Babies in Waiting (28 page)

So as I say, James and I were invited for Sunday lunch. We arrived in good time, because we knew the routine: drinks at twelve fifteen, lunch at exactly one. My dad wasn’t a great cook, but he took great pride in his Sunday roast, and I knew that the timing was everything. If we were early or late, we’d throw out his careful preparations.

We rang the bell, and he came to the door, wiping his hands on his cooking apron. My dad is very finicky about his clothes, and because of that, he’s a big fan of aprons. He has a pinstripe-navy one he wears in the kitchen (the above-mentioned cooking apron). Then there’s an oilcloth one for the barbecue, a dark-green canvas one for gardening, and a white one with matching hat for pruning. I’m not kidding. He also has a tweed hat for going for walks, and driving gloves. Sometimes I think he time-travelled from the nineteenth century, from a vicarage or something.

He’s quite a handsome chap . . . he’s still slim and very narrow . . . I think he’s terribly English-looking . . . imagine an older version of Jeremy Irons. Where I came from, all round and curvy and messy blonde curls, I’m not really sure. I’m definitely his, though . . . we have exactly the same hands, and we’re both obsessed with correct punctuation.

I stepped in and gave him a big hug. He held me at arm’s length and looked me up and down. He gave a little nod, and I saw a tiny smile . . . I knew he was completely thrilled about the baby and the idea of being a grandfather. Now I was so enormous, there was plenty of me for him to admire. James followed and shook his hand. They did that gruff man-hello shoulder-patting thing. My dad likes James, but he’s very reserved by nature.

‘Come through,’ Dad said. ‘The weather’s rather good, so I thought we might have a drink in the garden before lunch.’ There was a recording of classical music playing softly in the kitchen, and I could smell roasting chicken and potatoes.

We took our glasses out on to Dad’s little patio, and he took me for a short walk around the garden, pointing out the neat rows in the vegetable garden, and the flowers in the tidy beds. When we were right at the bottom of the garden, he said, rather stiffly and formally, ‘So, how are you . . . feeling?’

‘Really well, Dad. Really, really well. We’ve had another sonogram, and everything seems to be going along just as it should.’ I knew he wouldn’t want any more detail
than that. It’s not that he’s squeamish, it’s just that . . . well, he’s my dad.

‘Good, good,’ he said. ‘And are you planning to work for much longer?’

‘I’ll have to stay at work pretty much until my due date. We need to save as much of my paid maternity leave as we can for after the birth. I don’t want to waste it on sitting around at home scoffing chocolates and watching daytime TV when I could still be working.’

‘Still, you don’t want to get too tired. Especially with the commuting. You might start to get a bit uncomfortable when you get . . . larger. Your mother . . .’ But he stopped himself, and then said brightly, ‘Shall we go in? I’d better check on my broccoli.’

I followed him into the house, but I was suddenly so sad. I’d have loved to hear a story about my mum’s pregnancy: I was still a teenager when she first got ill, so there’d never been a time when we might have shared stories like that. But I knew how hard it was for my dad to talk about her and I didn’t want to push him.

We all have jobs at Sunday lunch . . . at the monk’s cell, things have to be done the same way every time. He sets the table perfectly, and I bring in the warmed plates and serve veggies and gravy for all of us. He lets James carve the chicken (which, thank heavens, James does neatly and well . . . my old boyfriend, Gavin, got one go at it. He basically ripped the carcass limb from limb with his hands. He wasn’t asked to do it again).

We made small talk through lunch – my dad told us
about a conference he was planning to go to in Cairo in the summer, and he and James had some banter about cricket. When we finished the main course, Dad went to the kitchen to fetch the cheeseboard. James turned to me when my dad was out of the room. ‘So why did you never go?’

‘Go where?’

‘Cairo. Egypt. Israel. The Middle East. Your dad must have gone all the time when you were growing up.’

‘Um . . . I don’t know. I don’t remember him travelling all that much when I was younger, and I suppose it would usually have been in school termtime. Then I was at uni, and Mum was sick . . .’

‘Would you like to go now?’

‘What, now? This afternoon?’ I joked.

‘I’m serious. I mean . . . I wouldn’t want to go in summer, when it’s forty degrees, but maybe January or February . . .’

