The Baby Group (31 page)

Natalie blinked and a single tear rolled down her cheek and onto the back of her hand. She was crying for Jack and for herself, but most of all for Freddie. She was crying for her baby who would lose his father before ever really knowing him.

‘And now?' she asked him, her voice unsteady.

‘Now?' Jack asked her.

‘How . . . how long have you got left?' Natalie forced the sentence out with difficulty, feeling as if with each word she spoke her heart was suffering another tiny tear.

Which was why she didn't expect Jack to laugh out loud.

‘Oh God,' he said. ‘About another sixty or seventy years. I'm not dying, Natalie – I'm cured!'

Natalie burst into uncontrollable tears.

‘Oh no, oh God.' Jack stepped towards her as if to embrace her and then thought better of it, his arms hovering before dropping heavily to his sides. ‘I'm so sorry, I keep forgetting that other people know as little about it as I did when I first found out. If I had really listened properly to my consultant at that appointment, I would have known then it's ninety per cent curable. I was in the lucky ninety per cent.'

Natalie shoved him back so hard that he fell back onto the settlee with some astonishment.

‘You bastard,' she said, her voice low with fury.

‘What?' Jack looked confused. ‘Weren't you just crying a minute ago because you thought I was dying?'

‘You total and utter arrogant bastard,' Natalie said, feeling the tumult of emotions she had been experiencing throughout this evening reaching boiling point in her chest and distilling into one hundred per cent proof rage.

‘
Did you even think about what effect your game-playing would have on me?
' She hurled the words at him. ‘You used me. You made me feel all these things, made me trust you and want you and all the time you were playing this
game
!'

‘I wasn't,' Jack insisted. ‘Not all the time. I just didn't want to . . . I couldn't tell you the truth.'

‘Why, because you'd finished needing your
distraction
?' Natalie asked him.

‘No, because I didn't want you to know that I was about to be castrated,' Jack shouted. He took a breath and lowered his voice. ‘At least that's what it felt like. I didn't want you to see me as a pathetic invalid. I still don't.'

‘What if I didn't care about that? What if I thought that the time we spent together was the best time of my life, and that I wanted to be with you even if you were bald and sick and one testicle down?'

‘Did you really feel like that?' Jack sounded surprised.

‘I don't know,' Natalie said furiously. ‘
Nobody asked me!
'

‘I didn't think it was fair . . .' Jack began, looking utterly confounded by her reaction.

‘So you were being all noble,' Natalie said scathingly.

‘Well, yes, actually.' Jack clambered to his feet and stood opposite her. ‘I did think I was being noble!'

‘Well, your nobility was sod-all good for me, Jack,' Natalie told him, her voice low now but no less fraught. She knew that this was her moment at last, and she knew that all chances of her meeting it with dignity and integrity were long gone.

‘While you were swanning off being all noble, Jack, I was left wondering what had happened. You could have at least told me that you were being noble, you could have at least told me . . .
something
!'

‘Natalie,' Jack said, looking shell-shocked and confused all at once, ‘I didn't expect any of this. All I wanted to do was to get things straight between us.'

‘Don't worry, we're going to,' Natalie told him.

‘What do you mean?' Jack asked her cautiously.

Suddenly Natalie made a grab for her bag, pulling out her wallet and flicking it open to reveal Freddie's photograph. She thrust it in Jack's face.

‘What's that?' he asked her, peering at the photo.

‘Did they cut out your brain at the same time as your testicle?' Natalie returned sharply.

‘What do you mean?' Jack looked again at the photo. ‘Oh God, you've had a baby.' He sat back with a thud on the low settle.

‘Of course, how foolish of me.' He shook his head. ‘Here I am trying to let you down gently . . . I should have known you would have moved on, met someone else – started a family.' He thought for a moment and as Natalie waited she could almost see him doing the sums in his head. He looked up at her. ‘You moved on pretty quick,' he said, looking gratifyingly offended.

