Mommy by Mistake (11 page)

It had to be the pregnancy hormones, she told herself. After all, they had been present from almost the very first moment she had spent with Jack. It was probably her elevated estrogen levels that were responsible for how she thought she still might feel about the wretched man to this very day. It must be the hormones that made her teary at the thought of her mother, and now she came to think of it, it was probably because of them that she had told all her new friends she had a fake husband, a fake husband who was gradually taking on a Frankenstein monsterlike life of his own.

It had to be some internal enemy that was altering her so drastically, because she couldn’t allow herself to believe that this con
fusing maelstrom of emotions would be coming from the rational and sane part of her.

What had troubled her most since Alice called her to tell her that Jack was back in town was that now instead of being just somewhere, he was
here
in this city, maybe only a couple of miles away from this very spot where she was standing. What Alice didn’t understand, what none of her new friends would understand even if she felt able to tell them, was that it was because she wanted to see Jack so much, and wanted to share their son with him, that she was so terrified of seeing him, let alone telling him about Freddie. She could accept his rejection of her because she still hoped her naggingly persistent feelings for him would fade as her hormone levels returned to normal. But what if, as she half feared and half hoped, the very thought of being a father sent him packing to the other side of the world on the first available flight? Perhaps it would be better to tell Freddie that his father had died in a car crash than tell him his daddy didn’t want to know him; after all, that was what Sandy had told her about her own father. It was the one lie her mother had told her that she had belatedly appreciated, and the one she certainly wished she had never investigated.

Natalie remembered briefly a wet and freezing February afternoon in Brighton nearly twenty years ago, and the man who had stood on his doorstep telling her in hushed but urgent tones to go away and leave him alone. At least when she thought he was dead she could fantasize about how much he would have loved her, and how different their lives would have been if he had survived.

But she knew she could never set Freddie up for a meeting like that one, and when it came to it, she didn’t have any control over what might happen in the future except to try to make the right decisions now. And that would be a first for her.

Natalie looked at Jess’s face, so honest and open that you could almost see every minute of her sleepless night illustrated on her exhausted features. Jess, who wanted to be her, who thought she was so capable and together. Suddenly Natalie desperately wanted to be able to tell Jess everything about her life, the whole sordid truth. But as they stood in the chill and bluster of that March morning, Natalie realized she had no idea how she would begin to explain just what a mess she had made of everything.

Jess, Meg, and the others thought better of her, they might even actually admire her a little bit. She didn’t want that to change. She liked being the woman who was the friend of Jess and Meg. She liked that version of herself.

“What’s up?” Jess asked her with a smile, cocking her head to one side. “What awful problem are you hiding from now?”

Natalie laughed and shrugged.

“Oh, just that my mom’s coming to stay,” she told Jess with mock heaviness. “Today.”

Jess laughed. “Is she
that
bad?”

“It depends,” Natalie said, reverting to that easy, apparently enviable version of herself who didn’t have a real care in the world. “If you don’t mind having a cross between Joan Collins and Joan Rivers as a parent, only minus all their maternal instincts, then no—it’s not a problem.” She grinned at Jess. “I spoke to her last night and she sounded almost human, and before I knew it I’d asked her to stay in a moment of weakness. But I know exactly what will happen. She will waltz in, criticize me for getting myself in this situation in the first place, and then try to sleep with Gary…”

“Gary’s home?” Jess said, her eyes widening. “She’d try to sleep with your
husband
?”

Natalie blinked at Jess for a second or two before her life story caught up with her.

“Oh no, Gary the electrician, I meant. It’s a very common name,” she said quickly.

“Oh, how confusing,” Jess said. “So, what situation have you got yourself in?”

“Being…married…to a man…who…works in Dubai, of course,” Natalie said, adding each word to the sentence as it occurred to her. She was fairly sure she had managed to pull the fib off.

“She can’t be that unreasonable, can she?” said. “After all, you can’t pick who you love based on their geographical location. And at least you are married. If you knew how much grief my mom gives me about
that
…”

Natalie thought about her mother, who was even now winging her way toward Heathrow. “She
can
be that unreasonable, and worse still she’s cunning. It’s like playing a game of chess with a malicious fox.”

Jess laughed out loud. “You are funny, Natalie,” she said. “If she’s
that
bad, then why on earth did you ask her?”

Natalie looked sideways at Jess. There weren’t enough words left in the English language to fully answer that question.

