Authors: Maeve Haran
No doubt if David wanted them to know, he’d tell them himself soon enough.
‘Can’t you get hold of him at the paper?’ Liz could sense that Betty was eager to get back to disinfecting her work surfaces.
‘He’s not there at the moment. He’s having a bit of a sabbatical. If you see him could you ask him to call me?’
‘I won’t be seeing him,’ Betty snapped suspiciously, ‘home is the last place he’d come to see in the New Year.’
And who could blame him, thought Liz bitchily as she said a hasty goodbye. Five minutes talking to Betty on the phone had made her feel depressed. God knows what eighteen years of it would have
done to David.
With all this excitement over David resigning she’d completely forgotten it was New Year’s Eve. She, who had always been aware of significant days and turning points and rites of
passage, and she knew that she didn’t want to spend it alone.
On the off chance she dialled Ginny and Gavin’s number and smiled with relief when she heard Ginny’s laughing voice answer the phone, a breath of life and warmth after the narrow,
grudging tones of Betty.
‘I don’t suppose . . .’ Now that her friend was there on the other end of the phone Liz suddenly realized what she was asking and tailed off shyly, not wanting to impose on any
plans they’d made.
‘You don’t suppose . . .?’
Liz answered in a rush. ‘I don’t suppose you’d all like to come over and celebrate New Year with me? We could have supper, and you could stay the night if you wanted so you
didn’t have to worry about driving.’
‘Speaking as the driver’ – Gavin had clearly taken the phone out of Ginny’s hand – ‘I’d say that’s the best offer I’ve had all
day!’
‘Are you happy, love?’
It was the kind of question that, three days ago, before this visit, Britt couldn’t imagine her father asking in a million years.
It was on the tip of her tongue to say ‘Of course I am, Dad’ and move the conversation on to safer territory. Instead she looked at him and thought for a moment about how to
answer.
He sat by the fire in his pyjamas with a rug across his knees, his face as grey as the ash her mother dutifully cleaned out of the grate each morning. But what was most noticeable was that he
had lost his combativeness. It was as though he had left it in a neat pile along with his clothes on the bedside chair. And she found seeing him like this more disturbing than she could ever have
imagined. Because she knew that it meant that he was worse, far worse, than he had ever let on.
She took his hand. ‘Am I happy?’ She turned the question around and looked at it from every side before facing the truth she’d never dared to face before. ‘Not really,
Dad, no.’
‘Not with all your achievements, and your company that’s doing so well and all?’
‘Maybe it’s not enough.’
She felt his grip tighten on hers. ‘Aye. Well, I’m glad you see that, love.’
‘Dad?’
Hearing the urgency in her tone he looked into her eyes.
She faltered for a moment. She felt the sudden desperate urge to tell him that she was pregnant, but she was terrified that this new closeness, this wonderful ability to talk might evaporate and
the old dad return.
He
would have thundered about throwaway values and selfish motives.
But she had to talk to someone. It was a risk she was just going to have to take.
She held her head up, and fixed her eyes on his. ‘Dad, I’m going to have a baby.’
She watched his face harden for a moment with the shock of the revelation. And she knew that he was thinking of all the sacrifices they’d made to give her a start in life, to make her
different from the mill-girls who fell pregnant at seventeen, and were trapped for life.
At last he spoke. ‘A baby? A baby, eh? Well I’ll be buggered!’
And she saw from his expression that he was not, as she’d feared, about to play the Victorian father and tell her never to darken his doors again. Instead she saw to her amazement that he
was taking what she had told him as a gift. The gift of life in death. And he opened his arms and held her.
‘A baby, eh?’ He patted her head gently. ‘Are you glad, love?’
Britt smiled and hugged herself like a small child with a secret. ‘Yes, Dad, very glad.’ And she knew to her astonishment that it was true.
‘A grandchild, eh? And just in time too.’
‘Oh, Dad, don’t.’ There was real anguish in her voice that touched him to the core. ‘You’ll be better soon.’
‘Aye. Maybe. So, come on, lass. How long have I got to last? When’s it due?’
‘In August.’
‘Are you going to get . . . er . . . you and the father . . .?’
