Not What They Were Expecting (9 page)

Rebecca scrunched up her face, her nose an accordion of wrinkles.

‘Perhaps just you and your old mum then,’ said Penny, ‘halfway through a pregnancy might not be the time to be trying the boob-tube look.’

They smiled at each other conspiratorially. ‘My young mum, you mean,’ said Rebecca, feeling a little guilty for her earlier unsaid tantrum. She slid up onto a stool on the breakfast bar and started poking through the contents of the fruit bowl. ‘Are you OK with Dad taking all his dirty laundry out in public?’ she asked without looking up.

There was a blast of water as Penny turned on the tap to fill the kettle.

‘Well, he hasn’t done anything wrong, so he has to get that message across in whatever way he can.’

‘But it must be so humiliating for you,’ Rebecca said, her glance switching back and forth between her mother and a satsuma she was kneading between her fingers. ‘He asked you about it first didn’t he?’

‘Now don’t be like that, Becky, we’re just doing the right thing. And yes. Of course I knew. He mentioned he was thinking of writing a letter to the paper.’

‘A letter to the editor he said? I’m guessing he glossed over his hopes for front-page headlines. Typical. Next thing you know he’ll be dragging you into it – standing next to him in press photos. The loyal wifey standing by her husband.’

Penny paused as she considered her collection of teapots.

‘There’s someone from the
Focus
coming around tomorrow lunchtime.’

‘Mu-um!’

‘Then that’ll be it, Becky, I promise. He’ll have had his say.’

‘And the police will just go away because he’s got his picture in the press?’

‘Maybe they’ll let him off with a warning.’

‘They tried to do that already.’

‘But that was on their terms, he’ll feel better if he’s in charge of the situation. You know him, he just needs to find a way to feel in control.’

The kettle boiled. Penny warmed the chosen teapot, and reached for the teabags from the porcelain jar proclaiming TEA. Rebecca lifted her hand to her face and was momentarily distracted by the waft of citrus from her fingers; the surface of the satsuma in her other hand was pocked all over by her having absently stabbed it with her thumbnail.

‘You don’t think he did it do you?’ she asked.

‘Becky!’

‘I’m just saying… Soon as it hits the papers, it’ll be “no smoke without fire”.’

‘This is just one of those unfortunate accidents. It’s a misunderstanding, and you know your father’s sense of injustice. He can be very compassionate. He’d be just as cross if it had happened to James, or anybody…’

‘But James wouldn’t be…’ Rebecca stopped the thought before it got any further. That James wouldn’t be loitering in public lavatories because he isn’t…

Penny plucked two clean, matching mugs from the cupboard and gave each one a splash of milk.

‘James has been very good actually,’ Penny continued. ‘He’s been very supportive. Your father was saying he’ll make a very good dad, was even wondering again if he might want to join the company at some point, now he’s going to be a family man.’

‘He’s been talking to James?’

‘Oh you know – not talking. Texting, emailing. Can’t keep your father away from the computer…’

‘He didn’t set this up, did he? With his dad?’

‘That was all your father’s idea. He’s just been bouncing ideas for the wider campaign off him, and you know, probably every other project he’s in the middle of at the moment.’

Rattled, Rebecca stood up. Her husband hadn’t said a word about this. But she didn’t know what to do next. Go and see James? Find out what on earth he’d been doing? What did she mean, there was ‘a wider campaign’? Angry thoughts flashed through her head like a faulty fluorescent light. No one was telling her anything. These ridiculous things were going on in her own family and no one was telling her. They were treating her like…they were treating her like they did her mother. She was about to let rip, and James was going to get the brunt of it, when Margaret came back into the house followed by the men, Howard barking away. Rebecca couldn’t do it in front of her.

‘Tea’s just made,’ said Penny brightly.

‘Would you have any filter coffee?’ asked Margaret.

‘I’ll get the caffetiere,’ said Penny.

James ambled into the kitchen from the living room, alerted to the bustle and voices coming back inside.

‘Finished your plans for world domination, guys?’ he asked.

‘Bloody freezing out there!’ said Howard. ‘Old Fidel had the right idea, he didn’t have to put up with blinking weather like this.’

