Nine

Natalie had expected Steve and Jill’s place to look more or less exactly like Meg’s, a huge sprawling Victorian mansion, only probably tidier and decorated in more of a contemporary style. She was almost right, except that it was one of three apartments that the house had been converted to in the nineties.

Whereas Meg’s house was all quirky little rooms, pantries and parlors, Steve’s place was open-plan, polished wood flooring and flat white walls. The main living space included a stainless-steel state-of-the-art kitchen at one end and Steve’s draftsman’s table at the other.

“Livework space,” Steve said, melding the two words into one as he showed Natalie in. “That’s what it’s all about these days. Multipurpose living.”

“Multipurpose living!” Natalie replied. “I’m impressed. It’s hard enough to find any purpose to living at all when you’ve only had three hours’ sleep and your jeans don’t fit you anymore.”

Natalie winked at Jess, who was sitting quite gingerly on the edge of a long orange sofa with such a low back and arms that to lean on it would be to take your life into your own hands.

“Look at you,” she said to Jess. “You look great, not a bulge or a spare tire to be seen. I want to be you.” Both Jess and Natalie were surprised by how sincere she had sounded, Jess because she was convinced that she must be the least attractive adult here and Natalie because she had never wanted to be anyone but herself before in her entire existence. Even when her life was at its most difficult and unsatisfactory in her twenties, she had always rather liked being herself.

“You don’t want to be me,” Jess exclaimed with a laugh. “I’m a total neurotic. I had us all up in the night because I thought Jacob was wheezing. I made Lee take us to the emergency room! Two hours, we were waiting. In the end the doctors said he was snoring.” She held up her thumb and forefinger. “I felt about this big.” Jess cringed as she thought back on the events of the previous night.

“The thing is, how are we supposed to know?” Natalie asked. “How do we know what it sounds like when a baby snores? We don’t. We have no precedent. I would have done the same thing.”

“You wouldn’t have,” Jess said.

“Well, no, I wouldn’t,” Natalie admitted. “But only because you are a proper mom who even thinks to worry about things like that. It never crosses my mind that anything is ever going to be wrong with Freddie. I sort of think he’s indestructible.”

“It’s official, then,” Jess said with a weak smile. “I wish I were you.”

“I’ve got us snacks,” Steve said, gesturing at a table of what looked like seeds. “I know you like cake, Natalie, but Jill’s got us on a special diet. It’ll change in about two weeks. We’ll only be eating carbs again, or bananas. Or oily fish. She’s a big fan of diets.”

“Couldn’t you tell her that you don’t want to go on the diet with her?” Natalie suggested.

“Well, I could,” Steve said with an affectionate smile. “But she’s a barrister. Very hard to argue with.”

When Frances arrived with Henry, Natalie was disappointed to see she did not have Meg, James, and Iris in tow.

“Where’s Meg?” Natalie asked Frances before greeting her, which a second after she had opened her mouth she realized was probably something of a faux pas, particularly where prickly Frances was concerned.

“Ill, apparently,” Frances said, as if Meg was being terribly rude by being unwell.

“Oh dear.” Natalie glanced at Jess. “I might go and see her later, do you want to…?”

“She doesn’t want visitors,” Frances said. “She told me to leave!”

“Did she?” Natalie was surprised. Telling someone to leave didn’t sound like Meg at all. The woman was patience personified and she was always putting everyone before herself. “She must be really ill, then.”

“Do you think so?” Frances said, seeming to brighten up a little.

“Oh yeah,” Natalie reassured her. “I mean, you’re probably her closest friend. If she spoke like that to you, she must be feeling awful.”

“Oh dear,” Frances said, her edges seeming to soften as she considered Natalie’s comment. “Poor Meg. She did look awful, actually.”

“Green tea, anyone?” Steve said, producing a Japanese tea set steaming with the aromatic brew.

Natalie wrinkled up her nose. “Now, Steve,” she said. “I think we all know a baby group wouldn’t be a baby group without one of these.” She plonked the now ubiquitous Jamaican ginger cake on his coffee table. “And have you got any coffee? I don’t mind instant.”

The aerobics class didn’t go quite as well as Baby Music.

It was as if everyone was just a little bit off kilter, literally in Natalie’s case as she fell over trying to do one of the exercises, landing hard on her back to save Freddie from getting squashed by her weight, a fall which shot an intense spasm of pain up her spine. Steve, she supposed, wasn’t quite as relaxed as he was at Baby Music, because he was the only man, and despite his best efforts not to care about it, he obviously did a little.

