The Yorkshire Pudding Club (10 page)

‘No, your car won’t start,’ he said, his black hair glittering with melting snowflakes. ‘What did you do? Leave your lights on or something?’

‘Yeah,’ she said, waiting for the ‘women drivers’ tirade to start. Not that he was ever like that.

‘You picked a good day to do that. It’s a nasty one, all right.’ He clipped in his seat-belt, slipped off the handbrake and started driving.

Silence reigned, unless you counted ‘Una Paloma Blanca’ playing out from Radio Sheffield.

‘Shopping, were you?’ John asked at the traffic-lights.

‘Went to Leeds,’ she said, slipping into monosyllabic mode.

‘I saw you coming off the train when I pulled in to get a newspaper from the shop. You know, the one in the bus station.’

‘Yes, I do know where the paper shop is,’ she said. It was the one she had stood shivering outside all those years ago, waiting for some bloke wearing a flower to take her out for a drink, although she didn’t remind him of that.

‘Didn’t buy much in Leeds, did you?’ he said, noting the distinct lack of carrier bags.

‘No,’ she answered flatly.

‘You banged your eye?’

‘Yes,’ she said, self-consciously pulling her fringe down over it. She had put three pounds of thick make-up on the bruising, but it must have started wearing off. God, she must look a sight!

‘Nobody banged it for you, I hope,’ he said, his voice tight.

‘Don’t be daft. I had an argument with a cupboard door.’

The wipers had to go full pelt to shift the snow. She snuggled down into his coat and caught a cocktail of old, shockingly familiar scents: leather and the bottom notes of aftershave and building sites and aromas that had no names but were just
him
.

‘I don’t know, I’ve only seen you twice since I came
back and you were skiving off work both days,’ he said.

‘I decided to change my job,’ she said, stiffly and with all defence mechanisms fully activated. ‘I went into Leeds hoping to find another.’

‘Any luck?’ he asked.

‘No,’ she said, and then the tears started leaking out again, much to her annoyance.

She saw him looking at her out of the corner of his eye but she kept staring straight ahead at the road and the weather. He did not say anything else until he pulled up in front of her house, which was just as well as any sympathy would have dissolved the dam wall holding the motherlode of those tears back.

‘Well, thanks for the lift and could I have my keys, please,’ she said, slipping out of his coat and handing it back.

‘I’ll hang onto them and get your car started for you. I told the car-park bloke I’d be back later so you don’t have to worry about getting clamped either.’

‘You really don’t have to bother. I’ve got AA cover,’ she said haughtily, hating herself for being so improperly independent sometimes.

‘Oh, Elizabeth, bugger off inside your house and get warm,’ he said and leaned right over her. Her heart boo-boomed because for a moment there she thought he was going to kiss her, but it was just to open the door.

‘Sorry, there’s a knack to this handle,’ he explained. ‘Your car might take me a couple of days to sort out. I’ll try and have it back for Thursday for you.’

‘Thank you,’ she said with a reticence that suggested he might be doing her a disservice rather than a favour, then she got out of the car. He pipped goodbye on the horn and she gave him the briefest of waves before going into the house, deliberately not giving him a backward glance.

What
was
it about that man that always made her feel so angry and mixed-up and confused, when all he had ever done wrong was love her?

Elizabeth hopped from foot to foot, partly from the cold, partly from nerves. She’d never been on a blind date before and, at twenty-four, she would not have been on that one either but for the begging and pleading of Janey to make up a foursome with George Hobson, who had asked her out in the pub the previous week. She was too nervous to go by herself and so, in her eyes, there was only one solution–a double date.

‘Please–I’ll owe you favours for the rest of your life,’ she had said, crawling after Elizabeth on her mam and dad’s front-room carpet.

‘No chance!’ said Elizabeth, shaking her away. ‘Absolutely none. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me.’

So there they were then, waiting outside the newspaper shop in the bus station whilst Janey chewed on her nails and felt delightfully on edge, and Elizabeth just longed for the whole ordeal to be over. She stomped some warmth back into her feet. George and friend were late; with any luck they’d stood them up.

‘What do they look like again?’ Elizabeth asked, breathing a huge sigh of relief as two beanpoles with spots came up to them, gave them the once-over and then walked on.

‘George is quite tall, just normal brown hair, and I don’t know about John.’

‘Oh well, that should make them easy to spot then,’ Elizabeth huffed. She was hating this idea more and more by the second.

