Dear Thing

by Julie Cohen

  Posie turned around without a word. Romily picked up her phone again and opened Ben’s text message. So have you taken the test yet?

  For a confused moment Romily wondered how Ben knew about Posie’s spelling test, and then she remembered. It was two weeks later already.

  She hurried to her bedroom and reached in the top drawer, where she’d stowed all the things that Claire had brought round. She took out a narrow box, realized it was an ovulation test, and tried again until she found a pregnancy one. 99% ACCURATE FROM THE FIRST DAY YOUR PERIOD IS DUE, it screamed on the side of the box. It was some sort of comment on the state of her life, when her male friend knew her menstrual cycle better than she did. The test was too small to conceal in her hand, so she shoved it up her jumper.

  Posie was in the bathroom, frowning at herself in the mirror and brushing her teeth at the slowest rate known to humankind, and the church bells down the street were chiming the half-hour, so Romily didn’t have time to pee on a stick right now. ‘Come on, come on,’ she said to Posie in passing, and hid the test in her handbag before her daughter could stomp out into the living room. She bundled Posie into wellies and a mac, threw on her own boots and jacket, and got them each a cereal bar and a banana from the bowl before they rushed out of the door.

  ‘This one is all brown and spotty,’ said Posie. Romily exchanged it for hers, which was slightly less ripe. Posie wrinkled her nose and began to eat it as they walked.

  ‘We’ve got to hurry.’ Romily peeled her own banana and remembered she’d forgotten to take her pre-natal vitamin. She’d dumped some outdated vitamins that she’d bought and never taken, and decanted the pre-natal ones into the bottle in her medicine cabinet. Posie might not know what the word ‘pre-natal’ meant, but she did know how to use a dictionary. And besides, the picture of the gurning baby on the bottle sort of gave it away.

  She’d take it later. In her handbag, her phone beeped again. Ben would be at work already, anxious for news.

  ‘Come on, Posie.’

  ‘I can’t eat and run at the same time.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean you have to go at a snail’s pace.’ She took Posie’s hand and tugged her along the pavement. Not for the first time she wished she’d chosen to rent a flat a little bit closer to Posie’s school. Like, ideally, across the street. But when Posie was a baby the most important thing had been to find something affordable with two bedrooms, close enough to the museum and university so that she didn’t have to waste money on petrol or buses; she hadn’t thought ahead to the school run. And besides, today they were so late that nothing short of a Tardis was going to get them to school on time.

  ‘Romily, you’re pulling my arm off.’

  ‘Walk faster, then.’

  ‘I can’t. My feet hurt. My shoes are too tight.’

  ‘They are? Since when?’ Romily ditched the banana peels into a bin and rushed Posie across the street in a momentary gap in traffic.

  ‘I don’t know. I think I need new ones.’

  ‘Oh, Posie, why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘I did. Just like I told you about the spelling test.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  Posie set her face into a scowl and it stayed there all the way to school. Romily had to buzz at the gate to be let into the empty playground. She hauled Posie up the steps into the school office.

  ‘I’m really sorry we’re late,’ she said to the school secretary, who regarded her with unfriendly eyes. ‘The battery went dead on the alarm clock.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘I’ll get a new one.’

  ‘Mrs Summer—’

  ‘Doctor.’

  ‘Dr Summer, Mariposa’s teacher is worried that her tardiness is affecting her education.’

  ‘I’ll get a new battery and a new clock. Tonight. Promise. While I’m here, I’ve got to pay for Posie’s school dinner.’ She dug in her jacket pocket and pulled out the only coins she found: one pound and two ten-pence pieces. ‘Er … can I pay you the extra tomorrow?’

  The secretary took the coins and went back to her typing as if she were washing her hands of this entire mess.

  Romily knelt down and pushed Posie’s damp fringe back. ‘I’m sorry about your shoes, Pose, but you’ll have to put up with them for today. We’ll go shopping for new ones after school.’

  Posie turned away and headed for the door to her classroom.

