The Baby Group

by Rowan Coleman

  Natalie laughed, amused by the scandalised look on Jess’s face. ‘He was someone I spent a few days with just before I met Gary,’ she said, mingling half-truths so easily that momentarily she quite forgot that there was no Gary, at least not one she was married to. ‘It was a very intense affair. He fell instantly for me and he wants to see me again.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ Jess asked her, looking puzzled. ‘No offence, Natalie, but he didn’t seem that keen.’

  ‘That’s his way of hiding his keenness,’ Natalie told her. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter because I’m only going to see him to tell him about Gary and to let him down gently.’

  ‘Are you sure it’s a good idea?’ Meg asked her with some concern. ‘Seeing an old flame while your husband is away?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Natalie said. ‘I am completely in control of the situation. I’ll tell him about Freddie the minute I get there, of course I will.’

  ‘And Gary,’ Jess said.

  A preoccupied Natalie looked blank for a moment.

  ‘Your husband, Natalie!’ Meg said, laughing nervously.

  ‘Oh yes, and Gary,’ Natalie said a little vaguely. ‘Of course I’ll tell him about Gary too.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Meg wasn’t used to an empty house. When she went in even Gripper was absent, a sure sign that she was holed up somewhere chewing the head off something she shouldn’t. Meg closed the heavy front door behind her and listened to the house as if she might be able to hear fragments of her own life echoing in the shadows. But everything was perfectly still.

  ‘Gripper!’ She called for the dog as she walked through the ground floor, flicking on every light switch she passed and turning on the TV for good measure, even though she had no intention of watching it. ‘Gripper – whatever you’ve got, drop it!’

  She walked into the kitchen and switched on first the kettle and then the radio, intent on filling the quiet house with noise. As she sipped a much-needed cup of tea, Meg looked at the Mystery is Power bag that Natalie had given her, sitting on the kitchen table. It was gone three o’clock and Robert had promised to be back by seven. All the food was prepared and just needed to go in the oven, so she had a whole afternoon, if she wanted it, to pamper herself in readiness for the evening. She couldn’t remember the last time she had properly got ready for a date, and for some reason the thought of doing it now made her feel foolish. It was the amount of effort it required, she realised. Farming out the children, prising herself into underwear she would never normally go near. Was it really necessary to go to those lengths just to have dinner with her husband? To try to smooth out some of the furrows that their relationship had turned up recently, shouldn’t she just be able to talk to him without the need for all this effort? But then she remembered she had tried that and worse still she remembered, with a contracting knot of pain in her chest, what he had said to her.

  Meg knew she just had to try, really try to get one thing right between her and Robert. She felt sure that if she could just do that then the rest would follow on, reconnecting them piece by piece, like pulling up a misaligned zipper. She had to show him how much she loved him and that she was still there for him, still the woman he had married and the wife he wanted to come home to. Somehow she had to make him see that, because if she didn’t . . . Meg couldn’t face the thought of what might happen then.

  Jess closed the flat door behind her as quietly as possible. She could hear the murmur of the TV in the living room and sure enough Lee was on the sofa watching the football, his feet up on a stool and a cup of tea balanced precariously on the arm.

  ‘Hey babe,’ he said, keeping his voice low. ‘How was it?’

  ‘It was great,’ Jess said, willing herself not to mention the position of the cup of tea or the number of times she had asked Lee not to balance drinks on the arms of the sofa. She was determined not to spoil her seduction technique with nagging.

  ‘I brought home something to show you later,’ she said. The soft tone of her voice made Lee look up at her.

  ‘Oh yeah?’ he said, a slow grin spreading across his face.

  ‘Yeah,’ Jess smiled as she walked round the sofa to kiss him. ‘And I . . .’

  It was at that moment she saw Jacob. He was fast asleep on the sofa, lying on his tummy, and from the angle that Jess saw him, his nose and mouth were obscured by the very edge of a cushion.

