Life can be complicated. And complications are the last thing you need when a baby’s on the way.

But when Rebecca and James announce their joyful news, little do they know the road to baby bliss is far from smooth. Not only has James lost his job, but he can’t find another and can’t tell his wife why. Meanwhile Rebecca’s own family has picked the worst possible time to start to fall apart, and are relying on her to try and fix it.

As secrets begin to permeate their lives Rebecca and James end up wondering are they really ready to be parents after all…

But it’s too late now – and the expectant couple are about to learn that life doesn’t always turn out quite as you expect it.

Also available by Neal Doran

Dan Taylor is Giving Up on Women

Not What They Were Expecting

Neal Doran

Copyright

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2014

Copyright © Neal Doran 2014

Neal Doran asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © June 2014 ISBN: 9781472095275

Version date: 2018-07-23

NEAL DORAN

grew up in London, and the only real childhood hardship he knew was not being able to get a bedroom door sign with his name spelled properly on it. He knew he’d rather be a writer than an astronaut from the time he realised he didn’t want a job that required too much travel. He has been an editor for spoof news website Newsbiscuit, written some jokes for BBC radio, and spent a short time as Britain’s most unlikely private investigator.

Neal now lives on the southwest coast of Ireland with his wife and two sons, who still prefer their mum’s stories to his.

He can be found on Twitter, usually when he’s not supposed to be, as @nealdoran.

Thanks to Mum and Dad, David and the much-missed Carol for not being anything like the parents and in-laws in this book. Thanks also to Mark & Liz for sharing their experience of ‘sharing’; Richard for knowing where I need to raise my game, and to Darren for getting locked out once; wise authors Mark Dawson and Matt Dunn; Miranda Dickinson for a year of marvellous mentoring; Kirsty Greenwood for putting an early version of the start of this story in the Novelicious Undiscovered final; Kathryn, Lucy and Victoria and all the team at HQ Digital for making this happen; and to Gavin Ames, because I forgot about him last time.

Finally, thanks to Jo for making life better than I ever could have expected, and Thomas and Noah for patiently waiting while dad wrote another book about kissing and stuff, rather than dinosaurs or zombies.

For Mum & Dad

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Book List

Title Page

Copyright

Author Bio

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Extract

Endpages

About the Publisher

Part 1

Chapter 1

‘Well at least the date means the anniversary will be easy to remember,’ James said.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘25th December 2011. The day the romance died. Still, five years, four months and seventeen days was a good run.’

‘Oh give over,’ Rebecca replied, ‘I was bursting. Now look away, I’m finishing.’

‘Although even without the romance there’s something about seeing you with your knickers around your ankles…’

‘Shut up and turn around, we’re running late as it is.’

‘I don’t need much time,’ he said, his mouth full of toothpaste.

Rebecca watched as he continued brushing his teeth, and making a big deal of looking away – staring at the bathroom doorframe, whistling, and occasionally feinting as if he was about to turn around. She grabbed the toilet roll from the top of the cistern, and noticed those cobwebs above the door must have been there for months.

‘And it’s five years, four months and fifteen days actually,’ she said over the cranky flush. ‘And I saw you wee in the first six months when we went for a ramble in the countryside after a pub lunch.’

‘I remember that walk,’ he said. ‘Did we—?’

‘No. There was a creepy looking guy with his dogs sniffing around everywhere, and I didn’t want to get grass stains on my skirt. And you freaked me out talking about how the dogs were probably picking up the scent of a dead body.’

‘Ah yeah. You never were much of a country gal.’

She squeezed between him and the shower cubicle and slid her hands into the sink, where he was standing dabbing dots of her Bright Eyes hydrating crème on the circles under his eyes.

‘And who was it that spent half the walk and the entire drive home complaining about getting dog shit on his shoes, Mr One-with-Nature?’

‘Cor, I remember. I loved those trainers. They were virtually brand new then. I should dig them out – I’ve still got them somewhere.’

‘No you don’t. I threw them out.’

‘When?’

‘Three years ago. They were making the wardrobe smell.’

‘Bloody dog shit.’

‘It wasn’t the dog shit.’

‘Are you sure it’s fifteen days?’

‘Anniversary’s the tenth.’

He stared at the ceiling through the mirror while he muttered days quietly to himself, and his thumb counted off his fingers.

‘Sixth, seventh, eighth… Aha! No, you’re wrong it’s… Actually, no you’re right, you’re right. Sixteen days to go.’

‘Just as well you haven’t got a job that needs you to be good with numbers.’

‘Ha ha,’ he said, his arms around her waist as he stretched to reach a towel. ‘It’s this sort of squabbling we’ll be learning to live with now the romance has gone, eh?’

‘I. Was. Desperate,’ she said, poking a finger into his chest, ‘and we haven’t got any time…’

‘I understand, I understand. It’s your condition. I just thought we had maybe a few more months of carefree unencumbered bliss…’

When had her life become so much about taking a piss? Rebecca wondered to herself. A couple of weeks or so before Christmas, she’d been in their cramped, desperately-in-need-of-a-renovation bathroom, trying not to pee on her fingers while she manoeuvred a plasticky stick in place. She wanted to make sure she got it while ‘in midstream’ as recommended by the box. She could hear James outside, pacing across the rug on the landing, over the creaky floorboards to the window in the spare room – soon not to be spare room – and then back again. He’d wanted to come in with her then, but she hadn’t let him. The plan had been she’d take the test, get herself back looking composed and presentable, and he’d come in and they’d wait for the results to become clear together.

