“Sounds hideous.”
“It was trendy then; at least I’m sure it must have been, or else she wouldn’t have done it. She was always much more into that stuff than I was.”
“Yeah—weren’t you all listening to the Bay City Rollers then? In the Tartan Army?” She was giggling.
“How old do you think I am?”
“I don’t know—about middle-aged?”
“Cheeky monkey. It was a long time after that. This was more an Ant Warrior, Culture Club thing.”
“Equally sad.”
“Fine. Just ten years later. At least give me credit for that.”
“What happened to the kilt?”
“Mum threw it away. She was pretty cross. Not even really because Lisa had cut the kilt up. More because she’d done such a bad job of it, I think!”
“Sounds like Mum. She’d have probably hemmed it with the machine, if Lisa’d just brought it to her.”
“Probably. Anyway, it was almost certainly all Lisa’s fault. She was always the wild one—I was just trying to keep up with her. . . .
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“So who are you going with, then, to this prom?” Jennifer knew Hannah wasn’t seeing this Nathan guy anymore. Not that he’d sounded much like a prom date. He’d written to Mark—a short, formal note, clearly written with his father standing behind him, apologizing for his irresponsible actions. The note said the police were pressing charges. He had to be seen to be doing penance. He’d certainly lose his license, he said, probably for five years, and maybe even get a suspended sentence.
What an idiot.
“Just Alice and Phoebe. I’m off blokes.”
“Indefinitely?”
“At least for now . . . Made a right balls-up back there, didn’t I?”
Jennifer reached over and patted Hannah’s shoulder. “Didn’t we all, at some point, Hannah.”
More recently than you might think, young Hannah,
she thought, draining her glass. “How’s the studying going?”
“Crap.”
“But it’s soon, isn’t it?”
“A couple of weeks ’til the first one.”
“Are you ready?”
“Not according to my mocks results, I’m not.”
“Ah, but they were special circumstances.”
“Hope so.”
“You’ll be fine. You’ve got clever genes.”
“Easy for you to say. Won’t be you sitting them.”
“I’ve sat them.”
“In the olden days . . . !”
“Exactly! When they were actually difficult. Before they invented A stars, whatever the hell they are.”
“Shouldn’t worry about what they are. I don’t think there’ll be any of those on my list.”
“Stop it, Hannah. You’re going to do great.”
“We’ll see. . . .”
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Hannah was saved by the bell. Her phone rang, its ring tone a tune Jennifer recognized vaguely as the hit of the summer, and she turned her back to answer it. Then she got up and lolloped to another part of the garden so that Jennifer couldn’t hear who it was and what she was saying.
Jennifer smiled to herself at the secrecy. Still a teenager, then.
When she rang off, Hannah came and sat down again.
The interruption hung briefly in the air. “I miss her.” Hannah didn’t say that often.
“I miss her, too.”
“I’m lucky, though. I know that. I’ve got Dad, and you and Lisa, and Amanda. I know I don’t always act like I know that’s lucky. But I do, really.”
“We always said, you had four mums. To love you and to nag you.”
“Could do without the nagging.”
“Can’t have one without the other. Did our mum teach you nothing?”
“You weren’t around much, when I was little.”
“You don’t know, you were little. Little people have notoriously unreliable memories.”
“I know, I don’t remember, because Mum always said so. She said that she and Mark had tried to make you and Lisa feel like a part of the family, but that she was afraid you didn’t, not really. She said you were too old, when she and Dad got together, to ever really accept it and want to belong to it.”
“She did?”
“She did. I think it made her sad.”
“I’m sorry.”
Hannah shrugged again. The universal gesture of adolescence.
“Don’t get me wrong. She wasn’t, like, very sad, very often. She was a pretty fun person.”
“She was, wasn’t she?”
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“That’s what I miss most. Dad’s fun, too, I know that. But the funny they made together, the funny only the two of them could make—that’s gone, and I miss it.”
Jennifer put her arm around Hannah and hugged her.
