by Vivien Brown
When she returned to their table, they were talking about something totally different. A book they had both read, and the TV adaptation of it that had got them both swooning over the leading man. Jenny put the drinks down in front of them and waited for a lull in the conversation.
‘Oh, it’s so nice to be back together,’ she said, taking a sip. ‘It’s just like old times.’
‘No Nat? Kate? I’m surprised you didn’t hire a minibus and bring the whole family.’
‘Don’t be daft. Mum’s gone off somewhere herself for a few days anyway, so she doesn’t even know we’re away from home. And Nat’s up to her eyes in wedding planning. Oh, I do wish you’d come, Laura. We’d all love you to be there. You do know where it is, don’t you? And the date?’
‘Of course I do. Unless she’s done a massive u-turn, the details of this wedding have been set in stone for what seems like years! But … oh, you know. It’s still weeks away. A long way off. Anything could happen. You didn’t tell her, though, did you? Nat? About finding me?’
‘No. Poor girl’s got enough to worry about.’
‘Is that what I am?’ Laura cut in. ‘Just another thing to worry about?’
Jenny put her hand on Laura’s. It was surprisingly cold. ‘Well, we have been worried. All of us. You’ve no idea how hard I had to work to track you down. Finding your aunt, and then twisting her arm to get even a hint of where you might be.’
‘So, why did you?’
‘To start with, it was just curiosity. To find out where you’d gone and to make sure you were okay. But then, when I dragged it out of you about the baby … that changed things. And the truth is that I brought Beth with me because … well, if I couldn’t get you to come back home, then I hoped maybe Beth could.’
‘I haven’t said anything about coming back home.’
‘No, I know. But now you’re having a baby – Ollie’s baby – I thought maybe you would. Or at least think about it. Babies need two parents; parents who stick together whatever life throws at them …’
‘Of course they do. And you know about that more than most. But this is different.’
‘Is it?’
‘You haven’t told him, have you?’
‘Ollie? No. It’s been hard not to, though. I haven’t told anyone at all, not even Beth until this afternoon. I promised I wouldn’t, so I won’t.’
‘So, why haven’t you told him yourself?’ Beth had been saying very little up until now, but she’d finally asked out loud what Jenny had been dying to ask ever since she’d first found out, although she wouldn’t have chosen to come out with it quite so bluntly. ‘Only, I do think he has a right to know, don’t you? Unless he’s not the father, of course.’
There was a stunned silence, broken only by a strangled sob coming from somewhere deep down in Laura’s throat. ‘Is that what you think of me, Beth? Really?’
‘I don’t know what to think, actually. I thought you left because you couldn’t give him a baby, and now here you are, clearly several months gone – which is what you both said you wanted so much – and you’re cutting him out of the equation altogether. It doesn’t make any sense to me.’
‘Beth!’ Jenny turned towards her sister and tried to stop her from saying anything else, but it was too late. Laura was already up and shoving her arms down the sleeves of her coat.
‘I shouldn’t have come,’ she said, pushing through the gap between them as best she could, one hand protectively covering her bump. ‘I knew you wouldn’t understand. Any of you.’
Jenny followed her out into the street. Pregnant women not being the fastest of movers, she wasn’t too difficult to catch up with.
‘Laura. Wait!’
‘What for? I came because I thought it might be good to see you, and maybe to try to explain. I didn’t expect you to start ganging up on me.’
‘That’s not what we’re trying to do. Honestly. Come back inside, Laura. Please. We’ll go easy on you, I promise. And I do keep my promises, as you well know. If I didn’t, it would be Ollie standing here right now, pleading with you. Not me.’
Laura hesitated for a moment, but Jenny could tell she had given in. In fact, there seemed very little fight left in her at all.
‘All right. I’ll come in, but that doesn’t mean I’m coming back home, or telling Ollie. Not right now, anyway. Just because you make all these rash promises doesn’t mean that I have to, okay?’
