‘It’s me, I can’t stay long, I’m still at work,’ Janey said. ‘You all right?’
‘Yeah, I’m painting like you said,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Lots of pink. Then I’m going to go down and pick a nice new red carpet.’
‘It’ll be like sleeping in a flaming womb!’
Elizabeth laughed.
‘Oh, by the way,’ Janey said suddenly. ‘I meant to tell you, guess who I saw in the Co-op?’
‘Elvis?’ said Elizabeth.
‘Give over.’
‘Shergar? Lord Lucan?’
‘Aye, them an’ all.’
‘The Picnic at Hanging Rock girls?’
‘I’m being serious!’ said Janey, being serious.
‘John Silkstone?’
‘How the bloody hell did you know that?’
‘I saw him in Just the Job when I was picking up the paint.’
Janey gasped. ‘Did you talk to him?’
‘Briefly.’
‘And?’
‘And what? We said hello and how are you, end of story.’
‘You must have got something more out of him than that!’
‘Flaming hell! How long have you been in the Spanish Inquisition?’
‘Oh come on, spill the beans, woman!’
Elizabeth sighed. ‘He’s living back here and it sounds like his marriage is over.’
‘Oh, really now,’ Janey said lasciviously.
‘Don’t say “Oh, really now” in that way,’ said Elizabeth, knowing exactly what she was thinking.
Elizabeth was right in her assumption. Janey’s mind had romped ahead and was seeing a second spark of hope for Elizabeth and John now that he had split up from the wad of cottonwool he had married. She had never liked Lisa, she had always thought of her as vacuous and dull as ditchwater, and believed that John Silkstone had only taken up with her on the rebound from Elizabeth; any idiot could have told any other idiot that.
‘Do you think you’ll see him around?’ Janey asked.
‘I don’t know. Probably, if I hang around do-it-yourself shops and building sites,’ she said.
‘He didn’t ask you out for a drink or anything?’
‘No, of course he didn’t!’
‘Oh well,’ said Janey, disappointed that her news was so anti-climactic, ‘that’s all I rang for, really. Helen’s vomiting for England, by the way.’
‘Oh dear, poor love. I’ll ring her later. Are you all right then?’ said Elizabeth.
‘Fine–more than fine, actually. I had a coffee with the Mr Big in Personnel and, guess what, he wants me to apply to be Manager of Customer Services.’
‘I hope you’re going to then!’
‘Too flaming right I am. Anyway, I’ll have to go because I need the loo. I think I must have a bit of an infection, you know, because I can’t stop going. I’m nearly as bad as you.’
‘It’s probably a mix of cold weather and us being old bags.’
‘Thank you for that. See you later then,’ said Janey, putting the phone down, thinking, Funny. She thought Elizabeth would have been a lot more affected, bumping into the man with whom she had once been so totally and utterly in love, according to that letter anyway. But then you never could tell with Elizabeth what was really going on in her head.
As Helen leaned over the toilet bowl for the five-millionth time that afternoon she wondered why they called it ‘morning sickness’ when she didn’t get a wave of nausea until at least lunchtime. Mornings were reserved for being so tired that she did not feel she had slept during the night, and then for the rest of the day she felt so sick she hardly dared step out of the house.
Her work colleagues were very sympathetic–thank goodness. The office was full of clucky old hens in early grandmotherhood who suspected she was pregnant and gushed over her, deluging her with helpful tips, although the ginger biscuit anti-vomit idea made her heave so much at one point she felt she was turning inside out. The only things she was managing to keep down were lemon juice and small baked potatoes covered with tuna and vinegar. She found she had even gone off tea and coffee–they left a really odd taste in her mouth, as if she was drinking them out of a tin can. Even her alltime favourite meal, grilled sole, had her clamping her hand over her mouth and aiming like an Exocet missile for the nearest cistern.