“You’re a wise old head, on young brown shoulders, aren’t you, Hannah?” she said softly.
“I am. With the odd fuck-up in between . . .” This Hannah seemed much more like the old one. “Get that from my mum! The wisdom part.
I
know
things.”
And there are things you will never know,
Jennifer thought, but didn’t say.
“What things do you know?”
“I know that you seem much happier, lately.”
Jennifer smiled. “I am actually.”
“That’s good.”
“Yeah.”
She sat for another moment or two, feeling a giant grin spread across her face, not wanting, or needing, to conceal her joy for a minute longer.
“I do know one little thing you don’t know, missy.”
“What?” Hannah sat forward. The grin was contagious, before she even knew why she was grinning.
“That I’m pregnant.”
So, the thing was, that when you’d tried to get pregnant and it hadn’t worked, and hadn’t worked for long enough that it was time to get it investigated, you forgot about birth control. Obviously. There’d been a while, back there, where it was redundant anyway; they’d made love so infrequently. But since the ski trip before Easter . . . well, that was no longer the case.
A missed period was nothing new for Jennifer. She’d never been especially regular. That had been noted, written down on the charts.
Sometimes she was so late she wasn’t sure whether the period was the
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last one or the next one. She’d been tired. Dead tired. The kind of heavy, sudden tiredness that makes sleeping facedown on your desk, or standing up in the underground, seem a suddenly attractive proposition.
She’d wondered whether she might be anemic, and started buying dark green leafy vegetables, which was unlikely to help, since she hated the taste of them, and, although they got steamed and served up, they were seldom eaten in any great quantity. Sore boobs should have been a sign—
indeed they might have been, if she’d been looking for one. But babies, and all things baby, had been so definitely shelved, so removed from the agenda of this relationship she and Stephen were rebuilding from the ground up, that it quite honestly never occurred to her that she might be pregnant.
Until she started to throw up. Blessed with the constitution of an ox, inherited by all four of them from their mother, this almost never happened. Amanda hadn’t been sick once in India, for exactly the same reason, even after eating watermelon sold at the roadside and taking ice in her Coke. They were all roller-coaster, choppy-sea, stop-start-traffic proof. But one morning, she awoke feeling as unfamiliarly sick as the proverbial parrot. As she sat legs akimbo, pajamas awry, on the cool tiles of the bathroom floor, clutching at the pedestal of the toilet for dear life, a new and awe-inspiring thought slowly dawned.
Stephen had been away at a two-day sales conference in Manchester.
Jennifer resisted the strong impulse to phone him and tell him. She wanted to see his face. She’d gone to the chemist and bought four tests, and done them, one after the other, until she’d perfected what she judged to be midstream urine. Even then, she had the sense of entering some new and alien world. She’d never considered the length or time span of a stream of her urine before.
They each obliged with an affirmative blue line. Peering from test to box and back again, Jennifer thought pregnancy tests would be better if they just said yes or no. Or, better still, if they came with the kind of 352 e l i z a b e t h
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computer chip that would just announce, in a Stephen Hawkings voice, whether you were or you weren’t. Some of the four lines were fainter than others. But they were all there.
The GP, whom she called immediately, fingers shaking as she dialed, exclaimed with joy. She didn’t think doctors were supposed to do that—register an emotional reaction to an outcome. But this was the GP they’d seen, ages ago, and who’d referred them for tests . . . of course she assumed the news was good. Four lines, she’d laughed, meant she almost certainly was pregnant. It wasn’t that unusual, she said. Un-explained infertility did sometimes resolve itself without intervention or explanation. It was just one of those things. Had they been on holiday?
Sometimes a change of scene or a distraction was all that was needed.
Couples had been known to become too focused on getting pregnant, and sometimes, when they took a step back, it just fixed itself, and it worked. She was thrilled for them, she said, and suggested that Jennifer come and see her in a couple of weeks, and they’d work out some dates and fix a scan.
And that was it. She was pregnant. They were pregnant.
