‘Sorry, little one,’ she said. She would be holding her baby properly very soon. She had tried to imagine so many times what it would like look. Would it have hair? How much would it weigh? Would it be a boy or a girl? She had always thought of it as a boy; a little boy would be lovely, but a little girl would be equally as nice. She had done the needle test but it had gone up and down and then round and round, and she’d scared herself stupid that it meant it would be a hermaphrodite like the baby on Footballers’ Wives. She stuck the needle back in the sewing box where it belonged and mentally slapped herself for being so silly and superstitious and for stressing herself out when there was no need.
Janey had reserved a little table so they could dine al fresco, but in the shade because the heat was cracking flags. It was another sun-flooded day and girlies everywhere were flashing flat midriffs below their cropped tops, although Janey was not looking at them enviously any more. She had been there, done that and much preferred the big baggy T-shirt she had replaced it with. She would miss not wearing maternity clothes; she felt quite formidable in her big pinafore. HMS Pinafore, George called her–not that he was complaining; she was just more woman to love, in his eyes.
Her friends gave Elizabeth a big kiss and as tight a hug as their portly frames would allow. It was strange cuddling Elizabeth, they both thought together, but nice. It was good she was starting to soften, especially as they had given up hope a long time ago of her ever enjoying the simple pleasure of a hug. They had made her up a hamper in a pretty basket with chocolates and tiny cherry pies and miniature jars of pickles and jams and biscuits and assorted olives, all of which Helen had found in one of her posh food shops, and they had bought her three frames for the pictures she had painted for the baby’s room.
‘I tried to get you some Gaviscon liqueur chocolates but Thornton’s had run out,’ said Janey, rubbing a niggle out of her lower back.
‘Thanks for the thought, though,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I just want to start scoffing everything you’ve brought me now.’
‘Even the frames?’
‘Especially the frames. They’ll be nice and tasty with a crushed olive or two.’
‘You poor mental bag,’ said Janey. ‘Well, thirty-nine, eh? We’re all on countdown for the big four–ohhhhhh now!’
‘You first,’ said Helen. ‘Three months to go.’
‘Yep,’ said Janey, watching as Helen passed them all menus then tipped some of the salt pot onto her hand and proceeded to lick it off.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ said Elizabeth in horror, sounding like an exasperated Billy Connolly.
‘Salt and lemons–can’t get enough at the moment,’ explained Helen. ‘You’ve got your olives, Janey has her Marmite and this is my weirdo craving.’
‘Thought “teddies” would be yours,’ said Elizabeth cheekily.
‘Go away,’ said Helen, but she was smiling.
‘So, is this where we all thought we’d be then, in the year leading up to forty?’ asked Janey.
‘What–sitting in a café with you two comparing bizarre food fantasies? Yes, of course I did,’ said Helen with a tut.
‘No really, come on. Elizabeth?’
‘Dunno,’ said Elizabeth, whose ideas had changed on that one over the years. When she was little, all she wanted to do was grow up and be old so her dad wouldn’t get her. Then, when she did grow up, she had hoped to find someone to love her, look after her ferociously as she had always tried to look after her friends. Then again, she had found someone who wanted to love her and look after her, only to throw him away. Did that constitute success or failure?
‘How about…married to Liam Neeson and walking permanently like John Wayne when he let me get out of bed,’ she said.
‘Trust you, you dirty cow!’ said Janey.
‘Oh, Elizabeth, play the game,’ said Helen, with good-humoured frustration.
‘Okay, okay.’ Elizabeth held up her hands in defeat. ‘Well, failing the Boy from the Bogs keeping me as a sex slave, I just wanted a good job, with a nice house, and a decent car and a kind man–you know, the ordinary things most people take for granted.’
‘Bet you never thought a kid would be in the equation though?’ This from Janey.
‘No,’ said Elizabeth, ‘and I still can’t visualize myself as a mother, to be honest.’
