A Groom With a View (20 page)

I couldn’t do either of those things, I decided, at some point during the interminable night flight up Africa. The only way that I could salvage some courage and self-respect out of this whole mess was to be brave and do it the hard way.

So when the taxi deposited me outside our front door, I asked the driver to wait. I went upstairs, tipped the contents of my bag into the washing basket and repacked it with winter clothes, and I told Nick I couldn’t marry him, because I’d slept with someone else. I was quite calm. I said I was going to stay with my parents, I was leaving, it was all off. I told him I was sorry.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Bcc:

Subject: Pickford/Martin wedding

Dear friends

I’m writing with great regret to let you know that the wedding planned between Pippa and me will not now take place.

I know many of you have made travel plans and other arrangements, and we are both deeply sorry for your trouble. Some of you have also sent generous gifts, for which we were very grateful. These will be returned as soon as possible.

Thanks for your friendship and understanding.

Warm regards

Nick

Mum took one look at me, standing on her doorstep dripping with tears and rain (I’d decided to walk from the station, and it had started pissing it down when I was halfway there, but, masochistically, I’d carried on instead of phoning and asking for a lift), and realised what had happened.

“Oh, darling,” she said, enveloping me in a fragrant hug. “My poor little Pippa.”

“It’s all my fault,” I sobbed into her shoulder.

She shushed me, told me I could talk about it when I was ready, ushered me inside, made me tea and a hot bath and put me to bed as if I was six and had been sent home from school after throwing up in assembly.

And that’s where I remained, in my childhood bedroom, long since stripped of the Spice Girls posters and Pony Club rosettes that had adorned it when I was a teenager, for the next three days. As if I were an invalid, Mum plied me with poached eggs on toast (the toast burnt and the egg whites undercooked and mucusy), endless cups of tea and a huge stack of Agatha Christie novels, which I devoured mindlessly (unlike the eggs, which I choked down so as not to hurt Mum’s feelings). Occasionally I heard her and Dad having worried, whispered conversations outside my door, but they didn’t ask me about what had happened, beyond establishing that the wedding was off, and I didn’t tell.

It was just the same as it had been the first time Nick and I split up, except that I was twelve years older and not pregnant.

It was the end of the long, hot summer after I’d finished A-levels, and my friends were beginning to drift away into their new, adult lives. I was both terrified and triumphant about having got a coveted place at college to learn to be a chef, having passed several terrifying and intense rounds of interviews and tests. Callie had left to begin her year out teaching English in a primary school in Peru. Suze was Interrailing around Europe with a friend. Nick had finished his first year at art school, and when I wasn’t at my part-time waitressing job, he and I spent almost every minute together, lying in the garden in the sun, going to gigs and making love. I couldn’t possibly say which of the many, many condoms we’d got through had failed us, but clearly one of them did, because a week before I was due to leave for London and start my training, I realised my period was late.

I’ve never known such blind panic. I didn’t want to tell Nick – I felt stupidly ashamed, and was sure he’d think it was my fault. Callie could only check her email intermittently at an internet café. I couldn’t face making an appointment with our family GP, a grandfatherly old codger who’d given me my measles vaccine when I was a baby and set my broken wrist after I fell off my pony when I was twelve. And I still believed Mum didn’t know Nick and I were sleeping together.

Besides, I was as sure as I’ve ever been about anything that I couldn’t have a baby. I’d seen girls from school who’d ‘got themselves pregnant’, as people said, as if some sort of immaculate conception had taken place or they’d wilfully lain around in a bath of sperm. Cerys Brown had moved into a council flat with her boyfriend, but it wasn’t long before he pushed off and whenever I saw her in the street with her baby it was screaming and she looked exhausted and defeated. Lisa Henderson was still living with her parents and back at school, brightly positive about her future, but when I imagined that life for myself, it just seemed bleak and frightening.

I’d have to give up my place on the course, or try to defer it, and perhaps never be able to get it back. I’d have to stay at home with Mum and Dad, and because they were both at work all day, there would be no one to look after my baby except me. Everyone else would have moved on and I’d be left behind.

