The Baby Group

by Rowan Coleman

  Robert was speechless for a second or two, and then he seemed to realise where he was. He was standing in the foyer of his office building with a street full of shoppers walking by outside and a couple of security guards and God knew how many CCTV cameras watching his wife screaming abuse at him.

  ‘Look, I’ll come home with you,’ he said levelly to Meg, as if she was being needlessly hysterical and he was the sensible one. Both Natalie and Lynne gasped as Meg turned around and shoved him so hard that he staggered backwards and fell over, sprawling at her feet.

  ‘Don’t bother.’ Meg looked down at him. ‘Don’t bother coming home now or ever. It’s too late.’

  Natalie watched her walk out of the building and she saw Robert staring after her, sprawled on the floor, finally calculating what he had risked and probably lost.

  She looked at Lynne, whose skin was blotched and angry. She looked older than she probably was, haggard and worried. She looked like a woman who was tired of being alone and who thought she had finally found someone to love her, even if he was never there when she woke up in the morning. If Natalie hadn’t hated her quite so much she might even have felt sorry for her. But she did hate her, very much.

  ‘He is leaving her for me,’ Lynne said to Natalie. ‘He said he loves me.’

  Natalie took a step closer to Lynne and looked her up and down.

  ‘I’m not a perfect person, Lynne. I’ve been around the block a good few times. Even had more than one boyfriend at once on occasion. But I tell you one thing I have never done. I’ve never, ever gone after a man who’s married, let alone one with children. I’ve never been so pathetic and so desperate that I’d want to break up a family and do that to another woman.’ Natalie leaned even closer to Lynne’s face. ‘If you know what’s good for you, you’ll pull yourself together and have some self-respect. You are pitiful.’

  Lynne took her eyes off Robert and glared at Natalie.

  ‘But I love him,’ she told her with complete conviction.

  ‘Then I feel sorry for you. I really do. You’ve wasted your love on someone who won’t ever love you back.’

  ‘Just who do you think you are?’ Lynne shouted at her furiously.

  Natalie smiled at her serenely. ‘A better person than you,’ she said. She wheeled Freddie’s buggy over Lynne’s toes as she left. ‘And it’s not often I get to say that.’

  When they got back to Meg’s house it was time for the older children to be picked up from school. Meg had asked for some time to get herself together and had gone up to her room with Gripper closely at her heels. Natalie thought it was best to leave her to herself for a while to let the events of the day truly sink in. She and Jess would be there when Meg needed them.

  Jess volunteered to go and fetch Alex and Hazel.

  ‘I can go if you like,’ Natalie said as Jess zipped up her jacket in the hallway, but Jess shook her head.

  ‘I don’t know what to say to her,’ she said. ‘I can’t get my head round it. You should stay with her. You always know the right thing to say.’

  ‘Do I?’ Natalie said thoughtfully. If it was true it was news to her.

  ‘Well, better than me,’ Jess said. She had started to unfold her buggy again. ‘I realised something today. I was a bit jealous of Meg, because she seemed to have it all, didn’t she? This house, no money worries, four healthy children and a husband who earns big bucks. But she doesn’t have the one thing that I have got, the one thing I couldn’t have coped without over the last few years. She doesn’t have a partner she can truly trust. We’re luckier than we realised, aren’t we?’

  ‘Lee is a good man by the sounds of it,’ Natalie said with a smile. ‘Listen, you can leave Jacob here if you like. I might as well watch him along with James, Iris and Freddie – that way you’ll have one less child to manage on the way back and two free hands for road crossing.’

  Jess looked down at the half-erected buggy for a few seconds and then back up at Natalie. ‘It’s stupid, I know,’ she said awkwardly. ‘And trivial, considering everything that’s happened not to mention probably pointless considering he’s been with them all day, but I’m worried about Jacob catching their cold. I mean I’m worried sick.’ She caught her lip in her teeth.

  ‘He’s not been ill yet,’ she went on. ‘Not properly. And I fall to pieces if he cries a lot or has a bit of heat rash. I don’t know how I’ll cope when he’s really ill. I know I can’t avoid it but it terrifies me, Natalie. What if I can’t look after him, what if he gets really ill and . . .’

