by Rosie Nixon
I wondered, if the truth hadn’t come out, whether the secret would have killed Aisha and Jason’s marriage eventually, anyway. However you looked at it, there didn’t seem to be an uncomplicated outcome.
For me, it was more than a ‘one-night stand’. Jason had been inside my head for over twenty years. And in my mind we’d been having an emotional affair since that evening over a year ago, because he had taken over my thoughts so regularly. As painful as it had been the following morning, I could never regret the sex we had because, one way or another, the course of events over that twenty-four hours gave me Albie. So something went very right. But I needed to know the truth now, for Albie’s sake.
Things had gone quiet on the WhatsApp thread and in light of what was going on, I didn’t feel inclined to make the first move. Aside from the note about the mislaid dribble bib – to which I did not respond – and a couple of exchanges between Will and Susie about suspected hand, foot and mouth disease after a session at a soft-play centre, there had been no suggestion of meeting up. I stayed mute and so did Aisha.
Aisha played on my mind; her face haunted me. She would be devastated, and the last person she would want to hear from was me. Everyone in The Baby Group was going to hate me, that was a given.
Then a really terrifying thought hit me: perhaps Aisha would want to confront me. Every time the doorbell rang, my heart rate sped up and I peered through the security camera, wondering if it was her, come to let rip. Once or twice I’d seen a stranger standing on the doorstep and hadn’t opened the door, worried that she or Jason had sent someone to confront me on their behalf. I missed a couple of Amazon deliveries as a result.
I began to live in fear of what would happen next and it sent a feeling of perpetual sickness through my body. I felt anxious most of the time, but was becoming adept at hiding it. Conversely, during the past two days, when I had successfully managed to internalize, things were better between Oscar and me, and he was back staying in the house every night. The only difference he did pick up on was that I had lost my appetite and the desire to cook. Personally, I wasn’t too worried about this side effect because it finally gave me the opportunity to drop some of the postpartum pounds I was having trouble shifting. But my disinterest in food began to be noticed by Oscar and one evening he cottoned on to something.
‘I’m thinking of making a noodle stir-fry for dinner tonight, but are you still on a diet?’ he called out, wok in hand, as I sat in an armchair giving Albie his bedtime bottle. ‘You should eat properly you know – you need the energy.’
‘I had a massive sandwich as a late lunch,’ I replied. It wasn’t true. But didn’t everyone have secrets, tell little white lies to cover up the truth sometimes? It had become second nature to me.
‘Where did you go?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘To eat,’ he said, ‘Where did you go to eat the sandwich?’
I looked at him blankly.
‘Earth to Lucy… Is there anybody in there?’
‘I was here,’ I answered breezily.
‘Where did you hide all the bread then?’ he retorted, opening the lid to the bread bin and finding nothing inside it. ‘I’ll just have a sandwich myself, if you’re not eating with me.’
‘Sorry, I must have finished it,’ I said.
He fixed his eyes on me. He knew I was lying; that I was up to something.
‘Lucy—’ he started.
I stared down. ‘I need to put Albie to bed. Let’s talk after that. Perhaps you could pour us a glass of wine each?’
I knew I needed to let Oscar in, but I was so scared it would end up with us having a fight – and worst case, that he would leave us. He would be flabbergasted by this news.
Once Albie had drifted off to sleep, I stayed in the nursery, sitting in the darkness on the bench seat by his cot for a while. The rhythmic sound of his breathing soothed me. I knew my behaviour must seem strange to Oscar; I’d practically become a recluse. Perhaps I hadn’t been hiding things as well as I thought. But I needed him now, more than ever.
As if Oscar was reading my mind, Albie’s door opened a little and a shaft of light from the landing created an orange pathway on the carpet. Then Oscar’s tall shadow filled it as he stood in the doorway. He had two glasses of red wine in his hands. His silhouette looked big, strong, sensible, and dependable; all the qualities I loved in him.
‘What’s going on, Lucy?’ he asked solemnly. ‘I can see you’re not yourself. Please talk to me.’
