The Baby Group (36 page)

‘I shouldn't be telling you this now,' Jess said apologetically. ‘Not when Meg needs us. But I've wanted to tell you all for some time now. I just didn't know how to; people feel awkward and embarrassed when they know, they stop looking me in the eye for a while.'

‘Of course you should tell us,' Natalie said. ‘And it's no surprise that you feel so frightened and so anxious about Jacob's well being. You'd be strange if you didn't fret about him, especially after what's happened to you. But I look at you, Jess, and all I can see is an amazingly courageous woman.' Natalie brushed the hair back from Jess's face and tilted her head upwards. ‘You have been brave enough and strong enough to face some truly terrible ordeals, and you've come through them with a partner who loves you and a happy healthy baby boy. And don't you think that if you are courageous enough to survive that then you owe it to yourself and to Lee and Jacob not to falter now? Sometimes you have to be just as brave and courageous to be happy.'

Jess gave Natalie a watery smile. ‘You are a very wise person,' she told her.

Natalie sat back on her heels, and shook her head. ‘I'm so not,' she replied, a little embarrassed. ‘I just want to see you happy and relaxed, enjoying your lovely boy.'

Jess nodded as she stood up and kicked the buggy so that it clicked shut. ‘I'll leave Jacob here with you,' she said.

‘Are you sure?' Natalie asked her. ‘I mean, I can go if you like and you stay with the babies?'

‘No, you're right, it's getting cold out there and it would probably be just as bad for him to be out in this weather. I'll go and get Alex and Hazel alone.' She smiled. ‘I need some fresh air to clear my head anyway.'

‘Have you remembered the password?' Natalie asked Jess as she held the front door open for her. She was referring to the secret word that Jess had to give to be able to collect the children from school.

‘Yes, Armageddon,' Jess said. It had doubtless been meant as a joke when Meg had thought of it months ago. But as her world seemed to be coming to a violent and destructive end it didn't seem very funny any more.

Natalie laid Freddie down in his cot and rocked him, watching the two bright points of reflected light in his eyes in the darkness until finally he couldn't fight sleep any more and his lids flickered shut.

The last couple of days had been nothing like she had envisioned. For one thing she had had no chance to get her own pointless secret off her chest and tell the baby group the truth about her and Freddie. But she thought of the look on Jess's face as she told Natalie about her lost babies. And she thought of Meg as she had left her, shell-shocked and utterly powerless to change what was happening to her life. And Tiffany's face as her mother had asked her to leave. Those women had all been through something awful, something that it would be impossible to recover from without the utmost strength of will.

All that had really happened to her was that she'd met a man and they'd spent a few great days together that had turned out rather differently from how either of them had expected. Perhaps she had spent the intervening months between then and now building their encounter into something much more significant and important than it really was, because she had needed that crutch of expectation to keep her going. At least she now knew where she stood, and a bruised heart and hurt pride were small prices to pay for the precious legacy that would bring her a lifetime of love and happiness: a son who had maybe made her a better person than she had ever been. In comparison to her friends
she
had hardly suffered at all.

Yet if there was any tragedy, any victim, in what Natalie and Jack had stumbled into, it was Freddie. Poor little Freddie, who didn't have a clue as to what was going on around him.

But at least he felt safe and secure and loved, Natalie was sure of it. And if she could keep him feeling that way from this moment on until the day she died, at least she'd be doing something right. She'd be doing her best for him.

That was something she
could
get right.

Chapter Twenty

With Freddie settled, Natalie went to the top of the stairs. She couldn't hear any noise coming from below so she ventured down slowly, stair by stair, until she reached the hallway. The tiles felt cold against her bare feet. She peered out of the window. Gary's van was still parked outside. He really must genuinely like her mother. Unless of course she had paralysed him with her crippling venom, leaving him powerless to fight her off. Or more likely got him so drunk that sex with an OAP seemed like a good idea.

The kitchen door opened and a swell of Latin-American music followed by her mother's cackle floated upwards.

