The Baby Group

by Rowan Coleman

When the weekend had come, when other people’s husbands and families were home and Gary and Anthony had packed up until Monday, the house seemed very quiet. This time, however, after the bustle of the week and the promise of more entertainment in the days to come, Natalie had been able to enjoy the temporary peace and quiet alone with Freddie.

  She did have the strangest feeling though, some hidden instinct that made her feel somehow as if this time was a haven, the quiet before the coming storm.

  Now, as Baby Music reached its tumultuous crescendo, Natalie was practically crying with laughter as Meg threw herself into ‘Incy Wincy Spider’ with the energy and drama of an opera singer, whilst 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 realise that it had been a stroke of luck that she had met Meg and Tiffany on the day the electrics 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. Her universe had shrunk until its limits were pretty much the four walls of her house, an occasional trip to the Turkish grocers and the frequent but usually flying visits from busy Alice. But in the few days since Natalie had met these new people, she had begun to see a slightly different reflection of herself whenever she looked at them.

  She was not to any of them the Natalie the rest of the world knew: the complicated, sometimes foolish and always restless woman who had only ever successfully channelled her energies into one thing prior to Freddie, her underwear business. And she was definitely not the woman who got herself impregnated by a philanderer for whom she stupidly harboured some muddled feelings. To them she was sensible, straightforward Natalie. She was Mrs . . . well, whatever. Married to a lovely steady man, with a lovely baby boy and a lovely house. Natalie liked that vision of herself. She felt wrong for liking it, determined as she always had been to be her own woman all her life long and not care if she had a man or not. She did have to admit, though, that in certain circles a husband could be a very useful accessory.

  But it wasn’t only her imagined home life that Natalie was enjoying, she was heartened by the beginnings of new friendships. 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.

  ‘Well, I can clear up one of those mysteries,’ Natalie said, watching a figure in a long black coat jogging towards them behind a buggy. ‘There’s Jess now.’

  ‘Has it started?’ Jess asked breathlessly as she drew up alongside them, her cheeks flushed and her hair wild with static.

  ‘It’s finished, love!’ Natalie said with a chuckle. ‘You’ve got the time wrong, you dippy mare!’

  Everyone laughed except Jess, whose face fell like a stone.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, with a distinct wobble in her voice. ‘I can’t believe it!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Natalie said lightly, quickly putting an arm around Jess’s shoulders. ‘It wasn’t that big a deal – you didn’t miss much, honest.’

  ‘But we really wanted to go,’ Jess said, getting quite heated. ‘We’d been looking forward to it; it was going to be the highlight of our day.’

  Natalie and Meg exchanged glances. It seemed to Natalie that even in her hormonal state Jess was over-reacting just a little.

  ‘I’m so stupid,’ Jess went on miserably, apparently determined not to let herself off the hook. ‘I can’t believe how stupid I am – and now I’ve missed our meeting!’

  ‘Stop worrying! Baby Music will be there next week,’ Natalie said firmly, deciding she needed to rescue Jess from her own distress. ‘And as for our so-called meeting, well, that isn’t over until there has been coffee and cake, especially cake.’ She glanced up at the sky, which was fairly clear for once. ‘Who fancies a walk around the park on the way to the café?’

  Meg and Frances nodded.

  ‘Can’t,’ Steve said, ‘I’ve got some work to do. When are we meeting next?’

  The five looked at each other and shrugged.

  ‘What we need is a regular date,’ Frances said, fishing in her bag and producing a small black diary and a pen. ‘How about every Wednesday? We could go to Baby Music first and then have a coffee for half an hour afterwards, which would mean the meeting would be over by . . . midday.’

  ‘Or . . .’ Jess began and bit her lip before she could finish the sentence.

  ‘Or?’ Natalie asked her encouragingly.

  ‘You might think it’s a bit too soon to see each other again, but there’s this baby aerobics group on this Friday at the sports centre that I thought might help me get back into shape . . . You exercise with your baby, I think it’s supposed to be quite . . . fun.’

  Natalie looked at Jess’s face. She’d said the word ‘fun’ as if it was a word from another language. It was obviously something she desperately needed.

  ‘Brilliant idea!’ Steve said, making Jess feel quite pleased with herself. ‘Count me in.’

  ‘But that’s a Friday,’ Frances said. ‘That’s two meetings in one week.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ Meg said. ‘We can treat this week as a getting-to-know-each-other week and there aren’t any rules, after all. The more the merrier I say.’

  ‘Yes you do,’ Frances said, looking down at Henry in his pram with an unreadable expression.

  ‘Aerobics,’ Natalie said dubiously. ‘Does it have anything to do with leotards because I’m not sure any of you want to see my arse in Lycra.’

  ‘You can see my bottom from the moon,’ Meg said with a chuckle that drew a look of disapproval from Frances.

  ‘I think it’s time I went,’ Steve said, looking a little pink. ‘I’ll see you there on Friday.’

  The four women watched Steve go.

  ‘He’s lovely, isn’t he,’ Meg said.

