The Baby Group

by Rowan Coleman

  ‘But I miss you, Mum – I need you,’ Tiffany pleaded, her voice breaking.

  Janine looked at Tiffany, her eyes brimming with tears, but she did not make a move to touch her.

  ‘Dad’ll be back soon,’ she repeated, her voice trembling. ‘You’d better go, love, hey?’

  Tiffany scraped her chair back and hurried out of the house as fast as she could with Jordan in the buggy, as Natalie strapped Freddie into his. Janine sat perfectly still, her elbows resting on the kitchen table as she held onto the teacup she had yet to drink from.

  ‘He’s the most precious thing in my life,’ Natalie said to her, nodding at her son. ‘I’d never let anything stand in the way of being his mum. I can see how much you love her, Janine, don’t lose her for ever.’

  When she got outside she found Tiffany sitting on the front wall furiously wiping away her tears with the sleeves of her jumper.

  ‘I told you it was too late,’ she said when Natalie stopped beside her.

  Natalie shook her head. ‘I don’t think it is, I think you really got through to your mum there and anyway, whatever happens you tried, and that’s important. It really is. I’m proud of you.’

  ‘Will you stop being proud of me,’ Tiffany said with a loud sniff as she stood up and defiantly shook her hair off her shoulders. ‘It’s getting to be embarrassing.’

  ‘Come on,’ Natalie smiled. ‘How about you come back to my place, I’ll cook us lunch, we’ll eat a load of cake and watch my Dirty Dancing DVD. It never fails to cheer me up.’

  ‘What’s Dirty Dancing ?’ Tiff asked her.

  ‘For both your sake and mine,’ Natalie said, slinging an arm around Tiffany’s shoulder, ‘I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.’

  The children were filthy so when they got back from the park Meg and Robert gave them one big midday bath, a fun-filled hour that saw the bathroom covered in mud and Meg and Robert wet through. Once Alex, Hazel and James were dried and dressed and packed off to watch a video before lunch Meg found herself alone again with her husband.

  ‘Just being with you and the kids has been great,’ Robert told her, drawing her body against his in an embrace so tight that she could hear his heart beating. He kissed the top of her head. ‘I feel like I’ve been away for a long time and now I’ve finally come home.’

  Meg looked up at him and perhaps the searching expression in her eyes surprised him because he dropped his arms from around her and took half a step back.

  ‘Have you?’ she asked him intently. ‘Have you really come home?’

  ‘Of course I have.’ Robert smiled. ‘Back where I belong.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Natalie found a Post-it note stuck to the telephone in the hallway when she and Freddie got back with Tiffany and Jordan.

  Jack called at 12, it read, in her mother’s characteristically undisciplined scrawl. Natalie looked at it thoughtfully. It was highly unexpected. If she had expected him to call her at all she had not imagined it would be today. And apart from anything else it meant that he did still have her phone number. After more than a year he still had the phone number he had never attempted to call after they had first met.

  What did that mean, Natalie wondered. Did it mean anything at all? After all, she kept numbers on her mobile phone for ever, names of people she could barely remember any more and hadn’t spoken to in months. But even if the fact that he had held onto her number was of no significance, he had still called her back unexpectedly quickly.

  That had to mean something, but Natalie had no idea what. She looked at the entirely inadequate Post-it note.

  ‘Typical,’ she said out loud.

  ‘What is?’ Tiffany asked her, unwinding her long pink scarf from around her neck.

  ‘Typical of my mother to not acquire details,’ Natalie said, waving the Day-Glo orange paper at Tiffany. ‘For example – am I supposed to call him back or is he calling me back? And what tone of voice did he have when he called? Short? Disappointed? Confused? Now I’ll never know. Like I said – typical.’

  ‘Really?’ Tiffany said wearily as she hefted Jordan out of her buggy. ‘That’s a very atypical thing to typically get wrong. I don’t know anyone who writes on a phone message how the person sounded – and anyway, who is this Jack guy?’

  ‘Oh, no one,’ Natalie said, tucking the Post-it note into her pocket and wondering if her mother was in the house. It was quiet, there were no tell-tale signs of her paraphernalia scattered around the hallway; the stupidly high-heeled tan boots were gone, her white coat with the imitation fur, leopard-skin collar was not hanging on the end of the banister and her gold fake Gucci handbag had disappeared from beside the phone. It looked like she’d gone out.

