Dear Thing (18 page)

‘Maybe a little.’

‘About half a stone, I’d say. Good. You’ve been dieting too much, but you know this yo-yo-ing isn’t good for you either.’

‘I’m fine,’ said Claire automatically.

Her father paused at the door with a boxful of plants. ‘Straight to the back? Ben’s still at work?’

Claire heard the crunch of tyres on gravel through the open door. ‘That’s him now. Go ahead and put the kettle on, Mum. We’ll be right there.’ She hurried outside to meet Ben’s car.

He looked exhausted. He’d left early in the morning before Claire was up, moving quietly. Lying still in bed, she’d watched him getting dressed. When he’d dropped a soft kiss on her head she’d closed her eyes so he would think that she was asleep. She wished now that she’d kissed him back.

‘Did it go all right?’ she asked him as he got out.

He gazed at the Jaguar saloon. ‘What are your parents doing here?’

‘They’re on their way to Helen’s. They’re only staying for supper. Is it all sorted out, the redesign?’

‘It’s been non-stop all day. It’s going to set everything back months, and the Vaughans are not pleased.’

‘Oh Ben, I’m sorry.’

‘Can’t be helped. You saw Romily?’

‘Yes. She’s fine.’

Maisie came up, wagging her tail, looking for a stroke. Ben ruffled her ears and she followed them up to the house. He took a deep breath before stepping through the door. Claire’s dad had come in through the back and was hanging up his Barbour in the cupboard under the stairs. ‘Hello, Mark,’ Ben said, all traces of his exhaustion hidden. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’

They shook hands. Ben and her father got on well; they listened to cricket together and shared appreciation of her father’s home-brewed ale, though Helen’s husband Andrew was clearly the favourite, mostly because he asked his father-in-law for investment advice. When Claire had suggested that Ben might do the same, even if he ignored it, just to make her father feel good, Ben had said he had enough advice from his own father, thank you, and he’d rather eat fried unskinned hedgehogs than ask for any more. But he’d said it
cheerfully
.

In the kitchen, her mother had already set out the teapot and cups and was slicing a loaf cake which had also come from her canvas bag. When it came to tea, the Hardy family never wasted any time. She embraced Ben.

‘Is that your marmalade I see, Louisa?’ he said. ‘You must be a mind-reader. I just finished the last jar this morning.’

He looked drained and had clearly had a difficult day. He hadn’t texted or rung to ask her how her meeting with Romily had gone; Claire had been worried about that, but seeing him now, she could see it was because he’d not had a
moment. He probably wanted nothing more than to take a long hot shower and collapse in front of the television with a cold bottle of lager. But he was going to have tea and make conversation with her family instead, because he knew it was important to her.

Love swelled in Claire’s heart for her husband. She took his hand and squeezed it, and he gave her a tired smile. She was so lucky to have him.

She wanted a baby with him, but the reason she wanted to be a mother at all was because of her parents. She’d had the perfect childhood, full of comfort and laughter and love. She wanted to give the same thing to her own child.

‘Mum, Dad, I’m glad you’re here,’ she said. ‘We have something wonderful to tell you.’

Her mother clapped her hands. ‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you? I knew you’d gained weight.’

‘How’d it happen?’ asked her father. ‘Your mother said you’d given up treatment.’

Ben’s fingers tightened on hers. She held on to him, hard.

‘We’re using a surrogate,’ she said.

‘What’s that?’ asked her father. ‘Some new technology?’

‘My God,’ said her mother. ‘You’re doing what?’

‘A surrogate is when another woman has the baby for you,’ Claire said to her dad.

‘You’re letting
another woman
have your baby?’

‘Mum, lots of people do it. It’s not so strange.’

‘It’s unnatural, is what it is.’

‘There are precedents in nature,’ said Ben. ‘For example, ants and bees have queens who produce all the offspring, and the other insects look after them.’

‘With all due respect, we are people, Benjamin. Not ants.’

‘Mum,’ said Claire. ‘This is our choice. We’re happy about it.’

‘How are you going to find a woman to volunteer to do such a thing?’

‘We’ve found her already.’

Her mother pulled out a chair and sat down. ‘This is all so unexpected. Aren’t you worried she’ll keep it?’

‘No,’ said Ben.

