“I know!” She’d hunched her shoulders with delight, and sped up, no longer watching her feet.
Lapping him, she came up from behind, shouting, “Feels good to be better at something than you are for a change. This, mate, is how it feels for me when we’re skiing.”
Stephen made the grave error of turning to look at her, a smart retort on the tip of his tongue, and fell hard on the ice. He actually felt sick at the impact. When she skated over, contrite and sympathetic, to help him stand up, he grinned sheepishly at her. “Except snow isn’t this bloody hard!”
By December 31, they had ticked all the tourist boxes except the Circle Line cruise around the island, which only a raving idiot would attempt at these temperatures. They spent the afternoon in Ma-T h i n g s I W a n t M y D a u g h t e r s t o K n o w 83
cy’s, buying cheap Levi’s and Calvin Klein underpants. The crowds gathering to watch some ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve started to thicken in earnest at around 6:00 p.m. The police herded them like sheep through an elaborate system of fences toward their target. It was freezing cold. Even wearing hats, gloves, scarves, and their thickest coats, and even in the midst of a pressing, eager crowd, Jennifer was so cold that her face hurt, and her feet felt like they might shatter. At 9:00 p.m., by mutual agreement, they had abandoned their plan to wait for midnight, and come back to the hotel, while you could still extricate yourself from the crowd. Stephen had run her a hot bath and ordered a cheeseburger and chips for them both from room service. She was luxuriating in the bath, enjoying sensation returning to her feet, while he gazed out of the window at the ever-increasing crowd milling around below.
“They must be crazy. All to watch some ball drop.”
“But it was exciting out there—the atmosphere and everything. Bet it’s great when the music starts.”
“Bet it’s not that great. There’s hardly any room to stand upright, let alone dance.”
“I’d like to have seen when they drop all the confetti and stuff.”
“Yeah, well, I’d rather watch it from up here.”
“You’re getting middle-aged.”
“Watch it!”
He appeared at the bathroom door, clutching two miniature bottles of champagne he’d procured from the minibar.
“They’re not that cold, but there’s that ice machine out on the landing. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Don’t they cost more than a full bottle bought outside the hotel?”
“Oh, give it a rest, Ebenezer. It’s New Year’s Eve!”
Back with the ice, bottles plunged into it to chill, Stephen pulled his sweater over his head.
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“Shift over. I’m coming in. Bags you get the tap end. You’ve already been soaking for half an hour. . . .”
Jennifer smiled and turned around in the water, laying her head to the left of the taps. He climbed in, but the bath wasn’t really big enough for both of them, and he sat, with his knees clasped to his chest, looking uncomfortable, until she laughed and climbed out, bubbles running down her legs onto the bath mat.
“Here . . . you have a go on your own.”
She put on a dressing gown and went to the window, toweling her hair. She loved the city. It throbbed with life, twenty-four hours a day.
Mum and Mark had had a honeymoon of sorts here—just a weekend.
Mum said it was her favorite place on earth. Jennifer could see why—it would suit her mum.
Stephen was calling again, from the bath.
“You know what we should do?”
She walked over to the doorway and leaned against the frame, watching him, and hoping this new plan of his didn’t involve getting dressed up and heading out into the cold night again.
“What should we do?”
“We should make a baby.”
“Right now?!”
“Well, not
right now,
obviously—there are burgers on their way. Tonight. A New Year’s Eve, New York baby. Can you get a U.S. passport if you’re conceived here?”
“Don’t think so.”
“No matter. You’d still have been conceived here. Great place to get made.”
“Are you serious?”
“Perfectly.”
She shook her head, smiling, and not quite certain how in earnest he was.
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“Think about it. A baby conceived tonight would be born in . . . what . . . September? Don’t you remember what an easy ride the September kids had at school? They were always the oldest ones in the year.”
“You’ve really been thinking about this, haven’t you?”
“Not really.” He grinned. “But why not?”
“Are you bored of just having me?”