I didn’t reply. Where would I even start?
Oscar came and sat next to me in the dark. He passed me a glass of wine and I took a much-needed sip.
‘I never should have joined that Baby Group – you were right,’ I muttered after a few seconds passed. ‘It’s brought back memories I wanted to forget.’
‘Memories?’ he asked. ‘What do you mean?’
We sat there in the shadows, talking for the next hour – somehow it was easier that way, close to the baby at the centre of all this, without the intensity of Oscar being able to read every expression on my face.
I told him about the night with Jason, and about what he had told me in the morning.
Oscar took it all absolutely calmly, saying, ‘Keep going’, in appropriate places.
Of course, I spared him the hottest parts, about how electrifying the sex had been and how consumed with lust I was from the first touch of Jason’s hand on my leg. But I also told him how things had ended. How Jason had revealed he knew I’d had an abortion all those years ago – that he’d known at the time, and just hadn’t told me. How I felt that if we had talked, maybe I wouldn’t have felt pressured to go ahead with it. How, after dropping that bombshell, he had left, only to completely blank me two weeks later when I tried to reach him on text to tell him I was pregnant. How he had blocked me from all of his social media accounts, callously cut me off. How it stung then, and that it still hurt me now.
‘So how did you find out about The Baby Group?’ Oscar asked. ‘If Jason had cut you off?’
‘I’d been googling him and found a photo on the society pages of a Hong Kong online magazine. It was a wedding photo of a couple who were obviously somebodies in Asia, and on either side of them, so the caption said, were friends Jason Moore and girlfriend, Aisha Chandra. I recognized him immediately. And I knew Aisha was of Indian descent, so there was no doubt it was her and her surname gave me another name to search for. Her Instagram account appeared immediately: “Aisha Chandra. Children’s book illustrator and lover of vintage finds, London”. It had to be her. Then I saw the latest photo on her grid.’ My heart leapt into my mouth at the memory. ‘A photo of a baby scan, and underneath it the caption: “Baby Moore, due early June”. From there, it wasn’t hard to find which Baby Group they had joined because I knew they lived in Clapham. At least now I knew why Jason cut me off. He must have panicked.’ I paused for a moment; revisiting all this was painful. ‘I’ll understand if you need to go somewhere,’ I said hesitantly, turning to Oscar. ‘I won’t blame you if you want to leave.’
But Oscar didn’t flinch. ‘This is quite a story. I want to know everything,’ he said.
‘You need to understand what it meant to me when I saw Jason on the Tube that day, and I’ll come onto that,’ I said, feeling calmer now that he wasn’t running to pack a bag. ‘I wouldn’t have approached him, it was him who came up to me, it was him who suggested we went to the pub, and it turned out that he had purposely found me that day. He must have followed me from work. We got really drunk; we were catching up on twenty years, and I can’t even really remember leaving the pub. But he came back to mine and… we got physical. It was consensual, of course. But he was really pissed – much drunker than me; he’d been doing shots on top of all the wine. I know we didn’t use any protection. Deep down I think it’s unlikely Jason is Albie’s father – even the IVF doctor told me the likelihood is ‘negligible’ – but on that night, you and I weren’t back together, and a bit of me st
ill wanted to believe Jason was the only man who could get me pregnant.’
Oscar had finished his glass of wine while I was speaking, and now he took mine and drank that too. I carried on. Oscar had to know this, even if it meant the worst. In a strange way, however awful this was, it was almost a relief to be talking to him. The words were spilling out like water from a broken tap. I didn’t want any more secrets; I hated them.
‘In my mind, after Jason cut me off, I wanted to get him back,’ I said, between pauses to blow my nose and wipe the tears from my eyes. ‘I wanted to test him. As time moved on, I still couldn’t let it go. Then I had this twisted idea that if I joined the same Baby Group, when Jason saw me he would put two and two together and believe he had fathered my child. And then, in one way or another, it would ruin his marriage. I wanted him to feel some of the pain I had endured over the past two decades. At the time, when I signed up to the group, you and I had only been back together for a few months and deep down I was nervous about our future. You had made it very clear you didn’t want a family with me not so long before, and having a baby felt like the biggest need in my life. I had to prioritise myself and Albie ahead of anything.’
