The Baby Group (11 page)

‘Daddy didn't kiss me goodbye,' Hazel had said wanly over her Rice Krispies.

‘He was in a rush, dear,' Meg had said, looking sadly down the empty hallway to the front door. She knew how disappointed Hazel felt. Robert hadn't kissed her goodbye either. The truth was, Robert did frighten her, but not because he was like Frances. It was because she wasn't sure
who
he was like any more.

‘He's like Frances in that he knows how he likes things and he's very focused,' she told Natalie, keeping her thoughts to herself and banishing her worries back to the small hours of the night where they belonged. ‘But apart from that they are totally different. Robert's great. A really great dad and a wonderful husband,' Meg went on in a doggedly happy tone. ‘We always wanted a big family with lots of kids. I was an only child and it was a very lonely childhood. And Robert – well, you can imagine the kind of home he came from by looking at Frances. His parents were very strict, very authoritarian – still are really. We wanted something different for our children and that's what we've created. I know I'm very lucky not having to worry about going back to work or anything.'

‘Lee is great with Jacob,' Jess said as they walked across the park and towards Church Street. ‘He's so calm and relaxed with him. When I look at the two of them together I feel sort of out of it. Almost excess to requirements. I think they'd get on fine without me, you know.'

‘Rubbish,' Natalie said lightly, picking up the doom-laden sentence and tossing it into the air with ease. ‘For one thing, Lee can't breastfeed, can he? And boys always prefer their mums to their dads. That's a biological fact.'

‘What about your husband, Natalie – is he a good dad?' Meg asked. ‘What's his name again?'

Natalie froze for a nanosecond. Her tiny harmless lie was just about to double in size. She felt powerless to stop it, and in some ways she didn't want to. She knew she
could
just tell them the truth and she was fairly sure they'd be OK about it. In fact, they'd probably laugh and be very understanding. But on the other hand, they might wonder why she had lied in the first place instead of just telling them the truth like any normal person would. And if they did that they might not be so keen on being friends with her. And Natalie knew that she needed friends, more especially
these
fledgling friends. As much as she enjoyed her daily conversations with Alice, it was only with these women that she felt her life with Freddie was real and forever, and not just some sort of phase she was going through before everything got back to normal. And on top of that, to be honest, she liked her fictional husband.

‘Gary,' she said, plucking the first available man's name out of the air. She might as well call him Gary because in her head he literally
was
Gary, or at least her version of him – the world's first dependable and dull fantasy man ever created in the mind of a woman. ‘He's a lovely dad, when he's here and even when he's not. I speak to him every night. He tells Freddie a story down the phone.'

As the others ‘ahhhd' Natalie wondered at the lie that had come so easily. She was always one for exaggerating, spinning a good yarn, adding just a little bit of gloss to reality here and there to improve the punchline of an anecdote, but she'd never told an actual, big, massive, get-found-out-and-you're-for-it lie before. Unless you counted not telling Jack Newhouse he was Freddie's father, which wasn't really a lie, but more of an omission.

‘He feels bad that he has to work away,' she went on, as if someone else had taken control of her tongue. ‘But when he's completed this contract he's coming back for good. We can't wait can we, Freddie?' Freddie, who was fast asleep after the excitement of Baby Music, remained oblivious to his mum's deception and potential insanity.

‘He missed the birth, didn't he?' Jess remarked sympathetically.

‘Oh no, he was there for the birth,' Natalie said, privately outraged at and full of admiration for herself simultaneously.

‘Really?' Jess said. ‘Only I didn't see you with anyone except that blonde woman when we were in.'

‘Yes, he arrived in the middle of the night I was in labour,' Natalie assured her. ‘He cut the cord. We had a few precious hours before he had to go again'.

‘Doesn't he get paternity leave?' Jess asked as they reached the café at last.

‘Not on a short-term contract.' Natalie winged it. ‘Scandalous, isn't it? Now, who's for carrot cake?'