‘Oh–and they said they’d be wearing flowers so we could recognize them.’

Great, thought Elizabeth. Details like that made it very hard not to run off there and then.

It was at that moment that the Millhouse bus pulled in and amongst the alighting stream were two very tall men with four-foot-long plastic sunflowers pinned to the front of their clothes. One was plumpish, grinning and rosy-cheeked, like a young cleanshaven Father Christmas. The other was black-haired, unsmiling, dressed entirely in black leather–cowboy hat to boots–with a stupid pencil-thin moustache underlining his nose as if it was important.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
theme tune welled up inside Elizabeth’s head as he slowly walked towards them, thankfully devoid of spurs. She blinked and rubbed her eyes, but alas he was still there.

‘Chuffing hell,’ she said to the beaming Janey. ‘Please don’t tell me Lee Van Cleef is mine!’

George knew exactly where to find Father McBride on a Thursday lunchtime. He nipped out of work and crossed the road to the George and Dragon pub and there, in the warm corner seat by the fake log fire, with a cigarette, looking at the horseracing and sipping from a half, was the old priest. He had led the services in church when George was a lad. He was a tough Glaswegian who had travelled the world, a good bloke who had taken up the cloak to wear with pride, not to hide behind it.

‘Father, can I have a quick word?’ said George tentatively.

Father McBride scrutinized him through his little rectangular spectacles. ‘I know you, don’t I?’ he said, giving him the once-over.

‘I doubt you’d recognize me,’ said George. ‘It’s been well over twenty-five years since my last Confession.’

‘What kept you?’ said Father McBride gruffly, but his eyes twinkled as he folded up his newspaper and indicated for George to sit down. ‘Is this an informal chat or should we be in the confessional?’ he said.

‘Probably,’ said George, ‘but I’m on my lunch and
if I don’t talk to you now I’ll go mad and probably do something stupid that’ll break up my marriage.’

William McBride took a slow sip of his beer and sat forward. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘My wife’s pregnant with our only bairn and it’s my fault.’

‘I should hope so,’ he replied. ‘And the problem is…?’

‘She didn’t want bairns, but I did. So…’ George stopped.

‘So…’ the old priest coaxed eventually.

‘I poked holes in our condoms.’ George cringed. It sounded worse out than it felt in.

Father McBride did not flinch when he heard the word ‘condoms’. He had been around and he knew people were not saints, and a lapsed Catholic was better than no Catholic at all, he reckoned silently. Had he been Pope, he would have been more lenient on the use of contraceptives, for he had seen too many unwanted babies born in the world, sick and diseased, their mothers unable to cope.

‘This is really one for the confessional,’ he said, starting to get up. ‘Look, come back with me now and—’

‘Please, Father McBride–please,’ said George, and something in his voice made the old priest throw up his hands and sit back down again.

‘An informal chat it is then.’

‘Should I tell her what I’ve done, Father?’ said George.

‘You know your wife better than I do. Do
you
think you should?’

‘I think if I told her, my marriage would be over and my baby would be born into a big mess, that’s what I think.’

‘Is it a good marriage you have?’

‘It’s the best,’ said George, almost in tears. ‘I’m so sorry, I’d never thought any of it through and she won’t stop crying. I feel like I’ve ruined her life. Every time I see her I want to say I’m sorry.’

‘Well, when anyone who isn’t God tries to play God there’s usually a fair amount of damage,’ said Father McBride.

George wished the priest would give him a good kicking. It would hurt less than his words. He was right though; he had taken Janey’s free will and controlled her. He
had
played God.

‘What a mess I’ve made,’ he said. ‘I just wish it would all go away.’

‘You’re not telling me you’d get rid of this baby, are ye?’ said the old priest.

‘No, no, that’s not something we’d do,’ said George, looking horrified. ‘I just meant, I wish I could turn the clock back.’

‘Well, time travel, alas, isn’t an option, son.’

‘I’m so sorry, so very very sorry.’

Father McBride had another couple of sips from his drink whilst he thought.

‘Are you really fully repentant?’

‘I am, Father.’

‘Will you be there for this family that you wanted so much? Will you bend over backwards for them, keep them and love them?’

‘You’ve no idea how much. Oh Father, what do you think I should I do?’

‘I don’t feel it’s up to me to decide that for you. What do
you
think would be the right thing to do for you and your wife?’