  It occurred to Natalie that she probably should have asked Sandy what she was doing today, maybe even have had lunch with her. After all, so far she had spent the minimum amount of time with her mother. But if she’d gone out it showed that she wasn’t exactly sitting around pining away, waiting for her only daughter and grandchild to return. Typical, Natalie thought sullenly to herself, aware of yet unable to repress the irrational thought.

  ‘If this bloke is no one, then why do you care whether or not he’s confused?’ Tiffany asked her reasonably.

  Natalie looked up at Tiffany. ‘Because I am a naturally caring, empathetic person, of course,’ she said, loading Freddie onto one hip and picking up her shopping bags with her free hand.

  ‘You do that a lot,’ Tiffany observed.

  Natalie swung round and looked at her. ‘Do what?’ she asked.

  ‘Say something that is obviously completely mental but with such authority that people don’t tend to question it. I’ve noticed, that’s all,’ Tiffany said with a shrug. ‘It’s quite cool.’

  Natalie examined Tiffany’s face and wondered just what else the young woman had guessed about her.

  ‘Yes, well,’ she said. ‘Come downstairs and help me peel potatoes. How’s that for authority?’

  Once in the kitchen Tiffany installed Jordan and Freddie on the rug by the window where they ignored each other happily, Jordan lost in her mission to chew through her rubber teething ring and Freddie striving to move just one single millimetre closer to Blue Dog, who was tantalisingly out of his reach.

  ‘Actually, now I come to think of it you are very mysterious,’ Tiffany said, after a few minutes of companionable peeling.

  Natalie blinked. ‘Who, me?’ she said. ‘Mysterious? I am not.’

  ‘You are,’ Tiffany said, arching a finely plucked eyebrow. ‘I think I know why too.’

  Natalie looked up sharply at the teen.

  ‘What? What is why? What?’ She had had more coherent moments.

  ‘You can tell me, you know, if you want to.’ Tiffany brandished the peeler at Natalie as she spoke. ‘You’ve been really kind to me and I am good at listening if you want to talk. I wouldn’t judge you.’

  Natalie put down the potatoes she was midway through peeling and wiped her damp starchy hands on a tea towel.

  ‘What do you think I have to tell you?’ she asked Tiffany cautiously.

  Tiffany’s smile was full of sympathy. ‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Natalie. If things aren’t as good between you and your husband as you are always saying they are and if you’re splitting up, is it because of that Jack bloke who left a message? Have you been having an affair and now he wants you to leave your Gary and marry him and is that why you want to know whether or not he’s confused?’

  Natalie spluttered all over the pre-prepared baby sweet corn.

  ‘I hope you’re not planning to take a GCSE in revealing denouements,’ she said, scandalised. ‘That is most certainly not what is going on.’

  ‘I reckon it is,’ Tiff went on confidently, ‘otherwise how do you explain that you have no photos of your so-called husband anywhere and that you don’t wear a wedding ring?’

  Natalie stared in horror at Tiffany. ‘Next you’ll be telling me it was Professor Plum in the l
ibrary!’ She snorted in what she hoped was a suitably derisory fashion. Tiffany had just picked a few very large holes in her story, which so far nobody else, including herself had noticed.

  ‘Look, Tiff, you’ve got it all wrong,’ Natalie assured her.

  ‘What then?’ Tiffany asked her steadily. ‘What’s the mystery?’

  Natalie looked at Freddie inching his way along the mat on his tummy. She thought about her son and Jack, and she thought about what was about to hit a very large high-speed fan at any moment anyway, and that soon all of her new friends would inevitably know the shocking truth about her. Actually it wasn’t the truth that was shocking, the truth would have been quite mundane. It was the unadorned silly web of lies that she had got herself tangled up in that was shocking; the kind of complicated nonsense that normal people would probably put down to borderline personality disorder. Sometimes Natalie wondered if she was a bit mad, chasing her tail over a fib that now was only to save the dignity she had never had too much of in the first place. The sane thing would be to simply tell Tiffany the truth right now.

