Head Over Heels

by Sara Downing

  I delve into the bag and pull out a gorgeously wrapped pair of long, black silk gloves. They look like something a nineteen-thirties screen goddess would have worn.

  ‘They’re beautiful, Alex, thank you,’ I say, and I mean it, stroking the sumptuous fabric and almost purring with appreciation.

  ‘Not entirely practical, I know, and rubbish in the snow,’ Alex jokes, ‘but I thought they’d be great for all those posh bashes you have to go to with Mark. Besides which, whoever wants anything practical for their birthday. Give me something I want, not something I need, any day!’

  ‘My turn now,’ says Evie. She hoists her handbag on to her lap, rummages around for what seems like ages – I’m such a kid, the anticipation is killing me – and hands me an envelope-sized present, wrapped in metallic gold paper and with a huge shiny bow. I destroy her beautiful wrap in one rip to reveal a pair of tickets to the opera at Covent Garden, for later in the year.

  ‘Wow, what can I say,’ I do manage to say, completely blown away by Evie and James’ generosity.

  ‘I knew you’d always wanted to go, and it is an excuse to get all dressed up and buy a new pair of shoes,’ she says, ‘not that you ever need an excuse to buy shoes!’

  ‘Thank you all so much, you are so kind and I love you all to bits,’ I say, grinning at my mates. I look across at Mark, but he is away with the fairies, probably in future-daddy-land, dreaming of those babies he so wants.

  Mark had dumped the whole baby idea on me first thing this morning. I’d bounced down the stairs in my new white robe, Mark had poured me a coffee, and I’d sat down to enjoy the croissants he’d warmed up, savouring the doughy bakers-shop aroma filling our kitchen.

  ‘Thanks, Mark, you’re my knight in shining Armani’, I had joked.

  ‘Nothing's too much trouble for the love of my life and the future mother of my children,’ he’d proclaimed. I’d choked on my first sip of coffee, spraying a fine mist of the stuff all over my robe.

  ‘Oh!’ had been about the extent of my reply, the shock clearly evident on my face. Something along the lines of ‘What would you like to do today?/ Is 9am too early for champagne? / Drink your coffee, I’m taking you back to bed for several hours of unbridled passion,’ would have been a little more expected, and not so likely to make me choke.

  I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, really. Mark had been growing increasingly clucky over our friends’ children in the past few months, but I’d been burying my head in the sand and hoping it would go away, and that it wasn’t a sign he’d like a few of his own. It was obvious, looking at it objectively, but I suppose I just liked to hope that he was being a nice friendly sort of uncle figure to the little angels. Hoping they’d ask him to be the new Santa for the village Christmas party this year, or something equally innocuous.

  The trouble is, in all the time we’ve been together, Mark and I have been a bit lax about discussing our plans for having children, or not. We’ve always assumed (or at least he has, and I’ve never really contradicted him) that one day, ‘when we grow up’, maybe we’d have kids. I’m a teacher, you see, so one would tend to think that with my great love of children (I work with the little darlings, don’t I?) I would want to start popping out a few of my own. But I’m a great believer in the correct order of things, and as Mark and I are still not married, I thought I had a bit of time before the question of parenthood would rear its not so aesthetically pleasing head.

  Plus there’s the issue of not wanting to put my parents through what they went through with my sister. Or myself, come to that. Or Mark.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely?’ he’d gone on, plugging away at it now that he’d started. He obviously felt that pacing the room whilst he put his case helped, but it just made him look even more like the lawyer that he is, let out of the courtroom on day release. I half expected him to say, ‘I put it to you, Miss Connery……’ He grabbed an apple from the fruit bowl on his way past and proceeded to half massage the poor thing to a pulp, like some sort of stress toy. There must be some kind of gene that gives lawyers that superiority edge over us mere mortals. Handy in the courtroom, I don’t doubt, but not so pleasant when it’s your other half giving you the third degree in the comfort of your own home.