‘Nonsense,' Sandy was saying as she was coming up from the kitchen. ‘You simply have to stay for another coffee. I wouldn't ask you, Gary, but I get nervous being in this big old house on my own. Now, I'll just find some more whisky to give those coffees a little kick and . . . Oh, it's you.'

Sandy appeared at the top of the stairs in a brightly coloured kimono-style dressing gown, a lit cigarette in one hand, a tumbler of something amber-coloured in the other and to complete the look, her ratty and ancient hairpiece that she persisted in jamming onto her head despite the fact that it had stopped bearing any resemblance to the actual colour of her hair about fifteen years ago. She was dressed to kill, and not just by scaring people to death, Natalie realised.

Her mother on the pull was the very last thing she needed to confront.

‘I told you not to smoke in the house,' Natalie said quietly.

Sandy giggled.

‘Gary said you'd say that, but as I said to him, if you and young Fred aren't in, what harm can it do? I didn't hear you come in – sneaking up on me now, are you?' She tottered a couple of steps closer to Natalie on her heeled slippers. ‘He is ever so lovely, you know. We've just been talking and laughing all evening. I can't get him to have a drink, mind, and he keeps trying to leave but I think I'm in there, so no hard feelings.' Sandy slapped one hand on Natalie's shoulder, her blurred features looming in Natalie's face. ‘Be a love and stay out of the way,' she said, finishing off with a loud hiccup.

Natalie had
never
been in the right mood for one of her mother's special harlot performances. Not even as a young girl when Sandy had still seemed genuinely glamorous and pretty to her did she enjoy her mother's company when she was in seduction mode. But if there had ever been a time when Natalie was the furthest from being able to tolerate Sandy's narcissistic foolishness, then this was it. Today of all days Natalie could not stand her a second longer.

She plucked the cigarette out of Sandy's hand, opened the front door and threw it out onto the street and pushed the door shut again. Then before Sandy could protest she snatched the glass out of her hand and emptied it in one burning swallow that told her it was the cooking brandy she'd had at the back of the cupboard for at least three years.

‘You cheeky madam . . .' Sandy began, her reactions somewhat delayed by cheap booze.

‘When I
say
you can't smoke in my house I
mean
you can't smoke in my house, not ever,' Natalie said, her voice full of pent-up fury and frustration as she regarded her mother. ‘Just look at yourself, Mother.' Natalie put the glass down on the hall table and now taking Sandy's shoulders, directed her to her reflection in the hall mirror.

‘Can't you see what you look like? Don't you have any sense of reality any more? You can't think you look good like that, you can't. You look ridiculous, Mum, you look . . . awful.' Natalie stared at her mother's reflection but Sandy seemed to be numbed to what she knew were hurtful comments. She just shook Natalie's hands off her shoulders and staggered a few steps until she was a safe distance from the mirror.

‘You're just jealous,' Sandy slurred.

‘Jealous!' Natalie exclaimed. ‘That's a laugh!'

‘You've always been jealous of me,' Sandy persisted. ‘Even when you were little girl. You couldn't stand me having any fun. You hated the fact that men were interested in me. The moment Mummy got any interest you'd start attention-seeking. What you never realised is that I am more than just your mother. I am a woman too.'

‘You were never
anyone's
mother!' Natalie heard herself shout, and dimly realised that Gary must have heard it too. She didn't care. ‘A woman who drags her daughter from town to town latching onto whichever lowlife will tolerate her until he gets bored with her – that's not a mother. All you ever cared about was you. Always looking for the next man, always telling me that this was The One. How many of them were there, Mum? Twenty at least, must be. You didn't care about what happened to me. I was just the burden you would have got rid of if you'd had the guts!'

‘I loved you,' Sandy began shakily. ‘I always put you first. If your father hadn't . . .'

‘Don't you talk to me about my father,' Natalie said angrily. ‘He's nobody, some man you barely knew – and all I was to him was some dirty secret he hoped would never get out.'

‘I loved him,' Sandy said.

‘You've never loved anyone but yourself,' Natalie told her bitterly.

