‘I really like you,’ he says into the silence. A date. I haven’t been on a date since … I can’t remember the last time I went on a date. Owen didn’t do dates.
‘I’d love to,’ I say. ‘How about tomorrow? We can meet outside the Hippodrome at 6.30. You can pick the film.’ I have tomorrow off to go to the hospital with Rosie so I know I won’t be kept late in the office.
My work phone starts to beep again.
‘OK, cool. I’ll see you then,’ he says happily.
‘OK, better go,’ I say, bugged by the beeping of my headset.
‘Jenny?’
‘Yes?’ I say a little testily.
‘I think I love you.’ He hangs up. His words are still ringing in my ears when I pick up the call from the other phone.
‘Hello, can I help you?’ I say on autopilot.
Silence.
‘Michael?’ I say stupidly.
Sodding bloody bastard fax. The line goes dead.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Waking up in my new bedroom almost makes mornings a pleasure. The day is gloomy and the orange glow of the street light that burns reassuringly yards from my window still shines brightly through my white voile-type curtains. I stretch out my legs and press my toes against the carved pine base of my bed frame, and sitting up I can see my reflection in the panel of mirror-fronted wardrobes that run the length of one side of the room.
Yes, the wardrobes are MFI, the pine bed has deep crayoned scratches on it from some past encounter with a creative child, and an intriguing set of teeth marks on the headboard, but in the first moments of the day basking under the sunrise of the street lamp I feel happy that finally I have a lifestyle. Second-hand and lived in as it may be.
Today is Rosie’s first scan. Selin, who can only stay the bare minimum of time away from work, is planning to go back to the office straight after, but Rosie and I intend to catch a cab to Oxford Street and buy some more maternity clothes that she doesn’t need yet, and have lunch. I have stopped telling her that she doesn’t really have a bump yet, as it makes her cry, and so for the first time in any female relationship I have ever had I find myself reassuring her that she is looking fat.
When I get up Rosie is already in the kitchen, wearing her new white pyjamas with little pink rosebuds coming into bloom left right and centre. She is setting out plates, two knives and a pot of strawberry jam. Yesterday I bought a butter dish that caught my eye in the Marie Curie shop window as I left work, and now it sits in all its steely ex-B&B splendour on the centre of an orange-and-white gingham tablecloth that Rosie must have acquired at some point. The pair of us have become addicted to breakfast. And not just any breakfast, but breakfast in the style of Doris Day.
‘Tea?’ she says. She seems a bit quiet, even for her. Maybe she’s a bit nervous.
‘Lovely,’ I say. ‘I meant to do this for you, it being scan day and all.’
‘Jen …?’ she begins in a tone I have heard a thousand times. She puts a round white teapot on the table and sits down. So overawed am I by the appearance of a teapot that it takes me a moment to notice the big fat tear that rolls silently down one cheek.
‘What’s up, sweet pea?’ I say softly. I am fully expecting her to break down because she fancied raspberry jam this morning.
‘I’m worried about the scan.’ She wipes the tear away with the heel of her hand and looks about seven.
‘It’ll be fine, silly,’ I say in what I hope is a brusque and positive manner, using the very phrase that winds me up so much when others say it to me.
‘But what if it’s not, I mean I drank and smoked for the first bit, didn’t I? I can’t even remember the last time I took anything. I mean, I can’t remember if I took drugs when I was pregnant or not. I might have … I might have … killed it!’ Bursting into tears she rubs her knuckles roughly in her eyes and her body shakes with sobs. So grief stricken is she that I figure this has to be more than just a mood swing. I drag my chair closer and put my arms around her. Two slices of toast bounce out of the toaster, one actually escaping and landing on the worktop.
‘Come on now, Rosie-Posie, it will be fine. I’m sure it will be.’ I try to think of something to say that will reassure her. ‘Look at all those rock stars’ kiddies, all of them perfectly healthy. I bet they were all on a bit of a bender before they found out they were pregnant.’
