The One That Got Away

by Lucy Dawson

  ‘When’s it due?’ he continued as I nodded. He gave me a thumbs-up and began to amble off happily downstairs. ‘Times they are a-changin’ eh? I can’t believe you’re going to be a dad,’ I heard him laugh. ‘Your poor kid …’

  ‘… I just hope it gets Beth’s ears.’ Dan was still nattering away about it in the car on the way to Mum and Dad’s. ‘No one deserves Ed’s great lugs. Or his hair for that matter. You know he started losing it when he was twenty-two?’ He shook his head with a chuckle. ‘Poor bastard … Do you think I’m going any thinner on top?’ he added after a pause, looking anxiously in the mirror. ‘Maybe next week I should ask her to cut the sides but leave the top the same length? What do you think?’

  ‘Eyes on the road,’ I said gently, avoiding his question.

  ‘So I AM going thinner. Let’s hope our kids don’t get my hair then … or my height and your feet. They’d fall over all the time.’ He fell silent for a moment. ‘Or your height and my feet. That would be even worse; a great big clown-foot baby,’ he laughed. ‘Scary eh?’

  ‘Help me, someone!’ I shouted. ‘I’m so frightened!’

  Oscar, my nephew, stopped growling and, balanced rather precariously on his scooter, pulled up his mask. ‘It’s still me!’ he said delightedly as I flopped down on to one of the kitchen stools.

  ‘Phew!’ I said in mock relief, taking a sip of my tea. Oscar put the mask back on and scooted over to the other side of the room where his younger sister Lily was having an increasingly frustrating time of it attempting to lift her doll’s pushchair over the lip of the kitchen step.

  Oscar paused and assessed the situation coolly. ‘You need a boy to do that,’ he said and tried to lift it up for her. Lily however, under the impression he was trying to take it away, squawked loudly in outrage, to which Oscar, clearly deciding the job was more trouble than it was worth, dropped it and rode off, Lily glaring after him in a ‘That’s right pal, you jog on,’ sort of way. Miscommunication between the sexes was apparently starting younger and younger.

  While making his getaway, Oscar nearly crashed into Mum, who was attempting to clear up the kitchen. ‘Er, it’s getting a little crowded in here,’ she announced in warning to the rest of us, most of whom were lazing around reading the Saturday papers.

  ‘I’m on it.’ My eldest brother Chris put down the finance supplement, unfolded his long legs and got to his feet. ‘Right, time for a game of hide-and-seek before we do the fireworks!’

  ‘I’ll play, Daddy,’ offered Oscar generously, looking excitedly up at him.

  ‘What a good idea.’ Mum whisked my half-drunk cup of tea away from under my nose and took it over to the sink.

  ‘I hadn’t finished with that,’ I protested.

  ‘Hadn’t you? Never mind,’ she said briskly. ‘Off you go.’

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if one of these days I wind up on that draining board,’ Dad remarked, keeping a firm grip on the review section and his own mug.

  ‘Are you going to play hide-and-seek, Granddad?’ asked Oscar.

  ‘No, love,’ Dad said regretfully. ‘I’ve got a bone in my leg. I’ll help you count though.’ He looked at the rest of us expectantly, so my sister-in-law Karen and I began rather reluctantly to get up. My other brother Stuart continued to read the sports section, while his wife Maria looked relieved to have the excuse of giving my youngest nephew Harry his bottle. ‘We’ll go to thirty shall we, Os? One, two, three …’

  ‘Come on Uncle Stu and Uncle Dan!’ Oscar urged. ‘We’ve started. You have to hide too!’

  ‘We should cosy up in the dark like this more often,’ Dan said in the spare room wardrobe, as he pinched my bum.

  ‘I hope that was you and not Mr Tumnus,’ I grinned as he leant in to kiss me. For a brief moment we started playing another game altogether until Dan reluctantly pulled back. ‘I think we should probably stop now,’ he said. ‘But can we carry this on when we get home?’

  ‘Yes please,’ I murmured, then, hearing Oscar stomping up the stairs bellowing helpfully ‘I’m coming to find you—’ we both shut up. ‘—But I need a wee first!’

  Dan snorted and I giggled. ‘This may take a while, sorry.’