“What a bloody odd thing to say. Bored with you?” He looked puz -
zled. “Of course not. What a weird way to see it. It’s what people do, Jennifer. They fall in love, they get married, they have babies. We’ve been married. Babies are the next bit.”
There was a knock at the door.
“Shut up a minute, will you?”
Jennifer shut Stephen into the bathroom and, checking how she looked in the mirror, answered the door to room service. She fumbled in Stephen’s jeans pocket for a couple of dollars while the man set up trays at the table near the window, and smiled at him. “Happy New Year.”
“Happy New Year, ma’am.”
“Great, I’m starving.”
Stephen had wrapped himself in a towel and came to grab a chip off his plate. Water dripped onto the tablecloth, and Jennifer picked up the hand towel she’d been using to dry her hair and ran it along his arm and shoulder. The touch was proprietary.
He pulled on his jeans and a T-shirt, kissed the top of her head, and sat down to eat in earnest.
“So, what do you think? Of Plan Baby . . .”
“You’ve sort of sprung it on me. . . .”
“Okay, so I’ve sprung it on you. Tell me your thoughts, O careful, ponderous, nonspontaneous one. . . .” His tone was affectionate, not cruel, but she felt just a little irritated. You couldn’t just spontaneously decide to have a baby. Could you?
“I thought we’d wait a bit more.”
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“Why should we? We’re not that young. I’m making good money—
you’d take maternity leave, go back when you wanted to . . . we’d have to tighten our belts a bit, if you didn’t want to or something, but we’d manage—millions do.”
Jennifer felt slightly railroaded. Of course they’d talked about kids.
In the abstract, starry-eyed way you did when they were still some way off. And now Stephen had jumped tracks onto the express. She felt almost breathless.
“You are serious, aren’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
“You really want this? It’s not some elaborate sort of foreplay?”
“Elaborate, and not, so far, terribly effective! I think I’d have done better with a couple of compliments and some ear nibbling, don’t you?!
Course I want this. I love you.” He made it sound so simple.
That was better. She took a large bite from her burger and made him wait for a response until she’d finished the mouthful.
“I’m on the pill. You can’t get pregnant until you’ve stopped a few months.”
“Party pooper.”
“Realist.”
“If you got pregnant straightaway after that, we could still tell him he was conceived in New York on New Year’s Eve, couldn’t we?”
“Only if you’re planning to raise a kid—sorry, a son, clearly; very
‘my boy Bill’ of you, by the way—who can’t count and never gets past a rudimentary understanding of biology.”
“Okay, wise arse. You don’t half know how to piss on a man’s bonfire. But there’s nothing to stop us practicing, right. Doing it like we mean it . . .”
She laughed. “No, we can do it like we mean it. I thought we usually did.”
He stood up and went to sit on the bed, patting the mattress beside him.
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“Come on, then.”
“You’ll get indigestion.”
“It’ll be worth it.”
“Don’t I even get my midnight champagne?”
“Honey—it’s ten thirty. You know me. You can have your champagne at ten forty. Now get over here. . . .”
So they’d been laughing together, back when it all began. She remembered them laughing such a lot. That’s what had been so wonderful—after John. He’d been so bloody serious about everything, so earnest, and so thoughtful. Stephen was the polar opposite. The sex had been lighthearted and fun and good, although she was right about the indigestion, and he’d needed an antacid before the ball dropped in Times Square. And she was on the pill, so even though she’d agreed, or at least stopped disagreeing in principle, she knew they weren’t really trying for a baby that night. But that was when it had started. It had seemed wonderfully simple. He’d always been able to spin things that way, in those days.
He’d waved her packet of pills at her a few days later, back in England.
“Shall I get rid of these?”
“I suppose you better.”
“More practicing?”
“Get lost—I’ve got laundry to do, and you said you’d go and see your parents when we got back.”
He winked, kissed her on the cheek, and headed in the direction of the front door. “Okay, then, but you just let me know where and when. . . . I’m always ready.”
