39 Weeks (47 page)

Okay what I needed was a plan, make that two plans, one for how to behave towards Rob when he got here, and one for how to ge
t through the next few days and work out what
the first plan
was actually going to be before I put it
into action.

I figured first of all
I needed to see Mum, not because she’d be able to help in any
way whatsoever with either plan, i
n fact it was imperative that she
was kept totally in the dark about Rob
coming back
. No I needed to see her today so
then I could be fairly sure
that I wouldn’t have to see her next weekend, and that she would be less likely to just turn up unannounced. Knowing Mum it’d be just like her to arrive just when things were looking hopeful and put her interfering giant foot right in it, and I couldn’t afford for that to happen.
 

I changed into my clean pair of jeans. I
now
only had two pairs that I could even hope to wear, one just about fitted, sort of, but the other pair were more comfortable because they were your actual maternity jeans. I’d succumbed reluctantly to the dreaded knitted waist insert pregnant jeans that I’d so derided previously, but the truth was yes they were still hideous but they were really comfortable given my current body shape. Anyway with only two pairs one was always in the wash or due for a wash
, and I’d be wearing the other pair. I flatly refused to wear a tent dress
of any kind
, that really was a step too far.

Anyway I pulled on the clean
pair of knitted waist jeans
, and a clean tee shirt, one of the Marsha pregnancy donation fund, and pulled a brush through my hair. I probably should have washed it knowing Mum was sure to have something to say about it, but I needed to get this visit over with and didn’t want to waste any time. I mean she was going to criticise something anyway no matter what I did
, or didn’t do, so I might as well give her the ammunition, and my not quite clean hair seemed the lesser of the many evils my darling mother
might
perc
eive
.

By six I was back home again. The visit had gone well. Mum had
gone through her normal ritual, after her initial surprise at my unannounced visit, of disapproval, then her run down of current ailments, and then to my amazement told me she was going on a dinner date with
Colin Stoddard. This was the guy who’d serviced Mum’s gas boiler and had hinted at them going out somewhere
,
and who my Mum had
derided as being totally unsuitable. ‘Are you serious?’ she’d said when I’d suggested her going on a date with him. But now apparently she was over, or overlooking, his unsuitableness and had agreed to have dinner with him.

‘But you said . .’

‘I know I did.’ Mum answered sheepishly.

‘So what happened to change your mind?’

‘Well you know that eighties thing I went to
with
your Aunty Mags
just after Christmas,
well
he was there.’

‘And?’

‘And he was wearing a suit.’

‘What!
Are you
seriously
telling me the reason
you w
ouldn’t even consider him before
was
because he wasn’t wearing a suit?’
My voice had gone up in
tone
a notch
or two in
shock, I mean I knew this was Mum but
still
I didn’t think
even
she was quite that much of
a snob.

‘No it wasn’t just the suit, although it did make me see him in a different light.
I don’t know h
e was different somehow, charming almost you might say.’

‘Charming?
’

‘Well yes. And
courteous.’

I guessed that it wasn’t so much a change in
this Colin Stoddard, as it was a change in my mum’s attitude after she
’d
found out about Dad and Stella Frankham. So now the big question was, was she just trying to get back at Dad, or did she real
ly fancy this bloke?
Seemed weird beyond belief to think of my mum fancying anyone never mind the gas man, but stranger things have happened I suppose, and even my mum must be susceptible to her hormones once in a while, whether she admitted to it or not.

‘So now you’re going on a date with him.’

‘I hadn’t really thought about it as a date, I’m a bit too old for dates and all that sort of thing.’

‘Um no you’re not, I don’t think you can get too old for ‘that sort of thing’ can you?’

‘
It’s not like that,
I’m not even thinking about that. All that happened was he invited me out for a meal.’

‘And you said yes. Sounds like a date to me.’

‘Are you angry?’

‘No course I’m not angry, just a bit surprised that’s all. I think it’s a great idea.’

Well this was a turn up for the book, I mean my Mum worried whether I was angry with her for going on a date with someone who wasn’t Dad? I wasn’t in the least bothered by her seeing this Colin, good for her I say and about time
she joined the real world
, but I was a bit bothered that she thought I might be bothered
, that wasn’t like her at all. ‘So where are you going for this meal?’

‘I don’t know, Colin’s deciding.’

And the surprises just ke
p
t
coming. Colin’s deciding! Okay, I thought to myself, who are you and what have yo
u done with my real mother
?

After that things settled down to a more normal Mum and me conversation, that is to say back to everything I was doing wrong. I breathed a sigh of relief
and tuned out while I listened to one of Mums typical lectures on all
the many
things
about me
that were
not good enough.
 

I didn’t mention Rob of course, plenty of time for that if and when he came back and we sorted out our differences.
If only it were that simple,
sorting out
our differences makes
it sound like we’d disagreed about
what to have for Sunday lunch
, or where to go on holiday.
My problem was
,
it was
n’t so much
our
differences as
the
great big ga
ping holes
between us
that needed mending.

