by Cathy Kelly
‘I’ve a busy day tomorrow,’ she said abruptly. ‘We’ve got two guest speakers coming in for the conference and I’m looking after them.’
She drank her coffee quickly, left money for the bill and then got to her feet.
Hannah gave her a brief, cool smile and leaned forward for a kiss on the cheek. The result was a classic air kiss, neither touching.
‘Bye, Leonie,’ Emma said, giving her a genuine hug.
She hurried away, snatching her coat from the waiter, not wanting to hang around in case she either burst into tears or screamed. Emma felt so emotionally charged that she didn’t know quite which emotion would emerge: rage or misery.
As she waited for the bus, she wondered how she’d explain why she was home so early to Pete. He’d be bound to notice that this dinner had been half the length of all the previous ones. He’d even teased her about it earlier, joking that if she came home plastered again, he wasn’t undressing her and putting her to bed.
‘I’ll be sending you to the Betty Ford Clinic for your next birthday if you keep up with these reunions,’ he laughed, his voice crackling on the mobile phone line. ‘I know you’re secretly out on the tear looking for men, I know your type Mrs Sheridan, leaving your wedding ring in your handbag…’
‘Pig,’ she chuckled into the receiver. ‘I must go, love. My other line is ringing. There’s a pizza in the freezer. I’ll see you later, Pete.’
Emma leaned wearily against the bus shelter, wanting to be home so she could feel Pete’s arms comforting her. Hannah was so pregnant, looking so blissfully maternal that it hurt. But, of course, she couldn’t explain that to Pete. What would he think of her if she revealed that a green-eyed monster raged through her every time she had to look at Hannah’s burgeoning belly? All evening, she’d had to look away or bite her lip to hide the intensity of her feelings. She was ashamed of herself. What sort of a friend was she? When the chips were down, she was more concerned about herself than about anyone else. Shame washing over her, Emma vowed to phone Hannah the next day and apologize. It was only fair. They were supposed to be friends.
She let herself into the house. The hall was in darkness. Good. Pete wasn’t home yet. He’d mentioned that he might go for a drink with Mike after work. At least his absence gave her a chance to go to bed. And if he came in after a few drinks, he wouldn’t be intuitive enough to notice her downcast eyes.
Emma left the hall light on and went upstairs to bed. She got as far as taking off her blouse when the wave of utter hopelessness hit her and she had to sit down on the edge of the bed and weep. Great gusts of sobs came from her, her chest heaved with each breath and she cried until her face was red and raw. Would she ever get over this pain of being childless? She’d stopped wondering if she’d ever have a child: that seemed too hopeless now. All she wanted was for the pain of wanting to abate somewhat, so she could cope.
‘What’s wrong?’
Startled, Emma looked up to see Pete standing in the doorway in his ancient leather jacket and faded jeans.
For a brief moment, she thought of lying. Then Elinor Dupre’s voice sounded in her head: ‘What’s so wrong about saying what you want, Emma?’
Elinor was right. She couldn’t hide it any more. ‘Hannah’s pregnant and it’s killing me. I can’t bear to think I’ll never have my own baby. I think I’m infertile,’ she said bluntly.
‘Oh Em,’ said Pete. ‘I’m so sorry, my love.’ He looked at her helplessly, his normally merry face miserable.
Suddenly, Emma regretted telling him. As if it wasn’t bad enough that she was upset, now he was too.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she backtracked. ‘Let’s forget I ever said that.’
‘Forget it?’ Pete said incredulously. ‘Why should I forget it? This involves me too, Emma, in case you’ve forgotten. There are two of us in this marriage, you know. Nothing annoys me more than the way you feel you have to shoulder all these things on your own,’ he said fiercely. ‘You’ve never let me stand up to your father, even though he bullies you; you insist on keeping secrets like this to yourself and you let Kirsten get away with murder when it comes to family responsibilities. You just won’t let me help. Why the hell are you pushing me away? You’re destroying our marriage, in case you hadn’t noticed. Stop locking me out of your life!’
She’d never seen him so angry. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. ‘Why can’t you see that I love you, Emma? I love you,’ he yelled. ‘Not the person you think you have to be to be loved!’
