The Sisterhood (16 page)

'I'll pay for the coffees,' I said eagerly.

She looked at me with a smile. 'Daddy's money?'

'It's the least he can do.'

'Then I won't refuse.'

We left the café together. So far, I told myself cautiously, so good.

December 1969

Mary thought about running away, and taking the baby with her. It wouldn't work. She knew it wouldn't, because it was the baby she wanted to run from.

All the same, as it lay in its Moses basket, with its fists bunched up, she told herself that she might be going to grow to love it. If she suddenly woke up one morning feeling like other mothers seemed to feel, then she would take the baby with her. Whatever happened, she was not staying here, not with Billy Greene.

But she knew she was pretending. The baby was at the centre of everything. The baby was why she needed to go.

One Tuesday morning, she decided to go out on her own, to see what it felt like. The baby was four weeks old, and it was asleep as usual. It wasn't due a bottle for three hours. She closed the front door quietly behind her, and listened for a few seconds to check that it hadn't woken. Then she strode along the street, feeling transgressive. She felt that everyone she passed could see that she had left an innocent child unprotected, so she looked down and tried to be inconspicuous.

At the corner shop, she bought a newspaper, a bag of apples, and a copy of
Private Eye.

'Little one not with you today?' asked the woman behind the counter.

'No,' Mary told her. 'My mother's looking after her.' She made an effort, when she was talking to people, to say 'her' and not 'it'. She was careful to get it right today.

'Oh, how lovely,' the woman said, sounding rather bored. 'Make sure you make the most of your time off. You've earned it.'

Mary walked home slowly. She let herself in quietly. She had been out for twenty minutes, and the baby didn't seem to have stirred.

She warmed the bottle, and flicked greedily to the back of the magazine. 'Eye Escape' was the section she was looking for. She scanned the classified advertisements, and suddenly, there it was. It was only a few lines, but it was all that was needed. There was a bus to Kathmandu. There was a telephone number. There was a price: one hundred and twenty five pounds. She had that much saved already.

She put a chair next to the telephone, took the baby on to her lap, and started giving it the bottle. Then she dialled the number. A man answered.

'Hello?' he said.

She took a deep breath, and spoke clearly.

'I'm calling about the bus to Kathmandu,' she said.

21 March

Kathy leaned across me and picked up her handbag, which was at my feet. She brushed my arm, in passing, but said nothing. I looked pointedly away from her, at the pot plants. One of them had almost reached the ceiling.

'Bye, Sandrine,' Kathy said, poison in her voice.

'See you, Kathy,' Sandrine said, with a sigh. Although Kathy and I had not quite reached the point of asking Sandrine to carry messages between us, we were nearly there. I shook my head gently. I wasn't going to move from our corner of the staffroom. I wasn't going to apologise, because I had nothing to apologise for. We had been ignoring each other for weeks, like vindictive teenagers, or a miserable couple in the last stages of a dire marriage.

'Bye, Kathy,' I said, pointedly, to her departing back. She paused, then carried on walking without a word, without looking round.

I looked at Sandrine.

'I tried,' I said. I could feel the rage simmering, but I was determined not to let it spill out. I would not give Kathy the satisfaction of a shouting match. I would not give the spectators anything new to gossip about.

In Kathy's eyes, I was a traitor. I had never quite realised the extent to which our friendship was founded on the fact that neither of us wanted children. I knew she had plenty of friends who were parents, and I was simmering at the unfairness of it all.

'You did try,' Sandrine said, and put a gentle arm on my shoulder. I wanted to shake it off, but was loath to alienate my one remaining friend.

'She won't change her mind,' I said. 'But I'm not moving from here. This is my chair and I'm fucking staying.'

'I know. She will change. She can't be so mad with a pregnant woman, just for being pregnant.'

'I hope you're right. But I don't think so. She'll never apologise. She might just start speaking to me again one day I'm not sure I'll be saying anything back.'

Sandrine shrugged. I stood up, gathered my things, and left. The path to the staffroom door was, by necessity, a meandering one. There were chairs and bags and piles of books everywhere. I was aware of several pairs of eyes following my progress. My colleagues were still speculating incessantly about the baby's paternity. They thought that if they stopped talking the moment they saw me, I would never guess what they had been talking about. I watched two conversations screech to an emergency stop as I came close.

