The Baby Group (30 page)

‘He didn't sound Italian,' Sandy observed.

‘He speaks very good English,' Natalie told her, slipping off her nursing bra under the sleeves of her top and exchanging it with some difficulty for an underwired black number that was now slightly too small for her.

‘Well, I'm here,' Sandy said. ‘If you ever want to talk.'

‘Thanks, I'll bear that in mind,' Natalie said, pulling her black chiffon shirt down over the bra and then undoing a couple of buttons, not, she told herself, because she wanted to look sexy but because if she didn't they would ping off anyway. She paused by her mother, considered kissing her on the cheek and instead bent to the baby chair that was positioned safely in the middle of the rug.

‘See you later, buster,' she said, planting a kiss on Freddie's nose. ‘Try not to let Nana Sandy drop you out of any first-floor windows.'

When Jack opened the front door to the flat he looked different. Dressed casually in a T-shirt and combats, he looked younger, less formal and forebidding then he had done in his suit. With his face taut with tension, a little gaunt even, Natalie thought that without the moonshine and frisson of yesterdayhe should not be the kind of man to get your heart racing. No wonder Suze hadn't accepted his invitation for drinks. He wasn't her type at all; come to think of it, the way he looked right now he wasn't Natalie's type either. But it didn't mean, she realised regretfully, that when she was confronted with him, a shadow of stubble on his jaw and perhaps the evidence of a late night around his eyes, she didn't still love to look at him, she didn't admire every contour of his face.

‘You're here,' he said, this time with a weary smile.

‘I am, right on time,' Natalie observed.

Jack nodded and stepped back to allow Natalie into the communal hallway. The flat on the top floor, he told her, and he led the way up the stairs.

Once inside the tiny flat Natalie slipped off her coat and handed it to him, closing her eyes for the briefest of seconds as she became suddenly aware of the close proximity between them.

‘Come through,' Jack said. He led her into a rather small sitting room, where a real coal fire was burning in the grate and the walls were lined with shelves filled with what seemed like hundreds of books.

‘All Minnie's,' Jack said. ‘She loves to read. Especially the steamy stuff. I told her I'm not sure it's good for her at eighty-three, but she says it should be prescribed on the NHS. She's touring Europe with her toy boy right now. He's seventy-four.'

The two virtual strangers stood in the small room, looking around at almost anything except each other. Natalie could feel the pressure of all the unspoken history they had created between themselves in their short acquaintance steadily building towards a thunderous climax.

‘Look, Jack, there's . . .'

‘Natalie, the thing is . . .'

They both spoke at once.

‘Please sit down.' Jack gestured to a chintz-covered wingback chair by the fireplace.

‘I need to tell you something a bit . . . massive,' Natalie said, twisting her fingers in knots as she spoke. Jack didn't really seem to hear.

‘Natalie, the reason I asked you here was because, well, I have to be honest, I didn't really want to see you again, but then there you were standing in front of me and it made me think about that weekend we met. I just wanted to clear the air between us. It seems like the right thing to do, because I want you to know that the reason it didn't go any further wasn't because of you – it was me, you see . . .'

‘Jack.' Natalie stopped him in his tracks. ‘You're going too fast. You don't have to tell me what happened last year – it really doesn't matter any more, what matters is . . .'

‘It does actually matter.' Jack was insistent. ‘To me at least – will you let me explain, please?'

Natalie wanted to say no, she wanted to say that what she had to tell him was absolutely, positively the most massive thing that he was ever likely to hear. But somehow she couldn't bring herself to do it, partly because listening to his excuses for not being in touch would delay the inevitable a few minutes longer, but also because she thought her news deserved top billing.

‘OK,' she said with a shrug.

Jack nodded decisively. ‘Wait there.'

He returned with two glasses and a bottle of wine. He poured out the first glass and handed it to Natalie. She looked fondly at it and wished she could drink it in one, but she knew from recent experience that any chance of her behaving with dignity and integrity would fly out of the window if she did, so instead she simply held it – like a talisman. Or an arsenic pill, just in case things got really bad.