Before she’d gone in he had studied the box carefully, reading all the instructions about what to do and when, and the small print about accuracy. She could hear him going over the possible outcomes as he paced, making sure he had it clear in his head what was a positive result. He’d wanted to get the digital version with a display spelling out the answer, but then if he’d had to do the test he’d have wanted one with sound effects, and maybe some kind of target to aim for that would tell you the accuracy of your shooting. She guessed they were getting a measure of that now anyway.

The test was lying on the basin while she washed her hands. Results in two minutes they reckoned. James had said something about the possibility there’d be a faint line, and you might have to wait longer. Maybe the digital version would have been a good idea after all. She’d told herself she wasn’t pregnant, she didn’t feel it. Or whatever it was she had been feeling that wasn’t quite right was just the nerves of worrying about whether she might be. Not that she didn’t want to be – she really did – but they hadn’t really started trying yet. The idea was still largely hypothetical. She wasn’t even sure there’d definitely been a time when it could have happened, with her cycle and everything, and it can take months anyway, even when using all those hormone level tests, and they were a bit away from that stage just yet.

No, she wasn’t pregnant she told herself. She just wasn’t sure whether she was going to be relieved or disappointed when she got the confirmation.

She’d dried her hands and was about to open the door when she took a quick glance down at the predictor. She was pretty sure it hadn’t been two minutes, but there were blue lines, bold as anything, one going up, one going straight across.

James was still pacing and she could hear his mantra: ‘Minus means you’ve not done it enough, but if it’s a plus then you’re up the duff.’

She stood there for a few seconds with her hand on the door, before she flicked the latch to see her husband.

‘So you’re still OK about telling your parents, then?’ he shouted over the noise of her hairdryer.

‘I don’t know, maybe we should keep it to ourselves a bit longer. Early days, and we don’t know…’

‘We’re going to be fine. But we can leave it. It’s your mum’s birthday in a month and we’ll have had a scan then – we can show them pictures. Your dad loves a slide presentation.’

‘God, I can’t leave it that long,’ she said, slumping down onto the bed. ‘And I’m no good at lying to Mum. She’ll spot something’s up and then I’ll crack and tell her, and then as soon as we’re gone she’ll crack and tell Dad.’

‘It’s going to be bloody obvious the second you step through the door and don’t head straight for the booze.’

She gave him a blast of hot air from her dryer as he bent over his neatly arranged bedside cabinet drawer, to collect his carefully laid out watch, wallet and phone.

‘Steady…’ he slightly yelped as he jumped upright.

‘A sober Christmas with my parents.’ Rebecca slumped even further and looked ruefully at the chest of drawers.

‘Sober for you maybe. I’m the man bringing them their first grandchild. I’ll be on the good stuff.’

‘I’m going to be spending the next nine months driving you home from everywhere pissed aren’t I?’

‘Yes, you are. I’m thinking I might start keeping some cans in the glove box.’

He gave her shoulders a squeeze as he walked past her at the end of the bed. ‘It’s going to be great, isn’t it? Telling someone?’

She beamed up at him. ‘It’ll be fantastic.’

‘You don’t feel too nervous or anything?’

‘No. No, it’s going to be good. Mum is going to dehydrate within minutes.’

‘We’ll bring tissues and bottled water. Your dad’s going to explode. He’ll be trumpeting around the house, singing his songs, telling me it’s about time…’

Rebecca shuddered slightly. ‘No more “Haven’t you got my daughter pregnant yet then?” jokes, thank God. Like he spent a lot of time thinking about our sex life.’

‘He’s just enthusiastic about things. He’ll be all about pregnancy now, asking about your discharges.’

‘James! Yuk…’ she said, squirming on the edge of the bed. ‘And he won’t anyway. He’s a results man, he’ll just want to know when it’s due, and start nagging me if it’s late.’

‘And speaking of being late…I’ll be down in the car. I’ve loaded up the presents.’

James headed downstairs, taking them two at a time, to check all the doors and windows were locked, before heading for the car. It was the best Christmas he’d ever had, all the more exciting for thinking how much cooler still the next one was going to be. A proper family Christmas, and he’d even get his parents to celebrate it next year.

The morning had been spent in bed opening presents with Rebecca, and talking about the future. He’d got up early and made breakfast in bed. Well, tea and toast, but with a beautifully wrapped and bowed packet of ginger nuts for Becs’ present. No morning sickness yet, but he’d thought they might be needed before long. As soon as they’d discovered they were pregnant they’d agreed they weren’t going to get each other expensive presents this year – they were going to need to be sensible and save up. She’d got him a funny old 1950s pregnancy and parenting manual from the charity shop. He’d got her the biscuits, and a two hundred quid handbag she’d had her eye on. He’d got his shopping sorted out the first weekend of December as usual, so the money was already spent.