  ‘Lee!’ Jess reached across and knocked the offending cushion to the floor. Kneeling down by the side of the sofa she stared at her son, holding her own breath until she was sure she could see the steady rise and fall of his back. She glanced up at Lee, who was fixated on the TV screen again.

  ‘I can’t believe it – we’ve let in another goal! Bloody hell . . .’ he moaned, sitting back in the sofa.

  ‘Lee,’ Jess said. ‘You know you’re not supposed to do that, don’t you?’ She was trying herbest to rationalise the anger and fear she was feeling. She knew there was no harm done, Jacob was fine. And she knew that Lee had been sitting right next to him, but just the thought that he would do something so thoughtless and foolish, something he must know would upset her, chased any idea of seduction right out of her head.

  ‘Lee! Did you hear me?’ This time the tone of her voice made him look up for entirely different reasons. Huffing out a sigh of displeasure, Jess scooped Jacob off the sofa and into her arms. Immediately he began to grizzle and nuzzle at her chest in search of milk. On her way to the armchair she deftly turned off the TV with the toe of her boot.

  ‘Oh what?’ Lee exclaimed in dismay. Jess ignored him.

  ‘You never, ever put a baby to sleep on his tummy,’ she said, her voice taut. ‘You never, ever put them to sleep on the edge of a sofa and you certainly NEVER, EVER let them do it with a cushion practically on their head!’ Jess unhooked her maternity bra and put Jacob to her breast, trying to reconcile her rising frustration and fury with the relief of having Jacob suckling in her arms again. ‘You know that, Lee,’ she added.

  Lee did not reply.

  ‘Lee!’

  He shrugged and stared at the blank TV screen as if he could somehow still determine the fixtures. This was one of the most difficult things about Lee. He hated confrontation but he was also rigidly stubborn and hated to back down, a combination which whenever they fell out resulted in him acting like a sulky teen and Jess berating him as if she were his mother.

  ‘But I was right next to him, babe,’ Lee eventually said. ‘I hadn’t left him. I wasn’t going to leave him. You didn’t have to worry, I was watching him!’

  ‘You were watching the football!’ Jess countered. ‘A troop of naked strippers could have abseiled past the window and I bet you wouldn’t have noticed them!’

  ‘I bet I would have,’ Lee said with a smile, trying his best to lighten the situation. He failed.

  Jess looked down at Jacob. Her son looked impossibly fragile to her, so delicate and easy to break that sometimes she even found it difficult to put him down in his cot for fear of hurting him. She couldn’t understand why Lee didn’t see him in the same way, or why he was prepared to take even a calculated risk with his safety.

  ‘It’s just you know all that stuff,’ Jess went on, the threat of tears thickening her voice. ‘And you know what I’ve . . . what we’ve been through to get him, Lee. I just don’t understand why you wouldn’t look after him as carefully as you possibly could.’

  Lee sat still for a moment longer and then got up from the sofa and crossed the room in one stride, kneeling at the foot of the chair and resting his arms on either side, encircling his small family.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, looking Jess in the eye. ‘You’re right – I didn’t think. Or rather, I thought if I was next to him it would be OK. But it was wrong of me to do that, it was wrong for Jacob and it was wrong for you. It was great to see you come in looking happy with a smile on your face. I don’t want you to think you can’t leave him with me. I promise you that from now on I’ll always
put him on his back in his cot and do everything by the book, I swear. Do you believe me?’

  Jess looked into his eyes. They were such steady and honest eyes. She knew that he wouldn’t intentionally do anything that might upset her. He just didn’t think sometimes. He just didn’t see disaster lurking around every single corner the way she did. And that probably made him the normal one in the couple.

  ‘I do believe you,’ Jess said with a small smile. ‘Unlike your promise to stop balancing mugs of tea on the arms of the sofa.’ The two smiled at each other.

  ‘I tell you what,’ Lee said, his voice softening. ‘I’ll stop doing that if you show me what you brought home from the shops.’

  Meg tied the cord of her dressing gown tightly around her waist and fed Gripper another piece of aromatic crispy duck. She looked at the kitchen clock. It was five past nine.