‘So.' Jack sat down opposite her on a low settle, his long legs folded awkwardly as he leant forward, resting his elbows on his knees and cupping his wine glass between his palms. He looked like he'd eaten too much of the wrong side of the magic mushroom from
Alice in Wonderland
.

‘Right.' He took a breath and looked into his glass as he spoke. ‘Here we go. The day I met you was rather an unusual day,' he said. ‘It was a day when I did things I would never normally do, behaved in a way I would never normally dream of. I was in shock, I suppose.'

Natalie didn't know she was biting her bottom lip until she felt the sharp pain. She realised she was afraid.

‘In shock?' she asked him. ‘Why?'

‘Well.' Jack looked uncomfortable. ‘It's still hard for me to talk about – I still find it a bit embarrassing. It's stupid, I know, but I think it's because men never normally discuss these sorts of things, least of all with women . . . I don't know how to tell you this but . . .'

‘Is it that you are gay and only realised after spending the weekend with me?' Natalie asked him abruptly.

‘God no!' Jack exclaimed. ‘I would have thought that you of all people would have known I wasn't gay.' He looked rather offended.

‘Well, are you married then, have you got kids and you fancied playing away for a weekend and you regret it terribly – is it that?'

Jack looked at her.

‘It's so strange that we don't know each other better when I feel like I've known you for years,' he said. ‘And anyway, I'm not the sort of man who would cheat on his wife if he had one, which I don't.'

‘Jack, please, just tell me what I'm here for,' Natalie implored.

‘OK, I will,' he said. ‘The day I met you I'd just found out I was going to die.'

‘Die?' Natalie couldn't comprehend what he was saying. ‘Like be dead?'

‘Yes.' Jack smiled fleetingly. ‘Like be dead. I was on the Tube on my way back from my consultant. I'd tested positive for cancer for . . .' Jack blushed, clearly struggling to muster the words. ‘Um, for testicular cancer, that's cancer of the . . . er . . . ball . . . area.'

‘Christ,' Natalie said, because nothing else seemed appropriate, and because of all the things she had expected him to say that was not one of them.

‘I heard him say “You've got cancer” and I didn't hear much after that,' Jack went on, looking into the fire. ‘Except that it was stage two cancer, and that it had spread from my groin into the lymph nodes in my belly which would kill me if left untreated. It's a strange thing to be suddenly faced with your own mortality, Natalie.'

He watched her for a few seconds in the flickering firelight. Natalie felt glued to her seat, unable to move a muscle, not even her face. Cancer?

‘So I was sitting on the Tube, stuck in that tunnel, and I could almost hear the wasted seconds of my life ticking away. And all I could think was, “This is it.” I was going to die. I'd never do the things I wanted to do with my life, took for granted I'd be able to because I'd always thought I'd live for ever. Take a balloon ride across the Serengeti, gamble my shirt in Vegas, be a husband one day, be a father. I was scared shitless. More than that, I kept thinking Ihad to make every last minute of my life important, make it count for something.' Jack looked back into the fire and smiled as he remembered that morning. ‘And then I saw you, sitting opposite me on the train. I remember you looked a little pink from the heat and you had a couple of buttons undone on your top.' Jack was almost shy as he a flickered glance in that direction. ‘Like you do now and your hair was all kind of wild and I looked at you and I thought, “Oh God, what if I never have sex again?” '

Natalie sat back a little in her chair.

‘So I just happened to be in the right place at the right time?' she said, finding her voice at last. ‘If another woman had been sitting there who looked halfway shaggable you'd have picked her up?'

Jack sighed and took a long, thoughtful sip of his wine.