There’d been a heavy frost, and so even at this time of day the car’s windscreen needed clearing before they left. It was a sunny day but with the direction the house faced and how low the sun appeared at this time of year, it would barely get the chance to warm up the glass all day. He went to the kitchen to heat up a bit of water in the kettle, and while it boiled he looked around the cramped space with its low ceiling. After three years in residence, he’d finally got the hang of stooping naturally whenever he came in, to reduce the risk of braining himself on a light fixture. He felt a small swell of excitement as he thought about plans for changing the layout – shift the wine rack off the floor onto some kind of wall mount, and the high chair could go in the corner next to the breakfast table. They could all sit around on Sunday mornings reading the papers and eating rusks. The baby’s first words could be something agricultural picked up from The Archers omnibus.

There’d been nothing in his life he’d ever looked forward to more. He wasn’t sure when the change from wanting kids at some point to actually wanting kids had happened, but the last time he and Rebecca had had their hypothetical children conversation, and she’d asked ‘When?’ his answer just popped out, ‘Now?’ The thing is he wasn’t sure he even liked them that much. He didn’t dislike them, and he wasn’t one of those people who tuts and sighs at the sight of them in a pub garden or Pizza Express, but he just didn’t know how to get on with a two-year-old. He was OK if they took charge though, and they often did. Being a big guy, and pretty smiley, at friends’ parties or work family days there’d usually be one cheeky toddler that’d see him as some kind of walking climbing frame and before he knew it there’d be a mob of them piling onto him, squealing and shrieking while he pretended to be a giant. He usually quite liked it, and wasn’t unaware of how it made him look to Rebecca – the cool, modern dad.

It’d been during a weekend in Edinburgh visiting old friends of his, who’d already managed three kids in about the past five years, when it’d happened. The first day they’d been there it had been a beautiful winter’s afternoon and they’d all bundled up and gone for a walk in the park. He’d had a five-year-old on his shoulders, and was carrying an upside-down three-year-old, while the baby nearly tripped him over and brought them all crashing down by tugging on his leg. Everyone was in hysterics. Then after the kids had gone down for the night they and Si and Jools had tucked into a mountain of fish and chips and wine and had a great laugh talking about how life had changed since he and Julia had been trainees together. Rebecca had just come off all her contraception, and they were on johnnies until they made a final decision to go for it. That night, they’d figured why wait any longer? By 6am they were hungover, had a Coco Pops-fuelled five-year-old bouncing on their bed, and had been woken up virtually every hour on the hour by a screaming baby who apparently was ‘a bit teethy’. They couldn’t even come out of their room to take a desperately needed slash because they could hear Si and Jools having a storming row, outside the door. It genuinely sounded like Jools was on the verge of leaving for a while. They decided they might leave it for a bit longer before they started trying after all.

But…

The kettle clicked off, and he picked up the jug and added a burst of cold water before taking it out to the car. Stretching over the windscreen he poured out a thin stream of hot water, seeing how little he could use to clear the whole screen in one pass, without any bits to go back over for maximum points. He finished his first go and saw there were a few bits he needed to give another splash, but not a bad effort. He smiled to himself as he thought about the pregnancy again. He knew it wasn’t a competition, or test of manliness or anything but still: he shoots, he scores! He checked the time on his watch; they were supposed to have been on the road ten minutes ago.

He wondered if he’d get away with a friendly ‘hurry along’ beep of the car horn.

Chapter 2

‘Winfield, you swine, my daughter make you late again did she?’

‘Howard! Great to see you. Merry Christmas!’ James gave Rebecca’s father a vigorous handshake while she gave her a mum a hug, before they swapped over. ‘Merry Christmas, Penny, your dress looks beautiful.’

‘Thank you, dear,’ she said adjusting the collar of her outfit. ‘Trip all right? I wanted Howard to call and make sure you were getting on, but I wasn’t sure who’d be driving, and he wouldn’t do it anyway. Too busy playing games on that blinkin’ phone of his…’

‘I was checking to see if your wayward son was online, dear. Thought he’d be missing the smell of your sacrificial sprouts,’ Howard said with a wink, before leaning in to James’s shoulder adding, ‘although those Angry Birds aren’t going to propel themselves into those green piggies are they, eh?’

James grinned back and gave Howard a pat on the back. Her dad being a slight, wiry man, watching him and James together often reminded Rebecca of watching an old lady’s Jack Russell terrier strutting about at the park bossing around a big, cheerful family Labrador.

‘Lunch smells gorgeous already, Penny. Have you done your potatoes?’ asked James.

‘I did an extra tray, just for you.’

‘What a woman!’

Over the years, it had been while watching him comfortably chat away with her parents that Rebecca had got an idea of what James must be like at work. Comfortable in a formal setting, but able to be relaxed and friendly. Respectful without being fawning. He’d been able to do it since they first met, and throughout the five years since, he’d been able to effortlessly play by their rules. It was a trick she’d never mastered, either at work or with his parents – although they were a bit odd so it wasn’t entirely her fault. She was just amazed at James’s ability to be someone else in these situations. OK maybe not someone else, but not exactly the same as the man who would burp ‘I love you’ after his first bottle of beer and bag of Doritos on a Saturday-night-in in front of the telly.

And it had only taken about eight seconds for her dad to get in his first dig about her timekeeping, she noticed. But these things weren’t going to bother her any more, or at least not today. Today she was going to be a woman serenely with child, and not a stroppy teenager who they just didn’t understand.

‘Toot-toot!’ James murmured in her ear with a supportive hand on her bum as they filed into the house behind her folks.

‘So have you heard from Matty?’ Rebecca asked her mum as they split away from ‘the boys’ and Howard took James to see a new programme for his computer.

