The Baby Group (27 page)

And as for Jack? Natalie had thought that towards the end of their evening that he might have wanted her too, if not nearly in the same way. He hadn't been pleased to see her, he'd almost run a mile when she'd bumped into him and she had more or less had to press-gang him into agreeing to meet her, but eventually he had clearly made up his mind to enjoy the evening as best as he could, which might very well have included sleeping with her. If her mother hadn't called she thought that perhaps over brandy Jack would have asked her to go home with him. One more night, no strings, no promises, that was what he would have offered her.

The truly frightening thing was, she was sure that if it hadn't been for her mother's intervention, she would have accepted.

Chapter Fifteen

When Meg woke up in the early hours of Sunday morning it took her a second or two to work out why. It was still quite dark outside and all the children were still at Frances's house. And then she felt Robert's breath in her ear and his hand sliding around her waist over the mound of her belly and finally cupping one breast. Everything that had happened last night came back to her all at once.

‘Good morning,' Robert whispered in her ear.

‘Is it morning?' Meg asked him sleepily. Robert rolled her onto her back and easing his weight on top of her, kissed her for a long time. It was a tender kiss, a gentle and loving one, and Meg longed to let herself fall into it without any reservation, but she couldn't, there was one small tight part of her that held back. Robert didn't seem to notice.

‘It's just gone six,' he murmured as he pulled back from their kiss. ‘But I couldn't wait any longer. I have plans for this Sunday. I want to make love to my beautiful and sexy wife, make her a great breakfast in bed and then go and fetch my children and spend the day with my family.' He bent his mouth to her neck and kissed her below her jawline. ‘Sound good?'

‘We haven't done that in the longest time,' Meg said wistfully. ‘Spent a whole day together.'

Robert stopped kissing her and looked into her eyes.

‘I know,' he said. ‘And I know that's partly my fault. I've let work rule my life and it's got me stressed and made me . . . cruel. Meg, I didn't mean what I said to you the other day. I was just angry at some work stuff and I took it out on you. It was wrong, really wrong.' The smile that followed was sweet; he looked boyish and young again with his hair all tousled and his face creased with sleep. ‘Can you forgive me?'

Meg looked up at him, colourless in the dawn light, and smiled.

‘Course I can, silly,' she said, because she wanted to.

She really wanted to believe that from now on everything was going to be all right. And maybe she could pretend that she hadn't seen what she had last night.

If she could just do that, then maybe everything would be perfect.

Natalie lay wide awake until 7.30 a.m. on Sunday morning, a time when she felt it was finally appropriate to get out of bed. Freddie had been asleep since four, but try as she might she could not force herself into unconsciousness. Jack and Freddie and what was going to happen, not to mention what might not happen, and a whole series of jumbled and disjointed thoughts spun around and around behind her eyelids whenever she attempted to close them. So she decided it was better to stay awake, stare at the ceiling and try to imagine a Sunday morning with her fake husband instead.

He'd bring her breakfast in bed. Coffee, orange juice, croissants and eggs. Then while she ate he'd feed the baby, sitting in bed next to her. They would watch the morning news and because it was Sunday they'd be going to somebody's parents' house for lunch. Either his fake mum and dad's, whom Natalie envisioned as a nice friendly old couple who lived in a thirties semi in Tottenham. Or her fake mother's place, an elegant Victorian villa, where her fake mother lived with her cat, taught piano and went ballroom dancing every other Thursday afternoon. Then after lunch they'd go for a walk around the park, and in the early evening when the baby was asleep they'd make love in the living room on the sofa. They'd be sitting hand in hand watching the
Antiques Roadshow
when, suddenly overcome with desire for her, he'd reach over and kiss her, his hand cupping her breast and then . . . It was at that point that Natalie felt it was appropriate to get out of bed.

Fake-husband fantasies might be distracting but they were also dangerous, especially when they concerned your real-life electrician.