He had been waiting in his sweat pants and T-shirt as Natalie came out of the ladies’ changing room. She and Freddie had been the first to emerge because she hadn’t technically changed, she had just turned up pre-prepared in her loose jersey trousers and long-line T-shirt, not realizing that other people were going to bring actual exercise wear to the class. She had expected it to be nothing more than a laugh, just like Baby Music, so when she found Steve clutching Lucy to his chest and trying to look anywhere rather than at the women leaving the previous aerobics class, she was privately glad that someone else was as uncertain about this as she was.

“They are all going to think I’m a letch, aren’t they?” Steve said under his breath, nodding at the other women who were waiting with their babies for the class to begin.

Natalie laughed. “Don’t be silly,” she said. “All women think you are fabulous. They all fancy you because you are here with your baby. Ironically, a man with his baby is perhaps one of the most attractive sights to a single or married lady.”

“Really?” Steve looked alarmed, eyeing the gradually increasing group of ladies now with some trepidation. “Jill would kill me if she thought anyone fancied me,” he said with charming anxiety.

“No, she wouldn’t,” Natalie reassured him. “We like our men to be fancied. What we do not like is for them to fancy others. That is when you risk wandering into the realm of sudden and violent death.”

Steve laughed, his cheeks pinking up a little. “Seriously though, Natalie,” he said, “you’re a gutsy kind of woman, aren’t you, quite like a bloke really?”

“Really?” Natalie said, glancing down at her capacious breasts in mock dismay. “Is that how you see me?”

“No,” Steve said, now turning a lovely shade of cerise. “What I mean is that out of all the girls in the group you’re the one who I get the impression has known the most men—”

“Oh I see,” Natalie said with theatrical haughtiness as she struggled not to laugh.

“No, I don’t mean like that,” Steve hurried on, his complexion now more of a deep fuchsia. “I meant to say that you are a woman of the world, so if you were a bloke, what would you think of me? Would you think I was weak for being at home with Lucy, would you think I was failing as a man?”

Natalie attempted to consider the muddled question as she looked at Steve, who now most resembled an overripe strawberry being flambéed.

“I think,” she said after a moment, “that you are stronger than most regular men. After all, here you are in the middle of a lot of ladies in Lycra, with your baby girl in your arms because you want to give her the best babyhood you possibly can, regardless of stereotypes and what is expected. That takes real guts.”

Steve smiled, his color calming. “Would your Gary ever do anything like this?” he asked.

“Well, he couldn’t,” Natalie told him with conviction. “But only because he’s busy building very complicated structures practically with his bare hands and brute strength alone.” She paused and then added before she knew what she was saying, “But seriously, Steve, I’d give anything to have Freddie’s dad with me. Anything.”

It was the unexpected sting of tears behind her eyes that made Natalie suddenly have to turn away from Steve and the other members of the group as they finally emerged ready for action from the changing room.

Ever the gentleman, Steve, probably assuming that she was missing her husband, stood between her and the others while she took a second to compose herself. Natalie hugged a wriggly Freddie a little closer to her chest and took a deep steadying breath. Why was it, when she had spent so long rigorously making herself get used to the idea of bringing up Freddie on her own, that every now and then a feeling like that would overtake her and practically drown her in longing? It had to be because she now knew that Jack was back in London. He was close, really close, but still almost impossibly out of reach.

And so Natalie hadn’t been able to enter into the class with quite as much gusto as she wanted to, still shaking off that feeling of loss for something she had never actually possessed.

And as for the others, well, Tiffany looked pale and drawn as she performed the exercises with expertise and grace, her smooth oval face perfectly still, hiding all the fears and insecurities she must be feeling as one so young cut adrift from her parents. Jess looked tired and worn down with worry and a night in the emergency room. And as for Frances—Natalie thought that Frances was probably born slightly off kilter, never quite fitting in comfortably with anyone around her. Despite her pristine new gym wear, which had probably been bought just for the occasion, she looked utterly out of place.

As Natalie stepped from side to side without much enthusiasm, she contemplated the other and much more pressing reason why she was feeling so jangled and out of sorts. Because in a bid to avoid telling Jack that she was bringing up his secret love child she had done the only thing she could think of that would mean Alice wouldn’t totally kill her next time they spoke. She had told her mother instead. And now that she had, she was torn between an oddly comforting feeling of relief and sickening certainty that she was going to seriously regret her decision.