‘We were just discussing the horror of becoming grandparents,’ said Margaret with an exaggerated grin, used only on the rare occasions when she wasn’t taking herself too seriously. ‘Thrown on the scrapheap of Western culture’s disposable youth culture.’

‘Totally irrelevant, we’ll be,’ chuckled Howard. ‘Maggie was saying we should move to India and we’d be ruling the roost.’

James stood behind Rebecca. She was ignoring him, but not in a way that would make it obvious to their parents in the room. Or even to him.

‘We’re just jealous of you,’ said Penny to Rebecca, ‘getting to become a mum for the first time.’

‘You’re going to have a wonderful experience. Very energising except when you’re exhausted. Your body can do the most amazing things,’ said Margaret.

‘Although I’m not sure I’d want to go through birth again,’ said Penny, ‘but it’s probably different these days.’

‘We don’t have to worry about that stuff too much do we, James, eh?’ said Howard. ‘Thank goodness. What’s that thing they say? About it being like squeezing a watermelon out of the old John Thomas? Excuse the language…’

‘If you’d seen the size of James’s head when he was born – and that I came out if it with barely a centimetre tear – you’d understand how the human body creates its own miracles every day,’ continued Margaret.

James put the word ‘tear’ in the context of what they were talking about. Looking at Rebecca, he tried to ascertain silently that they weren’t
really
talking about what he thought they were talking about. And also if what was being talked about really
was
what he didn’t want to even think about
ever
being talked about, could she do something to just stop it? Rebecca looked back at him with a shrug that said yep, we’re talking about precisely what you’re thinking about. And this is what happens – deal with it.

‘Nothing miraculous about Becky,’ said Penny. ‘I got to know about every junior doctor in the hospital the way my stitches kept popping’.

James bit down on the end of his thumb and tried not to hear what was being said.

‘You had that blow-up rubber ring to sit on didn’t you? I gave it to the kids when they were older for the paddling pool,’ said Howard.

Even Howard’s joining in?
thought James. This conversation cannot get any more painful.

‘Of course the labial massages Ben gave me every day throughout the pregnancy helped with that,’ said Margaret.

A sound emerged from James, that was somewhere between a squeal and a whimper. Meanwhile Howard gave Ben a quizzical look. Ben, as usual, wasn’t really paying attention.

‘On that lovely thought, I think it’s probably we time we hit the road,’ said James. ‘Not that it’s reminded me of anything I have to do, just…well, just I need to go and wash out my ears with corrosive acid.’

Chapter 11

It wasn’t as soon as they got in the car that the row started. James at first was too excited to be out of there to notice his cheerful observations were hitting a wall of silence.

‘Talk about an ambush,’ he said, ‘the first thing I thought when I walked in and saw Ben was we’d come to the wrong house and my mother had become a late convert to the Dulux shades of magnolia range.’

He shifted his big frame in the small car to look at Rebecca in the passenger seat – he was driving since he’d only had a glass of wine, knowing it wouldn’t be the day to have two or three and risk a domestic in front of the in-laws. She was watching the parked cars whizz by in her wing mirror.

‘All right, babycakes?’ he asked.

Rebecca didn’t say anything for a minute.

‘I can’t imagine it must have been that much of a surprise to you,’ she finally said, just as James was coming onto a busy roundabout.

‘What do you mean?’ he said as innocently as he could manage as he indicated to come off at their exit.

Rolling back over the way the afternoon panned out, he figured that the appearance of his parents had sparked Rebecca working out that he knew more than he let on about Howard’s court case. At least that was what he suspected, but he wasn’t going to admit anything until he had to.

‘Everybody conspiring away behind my back, having great larks embarrassing my whole family,’ Rebecca continued.

‘What are you talking about?’ he asked, as confused as he could manage, as they sat at a pedestrian crossing. That’s it, the Penny’s definitely dropped, he thought to himself. He winced inwardly at the pun on his mother-in-law. And the realisation he was turning into his father.

‘You knew what was going on. You’ve been planning this along with him, like it’s some kind of jolly wheeze.’

‘What do you mean…’ James started, before giving up the pretence with a deep sigh. ‘I really didn’t think he’d go through with it.’