  ‘He is,’ Natalie agreed. ‘But I wouldn’t shag him.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Frances said smartly as the others giggled. ‘I’m going home. Goodbye.’

  ‘Frances!’ Meg called out after her half-heartedly. ‘Don’t go – come for a coffee.’

  ‘No thank you,’ Frances said stiffly over her shoulder as she wheeled Henry rapidly into the distance.

  ‘Did I offend her?’ Natalie asked Meg. ‘I was only joking.’

  ‘Frances is a funny old stick,’ Meg said. ‘She’s basically a very nice woman but very hard to get to know. I have no idea how she ever let anyone close enough to her to actually marry her, but her husband Craig is lovely and he obviously adores her.’ Meg shuddered, possibly against the cold, but probably not. ‘I don’t think I could be married to her though, it would be like walking a tightrope with no safety net every day.’

  ‘However, you are married to her brother,’ Natalie said as they set off. ‘They’re not at all alike then?’

 
; Meg thought about Robert. He must have come home last night after she had fallen asleep. She dimly remembered feeling the weight and warmth of him suddenly materialising next to her in bed and then sometime later when she had got up to see to Iris she had seen his shape under the duvet. He was in the shower when she had been getting everyone’s breakfast. He’d been out of the door, shouting his goodbyes down the hallway with his skin still damp before Meg could even offer him a cup of coffee.

  ‘Daddy didn’t kiss me goodbye,’ Hazel had said wanly over her Rice Krispies.

  ‘He was in a rush, dear,’ Meg had said, looking sadly down the empty hallway to the front door. She knew how disappointed Hazel felt. Robert hadn’t kissed her goodbye either. The truth was, Robert did frighten her, but not because he was like Frances. It was because she wasn’t sure who he was like any more.

  ‘He’s like Frances in that he knows how he likes things and he’s very focused,’ she told Natalie, keeping her thoughts to herself and banishing her worries back to the small hours of the night where they belonged. ‘But apart from that they are totally different. Robert’s great. A really great dad and a wonderful husband,’ Meg went on in a doggedly happy tone. ‘We always wanted a big family with lots of kids. I was an only child and it was a very lonely childhood. And Robert – well, you can imagine the kind of home he came from by looking at Frances. His parents were very strict, very authoritarian – still are really. We wanted something different for our children and that’s what we’ve created. I know I’m very lucky not having to worry about going back to work or anything.’

  ‘Lee is great with Jacob,’ Jess said as they walked across the park and towards Church Street. ‘He’s so calm and relaxed with him. When I look at the two of them together I feel sort of out of it. Almost excess to requirements. I think they’d get on fine without me, you know.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Natalie said lightly, picking up the doom-laden sentence and tossing it into the air with ease. ‘For one thing, Lee can’t breastfeed, can he? And boys always prefer their mums to their dads. That’s a biological fact.’

  ‘What about your husband, Natalie – is he a good dad?’ Meg asked. ‘What’s his name again?’

  Natalie froze for a nanosecond. Her tiny harmless lie was just about to double in size. She felt powerless to stop it, and in some ways she didn’t want to. She knew she could just tell them the truth and she was fairly sure they’d be OK about it. In fact, they’d probably laugh and be very understanding. But on the other hand, they might wonder why she had lied in the first place instead of just telling them the truth like any normal person would. And if they did that they might not be so keen on being friends with her. And Natalie knew that she needed friends, more especially these fledgling friends. As much as she enjoyed her daily conversations with Alice, it was only with these women that she felt her life with Freddie was real and forever, and not just some sort of phase she was going through before everything got back to normal. And on top of that, to be honest, she liked her fictional husband.

  ‘Gary,’ she said, plucking the first available man’s name out of the air. She might as well call him Gary because in her head he literally was Gary, or at least her version of him – the world’s first dependable and dull fantasy man ever created in the mind of a woman. ‘He’s a lovely dad, when he’s here and even when he’s not. I speak to him every night. He tells Freddie a story down the phone.’

  As the others ‘ahhhd’ Natalie wondered at the lie that had come so easily. She was always one for exaggerating, spinning a good yarn, adding just a little bit of gloss to reality here and there to improve the punchline of an anecdote, but she’d never told an actual, big, massive, get-found-out-and-you’re-for-it lie before. Unless you counted not telling Jack Newhouse he was Freddie’s father, which wasn’t really a lie, but more of an omission.

  ‘He feels bad that he has to work away,’ she went on, as if someone else had taken control of her tongue. ‘But when he’s completed this contract he’s coming back for good. We can’t wait can we, Freddie?’ Freddie, who was fast asleep after the excitement of Baby Music, remained oblivious to his mum’s deception and potential insanity.

  ‘He missed the birth, didn’t he?’ Jess remarked sympathetically.

  ‘Oh no, he was there for the birth,’ Natalie said, privately outraged at and full of admiration for herself simultaneously.

  ‘Really?’ Jess said. ‘Only I didn’t see you with anyone except that blonde woman when we were in.’