‘
What
January or February?’

‘Next year,’ he said, like that was a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

‘With a three-month old baby? Are you mad?’

I didn’t mean to sound so shrill, and James looked shocked.

My dad came back into the room, carrying the cheese-board. He looked at James and me, staring at one another, and I could see he sensed a bit of an atmosphere. I know how much he hates a scene, so I tried to defuse it by making a joke about it.

‘Listen to this, Dad, James thinks we should head off to the Middle East in January, baby and all!’

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. It sounded like I was asking Dad to gang up on James with me.

Dad’s never a man to be hurried, though, so he thoughtfully put down the cheeseboard and went to the sideboard to get the knives and plates before he spoke. I could feel James seething beside me. ‘Well, it would depend on where you went, but I don’t see why not—’ Dad began. But James, who is never rude, cut in.

‘You see?’ he spat at me, then turned back to Dad. ‘When we first found out Toni was pregnant, we said it wouldn’t change our lives. That we could still travel. Still do things—’

‘No,
you
said that!’ I interrupted. ‘You had some harebrained scheme about shoving our baby in a backpack and going to Thailand.’

‘It was an example!’ said James sharply, and I was mortified to realise we were yelling, and we were doing it in front of my father. As calmly as I could, I said, ‘Can we talk about this later?’

James caught himself. I knew he’d also seen how awful the situation was, and he said, very coldly, ‘Of course.’

He turned back to Dad and tried to make a polite comment about the Camembert, but the afternoon was ruined.

We left soon after that, and started walking down to the Tube station in grim silence. James was walking too fast for me so I had to run and skip like a little girl to keep up. Eventually, I had to say, ‘Can you just slow down?’ and there we were, fighting again.

‘Jesus, Toni, was that really necessary?’

‘Was what necessary? Asking you to stop when you picked a massive fight in front of my poor dad?’

‘I didn’t pick a fight!’ James really was furious. He stopped in the middle of the pavement. ‘I was just talking about plans for the future. Our future. Things we might want to do together.’

I touched my belly. ‘This is our future, James.’ And that was exactly what he’d been waiting for me to say, because he went ballistic then.

‘Is it? Is that it? Our whole future? We can never think about anything else, plan anything else, want anything else?’

‘I don’t understand . . .’

‘Don’t get me wrong, Tones, I’m thrilled as anything we’re having a baby, but sometimes . . . I think about all the things we . . . I . . . haven’t done.’

‘And you think I don’t?’ Well, right then I wanted to scream at him like a fishwife, or punch him right in the face, or storm off, all of which are not things it’s right to do in a rather nice bit of north-west London, where lots of people I went to school with still live. So instead, I said as calmly as I could, ‘You know what, James, I can’t have this conversation with you right now. I’m tired, and my feet hurt, and what happened at lunch was . . . diabolical. And we’re very bloody far from Surrey. So can we just get home? Please?’

James seemed to come to his senses and he nodded. We walked in silence to the station. We didn’t say a word on
the way to Waterloo, or all the way home to Kingston on the train, which, let me tell you, is a bloody long time not to talk.

When, finally, we were back in our own little house, James went into the kitchen and made two mugs of tea. I curled up in a miserable ball on the sofa, and he came to sit by me, putting my tea within easy reach.

‘I’m sorry—’ he began.

‘Well, you should be!’ I butted in, but then I saw his nostrils flare, and I knew I’d said the wrong thing. ‘Sorry,’ I muttered. ‘Why don’t you finish?’

I could see he was holding back a lot of anger, but he said, as calmly as he could, ‘I’m sorry we ended up rowing in front of your dad. That wasn’t my intention. But Toni . . . sometimes I feel . . . well, I feel like you don’t see me any more. Or hear me. I feel like everything is changing, and while it’s wonderful and amazing that we’re having this baby, there’s, well, there’s other stuff.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, like the fact that we can never go to the Middle East.’

‘I didn’t say never, just not three months after the baby’s born. And since when have you had this yearning to go to the Middle East?’

‘I don’t! But I might have. Or I might have a yearning to go to South America. Or to chuck in my job and be a painter. And now I can’t do any of those things.’