And Nick? I’d got it all planned: he and I would carry on seeing each other, even though I’d be in London. We were in love, we were going to be together forever – what did a couple of hundred miles matter? But if being with me meant a tiny flat somewhere with a baby and no money, would he still want me? I didn’t think he would. But I didn’t know what to do or where to turn.

So I told Erica. We were friends, she was a nurse, she’d know what to do, I reasoned.

I chose a time when I knew Nick would be at band practice, and went round to their house. Erica was in the kitchen making one of her worthy vegetarian dinners, and the smell of boiling chickpeas made me feel sick (it still does, to this day). She welcomed me warmly, as she always did back then.

“Nick’s off gallivanting somewhere,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I came to see you, actually.”

“Well, what a nice surprise!” She made tea and produced a plate of dry flapjack and we sat down at the kitchen table, and I spilled out my sorry little story.

“And I thought maybe you’d know if there was something I could take. . . some herbal thing, like a natural remedy, to bring on my period?”

I’d been looking down at the scrubbed table top, pushing a few crumbs around with my finger, but now I looked up at Erica. Her face was white.

“But that’s abortion!” she said.

I realised that it was, of course. Erica wasn’t some modern-day white witch who could make it all disappear by magic or with some homeopathic drops in a glass of water.

“I know,” I said in a small voice. “But I don’t think there’s anything else I can do.”

“Pippa, I think you’re making a dreadful mistake. I know you think you’re grown up, but you’re not. You’re rushing into something I know you will come to regret very, very deeply. This is not just an inconvenience, a stumbling block to your ambition. It’s a human life. It’s your baby, Nick’s baby, my grandchild. What you’re suggesting is. . . it’s wicked.”

I was appalled. I’d always thought of Erica as laid-back and liberal in her views, but now I remembered her ten brothers and sisters and realised that there was more to her background than I’d considered. I would have done anything to take back my words, but I couldn’t.

“I have thought about it, Erica. I’m not rushing into anything. I can’t have a baby. I don’t want to. I’m frightened.”

“Of course you are, my dear! Any girl would be. Even when a baby is longed for, strived for, it’s a frightening time. Being a mother is the most important job any woman can do. It’s a wonderful, precious opportunity. And we can make it work, Pippa. You’ll have my complete support, and of course that of your parents, when you tell them.”

I thought, no, I’ll only have your support if I do what you want.

“I’m sorry, Erica,” I said. “But I can’t. I’m going to London, I’m going to be a chef. There were hardly any places on my course, and I got one. I was so proud of myself. I can’t give it up and have a baby.”

“There are other ways, Pippa,” she said gently. “Have you thought how many childless couples there are, so full of love, who would give anything – anything! – for the life you’re carrying? Surely the mature, generous thing to do is to wait a little while to pursue your ambitions? You’re so young, you have your entire life ahead of you. This need only interrupt your plans for a year.”

“No!” I said. “I don’t care about those other people. I don’t know them. I’m not going to go through this just so some random people I’ve never met can have my baby. And working in a kitchen all day – it’s hard, physically hard. It’s so competitive. I don’t think I could manage it if I was being sick and stuff.”

Besides, I’d heard what Lisa had said about the overwhelming love she had for her child, how she didn’t regret having Callum for a moment and wouldn’t change a thing. How she couldn’t understand how anyone could ever bear to give their baby away. The prospect of that happening to me was the most frightening thing of all.

Erica stood up. “I don’t think there’s anything left for me to say, Pippa. You can only examine your conscience and choose whether to do the right thing or the other, the selfish, sinful thing. And please know that if you go through with this abhorrent act, you will no longer be welcome in my home.”

And then she quite literally showed me the door. If she could have thrown me out bodily, I’m sure she would have done.

I went home and sat in my room in the dark, alone and terrified, until Nick came over. I had decided that I would talk to him about it, and we could make the decision together. But I didn’t in the end, because he had something important to tell me, and it was that he didn’t think a long-distance relationship could possibly work, that I needed my freedom, and that since I wasn’t going to end our relationship, he was.

So the final week of that summer I spent in bed, in tears, being brought tea and detective stories by Mum. There wasn’t any choice to make any more, there was just me, alone and afraid, with only one option open to me. As soon as I got to London, I phoned a number I got off a poster on the Tube and a few days later, I wasn’t pregnant any more.

