Fifteen

When Meg woke up in the early hours of Sunday morning, it took her a second or two to work out why. It was still quite dark outside and all the children were still at Frances’s house. And then she felt Robert’s breath in her ear and his hand sliding around her waist over the mound of her belly and finally cupping one breast. Everything that had happened last night came back to her all at once.

“Good morning,” Robert whispered in her ear.

“Is it morning?” Meg asked him sleepily. Robert rolled her onto her back and, easing his weight on top of her, kissed her for a long time. It was a tender kiss, a gentle and loving one, and Meg longed to let herself fall into it without any reservation, but she couldn’t, there was one small tight part of her that held back. Robert didn’t seem to notice.

“It’s six,” he murmured, as he pulled back from their kiss. “But I couldn’t wait any longer. I have plans for this Sunday. I want to make love to my beautiful and sexy wife, make her a great breakfast in bed, and then go and fetch my children and spend the day with my family.” He bent his mouth to her neck and kissed her below her jawline. “Sound good?”

“We haven’t done that in the longest time,” Meg said wistfully. “Spent a whole day together.”

Robert stopped kissing her and looked into her eyes.

“I know,” he said. “And I know that’s partly my fault. I’ve let work rule my life and it’s got me stressed and made me…cruel. Meg, I didn’t mean what I said to you the other day. I was just angry at some work stuff and I took it out on you. I was wrong, really wrong.” The smile that followed was sweet; he looked boyish and young again with his hair all tousled and his face creased with sleep. “Can you forgive me?”

Meg looked up at him, colorless in the dawn light, and smiled.

“’Course I can, silly,” she said, because she wanted to.

She really wanted to believe that from now on everything was going to be all right. And maybe she could pretend that she hadn’t seen what she had last night.

If she could just do that, then maybe everything would be perfect.

Natalie lay wide awake until seven thirty a.m. on Sunday morning, a time when she felt it was finally appropriate to get out of bed. Freddie had been asleep since four, but try as she might she could not force herself into unconsciousness. Jack and Freddie and what was going to happen, not to mention what might not happen, and a whole series of jumbled and disjointed thoughts, spun around and around behind her eyelids whenever she attempted to close them. So she decided it was better to stay awake, stare at the ceiling, and try to imagine a Sunday morning with her fake husband instead.

He’d bring her breakfast in bed. Coffee, orange juice, croissants, and eggs. Then while she ate he’d feed the baby, sitting in bed next to her. They would watch the morning news and because it was Sunday they’d be going to somebody’s parents’ house for lunch. Either his fake mom and dad’s, whom Natalie envisioned as a nice friendly old couple who lived in a thirties semi detached house in Tottenham. Or her fake mother’s place, an elegant Victorian villa, where her fake mother lived with her cat, taught piano, and went ballroom dancing every other Thursday afternoon. Then after lunch they’d go for a walk around the park, and in the early evening when the baby was asleep they’d make love in the living room on the sofa. They’d be sitting hand-in-hand watching the Antiques Roadshow when, suddenly overcome with desire for her, he’d reach over and kiss her, his hand cupping her breast and then…It was at that point that Natalie felt it was appropriate to get out of bed.

Fake-husband fantasies might be distracting but they were also dangerous, especially when they concerned your real-life electrician.

What she needed, Natalie thought as she showered, was a distraction to get her through this day, this sort of no-man’s-land of a Sunday where everything was still up in the air and unresolved. She couldn’t go to Meg’s, where she hoped marital bliss was in full swing, and she knew Jess and Lee had the grandparents coming. Alice would be working on the collection with Gregory, and Natalie didn’t think that Frances—as intrinsically good a person as she was somewhere underneath all those prickles—was the kind of distraction she was looking for. That left Steve, who she knew was playing football with his mates in a bid to keep in with his manhood, and Tiffany.

That was what she would do today. She would go and visit Tiff and Jordan and see how they were getting on. If there was one person who put her own self-inflicted troubles into perspective, it was Tiffany.

And as for Jack, well, it was out of her hands, at least for now. He had said he would call her.

Of course he had said that once before, and she had still been waiting for that call a year later.

Meg wondered how she would feel at this moment if last night hadn’t ended the way it had, if all she had done was fall asleep in Robert’s arms.

She decided that she would have felt utterly happy, content and secure in the strengthened foundations of her marriage. Erasing the two minutes that prevented her from feeling like that, however, was harder than she had hoped. Instead, she was left with this peculiar mix of happiness and anguish: the joy of seeing him here now playing with his children, and the fear that despite how it looked and how it felt, it could all be just a fragile veneer in danger of shattering at any moment.

