by Terry Tyler
Celebration for my twenty-fourth birthday in August would have felt inappropriate because of Robert and Izzy’s circumstances. I’ve grown out of the getting-rat-arsed-in-clubs sort of do that my old friends still go in for, anyway. The Lanchester Estates bash on the boat apart, I’m not into whooping it up anymore. Instead, I spent a few days with Robert down near Hastings in East Sussex; I wanted to be somewhere quiet where I could wear jogging gear and no make-up for the whole week, go on long beach walks, drink beer in proper old-fashioned pubs and eat fish and chips. It was bliss, and good for Robert, too. We’d walk miles and just talk, and do all the normal things people do when they love each other, without having to worry about anyone seeing us together.
On the way back we made a detour so we could call in on my cousin Caitlin. Letty was twenty months old and I was dying to see her; with my busy schedule I had to make do with photographs most of the time. Although she was my second cousin I thought of her as my niece, and Caitlin referred to me as ‘Auntie Erin’.
Caitlin and Ross were married by then, and lived in a sweet little house out near Epping Forest, courtesy of Grandpa Milton. She was one of the handful of people who knew that Robert and I were more than friends; it was good to be able to relax around the chosen few and be openly together instead of having to keep up the pretence, remembering not to hold hands, that sort of thing.
Caitlin looked frazzled when she answered the door and started saying things about Letty coming up for ‘the terrible twos’, smiling at me as if I had some sort of clue what she was talking about, the way mothers do. Actually, Caitlin was pretty good, and didn’t dominate our conversations with blow-by-blow accounts of Letty’s feeding/sleeping/shitting timetable, as do so many.
Ross was out at work; the cosy living room had the air of being given over completely to the accommodation of a child. Brightly coloured boxes filled with toys were everywhere, and I got the impression the contents had been all over the floor only ten minutes before we arrived.
I’m telling you about this visit because something strange happened to me during it. I told Robert about it on the way home.
He said I might have an overdeveloped sense of intuition about approaching doom because of the extreme amount of emotional upheaval to which I’ve been subjected in my life. I wasn’t quite sure if this meant he thought I was nuts and just imagining it, or not. Anyway, I’ll tell you what it was.
Letty was hiding round the corner when we came in. Caitlin managed to coax her out, and within about ten minutes she was nodding to say that yes, she knew I was Auntie Erin and she remembered me from my last visit. She sat on my knee and played with my hair and it was all very wonderful; I loved cuddling her. She was such a beautiful child, her hair a mass of thick, shiny, dark curls, her mouth a perfect dark pink rosebud. With her huge, dark eyes she was a proper gorgeous Hever girl, just like her mother, grandmother and great aunt.
She giggled with Cait and me, but was shy with Robert.
We got out the wedding photos; it had taken place in April, and I’d attended on my own. Letty kept pointing to the pictures of herself, and saying that her mummy looked pretty in her dress. Caitlin said to her, “one day you’ll get married, too, darling, and you can wear a pretty white dress and look like a princess!”
“Or you can just look like a princess anyway, never mind all the getting married stuff,” I said, squeezing her and shoving my nose in her baby soft hair. Then she started smiling at Robert. He leant forward and tickled her under the chin and she loved it. She put her arms out, and he picked her up; she was happy to sit on his knee.
Caitlin said, “Don’t listen to your cynical old Auntie Erin! You’ll marry a lovely handsome prince, just like your daddy!”
“Oh, don’t start her off on all that Cinderella complex stuff this young, for goodness sake, Cait!” I said, and we were all laughing about that, which was when it happened.
Letty turned and put her dear little pink hand out to stroke Robert’s face. She looked at him adoringly, and said, “Marry you.”
Of course, we laughed about that too, and made jokes about Robert having an admirer, and Letty chortled because we were all making a fuss of her, though ten minutes later she got bored with the grown-ups and wandered off to find her dollies. Nothing odd at all.