  ‘I mean, you're thirty-three now and I'm thirty-six and we're not getting any younger and we're financially stable and we have a beautiful home and we have a lot to give a child and all our friends are doing it and you love kids, you're a teacher after all, and surely you must be ready........ Aren’t you?’ No wonder I had been taken aback; he’d clearly been building up to this for a while.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be great to be a family?’ He’d beamed from ear to ear, eyes gleaming like a small puppy with a new toy. I’d struggled not to let out one of those loud, comedy gulps, like they do in cartoons.

  After lunch Mark gets up to stretch his legs and wanders out on to the small deck at the front of the boat. I feel a bit like I should follow him; he looks like a schoolboy at a disco, popping outside for some air to pass the time because no one wants to dance with him. How unfortunate it now seems that he had to bring up the subject of babies this morning. He had arranged this fabulous treat for me, and although it’s brilliant and I’m loving every minute of it, I can’t help the tiny bit of resentment that’s brewing inside of me, and the cross feeling that he has in some way spoiled my birthday, despite all this.

  ‘Are you free after school on Monday?’ Evie asks before I have a chance to trail after Mark. ‘Why don’t you pop round for a cuppa and a natter? Sounds like you need a bit of girl talk.’ She is doing her best to make me feel better; she’s a great one for doing that without judging or expressing an opinion of her own.

  ‘I hate this, it’s the first major thing we haven't agreed on,’ I explain. ‘But we never set out the ground rules, so neither of us really knows how to approach it. You should have heard him this morning, it was like he'd prepared a sales pitch for me.’ I hate slagging Mark off to her, to anyone come to that. But I need to get it off my chest. ‘He wants us to talk about it tonight. I just want a quiet night in and a cuddle on the sofa.’

  Evie will no doubt profess to understand, but having children has come so naturally to her, and she’s everyone's idea of the press-inspired ‘Yummy Mummy’. She adores her kids and cannot imagine life before they came along, but at the same time she’s fortunate enough to still be able to maintain her glamorous lifestyle, hobbing with the nobs at James' work do's, off on regular shopping jaunts to London, and travelling with James on the odd business trip overseas – without the kids of course. She is always decked out in the finest designer clothes, her hair, make-up and nails radiating that ‘just stepped out of the salon’ look. She’s the sort of woman who looks like she knows how to climb out of a sports car; knees together, swing to the side, don’t get up until your stilettos hit the red carpet.

  Evie not only seems to have it all, but to be able to make it work too. She has made one big sacrifice though, but this tends to be overlooked by those who come into contact with her, in the face of her outwardly charmed Modus Vivendi. When she met James she had been working as a project manager for a software company specialising in financial packages. She was outstanding at her job and destined for greatness. She and James' paths had crossed when she was overseeing an installation at his offices. Their romance had been pretty whirlwind – they were both hovering around thirty and on finding one other, seemed to discover from within an agenda which included settling down and having children before they got too old, despite an immense drive for career success from both of them. Maybe it was simply a case of meeting the right person at the right time, and a dawning realisation that they both wanted more out of life than just job status.

  So Evie had promptly married James and conceived their first child, Imogen, on one of the many drunken honeymoon nights they spent in Bali. Not quite how they had envisaged starting a family – a year or so together first would have been nice – but they were both o
ver the moon, if a little shell-shocked, when Evie discovered she was pregnant. There had been no looking back; Imogen had been followed almost exactly two years later by Anastasia, and the Brookes family was complete. James would have loved a son, but the symmetry of two adults and two children was just too comfortable for them, and neither felt the need to carry on reproducing beyond the arrival of their two gorgeous girls. The girls grew up, passed the toddler stage and started school, but somehow Evie never managed to find the time to go back to work. The loss of her salary was quickly absorbed as James' financial advisory business grew in stature and their net worth increased dramatically over the next few years.

  If Evie misses the excitement of the career she has sidelined, she hides it well. But she is an extremely intelligent woman, and I sometimes wonder how she copes without the stimulation and the daily cut and thrust of the workplace. Her life as it is now doesn’t involve a lot of stress; I can’t think what she does for the large chunk of the day that isn’t taken up with making sure the girls get to their various activities, or visiting some salon or other for hair styling or removal, but she must fill it somehow. Surely there is a limit to how many times you can realistically go shopping in one week? And that from me, Grace, Queen of Shoppers.

