Separate Lives (31 page)

“Where's Hal?” said Richard. “I thought you were getting him back this morning?”

“I was. I did. He's gone already.” I shrugged. “Teenage boys; they're not exactly charms on their mum's bracelets, are they?”

“Which of course means you've done a brilliant job.”

“Do you think? I don't know. I suppose it's just a succession of ‘goodbyes' from here on in.”

“We males have stuff to do: continents to conquer, wars to fight, girls to . . . well, now we have the house to ourselves for a bit, come here . . .”

The next day, I had both Hal and Richard on my turf. An embarrassment of males, which, come to think of it, could very well be the collective noun. Neither had spent an entire day with the other, though they were off to an easy start, talking tries and tackles and whatever else constitutes a discussion about rugby (I may have watched a few matches in my time but the finer points of the game—and all team sports, really, being a tennis fan—still eluded me). I was intrigued as to how our time together would pan out, especially as I had A Plan, of which Richard had already been primed.

“OK, Hal—and Richard—how do you fancy a trip to the seaside? I know it's February, but I thought you might want to see a house I've just bought, Hal? And not just any house but a part of your heritage. It used to belong to your great-grandmother.”

Hal glanced up from his poached egg. “Cool. Where is it?”

“Random-on-Sea. Down from London and left a bit, right at the end of East Sussex, before you hit Kent. I spent a lot of time there as a kid, before Nan died in 1977.”

“Elvis died in 1977.”

“Er, yes, he did. Nan died after Elvis, but she was older.”

“Yeah, Elvis was only forty-two. He died on August sixteenth. Which happened to be my eleventh birthday,” said Richard. I hadn't known that.

“Cool,” repeated Hal. “Not the dying on your birthday bit, though. When are we going? Are we moving there?”

“No, we're not moving there! I'm just kind of keeping it for a rainy day. And we should go now. Although it's Sunday the previous owners very kindly agreed to meet us at the house with the keys at midday—and it usually takes a couple of hours, so let's get cracking.”

I had assumed Hal would spend most of the journey incommunicado, hooked up to his iPod Touch; I had assumed wrong. Hal's new school already seemed to have assisted him in becoming the kind of teenager who was happy to make conversation with adults for periods in excess of, say, five minutes, rather than retreating into monosyllables, though I suspect Richard's presence may have contributed to that. It also occurred to me that since I'd split with David, Hal had never spent much time with me and any adult male who wasn't his dad. He was making up for it now, though, and I loved how well he and Richard were getting on and how Richard was so easy with Hal, treating him mostly like a slightly shorter equal.

We drove past the sign that said “Welcome to Random-on-Sea!”—somebody had spray-painted a sarcastic “You're” just above it, though I was pleased they'd punctuated correctly—and on through the 'burbs, down the hill, past the park and the shopping center, after which we hit the seafront. When I turned left for the Old Town, Hal had been silent for about ten minutes.

“What do you think, Hal?”

“Weird place. Kind of sad.”

He wasn't wrong. At midday on a chilly, overcast February Sunday, Random was not at its perkiest. The tide was high and as the waves slapped against the groins, a silty gray spume spilt on to the road. Very few people were on the streets, just a couple of hardy joggers and heads-down families swaddled in layers, carrying just-in-case umbrellas.

“I know what you mean. But if you can find a way to appreciate it like this, believe me, you'll be completely charmed by the place in July. What about you, Richard?”

“Put it like this, Pippa: the only way is up.”

“Look, I know it's not exactly Santa Monica but give it a chance.”

We parked easily on the Old Town seafront, opposite the shut-for-the-season dodgems and ghost train, although Slots of Fun was still open, plying its tacky trade.

“We'll have to walk from here because the parking's a bit iffy. It's not far.” A few meters inland and the atmosphere changed. Even on such an unprepossessing day, the Old Town looked warm—well, warmer—and welcoming.

“I feel a pub lunch coming on,” said Richard.

“Sick,” said Hal.

“Hopefully not
too
sick,” I said.

Off the High Street we turned left and right and right again. There were lights on inside Nana's house. I knocked and the door opened to reveal Ruth Abbott, Zoe clamped to her thigh, and behind her a tall, pleasantly smiling man I assumed must be Tom. Inside we made the introductions.