Except that I had this weird feeling of fear.
I know that Letty is going to bring me heartache.
In short, I know that she will, indeed, marry the man I love.
There are twenty-six years separating them. Less than Jim and Raine.
I loved Robert for not laughing at me when I told him what I’d felt.
He said, “I can’t imagine I will ever want anyone but you,” but I know that one day he will.
However, that is the future, and life is made up of joy, pain and everything in between. While I’m building for the future I must live in the moment, too, because every moment is lost forever once it is past, and every one is precious.
I felt very weird that day, though.
There was another reason why I felt weird, though I didn’t cotton on to it for a couple of weeks.
I was pregnant.
It must have happened some time around my birthday.
I’d swapped from the twenty-one-day to the mini pill; I was vaguely aware that I’d forgotten to take it for a couple of days when I changed over, but no one ever thinks that will make any difference, do they? I was so busy, rushing around and trying to do six things at once, as usual. I was never very regular, and took little notice of my monthly inconvenience; I didn’t suffer much. But I suddenly thought, around the second week in September: hang on a minute. I haven’t had the curse for ages. I sat at my desk with my calendar, rifling through my memory.
The last time I remembered being encumbered was when I’d been to Cecilia’s for dinner, on Saturday, the second of August. It was a formal do; I’d been disappointed because I was too bloated to wear my favourite LBD. Now, it was Wednesday, the tenth of September.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fucketty-fuck.
I counted the days on the calendar. Yes, there were way too many of them.
I needed one of those pregnancy testing kit thingies, and I needed it now.
I trusted Blanche with almost everything, but not this. If she thought I was pregnant, she wouldn’t be able to resist telling someone, and then there would be all the speculation about whether or not Robert was the father—no.
I picked up my bag and flew out, telling her I’d be twenty minutes max.
The short drive into town took forever. Drum, drum, went my fingers on the steering wheel at traffic lights. I was about to have a cigarette, but then I remembered: wasn’t smoking especially dangerous in the early stages?
I screeched to a stop in the car park near Boots and zoomed into the shop, but once I’d located the testing kits I hadn’t got a clue which one to choose.
I just stood and stared at them while they leered at me off the shelves. Pregnant, pregnant, pregnant. Lots of medical type symbols and pictures of women looking dead chuffed because they had huge stomachs.
In the end a very nice assistant came over to help me, no doubt alerted by my expression of panic and bewilderment. I told her I was nearly two weeks late, and needed to know immediately.
Immediately.
I couldn’t sit around for half an hour waiting.
“Try this one,” she said, “results in three minutes and you can get a second one at half price.”
“A second one?” My voice came out like a demented Minnie Mouse. “I’m not going to be this daft twice!”
She laughed. “No, I know. But sometimes the results are inconclusive, and people like to try again the next day.”
Inconclusive?
“I’ll take four,” Minnie Mouse squeaked again, as I followed her back to the counter and thrust my card at her.
“Don’t forget to read the instructions!” she called out behind me.
I hurled a bottle of w
ater down my neck on the journey back to ensure a full bladder, and as soon as I’d panicked my way back up in the lift and back through Blanche’s office with barely a smile of acknowledgment, I threw open the door of my private bathroom, gave the literature a cursory glance so I knew what sign I was looking for in the little window on the stick (I’m not very good with instructions), and pulled down my knickers, pondering that this was what had got me in this pickle in the first place.
A thick pink stripe for positive, a blank for negative. A negative could still mean a positive, and a pale hint of a stripe was inconclusive. It had better not be fucking inconclusive, I thought, I can’t go through this more than once.
It wasn’t. Within a couple of minutes, the big thick stripe was there for all to see. Bright pink and staring me in the face. I was pregnant.
Fuck!
Fuck!
How could I be pregnant? I needed to be in the office ten hours a day. I had business dinners to go to in the evenings. I had to travel up and down the country. Sometimes out of the country, and more so in the future, when all my new plans came to fruition.
