“Oh, that wasn’t Meg, that was me,” Frances said, with an icy edge. She pointed at her apron. “Domestic goddess, see?”
There was an awkward moment as everyone tried to work out if Frances was attempting a joke or an insult. Not even Frances was exactly sure.
“So what shall we talk about then?” Natalie said a little chirpily over the silence. “Feeding? Nappies and their contents? What do you do at this sort of thing? Compare stretch marks?”
The doorbell chimed again.
“Oh, I invited someone else!” Meg said, clapping her palm to her forehead. “I completely forgot! The neighbors over the road—Jill and Steve.” She looked at Frances. “They had a little girl recently. I dropped off a note last night; I thought Jill might want to come. That’ll be her.”
Frances looked at the five mugs arranged on the tray and slowly got up and fetched another.
“I’ll have to make another cafetière,” she said pointedly. “Megan never thinks these kinds of things through.”
But when Meg returned, she did not have Jill or anyone who even looked like Jill with her. She had a man with a baby in his arms. A man who just by virtue of his sex immediately reminded Natalie that she had no makeup on again and that her tummy still flopped over the top of her trousers.
“Well!” Meg said. “This is Steve and little Lucy. It seems that Steve’s a stay-at-home dad.”
“Really?” Jess said politely.
“How interesting,” Natalie added, sucking her gut in with the remnants of her abdominal muscles.
“That’s cool,” Tiff said in a low voice.
“But you’re a man,” Frances said. “Men can’t come to a mothers’ group. It’s women only, I’m afraid.”
It was Meg who took baby Lucy from Steve’s arms and sat the poor blushing man down before giving him back his daughter and pouring him a cup of coffee.
“Of course Steve’s allowed,” Meg said as lightly as she could. “Ours isn’t a formal group—it’s more of a casual gathering and anyway I think I saw on the local news that Stoke Newington is the capital of stay-at-home fathers, so I’m sure that men are allowed to go to even organized meetings. This is the age of equality, after all!”
Natalie and Jess murmured in agreement.
“But she said she wanted to talk about breastfeeding and compare stretch marks,” Frances said, nodding at Natalie. “You can’t do that with a man around.”
“Don’t worry, Frances,” Natalie said, carefully enunciating the other woman’s name. “I was only joking. It’s just nice to get out of the house. We can talk about football for all I care.”
“I don’t have to stay,” Steve said, half rising in his chair.
Three women pushed him back down. One didn’t and one teenager stared quite hard at the tabletop and wished she’d stayed home.
“You’ll laugh,” Steve said. “But I’ve been wondering and wondering all morning about coming over. Jill said I was an idiot to worry and that of course you wouldn’t mind, but I thought—a bunch of girls together, you won’t want a man hanging round.” He smiled apologetically at Frances, whose face did not move a muscle. Steve, who had sandy hair and pleasant brown eyes, also seemed to have a treacherous complexion as he flushed perfectly pink once again. “Jill earns the most money, you see, as a barrister. And I’ve started working from home as a freelance graphic designer. It made sense for me to give up my old job, it was something I’ve wanted to do for ages anyway—go solo. I like being a full-time dad, I don’t think it’s undermining my manhood or anything. I think I’m privileged actually, to be such a big part of Lucy’s life so early. So many dads miss out on this bit.”
The women did not actually say “Ahhhhh,” but all of them thought it. Even Frances was touched.
“Well, good for you,” Natalie said. “Fancy a slice of ginger cake?”
“Or what about a freshly baked muffin?” Meg added.
And it seemed to be decided without the need for any further discussion that a man was an acceptable member of the group. As Meg came back from fetching a mewling Iris she paused and looked back at the group of people sitting round her table. Natalie and her peculiar mix of confidence and flakiness seemed to make everyone laugh. Jess was pleasant and quietly funny and young Tiffany didn’t say two words as she picked at her cake and watched the others talk. Brave Steve with little Lucy cradled on his shoulder was talking about the best burping technique, and finally there was Frances, pouring more cups of coffee, refreshing the sugar bowl, and wiping rings from under mugs.
Meg was glad they were all there, filling her great big house with voices and laughter, and using up part of her day, helping to take her mind off the things she didn’t like to think about.
She had a few hours now to shut away her wondering and worrying and not to think at all about her and Robert. Or when exactly it was that they had started to become strangers.
Five
Jess looked hopefully at the man blocking her way onto the bus.
It had been something of a performance to get Jacob out of the buggy and to fold it down ready for travel. These modern buses were supposed to make it easy for people with strollers, but there was still never enough room to wheel a buggy on board, not on this route anyway. And for some reason she just didn’t get it like other women seemed to. She saw other moms snap their babies in and out of slings in seconds while it still took her several flustered minutes to work out what went where, with her fingers losing any dexterity and even working up an anxious sweat. And as for the buggy, whatever pedal she pushed or kicked or handle she pulled it never seemed to be the right one, she could never get it to fold right down and click neatly into place like it should.
The other people at the bus stop had ignored her as she struggled to flatten the contraption with Jacob tucked under one arm. Nobody offered to help. Now she had to contend with the man who stood between her and the bus door.
