Foetal Attraction (24 page)

Harriet’s mock-Tudor mansion, or ‘joke oak’ as Gillian would call it, was situated in a rain-varnished valley in the Chilterns. The house was full of various other strays, temporarily adopted. There was a reformed hard-core porn actress completing her autobiography. The daughter of a Tory MP who’d just got out of prison on a drugs charge. A few god-children who’d run away from parents who wouldn’t let them have sex at home. A couple of survivors of acquaintance rape. Two spokeslesbians for the eradication of male self-glorification in history. And Maddy, the more traditional waif – pregnant and penniless.

‘We’ll put you in the blue room,’ Harriet enthused. What this meant, Maddy was to find out later that night, was that blue would be the colour of her lips as she froze to death. During her first night Maddy heard gurgling noises and got terribly excited thinking that the central heating was finally kicking in … but it was only the spokeslesbians next door, having sex.

The frostbite was not the only thing that made living at Harriet’s challenging. There were also the endless lectures on diet and health habits. Harriet was Chief Inspector of the Pregnancy Police Force. Maddy was not allowed to consume soft cheese or coffee, sip a
glass
of Christmas cheer or sit on the grass in case the soil was infected with something called toxoplasmosis – a microscopic parasite found in dog faeces. Harriet had no dogs.

Not drinking was the worst. It made parties a torture. Staying sober while everyone else was sloshed was like watching a film in a language Maddy didn’t understand. In slow motion. With no subtitles. It was like not getting the punchline of a joke, over and over and over.

The New Year’s Eve party Harriet took her to at the residence of some dreary Oxford don was just such a torture. The place was packed with pontificating professors and their glum-bum wives in evening gowns and galoshes. The men were as drunk as the Lords they hoped to become. And their women felt compelled to regale Maddy with every labia-tearing, blood-spurting detail of their labours. Two sentences in and the conversation would eddy in terrifying circles closer and closer to the agony, the stitches, the ‘you’ll never have sex again’s. But that torment was a flea bite in comparison with the pain Maddy underwent at the appearance of Alex and his wife Felicity. Maddy bit her lip. She smiled politely. She refused to shriek. The bemused hostess merely wondered why the young woman Harriet had brought had suddenly taken the cheese knife and stabbed the Roquefort to death.

The waiter proffered Maddy a glass of champagne.
She
grabbed it and gulped gratefully. ‘Would Modom like a refill?’

‘No,’ Harriet answered for her, sweeping into view and swiping the glass from Maddy’s hand. Felicity followed in her wake, an aghast Alex in tow, his face as distressed as his denims.

Maddy desperately reached for a fresh glass from the tray.

Harriet seized her wrist. ‘Madeline, do you really want the child to be mentally retarded?’

‘What are you? Its
agent
? Besides, it already
is
retarded,’ Maddy growled, looking directly at Alex. ‘By its gene stock.’

‘Gene stock …’ Alex laughed nervously. ‘You make him sound like a soup.’

‘It’s a
her
, actually.’

Alex got busy shredding his paper napkin into some origami creation.

‘Hello,’ Alex’s wife salvaged the agonizing silence, extending her hand. ‘Felicity Drake.’ She was slim, with a turban of auburn hair and a perfect complexion and she was wearing a casual but Capital ‘E’ Elegant Chanel suit.

In her voluminous brown maternity dress, Maddy felt as though she were trapped inside a dried cicada skin. She offered the hand she had recently reclaimed from Harriet’s clutches. ‘Madeline.’ The grasp, Maddy noticed, was firm and friendly. ‘Madeline Wolfe.’

‘And this is my husb—’

‘We’ve already had the pleasure.’ Maddy surveyed his face with optometrical attention to detail. He couldn’t look her in the eye.

‘Well done in the bun-oven department.’ Alex’s wife patted Maddy’s protruding stomach. ‘I always felt it was good luck when someone rubbed my bulge. Do feel, Alex. It’s
lovely
!’ Alex and Maddy simultaneously shrivelled and shrank back. ‘Oh, don’t worry about
him
. He’s harmless. Monogamy is probably curable if caught in the early stages, but it’s too late for us, isn’t it, darling?’ Alex, having destroyed his paper napkin, now seemed to be knotting
himself
into some kind of traditional Japanese paper ornament. ‘I’ve just let him go off for a weekend to
Paris
for a seminar. And you know how sex obsessed those French women are! It’s all they ever talk about.’

‘Really?’ Maddy said tersely.

‘But that’s all it is. Talk,’ Alex blustered. ‘The French just talk about sex so they don’t have to talk about money.’

