Lost Dogs and Lonely Hearts (33 page)

‘No, it’s not!’ Natalie burst out, and Zoe saw pain flash across her face. ‘It’s
not
the same thing. God, Bill, for a doctor you can be incredibly insensitive.’

There was clearly something more going on here, but if Zoe hadn’t been feeling so disappointed, she might have been more embarrassed at the private drama she’d stumbled into. But just then, her maternal instinct was over-riding everything.

‘She’s right – kids
aren’t
the same as dogs!’ Zoe heard herself say. ‘They’re far more than that! I mean, they’re hard work, yes, and they can drive you mad, but they’re the best thing that ever happened to me, and I wouldn’t swap them for the world.’

Bill’s brown eyes clouded over with mortification. ‘I didn’t realise you . . . Oh, God, I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t be sorry. I’ve got two, actually,’ said Zoe. It tumbled out of her once she started, as if she couldn’t say enough to make up for her silence. ‘Two boys – Spencer, he’s seven, and Leo, who’s just turned six. I’m not saying it’s easy, because it isn’t, not when I’m bringing them up on my own. But they’re amazing and I love every moment I have with them, even when they are driving me berserk. They’re the best gift in the whole world, children.’

Her mouth was dry and her tongue seemed to be sticking to the roof of her mouth. As she spoke, Zoe saw Natalie stifle a sob. Johnny had – oh
no
! – tears in his eyes, which he was trying to blink away. It suddenly occurred to her that the tests hadn’t been school-related at all – and if Bill had been trying to cheer Johnny up, maybe her little outburst had only made things worse.

Zoe wished the ground would open and swallow her up.

She touched Natalie’s shoulder awkwardly. ‘I’m really sorry, Natalie. I hope I haven’t said anything to upset you. I think I should, um, just go. You’ve got things to talk about, and, um . . . Sorry.’

‘Zoe, listen,’ Bill started, but she just gave him a quick, tight smile.

She might have made a fool of herself, but she had to admit it: if he’d been right for her then he’d never have said something like that. Better now than after the romantic Indian meal, when her hopes had been properly raised.

Zoe grabbed hold of Treacle’s lead, then turned and marched up the hill, to collect her puppy first, and then her sons. And if they wanted to go to McDonald’s, for once she wasn’t going to beat herself up about not being able to say no.

19

Johnny didn’t talk to Bertie in the car as he usually did on the way home. He didn’t talk to Natalie much either, except in direct response to questions, and when they got home, he took himself off for ‘a walk’. She and Bertie weren’t invited.

Natalie waited until he was out of sight, and then got on the internet, methodically winkling out all the information she could find, all the message boards, all the helplines. Bertie lay at her feet, his nose pointing towards the door. Neither of them moved for a couple of hours, and when they both heard the scrape of Johnny’s key in the lock, Natalie slammed her laptop shut, and Bertie sprang to his sturdy feet.

Natalie prepared her face to look calm and sympathetic, but Johnny went straight upstairs and they heard the bath running.

Bertie gave Natalie a sideways look, and slunk out of the room, to follow Johnny up the stairs, if not into the actual bath.

‘No, Bertie,’ said Natalie, getting up to grab his collar. ‘Daddy doesn’t want to be disturbed now. He’s sad.’

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she bit her lip.
They’d started calling each other Mummy and Daddy in front of Bertie as a joke – they weren’t
really
the sort of people who’d use a homeless dog as a baby substitute.

Except they were. That had to stop.

‘Let’s get some supper!’ she said, and at the sound of the words, the apparently untrainable Basset hound dropped into a sit that would have amazed Cesar Milan, and Natalie’s heart pinched with love for him.

Johnny’s brooding silence lasted all evening, but by Monday morning, he was at least talking again. Just not about the tests.

‘Look, I’ll go and do another one,’ he said, raising his hand to ward off her tentative questions at breakfast. ‘Don’t go on at me, Nat. I’m still getting my head around it all.’

Natalie noticed that he didn’t look her in the eye as he left, and though he muttered the usual ‘I love you’ as he went, she could feel something different between them, and it made her cold inside.