‘We got a call last night, it was already Christmas where he is, and he was just going into work at the hotel, and some of the people from his hostel were getting together to have Christmas dinner on the beach.’

‘Sounds like he’s having a fab time.’

‘It’s a funny way to spend Christmas, his first time away from home. I hope he’s OK. I just worry he’s not going to eat enough before drinking. Or they won’t cook something properly on the barbecue and he’ll get food poisoning.’

‘You just worry, Mum.’

‘I just remember that time he got carried away and had that barbecue chicken that hadn’t finished cooking and was terribly ill for more than a week. He doesn’t think about these things, and he won’t have anyone to look after him.’

‘That happened over a decade ago, he was seven!’

‘Still, having him ill on the other side of the world would be the last thing we’d need right now.’

‘Right now…?’

‘And the thing is, it’s got everything on there you’d ever need to know. Do you know how much data it stores?’

‘Gigabytes, I’d bet.’

‘Terabytes! Terabytes of the stuff.’

As Dad and James came back into the room Rebecca felt a fluttering in her stomach. The champagne or Buck’s Fizz question would be next, it was coming up to the time to tell them.

‘Right then!’ barked Howard, with a clap of his hands. He opened his mouth to say something, but paused, looking at Penny like he’d forgotten his next line.

‘I was just telling Rebecca that Matthew had called last night and it was already Christmas,’ said Penny.

‘Ha! Yep, yep, yep, he’ll be pissed and chasing around some poor Aussie girl with the mistletoe by now, the little bugger.’

The expectant silence returned to the room. Dad always does the big host thing, thought Rebecca, this was his favourite moment. So why was he standing there with his hands in his pockets?

‘I’ll just go and get the stuff in from the car,’ announced James.

‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Rebecca.

‘No, no, you’re fine. Not in your cond…’ Rebecca’s eyebrows flared at James across the breakfast counter. ‘I mean OK, you can grab the pressies.’

The couple scurried out to the car.

‘What the hell is going on in there?’ asked Rebecca as James opened the boot.

‘I know, I know, sorry, it almost slipped out.’

‘Not that. With Dad.’

‘He was just showing me one of his heritage research programmes. He likes me to see this stuff, he’s just being nice in his way.’

‘Are you doing this deliberately?’

‘What?’

‘The atmosphere! I had to get out of there.’

‘That was about ninety seconds. Are you trying to set some sort of new record?’

‘Something’s going on. Did Dad say anything to you?

‘Just the usual. He’s really getting into the family tree stuff this time, said it’s good to get away from it all.’

‘What did he mean by that? Get away from what?’

‘Come on. You’re just edgy about telling them, let’s go and spread some joy, eh? That M&S bag for life’s got the stuff for your folks.’

James bounded up the stairs with the overnight bag, while Rebecca slowly headed back towards the kitchen. As she walked in she saw her mother’s eyebrows flare at her dad, and her dad hop slightly.

‘Presents, oh goodie!’ said Howard clapping and rubbing his hands together as James reappeared by Rebecca’s side. ‘Right then it’s officially Christmas. Drinkies time. Champagne or Buck’s Fizz?’

‘Straight up bubbly for me please,’ said James grinning, while looking Rebecca in the eyes.

‘Just an orange juice for me please,’ she said, bouncing on her heels gently, her tingly fingers fluttering by her side.

Meaningful looks bounced around the room. Rebecca’s parents looked at her, tentatively checking they weren’t jumping to conclusions. Penny looked at Howard, fiddling with the wire on the champagne bottle. James stepped across to link fingers with Rebecca, and grinned at his in-laws with a cheeky look on his face. Penny was already in tears.

‘Something you two want to tell us?’ asked Howard. ‘You’re not on those anti-bi –’.

‘I’m pregnant!’ Rebecca said.

There was a delighted shriek and gruff cheers as Penny and Howard swooped on their daughter. James had never seen the two of them move so fast as congratulations and garbled questions built up on top of each other, Rebecca answering half of one before moving on to the next, speaking garbled happy nonsense. Then the attention turned to him, with hugs and back slaps and laughter.

‘A toast! Drinks for those drinking,’ declared Howard. ‘And juice and a seat for the new mummy.’

‘To be,’ added Rebecca, taking the seat being offered at the kitchen breakfast bar, while her parents fussed with glasses.

‘To the new master Winfield,’ pronounced Howard. ‘Or miss. Mzz, I suppose. Do you know what he’s going to be yet?’

‘They won’t know that kind of thing yet, dear,’ said Penny. ‘Always getting ahead of himself. No patience, your father.’

‘It’s still very early days yet. Only seven weeks so, y’know, there’s still a chance it won’t… We probably shouldn’t really be too…’ said Rebecca, unable to complete the warning.

‘We’ll be fine,’ said James, with an arm around her, while Penny surreptitiously tapped the counter top. ‘I’m practising my breathing already.’

‘It’s going to be fantastic. And they’ll get an idea of what they put us through, isn’t that right, grandma?’ said Howard.

‘Oh, don’t,’ said Penny with a giggle. ‘Grandma! I’m going to have to book in with the hairdressers for a heap of maintenance work now if I’m going to be a grandma.’

‘Blue rinse?’ asked Rebecca.

‘I’ll have to stock up boiled sweets,’ said Penny.

