The Yorkshire Pudding Club

by Milly Johnson

  ‘Simon tells me you’re going to be busy decorating after the weekend!’ said Con.

  ‘Did he?’ Helen looked at Simon for clues as she really had no idea what Con was talking about.

  ‘We’re starting the nursery on Monday–well, the decorators are, anyway,’ said Simon, putting his hand down over hers and Con smiled indulgently. No doubt he and Melia subscribed to the theory that the Cadberrys were the perfect loving couple too, who would make upper-middle-class love when they got home, with a half-time break for champers and canapés.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Helen affirmed blindly.

  ‘Who’s doing it for you?’ asked Melia with slitty-eyed curiosity.

  ‘Chansons,’ said Simon, delighted with the opportunity to swank the name of the ‘in’ decorators up North. It was a mutually beneficial agreement–he got a top name quickly and cheaply; they got a big fat discount on their advertising bill.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ said Melia with admiration. ‘We couldn’t get them for months for Barcelona’s room’–she pronounced the name Bar-the-luuu-na, lingering over the vowels like Julio Iglesias might in a love serenade. ‘So, what colour scheme are you going for then?’

  ‘Well, I was thinking…’ began Helen.

  ‘White,’ Simon said, smiling beautifully.

  ‘You’d be better with an off-white,’ said Con. ‘We did Salvador’s room in white at first and had to redecorate. Far too bloody cold for a baby.’

  ‘It’s classic and neutral. The house theme is white,’ said Simon with icy explanation.

  White? Helen’s first thought was disappointment, but her second was more comforting; with lots of pink or blue accessories, it would not look cold at all when she had finished with it.

  ‘We’d better clear the room out quick then!’ laughed Helen to Con. ‘It’s absolutely full of Simon’s junk.’ Whereas she was thrilled that Simon was thinking about the baby, she wished he had given her slightly more notice. It would take forever to shift all that stuff out.

  ‘Which room are you talking about, Helen?’ Simon said to her slowly and deliberately, as if she were slightly retarded.

  ‘The guest room, of course.’ Her smile withered as his head began to move wearily from side to side.

  ‘No, we’re putting the baby in the little room.’

  ‘We can’t do that, it’s far too poky!’ she protested.

  ‘The guest room isn’t appropriate–besides, I have plans for it. The little room is far more sensible and, as it’s more or less empty, it can be done quickly.’

  ‘I’ll clear it out, I don’t mind!’ said Helen, a little more loudly than she had intended, biting back the temptation to ask where he would go to sulk if the little room was occupied. Maybe that’s what his secret plans for the guest room were.

  ‘We’ve gone through all this before. Honestly, you and your hormones, darling, you can’t remember a thing at the moment, can you? The small room is perfectly adequate for a tiny baby,’ he said, and gave her hand a hard squeeze whilst smiling softly. Helen heeded the warning and she quickly moved onto a less controversial subject.

  Janey woke up late on Sunday morning to the smell of paint. She weaved a yawning path down the hallway to the spare room earmarked for the little one to find George in some old clothes, halfway up a ladder finishing off wall number two with lilac emulsion.

  ‘Oh, flaming hell, I wanted it to be a surprise for you!’ he said, hearing the door creak open. ‘I didn’t want you to see it until I’d finished.’

  ‘Wow, it’s going to look really bonny, isn’t it?’ she said, visualizing some nice lilac curtains with swags and tails framing the pretty picture of the quiet back gardens. Obviously she would make them herself.

  ‘Only the best for Hobson junior!’ said George.

  ‘We’ll have to start thinking about names, won’t we?’ said Janey.

  ‘Whitney or Brad, I was thinking.’

  ‘Hmm, I fancy Keanu or Sinitta.’

  ‘Eric or Hilda?’

  ‘We can’t call it the same name as the goldfish. I might get confused and start feeding it mealworms!’

  ‘Or stick your boob in the aquarium!’