‘Right, Bertie,’ she said, when Johnny had left the house and the day stretched endlessly ahead of her. ‘Let’s get you walked.’

They took their usual route along the canal, past the ducks and swans that Bertie arooed at, and into the park, but once there, Natalie’s legs still twitched to walk further. She wanted to walk off some of the tension that Johnny’s unusual mood had coiled into her.

‘How about a visit to the kennels?’ she asked, eyeing the route up to the hill. It would double their normal outing, but what did she have to get home for? As if someone was reading her thoughts, she saw Megan heading down into the park with an assortment of terriers, trotting perfectly on their leads.

Natalie waved as if she’d just arrived herself, and was strangely consoled when Megan cheerily called her and Bertie over.

An hour and a longer walk later, Natalie was back in the warm kitchen up at Four Oaks, Bertie was in a basket by the Aga with Gem, and she was helping Rachel insert copy into the new Second Chance Dogs website.

It was like being in an office and being at home at the same time – a pretty good combination, Natalie thought, helping herself to another biscuit.

They’d made heartwarming profiles for Treacle the Lab and Lucy the Staffie
– making each other well up with tears at the messages they were posting on behalf of the dogs – when Rachel took a break to make them some elevenses.

Natalie had only taken a sip of her coffee when Rachel pulled a face and stopped her. ‘Sorry, don’t drink it! The milk’s off.’

Natalie smelled her mug. ‘Is it? Tastes perfectly fine to me.’

‘No, it’s foul. I thought there was something wrong with it on my Weetabix this morning, so I opened a fresh pint but this is the same. It tastes really nasty. Eurgh.’ She shuddered dramatically. ‘It actually turned my stomach. I thought it was that bug of Megan’s making me feel pukey, but it’s the milk.’

Natalie scrutinised her. Rachel seemed even paler than usual, and drawn, as if she hadn’t slept. Cogs began to turn in her mind, little boxes that she’d tried really hard to check herself each month, starting with that elusive metallic taste, ironically brought on by folic acid tablets.

It wouldn’t be fair. It would be so unfair.

‘It tasted sort of metallic?’ she asked, unable to resist.

‘Yes!’ Rachel pointed with her pen. ‘Like someone had left ten-pence pieces in it. Can you taste it? Is it just local milk or something?’

Was she being obsessive? Should she say something?

‘What?’ Rachel demanded. ‘Why are you looking at me like that? You think I’m going mad, don’t you?’

Natalie shook her head. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you think you might be pregnant?’

Rachel laughed. ‘No! I don’t. Why? Is it a sign? Milk tasting like spare change?’

‘Yes,’ said Natalie and watched as Rachel’s face fell. ‘Is your period late? Do your breasts feel too big for your bra? Are you spotty?’

Rachel’s hand went automatically to her chin, which was, Natalie noticed with a sinking heart, caked in the palest concealer she’d ever seen.

The number of spots she’d almost celebrated, wanting to believe they were a hormonal shift inside.

‘No,’ said Rachel, almost to herself. ‘Oh . . . no.’

Silently, Natalie reached into her handbag and pulled out her emergency test, the one she hid in the zip pocket for moments of total weakness. ‘Easy way to find out.’

Rachel was shaken out of her bewilderment by the foil-wrapped sachet. ‘You carry pregnancy tests around with you?’

‘When you’ve been trying as long as we have, you have to hide them well away from the loo,’ said Natalie. ‘How late is your period?’

Rachel gazed at her with big, scared eyes. Natalie thought she’d never seen such long lashes – round and dark, real sixties go-go girl eyes.

After a moment’s pause, she laughed lightly and said, ‘I don’t know. Isn’t that awful? I don’t really notice. But, Nat, it’s not going to be that. I’m nearly forty – I thought it was pretty much impossible to get pregnant at my age, unless you were on IVF and shipping in eggs from students.’

‘Apparently not.’ Natalie chewed her lip in an effort to stop it wobbling. ‘Cherie Blair, Mariella Frostrup, Jerry Hall. All older mothers.’