“Excuse me.” Jess’s voice wobbled treacherously as she extended the buggy toward him with an aching arm. “Excuse me, can you help me, please?”
The man looked down his nose at her and crossed his arms.
“I’m not a porter, love,” he said, managing to make her feel as if she was somehow insulting him by asking for his help.
“I didn’t think you were,” Jess said, her voice taut as she attempted to fling the buggy onto the ramp. “I did think you might be a person with an ounce of human decency who might see how difficult it is for me to manage. I was obviously wrong.”
She climbed awkwardly onto the bus, the muscles in her arms aching as she finally managed to clamber past the man. He did not move a single inch to make her life easier and muttered, “Stupid bitch,” under his breath as she passed.
Jess shoved the buggy into a space behind a seat and made her way down the bus. Jacob began to cry. He was probably hungry, Jess thought, feeling instantly anxious. She had read that if a young baby went too long without fluid it could become dangerously dehydrated in no time. She ran her forefinger gently over the soft spot on his forehead to check if it was sunken, but as she felt the slight depression beneath her fingertips she wasn’t sure what constituted sunken, which hiked up her anxiety level even further.
“Nearly home,” she whispered in Jacob’s ear as she looked around for a seat and found none. None of the seated passengers would look at her. A man who was also standing, his leg in a cast, smiled sympathetically at her.
“If I had a seat I’d offer it to you, love,” he said with a shrug.
Jess smiled back at him and held on tight, bracing her legs as the bus lurched forward and swayed her and Jacob dangerously off balance.
It was only a few stops, she told herself. Hardly anything really. It would have been easier to walk it, except that after visiting Meg she just felt so utterly tired with the effort of talking and smiling that she thought she’d get the bus home. Now she wished she hadn’t. The experience was hurting her from the inside out.
Somehow bef
ore when she used to commute to her job in human resources in the West End, back before Jacob had been born, the hardness of the people around her just rolled off her like raindrops off glass. She never noticed the implicit unkindness and disrespect that everyone showed to everyone else. She supposed she had been just as bad, locked so tightly in her own little bubble that she barely noticed the other humans around her. But since Jacob had arrived in her life, all her outer protective shell had been peeled painfully away and suddenly she was vulnerable to every ounce of cruelty or indifference, no matter how slight. And the fact that these people on the bus would not offer her and her baby a seat almost brought her to tears. Jess knew that they were just ordinary people on an ordinary London bus. But if these people could be so hard and unfeeling, then what about the next terrorist to get on the next Underground train or bus? Or what about Iran? Iran was developing nuclear weapons. North Korea already had them.
All at once the world had become a terrifying place to live in, with danger lurking in every shadow. Worst of all, Jess felt as if she was barely equipped to be a mother, let alone to protect her child from the horrifyingly violent and unfeeling world into which she had brought him.
She wanted to be able to just love and enjoy him like his father did. She wanted her relationship with Jacob to be that perfect and that simple; but every single moment of their time together was interwoven with fear. Even when she was laughing, just as she had at Meg’s earlier that morning, she felt as if it was merely a fragile front to cover up the truth. No one there knew that her stomach was knotted in a constant contraction of anxiety brought about by an unshakable conviction that somehow, somewhere, something would go terribly wrong.
It had started at conception. Jess had longed to be pregnant again but feared it, too, because it filled her with the promise of hope and loss in equal parts. She had been pregnant twice before. The first baby had been lost before the end of the first trimester. It had broken her heart, but eventually she had been able to accept it. But the second, her little girl, was stillborn nearly six months into the pregnancy.
Even now Jess could not bear to think of that gray morning in the delivery suite, with the rain rushing against the window and the faded frieze of bunny rabbits painted around the ceiling. It was the knowing that made it unbearable, the knowledge that every contraction that wracked her body wasn’t bringing a new life into the world. Knowing that she was delivering a dead baby, a little girl who had somehow died in the womb. In her womb.
Between the waves of physical pain Jess could hear the cries of other children somewhere on the ward. She would always remember the laughter and joy of a family ringing off the walls in the corridor outside, and wanting to scream for them to shut up. But all she could do was to stay as quiet as she could with Lee at her side, holding her hand, telling her she was so brave and how much he loved her, brushing away his tears between reassurances.
What Jess found almost unbearable was that the baby had died without her even noticing her passing. That she hadn’t even been able to do that much for her child, to reach inside and try to say good-bye. She felt that she should have known her baby was terribly sick, but instead she might have been asleep or shopping or sitting on the Tube reading the paper when it happened. It seemed such a banal way to lose a child.
It was no one’s fault, the doctors told them; sometimes tragedies just happen, but that didn’t comfort Jess at all. She always felt it should have been someone’s fault—and if it was anybody’s it had to be hers.
Lee had wanted them to stop after they lost the second baby. He said that the doctors had told him there was plenty of time to wait and try again in a year or two. That there was no reason why Jess shouldn’t carry a baby full term and deliver a healthy child. But Jess had not been able to wait. She told Lee she wanted to try again straightaway. That had been hard for him to understand.
