Dear Thing (14 page)

‘Can I use your phone? I’m going to ring Claire and tell her about my ideas for names.’ All traces of tears were gone.

‘I don’t know if Claire’s around this afternoon,’ Romily said carefully. ‘Maybe you should text Ben instead. That way he’ll get it as soon as he finishes work.’

She dug in her pocket and handed Posie her mobile, which she scampered off with towards her room. At the door, she paused and looked back.

‘I’m glad you don’t have cancer,’ she said.

EVERYONE IN THE
clinic thought they were a couple.

In the Rose and Thistle, all of the regulars were locals and they always asked about Claire, who came in with Ben sometimes for a meal. At the football, Romily and Ben were obviously mates in supporters’ tops. Through the years she’d been his little female sidekick, his buddy, an honorary man.

In an ultrasound clinic waiting for the dating scan, holding her pregnancy notes in a plastic folder, she couldn’t be taken for an honorary man. Of course, Ben was wearing a wedding ring and she wasn’t, but she could have taken hers off for any number of reasons. Or lost it. She probably looked like someone who would lose her wedding ring.

Stop it
, she thought.

Ben looked up from his sheaf of papers and smiled at her. ‘I’m sorry I’m not much of a conversationalist today,’ he said. ‘I need to go through all of this before tomorrow.’

‘It’s okay. I’m glad you could take the time off to be here.’
Besides, it’s easier to construct elaborate fantasies if you’re not talking
.

‘I wouldn’t miss it for the world. The first chance to see our child.’

She knew who the ‘our’ was that he was talking about, and immediately said, out of guilt, ‘It’s too bad Claire couldn’t make it.’

‘It’s hard for her to get time off during the term,’ said Ben, though it didn’t sound entirely convincing. As Romily had not set eyes on Claire for nearly two months, she suspected it was more than that. But Ben hadn’t said a word about Claire having second thoughts, or about the obvious fact that Claire couldn’t stand her and didn’t trust her. He was adamant that everything was fine. Probably because he wanted to spare her feelings.

And the sad truth was that it was easier for Romily if Claire wasn’t around. Except for these errant thoughts, which were probably the result of hormones, and which she really should get under control.

‘Romily Summer?’ The ultrasound technician poked her head outside of the scan room, a file in her hand. Romily got up. The technician had short greying hair; she could be the same technician who had scanned Romily when she’d been pregnant with Posie. She thought it was probably the same room, though she didn’t remember it all that well. All scan rooms no doubt looked just about the same.

‘Lie down, please, Romily. Is this Daddy here with you?’

‘Yes,’ said Ben, and Romily could see his chest puffing out a bit with pride. In Romily’s opinion, it was a little bit creepy to call the man ‘Daddy’, as if the baby could hear or as if he were Romily’s own father – but she knew it was the first time Ben had been called ‘Daddy’.

‘You can sit by the side there. Now I’m going to need your top up, please, Romily.’

‘He’s not my husband,’ Romily told the technician. She wasn’t exactly sure why she was saying this, after basking in
mistaken impressions in the waiting room, but it seemed important now. For the record.

‘We have all kinds of families here,’ the technician said. ‘Top up, please?’

Reluctantly, Romily pulled up her T-shirt. Ben had never seen her bare belly before. ‘It was artificial insemination,’ she said. ‘I’m a surrogate. I’m not keeping the baby.’

The technician seemed entirely unfazed. ‘Do you want me to turn the monitor away so you can’t see it?’

‘Why?’

‘Sometimes women who are giving up their babies for adoption say they don’t want to see the scans so they won’t bond with the baby.’

‘At ten weeks, a human foetus looks like a cross between ET and a tadpole,’ Romily said. ‘I don’t think I’ll be bonding with it.’

‘I will,’ said Ben.

The technician squirted the warmed gel on Romily’s stomach. That was something that had changed, at least; she remembered the gel as being freezing cold. ‘So this is your dating scan, so we’ll know when your baby is likely to be born.’ She applied the scanner to Romily’s belly and started rolling it around.

Ben watched the screen. Romily watched Ben. She could see the exact moment when the baby appeared because his eyes got wider, his face softened in wonder.