  She had phoned Frances just after she got in to check on the children and see how they were doing. They were doing exactly what Frances told them to, of course, because that was the way Frances ran her house, with military precision. Even so, Meg could hear Alex and Hazel laughing at a game of Mousetrap they were playing with Craig, a game they were reluctant to be dragged away from to say hello to their mother. James, separated by Frances’s stringent TV-viewing rules from his beloved Thomas the Tank Engine video after only half an hour, was building happily with Duplo, and Iris had had her bottle at the same time as Henry and now the pair were napping side by side.

  ‘Are you sure you don’t mind having them for the night?’ Meg had asked her sister-in-law, because she felt she should. Frances, who was always more than ready to help her out in any way she could, somehow had the knack of simultaneously seeming just a touch resentful about being put upon even when volunteering her assistance freely. In this case Meg had actually asked her for what was really quite a big favour, and so the mixture of guilt and gratitude that she instinctively felt was required from her by Frances was a tricky one to gauge.

  ‘If you think it’s too much,’ Meg went on, ‘I could come and get them and put them to bed here and I’m sure Robert and I would have just as nice a time.’ Meg half wanted Frances to say, ‘Yes, please come and get them’ because she missed her children in the same constant way that she did whenever they weren’t in the same room with her. But love them as she might, even she knew there was little hope of any kind of romantic dining going on with all four in the house. At least two children at any given time would be demanding something from one of them.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Frances replied smartly. ‘They are absolutely fine here. You shouldn’t have asked us to have them if you weren’t sure that we could look after them.’

  Meg bit her lip,. It really was quite amazing how regularly she managed to unwittingly offend Frances.

  ‘I just hope Iris doesn’t keep you up all night,’ she said wanly.

  ‘Organisation, Megan,’ Frances said. ‘That is the secret, one you have never seemed to master.’

  Meg had had dinner ready for exactly seven on the dot so that she could serve it the moment that Robert walked in the door. She really had thought he would be on time, because punctuality was one of his big things. He could not bear lateness; he often said people who were habitually late were basically telling you that your time, the precious moments of your life, was worthless.

  But he was very late now. Meg was used to him coming home at all hours when he hadn’t specifically agreed to be in at a certain time. But he had never done this before, not ever.

  Just before seven she had put on her new dark green top that had been sitting in her drawer with the label still attached to it waiting for a special occasion, and the Topshop skirt with a pair of heeled boots. It seemed silly to put on boots when she wasn’t going out; but she didn’t think she looked fully dressed without them. She hadn’t put on her underwear at that stage, because it seemed impossible to breathe out at all once you were in it. Instead she had planned to pop upstairs just before dessert and surprise Robert after the lemon sorbet, although she was not exactly sure how. She had hoped a couple of glasses of wine would have helped her wing it.

  At a quarter to nine Meg had reluctantly tried his mobile number, reluctantly because she didn’t want him to think that she was nagging him. It rang for a long time before his voicemail picked it up. She hesitated before leaving a stupid and clumsy message. ‘It’s me, Meg. It’s nearly nine and I just wonder if . . . you are OK? Are you coming? Can you call? I hope you’re OK.’ Meg looked at the telephone for a long moment after she put the receiver down, half expecting him to ring back immediately. When he did not she decided she simply had to revise her plans. He was probably stuck in a traffic jam somewhere, with his phone completely flat.

  Instead of allowing herself to get upset, or worse still give in to the impulse to cry, she would move directly to phase two of the evening. She went upstairs and put the underwear on, wishing she had a silky satin dressing gown, like the negligee in Natalie’s collection, instead of the chunky towelling one she slipped on over the ensemble.

  She waited, her whole body poised, leaning towards the moment she would hear Robert’s key in the lock. But even as she waited she knew he wasn’t coming, at least not for another twenty or so minutes. She knew this because Gripper seemed to always know exactly when Robert was going to come through the front door, no matter what time of the day or night it was. And at almost exactly twenty minutes or so before he appeared she would stop whatever she was doing and go and position herself by the front door, getting ready to greet the leader of the pack.

