by Hilary Boyd
‘Stella, don’t hang up, please. I need to see you. Something’s happened.’
‘What’s happened? Are the children OK?’
‘Oh, God, sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you. This has nothing to do with the family.’
‘Is this just a ruse to meet up, Jack? Because I really don’t appreciate it if it is.’
There was silence on the other end of the line. ‘It’s not a ruse, Stella, I promise. I just really don’t know what to do.’
The note of desperation sounded so genuine that Stella found herself agreeing to his request. ‘OK, a coffee, then.’ She suggested the café/sandwich bar near the fire station, where she and Annette sometimes met when they were tired of the upmarket trendiness of so many Shepherd’s Bush establishments.
She steeled herself as she sat waiting for Jack in the small café – almost empty at mid-morning except for a pair of older ladies enjoying a whispered gossip at the table in the corner. He was not going to get to her this time. She would listen and help if she could – whatever the emergency was – then she would just walk away. But as soon as she saw him striding along the pavement and pushing open the door, his tweed coat flapping despite the dank February day, she felt her heartbeat quicken uncomfortably.
Jack looked like a ghost this morning, as if he hadn’t slept in a month. He frowned as he took a seat opposite her at the small table, still huddled in his coat, his hands deep in his pockets. She listened, mouth open, as he blurted out a jumbled account of the previous evening.
‘Not your baby?’ she said, almost in a whisper, when he finally stopped.
He nodded.
‘Are you sure?’
‘As sure as Lisa is, which is pretty sure.’ He gave a tired shake of his head. ‘As I’ve said a thousand times, but no one ever believes me, we always used a—’
‘OK, OK.’ Stella held up her hand to interrupt him. She didn’t want images of Jack having sex with Lisa stuck in her head. ‘So what are you going to do? Does this Greg guy know?’ As she spoke, she was aware of a small glow developing around her heart, where previously there had been nothing but ache. Not Jack’s baby, she kept repeating to herself, hardly able to believe what she was hearing.
Jack’s eyes rested on her. ‘No, he doesn’t. She intended to tell him months ago, then he didn’t show.’
‘But surely she’s going to?’
He nodded. ‘She left him a message, asking to meet up … very reluctantly.’
‘Which he might be equally reluctant to answer.’
‘Which, indeed, he might not answer at all. In which case, I’m fucked … screwed … Sorry, I can’t think of a polite way of saying just how fucked I am.’
She couldn’t help smiling and she saw a ghost of a smile flit across his face too. ‘What does Lisa expect you to do?’
‘Well, in the absence of Greg riding up on his white charger and carrying her off to his fairytale castle on the hill, I can hardly leave her. Not two months before the baby’s born.’
‘No, you can’t do that,’ Stella agreed. ‘Poor Lisa, she seems to have got herself into a right old mess.’
Jack raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m amazed you can be so understanding.’
‘I’m sure you’re furious with her – and quite rightly so. But it must be really scary being in her position.’
Jack didn’t speak for a moment, he just gazed off into the middle distance. ‘Honestly, Stella? I feel more baffled than angry. I’m absolutely shredded by what she’s done. You don’t realize how deep it’s gone. I’ve painted the spare room primrose for the baby, bought a pram the size of Windsor Castle – and twice as expensive. I’ve seen the baby’s little outline on the monitor and believed it to be my own flesh and blood. I actually went to a couple of antenatal classes …’ He paused, grabbing his cup of coffee and swigging the remains in one gulp, then banging it back in the saucer. ‘The effort I made to want this child – I even partially succeeded – and all the while it’s not even mine.’
They sat in silence. The place was filling up with people ordering sandwiches and tea, cans of fizzy drinks and sweet pastries, the sweating, middle-aged Portuguese owner greeting his regulars with genial banter as he quickly scooped fillings from the square white plastic containers in the food display cabinet.
‘Greg’s got to be told,’ Stella said.
