Good Husband Material (37 page)

The puppies have opened their eyes! They all have identical milky blue ones: was Bess kidnapped by aliens?

Bob was enthralled by the sight and, do you know, his eyes are the same weird blue. Perhaps he’s an alien too?

Bess condescended to come out for a little run with me (though neither of us is up to much running) and we met James, who was in a mood of rather shame-faced truculence. He didn’t even ask how I was feeling.

Mrs Blacklock has made me send in a driving test application (the written exam comes first, but I’m not worried about that one), and I’ve booked extra driving lessons for after Christmas. I don’t know how I’ll manage if I haven’t passed before the baby arrives, but as I drove along during the last lesson, I suddenly had the exhilarating feeling it could be quite fun – but then I stalled three times at the traffic lights and the feeling vanished. I wish I could always turn left.

Fergal is back; Nerissa phoned especially to tell me, though goodness knows how she got my ex-directory number, unless she’d been riffling through Fergal’s address book.

‘I know he’s got the goods,’ she said conspiratorially, ‘because a friend saw him coming out of a jeweller’s. But I guess I’ll have to wait until Christmas.’

I hope I said the right things. I wonder if I can bear to live here with Nerissa married to Fergal and giving me a running account of their wedded bliss.

One thing is for sure – I won’t be asking him to take me out for some driving practice! He only offered because he felt sorry for me, and I can manage by myself.

I can manage
everything
by myself.

Our annual Christmas card and present arrived from James’s parents in South Africa, plus a long, printed, round-robin letter about nothing in particular. If James has told them about our separation or my pregnancy, they don’t mention it. But at least I now understand why they don’t mind not seeing him for years, as I feel much the same myself.

The present is a small watercolour of wild animals round a waterhole. There’s a lot of dust, and a lion seems to be killing a zebra in the background. James can have it – it isn’t my cup of tea at all.

Alice, Howard’s girlfriend, called, suggesting we meet and talk over the situation regarding her sister, Wendy, and my ex-Significant Other!

I couldn’t see the point, but she was pretty insistent in a vague way, like a cobweb that wouldn’t brush off, so we met at a pizza place roughly halfway between us.

She was already there when I arrived, looking almost normal in jeans and a fringed Indian cotton top, tie-dyed.

The baby was asleep in a sort of plastic bucket seat next to her. It didn’t look much bigger, but it had a lot of indeterminate brown hair and was wearing a Babygro also tie-dyed in mustard and a rather bilious green.

‘Hi, Alice! Nice to see you again,’ I said with false breeziness, and she smiled vaguely. ‘Shall we order and then talk? I’m ravenous.’

I always am lately.

‘Your hair is
red
!’ Her mud-coloured eyes examined me with mild surprise.

‘It isn’t,’ I replied coldly. ‘Must be the light in here. James is the one with red hair.’

She blinked slowly, like something unused to bright lights, which she probably was, since Howard’s electricity is always being cut off.

‘I’m having the Vegetarian Special,’ she offered.

‘That sounds healthy – I’ll have that too. And a side salad and a chocolate milkshake.’

When we’d ordered, since she still didn’t seem about to burst into speech, I cast around for something to say.

‘What did you call the baby? I expect James told me, but I’ve forgotten.’ (James hadn’t told me – or even whether it was male or female, come to that.)

‘Mickey. We couldn’t think of a name, but when I saw those Mickey Mouse bibs I knew …’ she sighed dreamily.

‘Michael?’

‘No, Michael’s a boy’s name! We called her just – Mickey.’

‘How … nice!’

I’m certainly glad the bibs didn’t have Thumper or Pocahontas on them.

‘What did you want to talk about, Alice?’ I enquired, grasping the bull by the horns. (Or vegetarian nut cutlets, in Alice’s case.)

‘It’s Wendy, my sister. She saw you at the party. She wasn’t supposed to be there that night, but she came back – and she didn’t
know
you were pretty because James never said, so she was jealous.’

Quelling the urge to ask how Dear James had described me to Wendy, I said: ‘It was Wendy who used to make those silent phone calls to me, wasn’t it?’

She nodded. ‘I told her not to – it made James cross, but she even did it one night when he was there asleep, and he woke up and was
furious
.’

