh, well, nice to meet you properly,’ Alice replied. ‘I haven’t had a minute to visit Natalie while we’ve been getting the new collection ready, so it’s good to know there are some sane people keeping an eye on her.’ She smiled at Jess. ‘Or insane, anyway.’

  Alice embraced Natalie, and pulling back examined her friend’s face. ‘You look great,’ she said. ‘And you’ve lost a lot of that baby weight.’

  ‘I knew there was a reason I loved you,’ Natalie told her. ‘Your comforting lies.’

  ‘I’m just glad Natalie’s got some friends to hang out with and keep her out of trouble,’ Alice said with a laugh as she sipped from the glass of champagne that Natalie handed her. ‘Otherwise she just keeps pestering me day after day to let her come back to work!’

  ‘Yes, we were saying before,’ Jess said, rather reluctantly removing her garter headdress. ‘How hard it must be for her with her husband away. I don’t know what I’d do without Lee, not that he is technically a husband . . .’

  ‘Her husband away?’ Alice repeated the phrase, as if she needed a moment to absorb its meaning.

  ‘Oh well, I do miss him, yes of course I do, but not to worry!’ Natalie said quickly, grinning fixedly at first Alice and then Greg. Greg would be a little slower to pick up on the lie, but he’d probably go with it because it wouldn’t be entirely out of character for Natalie to have actually got secretly married in the last few of months. It was Alice she was worried about, moral, high-minded, straight-as-a-die, truth-telling-fanatic Alice.

  Alice’s smile was unreadable.

  ‘And where is he working now?’ she asked Natalie sharply. ‘China?’

  ‘Dubai actually,’ Natalie said.

  Alice raised her eyebrows and took a sip from her glass.

  ‘Poor old you,’ she said lightly. ‘And poor old Freddie too. I’d bet he’d love to see his dad.’ She tipped her head to one side so that her straight hair fell over one shoulder. ‘Can I have a quick word with you in the office, Natalie? About the collection?’

  Natalie followed Alice into her office. She winced when Alice firmly shut the door behind her.

  ‘Guess what,’ Natalie put in quickly before Alice could speak. ‘My mum came to stay! I phoned her and invited her over like you told me to. She’s been here since yesterday and we’ve hardly fought at all! Well, not while we’re in separate rooms or asleep.’

  ‘Really?’ But Alice was only momentarily distracted. ‘And have you spoken to Jack?’ she said, sitting on the edge of her desk and crossing her arms. ‘What about Jack?’

  Natalie chewed the inside of her mouth. ‘What about Jack? Well, I was about to call him when you’ll never believe what happened . . .’

  ‘Natalie,’ Alice interrupted her. ‘Come on, this is me you’re talking to. Just exactly how did you go from deciding to tell Jack he is the father of your baby to inventing a fake husband?’

  ‘Did I mention my mum is staying?’ Natalie said wanly.

  ‘Natalie!’ Alice’s voice was full of frustration. ‘You know that I love you, don’t you?’

  Natalie nodded. ‘I love you too,’ she replied.

  ‘And since you’ve been on leave I’ve realised exactly how much stuff you do around here, stuff I didn’t really appreciate before.’

  Natalie brightened a little. ‘Really?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes
! Knowing all those journalists, and buyers, and writing all the presentations. It’s been hard work to keep up your standards, which by the way is meant purely as a compliment and not as an invitation to come back to work yet.’

  ‘Thanks!’ Natalie said. ‘But if you’re complimenting me why does it still sound like you’re cross?’

  ‘I’m not cross,’ Alice said crossly. ‘I’m worried about you! What I’m trying to say is that you are a good, kind, generous person, not to mention my best friend. And you are obviously a clever person, otherwise you wouldn’t have helped make this business work so well. But yet you still seem to think and act like a half-brain-dead teenager who’s got pissed on a bottle of Thunderbird! What’s all this about a husband, and what about Jack?’