  But Gripper was nowhere near the front door. She was asleep under the kitchen table, full of aromatic crispy duck.

  Jacob had cried for about an hour after Jess had finished feeding him. She had put him on her shoulder and rubbed his back until she heard a bubble of air pop out of his mouth and felt a warm wet spurt of excess milk dribble down the back of her neck, inevitably missing the muslin cloth she placed on her shoulder. But still he cried.

  She walked him unsuccessfully up and down the living room for a long time until Lee took over. Standing in front of the TV he swayed Jacob from side to side as if he was on the deck of a boat in a stormy sea, and for a while Jacob stopped crying, only to start up again the moment Lee stopped moving.

  ‘Try singing,’ Lee had suggested when he handed the baby back to Jess. Jess tried singing but it seemed to make Jacob cry even harder which made them both laugh, despite their frustration.

  ‘Try stroking the bridge of his nose,’ Jess said as she transferred Jacob into Lee’s arms once more. ‘I heard it makes them want to close their eyes while also soothing them.’ As she watched Lee tenderly stroking her son’s nose she thought of the contents of the Mystery is Power bag again. The bellows from Jacob’s healthy and strong lungs reassured her, and the sight of Lee handling him so tenderly and carefully made her feel happy. For a few precious moments she felt an incredible kind of high and a sensation of peace simultaneously.

  And suddenly the peace became literal as well as metaphorical. Jacob was asleep.

  ‘You’ve done it!’ Jess whispered, putting her arm around Lee’s waist and looking down at Jacob. She kissed Lee’s shoulder.

  ‘Let’s put him in the cot and then I think it’s time that you and I had a little lie-down ourselves.’

  ‘Crikey,’ Lee said happily.

  By a quarter to ten Meg was beginning to realise why womankind gave up bones and stays in favour of Lycra at the first opportunity. While in the lamplight of the bedroom she secretly thought that she did look rather fetching, visualising what her soft white torso would look like underneath the corset made her wince, as she could picture long red welts mirroring the garment’s construction printed into her ample flesh. Every few minutes she would go to the top of the stairs and peer down at the front door. Gripper still wasn’t there.

  Meg rather wished that she didn’t have quite such a reliable indicator as to Robert’s imminent arrival. It robbed her of the bal
m of hope and made the waiting seem all the more futile. After what seemed like an age divided between sitting on the edge of the bed and chewing her bottom lip while looking at her knees, and leaning over the edge of the banisters hoping to get a sight of Gripper, nose on paws by the door, Meg noticed that the digital alarm clock on Robert’s side of the bed now read 23:04.

  Even the resolute optimist in her had to admit that the evening had been ruined. He wasn’t here, he hadn’t come. He hadn’t even called. But Meg still believed that it had to be due to circumstances that Robert couldn’t control, because, she told herself, even if he were about to leave her, the man she had married would never be intentionally late. Even if he had planned all along to tell her over dinner there was no hope for their marriage, she was certain he would have been on time to deliver the bad news. She tried not to take his absence personally. She did her best to excuse his failure to call and let her know what was going on, and as she lay down on the bed and closed her eyes for a few minutes she told herself there was nothing to be gained by crying about something she wasn’t sure had even happened yet.

  But all the same there were tears on her pillow as she drifted off to sleep.

  ‘Babe,’ Lee said admiringly as Jess posed rather self-consciously in the door frame in her new underwear.

  ‘What do you think?’ she said, tilting her head to one side and cocking a come-hither eyebrow. She didn’t have to ask. What he thought of her was highly visible as he waited on the bed.

  ‘I think come here,’ Lee said, kneeling up and holding out his arms to her. ‘Right now.’

  As Jess slid into his arms and felt the dry warmth of his palms sliding down her back and across her bottom she felt happy. More than happy, she realised, as she buried her face in Lee’s neck. She felt like herself, like the woman he had met in that pub in Islington. She felt like his partner, his girlfriend and his lover again. She felt just like that woman she had once been; that woman who knew how to be happy.