  ‘Good luck on the test,’ Romily called after her. She didn’t reply. Romily watched her, the narrow shoulders in her mac, the tights sagging at the knees, the hair that hadn’t been combed properly. So small and young, the kid with only one parent. Could’ve been herself at that age.

  Romily straightened up and sighed. Then she took off out of the door at a run for work, pulling her hood up over her head to shield her from the rain.

  Her way took her down the towpath along the Thames, passing ducks and moor hens on the water and mothers with pushchairs and bicyclists on the path. She swerved to avoid goose droppings, ran past council blocks and expensive towers of flats. The rubber soles of her boots slapped on the pavement and made echoes in the underpass. The Brickham Museum was in the centre of town, in the former Town Hall – a Victorian gothic building of red and grey brick. From the front, it had swooping arched windows, pointed towers, a cathedral-like entrance with modern glass automatic doors. She slipped through them, returning the hello from the volunteer who was already standing with her clipboard, ready to greet visitors. Downstairs, the museum charted the history of Brickham, from medieval abbey to Victorian industry to modern shopping. Romily made her way through the box room, with its rolling shelves of school lending boxes, and signed out the key for the entomology collection. She went straight up the narrow back staircase, past the offices where she waved at the women already hard at work, to the third floor and the inner study, a crowded room with three desks, three computers, shelves and shelves of things waiting to be put away, and a small window up high in the north wall.

  No one else was here yet. She breathed a sigh of relief, hung up her wet coat in the corner and put her bag on the only desk which had a view of the window. On a Tuesday, she had to battle for the desks with a volunteer working to catalogue the biscuit tin collection and an art student doing a PhD on equestrian statuary. Not that she minded either of them – Sheila and Layla were nice enough, and she’d been a PhD student and a volunteer herself in her time – but she’d been working here longer than either of them and she liked being able to see a little daylight.

  But this wasn’t the place where her work really lay. That was up another flight of stairs, a small and even narrower one that ended in a single door covered with yellow warning stickers. She went up, unlocked the door and stepped in.

  The mothball scent of naphthalene, the noise of the fans constantly whirring. Some cabinets were modern green-military metal, others mahogany. She knew the contents of all of them, but hers was the big rosewood one at the back of the room under the sloping rafters. The one with the glass door and the narrow shelves, each one with a brass knob. There was a small brass plaque on the top of the cabinet: Collected by Amity Blake, 1847–1907.

  She opened the glass door and carefully slid out drawer No. 70. Watching her feet on the steps, she brought the glass-topped drawer downstairs and put it on the desk. It contained dozens of insects, each secured with a pin, each labelled in a tiny script with a reference number to a catalogue which had long ago been lost.

  Amity Blake had been the only daughter and heir of brick manufacturer Absolom Blake. Very little of her history was known, except for the fact that when she was twenty-eight and a spinster her father had died, leaving her his entire fortune, and instead of using it as a dowry to attract a man, Miss Amity Blake had gone travelling around the world collecting insects. Miss Blake wasn’t unusual – Romily had the impression that every Victorian with time to spare spent it larking about in fields with a net and a killing jar – except that she was a single woman.

  The col
lection had been donated to the museum not long after Amity’s death, and some of it had been displayed, though two world wars and ever-decreasing financial backing meant that the collection had never been catalogued properly.

  Romily had first discovered Amity’s rosewood box of wonders when she was a newly minted PhD student. One look and she’d fallen in love. Working in the time she probably should have spent writing up her own research, especially with a toddler at home, Romily had identified species from Africa, India, Malaysia and the Philippines, all places supposedly off-limits to a Victorian spinster. Romily had convinced one of the museum’s local history volunteers to look for a surviving photograph of Amity, but they hadn’t found one. It didn’t matter to Romily. She could picture Amity perfectly: an upright, unhandsome woman, with a netted hat and sensitive fingers and a pair of pince-nez for delicate work. She’d have hacked through miles of bush wearing near enough a full-length gown.

  She was Romily’s hero.