  ‘The husband thing was sort of a random comment,’ Natalie explained. ‘The electrician asked to speak to him and I don’t know, I sort of flapped and before I knew it I said he couldn’t because my husband worked abroad. And then I mentioned it to one person and another and it snowballed! It’s too late to take it back now. Did I tell you I’m in a baby group? We meet once or twice a week to do activities. We did Baby Aerobics yesterday and every time I threw Freddie in the air he laughed his head off. Proper deep little chuckles. I swear he’s got the laugh of a fifty-year-old man who smokes fifty a day and drinks whisky.’

  Natalie was hoping to distract Alice with some baby talk, but it was a faint hope.

  ‘It’s not too late to take it back,’ Alice said firmly. ‘They seem like nice, normal women to me, even the one got up like a young Miss Havisham. And if you want nice normal friends then you’ll have to try really hard to be a nice normal person too. Tell them what happened – your life will be much better, I promise you. Otherwise I know you. You’ll end up hiring an actor to stand in for your imaginary husband.’

  ‘Oh, I hadn’t thought of that . . .’ Natalie began, only half in jest.

  ‘Nat!’ Alice exclaimed. ‘You need all the friends you can get – when are you going to get it into your thick head that you are a good person, a great person in your own right? You don’t need a fake husband for real people to like you.’

  ‘I do know that,’ Natalie said, feeling a little cornered. ‘I didn’t mean this to happen.’

  ‘Well, sort it,’ Alice pressed on. ‘And what are you going to do about Jack?’

  ‘Well, you must admit it is a hard thing to do,’ Natalie said, all trace of humour gone from her voice as she remembered what she had to confront. ‘He’ll think I’m phoning for another wild, sex-fuelled fling and instead I’ll be about to announce to him the birth of his son.’ Natalie looked at her hands: her weeks-old nail varnish was chipped and her nails bitten down, her skin looked dry and neglected. ‘And . . . well, things are good with Freddie. I love him so much, Alice. It’s great being able to love another person that much and be fairly sure that he loves me back, even if it is just for the milk and the midnight chats. We get along really well together. Jack will spoil everything, I know he will!’ Natalie was dismayed to hear the strength of her emotion thicken her voice.

  Alice’s face softened and she dropped her crossed arms to her sides. ‘I’m sorry, Nat. I’ve been bossing you around, telling you what to do without thinking about how all this must make you feel. It must hurt you very much.’

  ‘It doesn’t hurt me.’ Natalie reacted defensively. ‘I’m not hurt. I’m worried.’

  ‘You liked Jack,’ Alice ventured. ‘I know you said you weren’t bothered when he didn’t call you after Venice, and you said he wasn’t important when you discovered you were pregnant. But I saw you, the way you acted, the way you looked when you got back after that weekend. It’s a cliché, but you were glowing, Natalie, you looked so happy. You were different too, you were more you and not one of the many made-up versions of you you think you need to hide behind. When he didn’t call, when he disappeared, I saw how much you were hurting. You can hide it from that lot out there, but not from me. You still feel something for him, don’t you?’

  Natalie hung her head and nodded slowly. ‘It’s hard not to really,’ she said with a shrug.

  Alice slid off the desk and put her hands on Natalie’s shoulders.

  ‘Darling,’ Alice said affectionately. ‘You have to get past this. All I want is you to be able to look in the mirror one morning and see the person that you really are, not the person you think you are.’

  ‘Huh?’ Natalie was confused.

  ‘You think you are a devil-may-care, responsibility-shirking, part-time femme fatale who will constantly be entangled in some kind of complicated situation because you can’t help but attract trouble,’ Alice explained in a matter-of-fact tone.

  ‘Hey, less of the part-time,’ Natalie joked weakly. ‘And anyway, I am well aware that all I am now is a full-time milk cow with my sex appeal stuck on repulse mode.’ A brief image of Gary’s fear-struck face darted across her memory.

  ‘Now, that’s not true,’ Alice said. ‘What you really are is a vibrant, clever and successful businesswoman, a great friend, a generous funny sweet person . . .’

  ‘Vibrant?’ Natalie interrupted. ‘I don’t like the sound of vibrant, it makes me sound like I’ve got bad taste . . . how about attractive, or handsome – even handsome is better than vibrant.’

