Stop the Clock (16 page)

She hadn’t piled on the weight, but there was only so much you could do with tunic tops, empire-line dresses and forgiving jackets. Her hair had the implausible bounce and vigour of a celebrity’s crowning glory in a shampoo ad, she’d gone up from an A cup to a C, her belly button was no longer an inny and she had a weird black line bisecting her belly from her navel to her pubes. The smell of cooked cabbage made her want to vomit, and after every lunch break she had to
fight the urge to crawl under her desk and nap.

The changes weren’t just physical, either. She had discovered a perturbing ability to cry; it had turned out to be a very bad idea to watch that film about unmarried, institutionalized mothers in 1950s Ireland. Yet her response to stress had slowed down; deadlines didn’t fill her with adrenalin as headily as they once had. Perhaps she just didn’t care quite as much. The baby thrashed around and pummelled her insides so insistently that it was impossible to forget how much her life was about to change, and while her old priorities hadn’t been swept aside entirely, they seemed to have been suspended.

She carried, in her wallet, the printout she’d been given after the twelve-week scan, showing a smudge of white curled against shades of grey. If you didn’t know what it was, you couldn’t have guessed; it looked like the ghost of a bean. But she had been told it was a boy. Her son! At the twenty-week scan – a couple of weeks ago now – she’d been startled by the array of bones he had sprouted, all as sharply visible as the remains of a dinosaur exhibited in a museum: the spikes of ribs, the limbs, the skull. She was gestating something as hard and enduring as a fossil, something that was, if not yet visibly human, at least obviously animal . . . and much too big now for its life-size image to fit easily into a wallet.

She knew from her baby books – her current guilty pleasure – that he was now growing toenails and fingernails, had capillaries blooming with blood beneath the skin, could hear her heartbeat, her voice, the
grumbling of her stomach before mealtimes. So far, nobody had said, ‘So when’s it due?’ or offered her a seat on the tube, but surely it wouldn’t be long. When she was in her swimming costume the real reason for her enhanced embonpoint was immediately obvious, but so far she’d managed to avoid bumping into anyone she knew in the pool.

She fancied that, just lately, she’d been the focus of sidelong, calculating glances from some of her female colleagues, most notably Anthea Trask, the lissom mother of five, but also, lately, Rowena Fix, the fearsomely efficient features editor, and even Julia, Dan’s girlfriend, who seemed to be surviving in her position as Rowena’s general dogsbody. Maybe they were trying to work out if she’d had a boob job. It was sod’s law that now Tina finally had a cleavage worth drawing attention to, showing it off was the last thing she wanted to do.

Dan had barely looked at her at all. Soon after she had decided to keep the baby she had bumped into him coming into the building with Julia one morning. After that she kept seeing them together, usually at lunchtime, when they paraded up and down the road outside the office, holding hands, and laughing at each other’s jokes, and looking like the picture of young love. Once she’d even walked in on them in the basement room where spare back issues were kept – though mercifully they’d been doing nothing more intimate than gazing into each others’ eyes.

She knew it was unreasonable to be hurt, and yet . . . She told herself that what she missed was the bantering,
flirty friendship she’d once had with Dan, and she’d wrecked that as soon as she’d slept with him – it wasn’t really Julia’s fault. It did occur to her to wonder whether Julia knew that something had happened between her and Dan and had put an embargo on any further contact, but she dismissed that as self-aggrandizing; why should Julia be jealous?

She kept going back to that awful conversation . . .
‘Really? You look younger.’
So humiliating. But thinking about it now, hadn’t what he’d said actually been rather innocuous? Couldn’t it even be interpreted as a sort of compliment? To be sure, it had been an awkward moment, but was it possible that that was more to do with her own feelings about having been left behind in the race than anything he had said?

But then . . . it was irrelevant now whether or not he’d been put off because she was at an age where she might want to chivvy things along towards commitment and reproduction. She
was
having a baby, and it might or might not be his. There was no way that was going to be welcome news.