  We waited patiently in silence for a moment. ‘I hope they’ll all play games like this with our kids,’ Dan whispered.

  ‘Of course they will!’

  ‘I was thinking downstairs – you know Ed and Beth are having a baby? They got married after us. I know we said a while ago we’d wait until we’d bought somewhere – but why don’t we just not?’

  ‘What?’ I said, confused. ‘Buy a house?’

  ‘No! Wait to have a baby. Why don’t we just do it?’

  ‘Finished!’ Oscar shouted as the loo flushed. I put my finger to my lips and silenced Dan.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said eagerly.

  ‘Shhh!’ I said. ‘He’ll hear you! Let’s not spoil the game.’

  On the way back from my parents’ house Dan was unusually quiet.

  ‘You all right?’ I asked, a little concerned, as he frowned at the road ahead of him.

  ‘Hmm?’ He shook himself out of his reverie and glanced at me before smiling briefly. ‘Yeah, fine. Just a bit wiped out.’

  ‘That’ll be all those piggybacks you gave Oscar,’ I reached out and squeezed his hand. ‘You were lovely with him today, thank you – I’m not surprised you’re tired though.’ I yawned, a little weary myself. ‘Early night for us tonight I think.’

  But when Dan did climb into bed next to me later, he didn’t seem to want to go to sleep …

  Just as I was happily thinking to myself that we had to make the effort to have sex more often because we were really good at it, he said, ‘Shall we not use anything?’

  I came down to earth with a bump and completely caught off guard blurted, ‘But I might get—’

  ‘I know,’ he said patiently, like I was a bit slow on the uptake.

  ‘Oh I see.’ We both went quiet for a moment and he began to kiss me again. But rather than feeling relaxed and slightly floaty, as I had been moments before, my heart sped up. We were actually going to do this? This was it? THE big moment? We were going to start – trying?

  In five minutes’ time I might be pregnant.

  My heart gave another thump … with something that felt a lot like fear.

  ‘Dan, shouldn’t we talk about this?’

  ‘You want to talk now?’ He brought his head back up and looked down at me. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well about timings, that sort of thing,’ I said quickly.

  ‘Timings?’ he repeated, clearly confused. ‘I don’t …’

  ‘We ought to chat first,’ I said, beginning to feel really quite panicky. ‘It’s not as simple as just doing it.’

  ‘It isn’t?’ He was obviously thrown, but being Dan – kind, caring and sensible to the core – he didn’t want to get anything wrong, so, trusting me, he shrugged and reached for the condom box.

  I was surprised and very unsettled by my almost instant sense of relief.

  The morning after – we drove to Dan’s parents’ house in Chichester for Sunday lunch and it was my turn to be reflectively quiet. I was silently having a sensible word with myself over my reaction in bed the night before, thinking it was probably normal to feel like that – deciding to start trying was a huge step after all – being apprehensive didn’t necessarily mean I didn’t want children, for crying out loud.

  Dan looked across at me and said, ‘Don’t chew your nails’ before gently pulling my hand from my mouth. ‘It’s just lunch, Moll, we won’t stay long if Dad’s in one of his moods.’ He smiled reassuringly at me. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you fill me in on these timing issues that I need to know about? When should we be doing it then? When you’re ovulating?’

  I shot him a look of surprise. I’d actually meant timings like getting pregnant in November would mean I’d be heavily pregnant in August which wouldn’t be much fun … for a baby either come to that, havi
ng its birthday in the summer holidays for the rest of its school-going life. Ovulation? Since when had Dan been so clued up?

  ‘You have a pretty irregular cycle though, don’t you?’ he continued easily. ‘Will that make it harder to work out when it is?’

  My mouth gaped. ‘Do we have to talk about this now?’ I said faintly.

  ‘Why not?’ he said in surprise.

  ‘Well, we’re nearly at your mum and dad’s house.’

  ‘Moll,’ he lowered his voice to a theatrical whisper, ‘even my mother couldn’t hear us from this distance, we’re about six miles away.’

  ‘Let’s just chat about it on the way back,’ I suggested and tried not to notice him give me a brief sideways glance.

  ‘OK,’ he said eventually. ‘No probs. We can talk about it later.’