‘Have you been researching into . . .’ Rachel stopped. ‘Oh, Nat, you’re only thirty! You and Johnny are going to have kids any minute now!’

‘No, we’re not!’ Natalie tried, but she couldn’t stop it bursting out of her. She had no one else to tell, who wouldn’t give her a hard time. ‘We got the results at the weekend. Johnny’s not . . .’

She couldn’t. That was too private. And saying it out loud made it more real. They were going to need help to conceive.

Natalie looked down at the First Response pregnancy test in her hands and felt something stab through her heart as she remembered the times she’d held her breath, waiting for the magic line to appear. All those months! All those tests and charts and nerves, when every single time there had been absolutely no chance of the lines turning blue, because there weren’t even any sperm to try. The money she’d wasted on tests when there had never been a thing there to test.

‘Here,’ she said, pushing it towards Rachel. ‘Have it. I don’t need it any more.’

‘Natalie.’ Rachel stared at her, lost for words.

‘Please.’ Natalie tried to smile. ‘You’ll know one way or another. And honestly, I won’t go mental if you are. I haven’t reached that stage yet. I can still be happy for other people.’

Rachel opened her mouth, as if she was about to say something, then thought better of it, and slipped out of the room.

Natalie made herself focus on small details to block out the darkness creeping up in her chest. The radio was playing ‘Clocks’ by Coldplay, and there was a bright jug of lemony daffodils on the windowsill, catching every ray of morning sun. Bertie was gazing at her, with two dark rings around his eyes like liner, and two bright orange eyebrows above his mournful eyes.

She stretched out her fingers to him, wanting to feel his soft head.

Bertie ambled over, thinking she was about to offer him something to eat from the table. Instead, Natalie held out a hand so he could shove his cold wet nose into her palm, and as he did, laying his trusting head against her knee, a fat tear dropped from her nose onto his.

‘Oh, Bertie,’ she whispered. ‘You’re going to have to be our baby now.’ She stroked the warm velvet of his ears and loose dewlap and her head tightened against the sheer unfairness of life.

Bertie took the opportunity to spring up and put his massive white paws on Natalie’s knee, and for once she didn’t push him down, or tell him she was worried about his spine. Instead she hugged him exactly as she’d have hugged a toddler to her and squeezed her wet eyes against his ears.

It suddenly occurred to Natalie that Bertie would have to go on the website too, so a full-time family could find him. She’d have to write a really amazing page for him, so someone would take him home and love him just as much as she and Johnny did already. She wasn’t prepared for the wrench in her chest at that, and had to hug Bertie even tighter.

Natalie clung motionless to her dog until the song had finished, then she put on a stern face and made him drop back down to the floor. ‘Not good for your back, Bertram,’ she said.

Somewhere deep in the house the ancient pipework announced the flushing of a loo, and after a moment, Rachel appeared in the door, looking sheepish.

‘Didn’t work!’ she said, marching over to the side to put the kettle back on.

Natalie quickly wiped her eyes. ‘What do you mean, it didn’t work? It’s really simple, you just have to . . .’

‘I know, pee on the stick. I think I peed on the wrong bit.’ Rachel waved her hands disparagingly. ‘Sorry, Nat, I’m not used to controlled urination. But I’m sure there’s nothing – I’m so old it’s probably the menopause, not a baby. My periods have always been a bit irregular, and there’s been all this stress.’

‘Mm.’ Natalie looked at her closely. There was something not quite right about Rachel’s face but right now she didn’t want to deal with it.

‘You’ll go to the doctor, though?’ she said, because she had to say it.

‘What? Yes, absolutely. Yes. Another cup of tea?’

‘Um, I’m OK, thanks.’ Natalie turned her attention back to the screen and the dogs who needed homes. She put Bertie to the bottom of the list. ‘OK, who’s next? Chester? Have you got some photos of Chester?’

When Natalie and Bertie had gone home, Rachel dragged on her trainers and set off across the fields.

She wasn’t even sure if Gem was following her to begin with. She wasn’t sure where she was going either, only that she needed to run and run and not think. The trouble was, she couldn’t stop thinking. The same thought stuck in her brain, not getting any more real: she was pregnant.