Authors: Rowan Coleman
N
atalie could not stop laughing. There was something about fifteen or so women and two men sitting in a big circle on a dusty floor singing “Row, row, row your boat” while doing the actions with babies who were either asleep or looked utterly bored that was very, very funny and which made her laugh so much she had to stop and catch her breath between fits of giggles. But it was the marching around to “The Grand Old Duke of York” with babies that couldn’t even roll over, let alone march, that made her practically hysterical.
“This isn’t a joke, you know,” Steve said, despite chuckling along with her as they marched to the top of the hill and down again. “It’s really good for them, music and singing. It stimulates all of their senses.”
Baby Music had been Steve’s idea. Just as everybody had been on the point of leaving Meg’s and saying how nice it was and
that they must do it again sometime, he had suggested they set a date.
“I’m taking Lucy to a baby music class in that place down by the park, it starts next week,” he said. “Why don’t we all meet there next if you like?” And before Natalie knew it she had been half press-ganged and half volunteered herself for yet another new and strange life experience, and found that she was even a little depressed that she had to wait a week before they were due to meet at the class.
Now, as Baby Music reached its tumultuous crescendo, Natalie was practically crying with laughter as Meg threw herself into “Itsy Bitsy Spider” with the energy and drama of an opera singer, while 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 realize that it had been a stroke of luck that she had met Meg and Tiffany on the day the electrical system 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. 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 toward 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 overreacting 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 dis
tress. “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 center 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. “Count me in.”
“But that’s a Friday,” Frances said. “That’s
two
meetings in one week.”
“That’s okay,” 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 me 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. Good-bye.”
“Frances!” Meg called out after her halfheartedly. “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 tight-rope 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 materializing 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 good-byes down the hallway with his skin still damp before Meg could even offer him a cup of coffee.
“Daddy didn’t kiss me good-bye,” 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 good-bye, 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 anymore.
“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 toward 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 breast-feed, can he? And boys always prefer their moms 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 okay 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. 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 over 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 punch line of an anecdote, but she’d never told an actual, big, massive, get-found-out-and-you’re-in-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 mom’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 blond woman when we were in.”
“Yes, he arrived in the middle of the night I was in labor,” 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 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 as 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 realization 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.
W
hen 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 guy 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 straightaway. 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 Suze
had scheduled lunch with Alice once she knew that Natalie was not likely to be there. She was a 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?” Alice asked. “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, feeling sickened. It was humiliating, like receiving a secondhand report of her own encounter with him, illustrating so clearly that from Jack’s point of view the whole event was horribly routine.
“I’m afraid so, Nat,” Alice said heavily. “Suze said she was taking a cigarette break when this tall, skinny guy sat down next to her on the bench and asked her if she knew the time. Anyway, he asked her all sorts of questions about herself, told her he’d just got back from a year in Italy, staying with family near Venice…”
“Bastard!” Natalie yelled, causing Gary to pause for a second before resuming his wire-pulling. She lowered her voice before adding, “Sorry, it’s just that I can’t believe this, Alice, I can’t believe what you are telling me. Of all the women in London he’s got to hit on he chooses somebody I
know
!”
“Maybe it was just the law of averages,” Alice said tentatively. “I mean, if he chats up enough women in one particular area, then sooner or later you were bound to know one of them…”
“So what happened then?” Natalie asked reluctantly.
“He said he had to go to a job interview but asked her if she’d like to go for a drink with him sometime. He wrote down his name and phone numbers on a piece of paper and gave them to her. She said his hand was trembling as if he was really nervous.”
“That’s his trick,” Natalie growled. “That’s how he draws you in, by being all vulnerable and sexy at the same time.”
“It wasn’t until after he’d gone,” Alice continued, “and Suze read his name that all the pieces started coming together, and she thought he could be
the
Jack Newhouse. The one who got you pregnant and then disappeared. She called me and asked me out for lunch. She told me what I’ve told you and gave me the numbers. She said she thought you could use them.” Alice waited.