Most disconcertingly, it hadn’t been as horrible as Natalie had expected. She was prepared for smugness, hilarity, scorn, and disgust from her mother. But surprisingly she had received none of these things. Instead, when she delivered the news in a deliberately lighthearted, this-is-how-it-is-and-I-don’t-care-what-you-think-so-there style, there had been a long silence on the other end of the phone.

“I see,” Sandy said finally. “So I’m a grandmother, am I?”

“Yes, at last,” Natalie said, rolling her eyes and sighing like a teen as she slipped the pad with Jack’s numbers on it under the base of the bedside lamp so she could not see it.

“And how are you coping?” her mom asked.

Natalie had not quite known how to answer the unexpected question. She was waiting and prepared for “And who exactly is the father and what were you thinking, a woman of your age, having unprotected sex when you should know better?” But certainly not any kind of expression of concern, unless it came with some barbed backhanded insult.

“Um.” Natalie considered the question. “Actually, really well. It’s hardest at night with no one to take turns with, I suppose, and I’m exhausted. But I love him so much, Mom, he has changed my life completely and for the better.”

There was another pause.

“If you liked, I could come and stay for a bit?” her mom asked. “Be someone to take turns with for a while?”

This time Natalie was stunned into silence. It was the fact that her mother had asked her that surprised her. She had been fully prepared to have to forcibly put Sandy off with all sorts of excuses once she found out about Freddie. But for her mother to actually ask her opinion about something was new; disconcerting and different. Natalie was surprised by a sudden pang in the pit of her stomach, and when she tried to work out what had caused it she realized it was a simple impulse she had never expected to feel again. She wanted her mom. It was such a jolting and strong sensation that she felt tears in her eyes.

“I would actually,” she said, almost incredulously.

“Fabulous, darling,” Sandy said happily, sounding suddenly much more like her old cocktail-lounge self. “I’ll be over on the first flight! I presume that I need to buy a ticket to London?”

“Yes, of course,” Natalie said, already panicking about whether or not she had done the right thing. “Where else would I be?”

“Well,” her mom said, with a voice as dry as the Gobi Desert, “I thought you might be in China.”

When they left the sports center Natalie had asked both Tiffany and Jess to accompany her to see how Meg was, but neither accepted. Tiffany said she had to be at a meeting with her teachers and her social worker to talk about what was going to happen with her exams, and Jess said she was desperate to at least try to get some sleep.

“That girl is unreal,” Jess said, as they watched Tiff wheel Jordan off down the road. “Look at how she copes and then look at me. I’m so pathetic. Snoring. I took my baby to the hospital for snoring.”

“You are not pathetic,” Natalie said. “You have problems and weaknesses like the rest of us, but at least you face up to your worries and deal with them. At least you don’t hide from everything that’s going on around you, hoping that somehow everything will work itself out without you having to actually do anything.”

Natalie heard the frustration in her voice as if she were listening to a stranger. Normally she made a point of never letting anything she did get to her because she always said that once a decision or action was taken you could never really undo it, even if you tried. She made a point of facing up to the future that she had created for herself, whether or not it was something she wanted. Only since Freddie—since Jack if she was honest—she had felt a little less brave.

It had to be the pregnancy hormones, she told herself. After all, they had been present from almost the very first moment she had spent with Jack. It was probably her elevated estrogen levels that were responsible for how she thought she still might feel about the wretched man to this very day. It must be the hormones that made her teary at the thought of her mother, and now she came to think of it, it was probably because of them that she had told all her new friends she had a fake husband, a fake husband who was gradually taking on a Frankenstein monsterlike life of his own.

It had to be some internal enemy that was altering her so drastically, because she couldn’t allow herself to believe that this confusing maelstrom of emotions would be coming from the rational and sane part of her.

What had troubled her most since Alice called her to tell her that Jack was back in town was that now instead of being just somewhere, he was here in this city, maybe only a couple of miles away from this very spot where she was standing. What Alice didn’t understand, what none of her new friends would understand even if she felt able to tell them, was that it was because she wanted to see Jack so much, and wanted to share their son with him, that she was so terrified of seeing him, let alone telling him about Freddie. She could accept his rejection of her because she still hoped her naggingly persistent feelings for him would fade as her hormone levels returned to normal. But what if, as she half feared and half hoped, the very thought of being a father sent him packing to the other side of the world on the first available flight? Perhaps it would be better to tell Freddie that his father had died in a car crash than tell him his daddy didn’t want to know him; after all, that was what Sandy had told her about her own father. It was the one lie her mother had told her that she had belatedly appreciated, and the one she certainly wished she had never investigated.

