Undertaking Love (18 page)

Oh God.
What was she going to say? What was Dan going to think? He had every right to demand she at least talk to him. Should she lie? Maybe he’d secretly
want
her to say the baby was nothing to do with him so that he could wriggle off the hook. But then, any fool can add up, and though she didn’t know him well, he didn’t seem like a village idiot. Christ, it was hot. She stripped her flimsy cardigan off from over her sundress and closed her eyes as she leaned back and fanned herself with her hand.

It was only when she realized that her inefficient cooling system had dramatically improved that she opened her eyes to find Dan wafting her with a rolled up copy of the Sun.

‘Lookin’ swell, darlin’.’

He sat down next to her and looked at her little bump, his blue eyes far more serious than his words.

Emily scooted herself upright and automatically draped a protective arm over her middle. At least he didn’t seem angry – that had to be a start, right?

‘Why did you call, Dan?’

He shrugged and looked away for a few silent seconds, his eyes on an after school kick-about in the distance.

‘I don’t know. I heard about the baby today.’

Emily nodded with a heavy sigh. It had been inevitable that she’d find herself here, and she’d agonised over how she should play it. Now the moment had arrived she knew that the only option open to her was the absolute truth, but actually, saying the words was really, really hard.

‘Is it mine?’

Wow. He wasn’t pulling any punches. Straight in with the million-dollar question; the question that kept her awake into the small hours and haunted her restless dreams when she finally fell asleep. She’d answered it a hundred different ways in her head and none of them had felt right.

‘I don’t know. Probably.’ She knotted her shaky fingers in her lap. ‘Yes, I think it is.’

‘Fuck.’ Dan watched the footballers again and rubbed his stubble with one hand.

‘Look, Dan …’ she wasn’t sure how to say that there was no need for him to feel obliged to play any part in his child’s life.

‘Does your husband know?’

‘No. I’ve tried to tell him, but the words won’t come out.’

‘I see.’ Dan nodded, and turned to search her eyes with his own. ‘So … what am I supposed to say now, Emily?’

This was her one chance to make the best of this for all of them. She couldn’t blow it. ‘I
think
you’re supposed to say that it’s best Tom never knows.’

‘Right … right.’ He stared at the ground. ‘And what if I don’t say that?’

Terror held Emily’s breath captive in her chest.

‘What if I said that I need to know for certain if it’s my baby?’

‘I’d say that you were within your rights. It’ll probably destroy my marriage and make me a single mother, but you’re within your rights.’

‘And what about the
baby’s
rights, Emily? To know its real dad?’

And there it was. The other question that worried her daily.

‘I don’t have all the answers, Dan.’ Her shoulders slumped in desolation. ‘Do you want to be a father right now?’

He put his head in his hands and groaned.

‘Because Tom does. Desperately. And I know he’ll be brilliant at it.’

‘So you’re saying, what? I should just walk away?’

‘Can you?’

‘I don’t know, Emily. I honestly don’t know.’

‘Of course you don’t.’ She bit her lip. ‘Sorry.’

They stared in silence at the footballers playing 5-a-side across the park.

‘I don’t want to smash your marriage up.’

‘No. Thank you. Me neither.’

‘I need to get out of here.’ He pushed his hands through his hair and stood up. ‘I’ll call you sometime. Maybe we can talk again, when I’ve got my head around it.’

Emily nodded, and the sincerity in his blue eyes reminded her why he’d been the one she’d turned to when the chips were down. His gaze dropped to her bump.

‘It suits you.’ A tiny, sad smile glanced across his mouth. ‘This pregnancy thing. It really suits you.’

Emily watched him walk away. His usual swagger was nowhere to be seen. He looked like a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

‘Yoohoo! Marla, honey!’

The distinctive squawk assaulted Marla’s ears across the crowded arrivals hall. She held her arms out and her mother tumbled into them, all suntanned wrinkles and expensive jewellery that jangled every time she moved.

‘Let me look at you.’ She gripped Marla hard by the upper arms and leaned backwards.

‘Still too pale.’ She clucked her tongue then reached up and pinched a cheek. ‘Are you using that juicer I sent you?’

