Stop the Clock (7 page)

She scowled at him to let him know he’d been too familiar. Truth to tell, when he said it, she wasn’t sure if she liked it. It sounded kind of hard and trampy. Not much like anything worth giving chase to.

‘What can I do for you, Dan?’ she asked.

‘Well, uh, I know things have been kind of awkward the last few weeks and I . . . wondered if you were free at lunchtime, if I could buy you a coffee, or maybe even a sandwich as well, and we could kind of smooth things over.’

‘Sorry, I have plans.’

‘Oh come on, Tina. Just ten minutes, that’s all I’m asking.’

‘I’m going to be in the Queen’s Head, celebrating my ten years at the
Post
. Jeremy emailed everyone about it last week – perhaps you overlooked it. Maybe I’ll see you there.’ She glanced at her watch to let him know she had made a major concession just by hearing him out this far, and was really much too busy for any further discussion.

‘Oh. Right. Yeah, I remember. Congratulations.’

He was about to turn and move on and she really should have left it there, but she couldn’t resist making a parting shot. ‘Yes, well, us wizened thirty-six-year-olds have to make the most of our meagre causes for celebration.’

‘I guess you do,’ he said, and walked on.

Tina glanced down at her notepad, and the list of questions she’d put together to ask the woman she was due to phone any minute now. She knew she needed to focus. Nevertheless, she found herself watching Dan as he trudged towards his desk, which was just as messy and disorganized as you’d expect. Probably a health hazard. He obviously wasn’t looking where he was going – hungover? – because he almost walked straight into the fresh-faced Scottish girl who’d just started working on the features section.

Tina had bonded with Julia McMahon, or so she thought. They’d had a chat about Edinburgh University, which Julia had graduated from a decade after Tina, and Tina had hoped that Julia might make a suitable protégée, someone she could take under her wing. She needed a lunch-break pal to take the place of the colleagues who had abandoned her for well-to-do husbands and new lives growing organic vegetables in Norfolk, or bonding with other bankers’ wives in Zurich, or making hats in Bath.

There was no doubt that Julia was luscious: she had flawless milkmaid skin and long, thick, heavy, shiny, coppery-red hair, and up until this point Tina had admired these attributes. But as Julia smiled up at Dan her friendly feelings immediately dissolved.

How irritating! Just look at her, batting her eyelashes and shaking out her hair, as if reassuring Dan that he would be perfectly welcome to walk into her any time he wanted to! She might as well just wrap herself up in a big red ribbon and invite him to untie it. Some
women were so . . . so unsubtle! Hadn’t she figured out that you had to be careful about these things? That an overt flirtation with a colleague was a surefire way to turn yourself into a laughing-stock? Hadn’t she realized that Dan, the jack-of-all-trades newshound, was much too low in the office hierarchy to be worth making a play for? Oh well, Julia would learn, by the time she got her marching orders if not before. These young women – they were all so clueless! They all carried on as if they still believed, deep down, that a man really could be the solution to all of life’s problems!

Tina forced herself back to her list of interview questions and got ready to make the call. At the other end of the line, a tired female voice said, ‘Hello, hello?’ as a baby wailed in the background. As Tina introduced herself and reminded the woman about the article she was writing, everything that had bothered or annoyed or troubled her that morning – Dan, Justin, the flirty redhead, the
Post
’s falling circulation, the response to the Vixen Letters, her 36-year-old reproductive system, being single for real after all those years of being surreptitiously attached – all of it just disappeared, like so much audience chitchat silenced by the clarity of a lone performer stepping out on to a stage and beginning to speak.

The interview was for an article about tokophobia: fear of giving birth. This was a new subject for Tina, who had written various articles over the years about the cost to the NHS of women who were too posh to push, but nothing at all about women who were too
scared to. When she’d wound up the call and was looking through her notes, she was prompted to think of Natalie for the first time that day.

She wasn’t feeling great about how she’d left things with Natalie – their last, chance meeting had been kind of weird. Natalie had been pretty grumpy for someone who never usually had a sharp word to say about anyone:
You know what us middle-class mothers are like. Obsessed with swotting up for that all-important practical birth exam . . .