She sat on the bench and watched her family playing Frisbee.

Alex and Hazel kept shouting at her to come and join in, their cheeks ruddy and their eyes bright as they raced around on the grass trying to throw the Frisbee to each other before a leaping Gripper caught it. But Meg said she had to watch over Iris, and anyway she wanted to watch as Robert scooped up James and hurled the giggling toddler into the air only to catch him just in the nick of time, with a whoop and a shout of delight from her son.

Her husband had been true to his word when it came to his plans for the day.

They had made love again that morning, not with the same passion and intensity as the night before, but this time somehow seemed more poignant. He had been so gentle and so tender with her that for the first time in a long while Meg felt truly cherished. She wished she could be certain that it was a feeling based on reality and not artifice.

Breakfast in bed had been scrambled eggs on toast and a cup of tea, and then just past eight they had left to pick the children up from Frances.

Robert, possibly the only man on earth able to stop his sister’s blunt questions and unintended rudeness, had engulfed Frances in a bear hug the minute she answered the door, and thanked her profusely for giving him and Meg the break they needed. He promised to look after little Henry for her and Craig in return any time. Frances had gone pink and glowed with pleasure at her brother’s gush of gratitude.

Meg knew how much the thanks and approval of her older and always more successful brother meant to Frances, and she was torn between delight that Robert had so expertly extricated them from Frances’s home in order to spend the day together, and feeling sorry for the woman who could be brushed off after a doubtless sleepless night caring for five small children with nothing more than a few platitudes. Did Robert mean to manipulate Frances? Meg had wondered. Did he mean to manipulate her?

If there was one thing she could be certain about, it was that he did love his children. The four of them, five if you counted Gripper nipping at their heels, were now tearing around and around a great old oak tree, Robert with his arms raised in a monster pose, the children squealing and giggling with delight. At last Robert caught James, tucking him under one arm and then hooking the other round Hazel. All three tumbled to the ground in a muddle of laughter and mud.

“Attack!” Alex commanded Gripper. “Attack the monster!”

And with uncharacteristic obedience Gripper pounced gleefully on her master and began a dogged attempt to literally lick him to death.

Natalie didn’t like to think of herself as small-minded and reactionary, so when she saw the four or five kids in hooded sweatshirts as she approached Tiffany’s high-rise building with Freddie, she was determined not to automatically think badly of them. They were probably perfectly lovely, ordinary young men out skateboarding or something. No, she absolutely would not judge them until they had at least mugged her for her cell phone.

But she did jump out of her skin when one of them stopped her in her tracks, shouting, “Hey, Miss! Hold up!”

Natalie spun round, expecting to find a “piece” pointed right in her face. Instead, it was Freddie’s stuffed blue puppy that confronted her.

“Dropped your kid’s dog,” the boy said with a wide toothy smile.

“Oh thank you terribly,” Natalie said idiotically.

“No worries, man,” the boy said, winking at her as he loped off to catch up with his friends. But even despite that motiveless act of kindness, Natalie was ashamed to admit that she was relieved when Anthony finally let her into the flat.

“All right?” he asked her.

“Super,” Natalie said because she was sure Anthony didn’t really want to know. “You?”

“Yeah, good,” he told her. “I’m off out. Derby match on at the pub. Meeting Gary for a lunchtime pint. He’s Spurs, poor guy.”

“Smashing,” Natalie said, wondering what on earth Anthony was talking about. “Well, have a good time.”

Anthony nodded farewell as he closed the door behind him.

Tiffany appeared in the doorway of the living room in a pair of drawstring pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. “Hiya,” she said and she shook a jar of Nescafé at Natalie. “Coffee?”

“Please. Do you mind me dropping round?” Natalie asked, as she lifted Freddie from his buggy and followed Tiffany into the kitchen. “Is it too early for you young people? I know it’s only eleven, but I’ve been up for hours and I waited and waited to call you.”

“I’m glad you came, I’d have been bored here on my own with Jordan.” Tiffany smiled at Natalie and handed her a milky coffee where she was sitting on the beanbag, made the way a little girl might like to drink it. “My schoolmates don’t keep in touch much anymore. I suppose they think I must be boring now. They’re right, probably.”

“You’ll make new friends when you start college—I wanted to find out how you’d got on when you saw the social worker and your teachers about your exams,” Natalie said, as she took a sip of the coffee.

Tiffany nodded.

“Yeah, it was good, I think,” she said. “My teacher reckons if I catch up over the summer holidays I can take them in September when they do the retakes. My coursework was mostly up to date and it still counts, so I just need to finish that.”

