Foetal Attraction (18 page)

‘My dear,’ Gillian said by way of explanation, ‘the man wore tweed underpants.’ They were facing each other across the pastel changing booth. ‘Never go out with a diplomat. He refused to French kiss. Said it was unpatriotic. Do me up, will you?’

‘It couldn’t have been that bad.’ Grunting and straining, Maddy tugged on the elasticized sides of Gillian’s bra, finally concertina-ing the hook-eyes at the back.

‘My dear, he gargled after oral sex.’

‘Sounds like he had more hang-ups than an English remand prison.’

Gillian tried to laugh, but the bra was too tight. ‘Believe me, the only stiff thing about that Englishman was his upper lip.’ Scrutinizing herself in the mirror, Gillian sobered. ‘You know, I’ve never been rejected before. What if he wasn’t anally retentive and … and … and just didn’t fancy me?’ The pale soufflés of her breasts pillowed forth from the lacy, rib-cracking contraption.

‘Well,’ Maddy addressed Gillian’s buxom but asthmatic reflection, ‘that’s one good thing about childbirth. The cleavage.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Gillian wheezed. ‘Not to mention the mood swings, the nausea, weight gain, and having to give up alcohol, caffeine, tannin, drugs, soft cheeses, sushi and sex. Sounds fabuuulous!’

‘Come on, Gill. You must want to sprog one day?’

Gillian was genuinely appalled. ‘Down with Fertility Fascists,’ she panted. ‘I’m going to start a Non-Parents Organization.’

‘Once you meet the right bloke, a kid is something to look forward to, right?’

‘Having breasts down to your knees.
That’s
what you’ll be looking forward to.’ Gillian began buttoning up her blouse.

‘You’re not going to buy that bloody thing, are you? You can hardly breathe.’

Gillian pivoted sideways. ‘Yes, but look at that profile.’

‘You know, it’s a proven fact that over thirty-five …’ Maddy trotted after Gillian out of the changing rooms ‘… a woman’s chances of having a Down’s syndrome baby increase.’ She caught her up at the cashier’s desk. ‘While the chances of having any baby at all decrease. More and more men are shooting blanks, you know. And, well, I’ve been thinking … What if this is the only time in my life I get up the duff? Or what if he changes his mind about having sprogs … only to leave me when I’m menopausal for a younger woman he’s knocked up? Or what if we break up tomorrow and I never again meet another bloke. Or …’

‘You could always do it the old-fashioned, traditional way – drill a hole in your Dutch cap, bonk some gorgeous hunk, then dump him.’

‘What, slip into some Designer Genes? Sure, it sounds simple. They start off not wanting to get
involved
and next thing you know, they’re eating the placenta and demanding custody.’

‘What about a Virgin Birth?’

‘A quick withdrawal from the Sperm Bank? Hi, who’s your father? Oh, an ice-cube tray … I don’t think so.’

‘Come in rather handy for cocktails.’

‘Besides, what assurances are there that it’s not going to be a serial killer? Or Norman Tebbit? I mean, is there a baby-back guarantee?’

‘Well, you
can
murder them, but only if you do it in the first few months.’ The lingerie department was adjacent to children’s wear. Gillian absent-mindedly picked up a pair of miniature socks and fingered them fondly. ‘Oh, look at these eensey teensey little sockie-wockies. Aren’t they
sweet
…’

‘I thought you loathed children?’ Maddy gloated.

‘I do.’ She dropped the socks as though they were radioactive. ‘They’re so … short. And all that uninterrupted cuteness. Ugh. And then there’s the Pregnancy Police. One drink in a restaurant, and you can be jailed for pre-natal child abuse.’

Mothers sauntered past, the curved legs of chubby babies bracketing their hips. Gillian selected one golden-ringleted little girl. ‘Isn’t she a
dor
able? I do so prefer the roundy jobs to the thin pinched types … No,’ she changed mental gear, ‘you can’t possibly have a child. Not in this country. The English detest children. The reason I’m so flawed as a human being is
because
my mother left me with the nanny, who left me at the bottom of the garden and fed me by the clock. That was the doctrine of Truby King, the baby guru of the day. Well, not only did Truby turn out to be a New
Zeal
ander, and a
man
, but all his philosophies were based on the scientific rearing of bucket-fed calves on an asylum farm. Mummy was on to her fourth marriage when I was born. I was simply packed off to boarding school. I was five years old. Still chasing A, B and C down the alphabetic labryinths.’

‘Gillian, I’m so sorry.’

‘Oh, I felt no resentment. All the other children were in the same abandoned boat.’ She laughed, but there was no joy in it. ‘I thought it was normal. But, of course, I can never love.’ She took out her compact and reapplied her lipstick. ‘It’s not in my repertoire. Which is why, if I were you, I would have been in the abortion clinic even before the test was positive.’