  They both laughed; it was a tinkly sweet sound that left them smiling at each other.

  ‘I’ll get us some toast and come and help you,’ she said.

  ‘Naw, get back to bed for a bit, you shouldn’t be climbing ladders and stuff,’ said George.

  ‘George, I feel as fit as a flea. Let me help you!’

  That was the truth of it, too. Janey felt better than she had done in the whole of her twenties and early thirties put together. There was no worrying about dieting, no frustrations about her career, and her sexlife was better than a rabbit’s in a Viagra-testing laboratory.

  ‘I’ve got two things to show you,’ said George, stepping off the ladder.

  ‘Oh yes?’ said Janey saucily.

  ‘Give over, you minx!’ He dragged over something that lay under a dust sheet. He whipped this off, to reveal a dainty little crib carved out of wood. Janey dropped to her knees to examine it.

  ‘George, when the hell did you do this?’

  ‘Ah, hang on, not finished yet.’ He flicked a switch on at the side which made the crib start to slowly rock.

  ‘You really are a clever sod, aren’t you?’ said Janey with admiration.

  ‘I’ll carve the bairn’s name at the top when we decide,’ said George, thrilled that she liked it. It was the way he was wired; he just got pleasure from making her happy.

  ‘And what was the other thing?’ said Janey.

  ‘Close your eyes.’

  ‘Closed.’

  She heard scuffling.

  ‘Now open them,’ said George.

  Janey flashed her eyes open to find George standing beside her with a massive plastic Viking helmet on. Her libido roared into life, firing up instantly on all cylinders. She swaggered over, her nightie already half off and, for now, George abandoned trying to please her with his paintbrush and satisfied her with his longboat instead.

  The surprise decorators came first thing Monday morning to Helen’s house and decorated the poky spare room at the end of the hallway plain white. It was to be a cold, small nursery for their baby.

  Chapter 26

  At Elizabeth’s fourteenth-week antenatal appointment, she heard her baby’s heartbeat for the first time. It was going like a racehorse in the last furlong of the National and she panicked immediately and said, ‘What’s up with him?’

  Sue, the midwife, laughed kindly and replied, ‘That’s a good strong heartbeat, nice and normal. A baby’s heartbeat is faster than yours or mine.’

  Satisfied then that he was all right, Elizabeth lay back and listened to him, totally unconscious of the width of the smile on her face. She had looked at the scan pictures so many times, but hearing him inside her, thriving, living, was indescribable. It was so loud, so positive. At least she must be growing him right.

  She came home from the surgery to find three tins of Lemon Sunshine emulsion and some white gloss and brushes on the back doorstep.

  John had refused to take any money for the paint he had left. He said that it had not cost him anything in the end and so he couldn’t very well charge her for it now, could he? Then the next week he brought her some huge fluffy white towels that one of the blokes on-site was selling off for his wife who worked in a textile factory. They were supposed to be seconds, although Elizabeth couldn’t see anything remotely faulty about them. She had ended up with a beautiful stack of baby-soft towels for a fiver. This was followed by baby nappies the week after–again, smoke-damaged stock apparently, although like the paint, there was not a hint of anything smutty about the packaging. He brought her enough to keep the little one in nappies until he was twenty-five.

  The morning of Helen’s sixteenth week was the anniversary of her daddy’s death. April was a queer month; sometimes it countermanded the dictates of March that spring was on its way and fr
oze the air, sending howling winds and cruel showers. Sometimes it was as balmy as summer and permitted the early May bluebells to fill the woods like thick, violet carpets. Today it was as then, bright and bitter, and the night that followed it would be dangerously beautiful. Chips of diamond stars would be peppered across the black skies and it would be so very cold.

  She took red flowers to his grave in Maltstone churchyard–long scarlet Asiatic lilies–and arranged them in the pot there. Funny how we fear death so much, but come to these places to sit amongst the dead and find comfort, she thought, taking a place on the nearby bench that was under the budding cherry-blossom tree, and she talked to her father as if he was there beside her and not buried in the ground.