‘Well, you soon will be, so you’d better start getting used to the idea,’ said Helen, with a little laugh.
‘I’m trying,’ replied Elizabeth, patting the mound of her stomach. Was not not wanting the baby the same thing as wanting it? She had driven herself half nuts asking herself questions like that. Her feelings about the baby were still so dreadfully confused.
‘What about you, Janey?’
‘Well, I wanted to have a super-dynamic job and a bloke I love to bits who treated me like a queen. Oh, and a Yorkshire terrier called Harvey that I could carry around in a basket, like my Auntie Cheryl used to have.’
They chuckled, and then a big jug of water arrived, with plenty of lemon slices in it for Helen to scoop out and encrust with salt.
‘And you, Hels?’
‘I wanted to be happily married to someone handsome and successful, with lots of babies and living in a nice big house like Mum and Dad’s.’
‘I’d rather have the house than…ow!’
Janey kicked Elizabeth under the table. Let’s not bring his name up and spoil the atmosphere, was her intimation. Elizabeth rubbed her leg. Janey had feet like skateboards.
‘It’s okay to talk about him,’ said Helen. ‘It doesn’t hurt at all.’
‘It does if her boot lands on you for saying it,’ said Elizabeth, pointing at Janey. ‘Jeez, are you wearing steel toe-caps?’
‘In fact, I met him yesterday,’ Helen announced.
‘Did you?’ the others said in unison.
‘Yes. He was coming from his solicitor’s office.’
‘And?’
Helen released a tinkly little laugh. ‘He was with a woman.’
Neither Elizabeth nor Janey knew what to say to that.
‘Go on, then. You’re dying to ask me: “what did she look like?’”
‘I am dying to ask, I’ve got to admit,’ said Janey.
Helen leaned over the table with a big beaming smile. ‘She looked like me. Pre-baby, obviously. Long blonde hair, skinny, blue eyes. It was weird–I saw them coming down the street and I thought, Lord, they look like Simon and me! Then I realized that the man really was Simon.’
‘It wasn’t that Julia then?’ asked Janey.
‘No, this one had positively inverse breasts,’ said Helen with glee.
‘What did he do when he saw you?’ asked Elizabeth tentatively.
‘He looked a little startled, to be honest.’
‘And what did you do?’
‘I stuck out my C-cups and walked past him.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Elizabeth, I swear to you, my heart didn’t even miss a beat. It was as if I was looking at a stranger.’
‘Funny, that,’ said Janey. ‘Him going for another Helen.’
‘A pale imitation of Helen,’ amended Elizabeth. She would bet her life savings there would be a succession of pseudo-Helens to come, whilst he was young and handsome enough to tempt them, anyway. Sweet, fragile women with no complications, whom he would control and bully to compensate for his innate weaknesses. Trophy women he could show off in public, who befitted his picture of an executive ideal, yet in private he could probably only do the business with a bit of rough, sporting massive gazongas. He really was a tortured soul. Good.
‘I bet it made you feel bloody marvellous, didn’t it?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Helen with a face-splitting grin. ‘It most certainly did.’
They ordered food and it arrived nice and quickly: lemon chicken for Helen, lasagne for Janey, and Stilton-topped pork tenderloin for Elizabeth.
‘My boobs are like two big Stiltons,’ said Janey, just as Elizabeth
was about to take her first mouthful.
‘Oh, flaming hell,’ said Elizabeth. ‘It’s a good job I’m not put off my food easily.’
‘I mean, where the hell do all those veins come from?’
‘Will you give over?’
‘I’m just saying, that’s all.’
‘I don’t think I’ll ever look attractive again,’ said Elizabeth.
‘Did you ever?’
‘Bog off!’
‘Well, wait until you’re floppy and fifty and you’ve grown a beard, then you can go abroad and find a gorgeous young nineteen-year-old Turk on the make,’ said Helen.