“Still sounds like a lot to do, though.”

“Well, I’m getting help at home from my form teacher, Mrs. Gough, over the holidays. She’s really nice, because she doesn’t have to help me and I can’t pay her or anything but she says she wants to see me do well. I’m lucky I know so many nice people.” Tiffany looked out of the window at the sky. “And if I do well enough in the exams, then I can go to college. They even have a free day care the students can use.”

Natalie nodded. “God, you take it all in your stride, don’t you? Let me think, what was I doing when I was sixteen?” She had a brief flashback of standing on her father’s doorstep in the rain. “Sunbathing, playing spin the bottle, and kissing boys, that was all I was doing. And look at you. You’re a mom, making your own home, you’re getting more qualifications than you can shake a stick at, and you look so capable, Tiffany. I’m very proud of you. Nothing scares you.”

Tiffany’s smile faded and she looked down into her coffee cup for a long time.

“Lots of things scare me,” she said. “I keep thinking what if I can’t pass the exams? What if Anthony and me break up and I’m on my own? What if I never talk to Mom again?” Her voice cracked on the word “Mom” and she paused. “I wish all I was doing was sunbathing and playing spin the bottle in the park. That’s what I should be doing. I mean, I love Ant and Jordan, so much, I really, really do, but sometimes I just wish things were different—easy.”

Natalie laid Freddie on the play mat on the floor and struggled up off the beanbag. She went over to Tiffany, putting her arm around her. “You miss your mom, don’t you?” she asked her simply. “You hate her, you’re angry with her, and she really hurt you, but you still miss her. Because she’s your mom, right?”

Tiffany nodded. “When I was sick or sad, or I’d hurt myself, my mom would always be there. She’d always have room for me in her arms no matter what she was doing. She’d cuddle me and say, ‘Mom’s got you, you’re all right now.’ I know I shouldn’t have gone behind her back, and maybe I was too young to be having sex, but we were being careful. I didn’t try to get pregnant. And the really bad thing is that I know if it had been a white boy I was pregnant by, she would have been okay in the end. She would have taken me in her arms and told me, ‘You’re all right now.’” Tiffany dropped her head onto Natalie’s shoulder and Natalie felt the young girl’s shoulders trembling under her palms.

“I bet she misses you too,” she said.

“But it will never be all right, will it? Because I can’t and I don’t want to change the color of my baby’s skin. I’m proud of her and Anthony. So, nothing will ever be all right again with me and Mom, and I act all strong, Natalie, but sometimes I just want my mom.”

Natalie held on to her tightly.

“Do you want to go and see her? I’ll come with you if you like?” Natalie offered.

Tiffany looked up at her. “She’d make mincemeat out of you,” she said with a watery smile.

“Well, then, let her try,” Natalie said with kamikaze bravado. “I happen to be a world-class negotiator, not to mention a champ at judo.”

“Yeah, right,” said Tiffany.

“That is one of the things I don’t like about you, Tiffany,” Natalie said gently. “You always see right through me. But seriously, do you want to go? We could go today—unless the whole family will be round for Sunday lunch?”

Tiffany looked thoughtful as she sat up.

“Dad will be fishing on the canal until at least four, that’s when we have Sunday dinner, and Dan will be round at his girlfriend’s. It will be Mom on her own at home. She says it’s her peace day with everyone out of the house. Could we go?” She looked at Natalie questioningly as they heard Jordan stirring in the bedroom, with little hopeful hiccupping cries.

“We could,” Natalie said.

“But she won’t change her mind,” Tiffany said, shaking her head. “About Anthony or Jordan. It’s too late.”

Natalie took her by the wrist and pulled her to her feet.

“It might be,” Natalie said. “But there is always the slight possibility that it might not. And that is worth finding out, isn’t it?”

Tiffany’s family home was a smart 1950s house with its pebble-dash painted cream and the front garden turned into off-road parking. A jaunty basket of red geraniums hung on either side of the front door, and identically planted window boxes sat outside all the front windows. It didn’t look like the house of a woman who would punch the friend of her estranged daughter at the least provocation, but still Natalie was nervous as they approached. She had no idea where she got this reckless campaigning spirit from when it came to sorting out her new friends’ lives. If she could only confront her own problems with as much direct action as she demanded from Tiffany and Meg, she might have resolved them by now. Perhaps she shouldn’t have brought Tiffany here, but when she saw her face this morning as she talked about how much she missed her mom, she knew exactly how Tiffany felt. She had been missing her mother for years, even when the woman was living under the same roof. If there was a chance for Tiffany to get back some sort of relationship with her mother, Natalie wanted her to take it. Any chance, even the slightest, had to be worth the risk.

