Seventeen

The first thing Jack had said once the penny finally dropped was, “Are you sure he’s mine?”

Natalie snatched back her photo of Freddie and held it close to her chest.

“I’m going,” she said, turning on her heel and looking for her coat.

“Natalie, wait…” Jack followed her into the tiny hallway, crowding her out with his presence.

“I didn’t mean to say that, it’s just a lot for me to take in. I didn’t expect to find out that I had a kid!”

“No.” Natalie looked up at him. “Join the club.”

“Look, I need some time to think,” Jack said. “I need time to get my head around it.”

Natalie opened the front door and turned back to face him.

“Don’t bother, Jack,” she said. “I don’t need you.” The words felt as painful as if her mouth was full of shards of broken glass. “I don’t want you. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you now, and so have Freddie and I.”

“Freddie?” Jack looked confused.

“That’s his name,” Natalie told him.

“Oh. Right.”

“We don’t need or want you. We release you. Forget you ever met me or knew about him. Stay out of our lives, please.”

She waited for what seemed like an age for him to say something; to say that he did still want her and that he did want to get to know his son. But Jack’s gaze fell to his feet and all he said with a shrug was, “Okay. Okay then.”

“Good-bye, Jack,” Natalie said as she shut the door on him forever.

When she got home, all she wanted to do was to find Freddie and hold him in her arms. She raced upstairs and then she stopped just outside her bedroom door.

Her mother was in with Freddie and she was singing to him. She was singing “Fly Me to the Moon,” and not in a drunken sort of way, either. She had a nice voice, smoky and soothing, a voice honed on cigarettes and vodka.

Suddenly Natalie remembered something: her mother always used to sing Sinatra to her when she was little. In the bath, with bubbles in their hair, they’d sing this song together and Sandy would say that one day they would fly to the moon, just the two of them on the back of a magic bird and, once they’d got there, eat all the cheese two girls could possibly want. How could she have totally forgotten something that now seemed so vivid? Could it be because it was a happy memory? Did it suit Natalie to believe that she had never been happy with Sandy?

She pushed open the door a crack and watched as Sandy dropped a soiled nappy into the bin and then cleaned Freddie with a wipe.

“Nana’s going to get it right this time,” she cooed to the baby. “No leaving you on your own again, even for a second, you wriggle monster you! I don’t know, you’ll be all over this house before she knows what’s hit her. Mommy’s going to have a terrible time trying to find period-style stair gates, I tell you.” Natalie watched as her mother bent down and blew raspberries on Freddie’s tummy, conjuring his wonderful gurgling laugh. “There’s a good boy,” she said. “There’s a lovely good boy, aren’t you?”

Then Freddie peed in her face.

Natalie clapped her hand over her mouth as the stream of liquid arced upward and hit her mother dead center between the eyes.

“Ugh!” Sandy exclaimed, screwing her eyes shut, and for a second Natalie forgot everything except this wonderfully silly tableau.

“Mom!” she said, pushing the door open. “Are you all right?” She handed Sandy a muslin cloth that was hanging over the end of the bed.

“A bit damp, love,” Sandy replied, chuckling as she dabbed at her face. “He’s a real marksman!”

“Go and wash your face, I’ll finish here,” Natalie offered. She stood well back as Sandy passed and then went over to where Freddie was lying on the change table, clearly delighted to be nappyless.

“Hello, baby.” Natalie looked down at him, resting the palm of her hand lightly on his tummy. “Remember I promised you that I was going to be the best possible mother you could ever hope for?” He kicked his legs enthusiastically in response. “Well, we know where we stand now, darling. We’ve got nothing left to worry about except us. Except you and me.” Natalie took a deep breath and made herself smile. “And we’re going to be fine on our own.”

“Not quite on your own,” Sandy said, appearing in the doorway with a damp but clean face. Natalie tried her best to hide her distress, but even her dissembling skills weren’t quite up to strength this time.

“What’s happened, love?” Sandy asked her.

Natalie picked Freddie up and held his cheek to hers.

“Oh, Mom,” she managed to say through the threat of tears.

“Come on.” Sandy opened her arms and for the first time in twenty years Natalie went to her mother’s embrace, and let her hold both her and Freddie.

“I’m here, love,” Sandy said. “I’m here for you.”

Natalie had cried for a long time, not in a dramatic or noisy wailing way. Not the easy come, easy go hormonal tears that had become such a familiar part of her life recently. She cried because she was in pain. She just sat down on the edge of her bed with Freddie in her arms and her forehead resting on Sandy’s shoulders and the tears had fallen. Sandy hadn’t asked her anything more and she hadn’t volunteered anything. Eventually, Freddie dozed off and sometime after that Natalie’s tears stopped.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pulling herself into an upright position, suddenly aware of being vulnerable around Sandy. “It must be tiredness, and the business meeting didn’t go as well as I hoped.”