I hate to say it, but it sounded to me like he was whining. I tried very hard to be reasonable.

‘It isn’t the baby that stops us doing those things. It’s having a mortgage. It’s not having won the Lottery. It’s real life.’

‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘But I’m not even thirty yet, and sometimes I feel like I’m going to spend every holiday for the rest of my life at Centreparcs, and every weekend going to those horrible soft-play places that smell of wee and chips.’

Well, then I really let rip. ‘Every holiday for the rest of your
life
? Spare me the melodrama, James, really. And I don’t see why you’re the one who’s so worried about making all these sacrifices. At least at the end of it all, you’ll still have a pelvic floor and a career!’

‘It’s not a competition, Tones . . .’ he began.

‘Bloody right, because you’d lose!’

He stood up then, and walked to the door. He turned back to look at me and his face was really bleak. ‘I’m sorry; I can’t fight with you about this. Tones, you’re my best friend. The only person I ever tell my secrets to. And if I can’t tell you how I’m feeling, how I’m really feeling . . . who can I tell?’

And then he left, closing the door softly behind him.

It was the worst row we’d ever had, and to be honest, I was quite scared he wouldn’t come back. I didn’t have the first clue how to fix it or how to take back the horrible things I’d said. The truth is, James had touched a nerve. What if our lives as we knew them were over? I wasn’t ready for us to be that couple we’d seen in the coffee shop all those months ago, ignoring each other, expending all
their energy controlling their feral children. James had kicked off about travel, but what about ordinary, day-today stuff? Would I never again be able to put on a sparkly dress and gorgeous shoes and go on the lash with Rob and Caro? Would we ever go to the cinema again? And was Kate, my boss, right? Was I throwing my career away? If I took a year off, would I be past it and out of the game?

But that was ridiculous. Of course our lives weren’t over. Millions of people have children and careers, and social lives. We’d be fine. We just had to decide what our priorities would be. It was a tiny, helpless little baby, for heaven’s sake. It would have to fit in with our lives, not the other way round. We’d be hip, cool parents who took their baby everywhere. I’d once seen a couple with a baby of about six months old at a festival. The mum was carrying the baby in a sling and they’d put those giant ear protectors on it, like road-construction men wear, and they were dancing right up front to ‘Thirty Seconds to Mars’. We’d be like that. Only with better taste in music.

James came back an hour or so later. He felt awful for yelling at his pregnant wife and storming out, and I explained how I was scared too which was why I had yelled back. We managed to patch things up, and spent the next few days being extra-carefully nice to one another. We’d be fine, I kept telling myself. And the thought that something ‘patched up’ still has cracks . . . well, I pushed that to the back of my mind.

Toni was eating her way through a bag of mini muffins. Her appetite for sweet goodies seemed just endless. After fifteen years of ballet, Gemma couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten one muffin, let alone a whole bag. They’d spent the morning shopping for baby things for Toni, and they were now resting their aching feet in a little coffee shop.

Toni took a sip of her hot chocolate. ‘So if it isn’t too weird a question, who’s your birth partner? Will Ben be there? Or your mum?’

‘It’s not a weird question, just one I hadn’t thought about. I mean, I imagined I’d do it on my own.’

‘On your
own
?’

‘Well, I suppose there’ll be doctors and nurses and things, but I don’t really want anyone I know to see me, you know . . .’

‘Screaming and swearing?’

‘Well, I’m more worried about the thing Donna told us in last week’s class.’

‘Oh my God . . . that you might poo when you push the
baby out? How did I never know that?’ Toni went pink with horror.

‘I think it’s one of those secrets they only tell you when you’re already pregnant.’

‘Do you think if women knew before, none of them would do it?’

‘Exactly. And I really don’t believe what Donna said about it,’ said Gemma firmly.

‘What, that when you’re in the middle of it, you won’t really care? Me neither. I’ve ordered James to stay next to my head at all times. I don’t want him seeing me squeezing out a poop and a baby at the same time. He’ll never look at me in the same way again.’

Toni looked closely at Gemma. ‘Which brings me back to my original question. Are you serious about not having a birth partner? Won’t you be scared? If I were you, I’d want my mum with me.’