For once George didn’t need to ponder, for now the answer seemed blatantly obvious. He knew the burden of this truth should be on his shoulders alone, that it was up to him to carry it, no one else.

‘I don’t think confessing to her will help anything but my conscience.’

‘I think confessing all to God might help you. Properly–in church.’

‘I will, Father.’ He would too. He needed God on his side to help him and keep him strong enough not to open his big gob to Janey about the horrible thing he had done to her.

‘And I hope to have the pleasure of seeing the wee chappy in church one day. With his
family
,’ Father McBride added, with a fair bit of weight behind it.

‘Thank you, Father McBride. I will. And I’ll be there for ’em always.’

‘George…George Hobson, are ye not? You were my altar boy once. Nice singing voice, if I remember rightly.’

‘You remember?’ said George, feeling honoured to have stayed in the mind of this good man. ‘That’s me, Father. I can’t thank you enough for listening, helping.’

‘I’ll pray for you, George Hobson, and your family.’

‘Thank you, Father. Can I get you a pint?’

‘No, I just have a very slow half these days,’ Father McBride replied. ‘I don’t want to be showing myself up like Father Jack in this corner, now do I? God bless you, my son. A packet of cheese and onion wouldn’t go amiss, mind.’

George got him his crisps and a half in for the next week anyway and went back to work with the snow pelting down on him, although he was thinking too hard to feel the wet of it. He continued to think things through for the rest of the afternoon, slowly but surely, as was George’s way, and by the time he handed over his machine to the night shift, he thought he just might have worked out how to make some of this right for Janey.

Elizabeth was booked in for her first antenatal at the surgery, although she did not see her crusty old Irish doctor but a midwife called Sue Chimes. She was weighed and consequently discovered that she had put nearly half a stone on already, although how, with all this vomiting and only a two-inch baby twizzling about inside her, she didn’t know. Most of the weight increase could have been explained by her chest, she supposed, for she seemed to have developed ‘six boob’ syndrome. Her nice normal bra that usually covered everything adequately now had two extra boobs popping out of the top and a pair pushed sideways under her arms. She looked like a ‘Ye Olde Tavern’ bar wench when she was stripped off.

She got forms for free prescriptions and dental treatment, and vouchers in a blue folder labelled
Primigravida, which she remembered meant ‘first pregnancy’ from her old Latin lessons, and she and the midwife together filled in a booklet with all her details. Apparently, she was ten and a half weeks’ pregnant, which sounded quite a lot. Had she been taking folic acid? asked Sue, and explained that it greatly reduced the chance of having a baby born with spina bifida. Elizabeth had her multivitamins in her bag, which she had taken consistently for years, and checked quickly to find that she was stoked up with the magic ingredient, albeit unwittingly.

When they got to the father question, Elizabeth expected the midwife to look at her with disapproval when she said, ‘He’s not around,’ but she didn’t.

Sue Chimes just wrote
not involved
on her notes, gave her a kind, supportive smile, and said, ‘Doing this on your own is very hard. I hope you’ve got a good support network?’

‘Aye,’ she lied, although it was not really a full lie because Hels and Janey were in the same boat so she supposed she wasn’t entirely on her tod.

Sue sent Elizabeth off with a small bottle to fill with urine, then she tested it, recorded her findings and strapped a freezing blood-pressure wrap around Elizabeth’s arm, inflating it until she thought her arm was going to burst open.

‘Lovely,’ Sue said, writing down the result. ‘Nice and steady. Now you keep that up!’

‘I’ll try,’ Elizabeth joked, and they laughed gently together.

Sue then told her all the things that were probably
starting, or would start, to happen to her and how she could combat them–headaches, cramps, hormonal weeping, tantrum fits, constipation, tiredness, nausea, increase in mucus production, more frequent bladder emptying, bleeding gums…the list went on and on. Then she gave Elizabeth an empty sample bottle for next time and a handful of pamphlets to read through.

‘There’s a lot to take in, but don’t be scared,’ said Sue Chimes, squeezing her hand and giving her a big smile, but Elizabeth came out of the surgery in a daze. It suddenly felt very real and she was lump-hammered by the enormity of it all. She was just about coping with what was happening to her now; she had not even started thinking ahead. If she did, she might just run off, except the thing making her run off would have come with her, because it was inside her. She did not hate it, she was more afraid of it than anything. She had never had anything to do with babies ever, never even held one, and now she would have the responsibility of one for the rest of her life.