I began to see that Wendy had strong-armed her vacuous sister into this meeting. ‘What does she want?’ I asked bluntly.

Her eyes opened wider. ‘James!’

‘So? She can have him.
I
don’t want him.’

‘But she wants to
marry
him!’

You’d think the concept was obscene. Come to that, perhaps it is.

‘But does James want to marry her? I mean, he has a lot of very old-fashioned ideas, you know, about there being two sorts of girls: the ones you marry and the ones you don’t, and I’m afraid Wendy qualifies for the second category.’

‘Marriage is an outdated ritual …’ she murmured sadly.

‘He’d have to get divorced first, anyway, Alice, and it does take some time. Can Wendy hang on to him long enough to get him to the altar, that’s the question?’

‘She’s given up her fashion design course and everything! Daddy says she’s obsessed, and he’s furious.’

Obsessed with James? But I suppose if people can be obsessed with trainspotting, or collecting bits of perforated paper with pictures on … It just seems awfully odd of her, that’s all.

Before he went to seed he did have a sort of rugged Highlander look about him, but he was never exciting – or maybe no man was exciting after Fergal?

‘I still don’t see what you want
me
to do, Alice. If she wants James, it’s up to her.’

‘But since he found out about the baby he thinks you’ll want him back, because you won’t be able to manage on your own. And she says he keeps talking about his son! Archaic!’

‘He’s a middle-class reactionary bore,’ I agreed, borrowing at random from Howard’s store of stock phrases. ‘An
unfaithful
middle-class reactionary bore!’

Alice’s eyes slid away like evasive mud puddles. ‘She says the baby isn’t his, that you’ve been seeing someone else.’

‘She’s wrong.’

‘She says it’s Fergal Rocco’s.’ Her eyes furtively scrutinised my face, and some sort of spark flickered in them.

So Fergal can even animate the Undead!

The faint spark died away. ‘I don’t suppose it was really true, though? Do you know him?’

‘I did know him a bit, years ago, before he got famous.’

She lost interest. ‘So it’s James’s baby?’

‘Unless aliens did a Midwich Cuckoo on me, yes.’

We ate vegetarian pizza silently for a while and then the baby started to stir and mutter.

‘So if you really don’t want him …?’ Alice had evidently been pursuing some train of thought of her own. ‘What would make him marry Wendy?’

‘Shot-gun?’ I suggested flippantly. (Or, in James’s case,
sot
gun.) ‘Or she could try wearing neat little suits and smart shoes, and Big Hair … and have a son or two.’

‘Have a son?’ she echoed blankly. ‘Suits?’ Her lizard lips stretched over the word.

‘That’s how he wants his wife to look, but the sort of women he has on the side probably all look like Wendy.’

Good old Bendy Wendy.

‘He thinks a solicitor’s wife should be respectable and above reproach. Wendy would be a bit of a non-starter on both counts.’

Mickey now woke properly, turned red in the face, and produced an ominous smell.

Alice sighed and got up. ‘I’ll have to go and change her.’

I sincerely hoped she wasn’t going to do it there and then! However, she set off with the little plastic bucket seat, and the smell followed her like a dog.

After fifteen minutes, when they hadn’t returned, I went to the ladies to look for her.

She was the sole occupant of the pink, softly lit antechamber, and appeared to be offering Mickey up to the wall-mounted hand-dryer, like some kind of small sacrifice.

‘What on earth are you doing, Alice?’

‘Drying Mickey’s hair.’

‘Was it wet?’

‘Yes … It was so nice and warm down here, and clean, and Mickey’s hair needed washing, so I did it. And then I thought I’d dry it … The electricity’s off at home, and Daddy’s in Capri.’

‘I – is he?’

The mad logic of all this was mind-numbing.

The baby gurgled, seeming to like the feel of the warm air blowing on her head.

‘Yes. He thinks Howard should get a job.’

‘What on earth
as
?’

‘He’s terribly clever really, Tish – he could be anything!’

‘Yes, he could!’ I agreed heartily. An escapee from the Planet Zog seemed the most likely.

‘But actually, Howard and I are going to learn craftwork and join a commune.’

Daddy would probably end up supporting the commune as well, if any commune was mad enough to include Howard and Alice among its numbers.

The baby’s hair was now dry, so we went back upstairs and collected our coats and paid the bill.