I paused at the doorway, struggling with myself. In the end I couldn't help it.

I turned round and clapped my hands. 'It's all right, everybody,' I shouted, staring particularly at the geography department. 'I'm leaving now. You can gossip about me with impunity. And to get you off to a good start, the baby's father is
not
in this room, and is
not
my ex-partner. OK? Go!'

And I left, fuming.

It was reassuring to be able to disappear into the central London crowds, and I tried hard to relax. I put a hand to my stomach, and briefly hoped that my emotions were not making the baby neurotic, or psychotic, or just plain miserable. I tried to think positive thoughts, to direct some good emotions in its direction, but at the moment that was hard to do. I was scared. I wanted to be in control of my life, but I was at the mercy of too many other factors, too many other people.

I had a bump now, a small but definitely pregnant stomach. I was proud, and it made me sick with fear. I often looked at myself, side on, in the mirror, and marvelled at the fact that this was me, and that I never expected that I could look this way.

I wandered towards the station without enthusiasm: I was supposed to be looking at a flat with Helen, when all I wanted to do was to go home, run a hot bath, rub my bump, and wallow.

My phone started serenading my fellow pedestrians with the strains of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which had seemed appropriately portentous and doom-laden when I decided to get rid of the Nokia tune, years after everyone else. I grabbed it from my big red bag, praying it was Helen cancelling. Helen was sweet, if naive, and I thought that she was probably a positive force in my life, but I had never intended to be her flat-hunting partner. I had an uneasy feeling that she had tricked me into it. I wasn't used to being tricked.

I didn't recognise the number, and answered warily.

'Where are you?' barked Steve.

'Why?'

'You know why.'

'I don't, actually.'

'Are you on your way home? You should be on your way home.'

I was suddenly alert. 'Why? Where are you?' I was approaching Victoria, and looked around carefully. There were people everywhere, most of them on the move. I stood by the clock that called itself Little Ben, and scanned the crowds. It was futile. I crossed the road, looking around carefully.

'Where do you think I am?'

'Don't you dare ambush me!'

'Why not?'

He was standing by the entrance to the Tube, holding his phone to his ear and looking hard at everyone who passed. I stepped behind a tall man, and used him as cover for a few metres. Then I managed to pass on the other side of the Tube entrance, and headed, at a jog, on to the main station concourse.

Steve still had an effect on me. Seeing him standing there, wearing a nice grey suit, made my stomach flip. I was certain it was pheromones, rather than the baby. I didn't want to have any feelings for him. All my anguish had supposedly been mown down by the shock of the pregnancy. He was supposed to be nothing to me any more. The baby was supposed to be the important one now, and it was not his.

I stood in the middle of the concourse, surrounded by hundreds, thousands, of commuters, and pretended to look at the times of trains to Croydon.

He tapped my shoulder.

'Gotcha.' He was laughing, and not in a nice way.

'Oh, hello.'

'Saw you slipping past. You can't get away that easily.'

'Why didn't you stake me out at school?'

He was standing close. He smelt different. Steve had never worn aftershave, but he definitely had something of the sort on now.

'Oh, I was going to,' he said, gazing at me, then stepping back for a look at my bump. I was self-conscious as he sized me up. 'But my bike got a puncture, and I had to ditch it and get the Tube. Only just arrived. Thought I'd get you here instead, and it worked, you must admit.'

'Yes,' I said. 'It did.'

Steve raised his eyebrows. 'Do you have something to tell me, Ms Greene? Congratulations are in order, I believe.'

To my horror, I felt myself about to cry. This was the first time anyone had said the word 'congratulations', even in jest. I blinked hard. Steve, who knew me too well, squeezed the top of my arm, and gave me time to recover.

I had known this would happen at some point, but I could have done without it being today. At home, I had a handwritten letter that I had been planning to post. It explained, courteously and with some dignity, that I was expecting a baby, that I was on my own, and that it was not his. It had taken me a lot of time and tears to write it, and I wished I had actually posted it.