I slid my eyes towards Oscar to gauge his reaction. He looked shell-shocked.
‘Lucy, I hear you, but don’t try to blame me for what you did. You might have destroyed a family. Possibly two.’
That last comment really stung because he was clearly referring to us.
‘I managed to convince myself that joining their Baby Group was the best way to see Jason again. But once I was in the class, I knew it was a terrible, terrible mistake. He was so filled with venom towards me. The pain he caused me when he told me he’d known about the abortion all along came flooding back and it hit me hard. But as I became friends with Aisha – with his wife – the secret, as well as my baby bump, grew bigger and bigger. I knew she didn’t deserve to be treated this way; that she deserved better than Jason; but I couldn’t see a way out.’
I hung my head low in shame. Sometimes I questioned my own sanity; saying it all out loud, it sounded like the doings of a mad, vengeful person. Was that what I had become?
It seemed absurd to think I could ever have been in love with Jason and built him up to be some kind of Adonis in my head, when the person I needed the most was right here under my nose all along. Oscar.
‘I wish I’d never joined that group because, if I hadn’t, none of this would have happened and I wouldn’t have had to unearth “that night” again.’ The dragging weight of the past made my head feel heavy and my eyes fill with tears.
Oscar had now finished my glass of wine. ‘Let’s move downstairs and get another,’ he whispered. I felt relieved he wasn’t exploding with rage, but his calmness was unnerving.
I walked down the stairs behind him and sat at the breakfast bar. I watched his back and arms as he refilled his glass and poured another, purposely keeping his body turned away from me, perhaps as a means of disconnecting for a bit. I wondered what he was thinking. I felt such enormous love for him. If anyone was worth fighting for, it was Oscar.
When he joined me on a stool at the counter I continued: ‘When you told me you didn’t want children, I had to split up with you,’ I said. ‘Having a baby has been one of the biggest desires in my life, and in my late thirties it became an obsession. I couldn’t imagine a future with you without children.’ I paused, pondering for a moment whether to go on.
‘Well Lucy, you got your baby.’ He turned his face away from me, so I couldn’t read his expression.
I swallowed hard in an effort to compose myself and continue. ‘Jason was the only man to have got me pregnant naturally, albeit twenty years ago. Subconsciously, when I was with him that evening, my body reawakened. I had imagined seeing him again so many times in my head over the years, and now it was really happening. Childhood sweethearts, reunited. It was such a romantic notion. But it was a baby I longed for, it wasn’t him. I know that now.’
In sentences punctuated with tears, I described how I had lived with the grief and guilt of terminating that baby for so long. It felt as though only now, now that I had become a mother again and held my own child in my arms, I could process the emotion I had blocked out.
‘After that night with Jason, when I had IVF the next day, it gave me a renewed hope that motherhood could be a reality for me. And coupled with seeing Jason, the timing of it so uncanny, I had the romantic idea that fate had brought us together and maybe we were meant to be together after all, whether or not he was the biological father of my baby. I thought we might have a chance of the future we lost twenty years ago. But I was so wrong.’ I stopped, took a deep breath and dared to reach for Oscar’s hand, ‘It was only ever you, Oscar. You are the one I love more than anything.’
‘Jason must have been petrified when he saw you there, in The Baby Group,’ Oscar said, almost comically, allowing my hand to gently rest on his for a few moments before he moved it. ‘But Lucy, if you felt all this, why did you continue going to the group?’
‘Because there was no return. You can’t just turn up like that and then just casually disappear in a puff of smoke.’
‘You can if you want to!’ Oscar snapped, startling me.
‘I had made a good friend there,’ I mumbled. ‘Getting close to Aisha made everything a million times harder. Some part of me thought we could be friends – as mad as that sounds.’