‘Better than the Americans,’ Harriet pontificated, swigging Maddy’s champagne and topping up the empty glass with mineral water before handing it back. ‘They only talk about money because they don’t want to talk about sex.’

‘And we English?’ asked Felicity.

‘The English,’ Maddy’s eyes bored into a withering Alex, ‘don’t talk.’

‘Really?’ Ferreting through her handbag, Felicity
uncased
an eyebrow pencil and poised it above a pristine napkin. ‘I could get a column out of this … Go on.’

‘As far as I can see, you carry around invisible crocodile-infested moats at all times. With no drawbridges. The father of my child for example …’ Alex’s face went the colour of cold porridge. ‘He hasn’t even told his wife.’

‘Oh, husbands never tell their wives anything. I have to sneak through Alex’s diary and appointment book to find out what he’s up to.’

The waiter glided by with a tray of nibbles. Maddy seized one. But Harriet confiscated it en route to her mouth and shook her finger admonishingly. ‘No soft cheeses. It’ll be bad for baby.’

‘And what about me?’ Maddy asked. ‘Don’t I count? What am
I?
A pouch?’

‘You sneak through my diary?’ Alex asked, horrified.

‘It’s not his fault he can’t communicate,’ Felicity expounded. ‘I blame his public school. That’s what they’re raised on. The three Bs. Bovril, buggery and bullshit.’

‘But I thought you were the Working-Class Boy Made Good from Grimsby?’ Maddy demanded. ‘I mean, at least that’s what I read somewhere …’

‘Good God, no,’ Felicity guffawingly answered for him. ‘That’s the image he likes to cultivate. Alex is middle-class with affectations of lower-class origins. He actually went to a minor public school in Surrey.
And
then to London University. His father was a bank manager, but we keep that really quiet, don’t we, darling?’

‘Felicity,’ Alex reprimanded, squirming uncomfortably.

‘He’s smart enough, I’ll give him that. Ever since I’ve known Alex, he’s just talked more and more properly, because any
genuine
working-class boy always tries to be posher. You see?’

‘Don’t exaggerate, Flick.’ Alex’s eyes fidgeted around the room looking for an escape route. ‘The whole class issue is a thing of the past. England’s opening up. Until recently, one wasn’t even allowed into the Royal Enclosure if one was divorced!’

‘It only referred to guilty parties,’ Harriet the historian corrected, scoffing the cubes of deep-fried Brie that Maddy was forbidden to eat.

‘Oh,’ Maddy enquired crustily, ‘there’s an innocent party in an affair? I always thought it took two?’ Alex was now jiving from foot to foot.

‘How can you say the class system is eroding, Alex?’ Felicity chided. ‘It will never happen as long as we’ve got the Royal Family. When it comes to royalty, the English lefties are the worst,’ she confided to Maddy. ‘They’ve got worn patches on their trouser knees from all that secret practice for the knighthood or peerage. Have you noticed that?’

‘Well, it did surprise me the way they espouse Republicanism … then cream their jeans when
they
get the invitation to the Palace garden party.’

A convulsive start shook Alex’s frame from head to toe. He inspected the floor coverings as though contemplating fitting something identical in his own home.

‘Absolutely. Alex got one of those recently. I refused to go.’

‘Me too,’ Maddy said bluntly, glaring at him. ‘Though I’m told a lot of women would
kill
to go.’ If
looks
could kill she would’ve been up on a third-degree murder charge. Though a jury of women, she felt, would never convict her.

Felicity smiled warmly. ‘Well, Madeline Wolfe. That man of yours doesn’t know what he’s missing out on.’

‘Oh, I think he does. He’s just a true blue mongrel bastard … And I’m not referring to his lineage.’

‘Surely he wouldn’t have just abandoned you with no reason?’ Alex said, perspiration beading his forehead. ‘For a lot of middle-aged, married men … I mean,’ he stammered, ‘I take it that he’s married and um, middle-aged …’

‘Oh, ancient.’ She glared at him. ‘Prehistoric. I do wreck-diving for a living.’

‘… It’s a climactic time in life. A time to be alone.’ Despite the cold, a rivulet of sweat ran behind Alex’s ear. ‘To get in touch with their fundamental masculinity—’

‘Really?’ Maddy hooted flippantly. ‘I’ve never
known
a man who can keep his hands
off
his fundamental masculinity.’

Felicity chortled. She had a loud, shameless laugh which Maddy felt was packed with sexual promise. A laugh, she realized, not unlike her own.

