Eighteen

So? How’d it go?” Natalie asked Jess as she stood in her friend’s kitchen unwrapping the now obligatory Jamaican ginger cake.

Jess’s smile was shy. “It was good, actually,” she said. “I must admit I didn’t think it would be. I thought you and your rants about lingerie was just you being…you. But the underwear did make me feel confident about my body, which did make me relax, and even though there were one or two little glitches it was worth it in the end. It was so nice to feel that close to Lee again. Like a proper couple, well, you must know?”

“Oh well, if I did I’ve forgotten,” Natalie said deliberately ambiguously. It was her new resolution not only to tell the baby group the truth, but also to try not to tell them any more lies.

Meg came into the kitchen with Iris on her shoulder. “James looks like he’s starting a cold,” she said, looking exhausted. “Poor little thing couldn’t sleep, he was up all night whimpering, usually a sure sign he’s coming down with something. Combined with Iris in full flow I’ve had a right old night of it.”

Natalie saw Jess looking anxiously at Iris and then at Jacob, who was sleeping apparently germ-free in his baby chair on the kitchen table. No doubt Jess was praying that her baby didn’t pick up James’s threatened cold, either directly or via Iris.

“Jess was just telling me that I have single-handedly saved her sex life,” Natalie said, hoping to distract Jess from her worries. “So I’m ready now for your gratitude.”

Meg smiled. “Oh it was wonderful, probably the best sex I’ve ever, ever had.”

“Really?” Jess exclaimed, with a wide-eyed laugh. “Meg!”

“I told you…” Natalie said smugly. “I knew all their marriage needed was the Curzon touch. I could be a lifestyle guru! I could teach arguing couples everywhere how to come together, couldn’t I, Meg? Hey?”

But Natalie’s smugness was abruptly curtailed when Meg burst into violent tears.

At Natalie’s direction, Jess shut the kitchen door as Meg sat down at the table and wept.

“What happened?” Natalie said, taking Iris from her arms.

Meg told them the unedited details of the night, and Natalie and Jess went from cursing the inconsiderate husband to oohing at Meg’s surprisingly frank description of the sex part, to swearing quite virulently when she told them about the text she had found on Robert’s phone.

“What did you do?” Jess asked, her eyes wide with horror.

“Did you beat him over the head with a blunt instrument?” Natalie asked, feeling at that moment genuinely moved to violence by what in her eyes was a clear-cut case of adulterous-guilt sex (not that she wanted to tell Meg that just yet).

“I didn’t do anything,” Meg said, wiping at her steady flow of tears with the paper towel that Jess had handed her. “I couldn’t think what to do. I mean, a few minutes before I’d been so happy, we’d felt so close. I just thought there was bound to be an explanation, it was bound to be something to do with work and nothing to do with me at all. So I just put the phone on the table and I lay down in bed next to him and waited for it to be morning.” Meg sat up a little in her chair and smiled weakly at her two friends. “And yesterday he was so lovely, like the old Robert again, really loving and attentive. He brought me breakfast in bed and came with me to pick the children up from Frances’s; he even told her we couldn’t stay for lunch. We took Gripper out and had lots of games in the park. It was wonderful. So I didn’t say or do anything because, after all, it might be nothing at all, mightn’t it?”

Natalie and Jess exchanged glances.

“I suppose it’s possible,” Natalie said, sounding as if she thought finding Elvis alive on the moon was far more likely.

“But you have to talk to him,” Jess said. “You have to.”

“But why? Why do I?” Meg asked her. “If I confront him and he tells me outright that there is someone else, what will I do? After all, it’s not as if he’s leaving me. I don’t want to be divorced. I don’t want to be a single mom with four children. If I don’t know for sure, then I don’t have to do anything, do I?”

“You can’t go on not knowing,” Jess said. “It will just eat away at you, the not knowing. It’s better to face the truth even if it’s not what you want to hear. You can’t live a lie—can she, Nat?”

“Not technically the best plan,” Natalie said after a while, feeling like a dreadful hypocrite. She wanted to say to Meg that single motherhood wasn’t that bad really, even if sometimes you felt lonely, bitter, and regretful, not to mention hurt, battered, and bereft. And that with your friends around you, you could do just as well if not better on your own. But she couldn’t say any of that because she had abandoned her own admittedly comparatively cushy single-mother status in favor of a fake husband.

She understood where Meg was coming from—if she’d felt the need to invent a husband for such a flimsy reason, she could see why Meg would be so keen to hold on to a terrible real-life spouse. But then again Meg didn’t want to keep Robert just for appearance’s sake. She loved him, she absolutely adored him. It was written all over her face.