‘I know,’ she stammered. ‘I didn’t want to tell you…’
‘In case I’d be angry with you,’ he roared, ‘like your bloody father?’
She flinched at the rage in his voice. ‘No,’ she protested, ‘not because of that. Because…’ she faltered.
He waited angrily.
‘Because I thought that if I said anything, it wouldn’t just be in my head, it would be real: I couldn’t have a baby. It would be the worst possible result, I just know it.’
‘Jesus, Emma, that’s stupid,’ he said, but she could see the anger fading from his eyes. ‘That’s superstitious rubbish. Did you really think that saying the words would jinx us? Because if you do, then there’s no point in us seeing an ordinary doctor about this. We might as well see a witch doctor or a voodoo queen. Or, better still, I’ll buy tarot cards and use those to work out why you haven’t become pregnant.’
‘You can’t buy tarot cards for yourself,’ Emma said in a small voice. ‘They only work when somebody else has bought them for you. I read that somewhere.’
Pete laughed and pulled her into his arms. ‘As you read so much, have you ever read about all the medical stuff they can do for childless couples?’ he asked.
She nodded.
‘Right. If they can clone sheep, pigs and the Boys from Brazil, they can help us have a baby. Infertility isn’t half as complicated as cloning, so I think we’re in with a chance. We’re young, we’re healthy – we’ll do anything, right?’
‘I hated the thought of putting you through all that investigative stuff,’ Emma said, her face buried in his shoulder.
‘You mean being locked in a room with a paper cup and the entire back catalogue of Hustler?’ he asked wickedly. ‘You may have to come in and help me with that, Em. But we can do it. Hey, who knows, there may be nothing wrong with either of us. You could be panicking unnecessarily. It takes time to make a baby, you know.’
‘It’s over three years,’ Emma reminded him. ‘That’s a long time to be using no contraception and still not be pregnant.’
‘OK, OK, maybe there is a problem, maybe there isn’t. But let’s find out for definite before we jump to conclusions. First thing tomorrow, phone the doctor and make an appointment. He can refer us to the specialists to get checked out, both of us.’
‘You…you don’t mind?’
Pete took her thin face in his hands, staring deep into the anxious pale blue eyes. ‘I love you, Emma. I’d love us to have children. And if there’s a medical reason why we can’t, then we’ll try our best to sort it out. But if nothing works and we can’t have them, I can live with that. I’ve got you, we’ve got each other. Right?’
Emma nodded tremulously.
‘Promise me one thing, Em. Don’t keep secrets from me any more. Promise? It’s been tearing me up, knowing things weren’t right but not able to get close to you.’
‘I promise I won’t keep any more secrets. It was just so hard for me to tell you…to talk about it. I wanted to keep it to myself…’
‘That doesn’t work, Emma,’ Pete interrupted. ‘Do you think I haven’t spent months worrying about you getting more and more introverted, worrying that I was doing something wrong, that you didn’t love me?’
‘You know I love you,’ she protested.
‘How can I know that when you keep this most important thing from me?’ he demanded. ‘I’m not very good at working out what people are thinking, Em, I’m sorry. I’m not a mind-reade
r. I need to be told. I was nearly going to ring Leonie and ask her. I mean, you tell her more than you tell me.’ He sounded so bitter.
‘Oh, Pete,’ Emma said, feeling worn out, ‘I love you. And, no, I don’t tell Leonie everything. I did tell her about how I felt about the baby,’ she admitted. ‘That’s all. I can’t explain why I couldn’t tell you.’ She sighed miserably. ‘Everything’s always my fault. I thought this would be too.’
‘Cut the bullshit,’ snapped Pete fiercely. ‘That’s your bloody father speaking. He’d love everything to be your fault, but that doesn’t mean it is. It simply means he’s a spiteful old bastard who wants to control your every thought by making you feel useless. If you want that therapist to give you your money’s worth, get her to exorcize your father’s malignant presence from your head!’
‘I never knew you felt that way,’ gaped Emma.
He smiled, looking like her good-humoured Pete again. ‘We’re both learning things tonight. The most important one is that we have to stick together, Emma. Don’t you agree?’
She nodded.