Mulling it over, she realized how little she knew him; she found it impossible to predict his reactions. Would he be angry? Upset? Would he push her to have a paternity test done as soon as possible – even though she had decided she wanted to wait until after the baby was born, because testing in utero carried a small risk of miscarriage and now she had decided to have this baby, she really didn’t want to lose it? Would he press her to tell him who the other candidate for paternity was, even if she said she couldn’t? Would he say the
magic words – ‘Whatever you want, I’ll support you’ – or would he accuse her of wrecking his life?

Justin’s response was much easier to foresee. He had forbidden her to contact him, so from the outset he would be angry, but coldly so, and his first concern would be for his reputation. He would warn her to keep him out of it. He would hint darkly that embittered ex-girlfriends tended to come off worst if they attempted to go public about their relationships with powerful men. And he would wash his hands of her and make sure she knew that she was on her own.

Which was how she felt: alone, with only the growing baby for company. Surely that was the best, the safest, the least complicated way. She didn’t want anything from anybody else. She didn’t need anything from anybody else. All she wanted to do was keep her head down, hang on to her job and her sanity, and stay healthy. And so she drifted along in a soporific, self-contained state, lying low, biding her time, knowing that sooner or later she would have to cope with the reaction to her news, but not yet quite ready to invite it.

She would have liked to tell Natalie, and Lucy too, but she could hardly go to her friends before she’d brought herself to disclose her pregnancy to her parents or her former lovers. She felt bad about keeping a bit of a distance from them, given that Natalie was trying to adjust to life with her new baby, and Lucy was having an awful time, with Adam gone and her mother in a nursing home. But right now, she needed to focus on looking after herself . . . and although she felt very sorry for Lucy, she still hadn’t
quite
got over the show
down over her column back in the spring.
You’re on your own, you haven’t got a man, and you’re running out of time.
She was glad they’d patched things up, but the words couldn’t be unsaid.

It hadn’t actually been all that difficult to avoid her friends – so many people were away in July and August, or expected you to be. And somehow, so far, she had got away with it. She’d gone out with Megan Morton, her actress pal, but Megan had been too busy going on about her planned reality TV debut, and checking to see if anyone had recognized her, to join the dots between Tina’s virgin Bloody Mary and mystery weight gain. A weekend with Lucilla Gordon in Norfolk would have been trickier to manage, but at the last minute Lucilla’s baby came down with chicken pox and Tina was able to stay home with a clear conscience.

Her parents had been more of a problem. After getting through her dad’s seventieth back in May, she’d felt she’d earned a couple of months’ reprieve. But Cecily had had other ideas, and Tina had been obliged to make a string of excuses to get out of going home: deadlines, summer flu, press trips, friends who needed her support. She’d just about managed to wriggle out of going down to Cornwall for the August Bank Holiday weekend, as she was due to work on the Monday. But actually, saying no had made her feel sad. It was more than a year since she’d stayed in the Old Schoolhouse, and she missed it. Now, more than ever, it would be good to be reminded that her childhood was not just an increasingly distant memory, and that the scene of all those long-ago summer holidays was still essentially
unchanged, and could be revisited any time she was free to go.

Even before she got her own column, Tina had noticed that the articles she wrote were umbilically connected to how she felt about whatever was going on in her private life. After she’d started seeing Justin she had found herself writing repeatedly about political mistresses, and middle-class career girls who were apparently respectable but nursed dark secrets, such as heroin or cocaine habits, which they somehow fitted in round office hours and funded with weekend lap dancing.

In the last few months just about everything seemed to have been about mothers and babies. Her latest assignment was a feature about women’s experiences of childbirth, which she suspected was not going to be reassuring.

She did the first case study interview with the editorial administrator, an unflappable, pragmatic woman who was currently on maternity leave, and who, under cover of anonymity, spoke candidly about her desire to suffer as little as possible, and how it came to be thwarted.

When Tina reviewed her notes after finishing their phone conversation, she decided she wouldn’t bother
with a birth plan either. Going by Natalie’s experience, they seemed to be pretty pointless, except as a psychological sop. Anyway, it would be fitting for an accidental conception to be followed by an unplanned birth.