  After she’d finished her PhD she’d stayed on as a volunteer, balancing unpaid work on the collection with a bit of teaching and a bit more work waiting tables in a local café, writing grant applications after Posie went to sleep. Nineteenth-century female scientists were trendy, and there was local interest besides, and Romily had been given funding to further catalogue the collection.

  Drawer No. 70 was full of dun-brown moths. Amity tended to collect a variety of different species rather than many individuals of the same species, and she liked to arrange them by colour rather than by species or where they were collected, which made Romily’s job that bit more challenging and exciting. A Cabbage White butterfly from Berkshire might be nearly rubbing wings with an Appias phaola from the Congo. She reached into her handbag for her glasses case and found the pregnancy test.

  Oh yes. That was the first thing. She pulled out her phone as well. There were five messages and three missed calls, all from Ben. Of course, he was going crazy waiting to hear whether he was about to have a baby or not.

  So not only was she a rubbish mother, she was a rubbish friend. Decisively, she hid the test back in her handbag and, carrying it, left her domain for the staff toilets. On her way, she stuck her head into the staff kitchen where Hal, the museum manager, was gloomily stirring his cup of tea.

  ‘Hal, can you log into the computer on desk one for me, please?’

  ‘Dr Summer.’

  She stopped. ‘Yes, Hal?’

  ‘Dr Summer. You are an educated woman. Can you explain to me why, in a country that is no longer a global superpower, we do not celebrate the great legacy of knowledge that is the only thing that remains to us?’

  ‘It’s a recession, Hal. The council puts museum services at the bottom of the list. Did you have a budget meeting yesterday, by any chance?’

  ‘We need to be sexier,’ he muttered. ‘Provide a more relevant experience to the community. Science for its own sake is dead. Mark my words, we’ll have Simon Cowell doing educational voiceovers next.’

  He drank deep of his tea, as if pronouncing the doom of the world had made him thirsty.

  Her phone beeped again, reminding her that she had other matters to attend to. Swearing under her breath, she resumed her original path to the staff toilets.

  It was the second plastic stick she’d peed on in just over two weeks. She pulled up her jeans and waited in the cramped toilet cubicle. The result came up almost instantaneously, in plain, clear text.

  Pregnant, 1–2 weeks.

  Some emotion rose up in a rush from her stomach, clenched her heart, closed her throat. Her surroundings wobbled. It’s his baby, she thought, and she leaned against the wall of the cubicle.

  I’m going to have his baby.

  She didn’t know whether that thing lodged in her throat was a laugh or a scream. She closed her eyes and forced in a breath, and then another. What should it be? Which one did she want? Which was safer?

  She hadn’t thought it would really happen. Not so fast. Not the first go. She’d thought she’d have time to reconsider.

  But she had reconsidered, before they’d done the bit with the syringe. And she’d decided she would do this.

  And now it was done. Their cells had met and merged. They were dividing inside her to make a brand-new person, and it was way too late to turn back.

  She listened to the cistern running, the ventilation fan with the missing blade, and thought about how weird it was that so pivotal a moment in so many people’s lives should be taking place in a lavatory. And not a very pleasant lavatory at that.

  For the next nine months she was going to be the vessel for someone else’s child. And though she’d downplayed it, nine months was, in fact, quite a big chunk of time. Posie would be nearly eight by the time this baby – this baby! – was born. Anything could happen in that time.

  So what did she want to do right now? Did she want to laugh, or did she want to scream?

  ‘Don’t tell anyone,’ Claire said into the phone. She was standing with her back against the music staff-room door, so that nobody would come in by mistake.

  ‘What?’ said Ben, forty miles away in his office in London. ‘This is big news. We’re going to have a baby!’

  ‘But we might not.’ She couldn’t breathe. The terror, again, of having something to lose.

  ‘Claire, Romily’s not going to change her mind. You don’t know her like I do. Once she’s decided something, she sticks with it one hundred per cent.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘Oh. I know, sweetheart. It’s frightening. But Romily’s healthy, she’s had a baby before. There’s no reason to think that anything will go wrong this time.’

  This time. Because Romily, unlike Claire, was able to carry babies.