  ‘I still feel so sick all the time, Daddy,’ she said. ‘I wish you were here to tell me everything is all right. I know it is really, but it would sound so much better coming from you.’

  She did not know how long she sat there telling him about her fears, but her bones were stiff when she got up for a badly needed stretch and flex. She was getting hefty around the middle now, her little waist had all but disappeared, but still her breasts stayed disappointingly small. She wasn’t greedy–she would have been happy with an extra cup-size. Just so that she could fill a normal bra, for once, without having to pad herself up in special bras stuffed with chicken-fillet gel pouches. Not that there was anyone around to enjoy them even if they filled out as big as watermelons. Simon was not involving himself in the pregnancy at all, despite the glimmer of hope she had felt when he had made the effort to get the decorators in for the nursery. She soon came to realize that that had more to do with bandying famous names about than preparing for their baby’s arrival. He had ignored the scan pictures and changed the subject at the mere mention of anything veering towards her condition.

  Helen desperately tried to rationalize his reactions and concluded that maybe he just couldn’t relate to something he couldn’t see properly or hold yet. So she stored the bags of baby things that she so much wanted to show off to him in the cold little room at the end of the hallway instead and bided her time. She hated that room where Simon always slept when they had one of those silly arguments that swamped her like a tidal wave and left her dazed and battered. She did not want her baby sleeping in there and said so to her father’s grave.

  ‘Goodness me, girl, where’s your Luxmore backbone!’ She heard her father’s voice as clear as day, even though she knew she was imagining it. It was what he always said to her when she needed that extra spur, like when Carmen Varley started to call her ‘posh cow’ names at school and she came home crying. Her father sat her down and talked it through with her; he told her how bullies functioned, and that standing up to Miss Varley would be a far better option in the long run, because bullies did not let go of weaker meat. So Helen had gone into school the next morning, armed with a Luxmore backbone full of iron, only to find Carmen Varley sobbing from a split lip and a triumphant Elizabeth there to greet her with a: ‘I’ve brayed her up for you’ as she put it.

  ‘Stand up to bullies, darling, don’t ever let them walk all over you,’ that’s what her father had said, and he had been right then and was still right now. Helen decided there and then that she was not going to put her baby in that horrible room. She would clear out the large, sunny guest room and somehow she would get her own way on this.

  ‘I love you, Daddy–sweet dreams,’ she said to him in death as she had in life, always, every night. Even on the night nineteen years ago, when she killed him.

  ‘You okay for baby towels?’ Elizabeth asked as she climbed into Janey’s Volvo. Her seventeenth-week appointment to see the consultant was only half an hour before Janey’s, so they had decided to go up together and have some lunch afterwards in the hospital café.

  ‘Am I okay for baby towels?’ said Janey with a sigh. ‘I’ve got about three hundred, thanks to Joyce. I was going to ask you if you wanted some. Why? Where’ve you got yours from?’

  ‘Oh, er…a sale on the market,’ said Elizabeth. If she told her the truth, Janey would regard that as tantamount to an engagement.

  ‘Got your sample?’ checked Janey. ‘And your notes?’

  ‘Affirmative,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Do you think Mr Greer will give us an internal?’

  ‘You should be so lucky!’ said Janey, but Elizabeth didn’t laugh for once and Janey adjusted her tone. ‘You’re not scared, are you?’

  ‘Well, I’m a bit nervous,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘You’ll be okay, you daft bat. You won’t have anything he hasn’t seen before.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Elizabeth, although that did not make her welcome the prospect any the more.

  The hospital was less than a ten-minute drive away, but finding a parking space was the difficult part. Luck was on their side that day though and they slotted into a nice vacancy right by the door. They reported their arrivals to the Antenatal receptionist and then took a seat as instructed, amongst a room full of other women with varying-sized bumps.