And the last time they’d got together properly had been a disaster, thanks to Lucy:
Another couple of years and it’ll be too late for you to have a baby even if you do meet someone!
Obviously Lucy had been way out of line, but after she’d stormed off, Natalie had attempted to rationalize her behaviour, and had reminded Tina about the thin time of it Lucy had had growing up and the great job she’d jacked in to devote herself to family life. Tina had ended up feeling bad, even though she was the one who’d been attacked.

Natalie’s due date had fallen on Tina’s birthday, at the beginning of the week. Natalie had sent a card, in which she’d written
Still waiting
. And probably she still was . . . but what if she wasn’t?

It could have all kicked off: the baby could be on the way that very moment. Natalie had seemed to have everything under control, what with the assertively written birth plan and the antenatal lessons and the books. She’d certainly done her homework. But when it came to the point of being put to the test, would any of that make any difference?

Natalie’s predicament continued to niggle at Tina over the next couple of hours. It was no good – not knowing what was going on was making it impossible for her to concentrate properly. She decided to give Natalie a quick ring and set her mind at rest; if Natalie was there and able to speak to her, then all well and good . . . and if not, like Natalie herself, she would just have to wait.

Tina took her personal organizer out of her bag to check for Natalie’s number. Dan had teased her for storing her diary and contact numbers in such a hidebound format, but Tina liked to have things written down and tucked away. If Justin hadn’t had a knack for writing persuasive love letters, she doubted whether their relationship, with its ongoing restrictions and frequent separations, would have lasted as long as it did.

The phone rang for a while before Natalie answered, sounding groggy and half asleep.

‘Hello?’

‘Natalie! You’re there!’ Tina exclaimed. ‘I was doing this article and it made me think of you and I just had to call. How are you? Is everything all right?’

‘If you’re phoning to see if I’ve had it yet, the answer’s no,’ Natalie said.

‘Oh well, I’m sure it won’t be long . . . I didn’t wake you up, did I?’

Natalie sighed. ‘You did,’ she said, ‘but never mind. How are you? Did you have a nice birthday?’

‘Actually, it was pretty crap,’ Tina said. ‘I ended up staying in and watching telly.’

‘You should have come round,’ Natalie said, ‘we could have watched it together. So have you made peace with Lucy yet?’

‘Er, no.’ Tina had half hoped that Lucy might get in touch on her birthday, but she hadn’t. ‘Why is it up to me, anyway?’

Natalie sighed. ‘Aren’t we a bit old for all this? You’ve been friends since 1995. Don’t you think you should try and sort it out?’

‘I will, I will. I’ve just been kind of busy, what with one thing and another.’

‘Oh yeah, the new man. How’s that going?’

‘Badly,’ Tina said. ‘I think he likes someone else.’

‘And you like him?’

‘Well . . .’

‘Do you?’

‘He’s not bad-looking,’ Tina conceded. ‘But he has a horrible brown jacket.’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, that’s hardly a deal-breaker. Learn to love it, or buy him a new one for Christmas. Have you tried actually talking to him?’

‘I think it might be too late.’

‘Tina, I’m the one who’s too late,’ Natalie said. ‘If I haven’t gone into labour by the middle of next week, I have to go into hospital to talk about being induced, which is not how I wanted this to turn out. They’ll let me go a fortnight late, and then that’s it.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway. I’d better let you go.’

And then she was gone. It was unlike her to be so terse, but perhaps this was a good sign. Perhaps she had somehow acquired extra reserves of feistiness that
would help her get through the approaching ordeal, and emerge restored to her usual gentle, mild-mannered self.

Tina was about to close her personal organizer and put it away when it occurred to her that she might have forgotten something. Something important.

She turned to the diary section and flicked back to the end of March: 20 March was marked by a small red cross. The next week, there had been various evening engagements: the launch of the Dunmore Gallery summer season; the opening night of that Rattigan revival; cocktails in the Oxo Tower with a bunch of telly people.

28 March: Natalie – what a disaster that had turned out to be. 30 March: G. Diary code for the Grandee – Justin. Their last night – an awful, lacklustre conclusion to so many years of hopeful anticipation . . .

