Babies in Waiting (14 page)

‘Are you, though?’ Kate said.

‘Am I what?’

‘Going to come back.’

‘Of course I am. Don’t be silly! I’ll take six months or so, we haven’t quite worked it out yet, and then I’ll be back.’

‘And put your baby in a nursery from eight in the morning till six at night? I don’t think so.’

‘What are you saying?’ I said, trying to stop my voice shaking.

‘Come on, Toni, how many women have you heard about who go on maternity leave and never really come back to work? They want to work part-time, then they get pregnant again with the second one . . . I just . . .’ She stopped herself and shook her head. ‘Never mind.’

‘You just what? What were you going to say?’

‘I can’t say. I’m your boss.’

‘You’re also supposed to be my friend. What were you about to say?’

She hesitated, then said, ‘I just didn’t think you were that sort of girl.’

‘What sort of girl?’ I felt close to tears now. This wasn’t the supportive, friendly girl-chat I’d been expecting when we decided to go out for lunch.

‘The sort who would throw it all away when you were still in your twenties.’

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t have said it. I’m going to go now, and pretend you didn’t say that, as my friend
or
as my boss.’ I stood up.

‘Toni, I’m so sorry,’ she said quickly, and I could see a look of panic in her eyes. But it wasn’t because she’d hurt a friend or because what she’d said was wrong, it was because it broke every HR rule in the book and she was worried I’d throw a gender discrimination lawsuit at them.

James was out at client meetings, so I rang Robyn to have a rant about what Kate had said as I walked back to the office.

‘I hate whining,’ I said. ‘But this just seems so unfair. I love my job. I had a career path. I’d have loved to have waited till my mid-thirties to have a baby. Another two years in this job and a few years as an account manager and I think my position would be much more secure.’

Robyn’s nothing if not direct. ‘So why didn’t you wait?’

‘Because the doctor told us that it was now or never. My crap ovaries are shutting up shop, so we had to choose. Conceive straight away, or maybe never have kids.’

It takes a lot to shut Rob up, but that did it. She was quiet for quite a while. ‘Do they know that at work?’

‘No. And it’s really none of their business.’

‘You’re right. But if people knew that they might not be so quick to judge.’ And I knew in that moment she’d been doing some judging of her own and was now feeling rotten about it. ‘Seriously, Tones, I didn’t really understand before. Now I get it. And I’ll help you as much as I can. I’ll babysit and everything.’

I imagined Robyn tearing down the road with my baby strapped to her bike carrier like a parcel, and I managed a smile. It was the only one that day.

When I told James that evening about Kate, he was furious. ‘You
should
sodding sue them!’ he raged. ‘How dare she say something like that?’

‘Because she believes it. She thinks I’m going to throw my career away and become a yummy mummy and pop out sprogs for the rest of my natural life.’

‘Well, that’s ridiculous. She should know you better than that.’

‘She might have a point, though.’

‘What? What do you mean?’ James looked panicked.

‘Well, I have to say, the way people have behaved at work hasn’t made me feel like they really care about me. And Kate is right . . . I don’t want to go back to work when the baby’s six months old and leave it in some horrible crèche for ten hours a day. Also, do you know what childcare costs?’

‘I haven’t a clue,’ James said.

‘I looked it up on the baby website,’ I began, and he started to roll his eyes. I ignored him and kept talking. ‘We’re looking at up to four hundred pounds a week. If I look at what I bring home, I’d be working to pay for childcare, for my Travelcard and lunch at work, and that’d be pretty much it.’

‘Four hundred quid a
week
?’ James went a little bit pale. ‘There has to be a cheaper way. Most people wouldn’t be able to afford that, surely. How do they manage?’

‘Well, a lot of people don’t live in the south-east, for a start. It’s a lot more expensive here. And maybe they have family to lend a hand. A grandma or a sister helps out. I don’t know.’

‘Well, we don’t have that option. Your mum’s no longer with us, and my mum’s miles away in Hove. It’s not really practical to take a baby down to her there every day.’

‘No.’

‘So what do we do?’ James looked at me expectantly.

