Bridget Jones's Baby (7 page)

“We're all just an impulse away from
The Jerry Springer Show,
love,” said Dad, patting his embryonic granddaughter affectionately. “I'm not even sure myself if you belong to me or that young curate who did a stint at the vicarage forty years ago.”

I gasped.

“I'm joking, pet. But you haven't done anything that ninety per cent of people in the world wouldn't have done in your position.”

We both looked round at the aged gentlemen club members, most of whom were dozing quietly in their armchairs.

“Eighty-five per cent?” said Dad. “Look, pet. You never go too far wrong by just telling the truth.”

“You mean tell Mum?” I said, horrified.

“Well, no, maybe not your mum just yet. But with Mark and Daniel, just tell the truth and see where it takes you.”

S
UNDAY 15
O
CTOBER

2 p.m. My flat.
Sitting on the floor, hands trembling, I dialled Daniel's number, feeling the six collective eyes of Tom, Miranda and Shazzer boring into me.

“Yeees, Jones?” said Daniel into the phone. “Is my ear about to be sprayed with…”

“Daniel, I'm sixteen weeks pregnant,” I blurted.

The line went dead.

“He hung up on me!”

“Fuckwit, total, total fucking fuckwit from hell with a tail.”

“How can any human fuckwit do that?” I said, fuming. “That's it. I'm through with bloody men. They're irresponsible; self-indulgent…Does anyone want to feel my bump?”

“You have to find some way of externalizing these angry thoughts and feelings,” said Tom in his creepy therapist's voice and patting the bump nervously, as if the baby was going to jump out and be sick on him. “Perhaps by writing them down and burning them?”

“OK,” I said, marching over to the kitchen table and grabbing a Post-it pad and a box of matches.

“No!” yelled Shazzer. “No fires! Use the phone.”

“Okeedokeee.”

I typed into the phone. “Daniel, you are a selfish, shallow…”

“Give it to me, give it to me,” slurred Shazzer, grabbing the phone. She typed “fuckwitted, crap writer” and then pressed send.

“We were supposed to BURN IT,” I said in horror.

“What? The phone?”

“She was supposed to express the angry thoughts and feelings, then send them into the universe,” said Tom. “Not text them to the object of the angry thoughts and…Here, have we run out of wine?”

“Oh, God. And he might be the father of my unborn child.”

“Iss fine,” said Tom, in a drunk yet soothing voice. “Do him good to hear it.”

“Tom, shut up. Bridget, you've done your practicing. Now text Mark,” said Miranda.

So I did. I simply texted: “I would like to see you.” And, to my utter astonishment, he wanted to meet me immediately.

S
UNDAY 15
O
CTOBER

I stood on the doorstep of Mark's tall white-stuccoed house in Holland Park, as I'd stood before, before so many earth-shattering events, sad, happy, sexual, emotional, triumphant, disastrous, dramatic. The light was on upstairs in his office: he was working as usual. What would he say? Would he reject me as a drunken slag? Might he be pleased? But then…

“Bridget!” said the intercom. “Are you actually still there or have you rung the doorbell and run away?”

“I'm here,” I said.

The door opened a few seconds later. Mark was in sexy work mode: suit trousers, shirt a little undone, sleeves rolled up and the familiar watch on his wrist.

“Come in,” he said. I followed him into the kitchen. It was exactly the same: spotless, streamlined cabinets where you couldn't tell which was the dishwasher, which was the cereal cupboard and which was the pig bin.

“So!” said Mark, stiffly. “How's life treating you? Work good?”

“Yes. How's yours? Work, I mean.”

“Oh good, well, shit actually.” He gave that conspiratorial half smile I so loved.

“Trying and failing to extract Hanza Farzad from the clutches of the king of Kutar.”

“Ah.”

I gazed out at the garden and trees, the leaves beginning to turn, mind racing. I mean my mind, not the trees' minds. Trees do not have minds: unless you're the mind of Prince Charles, or perhaps in Daniel Cleaver's novel. Our whole future rested on these next few babies, I mean moments. I started to rerehearse what I was going to say. It had to be subtle, slowly built up to.

“All caught up with international trade, of course,” Mark was going on. “Always the problem with the Middle East: endless layers of subterfuge, deceit, conflicted interest…”

“Excuse me.”

“Yes?”

There was a pause. “The garden looks lovely,” I eventually said.

“Thank you. Of course, it's a devil to keep up with the leaves.”