She would be so glad when that stage of things was over–touch wood–in another five weeks, earlier if she was lucky. At the moment, all she could think about was the pulsing headache in her temple and she felt terribly guilty that she could not fully concentrate on what Janey had just been telling her on the phone about an interview, and that John Silkstone was back, and that Elizabeth had met him somewhere. Not that she knew him as well as the others did, but he had been very sweet when he came to take the little black kitten away from her for Elizabeth. She had made a total fool of herself by crying buckets and he had given her his hankie, which had been roughly the size of a double quilt cover. However, she did think that what happened between him and Elizabeth had been such a stupid shame, even more so when they read her letter. Helen loved her friend dearly but sometimes she wished she would open herself up more and let people in. Then again, who was she to say that, really?
Elizabeth had to stop painting to take a nap and then she woke with a blinding headache, which served her right for going to sleep in a room full of fresh paint. At least it gave her the perfect excuse to text Dean and tell him not to come over, as there was nowhere to sleep. He sent one back saying WE DON’T HV 2 SLEEP!!!! She fired one back saying I M REALLY TIRED. One came back straight away with his intelligent spelling: YUOR ALWAYS BLUDDY TRIED.
It was not a relationship; it was just a habit and one that needed stopping. Dean was a casual labourer who had lingered too long after doing a job next door and he had knocked on the door and bothered her for a cup of tea. She could not tell where the job ended and they began, but he had stuck his feet quickly and firmly under her table. Then again, Elizabeth wasn’t exactly renowned for her judgement of character. Funny, that–all the people she ever grown fond of she had taken against when she first met them: she thought Janey was thick, Helen was a stuck-up cow, George was a lump and she thought her Auntie Elsie was the Wicked Witch of the West with her flaming boiled ham and over-diluted orange juice. As for John Silkstone, dressed from head to foot in black leather with that stupid cowboy hat on, thinking he looked cool and interesting! She really did not want to like him, but he sneaked up on her heart over the years and so she did the only sensible thing in the end for Elizabeth–she got rid. She sent him away to another woman and another life, yet Dean and his snoring and his mess and his laziness and his revolting habits were there taking up space in her existence. Now really where was the sense in all that?
The job vacancy went up on the noticeboard Thursday and they interviewed Janey on the Tuesday following, three of them: Barry, Judith Booth–the HR woman–and Barry’s second-in-command, Tony Warburton. Janey had crossed paths with them all in the past and they had seemed very fair, capable and decent people. The last Customer Service Manager had left quickly and suspiciously, despite having been young and supposedly dynamic, and Janey knew they needed to fill the position as soon as possible. They called her after lunch and asked if she would be available for an impromptu meeting and thank goodness, she’d had the foresight to come to work especially smart and prepared, just in case they sprang something like this on her.
She was a little nervous, but not so much that it made her give daft answers to their questions. All in all, she thought she had done quite a good job and they nodded a lot at what she had to say and seemed quite impressed at how she conducted herself. The stress of it told later though, when she walked out of the interview room with her head held high and went straight to the Ladies, where she threw up the contents of her stomach and three other people’s besides.
As Janey was composing herself in the loo, Elizabeth was standing back to admire her handiwork in her new, nearly finished bedroom. It looked so
different from the old look that it could almost have been a new extension rather than a revamped space. Even the window looked twice the size with a pair of new pale-pink curtains at the window instead of the old heavy tapestry drapes. She had thrown out the bulky bedside cabinets and tugged and heaved the furniture about, experimenting with a different arrangement, and was surprised at how much larger and lighter the room felt. As she was cutting up the old carpet into strips for the Council to take away, she knew that she did not want Dean staying in this fresh, clean space and that she must now finally end this non-relationship they had. Then she drove into one of the trading estates on the outskirts of town and picked a carpet–a soft strawberry red with a lovely thick pile. There was plenty of it in stock so it could be fitted the following Monday.
Had she picked a blue carpet, things might have turned out not quite the way they did. Funny how the turn of life can hang on something as simple as that, she would later come to realize.
