The Baby Group (18 page)

‘If you say so,' Sandy said simply, and Natalie knew in this one respect she could trust Sandy. After all, her mum was a woman who built almost her entire life on a series of what Sandy called ‘little white lies', from her real age to how much she had in the bank. Natalie knew that Sandy – the original mistress of disguising the truth – wouldn't blow her cover story or even bother to ask why she had one in the first place.

Why, Natalie found herself wondering as she lowered Freddie into his cot, had she invented a cover story in the first place? What exactly was wrong with the bare facts of her life? She was a woman on her own who'd had a brief affair that had resulted in a baby. She lived in the twenty-first century. Nobody really cared about her circumstances, so why did she feel this subterfuge was necessary? Natalie had a stack of reasons and excuses she could trot out blithely to anyone who asked, but the reality was that she was concealing a deeper truth. She had never been very sure, not even when she was a tiny girl, that the real her was good or interesting enough to be loved by anyone, certainly not her father and possibly even her mother. Maybe even especially her mother.

Dinner was amazingly pain-free.

Natalie's mother had been right. With Gary there they did not fight, principally because Sandy was far more interested in Gary than she was in her daughter. All Natalie had to do was to sit back and let her single allotted glass of wine numb her nerve endings while Sandy flirted with Gary. Or rather at him.

Occasionally Natalie considered rescuing the poor man from Sandy's barrage of compliments and innuendo. But it was a dog-eat-dog world and frankly she'd rather not focus her mother's attention back on her. Instead, Natalie used the time to try to collect herself. She felt as if she had been blown in a million different directions and couldn't quite remember where it was she had started out.

This gradually increasing sensation of slipping out of control of her own life had begun the minute that Alice had called her to tell her that Jack was back in town, Natalie decided. Until that moment she had been keeping a tight lid on top of all the unresolved issues and emotions she had concerning Jack, even in the face of Alice's relentless questioning. But it now seemed that Jack was back and there was a very real threat that she wouldn't be able to control what happened next. It was too much.

Natalie could cope with the electrics being ripped out, she almost enjoyed her long nights sitting up with Freddie. She welcomed her tentatively new relationship with the baby group members, and even her mother was manageable as long as she was preoccupied with Gary and half-cut. But the thought of seeing and speaking to Jack made her want to run away and hide in the airing cupboard. She was terrified of seeing him, almost as afraid as she was of not seeing him.

It wouldn't be so bad if she had any idea what he was really like or who he really was. Instead, all she knew about him seemed to be based on lies, on some kind of elaborate performance. He wasn't that sometimes shy, sometimes eccentric man determined to act on uncharacteristic impulse to spend time with Natalie. He couldn't be that man she had talked to more honestly about herself than she had ever done with
anyone
, let alone any man, before. Because if he was that man, then he wouldn't have disappeared without even bothering to call and apologise. The man she had such trouble forgetting didn't really exist. And yet it was that man that Natalie couldn't stop thinking about.

And what galled her the most was that she, a veritable expert in changing the person she was to fit all circumstances, had been fooled by someone playing exactly the same game whilst she – for once in her chameleon-like life – had been simply herself.

If only, Natalie wished, there was some way she could find out what Jack was really like before she had to tell him about his son. If she could just see him again, give herself a chance to let the scales fall from her eyes and examine his true identity, she was sure she would be able to manage her mixed feelings for him. The problem was that she knew, because all the evidence pointed that way, that he was no good, not for her and probably not for any of the many women he must approach on a regular basis, she
knew
that. But she didn't
feel
it yet, because her overriding memory of him was entirely different. It was a memory of a man she thought she could have fallen for, given the chance.

Natalie had barely spoken to her dinner guest when just before ten the baby monitor crackled into life and Freddie began to cry.

‘He probably needs feeding,' she said as she pushed her chair out from the table. She was surprised to find that her one largish glass of wine had gone immediately to her head and somewhere in the general locations of her knees. For a moment the corners of the room dilated and then contracted back into right angles as she sat down again unsteadily.

