by Hilary Boyd
‘Me too. I really like Iain. And I don’t want Mum to be alone, not at her age.’
‘Maybe they’ll work it out,’ Jack said, all the while hoping, with every cell in his body, that they would not.
‘Mum didn’t seem to think so.’
Jack’s thoughts were whirring. He wasn’t really paying attention to what his daughter was saying.
‘Are you coming down this weekend?’ Eve was asking.
For a moment Jack couldn’t remember what he was doing this second, let alone at the weekend. ‘Umm … No. Maybe the following one.’ Although, by then, he thought, everything in mine and Lisa’s life will have changed irrevocably. ‘I’ve got a seventieth on Saturday,’ he hurried on. ‘You remember Peter Tillotsen? He ran Reuters in Bucharest for years. Should be fun. All the usual suspects will be there.’
‘Not really,’ Eve replied. ‘I remember bonkers Howard and that giant American guy, the one who bought me the gumball machine for my thirteenth birthday … Sorry, better go, Dad. I can hear Mairi.’
Jack sat at his desk in his study in Queen’s Park and mulled over what he had just heard. Stella and Iain … She was upset, Eve said. Which meant she must still love him? Jack didn’t know what to think.
He had said nothing to Lisa yet. Not because he was avoiding the issue – however much he was dreading telling her, he was still desperate to do it, to get it over with. The words he intended to use were on a well-rehearsed loop, burning a hole in every conversation he had with his wife and making him feel like the cruellest person in the world.
But she hadn’t been well on Monday – a passing stomach bug laying her low. Then on Tuesday and Wednesday she was on a shoot in Bournemouth, arriving back late and exhausted. And this morning she had disarmed him, proudly showed him the dress she’d bought for Tilly’s party and waiting expectantly for his approval. So it would have to be Sunday, now, after the party. He tried to imagine the relief he would feel when he finally told her the truth.
His friend’s seventieth would be a glam, tinselled affair, if he knew Tilly. It was being held in a private dining room above a trendy restaurant in Covent Garden. The ageing-hack contingent would be infused, thank God, with Tilly’s wife’s mates in the fashion world, where she was a star designer, and her knock-on connections with the celebrities she dressed.
Jack was shaved and showered and had changed into his blue suit, a white Paul Smith shirt – edged down the front and around the buttonholes with navy – and his new tan brogues with the long toes. Lisa wanted him to wear a tie, too, but Tilly was not sartorially concerned – ironic, given his wife’s line of work. His clothes were always creased and rumpled, as if he’d been trapped in a drier-cycle set to ‘Hot’.
He waited downstairs for Lisa, distracting himself from the unnerving thought that this was probably the last time he and his wife would be going to a party together by scrolling through Facebook on his mobile. Catching up, as he rarely did, with all his friends’ posts. Part of him would have liked to join in, to find his own short videos, or inspiring quotes, or right-on campaigns for the liberation of the oppressed around the globe. Something that would stir debate or make people laugh. But he seldom got around to it and, when he did, it proved more effort than it was worth.
He looked at the time: seventeen minutes past seven. The taxi would be here in a minute. In fact, as he looked at his screen, it lit up with an incoming text from the driver.
‘Lisa!’ He got to his feet and went to stand at the bottom of the stairs. ‘How’s it going up there? Taxi’s on its way.’
No response. He listened, then called again, ‘Lisa?’ There was no sound from upstairs. No hairdryer or taps running or the music – Ed Sheeran, Sam Smith, Rita Ora – she always listened to when she was doing her intricate make-up. Just an eerie silence.
Jack began to mount the stairs. Then he heard it, the sound of his wife crying quietly, the intermittent sobs seeping out on to the landing like soft plops of rain.
Opening the bedroom door, he found her curled up on the bed, her body wrapped in the pink-and-blue mohair throw that usually sat folded over the foot of the bed. From what he could see, his wife was dressed only in a black bra and knickers. The strappy red organza dress she’d bought for the party was still hanging on the outside of the built-in wardrobe.
When he entered the room, she didn’t turn and made no indication that she’d heard him at all. He hurried over and sat on the bed, resting his hand gently on her bare shoulder. ‘What on earth’s the matter, sweetheart?’