She suddenly wondered if Bev had kept hers.

Helen woke up crying, following a bad dream in which her baby was really ugly and handicapped and would never grow up. Simon impatiently snapped out a man-size tissue from the box on his bedside cabinet for her and told her to pull herself together. He made her feel as if she had just acquired an unsuitable toy that was interfering with his life, which in a way it was. His back in bed was a cold punishment for having
to pull out of the dinner date with his boss because she felt so drained and sick.

He had stomped off alone and blanked her when he came home to find her sitting up waiting for him in their long white dining room. She was reading her Miriam Stoppard book at the table with a cup of peppermint tea and a couple of Digestive biscuits on a saucer. He took one look at her and laughed in an ‘I don’t believe it’ sort of way.

‘If you were well enough to wait up for me, then you were surely well enough to support me at dinner with Jeremy and Fen,’ he said, jabbing a finger in the direction of a half-eaten biscuit, ‘and I thought you said you couldn’t eat anything?’

‘This is the only thing I’ve eaten all day!’ she protested, but it was obvious that he thought she was lying.

Helen could not even say, ‘Sushi,’ at the moment, never mind dine out on it, and the doctor had told her to take things easy as her blood pressure was a little high. None of this was judged to be as important as diverting some wife so their husbands could talk business, apparently. Simon then accused her of milking her situation for sympathy whilst he took off his tie and threw it over the chair. She watched him, remembering the night she had conceived, when he had stripped off his tie and by the time it had reached the floor, she was in his arms, preparing to seduce him. They had not made love since then and, despite the sickness, she wanted–
needed
–him to touch her so much, to run his hands over her rounding stomach and feel their baby growing.

‘The baby, the baby,’ he mocked. ‘That’s all you ever say these days. Look–you’re even reading about it again! You really are becoming a huge baby bore!’ Then he announced that he was going to bed and flicked off the light behind him, leaving her to cry alone in the cold dark dining room, before she made her way across the hallway to the even colder, darker bedroom.

The table was set when Janey got home, but with candles and the best tablecloth and a small Christmas tree (a last-minute decorative addition). There was chicken in white wine, grapes, and potatoes in their skins bubbling away in the kitchen, mixed vegetables boiling in a homemade stock for extra taste, and a cool bottle of non-alcoholic wine stood uncorked on the table. George was waiting, like a patient butler, to hand Janey a glass of it when she came downstairs from changing out of her suit. The house looked even more shiny than normal.

‘You were born with a pinny on you, George,’ she often joked. Not that he was a wimp; he once floored a bloke for being horrible to Elizabeth in the pub when they were courting with a right hook that Tyson would have been proud of. John had been in the toilet at the time, which was lucky for the remainder of the bloke’s neck. She hadn’t told George that Dean Crawshaw had given Elizabeth a black eye because she knew he would have thrown his coat on and gone straight out to the Victoria to give him a taste of his own medicine without a second thought, and Elizabeth
wouldn’t have wanted that. Just because his heart was soft didn’t mean the rest of him was.

‘Hiya, love, had a good day?’ he said, suddenly noticing how drawn she looked. ‘Not feeling sick, are you, sweetheart?’

She plastered a smile on the outside for his benefit, even though she wasn’t smiling inside. She had spent the last hour of her working day drafting out the letter that would decline her dream job, knowing that she would probably never be offered this chance again, ever. She would be written off as a baby machine with ‘female priorities’. Oh yes, she felt sick all right.

‘I’m okay,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to go shopping for something stretchy though, this weekend. These tight waistbands are killing me. I can’t fasten the top button at all.’

She had been a steady size ten for three years and had thrown all her ‘fat’ clothes out. She needed some bigger bras as well because her boobs were inflating like weather balloons. Unlike the others though, her nausea and fatigue had luckily been very short-lived symptoms.

They were both quiet over the main course and, delicious as it was, there was a lot left on their plates at the end of it.

‘What’s the occasion then?’ said Janey, as George planted a crême brûlée in front of her for afters.

‘Janey…’he started. She waited another five minutes before prompting him.

‘I don’t know how to say this right, so bear with us,’ he went on.

‘Okay,’ she agreed, putting down her spoon. Reluctantly so, because George’s puddings were exceptional.

‘Don’t be offended or anything, will you? I’m not saying this because I’m lazy or owt…’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, love, just say it, will you?’