Not What They Were Expecting (3 page)

‘We’re having a baby not a Martian.’

‘Martians make more sense than teenagers though – you’ve got all that to look forward to!’

The two couples stood there, smiling at each other, both having drifted closer during their chat. Penny and Howard side by side with an arm wrapped around each other, James behind Rebecca on her stool, an arm on her shoulder. Sharing memories and a future.

‘We’re so excited. Lovely to have some good news,’ said Howard.

‘That’s a hundred times you’ve said something like that today. Is something going on?’ Rebecca snapped.

‘Something like what? We’re just happy for you, Becky,’ Howard said.

‘We’re fine darling, honestly.’

‘Well now I’m really worried,’ said Rebecca.

Howard and Penny started a semaphore conversation using the top half of their faces, her fluttering eyelids pleading for a reprieve, his eyebrows resigned to getting it over with. Watching them James got an inkling that Rebecca might have had a point that something funny was going on.

‘Now, who’s for a top up?’ Howard asked, clearing his throat. With a wet rattle, he pulled the champagne bottle from the bucket of melting ice and poured more drinks for everyone. Rebecca hesitated before refusing the bottle hovering over her drained orange juice glass.

‘You can’t get anything past my girl, can you?’ smiled Howard. Rebecca’s grip got tighter on James’s hand.

‘Maybe we should wait til –’

‘Mum,’ said Rebecca.

‘Best to do it now, dear,’ said Howard, ‘in fact it’s a good time. This sort of good news puts it all in perspective, doesn’t it?’

He looked around the room expecting acknowledgement of the wisdom, but could only see anxious faces. He smiled his best authoritative smile, and picked up, then put down his champagne.

‘Your old man’s got himself in a bit of trouble with the law.’

Rebecca pulled her hand away from James, and hunched forward in her seat, stifling a shiver.

‘Your father was arrested last week,’ added Penny. ‘I wanted to leave it until at least after dinner.’

‘What…what was it?’ asked Rebecca. ‘The company?’

‘What? No, nothing like that,’ said Howard.

‘It’s a misunderstanding. Mr Maplestone has recommended us a very good expert in the area,’ Penny said.

‘Were you stealing?’

‘We’ll get it sorted out before you know it, all going to be absolutely fine. In a way it’s quite fascinating, the procedure,’ Howard said.

‘Your dad had been out, there was a mix-up, that’s all.’

‘Have you been charged, are you on bail, what’s going on?’ Rebecca tensed and shrugged away as James put a hand on her shoulder.

‘Just let your dad…’ he said.

‘There’s lots of technical terms for it, sound terrible. Very Victorian. Almost funny when you think about them.’

‘Just tell me what’s going on, Dad.’

‘Persistently importuning, lewd conduct, outraging public decency. Like Dickens…’

‘Dad’s been doing a lot of research himself on the internet.’

‘Jesus, are you having an affair or something? You didn’t…assault someone did you?’

‘They offered a caution, but apparently that would involve an admission of guilt, and of course nothing happened,’ said Penny.

‘What the fuck is it?’

‘There’s no need for that sort of language, Rebecca,’ said Howard. ‘You should know that I’m going to be challenging a ridiculous accusation of a public order offence that’s on shaky ground from the start.’

‘I didn’t want legal terms I wanted—’

‘It was the train station. I was caught short, there was a big burly copper in there. He got the wrong end of the stick. I was accused, I think the word on the street is, of cottaging.’

The room went silent. Rebecca went pale. Then she jumped from her seat and ran to the downstairs toilet, where the three of them listened as she noisily vomited.

‘I think that might be the start of morning sickness,’ said James.

Chapter 3

‘Fucking hell, what has he done?’

James could tell Rebecca was stressed by the swearing. She almost never swore, except when she was freaked out about something, and then she wouldn’t stop for hours and days on end. Not that he’d needed a handy pointer to tell him his wife was a little het-up on this occasion.

‘Fuck.’

They were driving further into town, from the leafy streets of Harrow Hill to the slightly scruffier leafy streets of Kilburn.

‘Did they say anything more to you?’

‘Darling, it was brutal, we talked about everything but. We were pretending like nothing had even happened. I’ve never heard so much polite chit-chat from people who’ve known each other for thirty years.’