‘Is that it?’

‘Yes. Here’s the head, here’s the spine. You can see the heartbeat is good and strong.’

He leaned closer to the screen. Romily could feel the warmth from his body. ‘Hello, little thing,’ he said.

Romily followed his gaze. The baby was a white shape, a
little body in a sea of black and grey. ‘It looks like you,’ she said.

‘Can I have a printout? I’d like to share with my wife.’

‘Of course. Do you want one too, Romily?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘It’s so tiny,’ Ben said, and she was drawn to him again instead of the screen. She had never seen him looking so rapt. So in love.

Right now, right at this very moment, Ben was looking at their baby. He was looking inside Romily’s body and seeing his child taking shape.

In the empty classroom, Claire removed student work from the bulletin boards and replaced the fading coloured backing paper with a fresh sheet from the roll. It was busy work; the display wasn’t that old and didn’t strictly need to be replaced yet. However, it kept her hands occupied.

She’d had ultrasounds before. Lots and lots of them, to see what was inside her. To see what was wrong.

In the diagrams of a woman’s reproductive system, everything was clear and neat: ovaries, fallopian tubes in a pair, uterus in a delicate curve, nestled inside the body. In her ultrasounds she looked as if she was made up of a maelstrom of clouds. Chaotic and imperfect. She hadn’t been able to identify any of her parts, but nodded as the consultant had pointed them out.

She stapled the paper to the board, neatly, every three inches. One dull thunk after another.

‘Hey Mrs Lawrence, do you mind if I come in and practise?’ Max lingered at the door, holding his guitar.

‘Max? Of course, you’re welcome.’ He came into the classroom and headed for a stool in the corner. ‘Weren’t any of the practice rooms free?’

‘I didn’t feel like being on my own so I thought I’d see if you were here.’

‘As long as you don’t mind the sound of my stapler.’

He shook his head and bent over his guitar. Claire watched him for a moment as he strummed a few preparatory chords, his slender fingers holding the instrument as if it were part of him. But she got the feeling that while he wanted company, he didn’t want to be watched, so she turned back to her display board.

She’d been that way with music, once. She took every opportunity to play, to lose herself, following the notes without even thinking of her fingers or the score or who else was around. Her father used to tease her, tell her she’d never find a husband if she spent all her time practising the piano.

‘I don’t need a husband,’ she’d told him. He’d laughed as if he knew better.

Her mother talked about her becoming a concert pianist, travelling the world, but she didn’t care about that, either. It was the music that mattered. Not boys, not money, not the world.

And then she’d met Ben.

She glanced at Max, utterly absorbed in what he was doing. He’d segued into a soft, slow progression of chords, lilting like a lullaby. It was a teenage thing, that absorption. You couldn’t afford it once you were grown up. No matter how beautiful the music was, there was still the mortgage and the credit cards. The laundry and the garden. The reports to be written, the lessons to be planned, the dozens of little tasks and annoyances that weighed down your hands.

The other woman who was carrying your husband’s baby.

She finished with the backing paper and began cutting lengths of scalloped edging to finish off the sides. She had
some photographs she’d printed out of the autumn concert to put up; maybe she’d include some of Year Seven’s drawings, too – the ones they’d made whilst listening to Mendelssohn. Some of them were quite exquisite, whimsical like the music. Claire went to the filing cabinet to find them. Leafing through them, she found that she was humming: a soft, slow progression of notes.

She looked at Max at the same time he looked up at her, and a small smile touched his face. He’d heard her.

‘Did you write that yourself?’ she asked him. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘Just something I’ve been working on.’ He dropped his gaze back to his guitar, and then looked up at her again.

‘It sounds like a lullaby. Safe and warm.’

‘It’s the mother theme.’

He blushed as soon as he said it, as if he hadn’t meant to, and Claire put the drawings down and came to lean on a chair across from him. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked. ‘A theme, not a song? Is it part of a bigger composition?’

Max nodded. ‘I’ve – I’ve got it in my head. Different people, with a different bit of music each. You put them all together, weave them through.’

‘It’s very ambitious. Is that what you’ve been working on writing down?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How much of it have you worked out?’

‘A few bits.’