Rosie sobs even harder and buries her face in her arms. ‘They all go on pre-conception regimes! I read it in Hello!’ I have seen Rosie cry a lot in my time, sometimes quiet tears and sometimes sad and angry mourning and sometimes laughing because she is crying for no reason, but I have never seen her weep with such abandon. I wonder how long it will be until Selin gets here?
‘OK, OK. What do we see whenever we step out of our front door?’ I’ve hit on a plan.
‘Pizza Gogo?’ she sniffs.
‘I mean up and down the road, what do we see? We see mothers and babies, right?’ That was my plan, now I have to improvise.
‘Yes? So?’ Her tear-stained face emerges from the nest of her hair and arms.
‘Lots of healthy bouncy babies. Well, I bet not every one of those mums planned their baby, and I bet you that for a few weeks they didn’t even know they were pregnant and carried on life as normal. And what have they got to show for it? Lovely healthy gorgeous babies. Just like yours will be.’ It’s a tenuous link, but it might just work.
‘Do you think?’ she says croakily but with a half-smile.
‘Yes, I’m sure and the doctor will say the same thing. I bet.’
‘OK.’ She sits up and pours the tea, and then reaches behind her to grab the toast from the counter. So it was a mood swing. One day I’ll get the hang of these things.
‘It’s going to be strange, isn’t it?’ she says as she butters her toast. ‘I mean, no matter how much I’ve thought about it, and planned for it, it’s all seemed a little bit like it’s happening to someone else. But today, I’ll see the baby. Today it will be really real.’ We look at each other for a moment, both trying to imagine how her life will alter, how in some way all our lives will alter when the first one of us has a child. It’s like trying to imagine the size of the universe. Both of us seem unable to quite grasp the reality of it.
‘Well, better get going soon-ish, I guess,’ Rosie says, shaking herself out of her reverie. ‘I’ve got to have a shower and then I need to find something to wear that looks, you know, responsible, and then I thought, hair up or down? What do you think?’ She now looks bright as a button.
‘Down, you don’t want any hairpins sticking in your head when you’re lying on the trolley thing, do you?’ I beam at her. ‘Now, I’m going to get dressed because Selin will be here soon and you know she’ll shout at us if we aren’t ready.’
This is obviously a hint for Rosie to get dressed as Rosie is never ready on time, but it washes over her and I leave her spreading jam on her toast and staring contemplatively at the landlord’s yellow print of two blue finches in a blossom tree that hangs above the table.
I’ve just finished blotting my lipstick when the doorbell chimes and without bothering to speak through the intercom I buzz the main door open and leave ours on the latch. Rosie is no longer in the kitchen. A quick investigation confirms that she is now in the shower.
‘Rose, we’ll have to go in about twenty minutes,’ I call through the door.
‘OK!’ comes the breezy reply.
‘Hello!’ The deep sound of a man’s voice makes me jump in shock a moment before I recognise it as Josh’s. Selin’s head appears over his shoulder and grins at me. I’m not surprised that he has turned up. He seems to have been around all the time recently. The last time was a few days ago when he came round with two bottles of nice wine, both priced over six pounds (I checked the stickers). Rosie was out and he got stuck with me the whole evening. Give him his credit he didn’t scurry off or make excuses, in fact we had a really nice time in the end, we got a bit tipsy and made up an entry for the
next Song for Europe contest called ‘Hoop-a-loo, I Love You (And World Peace)’. In the end I had to kick him out otherwise I would never have got up for work the next day.
Selin looks impatiently at her watch. ‘Where’s mum-to-be? Let me guess, in the shower?’ she says and shouts through the bathroom door. ‘Get a move on, bird!’
‘OK!’ comes the same cheery reply. The sound of the shower drums on.
‘Do you want tea?’
Selin declines but Josh wants one so I lead them into the kitchen.
‘This kitchen is a work of art,’ he laughs. ‘You should enter it for the Turner Prize as the ultimate antithesis to Tracy Emin.’ For some reason his comment offends me and I pat a shiny worktop defensively.
‘What are you doing here anyway?’ I ask in a slightly more challenging tone than I meant.
‘Oh well, I’ve got my car back from the garage and no work on today so I thought I might as well drive you. I mean, if you like.’