‘And you’ll have to get loads of–’ James was about to make a joke about knitting doilies for ornaments before he remembered the Collinses’ lounge was already full of the things ‘– loads of wool, for booties.’

‘Booties! You remember how many of those your mother made before Becky was born?’ Howard said to Penny, before turning to the kids. ‘We had a house nearly as tiny as yours, just full of them. And you never wore the blighted things! Pulled ’em off, had the occasional suck on one.’

‘I’ve still got them somewhere if you’d like them,’ offered Penny.

‘They’re not going to want those old moth-eaten things,’ Howard said.

‘It’d be lovely to see them if you can dig them out,’ said Rebecca.

‘Retro’s very in, from what I’ve read in the parenting magazines,’ added James.

‘Parenting magazines? None of that stuff in our day, was there, Pen? Just that book by that fellow with the sci-fi name.’

‘Dr Spock,’ said Penny.

‘Doctor, mister, one of those. Like something out of the Star Trek. What was it I used to say to you all the time?’

‘We’re having a baby not a Martian.’

‘Martians make more sense than teenagers though – you’ve got all that to look forward to!’

The two couples stood there, smiling at each other, both having drifted closer during their chat. Penny and Howard side by side with an arm wrapped around each other, James behind Rebecca on her stool, an arm on her shoulder. Sharing memories and a future.

‘We’re so excited. Lovely to have some good news,’ said Howard.

‘That’s a hundred times you’ve said something like that today. Is something going on?’ Rebecca snapped.

‘Something like what? We’re just happy for you, Becky,’ Howard said.

‘We’re fine darling, honestly.’

‘Well now I’m really worried,’ said Rebecca.

Howard and Penny started a semaphore conversation using the top half of their faces, her fluttering eyelids pleading for a reprieve, his eyebrows resigned to getting it over with. Watching them James got an inkling that Rebecca might have had a point that something funny was going on.

‘Now, who’s for a top up?’ Howard asked, clearing his throat. With a wet rattle, he pulled the champagne bottle from the bucket of melting ice and poured more drinks for everyone. Rebecca hesitated before refusing the bottle hovering over her drained orange juice glass.

‘You can’t get anything past my girl, can you?’ smiled Howard. Rebecca’s grip got tighter on James’s hand.

‘Maybe we should wait til –’

‘Mum,’ said Rebecca.

‘Best to do it now, dear,’ said Howard, ‘in fact it’s a good time. This sort of good news puts it all in perspective, doesn’t it?’

He looked around the room expecting acknowledgement of the wisdom, but could only see anxious faces. He smiled his best authoritative smile, and picked up, then put down his champagne.

‘Your old man’s got himself in a bit of trouble with the law.’

Rebecca pulled her hand away from James, and hunched forward in her seat, stifling a shiver.

‘Your father was arrested last week,’ added Penny. ‘I wanted to leave it until at least after dinner.’

‘What…what was it?’ asked Rebecca. ‘The company?’

‘What? No, nothing like that,’ said Howard.

‘It’s a misunderstanding. Mr Maplestone has recommended us a very good expert in the area,’ Penny said.

‘Were you stealing?’

‘We’ll get it sorted out before you know it, all going to be absolutely fine. In a way it’s quite fascinating, the procedure,’ Howard said.

‘Your dad had been out, there was a mix-up, that’s all.’

‘Have you been charged, are you on bail, what’s going on?’ Rebecca tensed and shrugged away as James put a hand on her shoulder.

‘Just let your dad…’ he said.

‘There’s lots of technical terms for it, sound terrible. Very Victorian. Almost funny when you think about them.’

‘Just tell me what’s going on, Dad.’

‘Persistently importuning, lewd conduct, outraging public decency. Like Dickens…’

‘Dad’s been doing a lot of research himself on the internet.’

‘Jesus, are you having an affair or something? You didn’t…assault someone did you?’

‘They offered a caution, but apparently that would involve an admission of guilt, and of course nothing happened,’ said Penny.

‘What the fuck is it?’

‘There’s no need for that sort of language, Rebecca,’ said Howard. ‘You should know that I’m going to be challenging a ridiculous accusation of a public order offence that’s on shaky ground from the start.’

‘I didn’t want legal terms I wanted—’

‘It was the train station. I was caught short, there was a big burly copper in there. He got the wrong end of the stick. I was accused, I think the word on the street is, of cottaging.’

The room went silent. Rebecca went pale. Then she jumped from her seat and ran to the downstairs toilet, where the three of them listened as she noisily vomited.

‘I think that might be the start of morning sickness,’ said James.

Chapter 3

‘Fucking hell, what has he done?’

James could tell Rebecca was stressed by the swearing. She almost never swore, except when she was freaked out about something, and then she wouldn’t stop for hours and days on end. Not that he’d needed a handy pointer to tell him his wife was a little het-up on this occasion.

‘Fuck.’

They were driving further into town, from the leafy streets of Harrow Hill to the slightly scruffier leafy streets of Kilburn.

‘Did they say anything more to you?’

‘Darling, it was brutal, we talked about everything but. We were pretending like nothing had even happened. I’ve never heard so much polite chit-chat from people who’ve known each other for thirty years.’

‘Huh. It’s like the Christmas when I was fifteen, and they got all upset when Matthew told them he knew about Santa. I got the blame somehow, then after a blazing row it was back to endless discussion about how tasty the sprouts are.’