‘We’re not,’ said Claire. ‘She’s already got a daughter and she doesn’t want any more children.’

‘That’s what she might say now, but she won’t feel that way when she sees the baby. You can’t carry a child in your womb for nine months and not fall in love with it. It’s unnatural.’

‘Mum—’

‘I’ve had three children, Claire. I do know what I’m talking about.’

‘And I’ve done a lot of research on surrogacy. People automatically assume that the surrogate mother is going to want to keep the baby because there have been some high-profile cases where that’s happened. But hundreds of people do this all over the world every year and most of the time, it goes perfectly well. There are associations to help people, support groups, everything.’

‘You’re doing it through an association?’

‘No. She’s a friend. We arranged it ourselves.’

Claire’s mother paused, to let this sink in.

‘So do you have any legal recourse if it goes wrong?’ asked her father. ‘Our solicitor Fredericks is very—’

‘It won’t go wrong,’ said Ben.

‘What about adoption?’ said Claire’s mother. ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to have a child when its parents have already decided they don’t want it?’

‘We want
our
baby,’ said Ben.

Louisa passed the tea around and they took a sip in silence.

‘So let me get this straight,’ said Claire’s dad. ‘You’re making a baby through IVF—’

‘An embryo,’ corrected Claire’s mum. Claire had given her a book.

‘And putting it into this other woman? So it’s your baby, but it’s in her body?’

‘That’s gestational surrogacy,’ said Claire. ‘That wouldn’t work for us. My eggs are no good. We’ve been through years of IVF and hardly harvested any. We’re using traditional surrogacy, with her eggs and Ben’s sperm.’

‘So it won’t even be your baby?’

‘It is my baby,’ Claire said. ‘In every way that counts, it’s my baby. Look. Here it is.’ She took out the photograph from her pocket and gave it to her mother.

‘You’ve done it
already
?’ she said. ‘I thought you were just talking about it.’

‘The baby is due in January.’

Her mother looked close to tears. ‘I don’t understand. Why didn’t you tell us before?’

‘It happened so quickly. Romily offered, we made the decision, and she was ovulating right then so we went ahead.’

‘We knew it was right,’ said Ben. ‘So there was no point in waiting.’

This wasn’t quite accurate, but another thing Claire had learned about being married: you presented a united front in front of your parents. Once, when they’d first been married, Claire had made an off-hand remark about how Ben always had to be reminded to do the washing-up. She didn’t mind that, really; he always did it when she asked, but at the time she’d been a bit annoyed. Her mother had taken it as a personal crusade to educate Ben in the desirability of helping your wife in the kitchen, pointing out how helpful Mark was,
how he did everything without being asked. Which he did. Claire had never seen her father fail to do the washing-up, or fail to hang up his wet towels, or fail to remember a birthday or anniversary. He took her mother out to dinner and they went to ballroom dancing classes together and they never, ever argued.

As a child and a teenager, she’d told her mother everything. It was only since becoming an adult, since marrying Ben, since realizing that she herself wasn’t perfect, that she’d begun the soft process of concealment, of gently obscuring parts of her private life. It wasn’t an untruth she offered her mother: it was an edit.

From the expression on her mother’s face right now, she’d been unaware of the editing.

‘If it was so right,’ Louisa said, ‘why didn’t you tell us?’

Claire went to her mother, who was still holding the scan photo, and hugged her. One part of her was thinking this was another person she’d let down with her worry, with her detachment. But another part, a bigger part, was wondering, for the first time, if one day her own grown-up child would edit its own life. She was almost excited at the idea of being kept in the dark, because that meant there would be someone to do it.

‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ she said. ‘We were going to tell you. We just wanted to make certain that nothing was going to go wrong this time. Before you got your hopes up.’

‘But it seems such a risky proposition anyway.’

‘I couldn’t believe it myself,’ said Claire. ‘I’ve been worried that the baby didn’t exist, that it was a figment of my imagination. Especially as I’m not pregnant myself and I can’t feel the physical changes. But we’ve got the scan here, Mum. It’s going to be born, and it’s going to be ours.’

‘Well, if you’re going through with it, then of course you must do what you think best. I just don’t want you to be hurt, darling. I don’t want you to be hurt.’

She held her mother tighter. ‘I won’t be. I promise.’