‘You know what, Pete?’ she said, eyes shining with unshed tears. ‘I love you.’
When you were older and falling in love, the problem wasn’t meeting your beloved’s parents, Leonie mused. Difficult prospective in-laws were no longer the major obstacle. Wary, exacting children were. She was about to meet Hugh’s two kids and she’d heard so much about them that she was as nervous as a vasectomy patient letting the doc touch his nether regions for the first time. Terrified was not the word.
It must have been the same for Fliss meeting Danny, Mel and Abby, she realized wryly as she got ready that momentous Saturday afternoon. Although that might have been easier. At least if you had children, you knew how territorial they could be and you could gird your loins for a certain amount of dislike/sheer naked hatred when Daddy or Mummy brought home a new ‘friend’. But if you were childless like Fliss, you probably laboured under the misapprehension that children were dear little things too busy thinking about their own prospects with the opposite sex to worry about anything their wrinkly old parents were doing. Wrong. Children who felt they were being sidelined could hate far more effectively than any estranged, bitter spouse.
Luckily for Fliss, the kids clearly adored her. She was briskly chatty and too confident to be affected by teenage prejudices. There hadn’t been any option but for them to adore her.
They were adoring her now, for sure. What kids wouldn’t adore a stepmother who had whisked them off for a thrilling long weekend in Cannes and all the shopping Mel could dream of?
Ray had begged Leonie to let them all go for a week. ‘We’ll be in France for a fortnight and it seems crazy not to have the kids with us for at least one week,’ he’d said.
‘Mel and Abby have school,’ Leonie replied. ‘They can’t just take a week off like that in the middle of May. They’ll be getting their proper holidays in a month. And Danny has important exams coming up, so he can hardly go for a week.’ She didn’t mention anything about Danny’s conviction that he wouldn’t pass half his exams.
‘Well, a weekend, then,’ Ray had pleaded.
Leonie had been working late in the surgery on Thursday evening and couldn’t drive the twins and Danny to the airport. She’d planned to book a taxi but Doug insisted he’d drive them.
‘Only if I get a 101 Dalmatians mug as a present,’ he told the twins.
At least she was footloose for the weekend, even if it did mean that the twins had more time to become besotted with their stepmother.
Leonie wondered how Hugh’s kids would view her.
‘They’ll love you,’ Hugh had said as he set about arranging a quick drink between the four of them.
Despite his assurances, she had a premonition of disaster. It wasn’t particularly to do with Stephen, who sounded a bit like Danny with the same GameBoy thumb and a penchant for spending entire weekends in bed finding personal meaning in the lyrics of Oasis songs. But Jane, beautiful, talented Jane, sounded like Trouble. Leonie couldn’t quite put her finger on why she thought this: something to do with the way Hugh spoke about his twenty-two-year-old daughter perhaps? In tones of pure adulation, as if Jane was Marie Curie, Mother Theresa and Julia Roberts all rolled into one adorable package. You didn’t need an IQ in the stratosphere to figure out that Jane could do no wrong. Which, conversely, meant that if Jane didn’t take an immediate shine to Leonie, it was curtains for Daddy’s new friend.
The meeting was a quick one on a Saturday afternoon in the National Gallery. A suitably innocent venue.
Thinking of how Fliss would have played it, Leonie dressed in her usual clothes – Prussian-blue silk shirt, black velvet trousers and an embroidered violet angora shawl she’d picked up in a charity shop in Dun Laoghaire – and did her best to feel nonchalantly confident. Not trying too hard, because that would be a mistake both for her personally and for Hugh. She dearly wanted his children to like and approve of her, but it had to be approval on real terms.
She didn’t want to transform herself into something she wasn’t just so she passed muster with a teenage boy and his twenty-something sister. Well, that was the theory, anyway.
It was only ‘a quick drink to meet the kids’, as Hugh had put it. Not a grilling in the High Court. But her theory wasn’t working very well and she still felt worried. I mean, she thought, desperate to bolster herself with courage, she had kids and she knew how to handle them. If she knew how to deal with the dizzying combination of Mel and Abby, surely Jane would be a doddle. Older and more mature, obviously…?