Erica was wrong – I’ve never regretted my decision, not for a second. But the sense of shame she left me with has never quite faded, and that’s why I’ve never told anyone else what I did. Not Mum, not Callie, not Nick. Especially not Nick. And now that it was over and we weren’t going to get married, I’d never tell him. At least Erica would be pleased about that.

In my rush to unpack my suitcase, pack it again, say what I had to say to Nick and walk out of our life together, I’d somehow neglected to pack my mobile phone charger. I could picture where I’d left it, on the packing box that had been serving as our bedside table, next to the beautiful ring I’d never wear again. I stared at the steadily emptying battery icon on my phone’s screen. Seven missed calls and messages from Nick and five from Callie were taking their toll. But Callie’s concern and Nick’s recriminations would have to wait – I had important plans for the precious fifteen percent of battery life that remained.

I called up my email and started a new message to [email protected] – although she wasn’t at work, I knew she’d still been using that address.

“Dear Erica,” I wrote.

So, you’ve got what you wanted. I’m not going to marry Nick, and you never need to see me again. More importantly, I need never see you. That feels pretty good right now. I hope you feel good, too.

I looked at the words on the screen, bitter and untrue. Then I put my finger on the delete button and watched them disappear, first one letter at a time, then one word at a time, then all the rest of the message at once. I pressed the compose button again.

Dear Erica

I expect Nick has told you what’s happened, and you’re delighted with the news. I can’t change the way you feel about me, but there’s something I wanted to explain. I know you think I made the choice not to have a baby lightly and selfishly, but I didn’t. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. For a long time, I cried about it every day. Even now, I sometimes wonder whether I did the right thing.

Nick always wanted to have children, but whenever I think about it, I feel as afraid as I did when I was eighteen. If I’d had someone to support me, someone I trusted, it might have been different. But we can’t change that now. I have to live with what I did, and so do you.

I read it through, then deleted almost all of it, and tried again.

Dear Erica

I expect Nick has told you what’s happened. Please take care of him. I’m so worried about him, but I’m really glad you’re there.

I’m sorry I made such a mess of things.

Pippa

This time I pressed send, quickly, before I could change my mind, and watched anxiously as the progress bar inched forward. I think it reached the end before my phone gave a final pathetic bleep and died. That was it – until I got hold of a new charger, all I could do was lie in my bed and hide myself in endless words about Venetian paperknives, lace handkerchiefs dropped on the library floor and sleepy villages rocked by murder most foul. As soon as I stopped reading, I’d find myself thinking of Nick again. What was he doing? Had he made all the calls and sent all the emails he’d need to, to call everything off? Was he missing me? Was Spanx? I was missing them, with a hunger that was almost physical.

But, as I’d learned back when I was eighteen, you can only lie in bed and cry for so long. After a while, my bedroom began to feel more like a prison than a refuge. When I looked in the bathroom mirror I realised that my hair hadn’t been blow-dried since I left South Africa. My bed was becoming increasingly scratchy with toast crumbs. I needed to man the fuck up and face what I had done.

So on the third day, so to speak, I rose again. I had a shower and dressed properly and even put on some makeup, and went downstairs to find Mum and Dad in the kitchen surrounded by seed catalogues.

“Hello,” I said.

Dad said, “Morning, Pippa. I was telling your mother that neon calendulas would be just the thing to brighten up that dark corner next to the weeping pear, but she insists that orange flowers are vulgar. What do you think?”

Of course, I couldn’t care less about gardening, but I was grateful to spend a few minutes focussing on something that wasn’t Nick, my wedding, or whether the butler or the vicar had done it. So I joined in the debate, taking Dad’s side because if orange is a good colour for cats, it must surely be good for flowers too.

After a bit Mum admitted defeat and said, “All right, order them then, Gerard, but if we get trounced by the Alcocks in the parish garden awards again, I shall blame you.

“Pippa, Callie rang up again. She says she completely understands if you don’t feel like talking, but she’s at home all weekend, and she said do pop round if you’re able to. I think perhaps. . .”