“Well, she is my mother, after all,” she said instead with a shrug. “And in some cultures that’s considered to be quite an important thing. Plus she volunteered to get up in the night with Freddie now and then, and I’d give Dracula a bed and breakfast if it meant I got a good night’s sleep again.”

When Meg opened the door, she looked terrible. But it wasn’t an ill terrible. It was obvious to Natalie that she had been crying.

“What’s happened?” Natalie asked, pushing Freddie’s buggy into the hall and then putting her arms around Meg.

“It’s all f…f…falling apart,” Meg managed to blurt out. “It’s all…all…
ruined
!”

A little while later, Natalie and a much calmer Meg sat at the kitchen table while James choo-chooed a train around their legs and the babies slept top to tail in Iris’s cot.

“That was a pretty harsh thing to say,” Natalie said, when Meg had finished telling her what had happened, keeping her voice expertly neutral so that her son would only hear the tone and not tune in to the words.

Natalie didn’t like the sound of what Meg had told her one bit. She didn’t have direct experience of the end of a serious relationship herself, but she had been there when Alice’s marriage to her ex-husband Frank had begun to disintegrate soon after they launched Mystery Is Power. And it was during Alice’s divorce that Natalie had realized something that might be worryingly pertinent now. All couples fight, shout, scream, and say hurtful things to each other in anger. But they only ever seem to say the really violently cruel things, to vocalize the deepest and darkest resentments they have been harboring for years, when one of them is about to leave.

Natalie was certain, however, that Meg didn’t want to hear that particular theory just now, and after all, she didn’t know Robert at all. She had never seen Meg with her husband. She might be completely wrong, and she sincerely hoped that she was.

“But everything he said is true,” Meg said bleakly, pinching her temple for a second as she gathered her thoughts. “I mean, look at me. I look old and fat and like a mom. I don’t look like a desirable woman anymore, I don’t feel like one. I have to face it, I’m not the kind of woman men look at and want to have sex with—I wouldn’t want to come home to me either.”

Natalie looked at Meg. She was tired. Her nose was red and swollen as were her eyes, and she was bundled in three or four layers of mismatched knitwear that probably made her look much bigger and far more shapeless than she really was.

“Rubbish,” she said firmly. “You are a sexpot! You’ve just stopped paying attention to yourself, that’s all. You are a very attractive woman. It’s just that you insist on hiding somewhere underneath all those big bulky sweaters. Never mind quality time for you and Robert—how about some quality time for just you? When you feel good about yourself, other people start to feel good about you.”

Natalie tried to ignore the fact that she was doling out the kind of advice that she could stand to follow herself. She wasn’t sure what was going on with Meg and Robert, but she
was
sure that if anything was fixable it was the way Meg looked and, more important, the way she felt about how she looked. Natalie knew she could help her with this.

“What do you mean, quality time for just me?” Meg asked.

“I mean that you need to take some time to peel off all those sweaters and get back in touch with your inner sexual being,” Natalie replied.

Meg looked worried.

“I reckon,” Natalie continued, “that when Robert got in last night, he was very tired and already in a bad mood. He took it out on you, which sucks, but it doesn’t mean that he’s spent today filing for divorce or that your whole life is over. I bet you when he gets in tonight he will be feeling really guilty and really sorry.”

“Do you think so?” Meg looked so hopeful that for a moment Natalie wondered if she was on the right track; what if her plan wasn’t enough to fix things? But she had to try to help her friend, and this was all she could come up with.

“I do think so,” Natalie replied without a hint of caution. “And when he does, I want you to capitalize on that guilt, maximize his bad feelings. Take the moral high ground. Be sweet and understanding and then demand that he make a date with you for Sat
urday night. Make him promise to keep it free for you. I’m sure Frances will look after the kids.”

“Robert’s very hard to demand things from…” Meg said uncertainly.

“It’ll be fine!” Natalie said, dismissing the worry with a wave of her hand. “And when he sees you tomorrow evening, it won’t be downtrodden dowdy old Meg that’s waiting for him…”

“Dowdy?”

Natalie patted her hand.

“Figure of speech—it will be glamorous, sex-kitten, hot-stuff Meg, draped over this very table in the finest lingerie that money can buy, except in this case you’ll be getting a freebie from me.”

“What?” Meg looked confused.

“I’m going to take you into work tomorrow and sort you out with some sexy knickers!”

“
Ohhh
,” Meg said, as the extent of Natalie’s plan dawned on her. “Oh. I don’t know, Natalie. I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean, you’re not sure? Of course you’re sure. We are talking about free shopping here!”

“But will it work?” Meg was disappointingly dubious.

