The Yorkshire Pudding Club (19 page)

Dirty old man, she thought with a smile as wide and juicy as a watermelon as she logged onto her computer, feeling totally energized for the hard day’s work ahead. Who needed stimulant drugs when you could have a George? Now that was true ecstasy.

When Elizabeth got the date for her second scan at twenty weeks, John offered to go with her–merely as a support, he said casually. She had been going to pull up her drawbridge and say, ‘No, sod off,’ when Janey’s, Helen’s and his own words came back at her about the baby turning out like her if she did not learn to let people near. Not that she hadn’t known love, because her Auntie Elsie was lovely to her, but she was not what anyone would call a demonstrative woman, as far as feelings were concerned. She was almost twenty years older than Elizabeth’s father, and they didn’t do hugs and kisses in Granny’s family, although it hadn’t warped Elsie like it had
him
. Sometimes she knew her Auntie Elsie wanted to cuddle her, especially when she had those nightmares that even had Sam whimpering in confusion, and Elsie’s hands would come out, only to end up patting the quilt around her instead. She never blamed her auntie, who showed her love in so many other ways, but that would not do for her own baby. Elizabeth didn’t want him to be an emotional island; she wanted him to bask in that sunshine feeling of being loved and not bat it back because his system couldn’t
cope with it, as she had, when a big love eventually came along.

Elizabeth stuck her neck out and practised being less independent. She said to John, ‘You can come if you want.’

And he did want and he picked her up at nine on the Thursday morning.

By nine-forty, Elizabeth was fidgeting desperately with the pain of holding all that water in. Thank goodness the appointment only overshot by ten minutes, because any longer and she would have flooded the place.

She didn’t expect John to come in with her, but the sonographer said, ‘Come on, Dad!’ and they both froze, then it seemed less complicated for them to play the game than explain that he was merely her escort.

It hit Elizabeth as ironic that here she was with no bloke in tow being accepted as half of a couple, and there was very-married Helen, who was having to go through this by herself for a second time, because Simon was busy being an aspiring top-management exec in his swanky Leeds office again. Helen had been trying to justify him on the phone the previous day and Elizabeth sympathized and, ‘Hmed’ in all the right places whilst thinking, Thoughtless wanker. Helen, it appeared, was even more alone than she was.

She forgot they pulled your trousers down to smear the gel on, and the sonographer did not spare any of her blushes, seeing as ‘Hubby’ would have seen it all before. Gallantly John kept his gaze averted, for which she was pretty grateful, as she suspected the top line
of her pubic hair was on display, and she could not see it properly to trim it these days. Any worries on that score were needless though as John’s eyes remained fixed on the screen, and Elizabeth could tell the exact moment he saw the baby for the first time by his reaction. His eyes rounded into dinner-plates and his face broke into the sort of amazed smile usually reserved for a first UFO spotting. The little one looked like a real baby now, an agile cherub wriggling to get himself comfortable and content within her.

‘Do you want to know the sex?’ asked the sonographer.

‘No,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I want that “it’s a boy” or “it’s a girl” moment at the end of it.’

John nodded as if he understood that completely.

‘Will you have a really good look, please?’ asked Elizabeth. ‘I got my blood tests back yesterday and they’ve given the baby’s chances of having Down’s syndrome as one in seven hundred and fifty.’

‘Is that high?’ said John, the smile closing up.

‘It’s higher than Helen and Janey got on their results.’

‘It’s still relatively low,’ said the sonographer. ‘Don’t worry though, I’m very thorough.’

‘I rang the midwife up in a bit of a panic,’ said Elizabeth. ‘She said you would be.’

Struggled through it alone again, Miss Bloody Independent, thought John with a little shake of his head, but he didn’t say anything aloud.

‘Is everything okay?’ said Elizabeth eventually.

‘I’ve had a very good look and he or she looks fine to me,’ said the sonographer, giving nothing away
on the baby’s sex, just as the new mum-to-be had asked.

Helen had always felt hers was a girl, although she would not have cared if she had been wrong. At the second scan they asked if she wanted to know for definite and she replied that she would. When they told her she was carrying a daughter, she burst into tears. Big, fat, happy tears that were issued straight from her heart.

Now she would have the empty guest room decorated in pale pinks, in readiness for the arrival of the little girl whom she could now feel fluttering inside her. Whatever Simon said.

George started crying as soon as he saw the baby appear on the monitor, and he set Janey off.

‘That’s my baby in there,’ he said, sounding a bit like a sobbing Orville the Duck. ‘It’s got my feet.’

He handed Janey a tissue. She was as moved as he was by the sight of her fast-developing baby on the screen. Like Elizabeth, they didn’t want to know what sex it was.

‘So long as it’s a healthy son or a healthy daughter, I really don’t mind which,’ George had said, before blowing his nose on his hankie. That more or less summed it up for Janey too. She wished he could feel the baby moving inside her, as she could now. He deserved more than her to feel it. He was so happy, and when she thought of how close she came to breaking his heart she could have kicked herself, with
George’s great big feet. She would have to carry the guilt with her for the rest of her life, like a yoke on her shoulders and her shoulders alone. It was her burden, the price she had to pay.