  That wasn’t what he meant. She swallowed. ‘I just think it would be prudent to keep it to ourselves until the end of the first trimester, that’s all.’

  ‘But don’t you want to talk about it with your friends? Helen?’

  ‘Not until it’s certain. And Ben, what if she does change her mind?’

  ‘She won’t.’

  Claire thought about Romily’s untidy flat, her spontaneous meals, the laundry filed in the sofa cushions. ‘I don’t know if she’s as single-minded and determined as you think she is.’

  ‘This is the person who got a PhD whilst looking after a colicky baby.’

  ‘Well, to be honest, we did a lot of the looking after too.’

  ‘I think we should celebrate, just us. It’s a big step. I told Romily I’d leave early and take everyone to the Swan for dinner.’

  ‘Including Posie? Because I don’t think Romily has told her anything about this yet.’

  ‘Including Posie. She deserves to celebrate too. She’s going to be a … what is it? Godsister?’

  ‘Half-sister,’ whispered Claire.

  ‘Godsister. I think Romily should be godmother, don’t you?’

  ‘You’re getting way ahead of yourself, Ben. Just like you always do.’

  He laughed. ‘You’re right. I’m excited, that’s all. I’ll pick you up at home at five.’

  ‘Okay. But don’t tell anyone. Please.’

  He paused.

  ‘Oh no, Ben. You haven’t, have you?’

  ‘Only Justin. And Elaine. But they’ve got children, they know how it works.’

  ‘Having children doesn’t mean you know how it works when you can’t have children.’

  ‘Claire, it will be fine.’ His voice was soothing. ‘It’s all going to work out. I promise you.’

  She twisted the hem of her skirt around her finger. ‘I don’t have a good feeling about it. It’s happened too quickly and too easily.’

  ‘Maybe it’s happening quickly and easily because this child was meant to happen.’

  ‘And our babies, the ones that you and I were trying to make, weren’t?’

  ‘No, I don’t mean that, of course I don’t. It’s just – this feels good. Doesn’t it?’

  ‘It felt
good the last time, too.’

  He paused again. ‘Sweetheart, I thought you were happy about this. I thought you agreed it was the best thing to do.’

  ‘I agreed that it was the only thing to do. There’s a difference.’

  ‘Why can’t you just be happy?’

  ‘Because she’s pregnant with your baby and I’m not.’

  ‘This is our baby.’

  ‘I have to go. The bell just went.’

  She pressed the ‘end call’ button, her heart pounding in her ears. She breathed deeply, for two full minutes. She hadn’t known she’d feel jealous until she said it.

  She hadn’t known that she would suddenly, whole heartedly hate the woman who was carrying her baby instead of her.

  Max was in her classroom, bent over a guitar. He’d taken to hanging out there at lunchtimes, practising whatever songs he liked, shifting from one to the other. Claire didn’t see the harm, and the music was pleasant.

  He glanced up when she entered the room. ‘Are you all right, Mrs Lawrence?’

  ‘What? Oh yes, Max. Thank you. Fine. You?’

  He strummed a chord and then another.

  ‘I’m fine too,’ he said.

  ‘I think I’ll have the mushroom stroganoff,’ Romily said to the waitress and folded up her menu.

  ‘I’ll have sausages and mash,’ said Posie.

  ‘They’re real meat sausages, Pose.’

  ‘That’s okay. I’ve had them before. It’s Ben’s favourite.’ Posie beamed across the table at Ben, who beamed back. Though to be fair, Ben hadn’t stopped beaming from the moment he’d picked them up at the flat.

  ‘How about I give you a taste of mine,’ he suggested.

  ‘No, I want a whole sausages and mash for myself. Romily says she doesn’t mind if I have meat if I want to have it because it’s my choice but she’s not cooking it.’ Her voice sounded exactly like Romily’s when she said it.

  ‘I’ll have the mushroom stroganoff too,’ Ben told the waitress. ‘That way, if Posie doesn’t like the sausages we can swap.’

  ‘I’ll like it.’ Posie sucked milk through her bendy straw.