‘You may laugh,’ Alex bleated, ‘but men are in a heads you lose, tails you lose situation.
We’re
the ones who are oppressed.
We’re
the ones who have heart attacks and die earlier.
We’re
the ones who have to go to war. And be good in a bloody crisis. And not cry. Jesus, we’re still not allowed into the bloody lifeboat!’

‘Good God, Alexander. You’re not contemplating making me into a Men’s Movement Widow, are you? Don’t you think it’s pathetic,’ Felicity asked Maddy, ‘the way all those men run off to their “Men’s Consciousness Raising Weekends”, leaving their wives at home with all the housework and the screaming offspring? It’s bad enough ironing your shirts, darling, without doing your emotional laundry as well.’ She patted Maddy’s tummy once more. ‘Believe me, you’re better off without a husband. Alex came to my birth and distinguished himself by saying loudly, “
How
long is this going to take?”, and “Can I use my mobile phone now?” ’

Britain’s leading Feminist sniffed contemptuously. ‘It’s beyond me why intelligent women marry at all!’

‘This is
England
, Harriet,’ Felicity countered fearlessly. ‘One must marry to stave off hypothermia.’

Maddy had longed to meet Mrs Alexander Drake
face
to face, so that they could thrash it out, woman to woman. And now here they were. But there was nothing to thrash. So far they agreed on absolutely everything. It was most unnerving. Alex had so often regaled her with a litany of his wife’s faults, that she’d been prepared to detest everything about her. But this woman seemed kind, not cruel. She probably even did the weekly wash on the gentle cycle, for God’s sake. Nor was she a melancholic moralist. Felicity Drake had a sense of humour drier than an AA meeting.

As a crowd bubbled around Alex, seeking anecdotes, Maddy sought her escape. She felt she could haemorrhage from grief at any moment. She made her way through the bustle and crush of the manor and waddled across to the summer house. Boarded up, it sat brooding on the lawn. The swimming pool was sheeted in a tarpaulin for the winter. Recklessly, Maddy stepped from terra firma on to this makeshift trampoline and bounced forlornly. The canvas membrane echoed her own swollen form. She was all liquid. Sloshing. Slurping. An ocean of amniotic fluid.

‘I suppose you’re going to kill me,’ came a voice from the shadows.

She wasn’t startled. ‘Put it this way: don’t plan to spend your pension.’

‘I haven’t stopped thinking of you … I’ve missed you. It’s been so long.’

‘Has it? I didn’t notice.’ Maddy rebounded
starward
. ‘How time flies when you’re suicidal.’

‘Look, things have been very difficult. I’ve been trying to save the Northern square-lipped rhinoceros from extinction.’

‘Don’t give me that naturalist crap. You’re just a glorified perv. All you do is film animals sleeping with or eating each other. There’s more sex and violence in your work than in a Michael Winner film.’

‘Look, you’ve no idea the hell I’ve been going through … Shouldn’t you get off there? It can’t be very good for the baby.’

‘What’s it to you?’ she jeered.

‘Felicity’s anthology … well, it’s not an anthology at all.’ Alex’s head followed Maddy’s movements – the vertical version of a Wimbledon spectator. ‘It’s a novel. All about me! Now is not the time to get her offside. Besides, we’re having terrible trouble settling in the new nanny … She’s East German. A Stasi Nanny. Can you imagine?’

‘Gillian said you weren’t fit to live with dogs,’ Maddy replied, lurching sideways. ‘But I stuck up for you. I said you
were
.’

‘Don’t joke.’ He grabbed her arm to steady her landing. ‘I can’t tell you how tense things are at home. Even Moriarty feels it. He’s been living on his nerves. Sometimes he’s his old self, affectionate and happy. At other times he just snaps. Ripping up carpets, eating the potting compost. I’ve had to put the child locks back on the cupboard. First I had him on Valium but
now
he’s undergoing psychological counselling.’ As Alex guided her on to safer ground, Maddy felt the pressure of his familiar fingers through the thick weave of her dress. Despite her anger she could feel herself capitulating. One touch had her going into orbit around Planet Libido. ‘You cut your hair.’

‘Yeah, in lieu of your balls.’ She had to fire her emergency booster rockets to get away from him. ‘Don’t worry. In a few weeks, you’ll be as happy as a dog with two dicks. I’ll have the baby and get deported. Then you can tell your wife all about it. It’ll make a good column. I can become part of your shared anecdotage.’

‘I’m torn apart! Can’t you see that? I love you.’ Alex’s face in the half-light was a mask of dismay. ‘But the pain, Maddy. The distorted lives I’d give my children. Felicity’s tears. I am not good at love. I am too soft on the pain.’