‘How are you getting home?’ I asked her, worrying about the baby, warm from the hand-dryer, going out into the cold December air.

‘Howard’s picking me up in the van.’

Just then a
frisson
of revulsion ran through the pizza house as something horrible flattened itself against the outside window.

‘I think he’s here,’ I told her.

‘Well, goodbye, Tish, and thanks for … for … you really don’t want him back?’

‘James? No, never ever again. If Wendy can get him, she can keep him!’

Howard leered at me, then without a word went and got back into his rusty little red van, leaving Alice to get herself and the baby in unassisted.

She put the bucket seat down on the floor by her feet in the front. I’m sure that’s illegal! And surely not safe.

It’s some slight comfort to realise that I’m almost certainly going to make a better mother than Alice!

I went to the antenatal clinic on my way home, where I sat with a lot of women expecting imminent triplets. They all had an air of bovine contentment that was very irritating.

Trailed back on the bus. I’m so tired of it – I’ll be glad when I can drive. Come to that, I’m so tired, full stop. And I expand visibly every day. Could I be expecting twins, and they’ve missed one?

I should be tethered in the sky somewhere with a slogan displayed up my side (if I’ve still got a side, that is).

The novelty of having puppies has definitely worn off for Bess, and she wishes they would all vanish; I only hope I don’t feel the same about the baby.

Fergal: December 1999

    
‘A Festive Fergal to warm you up for Christmas …’

Trendsetter
magazine

Ho, ho, ho little girls – have I got a surprise for you!

Oh horrors! Mother’s invited herself over for Christmas!

I told her that I felt like being alone, since I had a lot of work to finish before D-day … or should that be B-day? No, on second thoughts,
not
B-day. But she assured me that she’d stay only a night or two, and not be any trouble, and that Dr Reevey had drawn the short straw and was working over Christmas, with his widowed sister coming down to stay, as she usually did.

Nose-out-of-joint syndrome.

I hope the romance is progressing. It would be wonderful to get her off my hands, especially to a doctor who would know how to nip her incipient alcoholism in the bud, though from what I’ve seen of his whisky habit, his own blood is probably ninety per cent proof.

But if she doesn’t get a better offer she’ll try to establish herself here permanently … and how do you throw your mother out? It might be more to the point if I got the vicar to come and sprinkle holy water to exorcise her, bell, book and candle. I expect she’d vanish fast enough then. Or perhaps it would be a garlic, cross and wooden stake job?

I foresee an awful Christmas.

She’s arriving on Thursday, and suggested I meet her train.

‘What in?’ I queried.

‘Well – the car, dear. I thought James might—’

‘Any arrangement you make with James is your own affair. But I’m certainly not coming all the way into town on the bus in order to meet your train just to turn around and come back with you. You will have to get a taxi.’

‘Leticia! Your little domestic tiff has made you very hard, dear. I’m sure poor James would come and pick me up if I asked him, and perhaps stay to dinner? After all, there’s no need for you not to be friends, is there?’

‘Mother,’ I managed to say evenly, ‘if you bring James with you, or make any attempt to meddle in my affairs by throwing us together, you’ll find yourself and your bags on the doorstep.’

‘I only want to do what’s best for my little girl!’ she faltered, and then began to sob gustily.

I said I knew what was best and I wasn’t a little girl (in fact, I’m now a very
big
girl), but I supposed she could come for a couple of days if she turned up without James.

I knew they weren’t real tears, but I couldn’t bear it.

On the Thursday before Christmas I woke with a deep sense of foreboding, then remembered that Mother was arriving today.

I popped down to the shop to add a few extras to my stores, though I’m certainly not cooking a turkey – the little turkey crown roast I have in the freezer will do nicely just for the two of us. Bob is presenting me with bushels of Brussels sprouts, and at least I’ll be sober this year when I peel them. Under the influence, I tend to pare the layers of leaves down like pass the parcel until there’s almost nothing left.

Realising I hadn’t even bought a Christmas present for Mother yet, I added two huge boxes of chocolates to my shopping, to Mrs Deakin’s approval. One was an over-the-top satin-covered affair, like a small chest of drawers, with tassels instead of handles, which was exactly Mother’s cup of tea. That will have to do.