“Mommy?” James’s tear-stained face appeared in the doorway. His lip trembling, he approached her, holding out something very small that glinted amber in the light. It was one of Teddy’s eyes.
“Teddy’s gone!” he wailed, tipping backward and hitting the carpet with a painful thud. “Gripper’s killed Teddy!”
Meg looked at her little boy lying on the floor, rigid with grief and bawling his eyes out. And she had to resist—with every ounce of her strength—the urge to lie down next to him and do the very same thing.
Nine
Natalie had expected Steve and Jill’s place to look more or less exactly like Meg’s, a huge sprawling Victorian mansion, only probably tidier and decorated in more of a contemporary style. She was almost right, except that it was one of three apartments that the house had been converted to in the nineties.
Whereas Meg’s house was all quirky little rooms, pantries and parlors, Steve’s place was open-plan, polished wood flooring and flat white walls. The main living space included a stainless-steel state-of-the-art kitchen at one end and Steve’s draftsman’s table at the other.
“Livework space,” Steve said, melding the two words into one as he showed Natalie in. “That’s what it’s all about these days. Multipurpose living.”
“Multipurpose living!” Natalie replied. “I’m impressed. It’s hard enough to find any purpose to living at all when you’ve only had three hours’ sleep and your jeans don’t fit you anymore.”
Natalie winked at Jess, who was sitting quite gingerly on the edge of a long orange sofa with such a low back and arms that to lean on it would be to take your life into your own hands.
“Look at you,” she said to Jess. “You look great, not a bulge or a spare tire to be seen. I want to be you.” Both Jess and Natalie were surprised by how sincere she had sounded, Jess because she was convinced that she must be the least attractive adult here and Natalie because she had never wanted to be anyone but herself before in her entire existence. Even when her life was at its most difficult and unsatisfactory in her twenties, she had always rather liked being herself.
“You don’t want to be me,” Jess exclaimed with a laugh. “I’m a total neurotic. I had us all up in the night because I thought Jacob was wheezing. I made Lee take us to the emergency room! Two hours, we were waiting. In the end the doctors said he was snoring.” She held up her thumb and forefinger. “I felt about this big.” Jess cringed as she thought back on the events of the previous night.
“The thing is, how are we supposed to know?” Natalie asked. “How do we know what it sounds like when a baby snores? We don’t. We have no precedent. I would have done the same thing.”
“You wouldn’t have,” Jess said.
“Well, no, I wouldn’t,” Natalie admitted. “But only because you are a proper mom who even thinks to worry about things like that. It never crosses my mind that anything is ever going to be wrong with Freddie. I sort of think he’s indestructible.”
“It’s official, then,” Jess said with a weak smile. “I wish I were you.”
“I’ve got us snacks,” Steve said, gesturing at a table of what looked like seeds. “I know you like cake, Natalie, but Jill’s got us on a special diet. It’ll change in about two weeks. We’ll only be eating carbs again, or bananas. Or oily fish. She’s a big fan of diets.”
“Couldn’t you tell her that you don’t want to go on the diet with her?” Natalie suggested.
“Well, I could,” Steve said with an affectionate smile. “But she’s a barrister. Very hard to argue with.”
When Frances arrived with Henry, Natalie was disappointed to see she did not have Meg, James, and Iris in tow.
“Where’s Meg?” Natalie asked Frances before greeting her, which a second after she had opened her mouth she realized was probably something of a faux pas, particularly where prickly Frances was concerned.
“Ill, apparently,” Frances said, as if Meg was being terribly rude by being unwell.
“Oh dear.” Natalie glanced at Jess. “I might go and see her later, do you want to…?”
“She doesn’t want visitors,” Frances said. “She told me to leave!”
“Did she?” Natalie was surprised. Telling someone to leave didn’t sound like Meg at all. The woman was patience personified and she was always putting everyone before herself. “She must be really ill, then.”
“Do you think so?” Frances said, seeming to brighten up a little.
“Oh yeah,” Natalie reassured her. “I mean, you’re probably her closest friend. If she spoke like that to you, she must be feeling awful.”
“Oh dear,” Frances said, her edges seeming to soften as she considered Natalie’s comment. “Poor Meg. She did look awful, actually.”
“Green tea, anyone?” Steve said, producing a Japanese tea set steaming with the aromatic brew.
Natalie wrinkled up her nose. “Now, Steve,” she said. “I think we all know a baby group wouldn’t be a baby group without one of these.” She plonked the now ubiquitous Jamaican ginger cake on his coffee table. “And have you got any coffee? I don’t mind instant.”
The aerobics class didn’t go quite as well as Baby Music.
It was as if everyone was just a little bit off kilter, literally in Natalie’s case as she fell over trying to do one of the exercises, landing hard on her back to save Freddie from getting squashed by her weight, a fall which shot an intense spasm of pain up her spine. Steve, she supposed, wasn’t quite as relaxed as he was at Baby Music, because he was the only man, and despite his best efforts not to care about it, he obviously did a little.
