Having It All (28 page)

There was one small problem. Most of the women on their books didn’t want to work over Christmas. Maybe she should start praying. The first instalment on their bank loan would be due in
six months and so far there weren’t enough funds to meet it.

She swept her papers into a pile. There was no point getting depressed. It was Christmas after all. Something would turn up.

Liz sat down in the coffee shop with a cappuccino and watched Jamie devour his slice of Sacher Torte. He had got his metabolism from his father, thank God, and could live on
Big Macs and still look like a string-bean. Fortified by the cake, a Coca Cola, and the foam from her coffee, he finally consented to leave.

They had half an hour to kill before setting off for Victoria Station and Liz intended to spend it looking at the clothes she couldn’t afford in the British Designer Room. As Liz browsed
through the glorious, wildly expensive frocks, Jamie contented himself with twirling the rails and avoiding the sales lady’s disapproving eye.

She was just holding up a Victor Edelstein ballgown worth about the same amount as her cottage when she heard a familiar voice shout her name and swung round to find herself looking into the
catlike features of Metro Television’s new Iron Lady.

‘How
are
you? I was
so
sorry to hear about everything.’ Liz noticed that Claudia sounded anything but sorry. ‘We really felt for you. I sometimes think that
if we women could only see what bastards men really are, we’d be a lot happier.’

Realizing that Jamie might pick something up at any moment, she sent him off to talk to the uniformed major-domo about how the lifts work.

‘Of course I saw it coming that night she came to the Metro party. If it hadn’t been David she got her claws into it would have been Conrad. I know her type. Ambitious little slut
who’d open her legs for anyone if she thought it’d get her up the ladder.’

Liz suppressed a grin at this almost exact description of Claudia herself and racked her brain for excuses to get away. The last thing she wanted to do was discuss her husband’s affair in
Harrods’ Designer Room in front of a fascinated audience of Christmas shoppers.

‘Claudia, it’s lovely seeing you but I’m afraid Jamie and I have a train to catch.’

Claudia looked stricken. She clearly felt there was a good half-hour in this one. Picking up her shopping Liz started signalling furiously to Jamie. But Claudia wasn’t letting her off the
hook so easily.

‘Poor Lizzie. It must have been so awful for you to hear their news. We go to the same exercise class and she told everyone on Monday.’

With a sense of relief Liz could see Jamie coming back at last, in another few seconds they could get away.

‘What news is that?’ she asked abstractedly, rolling her eyes to heaven as Jamie stopped to chat with a small boy next to the escalators.

Claudia leaned towards her and dropped her voice until it was guaranteed to rivet every shopper in the room. ‘About the baby.’

Liz looked at Claudia for the first time. What the hell was she on about? ‘What baby?’

‘
Their
baby. Britt and David’s. It’s due in August.’

Liz felt the blood rush from her face. Britt’s baby. Britt and David’s baby. It couldn’t be true. Britt loathed children. The idea was ludicrous. Claudia must have got it
wrong.

‘She’s been telling everybody. I saw her yesterday at the exercise class. The teacher congratulated her and said she was going to be the fittest mother in London.’

For a moment Liz thought she might faint. Only the sight of Jamie three feet away pulled her out of the black hole sucking at her feet.

‘Liz?’ For a brief moment Claudia looked repentant. ‘Liz, you did know didn’t you?’

Liz leaned against the door of the cubicle and tried to fight back the tears. Only the thought that the other side of the thin plywood door, Jamie was waiting for her,
unsuspecting and happy, kept her from breaking down.

She couldn’t believe how much it hurt – more than walking into that restaurant, more even than splitting up with David. And for the first time she had to admit why. Until five
minutes ago, in some deep, unconscious part of her mind, she had believed they would get back together.

Ever since she’d been a child she would sometimes wake and feel unaccountably happy without knowing why. It would take seconds, sometimes minutes of fishing round in her mind and memory
until she found the reason: the piece of good news, the promised treat, the compliment, stored away but still powerful enough to make her glow with unexpected pleasure. And leaning on the door of
Harrods’ Powder Room, trying not to picture the queue of Christmas shoppers piling up the other side, she saw that it was this belief that David would come back, unfaced, disapproved of even
by her conscious mind, that had lain deep inside her, beaming out hope and the promise of happiness regained into her darkest moments. And now it was lost for ever. With a mute cry of pain she saw
that she was just a cliché, the discarded wife who can’t accept the reality of the split in the face of overwhelming evidence.