For six months, they had carried on like they had been, just without chemical intervention. For six months they didn’t worry.
They laughed, and they made love, and often both at the same time.
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For the next six months, she paid a little more attention to the right time to conceive. She made little doodles in her diary, counting fourteen days forward from a period. She even turned down the odd invitation from friends when it fell on a likely night, although she never told Stephen she had.
For the six months after that, she used an ovulation prediction kit from the chemist. Stephen called her the Professor.
When nothing had happened for eighteen months, at Stephen’s request, she went to the doctor.
And at every stage, when she knew a normal woman would have been increasingly anxious and worried, she grew more and more am-biguous about the whole thing.
Stephen was, certainly, doing well at work. She didn’t really understand much of what he told her about what he did, but it appeared that he did it well. He had a couple of promotions, got a company car, started going to more and more overnight sales conferences. He got a BlackBerry and was never off it. It came on holidays with them, demanding constant attention, and slept in bed beside them. She often awoke—far too early—to the clicking of his fingers on the miniature keyboard. She told a friend at work they didn’t need a baby; they had a BlackBerry and that was enough. He was preoccupied. He wasn’t listening to her so much.
But worse than that was the subtle, inexorable change in his attitude toward their conceiving a child. At the beginning, it was both of them, and it was fun. Both of them trying, both of them failing. Then she knew it had shifted. Something in him needed to believe that it was more to do with her than with him, some ancient, buried machismo, some unwillingness to admit defeat. When she was unwilling to go to the doctor—claiming that with a young, healthy couple, the system wouldn’t be interested until they’d tried on their own for a long time—
he could give vent to the insinuation that had been there, unspoken, for a while.
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He was less kind to her. Less patient. They stopped laughing so much. And all the time, she became less and less certain that getting pregnant was what she really wanted.
How had things changed so much in three New Year’s Eves? They’d been so happy—young and in love and at one—in New York. It was like something had happened. Like someone had had an affair, only no one had. It was what hadn’t happened, what apparently couldn’t happen, that had caused this. She sometimes wondered whether she had just fallen out of love with him. Like she had with John. Maybe there was a time limit on her ability to love another person . . . but there were still moments between them when she knew it wasn’t that. You couldn’t explain it, could you? It was a million tiny things that made it change.
And so they went out, of course, this year, like they did most years.
They were all about making it look like everything was fine. They met friends in this noisy Italian restaurant, and ate and drank and danced.
You would have to be watching very closely to see what was missing between them. They were not the kind of people who would ever fight in public, or make other people uncomfortable, or show their vulnerabil-ity. That was something they still had in common—this ridiculous, dumb pride. But that just made her feel more isolated. If only Mum was alive. She’d give up, she’d talk to her. Maybe she only told herself that because Mum was dead, and it couldn’t happen. No—she would. She was desperate. She’d listen to what she had to say. As the clock chimed midnight, and everyone was falling into each other’s arms, kissing and whooping, she was thinking of her mum, and how she’d missed her chance.
When Stephen found her in the crowd, he put his arms around her and held her close. “Let’s make this one a better one, hey,” he whispered. It was a request, and a promise, and a plea. He was just as sad, just as unhappy as she was. She didn’t know how he interpreted the tears in her eyes, but she nodded yes, and held him right back, praying that it would be.
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Amanda
Amanda had imagined Ed was taking her to a party. He’d arranged to meet her at the underground station at 8:00 p.m. She was excited. She’d met a few of his friends, people he was at college with, before Christmas, at the pub, and they were fun. She’d dressed carefully in a dress, which was rare—this dress being pretty much the only one she had—
and heels, which was rarer. She didn’t wear makeup normally, but tonight she’d put on mascara and lip gloss. It was really cold, and she knew her nose and cheeks were pink.
It was crazy, really. Being so excited. She barely knew him. They’d been out, what, five times? Three of those had been in a big crowd, where conversation was almost impossible. One coffee, and one curry.