The Baby Group (22 page)

‘God, tell it like it is, Alice,' Natalie exclaimed.

‘But,' Alice continued firmly, ‘the son you had because of it is here to stay. You have focus on a real, straightforward life. Maybe then you'll start to be happy.'

‘But I am happy!' Natalie protested, waggling her fingers by way of demonstration. ‘Look at me, I'm virtually hysterical.'

‘You could be happier than you know,' Alice said sagely.

The two women regarded each other for a long moment and then Natalie said, ‘I love you, Alice, but sometimes you talk an awful lot of bollocks.'

Natalie was only half listening as Jess and Meg chatted away happily over a chicken Caesar salad and bowl of pasta. She was looking around the small Italian restaurant, gazing at the fishing nets that hung off the ceiling and the thickly Artexed walls and thinking about the first time she had come here. It was the day that she had met Jack Newhouse and he had brought her here for lunch.

She hadn't intended to bring her friends here. As they had wandered out of Soho and onto Oxford Street the three of them had been in high spirits and more than a little tipsy.

Natalie was glad that Alice now knew all her shameful secrets and, despite everything, she felt that sharing her fake husband with her oldest friend and confessor had eased the problem, as if just talking about it was the equivalent of actually doing something. So she decided to give herself the rest of the day off from thinking about him at all, at least intentionally. It was harder to reign in those unconscious thoughts that seemed to pop into her head unbidden at any moment, but she would try.

Jess had phoned home just as they were leaving Mystery is Power and looked relieved when Lee told her that Jacob was fine, lying on the floor on his play mat batting the mirrors on his baby gym. He told Jess to take her time and enjoy herself, but as she hung up the phone she looked uncertain.

‘All OK there?' Meg asked her.

‘Fine, absolutely fine,' Jess replied. ‘Which is great. It's just . . . I suppose I'm jealous really. That Lee finds it all so easy.' She shrugged and shook her head. ‘Stupid, I know.'

‘Not stupid,' Natalie said. ‘Not
especially
rational but not exactly stupid.'

‘And . . .' Jess hesitated. ‘Well, I've had a great time today, I really have, I've felt happy and relaxed. But sometimes I worry that if I'm not worrying, if I'm off duty, that's when something bad will happen.'

‘Now that is stupid,' Natalie said mildly.

‘And at least you know they are both fine,' Meg said. ‘So let's make the most of this time, shall we?' Her smile was fleetingly obscured by a frown. ‘Poor old Frances. Oh dear, I do feel terrible that I'm out having fun while she's got all my children, who are a handful at the best of times.'

Natalie put a sincere hand on her arm. ‘If you feel terrible call her and get her down here, the kids as well,' she suggested mischievously.

‘You're right,' Meg said. ‘I don't feel
that
terrible.'

‘Who fancies Topshop then?' Natalie asked her friends, shepherding them determinedly past Marks and Spencer.

‘Topshop?' Jess asked uncertainly. ‘I can't remember the last time I was in Topshop. I started to feel like I was a bit old for it.'

‘Which is exactly why,' Natalie told her, ‘we should shop there.'

Natalie loved expensive clothes. She was never happier than when handing over her credit card to pay for one tiny garment that could have bought an entire branch of New Look, but still she loved Topshop. Specifically Topshop, Oxford Street, London. She supposed it might be because she had grown up with it; it had always been there through her teens, her twenties and even now, as that big number that began with an ‘f ' and ended in a zero was looming just a few years away, she still got a buzz out of shopping there. It was true that she could no longer get away with a lemon yellow puffball miniskirt and that the shop staff all looked as if they needed babysitters but whenever she had time to spare she'd spend it in Topshop if she could, getting her eardrums blasted by the in-store music and searching for something, anything, to take home.