‘It’s such a shame really, to only have them once a year. I hear the secret’s in the blanching.’

‘There really isn’t any need for them to be fucking soggy I hear.’

It wasn’t entirely true that Howard’s arrest hadn’t come up for the rest of the day. In fact, between showing James hugely optimistic financial models for his company and 3D diagrams of car engines that neither of them really understood, Howard had been quite keen to talk about the case. It seemed he was winding up to make a bit of a crusade of it, maybe even scaling back on his work commitments to study up and represent himself.

But James figured this wasn’t something that Rebecca needed to know about right now – Howard would probably change his mind on that. And he certainly wasn’t going to tell her about how it had actually happened that her dad got arrested. Having to hear about bladder challenges for a man of Howard’s age’s, and getting nudges in the elbow about the perennial effects on a man’s anatomy of the bumpy track on the non-stopping Amersham train, had been a worse experience than having to shower with him the time they played tennis at his club.

Now it was the second part of their Christmas family extravaganza, Boxing Day at his mum and dad’s, or Ben and Margaret, as they preferred him to call them.

‘Just a few hours and we’ll be home,’ he said. ‘They have to go out this afternoon, a memorial event for some atrocity or other that happened this time twenty-five years ago.’

‘What memorial is it?’

‘Can’t remember.’

‘What happened?’

‘Don’t care.’

Rebecca shrugged that that seemed a fair enough response. James was permanently cynical about his parents’ humanitarian efforts. She’d never heard someone so uncharitable about people who chose to spend Christmas Day helping at a soup kitchen, but over the years she’d learned to see his point.

‘Darling,’ James said in as plummy an accent as he could manage, ‘what do you say we blow off the lefties and go and get pissed on vodka in the park?’

‘A delightful idea, darling,’ said Rebecca, ‘but I’m not sure that’s such a jolly good idea in my delicate condition.’

‘Hungover, eh? Better make it dry sherry and a quick bunk-up in the rhododendron bushes. That’ll get you spiffy again.’

‘Darling, there’s something I think you should know.’

‘Yes, darling?’

‘Well, darling.’

‘I’m listening, darling.’

‘You see, darling…’

‘Yes?’

‘I’m pregnant, darling.’

‘Crikey.’

They grinned at each other, breaking out of ‘Sebastian and Jemima’. James stretched across to give her knee a squeeze and hold her hand while the traffic was stopped.

‘How did that happen, eh?’

‘You were there at the time, chum.’

‘I remember it well. I’ve taken some notes so I don’t forget for the 21st birthday party.’

‘How lovely.’

‘Told you we should have recorded it on my phone.’

‘Mum was as damp as we expected about the whole thing,’ said Rebecca.

‘Damp? She was torrential! You were upstairs, we were bailing out the kitchen with buckets. It was how the turkey was so moist. Basted with a grandmother’s tears.’

‘Well that could’ve been because of…’

‘Come on. We’re focusing on us today,’ said James.

‘The three of us,’ said Rebecca.

‘Or possibly four. Or five.’

‘What do you think you married? A Dalmatian?’

‘There’s a word I could use there about you, but it would be demeaning and sexist and I respect you too much as a human being,’ James said, imitating the way they pretended his parents spoke.

Speaking of some kind of bitch, thought Rebecca.

No, that wasn’t fair she said to herself, her problems with her mother-in-law were of her own making, not Margaret’s. She had strong views, and how Rebecca dealt with them was to do with her own insecurities. And maybe Margaret’s sensitivity to expletives and insults linked with the female gender could be explained by the fact she was probably called every single one of them on a regular basis.

Come on now – behave, Rebecca told herself. Rebecca had felt awkward and stuffy from the first time she met James’s parents. Actually she’d felt a bit of a plodder from as soon as she heard what they’d done with their lives, and how he was a journalist and she was an artist. But it was when they’d met for drinks that first summer and she was the only one wearing a bra that it really crystallised. Afterwards James had said if he realised it would have been that much of a problem he would have worn one too.

Now every time they visited his parents she ended up getting all tongue-tied about what she could and couldn’t say, second guessing anything that might be deemed inappropriate, or ‘typical of middle England complacent thinking’. Usually she got it wrong when she was trying to say something polite about whatever horribly overseasoned ethnic cuisine of the month they were attempting to cook. Could she say ethnic in that context? Did that have connotations? She knew ‘minorities’ was out as subliminally imperialist but she assumed ethnicity was a good thing.

God, she hated how a trip to the Winfield-Smallings made her feel like her dad, who was always complaining about courses and policies about what he was supposed to call ‘them’. Still, she couldn’t imagine that Eritrea’s answer to Nigella would be willing to say whatever it was that Ben and Margaret did with okra, pulses and the less palatable parts of a sheep was the essence of modern, convenient dining for the busy African family.

They drove along not speaking for a while, James singing the bass guitar riffs for the songs on the radio at first, before going quiet, which suggested he’d started thinking. On the way to his parents it always seemed to happen after they’d come through Wembley. The predictions of doom and sarcastic questions would probably start next.

‘My mother’s going to want me to have a vasectomy now because of the world population crisis,’ he said.

‘Give me a few months and I’ll probably be up for doing it at home myself.’

‘I wonder what it’ll be we’re doing wrong already,’ he said.