I couldn’t take a baby with me.
Nannies. Oh yes, of course, people had nannies.
Maybe Hannah would look after it.
But what about when I was really big, seven months gone, and tired? Too tired to work those ten hour days?
Who would take care of my daddy’s company, then?
I threw the testing stick into the bin and walked slowly back to my desk. I sat back in my chair and put my feet up on my desk, admiring my long slim legs and neat little feet in their high-heeled Prada courts.
Didn’t people’s ankles get all horrible and swollen when they were pregnant?
What was I going to do when it started to show? Make an announcement, or just not say anything and leave them to make up their own stories about who the father was?
Oh yes. Robert. I’d forgotten. I’d have to tell him, wouldn’t I?
Then he’d start going on about marriage again.
Nope, not getting married.
Termination?
No way on this earth. No more death. Babies were hard to come by in our family.
I stared at the far wall. There was a big framed photo on it, of my mother and father, on holiday in Thailand. It was a beautiful, natural shot; they looked happy, relaxed, both laughing in the sunshine. Mum looked like a gorgeous Hawaiian girl, with her hair flowing over her shoulders, a big flower behind her ear. Dad looked like a handsome surfing dude. How I loved them. I’d had the photo enlarged and hung there as soon as the room became mine, so that I could see it whenever I looked up. Mummy and Daddy.
I smiled, and started to tingle all over. That was when it hit me. I was going to have a baby. My baby. My child. Our child. For Mum and Dad and Jaz and Izzy. And Grandpa Jasper, and Grandma Elizabeth, Uncle Alex and Great-Grandma Peggy. Part of our family.
A new Lanchester. Inside me. Made by me. Okay, yes, and Robert.
Wow!
Well, I wanted to experience everything in the world, didn’t I?
Motherhood! Okay, I’d have preferred to do the bungee jump and fly a plane first, but—
Harry for a boy, Annette for a girl. No. Didn’t really like the name Annette. I remembered Dad telling me that he wanted to call me Elizabeth, after his mother, but Mum said her daughter would not be an Elizabeth sort of person, and chose Erin for me. She was right. She knew me already, you see. I love my name. It’s short and unfussy, pretty if I want it to be, and kinda cool.
Oh, Mummy, I want you to see my baby, too. I want you to see that you were right, and I’m not an Elizabeth, I’m an Erin.
Daddy, my daddy, I want you to know your grandson. I’ll have a boy, just like you, and one day he’ll sit where I’m sitting, where you sat before me.
Since I took over Lanchester Estates, I think I’ve grown up quite a lot, a process that began when Jaz died. When Isabella sent me over to Norwich because she was scared I would take Phil away from her (as if), it was the best thing that could have happened to me. Away from all my friends, and home, my main focus became work, and I discovered that I loved it. I became fascinated by the art of creating a building, by the process of marketing, the understanding of the overall picture. I read, I observed, I learned. Within just a few months I’d taken over the staff meetings, and poor old Bedingfield couldn’t do a thing about it. I was delighted to discover that I possessed qualities of natural leadership, like Dad, and probably both my grandfathers, Jasper Lanchester Senior and Milton Hever. Knowing how good I was at what I did was such a thrill—and I became particularly grateful for another skill with which I’ve been blessed, i.e. the ability to keep work and my personal life separate. When I’m at work, that’s all I think about. Aside from the weeks immediately after Jaz died, I can switch off emotion about whatever else is going on. Yep, all those people snuffing it or walking out of my life or going bonkers has stood me in good stead. I had to cope at school, so I’ve coped at work too.