  Natalie realised what Jess was about to say and tried her best to make light of her fears.

  ‘That won’t happen, Jess, honestly. Babies are really strong,’ she said. ‘They are much tougher than we think. They don’t just die!’

  The moment she said the last word in that sentence, Natalie knew by the look on Jess’s face that she absolutely did not have the knack for saying the right thing.

  ‘Oh, Jess, I’m sorry, what have I said?’ Natalie reached out and touched Jess’s arms. ‘I was only joking, or at least trying to – are you OK?’

  Jess sat down heavily on the stairs. ‘I’ve lost two babies,’ she said bleakly. ‘One to miscarriage and one was stillborn. They both just died, Natalie, and nobody really knows why. No reason, they said at the hospital. No reason? So babies do die and they die for no reason, I know they do.’

  ‘Oh, Jess,’ Natalie said. ‘I can’t believe how thoughtless I was.’

  ‘You didn’t know.’ Jess offered the empty platitude.

  ‘It must have devastated you,’ Natalie said, the final facets of Jess’s sometimes fragile personality slipping into place. ‘It must have made your pregnancy with Jacob very frightening.’

  Jess nodded and rubbed her eyes with clenched fists.

  ‘At the hospital after I had delivered my little girl they brought her to me. They wrapped her up in this soft white blanket and put her into my arms. She was tiny, but so perfect. I looked at her and I couldn’t understand how someone so beautiful, so perfect looking could just die. Her little face was so pale and still, like a porcelain doll’s, and I wished and wished for her to open her eyes. I never got the chance to look into her eyes.’

  ‘Oh, Jess,’ Natalie whispered.

  ‘Sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with a start and for a few seconds before I tune into Jacob’s crying or realise that I need the loo I’ll see him lying like that in his cot, pale and still. I have to go and hold him, wake him up even, until I can make the nightmare go away.’

  Natalie knelt in front of Jess on the tiles in the hall and put her arms around her.

  ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this now,’ Jess said apologetically. ‘Not when Meg needs us. But I’ve wanted to tell you all for some time now. I just didn’t know how to; people feel awkward and embarrassed when they know, they stop looking me in the eye for a while.’

  ‘Of course you should tell us,’ Natalie said. ‘And it’s no surprise that you feel so frightened and so anxious about Jacob’s well being. You’d be strange if you didn’t fret about him, especially after what’s happened to you. But I look at you, Jess, and all I can see is an amazingly courageous woman.’ Natalie brushed the hair back from Jess’s face and tilted her head upwards. ‘You have been brave enough and strong enough to face some truly terrible ordeals, and you’ve come through them with a partner who loves you and a happy healthy baby boy. And don’t you think that if you are courageous enough to survive that then you owe it to yourself and to Lee and Jacob not to falter now? Sometimes you have to be just as brave and courageous to be happy.’

  Jess gave Natalie a watery smile. ‘You are a very wise person,’ she told her.

  Natalie sat back on her heels, and shook her head. ‘I’m so not,’ she replied, a little embarrassed. ‘I just want to see you happy and relaxed, enjoying your lovely boy.’

  Jess nodded as she stood up and kicked the buggy so that it clicked shut. ‘I’ll leave Jacob here with you,�
� she said.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Natalie asked her. ‘I mean, I can go if you like and you stay with the babies?’

  ‘No, you’re right, it’s getting cold out there and it would probably be just as bad for him to be out in this weather. I’ll go and get Alex and Hazel alone.’ She smiled. ‘I need some fresh air to clear my head anyway.’

  ‘Have you remembered the password?’ Natalie asked Jess as she held the front door open for her. She was referring to the secret word that Jess had to give to be able to collect the children from school.

  ‘Yes, Armageddon,’ Jess said. It had doubtless been meant as a joke when Meg had thought of it months ago. But as her world seemed to be coming to a violent and destructive end it didn’t seem very funny any more.

  Natalie laid Freddie down in his cot and rocked him, watching the two bright points of reflected light in his eyes in the darkness until finally he couldn’t fight sleep any more and his lids flickered shut.