Marla laughed. It had taken all of forty seconds for her mother to find fault. She just couldn’t help herself. Moments later she noticed the short man a few steps behind her mother, locked in a battle with two trolleys piled high with coordinated luggage.

‘Honey, this is my fiancé, Brynn. Brynn, meet Marla. Isn’t she every bit as gorgeous as I said she was?’

Brynn shuffled forward, a vision in crumpled cream linen and an ivory fedora. Marla shook his outstretched hand and tried not to wonder where a taxidermist’s hand might spend the majority of its time.

And fiancé? Was it her mother’s life mission to reach double figures?

‘Good to meet you, Marla. Cecilia has told me so much about you.’

He had a thin voice, and when he fixed her with his gimlet eyes, Marla got the alarming feeling that she was being sized up for a glass display case.

She forced a smile, but her heart had well and truly sunk at the thought of her serene cottage being invaded by her mother, the lover and their luggage. She eyed the trolleys to double check Brynn hadn’t smuggled any dead foxes or such like through customs, before leading them outside to her car.

Neither of her passengers offered to help as Marla loaded the cases into the boot. Nor when she took them all out again because they wouldn’t fit. She heaved the largest case onto the backseat next to Brynn, and then shoe-horned the rest into the boot space.

‘Have you been to the UK before, Brynn?’

‘Only on a one-night stopover a couple of years back en route to the Austrian taxidermy championships.’

‘Oh.’ Great. He was a conversation killer as well as an animal stuffer.

Marla steered the car through the busy airport traffic onto the motorway and attempted to get the conversation with Brynn back on track.

‘So. How long are you visiting for?’

‘Oh, not long for me, I’m afraid. I’m a key note speaker at the London taxidermy exhibition, and then it’s on to Russia.’

‘Another lecture?’

‘No. I’m collecting a dead zebra from Moscow Zoo.’

Marla met his gaze in the rear view mirror and couldn’t decide whether or not he was joking. Terrific. Trust her mother to bring Hannibal bloody Lecter to visit.

‘Please Jonny! You owe me.’

Jonny pouted as Marla clutched his shirtsleeve in desperation.

‘How many more times are you going to use that line before we’re done?’

‘Oh, a lot more yet. You nearly closed us down. It’s a big debt.’ She gestured with her hands to demonstrate the size. ‘Huge. So you’ll come, then?’

‘Go on then.’ Jonny grumbled. ‘But
only
because I don’t happen to have made other plans.’

He hummed the Star Trek theme as he spun on his block-heeled cowboy boots and sashayed off down the aisle. They’d been preparing the chapel for a big Trekkie wedding all day, and short of actually being beamed up, they were more or less ready.

Marla grinned at his retreating back. He was a true friend, and would have come on Saturday evening just because she needed him there, but she knew he was dying to meet her mother. Actually Brynn, to be precise. He’d howled with laughter when she’d relayed the conversation from the car, but all the same he couldn’t possibly have accepted her invitation outright. That would have been far too straightforward for Jonny.

Marla counted up the dinner guests in her head. Jonny, Emily and Tom, Rupert and herself, and of course her mother and Brynn. Seven ought to be enough to dilute the effect her mother had. Cecilia had insisted on a swish dinner at Franco’s, but the last thing Marla felt like was a cosy double date with her mother, Brynn and Rupert. The two men would have absolutely no common ground, and Lord knows Brynn could be relied on to stop a conversation in its tracks with a random comment about a female hippopotamus’s enormous lady bits. He appeared to specialise in huge animals, and after two days under the same roof, Marla knew far more than she ever wanted to about the anatomical complexities of lions and tigers and bears.

What was her mother thinking?
There was every possibility that she would end her days stuffed, mounted and on display in Brynn’s travelling freak show, probably wedged somewhere between a giant panda and a Palomino.

Maybe he was rich.
But then that wasn’t something that usually turned her mother’s head; Cecelia had enough independent wealth to not need to lean on anyone else.

Oh, God.
A hideous thought crept into her mind.

Maybe he was awesome in the sack
.

Marla fought to keep her lunch down at the idea and tried to banish it from her head. There had to be something, though, and she was going to make it her business to find out what it was.

