Six

Natalie 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 distress. “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.