She breathed a silent sigh of relief as she finally directed the conversation away from herself and on to cake. It was dangerous that she enjoyed talking about fantasy Gary so much, because apart from anything else the more she told her friends about him the harder it would be to have to tell them one day that he didn't exist. She'd end up having to invent a mistress that he had abandoned her for, or some kind of tragic engineering accident that left her a fairly young and fairly beautiful widow . . . Natalie stopped herself in her tracks and told herself to get a grip on reality. For a second she imagined how things might have been in a parallel life. She pictured Jack Newhouse holding her hand a she pushed and swore and screamed, and almost laughed out loud at the ridiculous image that was no more real than her fake husband. It was even more implausible, a realisation that gave her a pang of sadness.

Natalie knew it was stupid to miss a man she had never really known and would never know. Except that wasn't quite true. When she looked at Freddie and caught glimpses of his father in his features, she felt as if she knew Jack more now that he was out of her life than the few intense hours he had been in it. She missed not only him – as absurd as that was – but also the idea of having someone to share the joy of her son. She mourned the absence of the other half that had co-created Freddie.

‘Gary sounds lovely,' Meg said with a wistful air as she studied the menu.

‘Oh he is,' Natalie agreed, snapping out of her reverie and nodding vigorously.

‘We're lucky, aren't we?' Jess seemed to need additional confirmation. ‘To have found three wonderful men. Really good men are in short supply, you know.'

‘That's true,' Meg and Natalie said together with heartfelt emphasis, but for entirely different reasons.

Chapter Seven

When Natalie got back to the house Gary Fisher was vacuuming the front room with a studied concentration that she found oddly endearing.

‘I didn't know cleaning came as part of the service,' she said twice before he finally gave up trying to hear her and switched the vacuum cleaner off.

‘Oh well, I like to leave a room tidy,' he said a little awkwardly.

‘How's it going?' Natalie asked him. It did seem a little surreal chatting to this powerfully muscled man covered in plaster dust while he clutched at the handle of her upright as if it were the very last straw.

‘We're making good progress,' Gary said. ‘Kitchen's done, half of downstairs.' He smiled and nodded at Freddie. ‘How's the little feller getting on then?'

‘Brilliant,' Natalie said. ‘We had a real laugh today, didn't we, Freddie – and to think I thought I was missing the cut and thrust of the lingerie business!'

Gary blushed deeply at the inflammatory word and looked down at his boots. The two of them stood there for a moment in silence.

‘Oh!' Gary said suddenly, his voice seeming loud in the quiet. ‘That reminds me, a lady called Alice left you a message on your machine. She said to call her straight away. Something to do with . . . Casanova?'

Natalie sat down on her sheet-covered sofa.

‘Oh,' she said. That could only mean one thing.

Jack Newhouse was back in town.

‘What did she say again?' Natalie asked Alice nervously for the third time. She found it very hard to believe what Alice was telling her, but she had to, because unless Alice had gone barking mad she was not in the habit of telling lies.

‘Like I said we were just having lunch, the first time in months, and then Suze says, “Remember that guy Natalie had the fling with? His name was Jack Newhouse, wasn't it? I remember because she made that joke about his name.” So I nodded and she tells me she thinks she's met him, within the last week in London.'

Natalie chewed her lip and looked anxiously at Gary's back as he pulled length after length of old wire out of the hole he had made in her wall.

‘But how does she know? It could be anyone, there must be hundreds of men called Jack in London. I bet she never met him! I bet she's making it up, it would be just like her.' Natalie thought about Suze, a pre-baby Friday-night friend who had become conspicuous by her absence soon after Natalie got pregnant, let alone had an actual baby. It did not surprise her in the least that she had scheduled lunch with Alice once she knew that Natalie was not likely to be there. She was fun girl, good for gossip and cocktails but shallow as a puddle and as reliable as – well, as Natalie could be herself sometimes, which wasn't very.

‘But are there hundreds of Jack Newhouses who grew up in Venice and have spent the last year in Italy? Because according to Suze that's the Jack she met. Think about it, it's not that weird. You met him near Soho, she met her Jack Newhouse in Soho Square. People move about in the same old small ponds no matter how big they like to think the world is, bumping into the same old fish. And he has got a track record of talking to random women, hasn't he? Well, that's what he did with Suze.'