  And so she said, ‘Don’t be such a plank, honestly. The photos of my Gary are in my bedroom, my wedding ring is at the jewellers being buffed and Jack is just a friend I had a bit of a falling-out with, that’s all. Now shut up, Miss Marple, and peel.’

  Some habits, it seemed, were hard to break.

  ‘Natalie,’ Tiffany persisted, perhaps sensing Natalie’s split-second wrestle with the truth. ‘The way you act, I sometimes wonder if you’ve got a husband at all or if you made it all up!’

  Natalie looked up sharply from the chopping board.

  ‘But how did you . . . ?’ She stopped herself when she realised from the expression on Tiffany’s face that she hadn’t known, she had only been teasing.

  ‘What, you mean . . . ? Tiffany spluttered. ‘You mean you haven’t got a husband. You mean you actually did make one up?’

  ‘No!’ Natalie protested. Tiffany raised a highly sceptical eyebrow. ‘Well, yes, OK then, except when you put it like that all blunt and matter-of-fact it makes me sound mad and totally unhinged and I’m not.’ She paused, struggling to rationalise the irrational. ‘I didn’t mean it to get so out of hand. It sort of slipped out when Gary was banging on at me to get the quotes checked by my husband and it grew from there. I know I was stupid, but I didn’t know any of the group that well then and I wanted to fit in. Besides, I wasn’t exactly ready to tell you the truth about me and Freddie, I wasn’t sure if any of you were ready to hear it without running a mile.’

  Tiffany seemed frozen to the spot by her words.

  ‘Well, say something then!’ Natalie begged her. ‘Shout at me, tell me what an idiot I am. Stomp off and tell the others if you like, but please don’t remain rooted to my kitchen floor until the end of time looking so horrified!’

  Tiffany thought for a moment and slowly shook her head.

  ‘You muppet,’ she said.

  Natalie shrugged – she couldn’t deny it.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know I am. Look, I’m planning to sort it out, I really am.’ She spread out her hands in a pleading gesture. ‘Will you just keep it to yourself until I can tell the others myself, please? I will as soon as I get the chance.’

  ‘Course I will,’ Tiffany said, pouting a little. ‘Just because I think you’re a nutter doesn’t mean that I’m a snitch. And anyway you’re my friend, weirdly even my best friend right now – so of course I won’t tell.’

  Natalie’s smile was one of relief.

  ‘You’re one of my best friends too,’ she told Tiffany happily.

  ‘So,’ Tiffany said as she resumed peeling. ‘Do you want to tell me about you and Freddie now?’

  Natalie looked at her young friend and found herself giving in to an irrepressible urge to giggle.

  ‘Why not?’ she exclaimed. ‘Why ever not?’

  The phone must have started ringing again just as Sandy was coming in through the door because she picked it up before Natalie could get to the extension in the kitchen and brought it downstairs with her.

  ‘Jack, again,’ she said, leaning towards Natalie so that she could take the handset from where it was wedged between her left ear and shoulder. ‘He seems keen!’

  Natalie took the phone, noticing that her mother was laden down with shopping bags from Argos to Zara; she must have been into the West End.

  ‘Hello, dear, I’m Nana Sandy – oh, what a lovely little girl,’ Sandy said to Tiffany who was sitting on the rug playing with the babies after lunch. ‘I must show you what I’ve bought . . .’

  ‘Jack,’ Natalie said, as she left the kitchen, pulling the door to behind her. She sat on the stairs up to the hallway. ‘I didn’t expect you to call . . . so soon I mean.’

  ‘Well,’ Jack said. ‘You left in such a hurry. I just wanted to see if everything was OK. Your house hadn’t burnt down or anything?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Natalie said with a half-baked chuckle. ‘No . . . no.’

  It seemed that despite Jack’s speed to call her, the awkwardness they had managed to shrug off last night had returned with a vengeance.

  ‘Natalie, last night was really . . . nice . . .’ Natalie thought she could hear a ‘but’ waiting to be tagged onto the end of the sentence. ‘Look, can I see you again – no real reason, no agenda . . .’ Jack said. ‘Just because . . . we never got a chance to finish our conversation, did we?’

  ‘No, we didn’t and we really do have to, Jack,’ Natalie agreed, determined to put an end to this situation.

  ‘Can you come over tonight?’ Jack asked her. ‘To the flat where I’m staying?’