‘Because,' Natalie explained to her friends as she rifled through the discount rack, ‘while you shop at Topshop you are still technically a young woman. Our challenge now, ladies, is to find and purchase a garment that we would genuinely wear on a daily basis. Scarves, hats, earrings, and hosiery of any kind do not count. It must be a fashion item. And if we each succeed then we may claim our right to eternal youth for another season. Go forth and seek your Topshop treasure.'

How Meg managed to find what had to be the world's last remaining gypsy skirt on the discount rack Natalie would never know, but find it she did. Even though the elastic-waisted monstrosity was exactly like a dozen other skirts that Natalie had seen her friend in, she supposed it was a fashion item of a sort, it was something that Meg would regularly wear and it did come from Topshop, so technically she had completed the challenge. Jess breezed it by buying a short black denim miniskirt that she looked far too good in and Natalie scraped in with a dark red V-neck top that she hadn't realised, until the others pointed it out to her, was almost exactly like the one she was wearing.

‘Doesn't matter,' Natalie said as she looked down at her chest and then into the bag. ‘What matters is that it is a fashion item from Topshop. Ladies, it's official. We are all still hip with the kids.'

As they had wandered and talked, heading back towards Charing Cross Road, and as it had become clear that Jess and Meg were following Natalie's lead she had begun to get the strangest feeling in the pit of her stomach. The kind of feeling she usually only experienced when she was about to go on a first date or make an important sales presentation to prospective buyers. As they walked she had focused on the raw-edged sensation and tried to assess what might be causing it. Life was certainly pretty fraught at the moment, that was true, what with enforced lack of sleep compounded by her dear mother in residence, a faux-husband lie to remember at all times and the Jack Problem. That was it, of course. The Jack Problem.

Natalie had been so busy trying not to think and not to worry about what would happen when she finally saw Jack that she hadn't noticed where their aimless strolling was taking them. She had brought herself and her friends back to the restaurant that Jack loved, the place where they knew him by his first name and brought him complimentary desserts. A place where he could definitely be considered as a regular, the very definition of which meant that when he was in town he was often there. He might, she had suddenly realised, even be in there right now.

Perhaps it was
because
he was in there that her treacherous feet had brought her here. Perhaps she had been thinking so hard about not thinking about Jack that some primordial force within her had homed to where Jack would be waiting.

The thought had stopped Natalie in her tracks outside the Italian Kitchen. For a second before Meg had pushed open the door to the busy trattoria Natalie had had to pause to catch her breath, bracing herself against seeing him and having to take those first steps towards finding out exactly how this mess would resolve itself. She heard her blood pounding and felt her intestines contract as adrenaline surged through her system.

But of course Jack wasn't there.

The anticlimax left Natalie feeling utterly drained and secretly rather foolish. For a few brief seconds she had convinced herself that fate or her amazing psychic powers were going to take the dilemma out of her hands entirely, but of course she wasn't just going to bump into Jack; fate would not be that kind to her, of all people, and considering she had just bought a top almost identical to the one she was wearing she didn't imagine that her intuitive skills were all that finely honed, either.

So when the same waiter who served them last time, but who did not remember her at all, sat them down at a table near the kitchen she was so exhausted by the release of tension that she was only able to smile and listen as Jess and Meg talked. Neither woman was entirely relaxed either, Natalie realised, Jess always keeping one eye on her watch and Meg glancing down at her bag of underwear every few minutes with a look of quiet trepidation.

With a sense of almost peaceful detachment Natalie looked at the table in the window where she and Jack had had lunch and tried to go back to that moment, that seemingly inconsequential moment that was only meant to be a fun diversion, and wondered what it was that had brought her here. At what point exactly had she made the decision that had altered her own existence so wonderfully and so completely? She tried to pin it down, but she couldn't. It might have been when she caught Jack looking at her on the Tube, or perhaps in the restaurant over lunch when she saw the light in his eyes as he talked about Italy. Technically it was probably when she idiotically decided to have sex with him without using a condom, but the romantic part of her didn't want it to just be about that. There was no one decisive moment, Natalie concluded. It was everything, every passing second of those few days.

