One Night Stand (23 page)
Authors: Julie Cohen
A curly haired toddler poked his head out from behind a bin of socks. He grinned at Roisin and then ducked back out of sight.
The last time I’d seen James, he’d been a crying baby, looking much like all crying babies. After Roisin and her boyfriend had become parents they seemed to drop out of our social circle. Not on purpose - they were both fun, and used to come down to the Mouse and Duck and drink everyone under the table. But once Roisin gave birth her talk inexorably turned to nappies, breastfeeding and school catchment areas. I hadn’t rung her in months. Maybe longer.
Guilt tickled me, and then dread. Was that what happened when you had a baby? You lost all normal twenty-something conversation?
‘James, come back here NOW.’ James didn’t come back, and Roisin turned back to me. ‘That child is driving me nuts. So what have you been up to?’ She looked me up and down and then her eyes widened. ‘My God, are you expecting?’
What was it about women who’d had children, did they have a special talent for detecting pregnancy? ‘In June.’
She gave me a big hug this time. ‘Eleanor, that’s great. Please tell me it’s Hugh’s. That man needs a baby in his life.’
‘It’s not Hugh’s. We’re just friends.’
Roisin blushed furiously, all the way to the roots of her red hair. ‘Oh, of course. I’m sorry, Eleanor, I’m out of the loop these days.’
‘Don’t worry about it. God, imagine Hugh with a baby. He wouldn’t know what to do with it. I’m the one who’s having it, and I don’t know what to do with it myself.’
‘You will,’ Roisin assured me, ‘at least till it learns how to walk. James!’ She leapt in an unexpected direction behind a row of winter boots and came back with James wriggling in her arms. ‘You are a monkey,’ she told him. He grinned at me with his tiny teeth.
‘You’re a gorgeous one,’ I said to him, touching my belly instinctively. This baby inside me would be that big one day. Walking. And talking. And everything like a normal little person.
‘So fancy meeting you in Jackson’s,’ Roisin said, wrestling James more comfortably into the crook of her arm. ‘We came in for some crafty-type things for James’s granny. How about you?’
‘The books tell me I need slippers,’ I said. ‘For the hospital or something.’
‘Oh God, don’t bother with those, I never wore slippers in my life. You only bleed on them anyway. Get cheap socks and plenty of them.’
‘You bleed on your feet?’ I swallowed. It wasn’t only the baby I didn’t know about. It was bleeding, and slippers, and cheap socks, and the whole frightening trauma of giving birth, and then the years afterwards of being avoided by my friends because I had changed into a different person.
It was everything, every single life-shifting thing.
Roisin put her free hand on my shoulder. ‘You’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘Are you going to classes?’
‘Um—’
‘Listen, I wasn’t going to bother with the classes this time because I figured I’d already done it once, but if you want to, we can both sign up and go together. Men are useless at these things. Would you believe, Jimmy nearly fainted when he saw the dolly go through the model pelvis?’
I laughed shakily, and Roisin laughed with me. She’d always had this fantastic dirty laugh.
‘Thanks, Roisin, I appreciate it, but I don’t think - hold on.’ Now that I looked, those jumpers could be hiding something. ‘You mean you’re pregnant too?’
She nodded. James gave a mighty squirm and dropped to the floor. Within a split second he had pulled six pairs of slippers off the rack and was banging the heel of one of them on the floor.
‘See, it can’t be that bad if I’m going through it all again,’ she said. ‘James! Put those away, please, and we’ll go and get a milkshake. James! Did you hear me?’
Roisin knelt on the floor and took the slipper from James, who instantly made a grab for another, got the rack instead, and pulled the whole thing down on himself. He burst into tears, covered with slippers.
At that moment, pregnant Roisin looked as far from serene as it is possible for a woman to get.
She swept him into her arms and did a lightning check for injuries. Then he buried his head in her shoulder with his chubby arm around her neck. She patted his back and rocked him, and when she caught my eye she laughed her fantastic dirty laugh, which hadn’t changed at all.
‘See, the childbirth is the easy part,’ she said. ‘So shall we go to the classes?’
‘Definitely,’ I said.
21
‘Oh, thank goodness. I thought you’d got fat.’
Four hours on a delayed train to Upper Pepperton on Christmas Eve, fretting all the way about how Sheila was going to react to her granddaughter-and-fake-daughter repeating her real daughter’s fate, and this was it?
I pushed aside my tea. ‘Did you miss something here, Sheila? I’m pregnant. Out of wedlock.’
‘I wish you’d keep on calling me “Mum”.’ Sheila refilled my cup, as if I’d asked for more, and replaced the cosy on the teapot. The cosy was pink and green and hideous, the product of her knitting club. Sheila was a joiner, especially since I’d left for university and not come back. Besides the knitting, she belonged to book, bridge, bowls, and bingo clubs; she took courses in ceramics and gardening; she volunteered to fundraise for just about any local cause. She said it filled her days. It also filled her house with paperbacks, wonky vases, tombola tickets and courgettes.