‘I don’t know, James! I don’t have all the answers. Ideally, I don’t want to go back to work before the baby’s a year or so old, and even then I don’t think I want to go back full-time. What’s the point in having a baby if neither of us ever see it?’

‘Fair point,’ James said. ‘But we can’t afford this house without your salary. We’re a bit screwed, really.’

We sat side by side on the sofa in miserable silence. ‘We didn’t really think this part of it through, did we?’ said James after a while.

‘Well, it did happen very fast,’ I said, stating the obvious. ‘I suppose we just thought we’d have more time.’

‘More time for what? To win the Lottery?’

‘I know. It seems impossible. But we’ll find a way to make it work. We have to. You can’t un-knock me up now.’

‘Well, I’ll look at some numbers over the next few days,’ James said. ‘Let’s see what we can do.’

James has always been the money brain in our relationship. He works out budgets and puts money away in savings accounts and tells me how much we have to spend
on a holiday each year. I knew he was the right person to solve this problem.

It took him a little while, but one evening a few days later, he asked me to sit down in front of the computer with him. He had a whole spreadsheet laid out, which just made me nervous. It looked so formal.

‘Okay, Tones, this is what we have to do. Here are our expenses, here’s what we have coming in if you take a year off and get statutory maternity pay after the first twelve weeks.’

I may be no good at finances, but even I could see that the first number was bigger than the second one.

‘So what do we do?’ I asked.

‘Well, we need to cut some costs,’ James said. ‘So, for example, we spend a lot on entertainment. If we cut down on nights out and takeaways, we can trim a bit there. Shopping in a cheaper supermarket will help too. I’m giving up my gym membership, and I think you should too.’

‘I don’t mind for me . . . I won’t be able to go at all soon, but why should you give it up?’

‘I go about once a week, so it costs me about a tenner a time. I’ll go running instead. That’s free.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Well, we have to economise somewhere, and we still have to eat. Luxuries will just have to go for now. Some costs will decrease while you’re not working, like your travel, but the baby will cost something too. Nappies aren’t free.’

‘That’s true.’

‘I’ve also been asking around, and I think I could get a bit of freelance design work. We’re not supposed to moonlight, but everyone does it, and we could certainly do with an extra few hundred quid every month.’

‘But you’ll have to do that in the evenings!’

James sighed and looked at me. ‘We have to do something, Tones. Somehow we have to get these two numbers closer together.’

‘Maybe I could take on some freelance writing, or do some PR stuff for local companies. I don’t know what the rules are with maternity leave, but I’ll see what I can do.’

‘That’s great,’ said James, then he gave me a quick one-armed hug. ‘Come on, Toni, we’ll make it work somehow. We always do. How hard can it be?’

She tried to tell Brian. She tried twice, in fact. She sent a text message to the private mobile number he’d given her, saying, ‘Can we meet up? Need to talk.’ She got no response. There was no way of knowing whether he’d discarded the SIM and got a new one to communicate with Stephanie, or whether he was ignoring her. As she’d already seen that he’d been too lazy to come up with a new secret sexy signal, Louise suspected he was just hoping she’d go away. But she tried again. She sent an email to him that could have been construed as a request for a work meeting, but she knew he would know was not.

He got his PA to respond, saying he was currently too busy to meet with her, but would be happy to look over any documentation she wanted to send. She considered peeing on a pregnancy test and posting it to him.

In a funny way she felt relieved. The thought of speaking to him made her feel sick. Seeing him touching Stephanie the way he had touched her made her feel even worse about that night in the hotel. She’d never imagined that
she was the first, or the only woman he’d seduced, but it now it was obvious that she had just been one in a string of his conquests. It made her feel foolish, and she didn’t like that at all. As far as she was concerned, she’d done her level best to contact him and tell him what had happened. He wanted nothing to do with her, so she would remove herself from the company and from his life, and hopefully never, ever have anything to do with him again.

Once she set the wheels in motion, it all happened really quickly. Andrew, her second-in-command, had been put in charge of her branch while they recruited a replacement. She’d spent the last few weeks handing over all her responsibilities to him. He was young, only in his late twenties, but he was ambitious. He’d be just fine as a stand-in, and Louise said privately to Edward that he could do worse than consider Andrew as a permanent replacement for her.