It was almost as if she'd lived an emotional lifetime in that weekend. It would be a lie to say she regretted it, because it would mean she regretted Freddie and that certainly wasn't true. She rejoiced in him: it was as if his birth had reconnected her to the planet she was so often perilously close to drifting off again. Perhaps if she was able to look at what had happened in a purely philosophical light Natalie would see that Jack had given her this marvellous gift, the best possible gift. But she didn't feel especially philosophical about Jack. She felt a lot of things, but philosophical wasn't one of them.

‘You're quiet, Natalie,' Meg said, interrupting her thoughts. ‘You didn't get into trouble with Alice for giving us free stuff, did you?'

‘Mmmm?' It took Natalie a second to register the question. ‘Oh no!' she reassured her. ‘Alice was fine about that. We just had to catch up on some business stuff. Alice is a sweetie really. She is sort of like the mum I never had. She's always telling me where I'm going wrong and what to do about it, and I'm always ignoring her and getting it wrong anyway. As opposed to my real mum who is always telling me where I went wrong before I do anything, and then getting drunk.'

‘I don't think you get anything wrong,' Jess said, a touch wistfully. ‘You look like you've got your life completely sorted to me!'

‘Well, it is a trial being perfect, you know,' Natalie said, wondering what Jess would say if she knew exactly how messed up Natalie's life was. Part of her almost wanted to confess then and there just to make Jess feel better about herself, but she didn't seem to have the energy. She emptied a second tube of sugar into her coffee.

‘I'm just tired, I suppose. I frequently forget that the human body isn't meant to rush about on only four hours' sleep. Last night is catching up with me. Mum said she'd take turns at night but it turns out that I can't sleep when he's awake, so it's easier for me to be with him. I'm not complaining, at least I got to go out today with you two – it's been fun.'

‘Is your mum's visit as bad as you expected?' Jess asked her with a wry smile.

Natalie shrugged. ‘I honestly didn't think she would be any good at that night-time stuff when I asked her to come over. I didn't think she'd be good at anything grannyish. I really only did it because Tiffany made me realise that even my mother is better than some people's. I mean she nearly gave me an aneurism on the way out this morning, but still I feel surprisingly good about leaving Freddie with her. Mostly because I've locked the vodka in the coal shed.'

Meg and Jess laughed and Natalie smiled, beginning to feel a little more like her old self again. Or at least the version of her new self that she was when she was around these women. She put her sudden drop in spirits down to tiredness and dear Alice banging on about doing the right thing. Yes, it was just the lack of sleep and the glass or two of champagne and being in this place that had her thrown her off kilter.

Alice had said she had to get a grip on reality, and Alice was more right than she knew. Because even Alice didn't know how much Natalie still thought about Jack, how much she still dreamt about him, both sleeping and waking. Soon he would have to be contacted and she would have to see him, possibly on a regular basis, for more or less the rest of her life, and before that happened she had to try really hard to fall out of love with him. The problem was, time was running out, and Natalie hadn't worked out exactly how she was going to do that, because if Jack going off and leaving her in the lurch with his love child didn't put her off him, it was going to take something a hell of a lot worse to do the trick.

Espadrilles, maybe. She never had been able to bear a man in espadrilles.

By the time they had paid the bill and were putting on their coats, Natalie had almost convinced herself that the very fact that she had not bumped into Jack in the restaurant
was
down to fate, after all. It was fate telling her that Alice was wrong and she was right not to have contacted Jack about Freddie, and that nothing would come of it except more complications and possible misery. Alice wanted her to have a less complicated life. Well, Jack not knowing about Freddie, at least until she had got this stupid crush over with, was far less complicated all round. Jack out of her life was much better for her than in it and that was a decision backed up by no one less than God.

However, Natalie was about to find out first hand that God really is extremely partial to moving in mysterious ways.

‘We're bound to get a cab if we walk towards the British Museum,' she was saying, happily at one with the cosmos.