“Look,” Natalie said. “I can see why you don’t want to confront him. And I think you’re right not to, after all it might be nothing at all!” Meg smiled so hopefully at her that for a moment Natalie felt intense guilt at offering her friend what she was certain was false encouragement. “What we need to do is find out more, build a case. Can you check for other texts, receipts, stuff like that…?”

“I can’t spy on him,” Meg said. “That would be wrong!”

Natalie was on the point of despairing when Frances marched into the kitchen, pushing the door open with such force that it banged against the wall.

“What would be wrong?” she demanded. “What are you doing here, anyway? We are all waiting in there! Tiffany said Natalie had something interesting to tell us, and besides, Steve’s brought gluten-free poppyseed muffins!”

“Yum,” Jess said, trying hard to sound enthusiastic but only managing sarcasm.

“I haven’t got anything interesting to tell anyone,” Natalie put in hastily.

“Well, those sandwiches that Jess apparently made are going curly at the edges,” Frances added accusingly.

“Anyway, why are you waiting and for what?” Natalie asked her. “There isn’t exactly an agenda. Eat the delicious homemade sandwiches!”

“This is a baby group, which means the group of us meet all at once,” Frances snapped back, shooting Jess a disapproving look for good measure. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to have a splinter group, Megan,” she added, talking directly to her sister-in-law. “You know how funny some people can be.”

“Don’t you mean you?” Natalie said under her breath, but Frances didn’t hear her, she was too busy examining Meg’s red and swollen face.

“Are you still ill?” Frances seemed to be affronted by the very idea.

“’Fraid so.” Meg nodded, forcing an apologetic smile. “James has got it now and it will only be a matter of time before the rest of them go down with it.”

“Well, come on, then,” Frances said, nodding toward the living room. “Join the group.”

“Let’s go through,” Meg said, as Frances walked out of the kitchen. “She hates to feel left out of anything. I think it goes back to when she was at school, you know what girls are like. Poor Frances was a bit of an awkward duck and she never really had any good friends. I won’t think about Robert just now. I’m tired and I honestly think I’m getting this cold. I’ll think about it when I feel better. I mean, if I’d never seen the text I would be feeling so happy today, as if everything was going right again.”

“Okay, but I don’t think you can be in denial about this, Meg,” Jess said kindly. “I think you have to know. There are some instances in life when you have to face the truth however much you are afraid of it, don’t you think, Nat?”

Natalie nodded. “Jess is right,” she said.

“Jess—are you going to be mother?” Frances called out pointedly from the living room.

Natalie shrugged. “Look, don’t worry. I’ve got a plan to sort this out once and for all.”

“A plan? What kind of a plan?” Meg looked worried.

Natalie patted her firmly on the shoulder.

“Simple,” she said. “We’ll go undercover.”

Steve stood by the edge of the pool, a multicolored bath towel wrapped firmly around his middle. He was surprisingly hairy, Natalie noticed, surprising because he was light-skinned and sandy-haired, with the kind of pale lashes and brows that in a certain light made him look as if he didn’t have any at all. Yet his chest was covered with thick darkish-brown hair that thinned into a line that headed in the general direction of his navel. Odd the things you didn’t know about people until you went swimming with them, Natalie thought. And drawing her own towel a little tighter round her middle she sucked her tummy muscles in as far as they would go, which was not nearly as far as she wanted.

“Lucy looks so cute in that outfit,” Natalie said as she approached Steve, nodding at the baby who was sporting an all-in-one pink and white striped suit.

“The one thing I regret about having a boy is the lack of opportunity to dress him in pink frilly stuff,” she went on, smiling at Lucy. “Well, I suppose I could still dress him in pink frilly stuff, he wouldn’t know the difference, only I don’t want to give him any ammunition to hurl at me later in life.”

Steve, who was regarding the water with a look of mild terror, did not reply.

“Are you okay, Steve?” Natalie asked him.

“I’m fine,” Steve said, looking sideways at her. “It’s just…well, I don’t know, I feel a bit odd.”

“Odd!” Natalie exclaimed. “Why? You’re not still worrying about being the only man in the group, are you?”

“No,” Steve said, a flush of pink coloring the bridge of his nose. “This time it’s the…garb.” He gestured at his half-naked torso. “It’s just I’d never do Baby Music or Aerobics or have tea with you in my underpants, would I? It feels strange you seeing me almost naked.”

Natalie laughed. She was aware that it probably wasn’t the right thing to do, that laughing at a man who was concerned about his female friends seeing him in his Speedo was probably tactless and potentially psychologically damaging. Still, she had had a very emotional and stressful weekend, and his worries, as endearing as they were, somehow broke the tension.