Despite this joining mania, it was easy enough to see how I’d passed for Sheila’s daughter for twenty-five years; I resembled her a hell of a lot more than I resembled June. Pear-shaped hips and all.
‘Unless you’re going to start calling June “Mum”?’ she added.
‘I couldn’t possibly imagine,’ I said.
It was the same as our usual Christmas Eves together: tea and mince pies and then we’d go to the carol service in the church down the road. When Stanley had been alive he’d drunk whisky instead of tea, and come with us to sing in his big bass voice. It was a time of year when I always missed him. June, when she was there, would nip from the whisky and skip church. There was no sign of her this year.
‘How far gone are you?’ she asked.
‘Sixteen weeks.’
She nodded. ‘It’s a little girl,’ she said. ‘I knew when I had June, and I knew when June was carrying you. Your bump’s spread out a bit. She’s active, I bet.’
‘She - it hasn’t moved yet.’
‘She will, soon.’ Sheila kept on nodding. ‘So are you and Hugh planning on getting married?’
Ah. The key to her mysterious lack of horror.
‘It’s not his baby. And Hugh’s never going to get married and settle down.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes. He tells me so every time he gets drunk. It has something to do with his parents getting divorced and using him to fight with each other for years. Anyway, didn’t you hear me? The baby isn’t Hugh’s.’
‘Oh. Are you sure?’
‘Since I’ve never had sex with him, that seems like a pretty good indication.’ I took a breath. There was no point getting annoyed with Sheila; this was all my own doing.
‘Whose is it?’
That, of course, was the question. ‘I’m trying to find him.’
‘Good for you. I know you’ll do the right thing.’
‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you going to lecture me about having unsafe sex? About getting pregnant by mistake?’
‘I’ve done that already, with June. I cried and I yelled and I lectured. It didn’t do any good.’ She smiled at me. ‘Knowing you, you’ve already done it to yourself anyway.’
Yes. It was good to know that the woman who raised me knew I was naturally guilt-ridden. But why wasn’t she upset?
I didn’t want the lecture, yet I felt cheated by not getting it. During the whole four-hour journey I’d dreaded telling Sheila, and at the same time looked forward to it. Finally, I was going to get the sort of attention that June always had. I was going to feel as if I’d been transgressive, made an impact. And now Sheila couldn’t be bothered to do anything but remember how she’d lectured June. As if June had got all the credit for my mistakes, too.
‘By “do the right thing”, do you mean marry the father?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘Well, that’s what I did.’
‘Oh, God.’ I buried my face in my hands. ‘Are you saying this runs in the family? Did your mother get pregnant before she got married too?’
‘She never talked about it. They wouldn’t, back then. Her wedding dress in the photo is very loose, though. Anyway, your fath—Stanley was a wonderful man, so I did the right thing. He loved you more than anything, you know.’ She took my hand and patted it. ‘I know you’ll get through this, you’ll find the father and tell him and you’ll be very happy.’
‘That would be nice,’ I said doubtfully.
Sheila knew pretty much everyone in Upper Pepperton and she lingered inside the church after the service, catching up with people as if she hadn’t seen them in weeks. I knew she’d most likely met up with them in one club or another in the past few days, but people in small towns didn’t take long to build up trivia to talk about.
For the first couple of conversations, I hovered at her shoulder watching her like a hawk. I’d asked her not to reveal that I was pregnant yet, but Sheila got carried away sometimes. When it became clear that she was going to stick strictly to other people’s gossip and last Wednesday’s bridge results, I slipped off to wait for her outside.
The damp settled into my clothes as I hopped from one foot to the other. It was only marginally colder outside than inside the church. I took up my usual post beside the lych gate, where I’d spent countless hours as a teenager kicking the ground, sulking, and failing to look cool while I waited for my mum.
She finally emerged in a chorus of ‘Merry Christmas’es and joined me walking down the road back to our house.
‘So it’s true,’ she said to me as soon as we were out of earshot of the rest of Upper Pepperton, ‘Ian and Nancy’s son Quentin is gay. He came home yesterday with that Colin fellow he’d claimed was only his friend and they announced they were getting married or getting a civil partnership, or whatever it’s called, right in the middle of decorating the tree. Nancy is all right with it but Ian is in a state of shock. I wouldn’t say it to them, but what did they expect? Nancy was always talking about Colin’s taste in decorating, she saved up the Christmas tree for him every year especially. This year it’s a fruit theme. Of course she couldn’t finish hanging the baubles, she had to comfort Ian, but Colin finished it up. Winnie says it looks gorgeous.’
I usually let these torrents of information pass right through my head and out the other side, but I perked up at this one. Not because Quentin was gay; I’d known that since we were in primary school together and he’d actively encouraged the nickname ‘Queen Quentin’.
‘People must have talked about us,’ I said. ‘When June got pregnant. Wasn’t it embarrassing?’ Full realisation struck me. ‘Oh God, all of these people must know that you’re not really my mother. They must have known all about it when I was growing up.’
My face flamed hot despite the cold, and I frantically tried to remember if I’d been given knowing looks by the neighbours throughout my childhood. I didn’t remember any but that could be because I’d received so many of them that I thought it was normal.
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