“It would be like putting my life on hold,” she had tried to explain to him one morning. “Like the next year, or two years would be just treading water waiting for…what? There’s never going to be a magic time when we know for sure everything will be all right. And I’m still going to be scared, Lee. I’m still going to be terrified even then. I need to try again now.”
Lee had sat on their sofa, his head bowed over his knee. “The thing is,” he said eventually, still staring hard at the floor, “I don’t think I’m ready, Jess. I’m still grieving, I’m still missing…her. I…I don’t think it’s right to just…replace her.”
Those last two words had almost been the end of them. It would have been the end of them if either one had had enough strength to survive without the other. But neither one had. They’d clung on to each other despite everything, and less than a year later Jess discovered she was pregnant for the third time.
When she told Lee, he didn’t hug her or smile, he just looked at her for a long time saying nothing at all until eventually he rested the back of his cool hand against the heat of her cheek and said, “It will be all right.”
They didn’t tell anyone about the baby until Jess was three months gone. She gave up work straightaway, forfeiting any rights she had to maternity leave. Lee said it would be a struggle but they’d manage, and that her health and well-being was what counted. She knew what he really meant was that he’d do anything to stop her from freaking out.
At the twenty-week scan Jess felt as if she was being taken to an execution. She lay on the hospital table completely drained of color with her eyes brimming with unshed tears. When the technician told her the scan was fine, she could hardly believe it. In fact, she didn’t believe it.
While Lee’s tension seemed to lift then and finally give way to happiness, Jess’s fears bound themselves even more tightly around her. The doctors, her and Lee’s parents, even Lee commanded her to stop fretting so much. She herself was sure that once the baby was in her arms where she could see him and hold him, she would stop worrying. Then at last all the fears and ghosts of the past would be put to rest.
But she was wrong.
From the second the midwife put him in her arms, there was a whole new world of worry. Jess was scared that he didn’t feed enough. She was worried that he slept for too long, or that he didn’t sleep enough. That he didn’t seem to poo as much as the book said he should or that he had too many wet nappies. Stupid things that when she asked the maternity nurse or doctor about made them smile and look at her as if she was slightly mad.
“It’s normal,” the doctor would say.
“He’s perfectly healthy,” the nurse would say.
“It will be all right,” Lee would tell her.
And she’d know that they were right and they had to be right; but she still couldn’t shake off this terrible feeling that somehow, somewhere, something was going to go terribly wrong.
Six
Natalie could not stop laughing. There was something about fifteen or so women and two men sitting in a big circle on a dusty floor singing “Row, row, row your boat” while doing the actions with babies who were either asleep or looked utterly bored that was very, very funny and which made her laugh so much she had to stop and catch her breath between fits of giggles. But it was the marching around to “The Grand Old Duke of York” with babies that couldn’t even roll over, let alone march, that made her practically hysterical.
“This isn’t a joke, you know,” Steve said, despite chuckling along with her as they marched to the top of the hill and down again. “It’s really good for them, music and singing. It stimulates all of their senses.”
Baby Music had been Steve’s idea. Just as everybody had been on the point of leaving Meg’s and saying how nice it was and that they must do it again sometime, he had suggested they set a date.
“I’m taking Lucy to a baby music class in that place down by the park, it starts next week,” he said. “Why don’t we all meet there next if you like?” And before Natalie knew it she had been half press-ganged and half volunteered herself for yet another new and strange li
fe experience, and found that she was even a little depressed that she had to wait a week before they were due to meet at the class.
Now, as Baby Music reached its tumultuous crescendo, Natalie was practically crying with laughter as Meg threw herself into “Itsy Bitsy Spider” with the energy and drama of an opera singer, while her toddler spun like a top in the middle of the room and Frances frowned with faintly irritated concentration as she tried to get little Henry’s tiny fingers to do the actions.
When the four of them made their way outside after the group was finished, Natalie was in the best mood she had been since before she was pregnant. It struck her that when you were out of the world of work and more or less out of touch with your old single or childless friends for the first time ever, finding new friends was almost as challenging and difficult as it could be finding a boyfriend. Natalie was beginning to realize that it had been a stroke of luck that she had met Meg and Tiffany on the day the electrical system went wrong. In fact, her dangerous wiring was possibly the best thing that could have happened to her because now she knew Jess, Steve, and even Frances too.
Because of them, her life had taken on a new and reassuring dimension. For the first time in her life she was comforted to know that she was not unique and that her experience of parenthood was just as challenging and as difficult as other people’s. Indeed, it seemed to her that under the circumstances she was making a pretty good job of it, considering that she was a beginner, and despite her inescapably distinctive circumstances she was enjoying every minute of it.
“That floor was very dusty,” Frances said, as she came out a little after the others. “I told the woman. I said she should contact the cleaners and complain but she was very rude…”
“I wonder what happened to Tiffany and Jess,” Meg mused, leaning against the black steel railing that surrounded the pond and looking down at the gathering of ducks and geese that seemed noisily hopeful for some kind of snack.
Mommy By Mistake Page 6