‘I’d swear you lose a year off your mental age every mile closer we get to your parents,’ she said.

‘Eh? I do not! We’re not the ones that are stuck in a lost youth.’

‘I know, I know, you never asked to be born. I wonder if ours will always regress into teenager-dom when we guilt them into visiting for holidays.’

‘We’ll be the cool parents the kids will want to spend time with, even though they have their own lives with lots of cool friends. The friends will love us too,’ he said, before adding in a mock-huff, ‘And I do not turn into a teenager, thank you very much.’

‘You so do. I’m permanently worried you’re going to disappear and lock yourself in the toilets for a wank.’

‘Well if Dad will leave his National Geographics lying around open at the dirty bits.’

Rebecca didn’t answer, and he glanced across at her gnawing on a thumbnail. He made a note to himself to watch out for any conversational directions that could end up leading to her thinking about sex acts in lavatories.

‘Fucking hell,’ she said.

‘Do you think they’ll have made an effort and cleaned up for our visit?’ he asked, trying to distract her from yesterday’s news with the miserable afternoon ahead.

His parents’ house was not one where bourgeois ideas of cleanliness and order got much of a look in, to James’s endless frustration. They’d spent much of his childhood on the move around Europe doing seasonal work or with his dad’s occasional journalism posts, and when they’d finally come back to London when he was eleven he’d hoped to instil a bit of order into their home. A tidy kid, he’d still never made an impression beyond the border of his bedroom door. The disarray got to him most at this time of year, when the decorations came out. Believing in no religion, they paid tribute to all of them. Christmas baubles (ironic) would hang from Hanukkah candle holders, and Diwali mementoes clashed with Kwanzaa souvenirs brought back from the US’s poorer states. The living room at this time of year gave an impression of the offices of an opportunistic fortune teller who was covering all the mystical bases. It drove James absolutely nuts.

‘Oh I forgot, we’ll be alternating fussy old lady with sulking adolescent,’ said Rebecca as they pulled up outside the ramshackle Victorian terraced house. ‘Come on, like you said, this is a happy time. Let’s try and focus on spreading that joy.’

Chapter 4

‘Are you keeping it?’ was the first thing Margaret had said.

‘Of course! I mean, not that there’d be anything wrong with taking charge of your reproductive, um, destiny, but yes, we’re keeping it,’ said Rebecca.

‘No, Mum, we came all this way just to share with you the joy of a woman’s right to choose,’ James grumbled to himself, drawing a glare from Rebecca.

‘You know the assumption of joy is one of the main tools of guilt and shame rolled out by the religious fanatics to foist unwanted pregnancies on women,’ said Margaret.

‘And we all know how inconvenient they are,’ muttered James.

‘But if you’re embracing the opportunity that’s wonderful news,’ Margaret said, smiling broadly at the couple, before swooping in for hugs. Before she knew it, Rebecca was engulfed in a mass of grey-flecked curly hair that smelled sweetly of tangerines.

‘It’s one of the most amazing experiences you can go through as a woman,’ Margaret said, surprising Rebecca again by stroking her cheek. ‘Ben, give your son and his partner a kiss. You’re standing there like a dummy – just like your father did when he first saw me seven months pregnant.’

‘Of course… Congratulations,’ said Ben shuffling forward happily from his spot looking out the front window. ‘Fantastic! Surprising. Inconceivable, almost, I suppose.’

A kiss on the lips for the couple, and he stood there nodding and smiling, trying to think of something more to add. ‘Drinks! I should get everyone drinks. Wine OK for everyone? It’s not a bad one, for an Ecuadorean.’

‘Just a water for me please,’ smiled Rebecca.

‘Of course, of course,’ said Ben, patting Rebecca on the arm as he headed for the kitchen. James looked at her with a raised eyebrow and shake of the head as his dad went out.

‘So it will be a natural birth? At your home?’ Margaret asked.

‘Well we haven’t thought that far ahe—’

‘Yes Mother, of course we’re going to be doing things naturally,’ interrupted James. ‘We’re not the Beckhams.’

‘The who?’

James muttered something to himself under his breath that even Rebecca standing next to him couldn’t quite pick up.

‘An association footballer of some renown and his wife, a former singer of popular youth dance tunes, your honour. Widely reputed to be too posh to push,’ he told his mother.

‘I know who the Beckhams are, James, I couldn’t catch it because my hearing’s down because I was next to a police loud hailer for three hours when we were kettled last week. The boys at the youth project talk about him all the time,’ Margaret said. ‘The body art seems to be the most interesting thing about him. His wife seems to be a principal cause of eating disorders for a generation so I don’t think she’d have the strength to survive a natural delivery. Now let’s go and find Ben in the kitchen. The Mongolian stew should be about ready, we saw it being prepared in this fascinating documentary on the collapse of Chinese-Soviet ideology, you really should see it…’

Stepping out into the garden after lunch, James saw his dad, loitering between a broken toilet cistern and a rusted, wheel-less bicycle and smoking a cigarette. When James had been growing up his parents had both smoked like French philosophy students. Margaret had always been passionate in her defence of smokers’ rights and against their stigmatisation, which she attributed to drugs companies and governments collaborating to create a culture of fear which they used to bolster their power and make money. Then about ten years ago she quit after a health scare, and the evidence on passive smoking suddenly became quite compelling. Any doubts became cheap diversionary tactics of Big Tobacco, and James’s dad now had to smoke in the garden. Fortunately the carcinogens in smoke were only conclusively proven to be present in tobacco fumes, and so Margaret didn’t have to join Ben outside when they were connecting to global folk traditions with a dope digestif after their dinner.