She turned her tear-stained face to him, staring up at him but not speaking, then blinked and raised a crumpled tissue to her eyes.
‘What is it, Lisi? Tell me.’ Jack felt suddenly anxious. His wife’s blue eyes were so huge, so luminous with tears and what seemed like overwhelming misery. Has she guessed? he wondered, his gut clenching.
Still gazing at him wretchedly, choking back more tears, she finally said, ‘I can’t say it, Jack. I just can’t say it.’
‘Say what?’ Jack’s tone was fierce with fright. ‘For God’s sake, Lisa …’
His wife pulled herself up, gathering the throw around her shoulders, and sat, slumped, her long legs crossed. She lifted her blonde hair off her neck and twirled it, one-handed, in a rope, which she then let unravel slowly down her back. She wouldn’t look at him.
Jack’s phone buzzed and he grabbed it impatiently from his suit pocket. ‘Hi … Can you hang on, please? I’ll be down in a minute.’ He turned back to the heap on the bed and took her in his arms.
‘Tell me,’ he whispered into her freshly washed hair.
He felt Lisa take a fluttery breath as she sank into his embrace, then she raised her eyes to his again. Now he saw panic.
‘Oh, Jack. You’re going to hate me,’ she began, her voice shaky with tears. ‘It’s your worst, worst nightmare.’ She stopped. She didn’t need to say another word. Jack knew, in that moment, what it was that she couldn’t bring herself to tell him.
There was silence. When he spoke it was as if the words were being dragged reluctantly from the very bottom of his soul.
‘You’re pregnant,’ he said, and Lisa’s body began to shake with fresh, uncontrollable sobs.
55
Stella held her little granddaughter in her arms and watched as Eve undid the ribbon from around the silver-tissue-wrapped present. It was lunchtime. Stella had left Hammersmith in a rush – she hadn’t been able to get to sleep again last night, then she’d crashed out and overslept, got caught up in the Saturday morning traffic going through the South London suburbs. She felt scratchy and disoriented. It had been a terrible week.
Now she waited for her daughter to draw out the soft navy cashmere poncho from the tissue. Arthur was outside with his father, raking up leaves and taking them down to the bottom of the garden, where they were building a bonfire. Arthur had tolerated the baby, so far, although he had apparently said to Eve earlier, ‘Now Bibi’s here, Mumma, you can go back to the ’opital and have the baby put back in your tummy.’ When Eve had said that wasn’t possible, he’d looked crestfallen.
‘Oh, Mum! It’s perfect,’ Eve exclaimed, immediately pulling the soft wool over her head, releasing her bright red ponytail from the neck and snuggling into it. ‘I can breastfeed under it if we’re out. You’re a genius.’
Stella smiled. ‘My thoughts exactly. I’m jealous, it looks so cosy.’ Mairi gave a hiccup, her little face screwing up in a comical grimace. She stroked her cheek, watched her dark button eyes squinting at her and wondered what she could see. When she looked up, Eve was eyeing her consideringly.
‘So what happened with Iain, Mum? I thought you two were on track to move in together?’
‘I thought we were, too.’
Stella, weakened by the previous days spent crying and railing against her own stupidity, and against Jack and all he stood for, had no energy left to dissemble. What did it matter what Eve thought, or anyone else, for that matter? She had well and truly burned her br
idges.
Taking a deep breath, she said, ‘He thinks me and your dad are in love with each other.’
Eve laughed as she got up to retrieve her baby from Stella’s arms. ‘Ha! Seriously? Why on earth would he think that?’
Stella hesitated. ‘Maybe because it’s true,’ she replied slowly. Over the past week, in the lonely silence of her flat, her thoughts in turmoil over Iain’s departure from her life, Stella had finally come to a quiet acceptance about her feelings for Jack.
Eve’s eyes widened. ‘Mum! What are you saying? You and Dad …?’
Stella nodded tiredly.
‘Wait, what? Seriously? Are you telling me you and Dad are having an affair?’
‘Not an affair, no. Although … we have kissed.’
Eve frowned. Then Stella watched the light slowly dawning in her daughter’s eyes. She sat down again, still wearing the poncho, although the kitchen was hot, Mairi beginning to wriggle against her breast.