“Well?” she said when Natalie remained silent.
“Well what?” Natalie asked her.
“You have to face up to this, Natalie, you know you
have
to. You can’t pretend that this hasn’t happened.” Alice paused, clearly waiting for Natalie to agree with her. When Natalie remained stubbornly silent Alice went on anyway. “You have a chance to contact him now and tell him about Freddie.” Alice finally stated the obvious. “It’s a chance you have to take.”
“Why now—doesn’t this just prove what kind of a man he is?” Natalie demanded. “I haven’t seen or heard from him in thirteen months and ten days,” she said, instantly regretting that she had let slip she knew exactly when it was she last saw the man she professed to be so uninterested in. She hoped vainly that Alice wouldn’t notice, and pressed on. “Things are going well, Alice. They are steady and stable. Why should I do anything to change that?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Alice replied, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “Let me think…”
“Alice, this isn’t funny!” Natalie exclaimed.
Gary looked up at her this time. She smiled at him and rolled her eyes. Realizing that she still had her coat on and that Freddie was still zipped up securely in his warm suit, she tucked the phone under her ear and began to make her way upstairs.
“I don’t think it is funny,” Alice said, as Natalie moved out of earshot of her electrician. “But even if you could manage to avoid him for the rest of your life, which seems unlikely, you still have to tell him. Take the moral high ground. I know it’s uncharted territory for you, but I think once you’ve done it you’ll feel relieved.”
“Or,” Natalie suggested optimistically, ignoring Alice, “we could relocate the business to Birmingham. I’ve always liked Birmingham.”
“Natalie, be serious.” Alice’s normally smooth and level tone rose slightly, which was about the only sign she ever gave that she was angry and not just annoyed. Natalie didn’t want Alice to be angry with her. Despite her teasing and ribbing of her old friend, it was important to her that Alice thought the best of her. She needed to be in at least one person’s good books to feel good about herself, and Alice had always been that person since they had met over women’s control-top pants. Although she had suddenly acquired a wealth of new friends, Alice was the one Natalie was certain still to be friends with in a hundred years’ time, because Alice loved her exactly the way she was, foibles, tics, and all. And even if Alice did sometimes get quite cross with her, Natalie loved her back with exactly the same steadfast loyalty.
“You make calling him sound so simple, let alone telling him,” Natalie complained miserably. “Like I can ring his number out of the blue and say, ‘Hi, Jack, remember me? No? Oh well, the thing is I’ve recently had your baby!’”
“It
is
simple,” Alice told her. “It might be hard to do, but it is simple. He is Freddie’s father. He has a right to know, just as Fred
die has the right to know his father. You haven’t even been able to tell him up to now—he vanished after that weekend, and the way he left things was sort of up in the air—but now you actually have his numbers.”
“I have someone’s numbers.” Natalie was insistent. “We don’t conclusively know if is the same half-Venetian Jack Newhouse.”
“Natalie, don’t stick your head in the sand!” Alice exclaimed. “It has to be the same Jack. And you have to call him. Think of this as a sign from above if you like, I know you like those.”
“If it is him, then it’s not a sign,” Natalie said. “It’s proof. Proof that I got myself impregnated by a sleazy liar.”
“Nobody’s disputing that he behaved badly—but don’t you think that it’s time to do the grown-up thing?” Alice sighed. “You know, the kind of thing a parent does?”
Natalie thought about the last time she had seen Jack. He had been sitting in the back of a water taxi where he’d dropped her off at Marco Polo airport. White collarless shirt unbuttoned at the throat revealing his warm, lightly tanned and, if Natalie remembered rightly, slightly salty-tasting skin.
“I’ll call you,” he had said. Usually Natalie prided herself on knowing when a man meant what he said. At the time she was sure he really did mean to call her; she’d been so idiotically happy at the thought of seeing him again and perhaps even—who knew? This might be the one romance that didn’t drift apart and might actually turn into something. When he disappeared without a trace she felt like a fool, but worse than that, it hurt her. It hurt her in the place where her heart was. She supposed she’d had this ridiculously romantic idea all along that the man she finally trusted, the man she finally fell for would be worthy of that honor, or at the very least want it.