‘Then you can get yourself an extra three hundred quid by selling your story to Women by Women, about how you got married and he left you three seconds after cutting your cake,’ said Janey. ‘You wouldn’t have any life savings left, but you’d have some really great memories of his seduction techniques.’
‘Eat your lasagne and belt up,’ said Elizabeth, and pinched the olive from Janey’s side salad at the same time as Helen nicked her lemon.
‘So what are you planning for your fortieth birthday bash then?’ asked Elizabeth when the bill had been paid and they were wobbling back to their cars.
‘A big sleep, if the rumours are true. Apparently we’ll be selling our souls for a few hours’ kip when the babies come,’ said Janey.
‘I can’t see what the fuss is about sleeping, I mean, surely babies sleep loads, don’t they?’ said Elizabeth. She had hardly thought about what was to happen in the months after the birth. Her head wouldn’t let her get much further than coming home from hospital and getting through her first shopping expedition with car seats and prams to negotiate. Everything after that was a big fuddled cloud.
‘Don’t think it’s quite that straightforward,’ said Helen. ‘We fit in with them, not the other way round, and sleep when they do, otherwise we might not get any!’
They kissed and went on their way.
There’s so much to know, thought Elizabeth, with a heavy heart as she followed the others out of the village. And I feel I know less every day…
When Elizabeth got home, she made straight for the big blue chair by the window and drew comfort from being rocked in it. She dropped seamlessly into a vivid dream that the baby was born with a grown man’s face with adult teeth, and then she woke up suddenly, realizing that she must have been sobbing in her sleep because her cheeks were wet. There was a heavy knock on the door just as she had got up to find some tissues in the kitchen. She wiped away her tears quickly and opened it to find John on the doorstep.
‘Hello there, Happy Birthday,’ he said, striding in, handing her a card and then giving her a brotherly squeeze on the shoulder. She looked up at him like a little stunned rabbit lost, disorientated and scared and as if she had been crying because her mascara was smudged, although he didn’t draw attention to it and embarrass her.
‘Thank you,’ she said, holding the envelope stiffly.
She felt awkward, uncomfortable; she didn’t know how to act around him now and it was clear that he didn’t know how to act around her either because he was keeping his distance.
It hurt to see him in her house, knowing there was someone else on his mind, and when he said, ‘I’m not staying, I’ve somewhere to go,’ it was as if he had rubbed salt into a big open cut somewhere very deep inside her.
‘I thought I’d just bob up and take a chance you were in, seeing as you never rang me back,’ he added, ‘so don’t put the kettle on for me.’
‘Oh, okay. Well, thanks for this.’
‘Aren’t you going to open it?’
‘Oh yes…yes, of course.’
She opened up the card; it had a nice verse, a ‘dear friend’ verse.
I’ve lost him.
She kept her head bowed, trying to read it, and battled with some mutinous tears. She felt as if she had cried an ocean since the day she told Laurence to stick his job. It was hard work being emotional and letting people in, although she had let them in too late and had only a gaping wound in her heart to show for it.
‘I’ll be off then,’ he said.
‘Okay,’ she said, managing a small smile that accentuated the sadness in her watery grey eyes. ‘Well, thanks for the card. See you, John.’
She expected him to turn and go then, but he didn’t. He just stood there, waiting for something.
‘Come on, then. Get your coat if you need it.’
‘What?’
‘Get your coat,’ he repeated.
‘What do I want my coat for?’
‘You’re going with me, that’s why.’
‘Where?’ she said.
‘I’ve got something to show you,’ he said, grabbing her little summer jacket from the peg near the door, because the day was cooling and he had seen enough of her shivering to last him a lifetime.
Helen gently rocked on the swing by the little babbling stream at the bottom of the garden and lifted her face to the sun. It was wonderful to be able to enjoy the summer without itchy eyes and sneezing every two minutes because her hay fever seemed to have been chased away by her pregnancy. It was so peaceful there in the grounds of the Old Rectory, especially because she wasn’t being relentlessly fussed over by her mother, who was away at a wedding in Oslo for a few days. She had been reluctant to go, but Helen had made her. First babies were notoriously late, she told her mother, she could easily last another five weeks.