“Of course it will work. Men are not complicated beings. There is no straight man alive on this planet or any other that doesn’t go wild for a push-up corset and stockings. God only knows why, but they do, and what’s more it will make you feel empowered.” A thought occurred to Natalie. “In fact, while I’m at it, I’ll get Jess to come, too—there’s another girl who needs empowering.”

Natalie was enjoying her latest role as lifestyle guru, not that the irony wasn’t lost on her, merely filed away in a mental drawer labeled “Facts I don’t want to face thank you very much.”

“Are you really saying that silky pants can solve everything?” Meg asked, the load of worry on her face lightened by the hint of a smile.

“I am,” Natalie told her triumphantly.

“There’s just one more thing,” Meg added.

“What’s that?”

“I won’t have to wear a thong, will I?” Meg lowered her voice. “I’ve had
terrible
trouble with hemorrhoids since Iris was born.”

W
ith the arrival of her mother looming, Natalie found a long list of things to do after she left Meg’s that would delay her having to go home and face up to that particular reality.

First of all she went to see Jess, woke her up to be precise, and asked her if she would like to come with her on her mission to cheer up Meg in the morning, not mentioning that it was also a mission to cheer up Jess too. Natalie had waited guiltily in Jess’s baby-clothes-strewn living room while Jess went to wash her face and wake herself up.

“God, I’m sorry,” Natalie said, when Jess finally returned. “I can’t believe how inconsiderate I am to barge in unannounced. You must think I’m a thoughtless cow. I
am
a thoughtless cow, clearly.”

“Don’t be silly,” Jess said, pushing a pile of clothes off what was, it turned out, a stylish azure blue sofa and gesturing for Natalie to sit down. “Sorry about the mess. Funny thing is that I’m
not an untidy person. The flat is quite small and normally I like it to be neat, but every now and then I have a sort of slowdown and it all piles up until I can’t stand it anymore and I have to tidy up in a frenzy.”

Natalie looked around the room; it was modern and light, with full-length windows. It was a nice apartment, a proper first home for a young family. The kind of place that made Natalie wonder how and, more important, why, she’d acquired her big old place just for herself until Freddie came along. Yes, her house was quite grand now that she had renovated it and she was very proud of it, but somehow this flat, this
home
, bought together by two hopeful people looking toward the future, seemed far more appealing than her place.

“Oh, I don’t care about mess,” she told Jess, shrugging off the sensation of jealousy. “I’m far more interested in getting you to come out on an adventure with me and Meg!”

But like Meg, Jess had not been instantly enthusiastic about the project, which surprised and disappointed Natalie. She couldn’t believe that any red-blooded woman with a pulse would pass up a chance at free shopping, not to mention hot sex. But Jess had looked hesitant.

“It will be fun!” Natalie said, feeling her attempt at rousing enthusiasm drop like a lead balloon. “Remember fun?”

Jess’s smile was wistful. “I want to come,” she said, her words elongated on a yawn. “But what about Jacob?”

“What about Jacob’s dad?” Natalie replied instantly. “It’s Saturday tomorrow. He’ll be at home, won’t he?”

“I haven’t left him before,” Jess said.

“I haven’t left Freddie before either, but we all need a bit of time away from them and any mothers that might be coming to stay. It’s not wrong, you know, to have a break. And it will do Lee
good to see exactly what you have to cope with on your own all day. Come on, Jess, you need a pick-me-up!”

“You’re right,” Jess said, seeming to steel herself at the prospect. “Of course you are right.”

Technically Jess’s flat was on Natalie’s way home, but she walked right past her own house and on into Stoke Newington without even a sideways glance.

It was almost dark by the time she headed into the bookshop, remembering the title of the book that Alice had told her she simply must read several months ago, and deciding that now was the very time to finally buy it. And for a moment on the way back she even considered taking Freddie for a twilight walk around the park, but then decided that no matter how much she wanted to delay going home and seeing her mother, she was not prepared to brave muggers and druggies to do it. After all, she would have to go home sometime. Even if she booked her and Freddie into the Ritz for the night, Sandy would still be there in the morning, waiting like some shadowy old blinged-up spider.