I left Mums with her promising to phone me
on
Friday morning after her date that wasn’t a date, and congratulated myself on
not mentioning Rob at all, no mean feat that seeing as he was the thing most prominent in my thoughts at the moment, or any moment really, and I hoped
I had
successfully
forestalled
any potential visits from her on the weekend. She’d said that if anything happened, and she
’d
looked pointedly at my Ella bump, I was to phone her straight away and that she’d be straight round, even if it was on Thursday during the not a date
,
dinner date
,
with Colin. But I just laughed and
said
that all that wa
s at least three weeks away yet, so she could relax and enjoy herself and not think about me.

So now I was back home again and trying to figure out the next part of my plan of action. Marsha knocked at around eight holding her half of the baby monitor, saying she’d had a call f
rom Mac and she had some news about
Ro
b. Course I let her
in straight away
. She placed the baby monitor in the middle of the dining table, told me to sit and
‘
listen out
’
, while she went out to the kitchen and put the kettle on to make some tea.

‘Is he alright?’ I shouted through to her.

‘He’s fine.’

‘Well where’s he been all this time?’

‘He’s been stuck on Rousay, trapped there by the weather.’

‘Oh. What’s Rousay?’

‘You mean where’s Rousay. It’s one of the Orkney islands.’

‘Oh
. What the hell’s he been doing there?’

‘D’you mind if I have coffee instead of tea?’ Marsha said popping her head round the door.

‘No have whatever you like. So what’s he been doing in the
Orkneys for the last five
weeks?’

‘Taking pictures mostly by the sound of it.’
She said as the kettle finally reached boiling point meaning we wouldn’t have to shout anymore over its noise. 

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘No he finally made it off Rousay this morning
and he’s on his way to Edinburgh to meet up with Mac, but he might stay over in Aberdeen or somewhere tonight.’

‘Why’s it taking so long?’ I said as she deposited my tea in front of me and sat down in the opposite chair with her coffee.

‘Sorry, but I had to wait for the kettle to boil didn’t I? Any sound out of the gruesome twosome?’

‘No nothing, they’re still asleep. I mean why is it taking Rob so long to get
back
to Edinburgh?’

‘The weather.’

‘But the snow’s all gone now.’

‘
Not in Scotland it ha
sn’t. Apparently a lot of the roads
up there
are still pretty bad.’

‘
O
kay
so
he’s been stuck on this Rousay all this time
, and couldn’t get back because of all the snow and everything,
but why didn’t he phone anyone.
I mean even if he didn’t want to speak to me he could have let you or Mac know where he was and what was going on, couldn’t he?’

‘That’s exactly what Mac said. But evidently, typical Rob, he
accidently
dr
opped his phone over the side of
the ferry
on the way
over.’

Well at least that explained the permanently switched off phone. All those text messages I
’d
sent
and voice mails I
’d
left
,
and
there must have been hundreds of them
by now
, all floating around somewhere at the bottom of the sea
.

‘So why didn’t he borrow someone else’s phone?’

‘No signal. Even the land lines were out for a while.’

‘Is that tru
e? I can’t believe that no-one i
n this Orkney island place could make or receive calls. For
over a month
they were all cut off? T
hat can’t be true, can it?’

‘I don’t know, I gather mobiles are a bit of a problem there sometimes
anyway
, and the land lines prob
ably were out for a while
, but Mac seemed to think it had more to do with Rob just wanting to . . well to not talk to anyone for a bit.’

‘I see.’ I said. But I didn’t see, I didn’t see at all. ‘Did he even ask about me?’

‘No I’m sorry Judy he didn’t mention you at all.’

‘But Mac told him how upset I was right? And that I’d been trying all this time to speak to him.’

‘No he didn’t . . well he thought it best not to say anything in case Rob took off again, but he plans to speak to him tomorrow when he turns up, you know face to face.’

‘Right. So what am I meant to do now?’

‘Just wait till Friday I guess.’

‘But . .
but . . Friday is
so
. .’ I wailed.

‘Look Mac knows how upset you are, and I’ve told him about h
ow Rob got it all wrong
, and I’m sure he’ll talk to Rob and explain, and I’ll talk to him as well if I get the chance, but other than that you’re just going to have to wait until Friday. I don’t see what else you can do.’

In the last five weeks I’d run the gamut of emotions from distraught and d
evastated in the beginning, to
convinced he couldn’t have ever real
ly loved me to leave like that. I’d been
angry with my mum, then angry with myself, then with Rob, then back to
being
distraught again. And now I just missed him
,
and Friday seemed like a
very
long way away.  

So now I was waiting, waiting for Rob, waiting for Ella, waiting to
see how my mum got on going on her
date with the gas man,
just waiting. I had no plan of action. I had nothing just this big empty void until Friday.