‘I know. But even if it is his, and even if he believes it is – a pretty big leap of faith on both counts – he’s still not likely to dump his partner and come running to Lisa’s side in time for the birth, is he? So that leaves me playing dad for the foreseeable.’ Jack covered his face with his hands for a moment, then let them drop and gave her a resigned look. ‘I can’t do it, Stella. I can’t stay with Lisa and bring up another man’s child. If I loved her it might be different …’
The implication hung in the air between them, and she remembered the passionate declaration he’d made to her in the cottage kitchen. She knew she ought not to be thinking like this, not with all this chaos and so many things to sort out, but the soft glow around her heart refused to go away.
‘Until Greg knows, you can’t tell what he’ll do.’
Jack nodded. ‘Lisa’s being all noble and dramatic at the moment, saying she doesn’t need me or Greg and that she’ll manage just fine on her own. Saying I needn’t have anything more to do with them. Which is ridiculous. She has no idea how much help a mother with a new baby needs. Look at Evie.’
Silence.
‘God … I don’t know what to say, Jack.’
He closed his eyes and sat very still. When he opened them again, she saw a flicker of his old resilience. ‘We can work it out, can’t we?’
Stella didn’t know quite what he meant. Is he talking about us? she wondered. Or about Lisa and the baby? Or about me helping him sort things out with Lisa?
‘There must be some practical solution you can both agree on, if Greg doesn’t come through,’ she said, her pragmatism an attempt to fend off what she was trying not to feel: hope.
Jack’s face was unreadable. ‘Maybe. I just don’t know where to start.’ Then he smiled at her. It was a hesitant smile, taking nothing for granted, but so tender it softened the anger in his blue eyes. For a moment she met his gaze and they stared at each other in silence. Stella found she was holding her breath.
As she made her way home, her head spinning, her heart thumping, Stella knew one moment of clarity had emerged from the confusing hour she’d just spent with Jack: she would definitely not be having sex with Peregrine Galbraith. She’d been fooling herself that she could have a relationship with the man – with any man, except Jack, even if that didn’t work out and she ended up alone. Perry had been no more than a very charming port in a storm.
65
Jack could see just how much effort Lisa had made with her appearance as she shrugged on her coat and wound her pashmina round her neck. She looked beautiful tonight. But it made him sad to see the vulnerability in her face, the insecurity beneath her tentative resolve. He quailed to think of what she had to face.
Lisa seemed almost shy as she waved an awkward goodbye from across the room. And Jack could understand why. But as he saw her off to meet the man with whom she’d had a two-night stand, he felt more like a worrying father than a cuckolded husband. It surprised him, his lack of jealousy. But he was also relieved that he wasn’t prey to that gnawing, raw, crazed torment he had so recently experienced when he heard about Stella and Peregrine, shafts of which still left him lying rigid with sleeplessness at night.
‘I don’t know how long I’ll be,’ Lisa said, as she opened the front door.
‘Have you got your key?’ Jack asked. A stupid question, Lisa always had her key.
She nodded, throwing him a wish-me-luck look that neither of them could articulate.
Greg had agreed to meet Lisa in a gastropub they both knew, a ten-minute walk from the house. She hadn’t told him why she needed to see him, just that she really did. And although he�
�d been surprised, apparently he hadn’t objected to the rendezvous. Or so Lisa told Jack.
As soon as the door was shut, Jack went to the kitchen and poured himself a large Scotch. He was restless and thoroughly anxious. The next hour was crucial. Not only would it determine the baby’s and Lisa’s futures, but also his own – even Stella’s, he still hoped.
He thought back to that moment in the café. God, how he loved her. Looking into those beautiful eyes, he had felt the previous doubts about his competency to sustain a relationship fall away. Stella was his soulmate; it would be different with her, if he was given that chance.
Jack waited. He wanted to get out of the house, take a good brisk walk in the cold night air and disperse his worries. But he didn’t want to be out when Lisa came home. Greg might take one look at her and run for his life. He might not believe the baby was his – Jack was pretty sure he wouldn’t, if a woman suddenly pitched up and claimed two nights in the sack had made him a father. And even if Greg did believe her, would he necessarily want to get involved? Perhaps, Jack thought, if he had feelings for her.