‘I love you!' Sandy replied, close to tears. ‘You must know I love you.'

‘I've never known it,' Natalie replied, her voice like ice. Why did Sandy do this to her? Just when she felt that things were improving between them her mother would do something, say something, that made Natalie feel as if they were strangers, continents apart, and as if she were split into two. As she spoke she was aware that the sound of her voice was cold and indifferent – she knew she must appear hard and uncaring, when the truth was exactly the opposite. But she could not bring herself to reveal her still raw and bruised feelings to Sandy, she could not trust her mother to understand or to care enough. The more Sandy pleaded with her the further Natalie wanted to be from her, and the more she hated herself for it. Hated herself and the chemical reaction that turned her to stone, impervious to her mother's tears.

‘It was different then, in the seventies and even the eighties,' Sandy said. ‘To be an unmarried mother with no dad around. People looked at you differently. Like you were just a stupid tart.'

‘They weren't far wrong, were they?' Natalie said cruelly.

‘You can talk,' Sandy shot back.

‘You're right, Mum, can't think where I picked that up from.'

Sandy seemed to bite back her retort. ‘It was hard, Natalie. I tried my best. You were never an easy child.'

Suddenly Natalie found that she was crying. The tears were running down her cheeks and she could not stop them.

‘Do you know why I don't call you?' she asked her mother. ‘Why I didn't tell you about Freddie? Why I didn't tell you what really happened to me on Saturday even though I wanted to, even though I was desperate to? Because I keep hoping that one day you'll change or I'll change and that somehow we will fit together properly. I keep hoping that one day I will actually be able to feel close to you. I even thought that Freddie might change something between us. But he hasn't. You're the same as you always have been, Mother. And that's why I don't call you. Because I can only keep hoping when you are not here.' Natalie shook her head, desperate for Sandy to react in
some
way. ‘Don't you realise that? Don't you care?'

Sandy's face looked horribly tired and haggard in the harsh hall light and her hairpiece had slipped to one side.

‘I'm sorry, Natalie,' she said, as if Natalie had been trying to talk to her about the price of eggs. ‘I'm a little bit drunk. I think I ought to go up now. I'll see you in the morning, dear. Say goodnight to Gary for me.'

Natalie stood perfectly still until she heard her mother's bedroom door close and then she sat on the stairs and put her head in her arms and wept.

She wasn't sure how much time had passed when she noticed Gary's boots in her field of vision.

‘Um, you OK?' he said.

‘I seem to be doing a lot of sitting on steps blubbing,' Natalie said, taking a deep breath and wiping her face on her sleeve before looking up. Gary looked like a man caught between the horror of having to deal with a weeping woman and his general sense of decency.

‘Is it the hormones?' he asked her hopefully as he manfully made the decision to sit on the step next to her.

Natalie shook her head, and took a few deep breaths to steady herself.

‘You probably heard,' she said, forcing a watery smile. ‘Mum and I had a bit of a tiff.'

Gary's large hands rested on his knees and he looked at them for a long moment before using one to pat Natalie's shoulder a couple of times.

‘I heard,' he said, returning his hand to his knee. ‘Look, I'm sorry I was here at all and that I let her get so drunk but she sort of got me cornered and I don't know, I never used to think I was the pathetic type but I couldn't seem to get past her. I kept thinking you were bound to come home soon and rescue me. But you were a long time.'

Natalie glanced sideways at Gary and realised that he was quite traumatised by the evening himself. She found herself chuckling.

‘It's not funny,' he said. ‘I kept thinking that wig thing was going to leap off her head and get me in the jugular.'

‘I'm sorry to laugh,' Natalie said. ‘I don't know why I am. It's been a horrible day. My friend Meg caught her husband with another woman. I was at her house. The husband came back and it got pretty messy.' Her smile disappeared as she thought about everything that had happened at Meg's house. ‘It took a long time to calm her down. Her sister-in-law turned up and threw us out, otherwise I would have stayed the night and then you would've been in trouble.'