Very carefully, Maddy selected an analogy to which Gillian could relate. ‘Well, motherhood is definitely on my shopping list of life’s experiences … I just came home with the package a little early … I do still love Alex. Oh, I know he deserves a Union Card in the Bastards’ Club, but I can’t help it. I love him so much it makes my bones burn. I dunno. I can’t help thinking that once I have the kid, he’ll come round.’

Gillian placed the back of her hand on Maddy’s forehead. ‘It’s the lack of food. You’re not thinking straight.’ And went on to the more important dilemma
of
where to buy something called the ‘butterfly knicker’, to lift and separate buttocks and rid all unsightly panty lines.

Waiting for the department store lift, Maddy got out her latest dog-eared postcard from Alex. ‘We’re all in this together’, it read.

Arvo Tea

WE’RE ALL IN
this
alone
, she wanted to tell him as she stood at the appointed time outside Doctor Etherington-Stoppford’s surgery in Harley Street. Sari-clad clusters of women emerged from chauffeur-driven Bentleys to be ushered in and out of various surgeries. In black neck-to-knee purdah, a young woman beetled out of the grasp of a posse of Arab men, only to be netted and led, sobbing, inside. Maddy had a queer feeling in her guts. Everything in her life had gone bung. She stood there, breathing in cab fumes, struggling with conflicting emotions. One moment she felt swollen with optimism. The next racked with relief that it would all soon be over … only to find her feet frozen to the pavement, her mind suspended in procrastinative fluid. It wasn’t the thought of the operation that gave her the colly-wobbles. She’d had a termination before. What red-blooded female in her late twenties, with a
diaphragm
she was sometimes too sloshed to put in properly, hadn’t? It was
de rigueur
. In fact, if you
hadn’t
had one, you had to pretend.

‘Whatja have? General or local?’

‘Oh, local, of course. It’s only a little op after all.’

A general anaesthetic was considered too sissy. It was much more macho, or rather, Maddy mused, ‘femcho’ to stay awake throughout. And look at the company she was keeping – Simone de Beauvoir, Billie Jean King, Gloria Steinem and Anaïs Nin … So, no, it wasn’t that.

The truth was,
this
time it just didn’t feel right. It sounded totally implausible, she knew. Like the explanation you give a cop when you’re pulled over for speeding. But she loved Alex. She ached for him body and soul. Her desire could have filled opera houses, oceans, entire galaxies. She only had to close her eyes to be transported back into the Lovers’ Dimension. In truth, it was her own fault. It was no good falling in love with Byron and expecting him to behave like Wordsworth. It was vanity, she supposed later, that made her think that he was only being negative because he’d had such a bad experience with Felicity. It was vanity that made her utter the words that every woman has at one time or another uttered.
With her, it would be different
.

The hands on the clock were foxtrotting by. Maddy’s stomach thought her throat had been cut. She was bent double with the need to pee. She felt like a nuclear
reactor
on the point of meltdown. Her core was rearranging itself. She did the only thing a girl in such a situation could do.

A platter appeared bearing a ziggurat of egg-and-cress and smoked-salmon sandwiches, hot cinnamon toast and chocolate hazelnut gâteau. A man in a tuxedo tinkled the ivories beneath a bronzed candelabra. The beaming waiters hovered behind the potted palms waiting to restock her tiered silver cake stand. The doctor’s appointment card sat mutely accusing in the ashtray, as Maddy ate her way through a long and leisurely afternoon tea midst the Empire Kitsch, by the Peacock Walk of the Palm Court at the Ritz.

Lie Down, Roll Over and 69 Other Ways to Say I Love You

‘YOU MISSED THE
appointment?’ Alex was incredulous. His armful of roses wilted visibly. ‘Why?’

‘I was shopping,’ Maddy confessed, coiling herself back on to Mr Arnold Tongue’s Jacobean four-poster with her book. ‘With Gillian.’

‘That bloody woman. It’s beyond me what you see in her.’

‘The reason I like her’, Maddy retorted with calculated calm, ‘is because if I kill you, she’s going to help me get rid of the body.’

He took a beat or two before deciding that she was joking … Most probably. ‘It’s the doctor, isn’t it? I’m sorry. Women had told me that he was brilliant. The best.’

Maddy snorted. ‘His bloody surgery is full of Buddhas … Would
you
put your life in the hands of a doctor who believes in reincarnation?’

‘Well, look, if you hate him that much, we’ll get someone else.’

‘Will we just?’ Maddy said, glancing up from the sentence she’d just read twenty times.