Chapter 8
It was the end of a lovely day for Helen. Today she was eight weeks and one day pregnant, and Simon had grudgingly given her permission to formally announce the fact at work–because the denials were becoming embarrassing. She had been warmly fussed over and Teddy Sanderson, her boss, had gone out and bought her a huge box of chocolates. It was the first night for a while that her nausea hadn’t totally wiped her out and she lay on their long white leather sofa, listening to a play on the radio with her Adonis at her side. He was reading the financial pages of the newspaper and sipping periodically from a glass of whisky, whilst she contented herself with lemonade. Her hand lay flat on her tummy and she wondered if the baby could sense the warmth in it. She felt calm and serene and totally blissed out. Then it all went wrong again.
She reached over to open the chocolates but as she opened the lid, Simon manoeuvred them out of her way.
‘Ah, ah, ah. Don’t want you getting fat now, do we?’
‘Simon, it’s only a chocolate!’ she said, laughing and trying to bring down his arm because she thought he was joking.
‘This is the time you have to watch out for,’ he said. ‘Despite the old adage, you shouldn’t really be eating for two, you know.’
‘There are probably more calories in this lemonade than there are in five of those chocolates,’ said Helen.
‘You should be drinking water then,’ he said, and he actually took her glass away, tipped it out and brought her some mineral water from the fridge. She laughed because it was so ridiculous and because she could not think what else to do. Surely, he wasn’t being serious?
‘What’s the matter with you?’ he said as she stared at him.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘I’m trying to help you, isn’t that obvious?’ He tossed the remainder of the whisky down his throat, his good mood gone.
‘It was one chocolate and a glass of lemonade!’ she said, her mouth still formed into a round of disbelief.
‘What’s that they say? “A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips”?’
‘I think so,’ Helen said, trying not to sound as indignant as she felt because the last thing she wanted was all this to end up in another one of those stupid rows that blew up from nowhere like a sandstorm to choke their whole evening.
He yawned, folded up his newspaper and said, ‘I’m going to bed, goodnight,’ and Helen jumped up eagerly, because she so needed him to make love to her and show her he was happy with her and thrilled about the baby, because she suspected he wasn’t. He had procrastinated about starting a family since they married, and at four years younger than Helen, he could afford to delay a little. When she argued that she was in her very late thirties, he argued back that women today were having babies easily in their mid-forties and so they had plenty of time still. Helen knew the chances were that she didn’t; her mother had gone through a terribly early menopause and apparently, that was hereditary. Of course, her father would have known the facts about that, had he been here to ask.
Whoever said that all top executives were animals in bed were very misled, in Helen’s experience. More often than not, Simon was always too tired to make love after a hard day at the office. Each time her date chart and temperature aligned on the optimum time to get pregnant, Simon was either away at a conference or exhausted and unwilling, and her window of opportunity closed for yet another month. She had been pretending to take the pill for three years now, hoping for a happy ‘accident’, but on the rare occasions they did make love, her punctual-as-ever period came and snuffed out the small flames of hope that dared to dance in her heart. So when her chart told her that New Year’s Day was the day, she pulled out every stop in the book to seduce him and it worked. Champagne cocktails, over-laced with brandy, oysters, lobster, scented candlelight, smooth music on the CD, giving him an erotic massage in her tiny red Agent Provocateur undies…Then whilst he slept, Helen sat with her legs up in the air like a porn star willing the little tadpoles to go find her egg, taking care not to spill one precious drop of them.
She knew she was pregnant; doing the test was just a formality for her. She held the pregnancy wand in her hand and watched the blue line appear like magic then she screamed with joy and sank to her knees, thanked God and cried and laughed. She couldn’t wait for Simon to get home that night and, as usual, he was late. But when she excitedly announced that he was going to be a father, his congratulatory hug was slack and robotic. She had initially put his shell-shocked demeanour down to the magnitude of the news. Then she realized it wasn’t that at all when the questions started: How could this happen? Did she forget to take her pill? Didn’t he tell her they should wait? Helen blamed a recent tummy bug for upsetting her pill’s efficiency. It was a well-known fact that that could happen, and she got away with the lie.