  ‘Well, we’re never going to be seen on time, here!’ said Janey with a huff. ‘I can’t see why they bother putting a time on your card if you’re going to be seen two hours later,’ and with that she picked up a magazine and started reading about Tantric Sex, although she could not see what all the fuss was about. Who wanted to wait seven hours for an orgasm when George could give her three or four in that time, as last Saturday night proved? She had made a note on the Sunday morning to let him have chilli con carne followed by apple crumble more often.

  Eventually, Elizabeth’s name was called and she moved to another queue outside the consultant’s room, to be joined ten minutes later by a moaning Janey.

  ‘Where do you think we’ll be queuing next?’ she asked, wearily flopping down next to Elizabeth, who did not have time to answer as the consultant’s door opened and it was her turn to go in.

  She liked Mr Greer instantly. He reminded her of Alex Luxmore: tall, lean, quiet and courteous. He scanned through her notes whilst a nurse in the background took her sample and tested it. Then she had her blood pressure taken and the results noted and Mr Greer asked if she had any problems, which she hadn’t. He smiled and said, ‘Good, that’s what I like to hear,’ then he helped her up onto the couch, and she lay down stiffly, her muscles tight and tense, dreading the moment when he would slip on a glove and ask her to part her legs. She wasn’t sure if she could.

  He had warmed up his hands and felt around her stomach with his head cocked to one side as if filling in a mental checklist. Then he crooked his arm for her to take and he pulled her up by it and said, ‘Everything seems fine. We’ll see you again around thirty-four weeks, Ms Collier.’

  ‘Is that it?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s it,’ said Mr Greer and went over to the sink to wash his hands.

  ‘No internal?’ Elizabeth said quietly to the nurse.

  ‘It’s not necessary,’ she replied. ‘They don’t give them these days at this stage. Not unless there’s a problem.’

  When Mr Greer had finished with Janey, they both went up to ‘Phlebs’ to have their bloods taken. Elizabeth had elusive veins and the midwife would prod and poke at her arm taking bloods, so it was a relief to have the experts on the case. The older the pregnant woman, the greater the risk of the baby having Down’s syndrome, so their blood was to be screened to assess the risks.

  ‘What if it’s high?’ asked Elizabeth.

  ‘Well, you’ll be offered an amniocentesis,’ said the blood nurse, ‘but that’s got its own risks. Why don’t you cross that bridge if and when you come to it? The blood results are taking about two to three weeks to come through at the moment.’

  ‘Three weeks?’

  ‘Try and put it out of your mind until then. I know it’s hard, but the radiographers take very thorough scans.’ The nurse stuck a plaster on Elizabeth’s arm and declared, ‘All done!’

  ‘The woman who scanned me said she had done a really thorough check and
couldn’t see any abnormalities,’ said Janey to Elizabeth, getting out of the chair next to her.

  ‘Scanned you? You sound like a bag of peas!’

  ‘Don’t you of all people talk to me about peas, missus! Anyway, whilst we’re on the subject of grub, let’s hit the baked spuds. I think we deserve one–what do you think?’ said Janey, and marched her off in the direction of food without waiting for an answer.

  Helen picked up the phone to Elizabeth’s chirpy, ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, yourself,’ she said back.

  ‘What are you doing? You sound puffed out,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘Oh, I’m just clearing a few bits and pieces out of the guest room.’

  ‘Well, don’t overdo it,’ said Elizabeth. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Oh, fine,’ Helen lied, because she had just been sick again. She had mentioned her endless vomiting to her consultant last week at her seventeen-week appointment and he had offered her some drugs that would help, but the thought of them entering her baby made her decline. He said that prolonged nausea was unfortunately normal in some cases and suggested a few alternative remedies and she listened, without telling him that she had tried them all already.

  ‘It’s just a quickie because I’m at work, but I wanted to see if you were okay.’

  ‘I’m absolutely fine. Thank you for worrying about me,’ said Helen, who felt over-sensitive to sympathy in her weakened state and had to gulp back some tears fast.