  ‘. . . who, as it turns out,’ Alice continued, ‘is a natural and happy mother. You are better than you think you are. You are so much stronger than you think you are. That’s why you have to sort out all these distracting messes you’re in; the affair you had with Jack is over – it’s gone.’

  ‘God, tell it like it is, Alice,’ Natalie exclaimed.

  ‘But,’ Alice continued firmly, ‘the son you had because of it is here to stay. You have focus on a real, straightforward life. Maybe then you’ll start to be happy.’

  ‘But I am happy!’ Natalie protested, waggling her fingers by way of demonstration. ‘Look at me, I’m virtually hysterical.’

  ‘You could be happier than you know,’ Alice said sagely.

  The two women regarded each other for a long moment and then Natalie said, ‘I love you, Alice, but sometimes you talk an awful lot of bollocks.’

  Natalie was only half listening as Jess and Meg chatted away happily over a chicken Caesar salad and bowl of pasta. She was looking around the small Italian restaurant, gazing at the fishing nets that hung off the ceiling and the thickly Artexed walls and thinking about the first time she had come here. It was the day that she had met Jack Newhouse and he had brought her here for lunch.

  She hadn’t intended to bring her friends here. As they had wandered out of Soho and onto Oxford Street the three of them had been in high spirits and more than a little tipsy.

  Natalie was glad that Alice now knew all her shameful secrets and, despite everything, she felt that sharing her fake husband with her oldest friend and confessor had eased the problem, as if just talking about it was the equivalent of actually doing something. So she decided to give herself the rest of the day off from thinking about him at all, at least intentionally. It was harder to reign in those unconscious thoughts that seemed to pop into her head unbidden at any moment, but she would try.

  Jess had phoned home just as they were leaving Mystery is Power and looked relieved when Lee told her that Jacob was fine, lying on the floor on his play mat batting the mirrors on his baby gym. He told Jess to take her time and enjoy herself, but as she hung up the phone she looked uncertain.

  ‘All OK there?’ Meg asked her.

  ‘Fine, absolutely fine,’ Jess replied. ‘Which is great. It’s just . . . I suppose I’m jealous really. That Lee finds it all so easy.’ She shrugged and shook her head. ‘Stupid, I know.’

  ‘Not stupid,’ Natalie said. ‘Not especially rational but not exactly stupid.’

  ‘And . . .’ Jess hesitated. ‘Well, I’ve had a great time today, I really have, I’ve felt happy and relaxed. But sometimes I worry that if I’m not worrying, if I’m off duty, that’s when something b
ad will happen.’

  ‘Now that is stupid,’ Natalie said mildly.

  ‘And at least you know they are both fine,’ Meg said. ‘So let’s make the most of this time, shall we?’ Her smile was fleetingly obscured by a frown. ‘Poor old Frances. Oh dear, I do feel terrible that I’m out having fun while she’s got all my children, who are a handful at the best of times.’

  Natalie put a sincere hand on her arm. ‘If you feel terrible call her and get her down here, the kids as well,’ she suggested mischievously.

  ‘You’re right,’ Meg said. ‘I don’t feel that terrible.’

  ‘Who fancies Topshop then?’ Natalie asked her friends, shepherding them determinedly past Marks and Spencer.

  ‘Topshop?’ Jess asked uncertainly. ‘I can’t remember the last time I was in Topshop. I started to feel like I was a bit old for it.’

  ‘Which is exactly why,’ Natalie told her, ‘we should shop there.’

  Natalie loved expensive clothes. She was never happier than when handing over her credit card to pay for one tiny garment that could have bought an entire branch of New Look, but still she loved Topshop. Specifically Topshop, Oxford Street, London. She supposed it might be because she had grown up with it; it had always been there through her teens, her twenties and even now, as that big number that began with an ‘f ’ and ended in a zero was looming just a few years away, she still got a buzz out of shopping there. It was true that she could no longer get away with a lemon yellow puffball miniskirt and that the shop staff all looked as if they needed babysitters but whenever she had time to spare she’d spend it in Topshop if she could, getting her eardrums blasted by the in-store music and searching for something, anything, to take home.