  Natalie paused, but he couldn’t have known it was because she wondering if she could get away with asking her mother to babysit again when she hadn’t even asked her to have lunch with her.

  ‘Or if you want I’ll come over to you, I still have your address.’

  ‘No, no,’ Natalie said hastily. ‘I’ll come to you. Eight?’

  ‘I look forward to seeing you then,’ Jack said.

  ‘Wouldn’t bet on it,’ Natalie said as she hung up.

  ‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’ Natalie asked Sandy as she sat expressing milk at the kitchen table. It was an odd sort of progress, when it came to the mother-daughter relationship, but Natalie had never imagined that she’d be able to sit, milk-heavy breast in hand, squirting it into a contraption that most resembled a medieval torture device whilst her mum cooked herself pasta. ‘I know it’s a day and two nights in a row, and I know I haven’t exactly seen you very much since you got here, but this is important.’

  ‘This Jack fellow,’ Sandy said, testing her tomato sauce.

  ‘Yes,’ Natalie said, screwing the top on one bottle of milk and transferring it to the fridge. She then began on the other breast. The last thing she wanted was for any breast milk leakage to occur before she had told Jack about Freddie. ‘He’s an Italian buyer, we’re hoping to distribute Mystery is Power through him on the Continent.’

  ‘He didn’t sound Italian,’ Sandy observed.

  ‘He speaks very good English,’ Natalie told her, slipping off her nursing bra under the sleeves of her top and exchanging it with some difficulty for an underwired black number that was now slightly too small for her.

  ‘Well, I’m here,’ Sandy said. ‘If you ever want to talk.’

  ‘Thanks, I’ll bear that in mind,’ Natalie said, pulling her black chiffon shirt down over the bra and then undoing a couple of buttons, not, she told herself, because she wanted to look sexy but because if she didn’t they would ping off anyway. She paused by her mother, considered kissing her on the cheek and instead bent to the baby chair that was positioned safely in the middle of the rug.

  ‘See you later, buster,’ she said, planting a kiss on Freddie’s nose. ‘Try not to let Nana Sandy drop you out of any first-floor windows.’

  When Jack opened the front door to the flat he looked different. Dressed casually in a T-shirt and comba
ts, he looked younger, less formal and forebidding then he had done in his suit. With his face taut with tension, a little gaunt even, Natalie thought that without the moonshine and frisson of yesterdayhe should not be the kind of man to get your heart racing. No wonder Suze hadn’t accepted his invitation for drinks. He wasn’t her type at all; come to think of it, the way he looked right now he wasn’t Natalie’s type either. But it didn’t mean, she realised regretfully, that when she was confronted with him, a shadow of stubble on his jaw and perhaps the evidence of a late night around his eyes, she didn’t still love to look at him, she didn’t admire every contour of his face.

  ‘You’re here,’ he said, this time with a weary smile.

  ‘I am, right on time,’ Natalie observed.

  Jack nodded and stepped back to allow Natalie into the communal hallway. The flat on the top floor, he told her, and he led the way up the stairs.

  Once inside the tiny flat Natalie slipped off her coat and handed it to him, closing her eyes for the briefest of seconds as she became suddenly aware of the close proximity between them.

  ‘Come through,’ Jack said. He led her into a rather small sitting room, where a real coal fire was burning in the grate and the walls were lined with shelves filled with what seemed like hundreds of books.

  ‘All Minnie’s,’ Jack said. ‘She loves to read. Especially the steamy stuff. I told her I’m not sure it’s good for her at eighty-three, but she says it should be prescribed on the NHS. She’s touring Europe with her toy boy right now. He’s seventy-four.’

  The two virtual strangers stood in the small room, looking around at almost anything except each other. Natalie could feel the pressure of all the unspoken history they had created between themselves in their short acquaintance steadily building towards a thunderous climax.

  ‘Look, Jack, there’s . . .’

  ‘Natalie, the thing is . . .’

  They both spoke at once.

  ‘Please sit down.’ Jack gestured to a chintz-covered wingback chair by the fireplace.

  ‘I need to tell you something a bit . . . massive,’ Natalie said, twisting her fingers in knots as she spoke. Jack didn’t really seem to hear.