What she needed, Natalie thought as she showered, was a distraction to get her through this day, this sort of no-man's-land of a Sunday where everything was still up in the air and unresolved. She couldn't go round to Meg's, where she hoped marital bliss was in full swing, and she knew Jess and Lee had the grandparents coming. Alice would be working on the collection with Gregory, and Natalie didn't think that Frances – as intrinsically good a person as she was somewhere underneathall those prickles – was the kind of distraction she was looking for. That left Steve, who she knew was playing footy with his mates in a bid to keep in with his manhood, and Tiffany.

That was what she would do today. She would go and visit Tiff and Jordan and see how they were getting on. If there was one person who put her own self-inflicted troubles into perspective it was Tiffany.

And as for Jack, well, it was out of her hands, at least for now. He had said he would call her.

Of course he had said that once before, and she had still been waiting for that call a year later.

Meg wondered how she would feel at this moment if last night hadn't ended the way it had, if all she had done was fall asleep in Robert's arms.

She decided that she would have felt utterly happy, content and secure in the strengthened foundations of her marriage. Erasing the two minutes that prevented her from feeling like that, however, was harder than she had hoped. Instead, she was left with this peculiar mix of happiness and anguish; the joy of seeing him here now playing with his children, and the fear that despite how it looked and how it felt, it could all be just a fragile veneer in danger of shattering at any moment.

She sat on the bench and watched her family playing frisbee.

Alex and Hazel kept shouting at her to come and join in, their cheeks ruddy and their eyes bright as they raced around on the grass trying to throw the frisbee to each other before a leaping Gripper caught it. But Meg said she had to watch over Iris and anyway she wanted to watch as Robert scooped up James and hurled the giggling infant into the air only to catch him just in the nick of time, with a whoop and a shout of delight from her son.

Her husband had been true to his word when it came to his plans for the day.

They had made love again that morning, not with the same passion and intensity as the night before, but this time somehow seemed more poignant. He had been so gentle and so tender with her that for the first time in a long time Meg felt
truly
cherished. She wished she could be certain that it was a feeling based on reality and not artifice.

Breakfast in bed had been scrambled eggs on toast and a cup of tea, and then just past eight they had left to pick the children up from Frances.

Robert, possibly the only man on earth to be able to stop his sister's blunt questions and unintended rudeness, had engulfed Frances in a bear hug the minute she had answered the door, and thanked her profusely for giving him and Meg the break they needed. He promised to have little Henry for her and Craig in return any time. Frances had gone pink and glowed with pleasure at her brother's gush of gratitude.

Meg knew how much the thanks and approval of her older and always more successful brother meant to Frances, and she was torn between delight that Robert had so expertly extricated them from Frances's home in order to spend the day together, and feeling sorry for the woman who could be brushed off after a doubtless sleepless night caring for five small children with nothing more than a few platitudes. Did Robert mean to manipulate Frances, Meg had wondered. Did he mean to manipulate her?

If there was one thing she could be certain about, it was that he did love his children. The four of them, five if you counted Gripper nipping at their heels, were now tearing around and around a great old oak tree, Robert with his arms raised in a monster pose, the children squealing and giggling with delight. At last Robert caught James, tucking him under one arm and then hooking the other round Hazel. All three tumbled to the ground in a muddle of laughter and mud.

‘Attack!' Alex commanded Gripper. ‘Attack the monster!'

And with uncharacteristic obedience Gripper pounced gleefully on her master and began a dogged attempt to literally lick him to death.

Natalie didn't like to think of herself as small-minded and reactionary, so when she saw the four or five kids in hooded tops as she approached Tiffany's tower block with Freddie she was determined not to automatically think badly of them. They were probably perfectly lovely, ordinary young men out for a nice sociable skateboard or something. No, she absolutely would not judge them until they had at least mugged her for her mobile.

But she did jump out of her skin when one of them stopped her in her tracks, shouting, ‘Hey, Missus! Hold up!'

Natalie spun round, expecting to find a ‘piece' pointed right in her face. Instead it was the stuffed blue puppy that Freddie had taken to that confronted her.