“Richard,” said Richard, reaching a hand out to Tom.

“Yeah, I know! Good to meet you. If I'd anticipated meeting a sporting hero I would've brought a ball along for you
to sign. I'm involved with a local charity auction for the NSPCC.”

I tended to forget that, to many people—my son included—Richard was a bit of a “ledge.”

“I suspect I may have a spare ball kicking around somewhere, though rather than throwing it back to you I'll have to rely on the Royal Mail.”

“That's very kind, Richard. Much appreciated.”

“I know you're not moving in,” said Ruth, “but I still wanted the place to feel homely so I forced Tom to light a fire. And there's a bottle of something in the fridge.” She reached out and touched my arm. “Pippa, I can't tell you how happy we are that you've got this house and, whatever you decide to do with it, it's great to know it will be loved, even from a distance. Your nana would approve.”

“She would. And it will. What do you think of the house, Hal?”

“It's like a doll's house but I still like it. It's cool.”

“From a man with a haircut as great as yours there is probably no higher praise,” said Tom, “and look, obviously I don't know what your plans are and we don't want to intrude, but why don't you spend a bit of time here and then join us for a pub lunch round the corner, at the Dragon?”

“This man is speaking my language. But first, Pip, we really must do some of that traditional knocking-on-ye-olde-walls and opening-of-ye-cupboards.”

Richard was great at this. I could've hugged him.

“Yeah, we'll just poke around for a bit, if that's OK. And then we'll pop down the pub and ask for a ten grand refund.”

While Ruth and Tom laughed, Hal looked mortified. “Mum!”

“It's a joke. Come upstairs and see Nana's old room. And I'll show you where me and Beth always used to sleep, in the attic.”

“Auntie Beth? You haven't mentioned Auntie Beth for years, Mum.”

Out of the mouths of teenagers. Hal was right. I hadn't.

“OK, that's true. And I don't know why I haven't because I should've. Come on.”

“You go upstairs with your mum. I'm going downstairs to knock on some walls and check out the fridge . . .” said Richard, correctly intuiting that this was a mother and son moment. Here was the thing: even after just six weeks together Richard didn't make my solar plexus churn like a cement mixer and my head fill with helium every time I saw him, but nonetheless, every day we spent together I realized he was beginning to break down my defenses and patch up my heart.

Which was just as well, because on a Saturday morning just four weeks later, shortly after Richard had left for the day, I found myself on my knees in the bathroom and retching into the loo. Again, and again.

After which I lay flat on my back on the chilly limestone and stared at the ceiling for what may have been half an hour—or possibly five minutes. It was hard to say. Eventually, I went downstairs to the kitchen and made a piece of dry toast and boiled a mug of water with a slice of lemon and went back upstairs to bed and reacquainted myself with the ceiling.

For quite a while I had assumed I was a grown-up simply on the basis of being in my forties. Like an idiot I thought it just came with the territory, but clearly this was not the case—patently I was still a teenager trapped in the body of a middle-aged woman.

Contraception hadn't really been a part of my life for a long time. Initially it was because I didn't need it. After Hal had been born, David and I were both keen to get a football team under way, but, despite our best efforts, nothing had come of it. By the time I had finally started visiting a fertility specialist in Wimpole Street, when Hal was four, and discussing IVF with an increasingly distant David, he had—although I didn't yet know it—already moved on to a younger, presumably more fertile model. Shortly after Hal's eighth birthday, in 2004, he'd gone. At the time I had assumed this was because I couldn't give him what I thought he wanted—more babies—but later I realized this wasn't the case. Turned out my obsession with having more babies far outweighed his desire to have them. There had, for example, been one terrible dinner party when Hal was six, during which our hostess—Wendy, a good friend, though also an ex of David's from uni—had announced that she was twelve weeks pregnant while proudly patting her midriff as she divided a
tarte au citron
.