Jenny slid her arm through Laura’s. ‘Of course you don’t. Whatever you want is fine by me. But I do want to hear all about junior here. Boy or girl? Due date? Possible names? Everything. Wow, Laura, I’m going to be an auntie, aren’t I?’ She laughed. ‘That sounds really funny, doesn’t it? Auntie, aren’t I! But I am. Going to be an auntie. Auntie Jen, the practical one, that’ll be me, opening it a savings account and buying it sensible shoes. And Auntie Beth can take it partying and do its hair, and Nat can … oh, I don’t know, take it for wheelie spins in her chair! It’s going to be just great.’
‘Slow down, Jen. This baby isn’t even born yet, and on my past record it still might not be.’
‘But you’re six months gone. You won’t miscarry this one. Not now. You’re home and dry!’
‘If only I could believe that, but there’s still a long way to go. Anything could happen. Anything could still go wrong. And not a day goes by, Jen, not an hour or a minute when I don’t worry that it will.’
Jenny didn’t know what to say. The sheer misery etched on Laura’s face brought tears stinging into her own eyes.
‘It will be all right, Laura.’
‘Will it? You can’t possibly know that. And it’s what I thought the first time, isn’t it? And the second. And this is the fourth, remember. Four! I hardly sleep, and when I do I just dream these horrible dreams. I can’t settle, or relax, or plan. Ever. It’s like I’m in a living nightmare, Jen, and it’s one I’m not going to wake up from until this baby is born safely, all in one piece, and lying in my arms. Do you think I could put Ollie through all this too? No! Never. It’s best he doesn’t know, doesn’t have to feel what I’m feeling, fret and stress and tie himself up in knots. Best he doesn’t have to go on blaming himself – or me.’
‘Blaming? For what?’
‘Oh, God, Jen, you really don’t understand, do you? Please, let’s go back in to Beth and find something else to talk about for once. Books, clothes, the sodding weather if we have to. But any more baby talk and I think I just might explode!’
Chapter 9
Kate, 1979
I packed my pants with a double layer of padding, swallowed three aspirins, and wore the dress back to front. Nobody would know. The neckline was a bit higher at the front than it would have been and the shaping, such as it was, was all wrong (thank God for small breasts), but the giant ribbons attached at the sides had been as easy to tie one way around as they had the other, and I was now eternally grateful I hadn’t gone for something with a train that would have made such improvising pretty much impossible. The small stain, still damp and not quite invisible, despite Linda’s frantic scrubbing, was now at the front of the dress, disguised, along with my bump, by the long trailing bouquet I was clutching so tightly that my knuckles had gone white.
Mum gripped my hand on the step. ‘Sure you’re okay to do this, love?’ she said, looking anxious. ‘Maybe you should have stayed lying down. It might make a difference.’
‘I doubt it. I don’t think babies fall out just because the mother is upright, do you? If I’m going to lose it, there’s not a lot I can do to stop it now. And I will see a doctor as soon as I can, I promise. But I think we all know it might already be too late.’
I took a pace forward to the door and tried not to think about what was happening inside my own body. If I’d thought too hard about it I would probably have crumpled, gone in there crying my eyes out, tripped over my own feet or something. Somehow it was easier to ignore it, pretend it wasn’t happening, tell myself that none of it was true. This baby had no
t been planned but over the last few weeks I had grown to love it, to want it. And now all I wanted was for it to hang on and live, to become a part of our brand-new family. Baby Blob, that was what Dan had taken to calling her, his hand stroking over my belly, his ear pushed against my skin as if he could hear her breathe. Her? Why did we just both assume it was a she? Little Baby Blob. No, don’t think about it. Concentrate on what’s happening right now. The wedding. Dan. Us …
Peering into the church, I could just see him standing at the front. Dan, with his back to me, hopping from foot to foot and straightening his tie, and Rich standing beside him, fiddling with something in his pocket. Probably the rings. And between them and me, a small rolling sea of heads and hats, a general murmuring of whispered conversation, and an unmistakable air of anticipation.