‘Oh, you idiot,' Natalie seethed. ‘I told you I had something to tell you too, didn't I? Not that you listened.' She took a breath. ‘While you were in Italy being noble with your very curable cancer I was here on my own. Pregnant.'

There, she had said it, but as she looked at Jack she realised he still didn't understand what she was saying. ‘About nine months after our weekend in Venice, Jack, I gave birth to a baby boy. To your son.'

Jack's jaw dropped.

‘Congratulations, Casanova. You're a father,' Natalie told him.

Chapter Seventeen

Natalie had never thought she would be so glad to be awake rocking a screaming baby at five forty-five a.m. on a Monday morning. But she was more than glad, she was ecstatic because at least that meant that the worst weekend of her life was finally over and she could get back to her unreal life, the life where everybody liked her and she was in control.

The first thing Jack had said once the penny had finally dropped was, ‘Are you sure he's mine?'

Natalie snatched back her photo of Freddie and held it close to her chest.

‘I'm going,' she said, turning on her heel and looking for her coat.

‘Natalie, wait . . .' Jack followed her into the tiny hallway, crowding her out with his presence.

‘I didn't mean to say that, it's just a lot for me to take in. I didn't expect to find out that I had a kid!'

‘No.' Natalie looked up at him. ‘Join the club.'

‘Look, I need some time to think,' Jack said. ‘I need time to get my head around it.'

Natalie opened the front door and turned back to face him.

‘Don't bother, Jack,' she said. ‘I don't need you.' The words felt as painful as if her mouth was full of shards of broken glass. ‘I don't want you. You've got your whole life ahead of you now, and so have Freddie and I.'

‘Freddie?' Jack looked confused.

‘That's his name,' Natalie told him.

‘Oh. Right.'

‘We don't need or want you. We release you. Forget youever met me or knew about him. Stay out of our lives, please.'

She waited for what seemed like an age for him to say something; to say that he did still want her and that he did want to get to know his son. But Jack's gaze fell to his feet and all he said with a shrug was, ‘OK. OK then.'

‘Goodbye, Jack,' Natalie said as she shut the door on him for ever.

When she got home all she wanted to do was to find Freddie and hold him in her arms. She raced upstairs and then she stopped just outside her bedroom door.

Her mother was in with Freddie and she was singing to him. She was singing ‘Fly Me to the Moon' and not in a drunken sort of way, either. She had a nice voice, smoky and soothing, a voice honed on a thousand fags and countless vodkas.

Suddenly Natalie remembered something: her mother always used to sing Sinatra to her when she was little. In the bath, with bubbles in their hair, they'd sing this song together and Sandy would say that one day they would fly to the moon, just the two of them on the back of a magic bird and, once they'd got there, eat all the cheese two girls could possibly want. How could she have totally forgotten something that now seemed so vivid? Could it be because it was a happy memory? Did it suit Natalie to believe that she had never been happy with Sandy?

She pushed open the door a crack and watched as Sandy dropped a soiled nappy into the bin and then cleaned Freddie with a wipe.

‘Nana's going to get it right this time,' she cooed to the baby. ‘No leaving you on your own again, even for a second, you wriggle monster you! I don't know, you'll be all over this house before she knows what's hit her. Mummy's going to have a terrible time trying to find period-style stair gates, I tell you.' Natalie watched as her mother bent down and blew raspberries on Freddie's tummy, conjuring his wonderful gurgling laugh. ‘There's a good boy,' she said. ‘There's a lovely good boy, aren't you?'

Then Freddie peed in her face.

Natalie clapped her hand over her mouth as the stream of liquid arced upwards and hit her mother dead centre between the eyes.

‘Ugh!' Sandy exclaimed, screwing her eyes shut, and for a second Natalie forgot everything except this wonderfully silly tableau.

‘Mum!' she said, pushing the door open. ‘Are you all right?' She handed Sandy a muslin cloth that was hanging over the end of the bed.

‘A bit damp, love,' Sandy replied, chuckling as she dabbed at her face. ‘He's a real marksman!'