  For once I was quite glad to arrive at Chichester. My father-in-law Michael was on unusually good form, proudly showing off his new nine-iron. Sadly though, it didn’t last. Witty, charming and incredibly good company when he wanted to be, he could also – in the blink of an eye – flip into grumpy old git mode for no apparent reason. How Susan could stand being married to someone so temperamental was beyond me, but then in all the time I’d known her, I’d barely heard her swear and never seen her properly lose her cool. Maybe she’d become indifferent to him over the years, or perhaps she just didn’t need to shout – once or twice I’d witnessed her utter a single, steely ‘Michael!’, making it clear he’d gone far enough, at which he’d fallen glower ingly but obediently silent. Then again, on more than one occasion I’d seen her embarrassingly left to pick up the threads of conversation after Michael had rudely stomped out of a room in a huff. Even after all this time, it was hard to work out who really wore the trousers.

  As we sat down to eat, Dan mentioned that one of his school friends had been made redundant.

  ‘Everything in your area is holding up though isn’t it?’ Michael said sharply.

  Dan reached for the water jug. ‘Well yeah Dad, it is, it’s as safe as anything is these days. All our pay’s been frozen though.’ He shrugged and topped up his glass.

  ‘Sorry?’ Michael put his knife and fork down, sat back, wiped his mouth on a napkin and looked at Dan challengingly. ‘Frozen? What do you mean frozen?’

  My heart sank.

  ‘I don’t have a lot of choice in the matter, Dad.’ Dan set the jug down with an unintentional clunk.

  ‘Careful!’ Michael admonished him. ‘And don’t be so ridiculous. Of course you have a choice. There are ways of negotiating tricky waters – I’m not saying there aren’t – but you need to stay at the helm.’

  Dan diplomatically said nothing, just reached for the bowl of roast potatoes and helped himself. Susan looked steadily at Michael but also stayed silent. I set down my knife and fork as I noticed her elderly dad, Dan’s grandfather, had dropped his napkin on the floor but was unable to reach for it.

  ‘Thank you, Molly,’ he said softly as I passed it back to him. His shaky hands reached out for the water jug Dan had absently set down.

  ‘May I?’ I offered quietly and he nodded gratefully. I refilled his glass and passed it to him. He glanced up the table at Michael and then subtly rolled his rheumy kind eyes as he looked back at me. I instinctively smiled and then discretely lowered my gaze as he returned to his food.

  ‘You know I don’t see that it can be that difficult to stand up to them,’ Michael had started up again, his still-thick hair bouncing as he energetically sawed through a fat slab of meat. ‘It’s terribly simple actually. You go in and you say, “It’s unacceptable that you are proposing to freeze my salary. Would you be prepared to accept this if you were me?” Honestly Daniel, next you’ll be telling me you’re expected to get in earlier and yet go home later.’

  ‘Pretty much,’ said Dan, ‘but there it is.’

  Michael shook his head in disbelief. ‘Well, I tell you this,’ he pointed his fork at Dan and I felt my temperature starting to rise. I stared back down at my plate, focusing on the pattern. ‘I was always home no later than seven; I made a point of it. If you can’t get everything done in that time you’re either not working efficiently or your employers are trying it on. Do not become the man they all begin to wipe their feet on. Never run away, always stand your ground.’ He jabbed a bit of beef in a liberal pool of gravy and then thrust it in his mouth. ‘You’re not at school now.’ He turned to look at me, ‘Do you know he legged it from his school at least three times Molly? The little bugger.’

  ‘Really?’ I said, trying to keep my voice steady, although of course I knew. Dan had been insufferably unhappy as a boarder and asked repeatedly to come home. Susan had wanted to remove him but Michael had put his foot down and told his eight-year-old son to ‘take it like a man’.

  ‘He couldn’t even do that properly. Stupid child got on the wrong train and wound up in bloody Bristol.’

  No one said anything.

  ‘We had to go all the way down there and pick him up. He was snivelling in the lost property office when we arrived. Do you remember, Susan?’

  I can’t have been the only one who then imagined Dan as a small boy, frightened and alone, desperate for his parents to come and get him, but probably terrified of their arrival all at the same time. The protective, painful stab of empathy I felt also induced a brief flash of something close to actual loathing of Michael.