He had been waiting in his sweat pants and T-shirt as Natalie came out of the ladies’ changing room. She and Freddie had been the first to emerge because she hadn’t technically changed, she had just turned up pre-prepared in her loose jersey trousers and long-line T-shirt, not realizing that other people were going to bring actual exercise wear to the class. She had expected it to be nothing more than a laugh, just like Baby Music, so when she found Steve clutching Lucy to his chest and trying to look anywhere rather than at the women leaving the previous aerobics class, she was privately glad that someone else was as uncertain about this as she was.
“They are all going to think I’m a letch, aren’t they?” Steve said under his breath, nodding at the other women who were waiting with their babies for the class to begin.
Natalie laughed. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “All women think you are fabulous. They all fancy you because you are here with your baby. Ironically, a man with his baby is perhaps one of the most attractive sights to a single or married lady.”
“Really?” Steve looked alarmed, eyeing the gradually increasing group of ladies now with some trepidation. “Jill would kill me if she thought anyone fancied me,” he said with charming anxiety.
“No, she wouldn’t,” Natalie reassured him. “We like our men to be fancied. What we do not like is for them to fancy others. That is when you risk wandering into the realm of sudden and violent death.”
Steve laughed, his cheeks pinking up a little. “Seriously though, Natalie,” he said, “you’re a gutsy kind of woman, aren’t you, quite like a bloke really?”
“Really?” Natalie said, glancing down at her capacious breasts in mock dismay. “Is that how you see me?”
“No,” Steve said, now turning a lovely shade of cerise. “What I mean is that out of all the girls in the group you’re the one who I get the impression has known the most men—”
“Oh I see,” Natalie said with theatrical haughtiness as she struggled not to laugh.
“No, I don’t mean like that,” Steve hurried on, his complexion now more of a deep fuchsia. “I meant to say that you are a woman of the world, so if you were a bloke, what would you think of me? Would you think I was weak for being at home with Lucy, would you think I was failing as a man?”
Natalie attempted to consider the muddled question as she looked at Steve, who now most resembled an overripe strawberry b
eing flambéed.
“I think,” she said after a moment, “that you are stronger than most regular men. After all, here you are in the middle of a lot of ladies in Lycra, with your baby girl in your arms because you want to give her the best babyhood you possibly can, regardless of stereotypes and what is expected. That takes real guts.”
Steve smiled, his color calming. “Would your Gary ever do anything like this?” he asked.
“Well, he couldn’t,” Natalie told him with conviction. “But only because he’s busy building very complicated structures practically with his bare hands and brute strength alone.” She paused and then added before she knew what she was saying, “But seriously, Steve, I’d give anything to have Freddie’s dad with me. Anything.”
It was the unexpected sting of tears behind her eyes that made Natalie suddenly have to turn away from Steve and the other members of the group as they finally emerged ready for action from the changing room.
Ever the gentleman, Steve, probably assuming that she was missing her husband, stood between her and the others while she took a second to compose herself. Natalie hugged a wriggly Freddie a little closer to her chest and took a deep steadying breath. Why was it, when she had spent so long rigorously making herself get used to the idea of bringing up Freddie on her own, that every now and then a feeling like that would overtake her and practically drown her in longing? It had to be because she now knew that Jack was back in London. He was close, really close, but still almost impossibly out of reach.
And so Natalie hadn’t been able to enter into the class with quite as much gusto as she wanted to, still shaking off that feeling of loss for something she had never actually possessed.
And as for the others, well, Tiffany looked pale and drawn as she performed the exercises with expertise and grace, her smooth oval face perfectly still, hiding all the fears and insecurities she must be feeling as one so young cut adrift from her parents. Jess looked tired and worn down with worry and a night in the emergency room. And as for Frances—Natalie thought that Frances was probably born slightly off kilter, never quite fitting in comfortably with anyone around her. Despite her pristine new gym wear, which had probably been bought just for the occasion, she looked utterly out of place.
As Natalie stepped from side to side without much enthusiasm, she contemplated the other and much more pressing reason why she was feeling so jangled and out of sorts. Because in a bid to avoid telling Jack that she was bringing up his secret love child she had done the only thing she could think of that would mean Alice wouldn’t totally kill her next time they spoke. She had told her mother instead. And now that she had, she was torn between an oddly comforting feeling of relief and sickening certainty that she was going to seriously regret her decision.
Most disconcertingly, it hadn’t been as horrible as Natalie had expected. She was prepared for smugness, hilarity, scorn, and disgust from her mother. But surprisingly she had received none of these things. Instead, when she delivered the news in a deliberately lighthearted, this-is-how-it-is-and-I-don’t-care-what-you-think-so-there style, there had been a long silence on the other end of the phone.
“I see,” Sandy said finally. “So I’m a grandmother, am I?”
“Yes, at last,” Natalie said, rolling her eyes and sighing like a teen as she slipped the pad with Jack’s numbers on it under the base of the bedside lamp so she could not see it.
“And how are you coping?” her mom asked.
Natalie had not quite known how to answer the unexpected question. She was waiting and prepared for “And who exactly is the father and what were you thinking, a woman of your age, having unprotected sex when you should know better?” But certainly not any kind of expression of concern, unless it came with some barbed backhanded insult.