I look him up and down. ‘Well, thanks,’ I say ungraciously and pass him his tea. This nice-guy act is all very nice, but he could be going a tiny bit over the top.
The four of us waiting in the antenatal clinic together has elicited some raised eyebrows, and Josh thinks the other mums-to-be think he must be some kind of love stud with three women on the go.
‘You wish,’ I say to him, and gratifyingly he blushes.
When the midwife eventually calls Rosie’s name and we all stand she looks us up and down sternly. ‘It’s only a standard consulting room, you know, not a football stadium.’ And then she bursts into sunny infectious laughter and we all smile nervously. ‘Oh, go on then, you can all come if you want to, but usually it’s only dad I let in. You dad?’ She points at Josh who shakes his head guiltily.
‘Oh, well then, what the hell,’ she says cheerily. ‘Support during pregnancy is very important to mummy and baby, no matter who gives it.’ We file into her room and she tells us her name is Fehmi, and she’s been a midwife for thirty years both here and in Africa, and she loves every one of her babies.
‘I tell you what, we just laugh those babies out,’ she tells Rosie and I see her tight face gradually begin to relax. After a series of questions that make Josh slightly uncomfortable she sends us up to the scan suite, where the waiting-room is quieter and almost empty except for a young couple sitting silently, hands entwined. We’re lucky I guess that everyone is in a good mood. The scan technician laughs when we ask her if we can all come and says we’re welcome if we keep quiet and don’t knock anything over.
At first it looks like a satellite picture of stormy weather. Then you see a tiny pulsing beat in the centre and you realise that it is the baby’s heart beating. After that the scan technician shows you its head and you can almost see a tiny profile, or maybe you’re imagining it. And best of all, when Rosie coughs it wiggles up and down like a frantic little hard-house fan.
Rosie’s hand reaches out to mine and, unable to take her eyes off the monitor, she whispers, ‘Look, look, there’s my baby. Hello, baby.’ The look of wonder on her face is reflected on each of our faces.
The scan lady tells us everything looks fine and we take the scan prints away with us. Rosie’s check-up has been fine, the scan has been fine, everything about her was wonderfully normal. As we sit in the hospital café Rosie cries again, but this time she laughs as well.
‘I’m really, really pregnant,’ she says. ‘I’m going to be a mum!’
Chapter Thirty
The usual foreign throng of Leicester Square mills thickly around me as I wait for Michael again. Under normal circumstances, the fact that I have waited for him twice in a row would be grating by now, after fifteen minutes surrounded by blonde pony-tailed exchange students called Heidi or something. What little natural light there was has started to surrender to the square’s neon finery and the evening has grown chilly. I still haven’t quite got the hang of the summer-to-autumn transitional wardrobe, my boots are pinching my toes and the so-called adaptable white shirt I refused to buy a size bigger than I think I am is gaping open over my bust because they only make clothes for flat-chested women, as if we are all mass-produced Kate Mosses.
However, these aren’t normal circumstances because something happened today that has jangled me, something that might be nothing to worry about or might be, something that might not be my business at all but something that I know I won’t be able to prevent myself from becoming involved in.
Things had gone fine after the scan, we were all in a good mood, and Josh took Selin back to work as arranged although he did try to offer us a lift into town.
‘Don’t be mental,’ I’d said. ‘We’ll get a cab.’ His new-found gentlemanly behaviour was getting on my nerves. Rosie had wanted to call Kaled but I persuaded her it wasn’t really fair to make him come all the way across town when we could get a mini-cab over the road.
‘But he’d love to see the scan photos!’ she’d protested before eventually seeing sense.
Rosie gets pretty tired pretty quickly these days but a big street full of shops seems to revitalise her in a way that ten hours’ sleep and a nice cup of decaff just can’t manage.
We went from one maternity department to the next. We discovered items called sleep bras, maternity thongs and, most alarmingly, nipple pads and breast pumps. We went from floral frock to linen shift to wide-legged stretchy pants more times than I can remember and by the third set of denim dungaree shorts I could see Rosie was desperate for designer.
‘Why doesn’t Donna Karan make maternity wear?’ she sighed, sinking on to an MDF platform sporting a foam rubber mum-to-be in M&S.