Jack clutched desperately at this thin skein of hope. Lisa did admit they’d been attracted to each other from the start. But it was a work environment and they were both spoken for. They had known each other a year or so when the show took a team up to Yorkshire in the summer to film a celebrity-packed sports event in aid of a disabled children’s charity, and she and Greg had been ‘thrown together’, as Lisa put it. She had clearly been nervous telling him the details, but Jack, knowing that almost the same thing had happened with him and Stella, could not, in all conscience, protest.
If she comes back quickly, Jack thought, as he tried to concentrate on another episode of the Vietnam documentary, it’s not a good sign. It was eight o’clock and she had been gone an hour already. Maybe Greg would be late. Maybe it would take her a while to pluck up the courage to tell him. Surely she’d be home by now, he thought, if he’d told her outright to fuck off. He was driving himself mad with various scenarios. Stella always used to tell him, ‘Never make assumptions; assumptions make fools of us all.’ But it was hard not to. He turned off the television – he would have to watch the episode again another time because he hadn’t taken in a single word.
Jack wondered, as he sat there in the silence, whether Stella would consider being with him, regardless of the baby. It was what he wanted more than anything in the world, to make it work with her again. He didn’t see why his future with Stella should rest solely on Greg’s willingness – or not – to take responsibility for his child. For a moment he considered calling her. But he knew he should wait.
It was nearly eleven thirty when Jack finally heard Lisa’s key in the door. He’d spent the evening drinking too much whisky and munching his way through a jumbo bag of cheese and onion crisps. He was nearly asleep in front of his computer, but he jumped up to welcome her, then waited, heart in his mouth, as Lisa slung her keys in the bowl on the shelf by the door. She put her bag down on the floor, slowly took off her coat, which she hung on one of the hooks on the wall, then sat herself down on the sofa, still with her scarf on, all without looking at him or giving him the slightest clue as to how her evening had gone.
Jack came and sat beside her. ‘Well?’
She turned to look at him and he could see the tiredness in her blue eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ she said softly.
A million questions rose to Jack’s lips, but he held back, not wanting to pester her. It nearly killed him.
‘He didn’t believe me at first,’ Lisa went on. ‘Or maybe it was more that he couldn’t get his head round the possibility that he was suddenly about to be a father. But I think he accepted I wasn’t lying.’
She fell silent. ‘He’s split up with Elaine. Last month.’
‘OK … So he’s on his own?’ Jack ventured.
Lisa nodded. ‘At first he was angry. He asked me what I wanted, like I was some money-grubbing tart …’ The rest of the sentence was incomprehensible as she burst into tears. ‘Oh, Jack, it was so humiliating.’
He pulled her into his arms and let her cry. After a while she sat up again. ‘But we talked and he calmed down, and I think he realized I was just telling him because he has a right to know.’
Jack, wired to the hilt, could not wait any longer for the steady drip, drip of information to deliver the answers he needed. ‘Does he want to be involved, then?’
Lisa raised a cynical eyebrow at his question. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? It’d let you off the hook, right?’ She moved away from him, her shoulders stiff. ‘I’ve told you, Jack. You’re not responsible for me or the baby. I’ll get out of your hair as soon as it’s born, go and stay with my dad for a while, then work something out.’
‘Don’t, Lisa. You’re certainly not doing that. I’m just trying to find out what you and Greg decided … if anything.’
She didn’t reply for a minute, just sat there, sniffing pathetically.
‘He said … he … he did say he would see me again.’
‘Oh, right.’ Patronizing bastard, Jack thought. It was good news, though, surely?
‘But, you know, it’s awkward, me being so pregnant … and living with you. He said he couldn’t walk me home in case you were lying in wait to duff him up.’
Jack liked the selfish wuss less and less with every passing minute, but he said, ‘I hope you set him straight.’
She nodded and he saw the first glimmer of a smile. ‘I know I’m making him out to be a bit of a shit, Jack, but he’s really not. I think he was just blown away by what I told him.’ She sighed. ‘I like him a lot. He makes me laugh.’
Jack felt the first and only frisson of jealousy, but tried to ignore the implication that Lisa hadn’t laughed much with him, although it was probably true.