I was late. Only by ten minutes, which we’d needed to try to sort out the dress, but that was probably enough to get tongues wagging. Where is she? Is something wrong? Is she going to turn up? The flash of an image popped into my head, of that woman Linda knew, seeing it all ahead of her, turning away and running scared, all the way to the bus. But not me. For better or worse, that’s what this was all about. And things didn’t come much worse than this.
‘Do you want me to slip in there and have a word with Dan? In private? Tell him what’s happening?’ Mum asked, her forehead creased into a frown, as she pulled a mirror from her handbag and had a last check of her lipstick. She looked, like me, as if all she really wanted was to get on with it, get it over with, as quickly as possible.
‘No, Mum. It’s not as if there’s anything he can do. And you whispering in his ear in front of that lot in there could hardly be less private, could it? Let him enjoy his own wedding, eh? No point all of us worrying ourselves sick, is there? Ready, Lin?’
Linda nodded as she pulled my hem into line and did a final tweak of my hair. ‘Then, let’s get in there, shall we? There’ll be time enough to tell Dan afterwards. When it’s too late for him to change his mind!’
They both laughed in a muted, nervous kind of way, but a little piece of me wondered if it was true. If he was only marrying me because of the baby, and now there was no baby …
The bells stopped ringing then and, having spotted us waiting in the open doorway, the organist started up and everyone suddenly stood and turned and stared. It was too late to do anything but go through with it. I grabbed Mum’s arm and pulled my flowers hard against me. Then, taking a big collective breath, all three of us stepped over the threshold and into the church, and made our way, very slowly, up the aisle.
***
Was that it? The moment I sealed my fate. Our fate? Walking down the aisle without telling him? Without saying a word? I knew it was the baby – the accidental baby – that had brought us there, to that day, that church, that rushed decision we might never otherwise have made. And now there might not be a baby, I could have stopped it all, the whole charade. Not that he ever complained, but it must have crossed his mind from time to time, later on, mustn’t it? That I’d tricked him somehow, not given him the choice. I was wrong. I know that now. I could have – should have – just told him, stopped the wedding, set him free. Or at least given him the option. But I didn’t.
It wasn’t easy to think straight. Everything was happening too quickly. I was bleeding, I was in pain, I wasn’t in control. Yes, I know they just sound like excuses now, but it would have taken more courage than I could muster to stop it. All those people, all that expectation, and no convenient bus waiting to whisk me away, blood-stained dress flapping wildly in the wind.
I loved Dan. Reliable, responsible, oh-so-conventional Dan, wearing a new suit and a carnation, and already there, waiting for me at the front of the church. Not only for me, but for our little blob of a baby too, because we came as a package now, didn’t we? One hidden away inside the other, like Russian dolls.
I should have told him the package had come undone, that our plans were already unravelling like an unruly ball of string. I should have given him the choice, to tie the knot or let it go, but I didn’t say a word, until it was too late.
It was the first big lie in our relationship, the first truly unforgivable thing I had ever done. And no way to embark on a life, a marriage …
I think I may have been paying for it ever since.
***
According to Rich, who’d travelled down by train early that morning with three more of Dan’s friends, and with the sole intention, best-man duties aside, of having a bloody good time, the reception was a hoot. Knowing how much booze that lot were able to put down their gullets, and Rich in particular, I was surprised he was able to remember it at all.
‘These country folk sure know how to party, don’t they?’ he said, perched by the side of my hospital bed, with one elbow on the blankets, and working his way through the grapes he’d brought with him, spitting the pips into his hand. ‘Drinking cider and chomping through mounds of food – delicious, by the way – and dancing the night away like there was no tomorrow. How your dad manages to get up and milk cows after a night like that I’ll never know. I take my hat off to him. My head’s still pounding like a sledgehammer, and I left before any of them. And the price of a taxi at that time of night, you wouldn’t believe! It was only five miles to our hotel too. Should have walked.’