‘Jonny’s memorial, when you both got drunk,’ Eve said, her mind clearly working. ‘You and Dad …?’
Stella winced and bit her lip, wishing herself a million miles from her daughter’s astonished stare, but knowing it would be impossible to explain that night to anyone.
‘God, Mum, what were you thinking? I don’t understand.’
Stella didn’t reply. She didn’t know what to say.
‘What about Lisa?’ Eve asked. ‘Does she know?’
‘I’m not sure what your father’s told her.’
Shaking her head in bewilderment, Eve said, ‘OK. Let’s back up a minute. Jonny’s memorial was two months ago. So you’ve been …’ she shook her head again, ‘you’ve been, what, falling in love ever since?’ She gave a short laugh. ‘I don’t know what to say, Mum. Honestly, I’m gobsmacked.’
Stella felt like she had on the night Eve found her in the bushes, drunk, at one in the morning. And, like then, she wasn’t sure if Eve was angry or not.
What would it be like, she wondered, to have your parents get together after spending your entire childhood biting each other’s heads off? She had no experience of parents, in the plural. Her darkly handsome father – the image gleaned only from photographs – died the summer she turned four. She had no recollection of him. According to her mother, the three of them had been on holiday in Cornwall. Robert, thirty-two at the time and a successful travel writer, had been swimming in the freezing June sea. But as he walked up the beach in the sunshine, he keeled over. Patsy always used the exact same phrase when recounting his death: ‘He just slid gracefully on to the sand and died,’ she would say. Which Stella had found almost romantic as a child. Apparently he’d suffered a massive brain aneurysm and was dead before he hit the beach. Patsy never looked at another man, or at least not in her daughter’s presence. The mould was broken. So she could not imagine what it was like to have your parents fall in love in middle age like a couple of secretive teenagers.
‘If you and Dad were planning to be together, why on earth did you pretend you were going to live with Iain?’ Eve asked, her tone unmistakably disapproving.
‘We weren’t planning to be together. In fact, we both agreed it was way too late for us,’ she stated, twisting her fingers together in her lap. ‘And if Iain hadn’t noticed something was wrong, it would probably have come to nothing. Iain and I would have moved in together and your father would have stuck it out with Lisa. He might still do so. We have no plans.’
‘Is that what Dad’s doing? Sticking it out?’
‘Things have been tricky for a while, I think … not because of me.’
Eve shrugged. ‘He never said.’ Stella’s heart contracted at her daughter’s hurt expression and knew she was guilty of the same omission. ‘I wish you’d told me, Mum,’ she went on. ‘All this going on under my nose …’
‘I was embarrassed. You’re my daughter.’
‘But I thought we’d got so much closer over the summer. I thought we’d begun to talk about stuff more.’
‘We have! And it’s been wonderful for me,’ Stella cried, desperate for Eve to understand. ‘I would have told you, sweetheart, if there had been anything concrete to tell. But it’s been so confusing. I still don’t understand what I really feel and I don’t think your dad does either.’ She paused. ‘It might all come to nothing.’
‘You two,’ Eve said after a moment, shaking her head like a disappointed parent. ‘I give up, I really do.’
It wasn’t only Eve, Stella thought, who wanted to give up.
56
Jack was numb with disbelief when he opened his eyes early on Sunday morning and glanced across at his sleeping wife. Her features were still blotchy, her face tear-stained. For the first time since he’d known her, Lisa had not removed the make-up she’d so carefully applied for the party – her false eyelashes were still in place, her eyes and cheeks smudged dark with mascara. The clock read 07:01 and he reckoned he’d barely been asleep for three hours.
As he’d spoken the word ‘pregnant’ the night before, and listened to his wife’s distraught sobbing, he waited in vain for the denial that never came. It was as if his whole future were poised, suspended in time, before being crushed by a very big rock, which he knew would slowly drain the life out of him as it pressed him to the earth.
‘How can you be pregnant?’ he’d asked when he could gather his thoughts again and her sobs had fractionally subsided. ‘We always use a condom.’
Lisa had seemed angry at his question. ‘It’s not a hundred per cent, Jack. Everyone knows that.’