  I couldn't imagine what it must have taken for Evie to walk away from her career so easily, but then the call to motherhood must have already been heard by her – I had not yet been summoned.

  As Mark comes back into the cabin, he whispers conspiratorially in the ear of one of the staff and suddenly the music changes pace and volume. Oh no, this has all the feel of the first dance at a wedding, only it’s not my wedding and at this rate it’s never bloody likely to be, and everyone is watching, and OH MY GOD, Mark is pulling me to my feet and suddenly we are spinning round to the strains of Lady Gaga’s ‘Just Dance’. I am relieved that at least it’s not a ‘slowie’ and thankfully we can just throw ourselves around the dance floor and be silly and have a bit of a laugh about the whole thing. Fortunately the others come to my rescue and before long we are all strutting our funky stuff on the miniature dance floor. It’s a long time since the necessity to dance has been foisted upon me mid-afternoon (except at weddings, it’s always at bloody weddings, isn’t it?) and somehow it feels really liberating and decadent. What a bunch of boozed up middle-agers we must look, but hey, who cares, we’re having a brilliant time and letting off some steam.

  All too soon it’s over and we are back at the little landing stage and disembarking, heaving all our bags back onto dry land and saying our goodbyes. Those poor waiters, lining up and hovering expectantly for their tips; for some reason we three ladies feel the need to show our appreciation for a brilliant afternoon with more than just cash, so those gorgeous young lads are subjected to much enthusiastic kissing – cheeks only, of course. We just can’t pass up an opportunity like that, can we? Evie and Alex have to get back to relieve babysitters, so we go our separate ways. I am very chilled out and more than a little tipsy, again. Still, today's champagne has completely killed last night's hangover, at least.

  At home and I disappear upstairs with my bags to unpack and try on. Mark always finds it hilarious that I can try all the clothes on at the shops, be happy enough to buy them, and then rush home and try them all on again, because you can’t tell properly in someone else's mirror if it really looks right or not. Shop mirrors can be false witnesses and flatterers, not always prone to telling the truth. Anyway it’s a woman's prerogative to change her mind, isn't it? No mirror but your own can be the proper judge of whether something makes you look fat, thin, whether the colour is ‘you’ or not, if those vertical stripes really are too much, and all those other fashion dilemmas that men just don’t get. But then when all you can EVER wear is a derivative of trousers and a shirt, life must be pretty easy. A bit like having a uniform only in lots of different colours. How easy it must be getting dressed in the morning when you're a man. No fuss, but not much fun either. No wonder David Beckham tried to make the case for men wearing skirts. Poor chap was probably just hopelessly bored with his wardrobe.

  Besides, I’m not just trying stuff on, I’m keeping busy in an attempt to put off our ‘chat’. I've had a brilliant birthday thus far; we’d had such a fun afternoon, and other than Mark’s one-off snide comment, he had been his usual gorgeous and entertaining self. I don't know why I expected him to be any different really; it wasn't like we'd had a row or anything, just that we both knew there was unfinished business between us to be talked about. But we had managed to shelve that in the name of having a good time.

  I slip into the first outfit – a turquoise silk dress – and parade off downstairs, sporting new heels and matching clutch bag too (Mark has to get the full effect, after all). I do a twirl for him in the kitchen with a ‘Ta daaa!’ and he pronounces the first outfit delectable, just as he had done in the shop. Poor thing.

  Indulging in my eternally favourite pastime – shopping – this morning had given Mark another chance to produce an Oscar-winning performance for acting as though it is his, too. Come on, we all know men pretend they are hard done by, being dragged from clothes shop to shoe shop, via that wonderful little bag shop that actually stocks Mulberry bags outside London and that cute little boutique with the really unusual stuff where the staff are so helpful, you just have to buy something. What man in his right mind doesn’t enjoy watching the love of his life have so much fun trying on clothes, shoes, bags, accessories, appearing to make a decision to buy the lot, then almost simultaneously changing her mind, handing it all back to the assistant and flouncing out of the shop, proclaiming that it just ‘isn't her’?