John sat holding a coffee in one hand, the pictures of the baby in the other, staring at it with unblinking intensity.

‘That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,’ he said.

‘What, my big belly covered in gel?’

‘I was a gentleman, I didn’t look.’

‘Good job, it would have put you off blancmange for life.’

‘Not me, you know how I like my grub,’ he said and smiled.

They were sitting in the hospital café, which was very nice, scrubbed and the air was full of toast smells. They looked to the entire world like a couple celebrating the forthcoming arrival of their baby, conceived in a loving relationship, which made her feel a bit odd–nice odd, though. She pushed half of the toasted teacake towards him but he waved it back.

‘You have it,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to get your picture greasy.’

‘There is a solution. You can put it down, you know,’ she replied.

‘I don’t want to. It’s just…gorgeous. I mean, this is inside a woman,’ he said with a catch in his voice. ‘You’ll have it inside you for nine months; it’ll have nothing but you to rely on. You’ll grow it like a seed, feed it,
protect it, love it…you couldn’t let it go, could you? After all that, you’d not want to, would you? Ever?’

His eyes were shiny as autumn chestnuts as she shook her head in answer to his question. No, she couldn’t let it go. She had presumed he meant her.

Terry Lennox buzzed through to Elizabeth with his usual reverence, charm and respect.

‘Oy, Fats, get yourself and me a coffee and waddle through here, please, will you? I want you a minute.’

She groaned and headed off for the kettle, waddling indeed because in the five weeks since the second scan she felt as if she had doubled in size. Not that she considered it a chore, pandering to the whims of the great executive. She secretly loved the banter that batted between them like a highly charged ping-pong match, and it was all far more fun than the insipid, colourless days working for Beelzebub and his demonic monobrow. Minutes later, she swaggered through his door, which he held open for her, and dropped into the big leather swivel chair opposite his own.

‘Fancy a night in a posh hotel–all expenses paid?’ he asked.

Elizabeth looked blank. Sometimes it was hard to know when he was joking and when he wasn’t.

‘I’ve one of these work things to go to,’ he answered her bemused face. ‘I’ve to give an after-dinner speech
about inspiration. Apparently I’m inspirational, did you know that?’

‘Fancy!’ said Elizabeth, deadpan, which made him roar with laughter.

‘Irene won’t go, she hates that sort of thing anyway, plus she’s promised to babysit whilst our lad takes his missus out for their anniversary. So it would be just you and me.’

He mistook Elizabeth’s immediate look of reticence and defensiveness for something else.

‘Oh, don’t worry, your mate Laurence won’t be there. I have it on good authority that he’ll be in Holland, although no doubt Handi-Save will be sending some representative–whilst they’re still surviving. I’ll have them soon, you mark my words.’

Terry had long since explained that the over-rated talents of Laurence could not rescue Handi-Save; the sharks were clustering around the bleeding animal, waiting for the kill. Admittedly, he was one of them–a Great White Shark, not like the benign Whale Sharks spectating and the more placid Basking ones that were sniffing around, hoping for scraps. Terry Lennox wanted to own Handi-Save, build it up and then sell it on for an enormous profit, and the stupid bloody-mindedness of Laurence Stewart-Smith, puffing himself up and still trying to convince him that he was operating from a position of power, was not going to stop him. Only a fool would take on Terry Lennox when he was running at full pelt. He was feared and hated but always admired. Or ‘inspirational’, as was his mantle.

‘I can’t get out of it,’ Terry Lennox went on. ‘It’ll be
excruciating, but I’ll have to do it. Will you come? I’ll drive you down there and back, and you’ll be paid overtime for it. Lovely hotel, great food, minibar on expenses, although I can’t see you two costing me that much in booze.’ He indicated her twenty-five-week-old bump.

She relaxed a little, berating herself for having suspected his motives back there.

‘When is it?’ she asked.

‘Couple of weeks. You do my diary, woman–when’s the Ocean View thing?’

‘Thirtieth of June, which is three weeks today,’ she said, without even blinking.

He looked at her in amazement. ‘You’re a walking Filofax, aren’t you?’

‘It’s my job,’ she said, clicking her tongue at him.

‘I’ll take that as a yes then,’ he said.

‘If I must,’ she sighed.

‘Yes, you must,’ he said, and sent her out for Hobnobs.

Helen thought that when she rang Simon from the hospital to tell him he was going to have a daughter, some miracle would have occurred and he would have softened immediately–daddies and daughters and that sort of thing. He punctured that little hopeful balloon immediately by snarling that he would have to go and she had just dragged him out of a very important video conference to tell him something she could have told him four hours later at home. Her heart had felt as heavy as a stone inside her still non-increasing chest, and she hadn’t mentioned anything about the baby in the weeks since.