She hadn’t expected to feel very emotional about leaving, but she found she was absolutely gutted. She had put heart and soul into building her branch and she felt devastated that she seemed to be so dispensable. By the time it got to the last few days, she was really just hanging around the office, watching Andrew deal efficiently with every aspect of management. Her team took her out for dinner on the last night. They tried very hard to press cocktails into her hand, but she told them she was on antibiotics and stuck to the Diet Coke.

She sobbed when she got home that night, like someone had died. She had moved to Leeds to take up the position
at Barrett and Humphries, and because she had been studying and working so hard, she’d made few, if any, friends outside of work, and certainly no one she was as close to as she was to her team. She was full of guilt that none of them knew why she was really leaving, and she felt sad she couldn’t share any of her sorrow, excitement and terror with them. She felt like she was running away into the night and going into hiding. She wouldn’t be able to come back and visit, wouldn’t even be able to stay in casual contact with these people. In the dark, early hours of the morning, it seemed like an enormous, terrible price to pay for an uncertain future.

On the domestic front, things had run suspiciously smoothly. She had handed over the care of her house to an estate agent, who rented it out to a doctor who had come over from Canada to work at a local hospital. She did a massive clear-out and threw away loads of stuff, then packed the rest and put it in storage. In the end, all she had to do was pack her clothes into two suitcases, put three pot-plants on the back seat of her car and drive down to London.

As she passed the Gateway service station in north London, she breathed a sigh of relief. This was it. She was here, for better or worse. As far as she knew, no one in Leeds suspected that she was pregnant. She hadn’t bumped into Brian before she left, thank heavens. Although, on reflection, he had probably put a lot of effort into making sure it hadn’t happened. If all went smoothly, he’d never, ever know that he was a father again. Louise would be a
distant memory, someone he’d known a long time ago and lost touch with. It was for the best. It really was. And when the baby grew up and had questions, well . . . well they’d cross that bridge when they came to it.

She navigated her way through central London, which was relatively quiet since it was a Sunday, and pulled up outside Simon’s building. She buzzed him and he rushed down and helped her carry her things up to the flat.

‘Is this all?’ he asked, surveying her neatly packed bags and the three plants, now sunning themselves on the windowsill.

‘My furniture and most of my stuff is in storage in Leeds. It was cheaper than putting it in storage in London. If . . . when I find a place, I’ll go up and fetch it. But for now, I’m a nomad.’

‘Wow. How are you feeling?’

She chose to answer the question as if he was asking about the pregnancy, not her emotional state. ‘Well, I’m thirteen weeks now . . . the nausea’s finally going, and I actually feel really great. I saw a doctor in Leeds, Rachel nagged me until I did, and I had a first sonogram. Everything’s fine.’

‘You had a sonogram?’ Simon was very excited. ‘Any pictures?’

‘Of course,’ Louise laughed. She opened her handbag and took out the pictures, which she had tucked away in her purse.

Simon peered at them closely. ‘That is the most beautiful white fuzzy blob that I ever saw. Hello, niece-or-nephew!’

Louise smiled. ‘It is beautiful, isn’t it? I can’t quite believe it’s in there. But it is. Today, it’s about two and a half inches long and completely fully formed. It’s even got fingerprints.’

‘Really?’ Simon peered closer at the picture. ‘You can see all that?’

‘No, silly. I’ve been reading. Rachel sent me a link for this baby website, and there’s loads of information. I didn’t think I’d get into it, but I’m totally hooked. I’ve learned loads!’

‘So you’re looking after yourself?’

‘Eating all the right things, taking supplements and getting enough sleep. Promise.’

‘That’s what I like to hear,’ Simon said approvingly. ‘Now, what would you like to do, lady of leisure? Late lunch? A walk along the Thames?’

‘Ah, you call me lady of leisure. I call myself a jobless bum. I’ve had lunch, thanks. I stopped on the way down and ate. But a walk would be lovely.’

They left the flat and strolled arm in arm along the riverside path. It was a cold, clear day and the tide was out, so the Thames was lying very low. Seagulls squawked overhead. ‘So, jobless bum, eh?’ Simon said after a while. ‘Any progress on the job front?’