‘Huh. It’s like the Christmas when I was fifteen, and they got all upset when Matthew told them he knew about Santa. I got the blame somehow, then after a blazing row it was back to endless discussion about how tasty the sprouts are.’

‘It’s such a shame really, to only have them once a year. I hear the secret’s in the blanching.’

‘There really isn’t any need for them to be fucking soggy I hear.’

It wasn’t entirely true that Howard’s arrest hadn’t come up for the rest of the day. In fact, between showing James hugely optimistic financial models for his company and 3D diagrams of car engines that neither of them really understood, Howard had been quite keen to talk about the case. It seemed he was winding up to make a bit of a crusade of it, maybe even scaling back on his work commitments to study up and represent himself.

But James figured this wasn’t something that Rebecca needed to know about right now – Howard would probably change his mind on that. And he certainly wasn’t going to tell her about how it had actually happened that her dad got arrested. Having to hear about bladder challenges for a man of Howard’s age’s, and getting nudges in the elbow about the perennial effects on a man’s anatomy of the bumpy track on the non-stopping Amersham train, had been a worse experience than having to shower with him the time they played tennis at his club.

Now it was the second part of their Christmas family extravaganza, Boxing Day at his mum and dad’s, or Ben and Margaret, as they preferred him to call them.

‘Just a few hours and we’ll be home,’ he said. ‘They have to go out this afternoon, a memorial event for some atrocity or other that happened this time twenty-five years ago.’

‘What memorial is it?’

‘Can’t remember.’

‘What happened?’

‘Don’t care.’

Rebecca shrugged that that seemed a fair enough response. James was permanently cynical about his parents’ humanitarian efforts. She’d never heard someone so uncharitable about people who chose to spend Christmas Day helping at a soup kitchen, but over the years she’d learned to see his point.

‘Darling,’ James said in as plummy an accent as he could manage, ‘what do you say we blow off the lefties and go and get pissed on vodka in the park?’

‘A delightful idea, darling,’ said Rebecca, ‘but I’m not sure that’s such a jolly good idea in my delicate condition.’

‘Hungover, eh? Better make it dry sherry and a quick bunk-up in the rhododendron bushes. That’ll get you spiffy again.’

‘Darling, there’s something I think you should know.’

‘Yes, darling?’

‘Well, darling.’

‘I’m listening, darling.’

‘You see, darling…’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m pregnant, darling.’

‘Crikey.’

They grinned at each other, breaking out of ‘Sebastian and Jemima’. James stretched across to give her knee a squeeze and hold her hand while the traffic was stopped.

‘How did that happen, eh?’

‘You were there at the time, chum.’

‘I remember it well. I’ve taken some notes so I don’t forget for the 21
^st
birthday party.’

‘How lovely.’

‘Told you we should have recorded it on my phone.’

‘Mum was as damp as we expected about the whole thing,’ said Rebecca.

‘Damp? She was torrential! You were upstairs, we were bailing out the kitchen with buckets. It was how the turkey was so moist. Basted with a grandmother’s tears.’

‘Well that could’ve been because of…’

‘Come on. We’re focusing on us today,’ said James.

‘The three of us,’ said Rebecca.

‘Or possibly four. Or five.’

‘What do you think you married? A Dalmatian?’

‘There’s a word I could use there about you, but it would be demeaning and sexist and I respect you too much as a human being,’ James said, imitating the way they pretended his parents spoke.

Speaking of some kind of bitch, thought Rebecca.

No, that wasn’t fair she said to herself, her problems with her mother-in-law were of her own making, not Margaret’s. She had strong views, and how Rebecca dealt with them was to do with her own insecurities. And maybe Margaret’s sensitivity to expletives and insults linked with the female gender could be explained by the fact she was probably called every single one of them on a regular basis.

Come on now – behave
, Rebecca told herself. Rebecca had felt awkward and stuffy from the first time she met James’s parents. Actually she’d felt a bit of a plodder from as soon as she heard what they’d done with their lives, and how he was a journalist and she was an artist. But it was when they’d met for drinks that first summer and she was the only one wearing a bra that it really crystallised. Afterwards James had said if he realised it would have been that much of a problem he would have worn one too.