And yet, had she been so deluded? She had felt this secret glow only last week when David came to the cottage. He had seemed so different, almost grateful to be there, as though in some
important part of himself he had come home. Despite the tension between them and her anger over Britt, his presence had seemed like the lost and missing piece in the jigsaw of her new life.

When there was a knock on the door, she jumped as though a tank had burst in to the toilet cubicle.

‘Mum, Mum. Are you all right?’

She heard the anxiety in Jamie’s voice. She must pull herself together. With his sensitivity he would guess in seconds that something was terribly wrong. She mustn’t lean on him,
tempting though it was,
she
was the grown-up, the protector. He was just a child. She had to be strong.

She rustled the lavatory paper and noisily flushed the toilet. Delving into her bag for her Quickies and small mirror, she wiped away the worst of the tears.

‘Yes, Jamie, I’m fine.’

The truth was she had thought David loved her again. Well, she had been wrong. David had just rubbed out his old life and started a new one. Whether she liked it or not, she had to face the
truth: babies meant commitment. Babies meant beginnings.

‘You’re not going to breastfeed surely?’ Less than one hundred yards away from Harrods in the trendy Brasserie St Quentin, Britt’s friend Carla put down
her forkful of monkfish and mangetout terrine and gaped in horror.

‘Of course not,’ Britt reproved her as though Carla had suggested some weird and disgusting sexual deviation, ‘I couldn’t go straight back to work if I did.’

‘How long are you taking off?’

‘I don’t know. Three weeks?’

‘That long?’ Carla’s tone implied that three weeks was more than a shade self-indulgent. ‘Laura Wells was back at TV North in two and my friend Ari Green, the film
producer, only took ten days. What I always say’ – Carla, consciously childfree, patted Britt’s hand and sipped her Sauvignon –‘is Watch Out. The waters close over you
and you get forgotten so quickly in television.’

David listened in disbelief as Britt and Carla compiled their list of high-powered new mothers, each outdoing the others in how short a time they were prepared to sacrifice to the minor
inconvenience of giving birth.

‘If anyone’s interested in what I, the mere father, think, three weeks sounds far too long to me.’

Britt and Carla looked at him in surprise.

‘Why don’t you just squat over your briefcase and send it home in a taxi? You wouldn’t even have to break up the meeting.’

‘If men got pregnant there’d be a birthing pool in the Gents!’ snapped Britt and she and Carla went on with their conversation.

‘As I was saying, three weeks off at the outside, otherwise I’ll come back and find no one’s even answered the phone.’ Britt looked relieved that everything was settled.
‘Did you know,’ she confided to Carla, ‘that there are these wonderful things called maternity nurses who take over the baby as soon as you get out of hospital and do all the
getting up in the night and feeding it?’

‘Great.’ Carla tried to keep the sympathy out of her voice and failed. Poor Britt. Getting pregnant. What a terrible thing to have happened. ‘So you won’t have to change
the shitty nappies or anything?’

‘Only at weekends. But I’m looking into getting a weekend nanny to cover.’

As he sat, on his second martini of the day, David felt the familiar depression returning. When Jamie had been born he and Liz hadn’t seen it as a brief intrusion into their busy
schedules. It had been, quite simply, the best day of their lives.

The birth had been a difficult one, and by the time the midwife asked if they would like to see the head come out Liz was too exhausted to care whether she was having a baby or a gorilla. So he
witnessed that incredible moment alone. After all that struggle, Jamie finally slid out like toothpaste from a tube, and as he did, he turned his head and gazed around, calm and collected as though
he was looking for a waiter to ask for the bill.

Then they had put him into Liz’s arms, and she’d cried with joy and relief and David had sat on the edge of the bed and held them, his family. It had felt like a miracle.

What had happened to all that love, that feeling that now they were a family anything was possible, that the world belonged to them?