‘Bit of a dizzy spell,' she said to Gary and Sandy who were watching her.

‘You stay put, love, get your sea legs back. He might just need a cuddle and a bit of a rock,' Sandy said, brandishing the cigarette she had been threatening to light for the last five minutes. ‘Oh go on, darling, let Nana Sandy have a go.'

‘Nana Sandy?' Natalie blinked. ‘Good God.' She exchanged a smile with Gary, who seemed relieved that the glare of Sandy's attention was no longer focused on him. ‘I suppose you can have a go, but just for the record if you take
that
thing,' she jabbed her fork at Sandy's cigarette, ‘within five miles of my son you will be on the first flight back to Spain. No smoking ANYWHERE in my house, understood?'

To Natalie's surprise, having half expected her mother to choose nicotine over her grandson, Sandy placed the offending article regretfully on the table.

‘I'll call you up if he won't go back down,' she said, turning the volume down on the monitor as she went out of the door. ‘After all, this is why I'm here, darling, isn't it? To give you a break.'

‘Break
down
more like,' Natalie mumbled as Sandy left the room.

‘Your mother certainly is a force of nature,' Gary said with a small smile.

‘Trust me, there is nothing natural about that woman,' Natalie told him bluntly.

‘You two always like that with each other?' he asked her, lifting one eyebrow rather rakishly, Natalie thought. Gary was quite attractive after a glass of wine. Possibly even before it if you liked solidly built, capable-looking men who were a little shorter than average. It would certainly be hard to find a man who was more different from Jack. Whereas Jack was long-legged and lean, Gary was possibly only two or three inches taller than her, with broad shoulders and a muscular torso. He must be little bit vain, Natalie decided, otherwise he wouldn't wear his T-shirts quite so tight, but in Gary she found it quite a charming quality. Jack had a surprisingly fair complexion despite his dark hair and eyes, while Gary's skin was darker, a lightly tanned tone that contrasted well with his light grey eyes. As Natalie's wine swilled around her momentarily empty head she decided she liked the look of Gary. He could be the perfect antidote to almost thin, stringy Jack – a broad, well-muscled, uncomplicated antidote.

‘I suppose we are,' she answered with a one-shouldered shrug. ‘I haven't really seen her that much since I was old enough to be able to escape her. It was because of Tiffany that I rang her. She made me realise that there was a vague possibility that I didn't have the worst mother on the planet after all. Do you know how Tiff got on with the social worker today, by the way?'

‘She's getting it all sorted, I think,' Gary said. ‘But it's a lot for her to manage on her own. She says she's coping, but how can she be when she's just a kid herself? Actually, I was thinking that maybe you could keep an eye on her if she needs an older woman to talk to?'

Natalie was surprised and rather touched that Gary had thought to ask her to watch out for Tiffany, even if he did take the edge off with the ‘older woman' comment.

‘Of course I will,' she said. ‘The alarming thing is that technically I am actually old enough to be her mother.'

‘You don't look it,' Gary said quietly, instantly redeeming himself from his previous minor indiscretion. ‘You look really great.'

Natalie couldn't help but beam at the compliment.

‘Well, I think I'm doing quite well as long I remember not to turn into her.' She nodded at the silenced baby monitor.

‘I quite like your mother in a way.' Gary, who had visibly relaxed since Sandy had left the room, leaned back in the chair and stretched his arms over his head, not like the rather formal and shy man she was used to at all. ‘She's very . . . ah . . . friendly,' he added, pulling one corner of his mouth down on the last word. Natalie laughed.

‘Well, Gary, if I can promise you one thing about my mum it is that at some point before you finish working here she will ask you to have sex with her. That's a given. You are exactly her type: younger, broad, strong and good-looking . . .' Natalie trailed off as she realised her list of compliments had caused Gary's shyness to return.