Now every time they visited his parents she ended up getting all tongue-tied about what she could and couldn’t say, second guessing anything that might be deemed inappropriate, or ‘typical of middle England complacent thinking’. Usually she got it wrong when she was trying to say something polite about whatever horribly overseasoned ethnic cuisine of the month they were attempting to cook. Could she say ethnic in that context? Did that have connotations? She knew ‘minorities’ was out as subliminally imperialist but she assumed ethnicity was a good thing.

God, she hated how a trip to the Winfield-Smallings made her feel like her dad, who was always complaining about courses and policies about what he was supposed to call ‘them’. Still, she couldn’t imagine that Eritrea’s answer to Nigella would be willing to say whatever it was that Ben and Margaret did with okra, pulses and the less palatable parts of a sheep was the essence of modern, convenient dining for the busy African family.

They drove along not speaking for a while, James singing the bass guitar riffs for the songs on the radio at first, before going quiet, which suggested he’d started thinking. On the way to his parents it always seemed to happen after they’d come through Wembley. The predictions of doom and sarcastic questions would probably start next.

‘My mother’s going to want me to have a vasectomy now because of the world population crisis,’ he said.

‘Give me a few months and I’ll probably be up for doing it at home myself.’

‘I wonder what it’ll be we’re doing wrong already,’ he said.

‘I’d swear you lose a year off your mental age every mile closer we get to your parents,’ she said.

‘Eh? I do not! We’re not the ones that are stuck in a lost youth.’

‘I know, I know, you never asked to be born. I wonder if ours will always regress into teenager-dom when we guilt them into visiting for holidays.’

‘We’ll be the cool parents the kids will want to spend time with, even though they have their own lives with lots of cool friends. The friends will love us too,’ he said, before adding in a mock-huff, ‘And I do not turn into a teenager, thank you very much.’

‘You so do. I’m permanently worried you’re going to disappear and lock yourself in the toilets for a wank.’

‘Well if Dad will leave his
National Geographics
lying around open at the dirty bits.’

Rebecca didn’t answer, and he glanced across at her gnawing on a thumbnail. He made a note to himself to watch out for any conversational directions that could end up leading to her thinking about sex acts in lavatories.

‘Fucking hell,’ she said.

‘Do you think they’ll have made an effort and cleaned up for our visit?’ he asked, trying to distract her from yesterday’s news with the miserable afternoon ahead.

His parents’ house was not one where bourgeois ideas of cleanliness and order got much of a look in, to James’s endless frustration. They’d spent much of his childhood on the move around Europe doing seasonal work or with his dad’s occasional journalism posts, and when they’d finally come back to London when he was eleven he’d hoped to instil a bit of order into their home. A tidy kid, he’d still never made an impression beyond the border of his bedroom door. The disarray got to him most at this time of year, when the decorations came out. Believing in no religion, they paid tribute to all of them. Christmas baubles (ironic) would hang from Hanukkah candle holders, and Diwali mementoes clashed with Kwanzaa souvenirs brought back from the US’s poorer states. The living room at this time of year gave an impression of the offices of an opportunistic fortune teller who was covering all the mystical bases. It drove James absolutely nuts.

‘Oh I forgot, we’ll be alternating fussy old lady with sulking adolescent,’ said Rebecca as they pulled up outside the ramshackle Victorian terraced house. ‘Come on, like you said, this is a happy time. Let’s try and focus on spreading that joy.’

Chapter 4

‘Are you keeping it?’ was the first thing Margaret had said.

‘Of course! I mean, not that there’d be anything wrong with taking charge of your reproductive, um, destiny, but yes, we’re keeping it,’ said Rebecca.

‘No, Mum, we came all this way just to share with you the joy of a woman’s right to choose,’ James grumbled to himself, drawing a glare from Rebecca.

‘You know the assumption of joy is one of the main tools of guilt and shame rolled out by the religious fanatics to foist unwanted pregnancies on women,’ said Margaret.

‘And we all know how inconvenient they are,’ muttered James.

‘But if you’re embracing the opportunity that’s wonderful news,’ Margaret said, smiling broadly at the couple, before swooping in for hugs. Before she knew it, Rebecca was engulfed in a mass of grey-flecked curly hair that smelled sweetly of tangerines.