‘Well, they might well do. We haven’t even been to Selfridges yet,’ I said brightly.
‘It’s all, well, it’s all so mumsy,’ she complained, ‘Madonna never looks mumsy when she’s preggers.’ Her shell-pink glossed lip formed a pout. ‘I need a drink and a big piece of cake.’
‘I sort of think mumsy is the point,’ I told her, and taking her by the hand I led her out of the store and off Oxford Street, walking silently past Browns and Karen Millen, carefully averting our eyes from a rose-pink flounced frock embroidered with silk and sequins.
If I was in a more frivolous mood I’d say there was something, a siren call or an inner compass that guided us towards our true North, but at any rate something altogether heavenly brought us to a boutique called Formes, Collection for Pregnant Women, Paris.
‘Paris,’ Rosie breathed and before I could say ‘Eighty pounds for a T-shirt’ I was installed on a stool sipping cappuccino as two sales assistants brought Rosie an array of clothes to make her heart sing. I’m the sort of girl who feels as if I’d be letting the sales ladies down if I didn’t buy something after they had been so nice to me but Rosie was doing no one but herself a favour when after forty-five minutes and four hundred and twenty pounds she left the store flushed and triumphant, the proud possessor of no less than four waxed paper bags swinging from twisted cord handles.
‘Now we really need a drink,’ she said, and we headed for the nearest café giggling like two schoolgirls who had just come off a roller-coaster ride. Who says you need to be high up and going fast to get an adrenalin rush?
‘Yeah, we do,’ I agree, thinking about a large gin and tonic.
‘Not you, you and me! We.’ She pats her tummy. ‘Me and my little baby in here. I wonder how long it will be before I feel it move. Remind me to look that up in the book when I get back.’ I nod and smile. Now that she’s had the scan and seen her baby the reality of her pregnancy seems to have lit her up from the inside.
So everything was fine until we went into the café.
I saw him first. Actually, I saw the woman first. If I’m completely honest I saw her legs stretched out across the aisle between two tables in a long shapely taunt, then I saw her immaculately tailored suit and the back of her head, a work of art in retro-eighties City greed, finished off with a little velvet bow. I took her in for a couple of moments
and then sitting opposite her I saw Chris.
Rosie’s-ex-husband-father-of-her-child Chris. His hair had grown a little too long around the collar, his square jaw had become weighed down by the early onset of jowls, and the eyes that Rosie had swooned over seemed to have retreated just a little behind droopy eyelids. But it was unmistakably him.
By this time Rosie had taken a seat by the window and I could see her peering into one of her bags, debating whether or not to break the seal on the tissue-bound parcel inside to re-examine her purchases, and I had a mini brown tray replete with two pieces of carrot cake, a latte and an orange juice for Rosie.
I couldn’t get her out of there without her seeing him and we couldn’t stay here without her seeing him. I had to tell her he was here. Stalling, I took the long way to our table and slid into the seat opposite her.
‘Rosie, don’t panic but …’ Before I could finish the sentence his unmistakable voice boomed across the café and in two seconds he was at our table.
‘Rosie!’
She looked up and her face blanched, she swallowed and smiled nervously and in that moment I could see, despite everything she’d said, that she was still not ‘so over him’. Her eyes slid from his face and over his shoulder to the woman he had been sitting with and then back to him.
‘Chris!’ she said with brittle bravado. ‘How nice to see you.’
He took a chair at our table and, just as I knew he would, he flipped it to face him and straddled it, folding his arms across the backrest.
‘And you, sweetheart, and you. God, I haven’t seen you since …’ He clicked his fingers as if to jog a memory.
‘Since the Vickers & Walmsley do,’ Rosie finished for him. His memory caught and he threw back his head and laughed.
‘Now that was a reunion.’ He winked at her and to my horror she smiled coyly in reply and fluttered her lashes.
‘How’s Melanie?’ I asked, maybe a little cruelly. Melanie was the ‘love of his life’. The woman he had met shortly after Rosie and he were married. The woman he could not live without.
Growing Up Twice Page 16