Natalie remembered briefly a wet and freezing February afternoon in Brighton nearly twenty years ago, and the man who had stood on his doorstep telling her in hushed but urgent tones to go away and leave him alone. At least when she thought he was dead she could fantasize about how much he would have loved her, and how different their lives would have been if he had survived.

But she knew she could never set Freddie up for a meeting like that one, and when it came to it, she didn’t have any control over what might happen in the future except to try to make the right decisions now. And that would be a first for her.

Natalie looked at Jess’s face, so honest and open that you could almost see every minute of her sleepless night illustrated on her exhausted features. Jess, who wanted to be her, who thought she was so capable and together. Suddenly Natalie desperately wanted to be able to tell Jess everything about her life, the whole sordid truth. But as they stood in the chill and bluster of that March morning, Natalie realized she had no idea how she would begin to explain just what a mess she had made of everything.

Jess, Meg, and the others thought better of her, they might even actually admire her a little bit. She didn’t want that to change. She liked being the woman who was the friend of Jess and Meg. She liked that version of herself.

“What’s up?” Jess asked her with a smile, cocking her head to one side. “What awful problem are you hiding from now?”

Natalie laughed and shrugged.

“Oh, just that my mom’s coming to stay,” she told Jess with mock heaviness. “Today.”

Jess laughed. “Is she that bad?”

“It depends,” Natalie said, reverting to that easy, apparently enviable version of herself who didn’t have a real care in the world. “If you don’t mind having a cross between Joan Collins and Joan Rivers as a parent, only minus all their maternal instincts, then no—it’s not a problem.” She grinned at Jess. “I spoke to her last night and she sounded almost human, and before I knew it I’d asked her to stay in a moment of weakness. But I know exactly what will happen. She will waltz in, criticize me for getting myself in this situation in the first place, and then try to sleep with Gary…”

“Gary’s home?” Jess said, her eyes widening. “She’d try to sleep with your husband?”

Natalie blinked at Jess for a second or two before her life story caught up with her.

“Oh no, Gary the electrician, I meant. It’s a very common name,” she said quickly.

“Oh, how confusing,” Jess said. “So, what situation have you got yourself in?”

“Being…married…to a man…who…works in Dubai, of course,” Natalie said, adding each word to the sentence as it occurred to her. She was fairly sure she had managed to pull the fib off.

“She can’t be that unreasonable, can she?” said. “After all, you can’t pick who you love based on their geographical location. And at least you are married. If you knew how much grief my mom gives me about that…”

Natalie thought about her mother, who was even now winging her way toward Heathrow. “She can be that unreasonable, and worse still she’s cunning. It’s like playing a game of chess with a malicious fox.”

Jess laughed out loud. “You are funny, Natalie,” she said. “If she’s that bad, then why on earth did you ask her?”

Natalie looked sideways at Jess. There weren’t enough words left in the English language to fully answer that question.

“Well, she is my mother, after all,” she said instead with a shrug. “And in some cultures that’s considered to be quite an important thing. Plus she volunteered to get up in the night with Freddie now and then, and I’d give Dracula a bed and breakfast if it meant I got a good night’s sleep again.”

When Meg opened the door, she looked terrible. But it wasn’t an ill terrible. It was obvious to Natalie that she had been crying.

“What’s happened?” Natalie asked, pushing Freddie’s buggy into the hall and then putting her arms around Meg.

“It’s all f…f…falling apart,” Meg managed to blurt out. “It’s all…all…ruined!”

A little while later, Natalie and a much calmer Meg sat at the kitchen table while James choo-chooed a train around their legs and the babies slept top to tail in Iris’s cot.

“That was a pretty harsh thing to say,” Natalie said, when Meg had finished telling her what had happened, keeping her voice expertly neutral so that her son would only hear the tone and not tune in to the words.