‘I don't know,' he admitted. ‘Maybe. I didn't have anything planned. I didn't really know what I was doing or who I was being. All I knew was that I didn't want to go back to the office and waste more seconds of my life on spreadsheets and meetings. I wanted to
do
something,
feel
something! I didn't plan to take you to Venice. It just sort of happened. When I started talking properly to you at lunch I suddenly really wanted you to see the city. And I wanted to be the one to show it to you. I was being selfish, Natalie – I wasn't thinking about anything apart from what I wanted and on that day at that time I wanted you. I wanted a distraction from the truth.'

‘I see,' Natalie managed to say.

‘I didn't want to tell you all this,' Jack went on. ‘I didn't ever want to have to see you and look you in the eyes and talk to you about my gonads, or rather the lack of them. But then I did see you and seeing you made me think.' He looked directly at Natalie for a second. ‘That time we spent together was really special.' He smiled ruefully. ‘I mean, I didn't just imagine it, did I? You felt it too, right? Otherwise that would be seriously embarrassing, almost as embarrassing as talking to you about my gonads.' Jack laughed but Natalie couldn't see the funny side.

‘It was special,' she said quietly. ‘It really was.'

‘I couldn't believe what was happening. I couldn't believe that this woman, the first woman I'd ever picked up on the Tube, was so great.'

The first woman. Natalie pondered. Maybe she had been the one to start him off on his serial conquests, among whose victims Suze might have been included. She didn't know if the thought made her feel better or worse.

‘Everything about you was so great,' Jack told her. ‘Your sexiness, your laugh and most of all your openness. It was so refreshing to meet a woman who wasn't into game-playing or pretending to be something she wasn't. You made me forget everything my consultant had told me and for those couple of days I felt like I'd never have to think about it again. And then you had to go back to London and I realised . . .' He trailed off, his face full of uncertainty again.

‘What?' Natalie asked him.

‘Reality set in,' Jack said quietly. ‘I was about to undergo surgery to remove my testicle and lymph glands, followed by a long and difficult treatment that would mean I'd feel really ill for a long time, and very likely lose all my hair. I had to face up to that. I knew I couldn't keep running away and pretending that everything was fine, not this time. There was no more time for distractions.'

Natalie said nothing. She couldn't rationalise what was happening. She had been right all along. Jack really was a completely different man from the one she thought she had met that day on the Tube. But he was completely different in a completely different way from what she had imagined. He'd told her all she'd had to do was to be sitting right in front of him to be whisked off to Venice. He could have chosen almost any woman to distract him from his illness. The randomness of it all stunned her. Consciously or not, she supposed that up until that moment she had always believed that she and Jack were meant to be together, if only for that weekend. That Freddie was meant to happen. And yet if he had got on a different train, or even the next carriage, everything that had happened to her in the last year would have evaporated into thin air. It seemed inconceivable that her life could be thrown so arbitrarily into total disarray.

‘I got back to London the day after you left,' Jack said, when it became clear Natalie wasn't going to speak. ‘I had a hospital appointment where they talked through my treatment with me, explained about the surgery and the three cycles of chemotherapy that would follow. They told me I'd be feeling like shit for the best part of a year. Look at me, I'm not exactly Mr Universe to begin with – I don't jog or train with weights or anything, but I'd always thought that I could if I wanted to one day – and then to find out that I wouldn't even have the strength to lift a coffee cup. Funny really. Like a bad joke.'

But Natalie was about as far from wanting to laugh as any woman could possibly be. Instead, tears were standing in her eyes as what Jack had been telling her finally began to sink in.

‘I was alone here in London, there wasn't any family or really close friends here that I felt I could ask to care for me, so I decided to go home, to my mum and dad to have my treatment in Italy.' Jack sighed. ‘Look, Natalie, I want you to know that if it hadn't been for the cancer I would have called you. I would have wanted to see you again and maybe things might have been very different. And now . . . well, that's what I wanted you to know. I know that we've missed our chance, our moment has passed and it's too late to go back, even if we wanted to. But it matters to me that you know why.'