  ‘Anyway,’ poor Dan tried valiantly to get us all back on track, ‘nothing would please me more than to have the kind of nine-to-five you used to enjoy, Dad, but it just doesn’t exist any more. They’d laugh in my face if I said I needed to be home by seven every night.’

  Michael snorted dismissively. ‘Rubbish. I thought there were supposed to be advantages to all these IT developments you tell me are so potent and necessary. Weren’t they all meant to make life easier, allowing you to have what I believe is referred to as “flexible working”?’ he looked triumphant. ‘Doesn’t sound like it to me. You can’t even get home at a decent hour and you work in IT, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Can you turn this music down a bit?’ Dan was finally becoming tetchy too. ‘It’s really loud. Molly’ll get a migraine and it must be hurting Grandpa’s ears.’

  Michael said nothing, just grabbed the remote, jabbed one of the buttons and turned it off completely, plunging us all into a pointed silence.

  After a moment or two however, having not had the last word, he could contain himself no longer. ‘That’s the trouble with careers based on fickle fashions like information technology …’

  I thought I saw Susan grip her knife a little tighter. ‘… it all eventually comes down to simple supply and demand Daniel. You may think you know otherwise, but the rules haven’t changed that much, I can assure you. There will always be a need for doctors, dentists … yet we could all still manage perfectly well without computers if you took them away tomorrow. I told you that a more traditional degree subject would hold its value, but you wouldn’t listen, would you?’

  ‘How is your knee after your operation, Michael?’ I enquired, unable to bear it a moment longer.

  ‘Much better, thank you,’ he said, turning away from Dan. ‘I was back at home after only a day! If it wasn’t for this bloody weather I should think I’d be back on the course already.’

  ‘It was supposed to be a week,’ Susan said wryly, ‘but thanks to this keyhole surgery … nonetheless, he does have to remember he’s nearly seventy-three now.’

  ‘Whole thing was a doddle.’ Michael said, reaching for the peas. ‘I really don’t know what all the fuss was about.’

  ‘It’s incredible isn’t it? They even do keyhole surgery for heart bypasses now,’ I said innocently. ‘A doctor was telling me recently that the surgeon holds tools connected to a computer …’ Michael paused, serving spoon midair ‘…which interprets his movements and manoeuvres the instruments to eliminate any tremors in the surgeon’s hands. So, they sort of work together to get the best results for the patien
t. I’m glad you felt the improvement in your knee so quickly.’ I picked up my water as a grateful smile flashed across Dan’s face.

  Michael looked at me steadily, his eyes glinting. As I set my glass down he said, ‘Not drinking, Molly?’

  ‘Not today, no.’

  ‘Oh?’ he said dangerously. ‘Any particular reason? You’re not pregnant?’

  ‘Nope.’ I laughed lightly, thinking Oh just fuck off. You’re going to have to try harder than that. ‘I just don’t fancy a drink drink – that’s all.’

  ‘You’re not worried,’ he sat back in his chair, hands resting on a remarkably flat stomach for a man of his age and appetite, ‘that unless he gets a bloody move on,’ he nodded at Dan, ‘all the relative bits and pieces are just going to shut up shop?’

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘Michael!’

  I should have left it – I should have let Susan do it – but as I stared at Michael, the urge to protect my husband mixed with outrage at how rude he’d just been; and maybe there was something else – a sensitivity or tension I wasn’t even aware had been building up within me… they formed a fireball of defensive anger and before anyone else had the chance to speak, I heard my own voice say, ‘You know I remember someone telling me that once men hit a certain age, they should never pass a lavatory without stopping, never waste an erection …’

  Dan choked on a mouthful of Yorkshire pudding, looked at me in horror and grabbed for his water, the liquid jerking all over the tablecloth. Even Susan was stunned.

  ‘… and never trust a fart. Would you say that’s true, Michael?’

  Chapter Four

  ‘Sunday lunch – and you start bandying erections about …’ Dan struggled to speak, gripping the steering wheel fiercely ‘… in front of my dad … and my grandpa?’

  ‘I know …’ I couldn’t look at him I felt so ashamed. ‘I know, Dan. I’m so sorry; I lost it. I shouldn’t have, you’re absolutely right, but when he was picking on you like that, I couldn’t bear it. What does he know about computers anyway?’