“We’ll go round the back,” Tiffany said, her voice lowered as if they were committing some kind of stealth operation. “She’ll be in the conservatory listening to the radio.”

“Roger, over and out,” Natalie said, as she negotiated Freddie’s buggy through the narrow alleyway and past the garbage bins. Sure enough, on the back of the house was a large Victorian-style conservatory, and sitting with her feet up and her eyes closed was Tiffany’s mother.

Natalie had imagined her as a big woman, with meaty arms and maybe a couple of tattoos, but this woman was as slight as her daughter, fashionably dressed, her long brown hair carefully kept. As Natalie observed her, she reckoned that if it came to it she could take her on in a fight.

Putting the brake on Jordan’s buggy, Tiffany went over to the conservatory door and pushed it open. Her mom didn’t stir.

“Mom?” she said softly, and then again, “Mom?”

The woman opened her eyes.

“Tiffany,” she said, sitting up. “What are you doing here?” She looked at her daughter and then at Natalie, who was standing outside beside the two buggies.

“You’d better come in,” she said stiffly.

Natalie was staring at a plate of pink wafer biscuits a few minutes later.

So far it had all gone rather well in that there had been no shouting or throwing of things. She noticed that Janine, as she had been instructed reluctantly to call Tiffany’s mother, didn’t look at either her daughter or her granddaughter as she bustled around the kitchen they were sitting in, finding plates for the biscuits. Worst of all, Natalie noticed that Janine kept glancing up at the kitchen clock every few seconds, obviously keen for Tiffany to be gone.

Finally she sat down and managed to look her daughter in the face.

“Your dad will be back before long,” she warned coolly. “You know how angry he gets.”

“And what about you?” Tiffany asked her. “Are you still angry with me?”

Natalie looked at Tiffany, a vulnerable girl who was so obviously in need of a reassuring hug, and wondered how her mother could resist putting her arms around her and doing just that. And it wasn’t just Tiffany’s age that made her seem so fragile, Natalie knew that. Only yesterday she had felt just the same as Tiffany did now, wishing with all her might that she and Sandy could have that strong mythical bond mothers and daughters are supposed to have. Perhaps that was why she was so interested in trying to get Tiffany and her mother back together. She was almost the same age as Tiffany when things went wrong between her and Sandy, and they had never been right since.

Janine looked inquiringly at Natalie, who had lifted a fretful Freddie out of his buggy and plonked him on her lap. He immediately picked up a teaspoon and shoved it in his mouth.

“Are you her social worker?” Janine asked Natalie bluntly.

“Who, me?” Natalie replied. “No, I’m a friend. We go to baby group together. Anthony is helping rewire my house. He’s doing a really good job, he’s a good kid. Hardworking, responsible—you don’t meet many like that at his age.”

Natalie hadn’t actually met any other seventeen-year-old boys since she was seventeen so she had no idea what they were like. Still, it seemed like the right thing to say.

“I see,” Janine said, with a nod at Tiffany. “You brought her here to interfere with our private business.”

“No, Mom, I…”

“She brought me for moral support,” Natalie said firmly. “And because a couple of hours ago she was crying on my shoulder over how much she missed her mom.”

“Well,” Janine said, looking down at her lemon gingham wipe-clean tablecloth. “Well, she had her chance, she made her choices.”

Natalie was about to speak again when the look on Tiffany’s face stopped her.

“I’m doing my exams in September, Mom,” Tiffany said in a small voice. “I’m getting help over the holidays and I’m going to college next year, like I always planned.”

There was silence.

“Jordan’s doing really well,” Tiffany went on, smiling down at the gurgling baby who was happily gnawing on her buggy book. “She’s got two teeth now, another one on the way, I think. She crawls everywhere and since she’s been on solids she’s growing so quickly, sometimes I think she’ll…” Tiffany trailed off; her mother was looking at the clock again.

“I suppose we’d better go then,” Tiffany said.

“You better had,” Janine agreed.

As Tiffany rose from her chair, Natalie put a hand on her wrist and she sat back down.

“Is this really what you want, Janine?” Natalie asked.

Janine looked at her. “I don’t see how it is any business of yours,” she said.

“It’s not, except that I can’t imagine this is really how you want it to be with your little girl. Why are you punishing her for doing nothing more than thousands of other girls her age do every year, and not half so many deal with so well? You’ve brought her up to be this amazingly strong and resourceful girl; she must have learned her mothering skills from you and she’s a damn good mother. You look like an intelligent woman, and I know because Tiffany’s told me that you two were very close. Do you really want to destroy your relationship with your daughter and granddaughter over a nonexistent problem? Is it really worth it?”