Hugh was waiting in the National Gallery restaurant when she arrived, hot from rushing from the car park and mentally berating herself for never going to the gallery normally except when she was meeting people in the restaurant. She must try harder to fit some culture into her life. Hugh was sitting at a small table at the back and there was someone with him, Leonie realized: a young woman in denims.
Her first thoughts were that he’d met someone he knew while waiting for all of them. It couldn’t be the fabled Jane.
Jane was, in her father’s words, ‘beautiful, stunning,’ and Leonie had had a mental picture of a girl with her father’s confident, laughing gaze and the bone structure of a gazelle.
This dumpy young woman with a denim jacket welded unflatteringly on to her could not be Jane. Short dark hair, not even washed, plump features and small eyes under over-plucked brows. This was not gazelle material, unless gazelles were blessed with suspicious eyes and a scowl.
‘Leonie!’ Hugh got to his feet and greeted her as though he’d just spotted a distant acquaintance and, after racking his brains for ages, had finally remembered her name. He patted her back energetically. Normally, he kissed her.
‘Meet Jane, my pride and joy. Jane, this is a friend of mine, Leonie.’
Leonie had been struck dumb on very few occasions in her life. Such a thing was unheard of in a woman who so hated gaps in the conversation that she would babble ceaselessly in company when there was an awkward silence just to fill in the blanks. Now, she smiled gormlessly at her boyfriend and his daughter, wondering how in the hell even a besotted father would describe Jane as ‘stunning’. But then, how awful of her to judge the poor girl on looks alone. Perhaps Jane lit up with some inner flame when she spoke and laughed.
‘I’ve heard so much about you, it’s lovely to meet you,’ she said, finally finding her voice and shaking Jane’s hand warmly.
‘I’ve heard almost nothing about you,’ Jane replied primly, shooting a look at Hugh.
She shouldn’t purse her mouth like that, Leonie thought absently. She’d have terrible lines when she was older.
‘Oh dear,’ Leonie said jokily. ‘Am I your father’s big secret?’
She intercepted a glare from the girl to her father. ‘I think so,’ Jane said sharply.
Hugh smiled helplessly at Leonie. ‘It’s no big secret at all,’ he said with the false bonhomie of a man facing the firin
g squad and turning down the use of a blindfold. ‘Leonie is my new friend and I wanted you and Stephen to meet her. It’s simple. We’ve only been out three times but you know I wouldn’t want you to feel left out, Jane, sweetie.’ He shot an imploring look at Jane.
Leonie felt that now wasn’t the time to point out that they’d been on ten dates and one heavy petting session where only the presence of her period and a pair of horrible big knickers had stopped them getting naked on the couch in Hugh’s apartment. She had long-range plans for a romantic scene that included bikini waxing, nice, non-grey underwear and fake tan to camouflage the flabby bits with a nice golden glow. These plans seemed very long range at this present moment. She’d thought she was his girlfriend, but he hadn’t made that clear to anyone else.
On the phone, he’d been murmuring sweet nothings and saying things like, ‘You’re incredible, Leonie.’ Now, in the presence of the Inquisitor General, he was a squirming mass of manhood who’d deny his romance with a ‘Makin’ Whoopee’-singing Michelle Pfeiffer herself if it would keep him in his daughter’s good books. Leonie felt betrayed. What was more, she felt like getting up and leaving them to it. But she didn’t. It would be unfair. As a mother, she knew how hard it was to draw the line between living your life for your children and giving them the ultimate power over your life. There was a balance, and poor Hugh needed help finding that balance.
She would help. If it was the last thing she did.
‘Don’t be silly, Daddy,’ Jane said. ‘I don’t feel left out at all. It’s just that I know all your friends. If I’d known you were meeting work people, I wouldn’t have bothered to come. Which branch are you working in?’ she asked Leonie.
Those last two sentences clarified matters for Leonie. It was obvious that Hugh hadn’t told his kids who she was or that they were going to meet her today. Either that, or Jane was determined not to acknowledge the existence of any woman in her father’s life and was therefore casting Leonie in the role of an unattractive colleague her father took pity on and brought out occasionally. And calling him ‘Daddy’! Most kids got over the Daddy stage when they went to big school and moved on to a bored-sounding Dad.