Dan chuckled. ‘Walked? Staggered, more like, knowing you lot. And down those little dark lanes? You’d have ended up in a ditch.’
‘Bit rough though, wasn’t it? You two missing your own reception.’
‘At least we made it to the wedding. That’s the most important thing.’ Dan squeezed my hand and I felt my new ring push its way gently into my flesh. His eyes were looking watery again and he quickly rubbed a sleeve over them. He’d been with me all night, dozing beside me in a chair, and had held my hand this morning, just as he was doing now, when the scan had shown us what we already knew. The baby was gone.
Rich looked uncomfortable, and I knew it wasn’t just because of his hangover or the hard plastic chair he was sitting on. He wasn’t good with emotional stuff, and the sight of his best mate on the verge of tears was not something he knew how to deal with. ‘Well, I just wanted to look in before I left,’ he said, bundling the last of the bunch of grapes, which by now wasn’t much more than a collection of stalks, back into their paper bag and dropping them on the bedside cabinet. He held out a hand to shake, but Dan walked around the bed and pulled him into an awkward bear hug.
‘Thanks for coming, mate. And, you know … for not losing the rings and everything.’
‘My pleasure. And I’m sorry about the baby.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
We watched in silence as Rich walked away down the ward, turning to wave before heading out towards the lifts.
Dan idly lifted up the paper bag, opened it and peered inside. ‘Grape?’ he said, plonking himself down on the bed and holding it out to me.
‘I don’t really fancy them now. Not having seen him spitting all those pips.’
‘Cup of tea, then?’
‘I’d love one. Although, now I’m not pregnant any more, I suppose we should push the boat out and have a proper drink. Of course, we may have to improvise a bit until we get out of here.’
‘Champagne, to celebrate?’
‘Well, maybe not celebrate exactly, in the circumstances. But at least to toast our future together, as we didn’t get to do it at the reception. Which reminds me, I never got to hear your speech, did I? Or the best man’s.’
‘Good job. They were rubbish anyway.’
And that was how our married life began. Just the two of us, where there should have been three, trying desperately hard not to cry, and sipping weak hospital tea with our eyes shut, pretending it was bursting with bubbles.
NUMBER TWO
Chapter 10
Natalie, 2017
‘Welcome home, you two.’ Natalie watched her sisters drop their coats and bags in the hall and went back to stirring a bowl of
pasta sauce on the hob. She lifted the wooden spoon, licked it carefully – they were family so nobody would mind – then put it back into the pan. ‘So, what did you get up to on this spa break of yours?’
‘Oh, you know, just chilling out really,’ Beth said, bounding into the kitchen and sniffing the air appreciatively. ‘Lettuce leaves for lunch, a bit of swimming, some woman bashing away at our backs and rubbing our heads too hard. That kind of thing.’
‘Did you get to the beach?’
‘Not really the weather for it.’
‘And we didn’t get a lot of time,’ Jenny cut in, slipping into a chair and fiddling with the cutlery Natalie had already laid on the table. ‘So, sorry we didn’t bring you anything back.’
‘I didn’t expect you to.’
‘When’s Mum home?’
Natalie tilted the steaming pan and started spooning the sauce over plates piled high with too much spaghetti. ‘Sunday, I think. I’ve not heard from her. She didn’t take her phone. I found it on the hall table.’
‘Typical!’ Beth carried two of the plates to the table and went back for the third.
‘Got any Parmesan, Nat?’ Jenny was already twirling the pasta inexpertly around her fork and dropping most of it back onto the plate.
‘Anyone would think I’m the only one who lives here! You know where the fridge is.’
‘Don’t bother yourselves, either of you,’ Beth said, using her best put-upon voice. ‘I’m still standing. I’ll get it.’ She rummaged around in the fridge, tore open a bag of ready-grated cheese, poured it into a bowl and sat down with it still in her hand. ‘And thanks for cooking, Nat. It’s been a very long journey and I’m famished.’
‘Not that long,’ Jenny said. ‘But I think all that sea air must have made us hungry.’