‘Married? No, Dad, we aren’t. In fact we’ve split up.’
Her father looked up in consternation.
‘Don’t worry. Everything will be all right. I know it will.’ She looked away for a moment, trying to summon the courage to swim even further into the dangerous waters of
truth.
‘Dad, I wanted to ask your advice. If you had a friend and you fell in love with her husband and he came to live with you for a bit and then left again. And then you were offered her job.
Not the job she’s doing now, but the one she used to do. And it was a wonderful job. An amazing job. One of the best jobs in television . . .’ She paused, struck by the absurdity of her
morally upright, no-nonsense father ever being caught in so murky a situation as she was describing. ‘Would you take it?’
‘Would she mind you having her old job, this friend?’
‘Yes I think she probably would.’
‘Then maybe I’d feel I’d had enough of hers already.’
Britt grinned. She’d known he would say that. And it was exactly what she’d already decided to do.
‘Did you know that Britt was pregnant?’ Liz handed Ginny and Gavin a drink.
Ginny looked appalled. ‘By David?’
Liz nodded.
‘Oh, Lizzie, how awful!’
Gavin slipped his arm round her. ‘Poor Liz. The bastard.’
‘And now he’s left her.’
‘My God.’
‘A happy ending then?’ Gavin joked. He’d never liked Britt.
‘Not for Britt.’ Liz sat down on the sofa.
‘Oh, come on, now!’ The idea of anyone, especially Liz, feeling sorry for Britt clearly irritated the hell out of Gavin. ‘Don’t worry about Britt. When she finds you
can’t get Calvin Klein babygros she’ll probably have an abortion!’
Despite herself, Liz giggled. She couldn’t imagine Britt as a mother either. It was impossible to picture Britt’s expensive beigeness stained with banana, or sticky fingers clutching
the hem of her Armani suit. Britt was built for cruising Harrods and Harvey Nichols, not Mothercare and Toys ‘R’ Us. She imagined for a moment a baby let loose in Britt’s
immaculate flat, and saw it, poor mite, dressed only in black and white, to tone in with the wallpaper.
And then it struck her, for the first time, that now that David had left her, Britt might not go ahead with the baby at all.
Britt sat on the uncomfortable sofa in her parents’ front room, tucked under a tartan rug. It was freezing cold and they had both gone to bed. Her father was still too
weak to stay up till midnight to watch Big Ben toll in the New Year on the television.
Britt clutched a mug of tea and watched this year’s disastrous TV attempt, live from Scotland as usual, to mix kilts and white heather with alternative comedians and rock ‘n’
roll bands in a merry Hogmanay hooley.
New Year’s Eve, Britt had often thought, had only been invented to torture the single and the lonely. There was something about spending it alone that condemned you to the intimate social
scrapheap. Even if you’d convinced yourself that you didn’t want to go to a party, that you wanted to work or to Be Alone, all that false jollity and pernicious resolution-making seeped
in somehow under your front door and depressed you all the same.
But, against all the odds, Britt didn’t feel depressed tonight. She felt happy and secure for the first time she could ever remember. Her father would get well now that he had something to
stay alive for. And tomorrow she would ring Conrad Marks and turn down the job. She basked for a moment in the unfamiliar glow of her own unselfishness.
And best of all – she hugged the cushion she held against her tummy – there was the baby.
From now on she would never, ever, have to be alone again.
Liz sat on the window-seat of Jamie and Daisy’s bedroom and looked out at the moonlit countryside. Any minute now the small church would start to toll in the New Year and
she would go downstairs and sing Auld Lang Syne with Ginny and Gavin and this year, the worst in her life, would be over.
Opening the latticed casement a few inches, careful not to let too much freezing air come into the bedroom and wake the children, she knelt up and sprinkled a few drops of the Glenfiddich that
Gavin had brought, on the earth beneath. A kind of libation. An offering to the ancient gods of this place to lend her some of their peace.
In the field opposite, next to the path leading up to the South Downs Way, a white horse stood in the moonlight, as though illuminated by a single spotlight. And it seemed to Liz that it was a
good omen, a symbol of life, not like the chalk horse carved into the hillside to remind all who saw it of dead love.