Natalie didn’t like the sound of what Meg had told her one bit. She didn’t have direct experience of the end of a serious relationship herself, but she had been there when Alice’s marriage to her ex-husband Frank had begun to disintegrate soon after they launched Mystery Is Power. And it was during Alice’s divorce that Natalie had realized something that might be worryingly pertinent now. All couples fight, shout, scream, and say hurtful things to each other in anger. But they only ever seem to say the really violently cruel things, to vocalize the deepest and darkest resentments they have been harboring for years, when one of them is about to leave.

Natalie was certain, however, that Meg didn’t want to hear that particular theory just now, and after all, she didn’t know Robert at all. She had never seen Meg with her husband. She might be completely wrong, and she sincerely hoped that she was.

“But everything he said is true,” Meg said bleakly, pinching her temple for a second as she gathered her thoughts. “I mean, look at me. I look old and fat and like a mom. I don’t look like a desirable woman anymore, I don’t feel like one. I have to face it, I’m not the kind of woman men look at and want to have sex with—I wouldn’t want to come home to me either.”

Natalie looked at Meg. She was tired. Her nose was red and swollen as were her eyes, and she was bundled in three or four layers of mismatched knitwear that probably made her look much bigger and far more shapeless than she really was.

“Rubbish,” she said firmly. “You are a sexpot! You’ve just stopped paying attention to yourself, that’s all. You are a very attractive woman. It’s just that you insist on hiding somewhere underneath all those big bulky sweaters. Never mind quality time for you and Robert—how about some quality time for just you? When you feel good about yourself, other people start to feel good about you.”

Natalie tried to ignore the fact that she was doling out the kind of advice that she could stand to follow herself. She wasn’t sure what was going on with Meg and Robert, but she was sure that if anything was fixable it was the way Meg looked and, more important, the way she felt about how she looked. Natalie knew she could help her with this.

“What do you mean, quality time for just me?” Meg asked.

“I mean that you need to take some time to peel off all those sweaters and get back in touch with your inner sexual being,” Natalie replied.

Meg looked worried.

“I reckon,” Natalie continued, “that when Robert got in last night, he was very tired and already in a bad mood. He took it out on you, which sucks, but it doesn’t mean that he’s spent today filing for divorce or that your whole life is over. I bet you when he gets in tonight he will be feeling really guilty and really sorry.”

“Do you think so?” Meg looked so hopeful that for a moment Natalie wondered if she was on the right track; what if her plan wasn’t enough to fix things? But she had to try to help her friend, and this was all she could come up with.

“I do think so,” Natalie replied without a hint of caution. “And when he does, I want you to capitalize on that guilt, maximize his bad feelings. Take the moral high ground. Be sweet and understanding and then demand that he make a date with you for Saturday night. Make him promise to keep it free for you. I’m sure Frances will look after the kids.”

“Robert’s very hard to demand things from…” Meg said uncertainly.

“It’ll be fine!” Natalie said, dismissing the worry with a wave of her hand. “And when he sees you tomorrow evening, it won’t be downtrodden dowdy old Meg that’s waiting for him…”

“Dowdy?”

Natalie patted her hand.

“Figure of speech—it will be glamorous, sex-kitten, hot-stuff Meg, draped over this very table in the finest lingerie that money can buy, except in this case you’ll be getting a freebie from me.”

“What?” Meg looked confused.

“I’m going to take you into work tomorrow and sort you out with some sexy knickers!”

“Ohhh,” Meg said, as the extent of Natalie’s plan dawned on her. “Oh. I don’t know, Natalie. I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean, you’re not sure? Of course you’re sure. We are talking about free shopping here!”

“But will it work?” Meg was disappointingly dubious.

“Of course it will work. Men are not complicated beings. There is no straight man alive on this planet or any other that doesn’t go wild for a push-up corset and stockings. God only knows why, but they do, and what’s more it will make you feel empowered.” A thought occurred to Natalie. “In fact, while I’m at it, I’ll get Jess to come, too—there’s another girl who needs empowering.”

Natalie was enjoying her latest role as lifestyle guru, not that the irony wasn’t lost on her, merely filed away in a mental drawer labeled “Facts I don’t want to face thank you very much.”

“Are you really saying that silky pants can solve everything?” Meg asked, the load of worry on her face lightened by the hint of a smile.

“I am,” Natalie told her triumphantly.

“There’s just one more thing,” Meg added.

“What’s that?”

“I won’t have to wear a thong, will I?” Meg lowered her voice. “I’ve had terrible trouble with hemorrhoids since Iris was born.”