‘He tried to pick her up?' Natalie asked Alice, feeling sickened. It was humiliating, like receiving a second-hand report of her own encounter with him, illustrating so clearly that from Jack's point of view the whole event was horribly routine.

‘I'm afraid so, Nat,' Alice said heavily. ‘Suze said she was having a fag break when this tall, skinny guy sat down next to her on the bench and asked her if she knew the time. Anyway, he asked her all sorts of questions about herself, told her he'd just got back from a year in Italy, staying with family near Venice . . .'

‘Bastard!' Natalie yelled, causing Gary to pause for a second before resuming his wire pulling. She lowered her voice before adding, ‘Sorry, it's just that I can't believe this, Alice, I can't believe what you are telling me. Of all the women in London he's got to hit on he chooses somebody I
know
!'

‘Maybe it was just the law of averages,' Alice said tentatively. ‘I mean, if he chats up enough women in one particular area then sooner or later you were bound to know one of them . . .'

‘So what happened then?' Natalie asked her reluctantly.

‘He said he had to go to a job interview but asked her if she'd like to go for a drink with him sometime. He wrote down his name and phone numbers on a piece of paper and gave them to her. She said his hand was trembling as if he was really nervous.'

‘That's his trick,' Natalie growled. ‘That's how he draws you in, by being all vulnerable and sexy at the same time.'

‘It wasn't until after he'd gone,' Alice continued, ‘and Suze read his name that all the pieces started coming together, and she thought he could be
the
Jack Newhouse. The one who got you pregnant and then disappeared. She called me and asked me out for lunch. She told me what I've told you and gave me the numbers. She said she thought you could use them.' Alice waited.

‘Well?' she said when Natalie remained silent.

‘Well what?' Natalie asked her.

‘You have to face up to this, Natalie, you know you
have
to. You can't pretend that this hasn't happened.'

Alice paused, clearly waiting for Natalie to agree with her. When Natalie remained stubbornly silent Alice went on anyway.

‘You have a chance to contact him now and tell him about Freddie.' Alice finally stated the obvious. ‘It's a chance you have to take.'

‘Why now – doesn't this just prove what kind of a man he is?' Natalie demanded. ‘I haven't seen or heard from him in thirteen months and ten days,' she said, instantly regretting that she had let slip that she knew exactly when it was that she last saw the man she professed to be so uninterested in. She hoped vainly that Alice wouldn't notice, and pressed on with complaining. ‘Things are going well, Alice. They are steady and stable. Why should I do anything to change that?'

‘Oh, I don't know,' Alice replied, her voice heavy with sarcasm. ‘Let me think . . .'

‘Alice, this isn't funny!' Natalie exclaimed.

Gary looked up at her this time. She smiled at him and rolled her eyes. Realising that she still had her coat on and that Freddie was still zipped up securely in his warm suit, she tucked the phone under her ear and began to make her way upstairs.

‘I don't think it is funny,' Alice said as Natalie moved out of earshot of her electrician. ‘But even if you could manage to avoid him for the rest of your life, which seems unlikely, you still have to tell him. Take the moral high ground. I know it's uncharted territory for you, but I think once you've done it you'll feel relieved.'

‘Or,' Natalie suggested optimistically, ignoring Alice, ‘we could relocate the business to Birmingham. I've always liked Birmingham.'

‘Natalie, be serious.' Alice's normally smooth and level tone rose slightly, which was about the only sign she ever gave that she was properly angry and not just annoyed. Natalie didn't want Alice to be properly angry with her. Despite her teasing and ribbing of her old friend it was important to her that Alice thought the best of her. She needed to be in at least one person's good books to feel good about herself, and Alice had always been that person since they had met over women's control-top pants. Although she had suddenly acquired a wealth of new friends, Alice was the one Natalie was certain still to be friends with in a hundred years' time, because Alice loved her exactly the way she was, foibles, tics and all. And even if Alice did sometimes get quite cross with her, Natalie loved her back with exactly the same steadfast loyalty.