Sandy looked at her skeptically.

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” she said, clearly hopeful that Natalie would relate everything that had led to her daughter’s misery.

Natalie thought about telling her the whole story, and a large part of her wanted to. But then she realized she still couldn’t. This moment between her and Sandy, this closeness, was new and most welcome. But Natalie didn’t know if it was real or temporary, some kind of glitch in their difficult relationship that might vanish all too soon.

“I’m tired,” she told Sandy, nodding down at the sleeping Freddie. “I think I’ll join him. But thank you, Mom.”

Sandy smiled. “Glad to be of help,” she said, leaning over and kissing Natalie on the forehead. “Goodnight, love.”

Things seemed to go depressingly quickly back to normal between Natalie and her mother after that. When Natalie, in need of a glass of water after feeding Freddie, found Sandy sitting in the kitchen just after one in the morning half-drunk and with a drink in her hand, she realized that one tearful hug did not mend everything.

“I feel awful,” Sandy slurred, topping up her tumbler to the brim.

“If drinking makes you feel so bad,” Natalie suggested before she thought she might actually commit murder if her mother groaned one more time, “then why don’t you stop? It can’t be good for you at your age.”

“Nonsense,” Sandy said. “A little drop here and there never hurt anyone.”

“Fine, drink yourself to death,” Natalie replied, struggling to remember why on earth she had thought they could ever be close.

“You’d like that.” Sandy narrowed her bloodshot eyes at her. “Then you’d have all my money and all your problems would be over.”

“You’re right, of course,” Natalie said sweetly, deciding to decamp back to the relative sanctuary of her bedroom. “That would be lovely if only you had any money. Goodnight, Mother, no need to tell you where the vodka is.”

Natalie had fumed back upstairs, bitter and resentful that the one glimmer of light to have sparked from her dire encounter with Jack had vanished the moment her mother was relieved of babysitting duties. She clearly loved the drink more than Natalie and Freddie which, Natalie told herself hotly, should be of no surprise to her. To think that for a second there she had thought that Freddie might actually be bringing them closer together!

It had been a long and miserable night, there had been nothing good to watch on TV, and Freddie didn’t really sleep, he was in a fretful and restless mood. So all she had to think about in the empty hours of her nocturnal confinement was the look on Jack’s face as she had left the flat.

It was blank, absent of any emotion at all. There was nothing that Natalie could have even hoped to interpret. She had a nagging sense that she had done something wrong, that she could have handled the situation a little better. Perhaps getting very angry with a man for having a traumatic and life-threatening disease had not been her finest moment.

When Natalie thought about what Jack must have gone through, she felt a panicky feeling fluttering in her chest, an echo of the intense fear and grief she had felt those few terrible minutes when, listening to his account of events, she had still thought that Jack was going to die. If he had died, she would have been devastated, Natalie realized. Did that make things better or worse? Worse, judging by how things were going, she concluded.

And maybe she shouldn’t have just sprung Freddie on him the way she had. Yes, he had been secretive and deceitful, but so had she. If she had really tried hard, she could have found Jack, she could have tracked him down and informed him of her pregnancy. But she didn’t, partly because in some respects she was old-fashioned and genuinely shy and couldn’t quite bring herself to phone the man who had so overtly rejected her, and partly because of reasons that were almost identical to Jack’s, she supposed.

How could she ask a man she hardly knew to be part of her pregnancy, let alone a father? It seemed unjust. She had assumed that Jack would react badly and leave her, anyway. The only difference was that whereas he had underestimated her, she had been right about him.

It was that look in his eyes when she told him that she and Freddie didn’t need him that she couldn’t get out of her head. It wasn’t blank; she had been wrong about that. It was a look of relief.

There might have been the slimmest of reasons to hold on to her feelings for him until that moment. There might have been some oblique possibility that things could have worked out between them. But if there was, then the expression on Jack’s face had extinguished any such hope.

Natalie knew that she had to get over Jack Newhouse. She had to do whatever it took.

Now at least the sun was up and the seemingly endless night was finally over.

Monday was a day of action. A day where she felt she could legitimately rejoin the human race as the single, messed-up, largely in denial and mainly dysfunctional person that she was.

Besides—and Natalie had never thought this phrase would lift her heart—it was baby group day. She was going to Jess’s house for lunch and then Frances had booked them in at a baby swimming class in the afternoon. All she had to do was to pretend she had never tried to kiss Gary, forget that Jack had ever existed, and tell her new friends that she was not the married lady and mother-about-town that they thought they knew. She was actually a compulsive liar with potentially the most complicated life of the lot of them. Still, life was full of challenges.

Her first challenge began when Gary arrived exactly at nine a.m., letting himself in with the key that Natalie had given him and finding her in the kitchen still in her pajamas, a little behind schedule in transforming herself into her weekday superself due to her exceptionally wakeful night.