‘Yes, but it’s pretty unlikely, isn’t it?’ He was trying to explain it to himself as much as seek an explanation from her.
Lisa sat up and brushed her hair off her face, sniffing indignantly. ‘What does it matter how it happened?’ She stared defiantly into his face. ‘The fact is, I’m having a baby.’
She was waiting for him to say something, and he knew he ought to rise to the occasion, behave in the way that is every man’s duty on hearing he’s to become a father. He knew he ought to embrace her and tell her he loved her; say, ‘It’s wonderful news’, ‘I’m over the moon’. But he was screaming inside and the words just wouldn’t come.
He did, at least, hug her, though she was stiff in his arms. ‘I’m sorry, Lisa,’ he said, ‘I’m just a bit shocked, that’s all.’
Her face crumpled. ‘I know. I know you really, really didn’t want a child, Jack. I didn’t do it on purpose.’
Neither of them spoke for a while, the two of them physically together but mentally miles apart. Then, pulling away, Lisa struggled out of his embrace and climbed off the bed. She stalked to the other side of the room to rip her pink dressing gown from the hook on the back of the door and wrap it round her body – still encased only in a lacy, black balcony bra and a minuscule matching thong – with brisk, economic efficiency. Then she turned on him, tossing her hair back over her shoulders and drawing herself up, arms tightly crossed.
‘But you know what? You don’t have to have anything to do with it, Jack,’ she said, her voice high-pitched with hurt. ‘I can manage perfectly well on my own.’
Her words temporarily jolted Jack out of his selfishness. But before he could speak, Lisa went on, ‘I’m going to have this baby, whether you like it or not. So don’t even dare start on about abortions.’
‘Christ, Lisi, I wasn’t going to,’ Jack objected. ‘Do you think I don’t know how much you wanted a baby?’
She gave an angry shrug and continued to glare down at him as he sat on the bed, still in his suit and Paul Smith shirt, all ready for the party they would never now attend. Her eyes were uncharacteristically flinty and cold. Does she want me to lie? he wondered. Make out I’m suddenly jumping for joy at the prospect of being a father again at bloody sixty-five?
‘So?’ she challenged him. ‘What are you going to do? Are you going to be part of our child’s life or not? Because I can walk out of that door right now and you need never see either of us, ever again.�
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Jack could see she was breathing fast, her words, he was sure, just bravado. He took a deep breath. The fight, such as it was, had gone out of him. Stepping over the shards of his dreams of being free, he finally managed to do the decent thing. Dragging himself to his feet, he went over to Lisa.
‘Come here,’ he said gently, as he drew her into his arms. She was cold and shaking, and he realized what a huge thing this was for her, to be having a baby when she had given up all hope and when she knew how much Jack was against the idea. He kissed the top of her head. ‘How far along is the baby?’ he asked.
The eagerness he saw in her eyes at his interest was painful to witness. This is only the beginning, he thought. A long road stretched ahead of him, where he would have to constantly edit his thoughts around his wife and pretend to a joy he was very far from feeling. Someone had once told him that if you said something over and over again, your mind begins to believe it’s true. Jack didn’t need to repeat over and over that he would love his baby – he had no doubts on that score, despite his dismay at its conception. But he was considerably less certain that he could bring himself to love its mum with the same conviction. A commitment that Lisa, as the mother of his child, would surely deserve.
Last night they hadn’t talked about the baby, beyond establishing that Lisa was six weeks pregnant. He had known he couldn’t say what she wanted him to say, or feel what she wanted him to feel, so he had said nothing. She had been too upset to speak.
Jack had texted Tilly to say that his wife had been taken ill and that they wouldn’t make it to the party. He had then opened a bottle of red wine and poured two glasses, before realizing his wife would not be drinking hers. Lisa, huddled in her sweatpants and a grey jumper, a tissue wadded in her hand, had barely picked at the cheese on toast Jack cobbled together for supper. Then they sat miserably side by side on the sofa in front of the television, watching a lurid, shouty talent show that neither could take in.
Later, as Jack lay in bed waiting to drop off, he prayed he would wake up in the morning and find it was all just a bad dream. But he barely slept and didn’t dream, so there was no nightmare to dispel with a relieved laugh. This was his reality now.