Alex gave her a skewed, jumpy look. ‘Well, how late are you planning to delay this termination? Till the foetus has beard stubble and a driving licence?’

‘Look, Alex, I thought all organisms were programmed to pass on their genes to the next generation?’ She appealed to the zoologist in him. ‘You taught me that.’

‘Oh, so what are you driving at? You’re feeling compelled by your ancestry to beach yourself and breed, are you? I didn’t realise I was having an affair with an elephant seal …’

‘How can you, of all people, chicken out of your obligation to your egg?’

‘… though you have put on a bit of weight lately.’

Maddy snapped shut the covers of her hardback. ‘It’s just one sperm. I mean, can’t I have just one? You’ve made about a billion of the buggers just during this conversation! Men have deposited their sperm inside unknown and unwilling women for centuries. Why get precious now? You give them away to the
Playboy
centrefold often enough.’

‘How absurd. I do not!’

‘You do, too. I found them under your bed.’

‘The bed? What bed?’

‘In the Maida Vale flat, where else? I broke in.’

‘Jesus Christ, Maddy! What if Felicity had been there? That was an incredibly irresponsible and irrational thing to do.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m doing irresponsible and irrational things for two now,’ she replied coldly.

Alex took a deep breath, curbed his temper and made his regular trek to Mr Tongue’s liquor cabinet. He’d been there so often of late, he’d worn a path through the shag-pile.

‘She looks like me,’ Maddy mused, lolling back on to the pillows. ‘A dead ringer.’

‘Who?’ he called from the living room.

‘Felicity.’

‘She’s a mildewed forty-three. You’re a ripe twenty-nine. She’s a bonsai. You’re a stunning six foot. She’s frigid. And you’re a hot-to-trot Sex Goddess … Otherwise the resemblance is astounding, it really is.’

He came back into the bedroom, a genial smile superglued to his face. ‘Listen,’ he took another deep breath, ‘I’ve got fantastic news. The misogyny anthology … She’s finished the eighteenth century! Only two centuries to go and we’ll be free.’

Maddy sat bolt upright. ‘You say you’ll leave her, but why should I believe you? You have pillowcases with “Yes” written on them, for God’s sake.’

Alex placed his hands on her shoulders. Ever so gently he massaged her neck muscles. ‘Hey, how would you like to meet the Queen?’

The only queens Maddy knew being the
leather-chaps-cock-ring-wearing
ones, she ignored him, concentrating instead on the hypnotic motion of his fingers. Her muscles turned to melted butter. Tension flowed out of her body. Crackles of electricity snaked down her spine. Love-making seemed to be the only cure for her nausea. A case of the hair of the dog that bit you.

‘I’ve been invited to a garden party at the Palace. I thought you’d like to accompany me.’ His mouth moved over her neck, stippling her flesh with goose-pimples. ‘Of course,’ he added acidly, ‘protocol won’t allow her to meet pregnant women. In case they fall over when they curtsey.’

Maddy stiffened. ‘I think the Royal Family should be mothballed.’

‘They’re good for tourism. Our version of Disneyland.’

‘Yeah, the British public is sure being taken for a ride.’

‘It’s the hottest ticket in town. Felicity would
kill
to go.’ He eased her backwards and lay languidly on top of her.

She liked his bulk in bed. He was so much more substantial than the wiry, windswept Aussie men she’d been used to. ‘Really?’

‘You don’t want to rush childbirth, believe me. You’ll miss these buoyant breasts …’ He slipped his hands under her shirt and cupped them lovingly. He ran his fingers down her body. ‘That trampoline-taut
tummy
…’ Maddy moaned softly. She flicked her tongue into his ear and suckled his lobe. ‘You know I love you, darling, don’t you?’ he purred.

‘What I
know
is that my visa’s about to expire. What I
know
is, if you don’t marry me, I’m going to be kicked out of the country.’ Nothing detumesced Alex faster than the ‘M’ word. He rolled on to his back and knotted his hands behind his head. ‘What’s the matter?’ Maddy enquired, propping herself up on one elbow. ‘Cat got your cock?’

‘Marriage is nothing more than legalized prostitution. As a Feminist, you should abhor the notion. Marriage erodes a woman’s self-esteem! Undermines her identity … But,’ he exhaled melodramatically, ‘if you want to ruin your life, then of course we’ll get married, darling,’ he said without conviction. Taking hold of her thighs as though they were a couple of jellied eels, he kissed them. ‘We’re destined,’ he added lackadaisically, before going through the motions of making love to her. It was like making love by numbers. The post-coital cigarette was replaced by Alex’s immediate dash out to the living room to ring the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital and schedule an appointment.