One part of Jennifer’s brain wondered whether it was too soon. The other part registered that it was extraordinary to have gone so quickly from questions about if to questions about when. The bigger part just went yippee.
The world was full of babies. It was full of babies when you wanted to get pregnant, and it wasn’t happening. It was full of babies when you weren’t sure you wanted to get pregnant, and everyone else wanted it to happen. And it was still full of babies when you were pregnant at last.
The babies all looked the same, but you looked at them completely differently. Jennifer didn’t think she could have gotten pregnant in France.
Maybe April. She’d missed two periods. Maybe earlier. If she was already about two months pregnant, then her baby would be born around Christmastime. Noelle. Holly. Christopher. Wenceslas. She remem-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 353
bered Jake, the Christmas baby, and hugged herself. This time it was going to be her.
She’d meant to tell Stephen in a special way. Make a story that could be told and retold. She bought sea bass. Decided that cooking sea bass was definitely going to make her sick. Put the sea bass in the freezer, in the belief and hope that morning sickness could not last for the whole nine months. She took a bottle of champagne out of the coat cupboard in the hall where they kept the bottle rack, but then remembered she wouldn’t be able to drink any and put it back. She rehearsed ways to say it.
He was late. Traffic was terrible on the M1. He called on the mobile from the car and told her he wasn’t sure when he’d be back. She tried to watch television, but there was nothing on interesting enough to hold her attention. She tidied the apartment, remembering what she had once heard about women nesting. She stood for ages on the threshold of their second bedroom, imagining where they might put a cot, a changing table. What color they might paint it. She felt, standing there, like she’d instantly changed, in the very moment she’d found out. She remembered something Mum had written in the journal and wished she knew. She’d be so pleased. She couldn’t imagine Stephen granting her admittance to the labor ward, like the diary had said, but she’d have been pleased enough, maybe, to wait outside.
She’d been almost asleep, feet up on the sofa, when he’d finally come home. All her grandiose schemes for breaking the news evaporated when she saw him. The burden of carrying the news alone for two days was finally too much. All he said, smiling at her from the doorway and starting to come toward her, was “How are you?”
“Pregnant.”
“You’re what?”
“I’m pregnant, Stephen. I’m pregnant.”
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That was a few weeks ago. The scan had confirmed it last week.
She’d lain there, jelly-bellied, and he’d sat behind her, holding her hand raised over her head just like in films and on television. And when the coffee bean baby hoved into view, gray and grainy, but definitely pulsing with life, she felt absolutely like she knew she should. She was twelve weeks pregnant. Labeled an elderly prima gravida, just as Barbara had complained, but pronounced at least a healthy and perfectly normal one, carrying a fetus about
x
long, who would be born not at Christmas—
maths had never been her strong point—but at the end of January the following year. The radiographer said she thought the baby was a girl, although she made no promises.
Hannah jumped up and punched the air triumphantly.
“You’re pregnant! That’s fantastic!”
Jennifer laughed.
“It is fantastic, isn’t it?”
“It’s fantastic.” Good word.
“I’m going to be an aunt.” With teenagers, in the nicest possible way, and however wise the head on their young brown shoulders, it was always just a little bit about them. “Auntie Hannah.”
“I can expect loads of free babysitting, then, I assume.”
“Too right. As long as it’s not prom night. Or Saturday nights. Or Fridays.” But she was grinning. She hugged her big sister.
“I’m
so, so
happy for you!”
“Thanks, Hannah.”
“How does Stephen feel about it?”
Stephen was quietly ecstatic. All his lines, in the ski chalet, about babies not mattering . . . she’d known what he meant, but she hadn’t bought it. This was what he’d wanted all along. That was fine. He’d just been more sure. There was nothing wrong with that. They hadn’t told anyone yet. At some point, there would be a trip to his parents. She looked forward to telling Kathleen, but part of her resented giving Brian
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what he said he wanted. She’d get over it. This wasn’t about any of them, anyhow. It was about her and Stephen, and this baby.
“When are you going to tell Dad?”