  I have to say I am reaping the benefits of Mark's fabulous new salary; there is no way on a teacher's earnings that I could indulge in my much-loved retail compulsion quite to the extent I have been, and he seems happy for me to do so. Ever since we set up home together there have never been any disputes over money, whose it is, who has earned it and who is spending the most (usually me).

  ‘Does your mirror like that one?’ he ventures bravely, as I head back downstairs in outfit number two.

  ‘Mirror says yes’, I reply. ‘Think I need a tan to go with this, though. Still, I won’t be wearing it till the summer.’ This dress shows more leg than I usually like, but I don’t see Mark complaining. Luckily I have the sort of skin which only has to spot the sun coming out and it turns brown, making me a bit of a bargain tanner – always useful when you live in a country where sunshine is a scarce resource.

  Mark, bless him, sits patiently whilst I produce a full-scale fashion show of everything else. Enough to try the patience of a saint, I should think, especially as he had seen it all not a few hours earlier. I plant a big kiss on his cheek.

  ‘Thank you for a wonderful day, you truly fabulous and gorgeously handsome and sexy man,’ I drool. Mark pulls himself up from reading the paper, which he has been doing between fashion parades, straightens his back and clears his throat nervously.

  ‘So,’ he starts. ‘Can we talk about this?’ Uh-oh, here we go.

  And talk we do. Mark is quite convincing in his argument, to give him his due. It turns out that he just really genuinely wants to be a Dad. He feels the time is right; we are earning enough to afford for me to take time off work. We could even employ help if we wanted to, he says, especially as our families live so far away. And practicalities aside, I sense in him this real urge to be a father, not just because that's what people of our age do, or because all his friends are doing it, but because he loves me and he wants us to be a family and the idea of having a baby with the woman he loves is the best thing in the world he can possibly imagine.

  I tell him that’s all very gracious and noble and all those things I know he wants to hear, and then I say that I would want us to get married first. That’s where we always hit the barriers. To be honest, we haven’t talked about it for a while; we had no reason to whilst parenthood wasn’t on the agenda, and it was only ever just going to be t
he two of us. Mark goes very quiet.

  ‘Why is it such a big deal to you, Grace? You know I love you, and isn’t this proof that I want us to be together forever?’

  ‘Yes, but in that case I don’t understand why you won’t commit to me,’ I push.

  ‘I am committed to you, I told you that didn’t I, and having a baby together would reinforce it.’

  ‘Yes, but being an unmarried mother is something I never saw myself being,’ I say. I get up and wander towards the window, gazing out at the garden.

  ‘Why do you have to be so old-fashioned about it?’ he whines. ‘Co-habiting partners these days have much the same rights as married women, you know that. You make it sound like you’d be stuck in a council flat on a sink estate with five kids by different fathers.’

  ‘Don’t throw all the legal jargon at me, Mark, just because you can,’ I say, spinning round to face him. I know my body language is defensive, but I feel as if I’ve been backed into a corner. ‘If you don’t want to marry me, just say so. I’m not being old-fashioned; I just want some security, if I am going to even consider having a child with you. When we got engaged all those years ago, I thought it was because you actually wanted to marry me one day?’

  ‘God, you’re starting to sound just like your mother,’ is his really helpful reply, still evading the question. At that point I leave the room. It’s my birthday, after all, and I’m not hanging around to be spoken to like that.

  Mark’s hurtful comments really stung me. He has always admired my family, and compared my childhood favourably to his own – he was the typical latchkey kid, in the days when it was acceptable to leave children under fourteen at home unsupervised. He'd let himself in, do his homework and get the tea started before his mother got home from work. We on the other hand used to arrive home from school to the smell of freshly baked muffins and a hearty casserole in the oven.