She looked up to see Julia approaching her. God, she was slim! Admittedly it was quite a nasty pinstriped shirt she was wearing, but at least she had a waist.

Julia came to a halt at a slight distance from Tina’s desk. She looked rather upset – bad day, perhaps. Julia’s boss, Rowena Fix, was a hardened marathon runner who was known to expect similar feats of endurance from her underlings, so it wouldn’t be surprising.

Tina attempted a smile, and Julia’s lips twitched in what might have passed for a friendly response, if she hadn’t looked quite so miserable.

Julia said, ‘I just picked up a call from reception for you. There’s a woman down there who says she’s your mother,’ and hurried off.

It was a quarter to one. Lunch, or at least a brief conversation, was unavoidable. Tina shouldered her handbag, took a deep breath, and went downstairs to meet her maker.

Cecily was sitting in one of the modish armchairs provided for waiting visitors, just in front of the framed and wall-mounted front cover that warned women not to wait to have babies: ‘Scientists reveal fresh insights into the fertility time bomb’. She was flicking through a complimentary copy of the
Post
, and for a moment Tina was able to see her as a stranger might: as a
conscientious, comfortable older woman who cared about appearances, and was doing her best to keep the ravages of time at bay.

Cecily’s skin had a buffed, healthy sheen suggestive of regular exercise, good lunches and quality moisturizer, and her immaculately bobbed hair was tinted blonde, a shade or two lighter than Tina’s own. She was dressed in a cotton blazer, T-shirt, slacks and pumps in shades of white, cream and beige, with a narrow scarf in copper and bronze silk wound round her neck – to disguise lines and droop, perhaps, or to add a dash of panache, or both. Somewhere under the scarf, Tina knew, was the small gold cross that Cecily always wore.

Then Cecily looked up, and Tina was reminded that her mother’s face was softer and rounder – more motherly, in fact – than her own, which had her father’s sharpness.

Cecily’s expression was tense and anxious. For a moment, for the split second in which she spotted Tina coming towards her, the fretfulness gave way to unthinking pleasure, only to be replaced, in rapid succession, by conjecture and assessment, diagnosis, shock and dismay. From the sudden tight set of Cecily’s mouth Tina deduced a suppressed question that would almost certainly spill out before very much longer:
So what about the father?

Cecily looked away first. She tucked the free copy of the
Post
into a John Lewis carrier bag – she must have been shopping round the corner, as a pretext for popping in – and got to her feet. Even though Tina had the advantage of an extra couple of inches, she
suddenly felt very small, and she was sure that she was blushing.

She knew the natural thing to do – the behaviour the receptionist would expect – was to attempt some sort of embrace, and peck her mother on the cheek. But somehow this was not possible.

‘Well,’ she said, and her voice sounded unexpectedly shrill and nervous, ‘this is a surprise.’

‘It is,’ Cecily agreed.

‘You should have told me you were coming.’

‘If I had, I imagine you wouldn’t be here,’ Cecily said. ‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’

That night Tina did not sleep well. She worked herself up into an impotent fury with Cecily for being so judgemental . . . so resolutely undelighted . . . so
ashamed
. For heaven’s sake, it was the twenty-first century! Tina had every right to bring a child into the world on her own if she wanted to. Perhaps some of Cecily’s more devout friends would disapprove, or be pitying, as if Tina had let the family down, but damn it, this was a new life, a first grandchild – surely it wasn’t really something to pull such a long face about?

OK, so perhaps Tina hadn’t handled it very well. She should have taken control, managed the disclosure, faced both her parents down at a time of her choosing. The truth was, she hadn’t told them because she’d been scared of how they would react. Oh, she knew they would come round, especially when the baby arrived; she knew she should give them time to adjust, and make allowances for their beliefs about family life,
according to which there was a right way to do these things, which involved matrimony, and a wrong way, which was everything else. They might manage to love the baby, but they would never ditch the beliefs, which meant that, in their eyes, she was a failure.