David was jolted back to the present by Carla’s next question.

‘Aren’t you terrified of becoming the size of a house?’

‘I don’t intend to. No bread. No biscuits. No pasta. And definitely no alcohol. I reckon I don’t need to put on a pound till six months, and maybe a couple more in the final
term.’

So that was why she wouldn’t drink his champagne, not because of the baby’s development, but because of her own bloody figure! He looked back at Britt and Carla who were discussing
how Yasmin Le Bon was back on the catwalk almost before she’d left the hospital and realized he’d had enough. Thank God he had to go and phone Bert at the
News
about
Suzan’s police exposé which was finally coming to the boil and might break at any moment.

He found the phone at the back of the restaurant, tucked out of sight behind a floral screen next to the Ladies. Infuriatingly Bert was unavailable, which probably meant he’d slipped over
the road to the Dog and Firkin for a swift half. He thought for a moment about ringing the Dog and Firkin direct, but the story was too sensitive to discuss in a pub. He’d just have to call
him later. On the spur of the moment he tried Suzan’s own number and was greeted with an irritating electronic voice repeating ‘Thank you for calling. We are trying to connect
you.’ Then the message suddenly switched for no apparent reason to a robotic ‘Sorrrry. We are unable to connect you. Please try later.’

He was about to put the phone down when he saw Britt and Carla walking towards him. But they weren’t looking for him, just the Ladies. He was about to jump out at them with a cry of
‘It’s your friendly neighbourhood flasher!’ but he knew Britt wouldn’t think it was funny and he could just hear enough of their conversation to be riveted to the spot.

‘So when did you realize you were in the club?’

‘Last week.’

‘Weren’t you amazed? I’d be gobsmacked. No, make that suicidal.’

‘Only that it took six fucks. I thought we might do it in one. My family’s very fertile. We only have to
look
at a prick and it’s hello abortion clinic.’

‘What do you mean, it took six fucks. How on earth do you know?’

For a moment David thought they were going to disappear into the loo and leave him there dangling like coitus interruptus, but Carla had clutched Britt’s arm and pulled her to a halt.

Britt dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘Come on Carla, you don’t think it was an accident, do you? I’m the world’s most efficient person.’

‘That’s why I thought it
had
to be an accident. You mean you did it deliberately?’

‘Of course I did it deliberately. Do you think I’d ever get up the spout by mistake? All it took was a couple of bottles of Bollinger and a Janet Reger teddy!’

‘And it worked?’

‘Like clockwork.’

‘But why did you want to get pregnant, for God’s sake?’

‘Because David’s still pining for his brats and I reckoned the only way I could stop him going back to them was giving him one of our own.’

For a moment David stood rooted to the spot as Carla and Britt continued their giggling progress into the Ladies. Then he walked very calmly over to their table and waited till she came
back.

Liz had intended to take advantage of a rare visit to Harrods to get a present for Ginny, some Penhaligon’s Victorian Posy toilet water perhaps or something by Crabtree
& Evelyn. She loved Penhaligon’s with its pretty nostalgic packaging. She remembered how one Christmas she’d stood in the queue and watched the man in front buy the entire
Penhaligon’s range – perfume, toilet water, moisturizer, foam bath, soaps in their little painted three-drawer box, face scrub, dusting powder, and all in antique glass bottles with a
silver stopper, packed into a huge old-fashioned leather lady’s dressing case that came straight out of Jane Austen or Georgette Heyer.

Someone’s going to have a happy Christmas, she’d thought, but she hadn’t really minded, had been glad for this lucky lady’s good fortune and hoped she appreciated it,
knowing she’d be having a happy Christmas herself with David and the children – just the four of them. And they had. One of the best Christmases she could ever remember. She stopped for
a moment, almost counting on the fingers of her hand in her amazement. Could it really have only been last year?

Even though there were only two or three people in the queue Liz knew she couldn’t wait any longer. She had to get home, to the safety of her cottage with its hideous welcome wreath, to do
the old familiar things that would give her comfort: lighting a fire from the logs they’d gathered in the woods, making tea, pulling the curtains and trying to pretend that everything in
their cosy little world was fine.