Natalie chided herself as she walked home; perhaps she was being too harsh on her mother. The woman she had spoken to last night had seemed different. Not too judgmental and even quite motherly at one point. Perhaps it was possible that in the months since Natalie had last seen Sandy she would have grown out the brassy gold highlights, toned down the tan, and begun to realize that cleavage is much less alluring when your skin looks like an aged orange crocodile’s. It was possible that Sandy might have realized that the years she’d spent dragging Natalie from town to town and school to school as if she were an inconvenient piece of luggage that got in the way of her social life, and telling anyone who cared to listen how hard it was being a young widow on her own, had been a terrible mistake. Perhaps Sandy was planning
to try to rectify her failings as a mother before she died of lung cancer or skin cancer or liver failure, or all three. Just maybe, Natalie dared to hope as she put her key in the door of her house, the woman who was waiting for her might be wearing a sweater set and letting the gray grow through her hair and chewing Nicorette gum.

“Hello?” Natalie called out as she pushed the door open and eased the buggy over the front step. The hallway was quiet and empty except for Gary’s tools, which were neatly stacked just to the left of the door, his collection of dust sheets carefully folded beside them. It looked like he had finished early for the day, but then if he had, why was his stuff still here waiting to be loaded onto the van?

“Hello?” Natalie went to the bottom of the stairs and looked up.

“We’re up here, darling!” The sound of Sandy’s voice echoed down the stairwell. “Your
gorgeous
electrician is helping me with my luggage.”

Her hopes plummeting, Natalie scooped Freddie out of the buggy and hurried up the stairs to the peals of her mom’s flirtatious laughter.

Poor Gary was standing by Natalie’s bedroom door, the palm of his hand on the back of his neck, looking like a fly caught in a web, utterly powerless to flee.

“Sorry,” Natalie said, hurrying past him into the room. Sandy was laying her clothes out on the bed.

“You’ll need to move some of the stuff out of this wardrobe,” she told her daughter without looking up. “I’ll never fit all my things in.”

Natalie looked at the size of her mom’s suitcase with dumb horror. It was not an overnight bag.

“Mom, this is
my
bedroom,” she exclaimed, all too aware that she sounded like a petulant teen. “You are going in the guest room.”

For the first time since she had arrived, Sandy looked up at her daughter.

“There he is!” Sandy dropped an armful of clothes with a clatter of coat hangers. “There’s my very firstborn grandson.” She rushed around the bed and before Natalie knew it she had Freddie in her arms.

“Oh look at him, isn’t he handsome? He must take after his father—if only we could get a look at his father.”

“Mom!” Natalie hissed. “Don’t be so stupid.”

“I’ll be off then,” Gary said, looking longingly down the stairs.

“No, you won’t, will he, Natalie?” Sandy’s commanding tone stopped him in his tracks. “You’ll stay for dinner, won’t you, Gary? Let me thank you for all your help. The cabbie wouldn’t take euros, Natalie, and as my own daughter wasn’t here to greet me, I had to rely on the kindness of strangers to get me out of a fix. You owe Gary forty-eight pounds and seventy pence plus tip.”

“Oh God, I’m sorry.” Natalie looked apologetically at Gary. “I’ll get that for you right now.”

“No, you won’t, because Gary isn’t leaving now, Gary is staying for dinner,” Sandy insisted, flashing him a smile. “I’m going to cook paella and bring a little Spanish sunshine into this gloomy old mausoleum my daughter insists on living in, Gary. And you absolutely have to stay because if you leave me alone with Natalie, we shall fight and fall out before midnight. It’s guaranteed, isn’t it, dear?”

“Is it any wonder?” Natalie mumbled, glancing up at Gary. “Mom, it’s Friday night, Gary’s probably got plans, haven’t you,
Gary?” she said, surprising herself by the sudden hope that he hadn’t. Anything, even sitting through her mother’s attempts to flirt with him, would be better than being alone with her.

“Um.” It was obvious that Gary was trying to make up an excuse, but he delayed too long to sound convincing and eventually had to concede that he hadn’t. “Just telly and some takeout,” he admitted.

“Then you’ll stay, won’t you, Gary?” Sandy all but shouted. “Dinner with two beautiful women over a quiet night in—there’s no contest, is there?”

“Um,” Gary said again uncomfortably, clearly caught between the desire to be polite and the urge to run several hundred miles away. “Well…”

“Good, that’s settled then,” Sandy said, stitching Gary up with the flourish of an expert. “It’s so nice to have a man at a dinner table. It gives cooking real meaning, I always think.”

“Right.” Gary looked down the stairs at his neatly stacked tools. “I’ll just go and tidy up.” And he was gone.

It took Natalie quite some time to persuade her mother to move out of her bedroom and into the guest room. In actual fact she didn’t bother to try to persuade her. As Sandy hung things up in her wardrobe, Natalie took them out again and relocated them to the other room. Finally, Sandy realized what was happening and admitting defeat wheeled her gigantic suitcase across the hall.