She knew it was the coward’s way out, but since visiting her father’s grave, she had been secretly orchestrating the major renovation of the guest room, planning it to take place when Simon was away on business for a few days. The room was full of detritus that his parents had brought over when they moved from their large house in the affluent outskirts of York to a smaller cottage in the Cotswolds–things that Simon hadn’t really wanted to receive and most of which was immediately planned for the dump, except they just got too comfortable in their space.

The baby was moving within her now, spurring her on, and within an hour of Simon leaving for his meeting in Frankfurt, a skip had arrived on the drive with the name
Tom Broom
and a telephone number painted on the side. She had actually spoken to the man himself when she had ordered it on the phone. When she told him she was clearing a room for a nursery, he had offered her two labourers to lift out the stuff for her, at a very reasonable cash rate. She was more grateful than he could know and intended to tip them well.

All this tat whilst my lovely things languish in the garage, she thought, watching the two strong wiry lads carry a broken football net and posts outside. Three hours later, local decorators were hard at work, painting and doing easily as good a job as the ridiculously priced Chanson’s. She had picked a delicate Shell Pink for the walls and Old Cream for the paintwork and the floorboards. Then, when they had left two days later, a beautiful deep rose, longpile rug was put in place. The two men who delivered it were sweet and indulged
her by moving the crib and the changing station from the cold little north-facing room at the end of the hallway into the new sunny space. The hand-made curtains were hung that afternoon and cast a soft, warm light into the room. Her baby was twenty-five weeks old now inside her and she was getting ready to say hello to her mum. In the next couple of weeks, she will be able to breathe for herself, Helen thought with a joyous thrill as she busied herself around the new nursery. She ferried in little trinkets from her secret stash in the garage–teddy bears and ornaments, and then she put a photo of her father in a silver frame upon the baby’s chest of drawers. He’ll watch over my daughter, she thought, like he watches over me.

The few days in which Simon were away were a tranquil oasis in her life, that she knew would be at an end as soon as he saw what she had done in his absence. On hearing his car crunch into the drive, she ran out to greet him, hugging him hello with gusto, hoping to soften him up for the scene she knew was around the corner. As she suspected, as soon as he entered the house he could smell the paint and, with the olfactory senses of an expert wine taster, he followed his nose down the hallway to the source of it. Helen waited with trepidation–it was all she could do. He glared at her silently, threw open the door of the guest room and blinked disbelievingly at the sea of froth and pink facing him.

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ said Helen.

‘How could you?’ he asked, in almost breathless shock. Not only was the colour an affront to his vision,
but it was full of hideous tat–stupid teddy bears and photos of dead people.

‘How could I?’ said Helen, with her courage mounting. ‘Because my baby is not sleeping in that horrible, cold, designer white room, that’s how I could!’

The baby fidgeted inside her, as if she knew she was being talked about.

‘Helen, I really don’t need this. I’ve been travelling for hours,’ he said, shaking his head at her with tired impatience though he still had plenty of energy to jab his finger at her and throw commands about. ‘Ring those decorators in the morning and tell them to paint it back to how it was. And get the people who moved the furniture out of the spare room to move it back again. Then get all that pink rubbish out of my house!’

My
house? thought Helen, with a prickle of annoyance.
My
house?

‘I most certainly will not,’ said Helen, which shocked him like a surprise slap because he had expected her to back down as always and say meekly, ‘
Yes, Simon, of course, Simon, three bags full, Simon…
’ but this time there were two of them facing him.

She took in a long, deep breath as if she was about to parachute off a plane and continued, ‘Every time I think of that room, all I can see is you sulking in there. I hate that room and our daughter is
not
going in there.’

‘It will be changed back, Helen, trust me.’

He made a grab for Helen’s arm and manoeuvred her out of the baby-pink room. She was not sure where the strength came for her to do it, but she shook him
off and with a force that surprised her more than him as he crashed back against the wall.

‘Don’t you EVER hit me again,’ she said, with a voice as hard as Helen’s voicebox was able to achieve.

‘Hit you?’ he countered, but a little thrown still by the change in her. ‘When have I ever hit you?’

‘All those sly nips and shoves and pushes and you shouting and swearing at me won’t happen again, do you hear me, Simon? They are abuse, too–
abuse, do you hear
–and I won’t take them from you any more, do you understand? No more!’ she said with quiet conviction. ‘No more.’

He looked back at her with as much disgust as if it was Elizabeth in the room with him, not mild, gentle Helen who wouldn’t say boo to a goose, but Elizabeth who would, and tell it to stuff itself as well. The shock of his domestic worm turning knocked him off course and he did not come back at her with his usual sarcastic and hurtful retorts. He merely waved his hand dismissively to indicate that he had had enough of this nonsense for now and he disappeared outside, striding off in the direction of his car, snarling that he was so pleased she was glad to see him back and how happy he was to be home again.

Helen leaned against the wall and gathered her thoughts and her breath.
I did it! I stood up to the bully!
It was the moment she should have had all those years ago with Carmen Varley. She was proud of herself; she felt her father would be proud of her too. It was then she realized that she had not been sick for over twenty-four hours.