They showered, separately, and then she climbed into bed and snuggled up to him, stroking his chest. He took her hand, kissed it and put it away to the side of her.
‘Can we make love?’ she asked.
‘Not tonight, darling, I’m so tired.’
‘But we haven’t made love since New Year!’ she said, trying not to sound as desperate as she felt.
‘It’s bad for the baby anyway, until twelve weeks at least.’
Helen lay in the dark for a while, holding him close, though he felt a million miles away. She tried to take heart that he had actually mentioned the baby. She rather thought it was the first time he had.
‘Simon,’ she asked eventually, ‘aren’t you happy about being a daddy?’
‘Oh, Helen, don’t be silly and just go to sleep,’ he said, shuffling away from her as if her body against his was an irritation.
Janey and George went through their usual after-curry routine (hers a half portion of a tomato-based one obviously). They went to bed; he made sure she was satisfied then he slipped on a condom and climbed aboard for the missionary position. Then they cuddled up and Janey talked about that interview, again, and twittered on for a bit and he listened patiently and stroked her back until he dropped off and she studied the ceiling for a while listening to his gentle contented snoring.
It might not have been Virgin and the Gypsy stuff, but it was warm and affectionate, easy and familiar, and he knew exactly where to touch her to make the bells ring on the rare occasions these days that they decided on a bit of ‘how’s yer campanology’. They had never been swinging-off-the-chandelier types and now, even though they were in a sexual rut, it was a comfortable one. Neither of them felt the need to spice things up with sex toys or dress up as Vikings or apply gels that made private parts tingle with desire. George seemed happy enough with his lot and wild dangerous sex wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, as Janey had discovered.
She had presumed that when she had lost all her weight, she would feel sexier, more confident, and totally liberated, but she did not–she just felt thinner and hungrier. George never said anything, but she knew he missed her curves, especially her boobs that the diets robbed her of first. He’
d always enjoyed having something to grab hold of and warm and soft to snuggle into. He was a bit like her granddad in that way, was George.
‘Eeh, you’re looking bonny, love,’ her granda’ would say, and by that she knew she had put on weight. Not that he was one of those blokes who would feed his missus pork pies until she couldn’t move, but he had liked to see a good, well-built woman. Her nana had massive boobs and hips that could have launched the QE2 and they had still been bonking in their eighties.
George loved Janey–big boobs or small–and she knew that all she would have to do is say it and it would be hers, whatever it was. She wished she could offer him the same, but she would never dare ask, because she knew that all he wanted from her was a baby. He never pressed her because he appreciated how important her career was to her, but it never left her conscience that she had not been fair to him. At first she had suggested they wait until they had finished decorating the house before they tried for a baby, then she wanted to wait until she had landed that big promotion or until they had more money to spare. She had made sure there was always something to wait for. Then it just got too late.
She cuddled up to him and kissed him in his sleep. She did not deserve him, she really didn’t. Not after she had almost destroyed him.
Dean was making so much noise at the front door that Elizabeth felt obliged to let him in before he disturbed the neighbours. He was obviously lying when he said he hadn’t received any text message telling him not to call up because he had already replied to it with an OK. He was full of Friday-night ale and burping bhuna smells, and he tried to dance with her, edging her towards the stairs to persuade her up to bed. Grudgingly she told him he could stay, but in the spare single bed at the front of the house as her room was not finished yet. He made all sorts of promises on the way up the stairs of what he was going to do to her but luckily, by the time she had come out of the bathroom he was snoring on top of the duvet, like a pig with a chronic adenoid problem. She dragged a pillow roughly out from under his head and headed downstairs for the sofa, berating herself for opening the outside door in the first place. She was just a girl who couldn’t say no. Unless that someone she was saying ‘no’ to happened to be someone decent who deserved a ‘yes’.
The Yorkshire Pudding Club Page 7