Natalie was warming rather dangerously to Gary. She hadn't noticed any of those things about him before tonight – in fact, if anyone had asked what she thought about him she would have told them he was nice-looking, in that he looked ‘nice'. Nothing more than that. But now as she looked at him she found herself imagining the weight and mass of him under her hands.

‘The thing is,' Natalie continued, ‘I don't think Mum sees her prey as younger. I worked out a few years ago that she somehow got mentally stuck at her peak, somewhere in her forties I think. And since then whenever she looks in the mirror she still sees that woman, not the wizened old crone she is in reality.'

‘She looks all right for her age!' Gary said gallantly.

‘Careful, Gary,' Natalie teased him. ‘She'll lure you into her boudoir yet!'

The pair of them laughed and Natalie felt quite floaty and mellow. Quite confident and womanly again. She had almost forgotten the still-sore place where her stitches had been, and the fact she was still wearing her stretch, wide-legged trousers from the gym that did absolutely nothing to restrain her failing tummy muscles. In fact, she felt quite good about herself when Gary Fisher smiled at her, and the spectre of Jack Newhouse that had haunted her all this time briefly diminished.

‘It's nice that you stayed,' she told Gary, hearing the drop in the tone of her voice, feeling the flutter of her unmade-up lashes and sensing that she was perilously close to flirt mode. ‘Thank you.'

Gary looked down at the table top.

‘Thanks for having me,' he said, apparently enormously interested in his place mat. ‘Besides, although I'm quite a good cook it's nice to be cooked for now and again. And it would have been a shame if you and your mum had fallen out on her first night here.'

‘Oh, there's still time,' Natalie said, glancing at the clock and then back at Gary. The two of them looked at each other across the table, and Natalie thought she must really be drunk because she felt the irresistible desire to lean across the table and kiss her electrician – with tongues and everything.

‘So when will you be finished?' she said instead, forcing herself to sit back in her chair and wondering if Gary had noticed her moment of desire for him.

‘Another week and a half ?' Gary hazarded a guess. ‘Maybe even a bit sooner.'

‘Oh really?' Natalie was surprised. ‘That soon?'

‘I'll miss coming here,' Gary told her, tipping his near empty wine glass around and around so that the remnants of the liquid inside circled the bottom of the glass.

‘You will?' Natalie said smoothly, almost flirtatiously, finding herself on the edge of that now so familiar precipice, the one she always seemed to climb just before she flung herself into some new, needless complication.

‘Yeah, I'll miss this lovely old house. I hardly ever get to work on places like this. It's really great that you've kept it as a house. If a developer had got his hands on it . . .'

And then all at once Natalie was free-falling again, plummeting downwards without any hope of reversing the action she was about to take, even though she knew in the seconds before she spoke that it was doomed to fail.

‘But the real question is,' she said, hearing her soft purring voice as if it were an entity entirely detached from her brain, ‘will you miss
me
?'

And then she leaned across the table, put her hand on the back of Gary's neck and tried to pull his head, his lips, towards hers.

Gary, eyes wide with fearful mortification, resisted, his neck and shoulders resolutely rigid with horror.

Two or perhaps three seconds of excruciatingly perfect embarrassment passed as Natalie gradually came to her senses and realised too late what it was that she had done. It seemed to take an age for her to remove her hands from Gary's person and sit back down in her chair.

For the first time in her adult life she was glad to see Sandy walking through the door.

‘No, it's no good, he needs feeding,' her mother said, stopping short as she entered the room as if she could somehow smell the atmosphere.

Natalie blinked to clear her vision and saw the look of naked terror still frozen on poor Gary's face. She saw her mum trying very hard to stifle a giggle.

‘Oh well, thanks for trying, Mum,' she said quickly, getting up from the table with a little stagger. ‘I'll settle him.'

Gary stood up too.

‘And I'd better be going. Thanks for dinner, Mrs . . .'

‘Sandy, darling, and please – stay for coffee. I could use some company.'