‘What should we tell everyone?’ asked her father.

‘Tell them the truth,’ said Ben. ‘That we’re having a baby in January, and a surrogate is carrying it for us, and that we’re incredibly happy and we’ll take the baby to visit everyone once it’s born.’

Her father went round to stand behind Claire and Louisa, looking down at the photograph she held. A gentle, mischievous smile touched his face, and he put his hand on his wife’s shoulder. ‘I know what I’ll say. I’ll tell them you’re doing an Elton John. That’ll shut them up.’

‘You,’ said Ben, after a very late supper and when they were alone at last, in their bedroom, ‘were amazing.’

‘I was truthful,’ she said. ‘That’s all. And you were right to make me go and see Romily. I’ve been too afraid, and it’s wrong.’

‘So we can shout out about our baby from the rooftops?’

‘Well, maybe start with friends and family first. Before the rooftop shouting.’

He took her in his arms. ‘I love you.’

Claire nestled her head into his shoulder. She kissed the side of his neck. ‘How tired are you?’

‘Not too tired at all.’ He slid his hand downwards and pulled her closer.

Her sister Helen rang first thing the next morning, before Claire left for school. ‘So you went through with it after all,’ she said. ‘You kept that under wraps.’

‘Sorry, Helen. We didn’t want to say anything until we knew it was all right.’

‘Mum is going round in circles and Dad has been muttering about talking to Mr Fredericks.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘I think it’s great.’

‘You do?’

‘Even Mum had to admit that you looked happy. And once you’ve got a baby we’ll see more of you. That’s good enough for me.’

Claire spent most of Saturday afternoon composing an email and sending it to her various groups, friends, relatives and colleagues. Ben said it was so good that she might as well send it to his contact list too. She printed off every single response and tucked them into a scrapbook so that the baby could see them when he or she was older. Every email, every card that came through the letter slot, made her feel that this was really going to happen.

Or almost as if it was really going to happen. She could pretend the rest.

IT WASN’T RAINING
yet at least, which was good. And Posie hadn’t suspected anything. Romily wasn’t sure whether that was good or not. The little girl sprinted ahead of her across the park to the playground and immediately swarmed up the cone-shaped rope climbing-frame. Romily followed through the gate, went to the nearest bench and sat down. She checked her phone, but he hadn’t texted her to cancel.

‘See, Romily, I can do this one too!’ called Posie to her, hanging off the pinnacle and waving. Romily waved back.

She’d chosen this park because it was across town from the one they normally went to. They’d been here before, so it was comfortable, but not too often, so it had some novelty for Posie. It was also far enough away from their flat so that if this all went terribly wrong, they would never have to come here again. The heavy grey skies meant that the play park was empty of other children, although some hardy souls were playing football in the adjoining field. Romily craned her neck, looking out for Jarvis.

‘You’re not watching!’

‘Sorry, Pose.’ She forced her attention back to her
daughter, who was now trying to balance on one foot on the slender rope, the toes of her other foot pointed like a ballerina’s. ‘Be careful there.’

‘Don’t worry, I can fly!’

But you can’t
, Romily thought, halfway off the bench, poised to run and catch her if she fell.

She had looked into some of the baby books Claire had sent her last night when she couldn’t sleep, searching for a chapter on what to do when your child met their father for the first time in their lives. Unsurprisingly, there wasn’t much advice in there. The closest she got was a paragraph suggesting that she express breast milk so that Daddy could give the night feed and let Mummy get some extra sleep.

Romily remembered the night feeds alone in her old one-bedroom flat. How she went to bed with Posie beside her so the baby could latch on in the night without either one of them really waking. How some nights when Posie wouldn’t settle she’d pace the flat, from bedroom to front room to bathroom to bedroom again, patting Posie on her bottom, murmuring lullabies of Latin names she’d memorized long ago.
Ephemeroptera. Embiidina
.

Those were the most alone times: four in the morning when the rest of the world was asleep, and four in the afternoon when the rest of the world was at work. The times when you willed the hours to pass so you could pick up a phone and talk to someone who understood language. The times when you knew there must be something wrong with you for wanting this to be over because everyone knew that mothers and babies made a world of two, made perfect happiness together. Because even carrion beetles could nurture and protect their young without feeling bored and desperate and alone.