“Yes it must be.”

“Yes.”

“Yup.”

“Mark?”

“Yes, Bridget?”

Oh God, oh God. I just couldn't do it. I wanted to savour these last few moments when everything seemed like it used to be.

“Is that a conker tree?”

“Yes. It is a conker tree and that one's a magnolia and…”

“Oh, and what is that one?”

“Bridget!”

“I'm pregnant.”

Mark's face was a mess of emotions.

“How much, how long, pregnant?”

“Sixteen weeks.”

“The christening?”

“Do you want to feel my bump?”

“Yes.” He put his hand on it briefly, then said, “Excuse me.”

He left the room. I could hear him going upstairs. What was he going to do? Come down with lawsuit papers?

The door burst open.

“This is the single most wonderful piece of information I have ever been given in my entire life.”

He came over and took me in his arms, and the familiar scent of him, the reassuring feel of him, washed over me.

“It's…I feel almost as if clouds are dispersing.”

He held me away from him, looking at me with tenderness in his brown eyes.

“When one's own childhood has been…when one has somehow…I never found it possible to believe that love could translate into a home life. That one could create a home we could bring a child into, that was somehow different”—he looked like a small boy—“different from one's own.”

I hugged him, this time, and stroked his hair.

“And now,” he said, coming out of the embrace, with that rare smile he has, “in a moment of…
unadulterated
passion, the decision has been made for us. And I'm the happiest man alive.”

There was a knock on the door and Fatima, Mark's longtime housekeeper, appeared: “Oh!” she beamed. “Mees Jones! You back? Mr. Darcy, your car is here.”

“Oh my goodness. I completely forgot. I have a Law Society dinner…”

“No, Mark, it's fine, you already said you had a dinner.”

“But my car can…we can drop you off.”

“I've got my new car, that's fine.”

“Tomorrow, we'll meet tomorrow night?”

“Yes.”

7 p.m. My flat.
This is unbearable. I'm pregnant, and Mark wants the baby and if I hadn't slept with Daniel as well this would be a complete fairy tale and we would all be so happy but…Oh God. Mark and I did occasionally take chances, so maybe sleeping with Daniel is
why
I'm pregnant.

Bloody dolphin condoms. But then I wouldn't have been having the baby, if I hadn't tried to save the dolphins from swallowing undissolved condoms. So actually I should be grateful to the condoms, if only the already-dolphin-friendly baby could tell me who's dolphin-friendly baby she is.

It's all my fault. But Daniel is so funny and charming. It's like they're two halves of the perfect man, who'll spend the rest of their lives each wanting to outdo the other one. And now it's all enacting itself in my stomach.

7.15 p.m.
Toilet really is wonderful invention. Is just amazing to have such an item in one's home, which can so calmly, cleanly and efficiently take all the sick away. Love the lovely toilet. Is cool and solid, calm and dependable. Is fine just to lie here and keep it handy. Maybe it is not Mark I really love but the toilet. Oh, goody, telephone! Maybe Mark asking how I am! Maybe I will just tell him the whole story and he'll forgive me.

8 p.m.
Was Tom: “Bridget, am I a horrible person?”

“Tom! No! You're a lovely person!”

Source of Horrible Person neurosis was that Tom had seen an “acquaintance” (i.e., guy he shagged once), Jesus, at the front of the gym snack bar queue, gone up to say hi, and then asked Jesus to order him a wheatgrass smoothie.

“The thing is,” Tom obsessed, “the thought of queue-jumping had—I think—crossed my mind before I decided to say hello to Jesus. So I'm one of those people who coldly, cynically, tries to make things better for themselves at the expense of others: like avoiding buying a round in the pub by going to the toilet.”

“But the key issue you're missing, Tom,” I said—happy to escape from my own fucked-up situation for a moment, whilst simultaneously feeling a nagging certainty that sooner or later Tom was going to remember about my fucked-up situation then decide he was a horrible person anyway for forgetting to ask about it—“is that, actually, saying hello to a friend is a nice thing, and joining Jesus for a gym-time beverage is much more friendly than just abandoning him and going to the back of the queue.”

“But then I did abandon Jesus and went and drank the wheatgrass smoothie with Eduardo because he's hotter. You see, I am a horrible person, aren't I?”

Mind was busily trying to turn the minuscule social gay gaffe into a random act of kindness, but then Tom crashed in with: “OK. I get it. I am a horrible person. Goodbye.”

The phone rang again.