Gabe ran the iron over his black shirt. His mobile phone was cradled in the crook of his shoulder as he tried to call a cab at the same time. He wished he’d never mentioned the fact that they’d now been open for three months. Melanie had pounced on it like a vulture and insisted that the whole team should go out and celebrate. He’d humoured her, and left her in charge of organising something, and now here he was, heading into town to meet Melanie, Dan and the pallbearers for dinner at some fancy restaurant. She’d made the arrangements and invited everyone before he’d even got wind of it. He’d tried hard to hide his surprise; all he’d had in mind was a swift half down the pub, not a full-scale dinner. On the flip side, he was glad that Melanie enjoyed work enough to go to such trouble.

He put the iron down as the switchboard operator muttered an unintelligible greeting against his ear.

‘Hi. Taxi to Franco’s please. Soon as possible.’

Franco’s was one of those
chichi
restaurants with glitzy chandeliers and mushroom suede banquettes, and on a different day in different company Marla would probably have loved it. But sitting around the table that evening, she felt uneasy. Their party had swollen to nine with the late addition of Dora and Ivan; Emily and Tom had threatened to drop out and Marla had become desperate. In the end they made it anyway, but hey ho: the more the merrier.

Brynn sidled up to Marla as they walked through the double glass front doors at Franco’s.

‘What a fabulous smell,’ he murmured, his mouth far too close to her ear for comfort.

God, please let him mean the food and not me,
Marla prayed silently.

And please don’t let him order a nice Chianti, either, or I’ll insist he sleeps somewhere other than my house tonight.

‘Jonny!’

Marla waved as she spotted her saviour lounging in the bar area, looking particularly splendid in a leopard-skin shirt, a lurid blue cocktail in his hand.

‘Well don’t
you
look lovely, darling.’

He smiled and kissed her cheek with a nod of approval towards her close-fitting aubergine silk dress, which was held up on one shoulder with a glittering brooch. She’d opted for all-out vintage glamour tonight in an effort to prove to her mother how sorted her life was. She was sophisticated, and successful, and she had an attractive,
normal
man on her arm. Although, to be honest, Rupert’s behaviour since the accident with Bluey had been anything but normal. He’d been on edge and overly attentive, but maybe she was reading too much into it, because she wasn’t feeling good about their relationship. She just wanted things to settle back to the no-strings-attached relationship they’d had at the beginning. Back then he’d been fun and sociable, and she’d enjoyed his company.

Why did it always have to become more complicated?

He seemed happy enough tonight, thankfully, and she had to confess she was glad to have him there. He was by both nature and breeding a ‘social animal’. Between him and Jonny, conversation was guaranteed to flow easily.

Marla felt conspicuously on show as they took their seats around a circular table in the centre of the room, like they were the after-dinner cabaret act. Given that their party included a sex therapist, a taxidermist and a gay wedding celebrant, the other patrons of the restaurant would be well within their rights to expect something of a performance.
Please don’t let them get one
, Marla prayed as she sat down.

Her daily quota of prayers had risen significantly since her mother’s arrival – impressive for someone who didn’t really have faith. It just made her feel better to ask someone, anyone, to intervene and come to her rescue if the going got too tough. Her mother had only been around a few days, and already Marla’s arms ached from the effort of juggling balls, trying to maintain the illusion that she was sorted. It wasn’t that Cecilia was judgmental. It was more of a personal battle to prove that she wasn’t going to reverse up the same emotional cul-de-sacs as her mother.

She shot a glance across at Brynn, the latest case in point.

He’d found himself perched between Dora and Rupert. She wasn’t sure who she felt most sorry for. Possibly Brynn, which spoke volumes.

The group had already started to yak between themselves and not so much as glanced at their menus. At this rate, it would be a long, long evening.

‘Shall we order?’ Marla attempted to steer the group in the right direction.

Cecilia took this as her cue and cleared her throat with a dramatic cough as she stood up.

‘Could I just take a moment to thank you all for being here this evening?’

Marla smiled. Her mother was in her element when she was the centre of attention.

‘I feel truly blessed to be here with my daughter’s special people. You’ve all made me feel very welcome,’ she gushed, and fluttered her ringed fingers at her throat. ‘At this rate I won’t want to go home!’