“Um.” Natalie considered the question. “Actually, really well. It’s hardest at night with no one to take turns with, I suppose, and I’m exhausted. But I love him so much, Mom, he has changed my life completely and for the better.”
There was another pause.
“If you liked, I could come and stay for a bit?” her mom asked. “Be someone to take turns with for a while?”
This time Natalie was stunned into silence. It was the fact that her mother had asked her that surprised her. She had been fully prepared to have to forcibly put Sandy off with all sorts of excuses once she found out about Freddie. But for her mother to actually ask her opinion about something was new; disconcerting and different. Natalie was surprised by a sudden pang in the pit of her stomach, and when she tried to work out what had caused it she realized it was a simple impulse she had never expected to feel again. She wanted her mom. It was such a jolting and strong sensation that she felt tears in her eyes.
“I would actually,” she said, almost incredulously.
“Fabulous, darling,” Sandy said happily, sounding suddenly much more like her old cocktail-lounge self. “I’ll be over on the first flight! I presume that I need to buy a ticket to London?”
“Yes, of course,” Natalie said, already panicking about whether or not she had done the right thing. “Where else would I be?”
“Well,” her mom said, with a voice as dry as the Gobi Desert, “I thought you might be in China.”
When they left the sports center Natalie had asked both Tiffany and Jess to accompany her to see how Meg was, but neither accepted. Tiffany said she had to be at a meeting with her teachers and her social worker to talk about what was going to happen with her exams, and Jess said she was desperate to at least try to get some sleep.
“That girl is unreal,” Jess said, as they watched Tiff wheel Jordan off down the road. “Look at how she copes and then look at me. I’m so pathetic. Snoring. I took my baby to the hospital for snoring.”
“You are not pathetic,” Natalie said. “You have problems and weaknesses like the rest of us, but at least you face up to your worries and deal with them. At least you don’t hide from everything that’s going on around you, hoping that somehow everything will work itself out without you having to actually do anything.”
Natalie heard the frustration in her voice as if she were listening to a stranger. Normally she made a point of never letting anything she did get to her because she always said that once a decision or action was taken you could never really undo it, even if you tried. She made a point of facing up to the future that she had created for herself, whether or not it was something she wanted. Only since Freddie—since Jack if she was honest—she had felt a little less brave.
It had to be the pregnancy hormones, she told herself. After all, they had been present from almost the very first moment she had spent with Jack. It was probably her elevated estrogen levels that were responsible for how she thought she still might feel about the wretched man to this very day. It must be the hormones that made her teary at the thought of her mother, and now she came to think of it, it was probably because of them that she had told all her new friends she had a fake husband, a fake husband who was gradually taking on a Frankenstein monsterlike life of his own.
It had to be some internal enemy that was altering her so drastically, because she couldn’t allow herself to believe that this confusing maelstrom of emotions would be coming from the rational and sane part of her.
What had troubled her most since Alice called her to tell her that Jack was back in town was that now instead of being just somewhere, he was here in this city, maybe only a couple of miles away from this very spot where she was standing. What Alice didn’t understand, what none of her new friends would understand even if she felt able to tell them, was that it was because she wanted to see Jack so much, and wanted to share their son with him, that she was so terrified of seeing him, let alone telling him about Freddie. She could accept his rejection of her because she still hoped her naggingly persistent feelings for him would fade as her hormone levels returned to normal. But what if, as she half feared and half hoped, the very thought of being a father sent him packing to the other side of the wo
rld on the first available flight? Perhaps it would be better to tell Freddie that his father had died in a car crash than tell him his daddy didn’t want to know him; after all, that was what Sandy had told her about her own father. It was the one lie her mother had told her that she had belatedly appreciated, and the one she certainly wished she had never investigated.
Natalie remembered briefly a wet and freezing February afternoon in Brighton nearly twenty years ago, and the man who had stood on his doorstep telling her in hushed but urgent tones to go away and leave him alone. At least when she thought he was dead she could fantasize about how much he would have loved her, and how different their lives would have been if he had survived.
But she knew she could never set Freddie up for a meeting like that one, and when it came to it, she didn’t have any control over what might happen in the future except to try to make the right decisions now. And that would be a first for her.
Natalie looked at Jess’s face, so honest and open that you could almost see every minute of her sleepless night illustrated on her exhausted features. Jess, who wanted to be her, who thought she was so capable and together. Suddenly Natalie desperately wanted to be able to tell Jess everything about her life, the whole sordid truth. But as they stood in the chill and bluster of that March morning, Natalie realized she had no idea how she would begin to explain just what a mess she had made of everything.
Jess, Meg, and the others thought better of her, they might even actually admire her a little bit. She didn’t want that to change. She liked being the woman who was the friend of Jess and Meg. She liked that version of herself.
“What’s up?” Jess asked her with a smile, cocking her head to one side. “What awful problem are you hiding from now?”
Natalie laughed and shrugged.
“Oh, just that my mom’s coming to stay,” she told Jess with mock heaviness. “Today.”
Mommy By Mistake Page 10