  The last couple of days had been nothing like she had envisioned. For one thing she had had no chance to get her own pointless secret off her chest and tell the baby group the truth about her and Freddie. But she thought of the look on Jess’s face as she told Natalie about her lost babies. And she thought of Meg as she had left her, shell-shocked and utterly powerless to change what was happening to her life. And Tiffany’s face as her mother had asked her to leave. Those women had all been through something awful, something that it would be impossible to recover from without the utmost strength of will.

  All that had really happened to her was that she’d met a man and they’d spent a few great days together that had turned out rather differently from how either of them had expected. Perhaps she had spent the intervening months between then and now building their encounter into something much more significant and important than it really was, because she had needed that crutch of expectation to keep her going. At least she now knew where she stood, and a bruised heart and hurt pride were small prices to pay for the precious legacy that would bring her a lifetime of love and happiness: a son who had maybe made her a better person than she had ever been. In comparison to her friends she had hardly suffered at all.

  Yet if there was any tragedy, any victim, in what Natalie and Jack had stumbled into, it was Freddie. Poor little Freddie, who didn’t have a clue as to what was going on around him.

  But at least he felt safe and secure and loved, Natalie was sure of it. And if she could keep him feeling that way from this moment on until the day she died, at least she’d be doing something right. She’d be doing her best for him.

  That was something she could get right.

  Chapter Twenty

  With Freddie settled, Natalie went to the top of the stairs. She couldn’t hear any noise coming from below so she ventured down slowly, stair by stair, until she reached the hallway. The tiles felt cold against her bare feet. She peered out of the window. Gary’s van was still parked outside. He really must genuinely like her mother. Unless of course she had paralysed him with her crippling venom, leaving him powerless to fight her off. Or more likely got him so drunk that sex with an OAP seemed like a good idea.

  The kitchen door opened and a swell of Latin-American music followed by her mother’s cackle floated upwards.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Sandy was saying as she was coming up from the kitchen. ‘You simply have to stay for another coffee. I wouldn’t ask you, Gary, but I get nervous being in this big old house on my own. Now, I’ll just find some more whisky to give those coffees a little kick and . . . Oh, it’s you.’

  Sandy appeared at the top of the stairs in a brightly coloured kimono-style dressing gown, a lit cigarette in one hand, a tumbler of something amber-coloured in the other and to complete the look, her ratty and ancient hairpiece that she persisted in jamming onto her head despite the fact that it had stopped bearing any resemblance to the actual colour of her hair about fifteen years ago. She was dressed to kill, and not just by scaring people to death, Natalie realised.

  Her mother on the pull was the very last thing she needed to confront.

  ‘I told you not to smoke in the house,’ Natalie said quietly.

  Sandy giggled.

  ‘Gary said you’d say that, but as I said to him, if you and young Fred aren’t in, what harm can it do? I didn’t hear you come in – sneaking up on me now, are you?’ She tottered a couple of steps closer to Natalie on her heeled slippers. ‘He is ever so lovely, you know. We’ve just been talking and laughing all evening. I can’t get him to have a drink, mind, and he keeps trying to leave but I think I’m in there, so no hard feelings.’ Sandy slapped one hand on Natalie’s shoulder, her blurred features looming in Natalie’s face. ‘Be a love and stay out of the way,’ she said, finishing off with a loud hiccup.

  Natalie had never been in the right mood for one of her mother’s special harlot performances. Not even as a young girl when Sandy had still seemed genuinely glamorous and pretty to her did she enjoy her mother’s company when she was in seduction mode. But if there had ever been a time when Natalie was the furthest from being able to tolerate Sandy’s narcissistic foolishness, then this was it. Today of all days Natalie could not stand her a second longer.

  She plucked the cigarette out of Sandy’s hand, opened the front door and threw it out onto the street and pushed the door shut again. Then before Sandy could protest she snatched the glass out of her hand and emptied it in one burning swallow that told her it was the cooking brandy she’d had at the back of the cupboard for at least three years.