She had been totally wrong. She had to deal with that and move on.
So as soon as Natalie knew she was pregnant and that the baby had to be his because nobody she’d met since had seemed worth the effort of being with, she never once thought about trying to contact him. She put the prospect of having any kind of real relationship with him in the past, gone and irretrievable even if his baby was slap bang in the very middle of the present, and would be for every single moment of every day for pretty much the rest of her life. What Alice didn’t seem to understand was that almost the only way Natalie could deal with Jack Newhouse and all the associated issues he had left her with was if he were far, far away, both in reality and metaphorically. If he was here it would be much, much harder to pretend that she didn’t still want him, or at least want that version of him that had taken her to Venice.
But Alice was right, Natalie thought, as she stroked the cheek of her son, which sloped down at exactly the same angle as his father’s—she
was
a parent now. Parents didn’t put themselves first. Parents didn’t do what was easy. They did what was best. And it wasn’t best to deliberately keep a child from his father without a really good reason, and Natalie didn’t think that heartbreak, jealousy, and general bitterness counted.
“You’re right,” she told Alice at last. “I know you’re right.”
“I knew you’d see sense,” Alice said, her voice warming again. “So, are you going to call him?”
Natalie sighed. “I will,” she said. “I suppose I have to.” She took a pen and pad out of her bedside drawer and wrote down the two phone numbers that Alice gave her.
“Anything going on in the office that I should know about?” Natalie asked, hoping that some complicated distraction might mean that Alice needed her help.
“Not really,” Alice said. “Selfridges have reordered. The new
Web manager is brilliant. That warehouse and supply company she found are doing really well. I’ll be messengering samples of the winter line for you to okay later on today. Everything is fine with the business, Natalie. All you need to worry about is yourself and Freddie.”
“If only,” Natalie said to herself as she hung up the phone, “that was true.”
After putting Freddie in his cot she made her way down to the kitchen, hoping to find some more cake. Instead, she found Tiffany in Anthony’s arms, crying her heart out. She didn’t even notice Natalie come in.
Natalie looked inquiringly at Gary, who was pouring boiling water into a teapot that she had forgotten she even had. He pressed his lips together for a thoughtful moment before nodding in the direction of the garden. Natalie followed him outside.
“Sorry,” he said, spreading his hands out, palms up. “She turned up all upset and I didn’t think you’d mind if she had five minutes with Anthony. Apparently she’s had an awful morning.”
Natalie was surprised by his apology.
“I don’t mind,” she assured him. “Not at all—but what’s wrong?”
It was terrible to admit it, but she felt immensely relieved that some other drama had bowled its way into her day, making it at least temporarily impossible for her to call either of the numbers that Alice had given her.
“Well, from what I can gather, her mom and dad came round to the flat this morning, she was just on her way out to meet you, she said.” Gary raised an eyebrow slightly as if he still couldn’t work out what a thirty-six-year-old woman was doing hanging around with a sixteen-year-old kid, which was fair enough, Natalie thought, as she hardly knew herself. “Well, she let them in, of
course; she misses them, especially her mom. After all, she’s only a child herself really, for all the front she puts on. They said they wanted to talk about the baby. Tiff hoped they’d come round to make peace. She built her hopes up. But it turns out they just wanted to get a look at Jordan. Apparently her dad said”—Gary paused, a look of disgust on his face—“that if she was light-skinned enough to pass for white, Tiffany could come back and they’d say no more about it.”
“Oh God, that’s awful!” Natalie exclaimed, hugging her arms around her as a sudden chill swept up the lawn. “Poor Tiffany.”
“The poor kid had to throw them out herself, and her dad’s a big bloke, determined, too. In the end a neighbor gave her a hand. She came straight round here with the baby.” Gary took a step closer to her, lowering his voice even though they were in the garden. “You don’t mind, do you? I expect it’s the last thing you need at the moment.”