Despite my having already guessed—Wendy hadn't had a drink all evening and her face had that wonderful natural Botox look some women get in early pregnancy—my involuntary, hormonal response, tears, and clearly not of joy, shocked even me. David was solicitous in our host's company. “I think Pip was hoping to beat you to it! But obviously that's wonderful news! Congratulations!” However, once we were out of the door (within fifteen minutes, as it happened) he didn't bother disguising his anger:

“For
chrissakes
, Pip, the world is heaving with pregnant women. You've been one yourself, for fuck's sake! It's not like we don't already have a perfectly wonderful child. Get a bloody grip.”

It had, needless to say, been downhill from there and David was gone within a year. While that same year—2004—went on to end far worse than it had begun. After all of which, I now realized, I'd shut myself down, and not only to the possibility of more children, obviously, but also to the possibility of ever being in the kind of place where more children might even be contemplated, much less conceived.

So here I was at forty-three and long-since resigned to the situation . . . except the situation I had taken for granted for so long was clearly no longer the situation, and I was slightly stunned by how very unprepared for this situation I appeared to be. Though I figured I'd probably better do a test. After which I would cross the bridge that was the paternity issue—a bridge which seemed infinitely long, a Golden Gate to-the-power-of, and not entirely stable.

I must say that being forty-three and buying a pregnancy testing kit in my local Boots on a Saturday morning wasn't helped by the girl at the till—who looked about seventeen but might have been twenty-one—being pregnant herself.

“Oh that's the one I used. Hang on, there's a two-for-one on those.”

“Thanks,” I muttered. “And sorry,” I said to the queue of six people behind me. “For my daughter,” I added, pointlessly.

Back in the twentieth century, when I had been pregnant with Hal, you could only do an accurate test with the first pee of the day. No longer. These days it seems you can test within minutes of a potential conception, at any time of the day or night—at which point a Poppins-ish maternity nurse will undoubtedly magically manifest on your doorstep,
tut-tutting
about soft cheese consumption and offering maternity yoga options.

But I wasn't in a rush to have the answer to the question posed by the “Ferti-kit,” mostly because I was pretty sure I knew what the answer would be. Now I came to think of it, I hadn't had my period since Christmas. How I hadn't noticed this was beyond me—I'd been able to set my watch by my cycle since I was twelve—but then perhaps I had noticed, deep down, and chosen to ignore it? Whether the outcome was good news or bad news, as yet I had no idea because there are some intellectual processes and responses that are entirely bypassed by biology. It would be whatever it was.

So forty minutes later, after much prevarication—and it was suddenly a matter of urgency that the dishwasher be unloaded and reloaded and a (very small) pile of washing be addressed—I had the answer I knew I would get: positive. Pregnant. At forty-three. And though the statistical evidence pointed to Richard being the father, I knew he wasn't.

Richard was a stepfather—his ex-wife Sarah's children (a twenty-two-year-old son, Danny, was currently bartending in Brisbane and a twenty-year-old daughter, Siobhan, was in her final year at Bristol. Needless to say I'd not met either of them) were the product of Sarah's brief first marriage. One evening in late January, when Richard and I were still feeling our way into a relationship, sharing our complex emotional CVs over spag bol and far too much wine, Richard had told me he couldn't have kids. It had never been a huge issue, apparently, because after he had split up with his long-term girlfriend, Liz, he had met Sarah when her children were still small and had loved being a stepdad. When he and Sarah's efforts to conceive had failed, they had done some tests and discovered that his sperm count was almost comically low.

“Mostly it was just a huge blow to my ego. I was still playing rugby at the highest level and apparently oozing testosterone on a daily basis, but I'd had an inkling that something wasn't right for a while, to be honest. I'd been in a relationship for five years before I met Sarah and during that time we had become careless about contraception, though there had never been even the hint of a scare. Of course it could have been Liz's problem, but I always felt deep down that it wasn't. We never discussed it—we were young and it wasn't yet an issue—but I sort of knew.” Richard shrugged. “Of course nowadays they'd probably be able to do something about it, but when I met Sarah she was very much out of baby-ville, though still in the small-children zone. Frankly, I wasn't disappointed being spared the broken nights and dirty nappies. And though I went from naught to sixty in what felt like seconds as a stepdad, I think I got most of the good bits of parenting and was spared some of the grief. I've always loved them as if they were my own. They're cracking kids. You'd love them, too.”