  ‘You cheeky madam . . .’ Sandy began, her reactions somewhat delayed by cheap booze.

  ‘When I say you can’t smoke in my house I mean you can’t smoke in my house, not ever,’ Natalie said, her voice full of pent-up fury and frustration as she regarded her mother. ‘Just look at yourself, Mother.’ Natalie put the glass down on the hall table and now taking Sandy’s shoulders, directed her to her reflection in the hall mirror.

  ‘Can’t you see what you look like? Don’t you have any sense of reality any more? You can’t think you look good like that, you can’t. You look ridiculous, Mum, you look . . . awful.’ Natalie stared at her mother’s reflection but Sandy seemed to be numbed to what she knew were hurtful comments. She just shook Natalie’s hands off her shoulders and staggered a few steps until she was a safe distance from the mirror.

  ‘You’re just jealous,’ Sandy slurred.

  ‘Jealous!’ Natalie exclaimed. ‘That’s a laugh!’

  ‘You’ve always been jealous of me,’ Sandy persisted. ‘Even when you were little girl. You couldn’t stand me having any fun. You hated the fact that men were interested in me. The moment Mummy got any interest you’d start attention-seeking. What you never realised is that I am more than just your mother. I am a woman too.’

  ‘You were never anyone’s mother!’ Natalie heard herself shout, and dimly realised that Gary must have heard it too. She didn’t care. ‘A woman who drags her daughter from town to town latching onto whichever lowlife will tolerate her until he gets bored with her – that’s not a mother. All you ever cared about was you. Always looking for the next man, always telling me that this was The One. How many of them were there, Mum? Twenty at least, must be. You didn’t care about what happened to me. I was just the burden you would have got rid of if you’d had the guts!’

  ‘I loved you,’ Sandy began shakily. ‘I always put you first. If your father hadn’t . . .’

  ‘Don’t you talk to me about my father,’ Natalie said angrily. ‘He’s nobody, some man you barely knew – and all I was to him was some dirty secret he hoped would never get out.’

  ‘I loved him,’ Sandy said.

  ‘You’ve never loved anyone but yourself,’ Natalie told her bitterly.

  ‘I love you!’ Sandy replied, close to tears. ‘You must know I love you.’

  ‘I’ve never known it,’ Natalie replied, her voice like ice. Why did Sandy do this to her? Just when she felt that things were improving between
them her mother would do something, say something, that made Natalie feel as if they were strangers, continents apart, and as if she were split into two. As she spoke she was aware that the sound of her voice was cold and indifferent – she knew she must appear hard and uncaring, when the truth was exactly the opposite. But she could not bring herself to reveal her still raw and bruised feelings to Sandy, she could not trust her mother to understand or to care enough. The more Sandy pleaded with her the further Natalie wanted to be from her, and the more she hated herself for it. Hated herself and the chemical reaction that turned her to stone, impervious to her mother’s tears.

  ‘It was different then, in the seventies and even the eighties,’ Sandy said. ‘To be an unmarried mother with no dad around. People looked at you differently. Like you were just a stupid tart.’

  ‘They weren’t far wrong, were they?’ Natalie said cruelly.

  ‘You can talk,’ Sandy shot back.

  ‘You’re right, Mum, can’t think where I picked that up from.’

  Sandy seemed to bite back her retort. ‘It was hard, Natalie. I tried my best. You were never an easy child.’

  Suddenly Natalie found that she was crying. The tears were running down her cheeks and she could not stop them.

  ‘Do you know why I don’t call you?’ she asked her mother. ‘Why I didn’t tell you about Freddie? Why I didn’t tell you what really happened to me on Saturday even though I wanted to, even though I was desperate to? Because I keep hoping that one day you’ll change or I’ll change and that somehow we will fit together properly. I keep hoping that one day I will actually be able to feel close to you. I even thought that Freddie might change something between us. But he hasn’t. You’re the same as you always have been, Mother. And that’s why I don’t call you. Because I can only keep hoping when you are not here.’ Natalie shook her head, desperate for Sandy to react in some way. ‘Don’t you realise that? Don’t you care?’