‘Go and wash your face, I'll finish here,' Natalie offered. She stood well back as Sandy passed and then went over to where Freddie was lying on the change table, clearly delighted to be nappyless.

‘Hello, baby.' Natalie looked down at him, resting the palm of her hand lightly on his tummy. ‘Remember I promised you that I was going to be the best possible mother you could ever hope for?' she asked him. He kicked his legs enthusiastically in response. ‘Well, we know where we stand now, darling. We've got nothing left to worry about except us. Except you and me.' Natalie took a deep breath and made herself smile. ‘And we're going to be fine on our own.'

‘Not quite on your own,' Sandy said, appearing in the door frame with a damp but clean face. Natalie tried her best to hide her distress, but even her dissembling skills weren't quite up to strength this time.

‘What's happened, love?' Sandy asked her.

Natalie picked Freddie up and held his cheek to hers.

‘Oh, Mum,' she managed to say through the threat of tears.

‘Come on.' Sandy opened her arms and for the first time in twenty years Natalie went to her mother's embrace, and let her hold both her and Freddie.

‘I'm here, love,' Sandy said. ‘I'm here for you.'

Natalie had cried for a long time, not in a dramatic or noisy wailing way. Not the easy come, easy go hormonal tears that had become such a familiar part of her life recently. She cried because she was in pain. She had just sat down on the edge of her bed with Freddie in her arms and her forehead resting on Sandy's shoulders and the tears had fallen. Sandy hadn't asked her anything more and she hadn't volunteered anything. Eventually Freddie had dozed off and sometime after that Natalie's tears stopped.

‘I'm sorry,' she said pulling herself into an upright position suddenly aware of being vulnerable around Sandy. ‘It must be tiredness, and the business meeting didn't go as well as I hoped.'

Sandy looked at her sceptically.

‘You don't have to tell me anything . . .' she said, clearly hopeful that Natalie would relate everything that had led to her daughter's misery.

Natalie thought about telling her the whole story, and a large part of her wanted to. But then she realised she still couldn't. This moment between her and Sandy, this closeness, was new and most welcome. But Natalie didn't know if it was real or temporary, some kind of glitch in their difficult relationship that might vanish all too soon. She sensed it was a fragile connection between them, and she didn't want Sandy to destroy the one good thing that had happened that night by opening her mouth and putting her foot in it. Besides, she didn't know that there was anyone in the world she felt ready to tell what had happened between her and Jack that night, not even sweetly understanding Tiffany who had listened without judgement to the truth about her and how Freddie was conceived. Somehow in the space of less than an hour she had ricocheted from thinking that Jack might still possibly want her, to finding out about his cancer, to listening to him tell her in so many words that he didn't want to know about his son. It had turned out to be the worst-case scenario she had feared all along, but instead of being able to face it head on she felt as if she'd been played like a pinball through a machine.

‘I'm tired,' Natalie told Sandy, nodding down at sleeping Freddie. ‘I think I'll join him. But thank you, Mum.'

Sandy smiled. ‘Glad to be of help,' she said, leaning over and kissing Natalie on the forehead. ‘Goodnight, love.'

Things seemed to go depressingly quickly back to normal between Natalie and her mother after that. When Natalie, in need of a glass of water after feeding Freddie, found Sandy sitting in the kitchen just after one in the morning half-cut and with a drink in her hand, she realised that one tearful hug did not mend everything. It was a spectacularly awful sight that turned out to be even more visually disturbing than the drunken stupor that Natalie was accustomed to. Although the stupor usually involved drooling and Richter-scale snoring, it could at least be ignored. Awake though, and, in Sandy's own words, ‘more than a bit squiffy', she was much less easy to avoid. Sitting under the harsh kitchen lights in her short nightie, legs akimbo, she looked like a too scary reject from a horror film featuring the zombie-nympho-undead.

Natalie was depressed further to have been right not to trust her mother with any details about what had happened with Jack. And she was stung that Sandy had felt the need to turn to the bottle so soon after they had had, in Natalie's eyes at least, something of a breakthrough.