And looking out over the silent night it seemed to her that it was time she accepted that the love between her and David was also a dead love, that a new chapter must open in her life, and that
she must accept, as she had never done yet, that moving here was not, until this moment, really the new beginning she had yearned for.
Standing up and shaking out the pins and needles in her legs, she could hear the bells of Seamington Church begin to ring out, as they had for hundreds of years. But tonight the rolling,
reverberating peal did indeed seem to toll for her, summoning her to start again without looking back this time.
And she knew there was one more admission she had to make. Just like Mel had said. She would never be an Earth Mother. She loved her children, but she needed, at least some of the time, to get
out of the house, to stretch herself. Never again would she put her career before her family, but it was time to face the fact that she also needed to work.
Britt lay in the narrow bed she had slept in as a teenager and listened to the bells of Rothwell United Reformed Chapel tolling out the old year and in the new.
Outside it was dark and silent. No drunken revellers or well-oiled First Footers bearing shortbread and a piece of coal to bring good luck ventured over their neighbours’ hearths in Acacia
Gardens. And there was none of the cheek-kissing and cries of ‘Darling!’ that characterized London parties. In Acacia Gardens decent people watched Big Ben and went quietly to bed.
But tonight Britt didn’t think them narrow-minded or joyless. They were just ordinary people leading quiet lives like her mum and dad. As she lay there wide-eyed and wakeful, the light
from a streetlamp lit up the small room and she realized that for the first time she’d stayed here since leaving home she had unpacked her suitcases and spread her belongings around the room
as though it were really her own.
Smiling, she turned over and snuggled down under the blankets. She felt an extraordinary peace with the world tonight.
At five o’clock, long before the first dirty streaks of light appeared in the sky, just as the dawn chorus was starting up its first noisy performance of the year, Britt
felt the pain begin.
Half-asleep she turned on to her side, hugging a pillow to her, and tried to forget about it. It was probably indigestion, the legacy of too much Christmas eating.
And then it started again, stronger this time, a wave of pain and nausea that snapped open her eyes and dampened her palms, and made her beg that she was wrong, that this wasn’t
happening.
But she knew that it was. Uncurling herself and lying absolutely flat as she had read you must, she felt the pain grip her again and the blood seep unstoppably out, soaking the sheets and
staining bright red the pure white of her silk pyjamas.
For a moment she thought of shouting to her mother to call a doctor. But she knew that it was too late. That no one could help her now. That she had already lost the baby.
‘Why don’t you come and work for WomanPower?’
Ginny held her breath, not even daring to look at Liz’s face. She knew that Liz might feel WomanPower was too small beer for someone with her talents, a tinpot little venture run by a rank
amateur, a housewife’s hobby.
And the problem was, she’d be right. Ginny looked round the small, untidy office with its single phone, its dingy paintwork and its ancient filing cabinets, not to mention its screamingly
inefficient eighteen-year-old receptionist/typist/dogsbody who was so unprepossessing she’d failed even to get on to a Government training scheme, but who, as a result, came extremely cheap.
It was hardly Metro Television.
For just a second, Ginny felt depressed again. WomanPower was a brilliant idea, she knew that, but if she was brutally honest with herself she just didn’t seem to have the imagination or
the management skills to get it off the ground. Liz, on the other hand, had both. With her on board Ginny knew they could make a real go of it. Realizing that Liz hadn’t answered, Ginny
decided to try a bit harder.
‘We couldn’t pay you a fortune, of course, but it’d be part time and you could still see the kids. Plus of course you wouldn’t be an employee. I’d want you to be my
partner.’
Liz looked around her and thought about it. She hadn’t meant to get a job quite so quickly and hadn’t even begun to wonder what she might do when she did. A little TV consultancy,
perhaps, where she could earn as much in a day as most people earned in a week. But looking round Ginny’s tiny offices, in the lovely peaceful little market town of Lewes, she felt a wave of
revulsion at the thought of dipping back into the world of television, with its crazy egos and obsessive navel-contemplation, and the idea of schlepping up to town, even for one day, which would no
doubt somehow spill into two, maybe with an overnight in some anonymous hotel, suddenly seemed too horrible to contemplate.