The entry for 3 April said: hygienist 8.00 a.m. She distinctly remembered that her gums had still been tender as she sat nursing her gin and tonic in a corner of the Queen’s Head after work, and looked up to see Dan coming towards her.

27 April: her birthday. A Monday. She’d planned a quiet drink with an actress friend, but had been stood up – something to do with a shoot for a toothpaste commercial overrunning.

Today’s date was 29 April. Which meant she was nearly two weeks late.

Someone cleared his throat, and she looked up from the incriminating diary pages to see Jeremy, the opinion and comment editor and her boss, wearing an
unnatural smile and reaching across her desk to present her with a small envelope.

Jeremy was a little terrier of a man who compensated for his lack of stature by barking at people as frequently and aggressively as possible. When she first started working for him Tina had been continually on edge, but she’d come to realize that he was quick to move on and growl at the next hapless passer-by, and there was something to be said for having a boss with a short attention span, who didn’t always hang on to your mistakes.

It was Justin who’d advised her on how to handle Jeremy –
someone like that may be tough on you, but if you give him what he wants he’ll probably end up being your biggest fan
– and this had turned out to be true; it was Jeremy who had swung it for her to finally get her own column.

‘My goodness! Is it presentation time already?’ she said, taking the card and opening it. A couple of M&S gift tokens fell out.

‘Yes, I’ve got a meeting at one, so I thought we’d better get on with it,’ Jeremy said. ‘Congratulations, Tina. You’ve got through a whole ten years without taking maternity leave. Long may it continue!’

Tina opened her card and glanced through the signatures. There it was, Dan’s spiky scrawl, so different to Justin’s well-formed copperplate:
Here’s to another ten years, I hope they bring you the happiness you deserve.

What was
that
supposed to mean? She
had
been happy. Still was, come to that. She loved her job – she loved pretty much everything about it. The access; the
right to ask questions; the urgency of having a deadline, and the relief after meeting it; the kick of seeing her name in print; the surprising insights into what other lives were like. More than that, she loved the feel and smell of newsprint, and the satisfaction of contributing to something bigger and louder than she was. Why, then, did it suddenly seem as if all this was not enough – too transitory, too ephemeral? An assembly of people who came and went, creating tomorrow’s fish and chip paper, the day after’s unsearched-for internet archive . . .

She looked beyond Jeremy to where Dan and Julia were standing in the space between the news and features sections, apparently oblivious to everyone else. They were laughing about something, and Julia was pressing her body towards Dan, and his arms were reaching for her as if opening up for an embrace.

‘When you’re ready, Tina,’ Jeremy said, ‘let’s go, shall we?’

Other colleagues were already mustering behind him: Anthea Trask, freshly lipsticked, smiling brightly; Monty Delamere, the pot-bellied, whiskery parliamentary sketch writer, who’d put his hand on Tina’s knee in the taxi after her first
Post
Christmas party, but had taken it in entirely good spirits when she’d turned him down; that week’s work experience, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and eager to please.

Tina closed her personal organizer and forced a smile.

‘Sure,’ she said. ‘Time to get out of here.’

A MONTH HAD
passed since Lucy had kicked Adam and Hannah out of the house, and so far she had managed to avoid telling anyone what had happened. She’d headed off potentially awkward questions from the school-gate mums, who were best placed to notice that something was up, by telling them that Adam had been seconded to another office and was away a lot. She had also said that Hannah had moved on. She had avoided mentioning Hannah and Adam in close succession; she didn’t want anyone to make a connection between their disappearances.

She was still wearing her wedding and engagement rings. It felt too weird without them on.

If she’d revealed even a fraction of the truth, the reaction would have been overwhelmingly sympathetic. But she wasn’t ready yet to lay herself open to others’ attempts to comfort her. It wasn’t so much that she wanted to keep up appearances, more that she was
terrified of what would become of her if she let them go.

Everything had become unreal; it was as if she had turned into a ghost, and nobody else had noticed yet. Force of habit kept her moving, and her shadowy half-life was both less vivid and less painful than being fully alive.