Tiffany gasped and stared at her mother as Natalie braced herself for a barrage of angry abuse. But Janine didn’t move. A few seconds ticked by on the clock, the only sound to break the otherwise total silence.

“I miss her too,” Janine said, speaking about her daughter in the third person. “I wonder how she’s doing, how the little one is. I know that boy is taking good care of her, people tell me. But it’s her dad. He won’t have it.” She shook her head, hopelessly. “He’s stuck in his ways and stubborn. I said to him, maybe we could try to get to know the boy, get along with him, maybe meet his family. But like I said, he won’t have it. He’s an ignorant old fool.” She looked down at Jordan in her buggy for the first time, and was rewarded with a gap-toothed smile.

“She’s beautiful,” she said, acknowledging Tiffany at last. “You’re doing well. A first baby is hard to manage.”

“You could still see us,” Tiffany said, her tone so hopeful Natalie felt her eyes prick with tears. “Dad doesn’t have to come. You could come and see us…you wouldn’t have to tell him.”

Janine looked at her daughter and shook her head. “I can’t go behind his back,” she said, with finality. “You know I can’t. We’ve been married twenty-eight years. We trust each other. He’s not a bad man, just a stupid one.” Her smile was bitter was she looked down into her teacup. “You know, I think it was the shock that did it—when you told us you were pregnant. I just don’t think that he ever, we ever, expected it would be our little girl. Always so good, always worked hard at school, never out later than you were supposed to be. He still saw you as the little girl who used to sit on his lap and read with him not so long ago. He was shocked and hurt, Tiffany. He latched on to the first thing he could think of to try to break you and Anthony up and to keep you as his little girl, pregnant or not. But you didn’t choose him, you chose Anthony. And that hurt him.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt him,” Tiffany said. “But how could I choose? I love Dad, but I love Anthony too and he loves me, Mom, he really does.”

Janine nodded slowly. “Yes, it does look that way, that’s for sure,” she said thoughtfully. “I think if things had happened differently, maybe when you were a bit older, he would have been fine with Anthony. But he’s said what he’s said now. He’s made his stand and he hates to admit he’s in the wrong, you know that, Tiff. Once his mind is made up, it’s impossible to change it.”

“But I miss you, Mom—I need you,” Tiffany pleaded, her voice breaking.

Janine looked at Tiffany, her eyes brimming with tears, but she did not make a move to touch her.

“Dad’ll be back soon,” she repeated, her voice trembling. “You’d better go, love, hey?”

Tiffany scraped her chair back and hurried out of the house as fast as she could with Jordan in the buggy, as Natalie strapped Freddie into his. Janine sat perfectly still, her elbows resting on the kitchen table as she held on to the teacup she had yet to drink from.

“He’s the most precious thing in my life,” Natalie said to her, nodding at her son. “I’d never let anything stand in the way of being his mom. I can see how much you love her, Janine, don’t lose her forever.”

When she got outside, she found Tiffany sitting on the front wall furiously wiping away her tears with the sleeves of her sweater.

“I told you it was too late,” she said, when Natalie stopped beside her.

Natalie shook her head. “I don’t think it is, I think you really got through to your mom there, and anyway, whatever happens you tried, and that’s important. It really is. I’m proud of you.”

“Will you stop being proud of me,” Tiffany said with a loud sniff as she stood up and defiantly shook her hair off her shoulders. “It’s getting to be embarrassing.”

“Come on.” Natalie smiled. “How about you come back to my place, I’ll cook us lunch, we’ll eat a load of cake and watch my Dirty Dancing DVD. It never fails to cheer me up.”

“What’s Dirty Dancing?” Tiff asked.

“For both your sake and mine,” Natalie said, slinging an arm around Tiffany’s shoulder, “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”

The children were filthy, so when they got back from the park Meg and Robert gave them one big midday bath, a fun-filled hour that saw the bathroom covered in mud and Meg and Robert wet through. Once Alex, Hazel, and James were dried and dressed and packed off to watch a video before lunch, Meg found herself alone again with her husband.

“Just being with you and the kids has been great,” Robert told her, drawing her body against his in an embrace so tight that she could hear his heart beating. He kissed the top of her head. “I feel like I’ve been away for a long time and now I’ve finally come home.”

Meg looked up at him and perhaps the searching expression in her eyes surprised him because he dropped his arms from around her and took half a step back.

“Have you?” she asked him intently. “Have you really come home?”

“Of course I have.” Robert smiled. “Back where I belong.”