Gary had seen her in her large and utterly sexless pajamas on several occasions, but this time Natalie felt more than a little self-conscious to be braless and pantyless under the thick brushed cotton.

She had hoped that the moment she had fancied Gary would have passed with the fleeting insanity that the glass of wine had brought on, and the mess of intense emotions that Jack had stirred up in her again would have obliterated any attraction she felt for him. But bizarrely she seemed to be even more drawn to Gary. It was as if Jack was a raging inferno and Gary was a smooth cool lake. A smooth cool lake with rather powerful forearms and muscular shoulders. Natalie felt bad for thinking of the poor man like this. She had to hope that the condition would wear off, because muscled hunk-of-meat men had never been her type.

Charming, funny, erudite, and sophisticated men were supposed to be her type. So why had she fallen for a skinny, no-good wastrel and why did she now fancy her solid and stoic electrician? Gary had barely spoken ten words to her, let alone made her laugh and laugh at some witty urbane aside. But then again neither had he got her pregnant, made her fall in love with him, and then, after appearing to be amazingly brave and courageous, spoiled it all by happily exiting from her and her child’s life ASAP.

And, after all, today was the first day of her moving on with her life. And what better way to move on than into the arms of a man as different from Jack as he possibly could be? It was just a shame really that he seemed to find her repulsive.

“All right?” Gary greeted her, looking at her left shoulder as he spoke. Natalie rejoiced that at least she didn’t have to battle against his sweet-talking charm.

“I’m fine—you?” she replied breezily. “Good weekend?”

Gary shrugged and his eyes met hers for a moment that, if Natalie wasn’t so sure that her present feelings toward him were illusory, would have been electrically sexy.

“Oh you know, the usual,” he said. “You?”

“Same,” Natalie said. “Tea?”

He had on another tight T-shirt today. He looked good in it, like he had one of those six-pack things that pop stars in boy bands had. It was the sort of muscular tone that Natalie had never really been drawn to, until the thought of licking that rock-hard stomach suddenly popped into her mind. Yes, she might well be unfortunate enough to think of herself as recovering from being in love with Jack, but Jack wasn’t here, and Jack wasn’t ever going to be here so it couldn’t do any harm to admire Gary in this way. It wasn’t as if anything was going to happen.

“Please,” Gary replied. “And one for Ant too, he’s unloading the van.”

Natalie didn’t answer him immediately because, despite her silent warnings to herself, just at that moment she wanted to run across the kitchen and rip off that tight T-shirt, lick his nipples, and shove his hand up her top.

“Two sugars, right?” she said instead.

Gary nodded. Natalie decided she had to confront this. She had to get the whole failed-kiss attempt out of the way and then maybe all these other strange feelings she was having would go, too; the last thing her already fragile self-esteem needed was to develop feelings for yet another man—even if they were only lustful—who did not want her.

Confronting the botched-kiss attempt would be like aversion therapy, she thought, although she had absolutely no idea what aversion therapy was. Still, she had to do something to break the spell.

“Gary?” she said, after a moment of two of consideration.

“Mm?” Gary glanced up at her. He really did have quite intense eyes, sort of hazel and in their own way very…compelling. She took a breath, closed her eyes, opened them again, and hoped to see the slightly stocky, not especially tall, sweet, but charmless electrician she had hired recently.

Natalie opened her eyes.

No, safe Gary was not there. It was still his German porn-star doppelgänger who was standing in her kitchen. She pressed on.

“Um, about Friday night. You…when I tried to…anyway, I’m really sorry and…”

“Friday night?” Gary cut her off with the question. “It was nice, thanks. Look, don’t apologize for your mom, she’s a bit full on but harmless, honestly.”

Natalie looked at him for a second.

“Actually, I meant when I…” Bravely she tried to exorcize her lust demon again.

“Don’t mention it. Forget about it, honestly. I’ll go and help Anthony unload.” And he was gone.

Natalie stared at the space where he had been standing. He obviously wanted to pretend it hadn’t happened. Which meant he wasn’t the least bit interested in her sexually, and that when he was looking at her he didn’t see a German porn-star housewife waiting to be serviced. He saw a slightly pudgy woman in her jimjams still wearing the remnants of yesterday’s makeup and probably a bit flushed in the face.

Natalie should have felt relieved. She should have been able to purge her urges for him now that he had made it brutally clear that the whole incident was just a horribly embarrassing hiccup he was happy to forget about. But the contrary part, the difficult, complication-creating part of her that Alice had spent so long trying to retrain, wasn’t so sure. Still smarting from the wounds that Jack had left her with, Natalie wanted to know why this man didn’t fancy her either. And she wanted to know what she could do to change his mind.

After all, there was no chance she’d ever be with Jack now—so what did she have to lose apart from her dignity?

And she’d lost touch with that particular asset months ago.