She had quite enjoyed being by herself there, padding around her old home and remembering all the wonderful times they’d had in it. The study still smelled as it had done when her father was alive–of old books and polished leather–and his presence was so warm and dear in it. Even the patio where she had found him the morning after he had died held no bad memories for her any more. The years had gently edited out the ugliness and guilt from the scene and finally she could remember him as looking peaceful and released from the pain that had depressed and frightened him so much.
Her mother’s dressing-table was still busy with the lotions and potions that Helen used to dab at and poke into as a girl, and in the kitchen lingered the spirit of their old housekeeper, Mother Hubbard, in her voluminous housecoat leaping on any speck of dust with an aggressive cloth and filling the air with the wonderful aromas of her baking. Helen would steal the cooling scones, throw butter at them and smuggle them upstairs to her two friends, splayed over her floor cushions as they savoured the problem pages of My Guy and Oh Boy whilst Mother Hubbard pretended not to notice.
She so wanted to bring her child up in a happy home like this one had been for her. A wonderful feeling of elation flooded like sunlight through her. It was so sharp it was almost a pain.
Chapter 49
‘Where are we going?’ Elizabeth said as he drove off.
‘Shut up and wait and see.’
‘You shouldn’t speak to your elders like that!’
‘You’re only older by two weeks.’
‘I’m still older.’
‘Like I say, shut up and wait and see.’
So she shut up and waited, whilst he drove out of town, into the surrounding countryside and turned into his building plot at Oxworth. It was eerily different to the last time she had been there, as if a magic wand had been waved over it, for now there were four complete houses, two on each side of a small road that went up and round a corner to a further destination. They were large, double-fronted constructions, two with turf already laid at the front, and each with a weighty millstone set in the garden bearing the number of their address.
‘You wanted to check I’d done ’em right,’ he said, ‘so now’s your chance.’
‘I hadn’t imagined them as nice as this though,’ she said.
‘Oh, charming!’
She punched his arm, not that he felt it, it was like hitting a brick wall. He helped her out of the car and she followed him down the path to the first house. Then he opened the door and turned off the burglar alarm. She came in behind him and no
sed around at the large, light rooms.
‘They cram houses into estates these days, don’t give any space between them and hardly let you have any room inside either. Well, I didn’t want to be known as a builder that did those sorts of homes. I want my buyers to be able to breathe,’ he explained to her as her shoes echoed around the oak floors of a very generous kitchen.
‘You could have built a lot more houses here, John, surely? Made yourself more profit.’
‘Aye, I could have, if I’d wanted,’ he said.
There was a long sitting room that went front to back of the house, a study downstairs and a utility room. Upstairs were four bedrooms, one en-suite, one with a vanity sink, and a lovely separate bathroom. There was a boxroom as well for storage, although it would have been big enough to sleep in at a push, and outside she could see there was a good-sized back garden and a double garage. She noticed the roof of the fifth house out of the upstairs window.
‘What’s that?’ she said, pointing to it.
‘That’s the one I’ve been working flat out on to get finished these past weeks. Come on–I’ll show you,’ he said.
They walked out and round a corner of thick hedges and trees that looked as if they had been there years already. The fifth house was different to the others, much larger and set apart in a very grand plot.
‘Bloody hell,’ was Elizabeth’s immediate verdict. ‘Which rich sod bought this then?’
‘Come in and see it before the owners move in,’ he said, finding the keys for it on his big jailer’s keyring. They walked into a wide hallway with rooms leading off everywhere and an imposing oak staircase going up the middle of it with an arched stained-glass window of summer flowers at the top through which light flooded and tinted the walls with soft pastel shades.
The Yorkshire Pudding Club Page 32