Today, however, I stared at a budget report that Ruth had put on my desk. I stared and stared, and the numbers weren’t painting a picture for me, like they usually do. They were just—numbers. I clicked onto my e-mails. Blanche filters the junk, so these were the ones I would want to see. An invitation to the christening of the show home on a new Lanchester estate in Aylesbury. Some posh gallery opening in Greenwich. Ah yes, I remembered, it was owned by the wife of a client for whom we built a leisure complex in King’s Lynn. I moved them into Blanche’s ‘tell them yes and stick it in the diary’ file, sorely tempted though I was to dump them elsewhere. There were five more e-mails that I apparently ought to look at, all since I went out for the pregnancy test. I didn’t click on any more of them, I just stared at the screen.
Today, I couldn’t do work. Today, I was having a baby.
I picked up my bag and sauntered out into Blanche’s office.
“Is there anything I absolutely have to do this afternoon?”
She smiled, brightly. A good girl, Blanche. She would switch off my computer and lights and clear up after me. I never had to think about a thing.
I was on my way towards the lift when I realised that not only had I waltzed off without actually waiting for her to answer my question, but also that I had left the testing stick in the bathroom bin and its packet in the basin. I zoomed back in and took care of it, then zoomed back out again. She still sat there, still smiling and poised to give me my answer. “No, there’s nothing you absolutely have to do this afternoon,” she said, looking at me oddly, I thought, though maybe that was just my imagination.
“Good! I’ve got stuff to take care of at home.” I glanced out into the corridor. “Is Mr Dudley in?” Mr Dudley, indeed. When did I ever call him that?
“He’s in a meeting with two of the architects.”
“Ah.” I felt as though she knew. “Will you tell him to call me when he’s free? On my mobile.”
Home, home, I couldn’t wait to get home. I didn’t even bother to locate Pat and pass the time of day with her like I normally did. I just went straight up to my bedroom and lay flat out on my bed.
Pregnant.
Baby.
I ran my hand over my stomach.
I was nothing if not practical. I did what had to be done. I phoned my doctor to make my first baby appointment, and spent the next couple of hours planning how I was going to make this thing work—and how I was going to tell Robert.
“I don’t know what your bloody problem is, Erin!” he said, once all the ecstatic lovey-dovey bit was over and he realised I still wasn’t going to marry him. “I know most people reckon it doesn’t matter these days, but it does to me, and it will to my family, and yours, too, and it probably will to our son or daughter at some point, as well! I want you, me and our child to have the same surname—and I don’t give a flying fuck if anyone thinks we were having an affair while Amy was alive, because we know we weren’t!”
“It’s only been fi
ve months since you lost her,” I said. “It’s a bit early to be knocking someone else up, isn’t it? What will her parents think? How can you go and see them and tell them that you’re marrying someone else who just happens to be pregnant, when to them it still seems like it happened this morning?”
That, he couldn’t argue with. “Okay, okay,” he said. “But tell me you’ll at least acknowledge our relationship to the rest of the world. I want to be proud that I’m going to be a father, not tiptoe about acting like we’ve done something wrong.”
It took me a long, long time to persuade him that if we did so, Amy’s parents would be bound to find out one way or another. Eventually I met him halfway; I agreed that he should go and tell them once I was past the first three months, during which time anything could happen. Once we knew our baby was safe, then we would tell them. There was no point in upsetting them before that.
What I didn’t tell him was that I had already decided my baby would be a Lanchester, not a Dudley, and I wasn’t having any truck with that ghastly hyphenated surname crap, either. I didn’t know how I would explain all that to him, how I needed this for my father and brother, but this was the way it was going to be, and nobody would dissuade me from it.
I knew I was having a boy. From the moment I got back to our family home and lay on my bed that first day, I knew my little Harry was growing inside me.
I didn’t want to be the last Lanchester. I wanted my son to go on and have more and more of us, so that when I was an old, old lady I could sit in my rocking chair on the terrace of Lanchester Hall and drink gin and tonics with my son and my grandchildren while we watched my great-grandchildren running around, just like Jasper and Elizabeth used to watch Harry, Alex and Dahlia.