As Natalie sat on a chair in the corner of the spare room with Freddie, watching but not listening to the constant stream of sound that came out of Sandy’s mouth, she realized that she should have known that seeing her mother again was always going to be the same, devoid of all emotion or sentiment. But despite everything that Natalie had experienced in her relationship with her mother she felt disappointed, which in turn made her feel like an
idiot for expecting anything about Sandy to be different. For some reason, after years of parting and then reacquainting herself with the woman, she still half expected a reunion with her mother to involve hugs or kisses, or at least some sign that the two of them were emotionally connected to each other in some way. Instead, Sandy was acting as if they had last seen each other only yesterday, and that the grandson she had only just found out existed was merely a pleasant diversion. Natalie had no idea who the kindly and concerned-sounding woman she had spoken to on the phone yesterday was, but it was not this woman, not her mother.

On the way down to the kitchen, Natalie paused on the stairs and looked back at her mother. “By the way, Gary thinks I’m married to Freddie’s dad who works abroad,” she told her bluntly.

“If you say so,” Sandy said simply, and Natalie knew in this one respect she could trust Sandy. After all, her mom was a woman who built almost her entire life on a series of what Sandy called “little white lies,” from her real age to how much she had in the bank. Natalie knew that Sandy—the original mistress of disguising the truth—wouldn’t blow her cover story or even bother to ask why she had one in the first place.

Why, Natalie found herself wondering as she lowered Freddie into his cot, had she invented a cover story in the first place? What exactly was wrong with the bare facts of her life? She was a woman on her own who’d had a brief affair that had resulted in a baby. She lived in the twenty-first century. Nobody really cared about her circumstances, so why did she feel this subterfuge was necessary? Natalie had a stack of reasons and excuses she could trot out blithely to anyone who asked; but the reality was that she was concealing a deeper truth. She had never been very sure, not even when she was a tiny girl, that the real her was good or interesting enough to be loved by anyone, certainly not her father and possibly even her mother. Maybe even especially her mother.

Dinner was amazingly pain-free.

Natalie’s mother had been right. With Gary there they did not fight, principally because Sandy was far more interested in Gary than she was in her daughter. All Natalie had to do was to sit back and let her single allotted glass of wine numb her nerve endings while Sandy flirted with Gary. Or rather at him.

Occasionally Natalie considered rescuing the poor man from Sandy’s barrage of compliments and innuendo. But it was a dog- eat-dog world and frankly she’d rather not focus her mother’s attention back on her. Instead, Natalie used the time to try to collect herself. She felt as if she had been blown in a million different directions and couldn’t quite remember where it was she had started out.

This gradually increasing sensation of slipping out of control of her own life had begun the minute that Alice called her to tell her that Jack was back in town, Natalie decided. Until that moment she had been keeping a tight lid on top of all the unresolved issues and emotions she had concerning Jack, even in the face of Alice’s relentless questioning. But it now seemed that Jack was back and there was a very real threat that she wouldn’t be able to control what happened next. It was too much.

Natalie had barely spoken to her dinner guests when just before ten the baby monitor crackled into life and Freddie began to cry.

“He probably needs feeding,” she said, as she pushed her chair out from the table. She was surprised to find that her one largish glass of wine had gone immediately to her head and somewhere in the general location of her knees. For a moment the corners of the room dilated and then contracted back into right angles as she sat down again unsteadily.

“Bit of a dizzy spell,” she said to Gary and Sandy, who were watching her.

“You stay put, love, get your sea legs back. He might just need a cuddle and a bit of a rock,” Sandy said, brandishing the cigarette she had been threatening to light for the last five minutes. “Oh go on, darling, let Nana Sandy have a go.”

“Nana Sandy?” Natalie blinked. “Good God.” She exchanged a smile with Gary, who seemed relieved that the glare of Sandy’s attention was no longer focused on him. “I suppose you can have a go; but just for the record, if you take
that
thing,” she jabbed her fork at Sandy’s cigarette, “within five miles of my son you will be on the first flight back to Spain. No smoking
anywhere
in my house, understood?”

To Natalie’s surprise, having half expected her mother to choose nicotine over her grandson, Sandy placed the offending article regretfully on the table.

“I’ll call you up if he won’t go back down,” she said, turning the volume down on the monitor as she went out of the door. “After all, this is why I’m here, darling, isn’t it? To give you a break.”