‘Can I hear another?’

He played a hard and fast riff, bluesy and dirty. She’d heard it before, tacked on to the end of another song he’d been playing, and assumed it was in the charts at the moment.

‘That’s Alan,’ Max said. ‘The bloke at the newsagent’s at home who ogles all the young girls.’

Claire laughed. The sound surprised her a little. ‘Have you done anyone I know?’

‘Mrs Greasley,’ he said, and blushing again, played a few bars of a sweet tune to the beat of a militant march that suited the headmistress exactly. Iron fist in velvet glove, that was Veronica Greasley. Claire clapped her hand to her mouth and he smiled at her, shy and proud.

‘That’s incredible, Max.’

‘It’s just something I’m doing.’

‘Well, I’m very impressed.’

‘It’s nothing, really.’

‘It’s more than nothing. Have you played the mother theme to your mother yet? I think she’d be very touched.’

Max scowled. He gripped his guitar. ‘She’s my stepmother. She’s too busy. And she doesn’t like music anyway.’

Claire paused. She was a music teacher, and that was all. At St Dom’s, the division was quite clear: the teachers taught, and the students’ emotional well-being was looked after by the pastoral staff – the heads of house, and the deputy head in charge of boarding. When a student told you something personal, an issue that might affect their happiness or their education, as academic staff it was your duty to pass it on to the appropriate member of the pastoral team and bow gently out of the conversation.

If Max said anything else to her, anything that indicated there might be trouble at home, she’d have to advise him to talk to his head of house about it.

But that’s not how relationships worked, not in real life. People weren’t purely teachers or purely pastoral staff. They weren’t either pupils or children.

She wasn’t really staying late at school to put up a bulletin board. She was here because she was too afraid to be anywhere else.

‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘you’re always welcome to come here and play it for me. I’d love to hear more and help you if I can.’

He didn’t say anything, and she took the drawings back to the bulletin board and began to pin them up. Behind her he picked out a melody, hit a wrong note. She tactfully ignored his mumbled swearing and waited for him to try it again. The clock said half past five. Ben was probably finished by now. He was probably on his way to his car, a photograph of the scan in his pocket, or more likely in his hand because he was poring over it, taking in every detail.

‘They don’t even fucking care about me,’ said Max suddenly, and there was so much anger and hurt in his voice that Claire forgot about his head of house and about her husband holding the photograph of his baby. She went to Max and sat down across from him.

‘Who doesn’t?’ she asked gently.

‘Dad and Jemima. Dad’s always at work, or up in his constituency running surgeries or whatever, and Jemima has the gym and her clubs and her charities and her hair. They send me away to school so they don’t have to deal with me. I even learned how to play this thing at a fucking holiday club when they went to South Africa.’ He looked down at the guitar with loathing.

‘But you’re good at it. You’re very good at it.’

‘I might as well be playing a bin lid as far as they care.’

‘Jemima’s your stepmum?’

Max grunted. ‘Half my dad’s age. It’s disgusting.’

‘What about your real mother?’

‘She’s on her third marriage. I don’t see much of her, either.’

‘So the mother theme—’

‘It’s in my head. I made it up.’ He played it, quickly and
harshly, crashing the chords together. ‘Listen, don’t think I’m crazy or anything. I don’t like sit around pining for the perfect parents I never had, despite that song. It’s just, it would be nice to be noticed once in a while. And I keep thinking about what would happen if Jemima got up the duff.’

‘You’d have an ally,’ said Claire. ‘My brother and sister were good friends to me growing up.’

Max shook his head. ‘It would go one of two ways. Either Jemima would throw herself into it, like a new cause or a new fashion, and the thing would be spoiled rotten, or she’d ignore that one too, and it would have a miserable life. Either way, I hope it never happens.’

‘Your dad must care about you, if he fought for custody of you.’

‘I don’t think he had to fight very hard. Plus, it looks good that he has me. Politically.’ He played four notes, upbeat like an advertising jingle. ‘That’s my dad’s theme. Always on message.’

Claire bit her lip. ‘Have you talked to your head of hou—’

‘I’m not going to talk to Mr Doughty. He and Dad are like this.’ He pressed his fingers together.