  ‘Yes, he arrived in the middle of the night I was in labour,’ Natalie assured her. ‘He cut the cord. We had a few precious hours before he had to go again’.

  ‘Doesn’t he get paternity leave?’ Jess asked as they reached the café at last.

  ‘Not on a short-term contract.’ Natalie winged it. ‘Scandalous, isn’t it? Now, who’s for carrot cake?’

  She breathed a silent sigh of relief as she finally directed the conversation away from herself and on to cake. It was dangerous that she enjoyed talking about fantasy Gary so much, because apart from anything else the more she told her friends about him the harder it would be to have to tell them one day that he didn’t exist. She’d end up having to invent a mistress that he had abandoned her for, or some kind of tragic engineering accident that left her a fairly young and fairly beautiful widow . . . Natalie stopped herself in her tracks and told herself to get a grip on reality. For a second she imagined how things might have been in a parallel life. She pictured Jack Newhouse holding her hand a she pushed and swore and screamed, and almost laughed out loud at the ridiculous image that was no more real than her fake husband. It was even more implausible, a realisation that gave her a pang of sadness.

  Natalie knew it was stupid to miss a man she had never really known and would never know. Except that wasn’t quite true. When she looked at Freddie and caught glimpses of his father in his features, she felt as if she knew Jack more now that he was out of her life than the few intense hours he had been in it. She missed not only him – as absurd as that was – but also the idea of having someone to share the joy of her son. She mourned the absence of the other half that had co-created Freddie.

  ‘Gary sounds lovely,’ Meg said with a wistful air as she studied the menu.

  ‘Oh he is,’ Natalie agreed, snapping out of her reverie and nodding vigorously.

  ‘We’re lucky, aren’t we?’ Jess seemed to need additional confirmation. ‘To have found three wonderful men. Really good men are in short supply, you know.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Meg and Natalie said together with heartfelt emphasis, but for entirely different reasons.

  Chapter Seven

  When Natalie got back to the house Gary Fisher was vacuuming the front room with a studied concentration that she found oddly endearing.

  ‘I didn’t know cleaning came as part of the service,’ she said twice before he finally gave up trying to hear her and switched the vacuum cleaner off.

  ‘Oh well, I like to leave a room tidy,’ he said a little awkwardly.

  ‘How’s it going?’ Natalie asked him. It did seem a little surreal chatting to this powerfully muscled man covered in plaster dust while he clutched at the handle of her upright as if it were the very last straw.

  ‘We’re making good progress,’ Gary said. ‘Kitchen’s done, half of downstairs.’ He smiled and nodded at Freddie. ‘How’s the little feller getting on then?’

  ‘Brilliant,’ Natalie said. ‘We had a real laugh today, didn’t we, Freddie – and to think I thought I was missing the cut and thrust of the lingerie business!’

  Gary blushed deeply at the inflammatory word and looked down at his boots. The two of them stood there for a moment in silence.

  ‘Oh!’ Gary said suddenly, his voice seeming loud in the quiet. ‘That reminds me, a lady called Alice left you a message on your machine. She said to call her straight away. Something to do with . . . Casanova?’

  Natalie sat down on her sheet-covered sofa.

  ‘Oh
,’ she said. That could only mean one thing.

  Jack Newhouse was back in town.

  ‘What did she say again?’ Natalie asked Alice nervously for the third time. She found it very hard to believe what Alice was telling her, but she had to, because unless Alice had gone barking mad she was not in the habit of telling lies.

  ‘Like I said we were just having lunch, the first time in months, and then Suze says, “Remember that guy Natalie had the fling with? His name was Jack Newhouse, wasn’t it? I remember because she made that joke about his name.” So I nodded and she tells me she thinks she’s met him, within the last week in London.’

  Natalie chewed her lip and looked anxiously at Gary’s back as he pulled length after length of old wire out of the hole he had made in her wall.

  ‘But how does she know? It could be anyone, there must be hundreds of men called Jack in London. I bet she never met him! I bet she’s making it up, it would be just like her.’ Natalie thought about Suze, a pre-baby Friday-night friend who had become conspicuous by her absence soon after Natalie got pregnant, let alone had an actual baby. It did not surprise her in the least that she had scheduled lunch with Alice once she knew that Natalie was not likely to be there. She was fun girl, good for gossip and cocktails but shallow as a puddle and as reliable as – well, as Natalie could be herself sometimes, which wasn’t very.

  ‘But are there hundreds of Jack Newhouses who grew up in Venice and have spent the last year in Italy? Because according to Suze that’s the Jack she met. Think about it, it’s not that weird. You met him near Soho, she met her Jack Newhouse in Soho Square. People move about in the same old small ponds no matter how big they like to think the world is, bumping into the same old fish. And he has got a track record of talking to random women, hasn’t he? Well, that’s what he did with Suze.’

  ‘He tried to pick her up?’ Natalie asked Alice, feeling sickened. It was humiliating, like receiving a second-hand report of her own encounter with him, illustrating so clearly that from Jack’s point of view the whole event was horribly routine.