‘This isn’t a loaded question, Lisa,’ he said after a short silence, ‘but do you think you and Greg could ever make a go of it?’
Lisa shook her head, but the movement was uncertain. ‘I don’t know. It’s not exactly the best way to start a relationship, is it? But we do get on. And he doesn’t have kids yet, although he wants them, he says. He and Elaine were doing IVF, but it wasn’t working. I think that’s what split them up.’
She yawned. ‘I need to go to bed,’ she said, and Jack knew he couldn’t badger her with more questions to which there were no definite answers, anyway. He would just have to be patient and stop expecting a magic bullet that would have Greg running joyfully into Lisa’s arms, scooping up her and the baby to live happily ever after – in Australia, preferably.
66
Eve breathed in the sea air, relishing the fresh salt smell on the evening breeze, the April sun warm on her face. She stopped on the sand and swung her arms wide, threw her head back and stood there for a moment in silence, gazing at the horizon. Eric was walking ahead, with Mairi’s dark head bobbing up and down on his back in the BabyBjörn, Arthur beside him, kicking the trail of water from the receding wave with his welly boots and laughing as the spray shot up. He was already soaked, but it didn’t matter.
As she stood watching her family, she wondered how her mother was getting on. She had been in such an edgy mood since she arrived at the house for Easter the previous week. Eve knew why, of course: Lisa’s baby.
Joshua – Josh – had been born three days ago, the Thursday after Easter. Two weeks early, but none the worse for that, according to Jack. And Eve had still not worked out what was going on in her mum’s mind when it came to the child. All through the pregnancy she’d barely talked about it, saying it was Jack’s mess. But she seemed to soak up every scrap of information Eve casually dropped into the conversation. Then, as the birth got closer, Stella became more and more tense.
‘I thought you said Greg was stepping up to the plate,’ her mum had said when Eve told her Jack wouldn’t be down for the holiday.
‘He is. Him and Dad. They’ll both be there.’
Her mum had frowned at this. ‘That’s p
retty weird, don’t you think?’
‘Well, given the circumstances …’ Eve thought the whole thing was totally weird, but she wasn’t going to go there with her mum in such a wound-up state.
‘It seems your father’s intending to be involved with the baby, then.’ Her mother’s voice was flat.
‘I think so, sort of. I told you, he’s said Lisa can stay in the house till the baby’s a bit older, then they’ll sell it and divvy up the proceeds.’
‘So he’ll still be living with her.’ Her mother’s face was a picture of jealous disapproval.
‘No, Dad’ll be living in the cottage. Greg’s going to be in and out at Queen’s Park and he’s hired a maternity nurse for the first six weeks so Lisa won’t be alone. She says he’s earning a mint at Amazon.’
‘Why can’t Lisa live with him, then? The whole thing’s a bloody shambles. That poor baby won’t know whether it’s coming or going.’
‘Mum, don’t be snippy. They’re doing their best in a tricky situation.’ Eve had been patient. ‘It’s Lisa’s home. And she and Greg aren’t properly living together. They may never be. I don’t think Dad entirely trusts Greg to do the right thing. Lisa is his wife, don’t forget.’
‘Oh, I hadn’t forgotten,’ Stella had snapped, and flounced out of the kitchen. Eve, receiving a bewildered look from Eric as he collided with his mother-in-law in the doorway, had felt sorry for her.
Now Eve’s phone rang. ‘Hey, Dad, how’s it going?’
‘Yeah, good, good. Little Joshua seems to be behaving. The maternity nurse – who looks gloriously like Hattie Jacques, although you won’t know who that is – has Lisa on a terrifying regime of self-improvement, which Lisa’s lapping up. You know the thing, cold baths and lumpy porridge, hospital corners and bed before nine.’
Eve chuckled. ‘I’m looking forward to meeting the baby. And what about Grisly Greg?’
Her father harrumphed. ‘He’s around. I haven’t warmed to the fellow, but Lisa appears to like him, which is all that matters. I’ve left them to it and come down to the cottage for a few days.’