Then I told him how Jason had confronted me in the hallway when I’d gone to the Ladies’ during one Baby Group session before he made a swift exit, and then he texted me trying to arrange a time for us to talk. I put him off. I was scared of Aisha finding out. At first he had warned me off – he had ordered me to ‘Stay away from his wife!’, and then he had started demanding a paternity test. He was threatening. I was terrified – not only for my own safety, but for Albie too. I told Oscar that Jason and I had taken a DIY paternity test and the results were expected in a few days. Although my instinct was that Jason had not fathered Albie, I knew that we all needed to know the definitive truth.
‘But whatever the result,’ I reasoned, ‘the big – and most important – thing I’ve realized since having Albie, is that it doesn’t matter who the real father is. We will probably never know who Albie’s real dad is because I opted for an anonymous donor. But actions are more important than biology. Oscar, you are more of a father to Albie than anyone could ever be. He is so lucky to have you in his life.’
I stopped again to catch my breath and simultaneously try to read Oscar’s face. Tears bubbled to the surface. I felt desperate. Desperate for him and any reassurance that he still cared about me and Albie. My voice faltered as I went on: ‘Please believe me when I tell you that I didn’t mean any harm. Please believe that I love you, Oscar – I love you with all my heart, and I can only imagine Albie and me growing old with you.’ My voice trailed off into little more than a quiet whisper as I uttered, ‘I am so sorry.’
This time the urge to cry was too strong. As tears spilled down my face, Oscar got up and pulled me into his chest. He didn’t say anything, he just held me tightly.
I’d gone to the precipice of losing him and it was a terrifying place to be.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Aisha
Tara had proven to be a hero friend. Adept at multitasking, she had opened the front door to me with one hand and put a glass of red wine into mine with the other. Then she had taken the pram and picked Joni up, planting kisses on her cheeks. She’d literally scooped us both up that day.
‘You and Joni will stay here until you’re ready to leave,’ she’d commanded. ‘I’ve sent Hugo away for the night to give you some space, but he agrees with me that you should stay as long as you need. We’ve got every type of baby paraphernalia you could possibly need – that’s if you don’t mind Joni dressed in boys’ clothes. This is the twenty-first century. And you can borrow anything of mine.’
I had cast an embarrassed look down at myself, taking i
n my denim jeggings, black espadrilles and gingham smock top, barely able to remember getting dressed that morning, it already felt like a lifetime ago. The scarf I had wrapped around myself in case I got covered in paint at the pottery class, or needed to breastfeed, was clashing badly. Things had really slipped in the fashion department.
‘How do you do it?’ Tara had commented, seemingly oblivious to the hot mess before her. ‘No matter what happens, you always look bloody beautiful.’
I’d been relieved when her youngest, three-year-old Dexter, appeared between her legs, causing a distraction just as my eyes were prickling with tears.
‘We’ll get the kids down ASAP and then talk. We’re going to take good care of my friend Aisha and baby Joni, aren’t we Dexter?’ she’d said to the little boy who was blowing raspberries at us both. ‘Our friend needs lots of cuddles.’
When she’d looked up again, tears were streaming down my cheeks. Like flowing rivers, they would not be stemmed.
‘Oh my darling Aish.’ She had lain Joni back into the pram for a moment and wrapped her arms around me in a big bear hug. ‘It’s fine, let it out. You and Joni are safe here.’
We had stood like that for at least a minute, both afraid to draw away from the warmth of each other, because then one person might be expected to say something. It wasn’t easy to find the words, for either of us. But that was the beauty of being with Tara, we didn’t need words. Another few seconds had passed until Dexter had given Joni a prod in her pram and she had made her presence known.
‘Thank you,’ I had mustered, as my breathing steadied. ‘Oh Tara, it’s so bad – I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do.’
The last two days at Tara’s had been exhausting physically as well as emotionally. I’d been through the whole spectrum, from crying uncontrollably for hours in the middle of the night, often with Joni on the boob, to feeling quite numb when thinking through the logistics and resolving there was no option but to make Jason move out. The fear that a call could come at any time to reveal the outcome of the paternity test also left me in a permanent, sick-to-the-stomach state of nervousness.