“There’s no need to get hysterical,” Steve said, looking rather alarmed. He watched a couple of the other mothers file in with their babies and climb into the water. Tiffany and Meg appeared, Tiffany long-legged and resplendent in her school swimming suit and Meg in a maroon number that had no underwire support at all and was obviously manufactured before the invention of Lycra.

“It’s just, you are worried about us looking at you—what about you looking at us?” Natalie inquired.

“Natalie,” Steve said, “I just wouldn’t. I don’t think of you girls in that way at all. I’m a married man.”

Natalie shook her head and grinned. “Well, most of us are married!”

“I don’t mean I think you’ll fancy me,” Steve said. He lowered his voice and leaned his head a little closer to Natalie. “It’s just—well, I haven’t been swimming for a while and it looks like I’ve put on a few pounds since the last time. These trunks are a bit snug, shall we say?”

Natalie pressed her lips together for a long time, waiting for the bubble of mirth in her chest to disperse. It wasn’t fair to laugh at Steve’s anxieties, she told herself sternly. She would never have laughed at any of her female friends if they had been worried about what they looked like in their swimsuits.

“Steve, this is a swimming pool,” she began to reassure him. “Nobody looks at another person in that way at a swimming pool, especially not…” Natalie had been about to say you, but as she had been appraising his hairiness only a few moments ago she thought that probably wasn’t quite true. “Especially not men,” she finished instead.

“We women don’t judge men by how they look naked. In fact,” Natalie added, a glint of mischief forming in her eye, “we don’t even see your nakedness; it’s an evolutionary thing, left over from primeval times. It’s designed to stop the female of the species running a mile when the male takes his suit off. So you see, we ladies are blind to your near nudity.”

“Is that true?” Steve asked her dubiously as Meg and Tiffany joined them.

“Absolutely,” Natalie assured him. “Didn’t you see that documentary on it? That rich guy with the bushy mustache presented it.”

Natalie smiled at Jess, who was joining the group along with Frances. “You saw that documentary about how women never look at men in swimming pools for anthropological reasons?” Jess blinked at Natalie. “Steve’s worried we’re going to ogle his package,” Natalie told her, with a covert wink.

“Goodness me,” Frances said disapprovingly. “This is why men don’t belong in baby groups. It’s simply not natural.”

“Ohhh,” Jess finally cottoned on. “I absolutely did see it. I saw that, Steve—it’s true.”

“Really? Oh well, then,” Steve said, dropping his towel. “That’s all right then.”

It was during the cheers, wolf whistles, and ripples of applause from Steve’s fellow group members—all but Frances—that Natalie found out something else she didn’t know about Steve. He blushed all the way down to his knees.

Once in the water, Meg finally began to relax. James, definitely snuffly but in good spirits, was in the free nursery, and despite her other worries she was resolved to enjoy this rare time she got to be with Iris alone.

It seemed that Iris was a true water baby, reveling in the depth of the water around her and the sense of weightless freedom she had to be feeling. The baby chuckled delightedly as Meg, carefully supporting her head, whooshed her gently through the water as she followed the teacher’s instructions.

Meg loved to hold Iris close to her in the pool and feel the warmth of her baby’s skin against her through the coolness of the water. She had her father’s eyes, dark and intensely inquisitive, her gaze roaming over the intricacies of the ceiling’s various air-conditioning vents and valves. But despite that, Meg felt that her fourth child was more like her than any of the others.

Prompted by the instructor, Meg let Iris cling on to her forefingers and took a step away from her so that she could kick and float freely in the water, but as she did so the joy evaporated from Iris’s face and she began to cry. Quickly Meg pulled her baby to her breast and put her arms around her, suddenly feeling the overwhelming urge never to let Iris go, never to risk letting her out into the world where one day inevitably somebody would be unkind to her, where one day she would feel lost and wish with all her heart to return to the safety of her home and her childhood.

As Meg began to make her way out of the pool, cradling Iris close to her, she thought about Robert and the threat of hurt that had hung over her since she had discovered that text. But he had been so lovely with her since they had made love, so gentle and even tender. And she had watched him with the children yesterday, seen the way he looked at them and at her. It was a look filled with love and pride and satisfaction. An expression that couldn’t be fabricated, she was sure. She climbed out of the pool and wrapped a large towel around both her and Iris, feeling her daughter’s rapid heartbeat fluttering against her skin.

Whatever that text meant, it had nothing to do with her and Robert’s marriage, Meg decided. It was nothing that would threaten the life that she and her husband had built up together.

It was simply impossible, because Meg knew, she was absolutely certain, that Robert would never do anything to jeopardize that which he held most dear. And so she had nothing to fear by agreeing to Natalie’s foolish scheme of going to spy on him tomorrow morning. If anything, all it would do would be to prove that she was right.