‘Dropped your kid's dog,' the boy said with a wide toothy smile.

‘Oh thank you terribly,' Natalie said idiotically.

‘No worries, man,' the boy said, winking at her as he loped along to catch up with his friends. But even despite that motiveless act of kindness, Natalie was ashamed to admit that she was relieved when Anthony finally let her into the flat.

‘All right?' he asked her.

‘Super,' Natalie said because she was sure Anthony didn't really want to know. ‘You?'

‘Yeah, good,' he told her. ‘I'm off out. Derby match on at the pub. Meeting Gary for a lunchtime pint. He's Spurs, poor bloke.'

‘Smashing,' Natalie said, wondering what on earth Anthony was talking about. ‘Well, have a good time.'

Anthony nodded farewell as he closed the door behind him.

Tiffany appeared in the doorway of the living room in a pair of drawstring pyjama bottoms and a vest. ‘Hiya,' she said and she shook a jar of Nescafé at Natalie. ‘Coffee?'

‘Please. Do you mind me dropping round?' Natalie asked Tiffany as she lifted Freddie from his buggy and followed her into the kitchen. ‘Is it too early for you young people? I know it's only eleven but I've been up for hours and I waited and waited to call you.'

Tiffany had sounded uncertain when Natalie had phoned and invited herself over.

‘Are you sure you want to come here?' she had asked.

‘Why not?' Natalie replied. ‘I mean, unless you've got plans or you're busy or something.'

‘It's just that this place isn't . . . it's not really sorted yet. There's no sofa and no decent mugs and we have to pour a bucket of water down the loo to flush it until Ant gets round to fixing the cistern.'

‘You should have got yourself a plumber, not an electrician,' Natalie joked, but Tiffany didn't laugh. Natalie could hear her discomfort in the silence.

‘I don't care about flushing loos and matching mugs,' Natalie said. ‘I want to see you and Jordan, not a three-piece suite.'

‘It's just . . .' Tiffany paused as she searched for the right words. ‘When someone else is coming over I look round at this place and I see that my life isn't as sorted as I make out.'

‘Whose life is?' Natalie said, feeling a pang of empathy for the teenager. ‘If you don't want visitors that's fair enough, I am sort of forcing myself on you. But I have to say if I do come – I'll bring cake.'

Tiffany chuckled. ‘Well, OK,' she said. ‘As long as it's not that awful ginger cake again!'

‘I'm glad you came, I'd have been bored here on my own with Jordan.' Tiffany smiled at Natalie and handed her a milky coffee where she was sitting on the beanbag, made the way a little girl might like to drink it. ‘My school mates don't keep in touch much any more. I suppose they think I must be boring now. They're right, probably.'

‘You'll make new friends when you start college – I wanted to find out how you'd got on when you saw the social worker and your teachers about your exams,' Natalie said, as she took a sip of the coffee.

Tiffany nodded.

‘Yeah, it was good I think,' she said. ‘My teacher reckons if I catch up over the summer holidays I can take them in September when they do the retakes. My coursework was mostly up to date and it still counts, so I just need to finish that.'

‘Still sounds like a lot to do, though.'

‘Well, I'm getting help at home from my form teacher, Mrs Gough, in the holidays. She's really nice, because she doesn't have to help me and I can't pay her or anything but she says she wants to see me do well. I'm lucky, I know so many nice people.' Tiffany looked out of the window at the sky. ‘And if I do well enough in the exams then I can go to college. They even have a free crèche for students.'

Natalie nodded. ‘God, you take it all in your stride, don't you? Let me think, what was I doing when I was sixteen?' She had a brief flashback of standing on her father's doorstep in the rain. ‘Sunbathing, playing spin the bottle and kissing boys, that was all I was doing. And look at you. You're a mum, making your own home, you're getting more qualifications than you can shake a stick at and you look so capable, Tiffany. I'm very proud of you. Nothing scares you.'