'There's a letter I've written to you,' I muttered. 'Yes, I am having a baby. No, it's not yours. I'm sorry I didn't get to you before the gossip factory did.'

He touched my shoulder, with unexpected tenderness. 'Liz,' he said. 'You don't have to do this on your own.'

'Yes I do.'

'You can tell me if it's mine. I'll do everything I can to help you. It might end up being an unconventional set-up, but that doesn't matter.'

I forced myself to look into his face. He looked sincere. I was desperate to say yes, to accept his help. For a fraction of a second, I considered doing it, pretending. No one would ever need to know the truth.

'I wish it was yours, Steve,' I said, quickly 'But it's the result of a stupid drunken one-night stand. I've been trying to track down the father but as far as I can tell, they've disappeared. It was never someone I was going to see again. In fact, the idea of seeing them again makes me heave. We weren't exactly good together.'

Steve was looking at me, hurt and dubious.

'What is he — married?' he asked.

'Umm. Something like that.'

'Lizzy, I can't tell if you're telling the truth. Do you think that no father is better than a gay father? Is that it? I know I hurt you, but don't push me away out of pride. We can still do this together somehow. We were never going to have kids, but ...' He tailed off.

I was angry again.

'No!' I struggled to keep control of myself. 'I wanted it to be yours. I wasn't completely sure until the dating scan. Even though I knew it probably wasn't, because of the circumstances, I still hoped it would be yours. That's how fucking bad things are right now. I'd rather have a baby with
you
, the twat who was too spineless to tell me that he was gay, the arsehole who brought a teenage boy
into my bed,
than be in my current situation. And that is bad.' I stopped. All I could hear was the sound of feet rushing past.

'Yes,' he said mildly. 'It doesn't sound good.'

I looked at Steve and wished he would renounce homosexuality. Bisexuality would do, if he decided he wanted me again. I would take him back like a shot. For a moment, I wondered whether to tell him everything. Before I could decide, he grabbed my shoulder and gripped it tightly, almost violently. He looked fiercely into my eyes. People strode around us, seeing nothing but an obstacle in the line between them and the correct platform.

'Only you know,' he said, 'but I just want to say this, and you can't interrupt. If it was my baby, and by my recollections, there must be a chance that it could be, then you could tell me, and I'd help you out as much as was needed. With the money side of things. It would be weird, but I would do my best. I don't think I'd be disastrous. And if it isn't mine, and if you're sure of that, then of course it's none of my business what you did with yourself when I left. God knows I am in no position to lecture you on that front.' He sighed, and looked away from me, into the window of W.H. Smith. 'So,' he continued, 'assuming you're right and it's this mysterious, elusive chap who did the deed, rather than me, then I still won't do anything awful to you. I mean, if that is the case, then you must stay in the flat for a while until you get yourself sorted. I'm not going to rush you.'

I frowned. 'What do you mean?'

'I mean the flat.'

I felt stupid. The ramifications of what he was really saying began to dawn on me.

'I'm paying the mortgage now,' I said quickly. 'I'll work it out and pay you back your deposit and everything you've paid while you lived there.' As I said it, I knew that this was not what he meant. Sure enough, he smiled a slippery, handsome smile.

'Lizzy,' he said softly. 'We paid five grand each as a deposit. I've been having a look at what's on the market. They go for 300K, minimum. Take off what's left of the mortgage, split the value, and we're looking at seventy grand each. More, probably. It's insane.'

'I have to magic seventy grand out of thin air to buy you out?' I was holding myself together, but only just.

He laughed softly and shook his head, as if this were nothing, a trifle. 'Not out of thin air, no. It's right there, in bricks and mortar. It's good news for you, too, Lizzy. Sell up, cash in, and put it down as a great deposit on a new place.'

I opened my mouth to reply. I wanted to shout. I wanted to tell Steve I hated him. I wanted to push him to the ground and kick him. I wanted to rope in a bunch of passing commuters to beat him up. I wanted to shout 'fuck' and 'prick' and all the swear words I knew. In the manner of the kids at school, I wanted to spit 'Your mum', a perennial favourite insult in the playground.