Rebecca didn’t say anything back. Just sat there shaking her head in a way James found absolutely infuriating.

They drove the rest of the way home in silence, Rebecca radiating fury silently, James steaming internally – indignant at the thought that she couldn’t see that, OK, maybe he was in the wrong, but it was for the right reasons. That he was protecting her.

Pulling up to the house, the silence in the car was even more prominent as the engine was turned off. It was momentarily broken by James abruptly snatching the door handle and swinging open the door. He didn’t move then. Rebecca quietly opened her side and left him sitting in the car. He sat there as she walked around the car and up the drive to their front door, fingers pumping the palms of his hands.

‘You’ve got the keys,’ she said just loud enough so he could hear.

With a slam that was louder than he intended, he locked the car, brushed past her and let them into the house.

‘I’m going for a lie down,’ she announced quietly, her hand on the banister.

‘You never want to hear about this stuff,’ he finally exploded. ‘You disappear whenever we start to talk about it.’

She was stood one foot on the first step, one on the second, making them on eye level with each other. They looked at each other for the first time since some time just after lunch.

‘That’s not true,’ she said flatly.

‘It fucking is! You’re always too tired the second it comes up, and I…’ He threw his hands up in frustration. The back of his hand rapped the living room door frame. He turned and faced the wall shifting from foot to foot with the pent-up anger, and to try and disperse the stinging pain from his knuckles.

‘I get tired. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but I am twelve weeks pregnant.’

‘Oh don’t use that as an excuse,’ he said turning to face her again. ‘I’ve tried to ask you loads of times, and you always find a way of getting out of it. Always shut down like you don’t give a shit.’

Finally an angrier edge came into Rebecca’s responses.

‘You could have warned me. And you should know not to encourage him.’

‘Christ, would you have wanted him picketing outside the bogs at the station, wearing a sandwich board and handing out leaflets? That was one of his ideas you know. He was going to march on Parliament, starting out near Newcastle or something, walking from public convenience to public convenience.’

James could see Rebecca visualise the idea in her mind, and that the controlled anger directed at him was being diffused. He pushed on with the point.

‘He was going to buy wet weather gear and a flat cap, collect signatures for a petition along the way and raise money for charity. Why he thought the Dog’s Trust would be a good choice I don’t know.’

‘He always has these ideas, though…’ started Rebecca.

‘Exactly. And they always come to nothing, which is why I didn’t want to worry you.’ James started to relax, feeling like he’d made his point, proved he’d done the right thing. He took off his jacket, dumping it on the stand, and headed towards the living room.

‘Did you mean what you said to your mum about the birth?’ Rebecca asked from her place on the stairs. She’d moved up one step when James had started bustling about as if it was all sorted, and as he turned back to talk to her, he had to crick his neck slightly to catch her eye.

‘What? When? I wasn’t even talking to Margaret about the baby today. I’m not sure I can think about birth again after all that stuff about stitching up your mum’s fanny.’

Rebecca didn’t react to James’s try at bringing the conversation back to the horrors of the afternoon’s events.

‘About having a home birth,’ she said.

‘What are you—’

‘When we told her I was pregnant you said we’d be having a home birth, and wouldn’t be like the Beckhams.’

‘I didn’t! I wasn’t…’ started James, before remembering maybe he did and he had. ‘When was this, Christmas?’

‘You said we’d be doing everything naturally, and I just wanted to say it will be me making those decisions.’

‘I wasn’t, I was just—’

‘It’s my body.’

‘Well you can get your own fucking ice cream from now on then.’

‘You just tried to take charge, like you had it all worked out.’

‘I was just trying to say we wouldn’t be acting like a pair of attention-grabbing celebrities.’

‘You sounded like you’d thought a bit further ahead than that. Do you know the level of risks associated with first-time pregnancies and home birth?’

‘No. I don’t.’

‘Well I don’t either. But I’m not making assumptions about what’s going to happen to my body.’

‘I forgot, it’s just you having this baby isn’t it?’

‘Feels like it. You couldn’t even be bothered to come and meet the midwife.’

‘Ah now come on…’