‘Well here he is. The traditional family man.’

‘Dad.’

‘I think we know each other well enough now, please, call me Ben.’

It was the same introductory chat they’d been having since James had got married.

‘So you’re joining the brotherhood of fatherhood,’ said Ben.

‘Yep, I guess so.’

‘Or is brethren better?’ Ben asked himself distractedly. ‘Maybe the point gets lost. Brotherhood of fatherdom maybe, if you don’t mind a neologism…’

The two men looked out over the erratically lined mud of the backyard vegetable patch, some shrivelled and frostbitten squash remains just about visible among the patches of dead weeds that were Ben and Margaret’s main crop. Sitting on a pile of old paving slabs Ben used the top of the toilet to roll another cigarette.

‘You don’t think you’re a bit young to settle down?’ Ben asked.

‘Older than you were.’

‘No, I was thirty by the time you were born.’

‘Dad, I’m thirty-two in June.’

‘Thirty-two? Really? I suppose that makes sense.’

Ben’s tongue flicked out daintily dabbing the edge of the cigarette paper. James turned away and kicked a pebble into a fence covered in ivy and repressed a little shake. The accompanying tiny wet clicking sound Ben made and physical resemblance to a tiny lizard always gave him the heebie-jeebies.

‘No, you’ll be fine,’ Ben continued, ‘you do learn to work around the restrictions, and they get fascinating as they get older. Got these open minds that you can really teach if you don’t fill them with gogglebox crap.’

‘I’m sure it’ll be interesting and rewarding for me eventually,’ said James.

Seeing the sarcasm had been missed by Ben, as usual, he decided he might as well change the subject to what he’d really come out to the garden for.

‘So how’s work?’ he asked.

Ben shook his head. ‘Advertising is down again, and I’m losing more editorial control. I try and fight, but these owners hold job cuts over my head. I won’t give up but they wield a lot of influence these media conglomerates.’

You’d think he was working for News International, not the local rag, thought James. He regarded his dad’s job as presenting a constant threat of self-righteous, dull diatribes about the freedom of the press and power of local communities, but at least it saw his father get animated about something. Ben’s work on the newspaper had also caused in-law tension for years, since both dads discovered they’d crossed swords before when Howard had been fairly senior in the borough council covered by the paper.

A few years before Rebecca and James had met, Howard had been Something Secretary or Deputy Chairman of the local Conservative Party, and the Tories had complained about media bias from the then politics editor, Ben (who was also the paper’s deputy editor, communities editor, and just-about-everything editor, apart from sport). This had caused an earlier storm over advertising and editorial independence, and seen a change in the scope and tone of the local politics reporting to something ‘more upbeat and positive’. It had emerged amid the volleys between both sides that many of the local advertisers were ‘coincidentally’ concerned that the paper was becoming too radical, and had threatened to pull all their advertising, which would effectively shut the Harrow Focus down. The Harrow Focus, thankfully for Ben, didn’t close down. The Harrow Focus was still going strong, or limping along depending on how you saw it, and still covered all the local news for Harrow and the district.

All the news.

‘And how’s the skyscraping temple of Mammon?’ asked Ben.

‘Good, good. I managed to reduce thousands of people to a number on a spreadsheet last week, so should be due a promotion. Listen, you still have that crime desk column?’

‘For what it is,’ sighed Ben. ‘It could be a powerful vehicle for tackling injustice, a spotlight on persecution, but apparently that doesn’t sell ad space to local plumbers, so it’s all about drug addicts robbing the elderly. What people want to read, it seems.’

‘Sex and scandal, that kind of thing, huh?’

‘Exploitation of poverty-induced misery, and prurient snooping into the lives of others. But I’ve managed to expand the arts section, and we’re making progress in covering more cultural events. Thanks to sponsorship from the local diversity-killing multinational supermarket ironically enough.’

‘Still, subvert from within eh?’ said James. ‘And the crime column. I’d been thinking about it the other day, just generally really, is it still picking up, say, the goings-on at the train station’s gents? Just, y’know, for example.’

‘Urgh, that’s reared its head again. We’d had a local police policy that was dragged into the mid-twentieth century a few years ago, with the revolutionary idea that what consenting people do between themselves was their business. Then a fifteen-year-old boy was propositioned outside his school and suddenly there’s moral outrage and the police are cracking down like Thatcher was still Führer. Of course fifteen-year old girls get propositioned all the time, but that isn’t a threat to public safety apparently.’

‘So all the gory details are making it to page seven are they?’ James asked nervously.

‘Two columns on page four and five now, next to the regular advertising for Debenhams.’

‘Right, I see. No reason. I was just wondering,’ said James, although there’d been no indication from Ben that he’d been about to ask why he wanted to know.

‘And we don’t need to ruin the holidays with work worries when we go back inside again do we?’ James continued as Ben, roll-up lit at last, drifted off into his own world again, and started work on his crossword.

Chapter 5

Rebecca had spent the morning in a frenzy of cleaning, in case the midwife making her home visit took one look at their place and immediately called social services.

As she sat on her knees scrubbing out the bottom of the crockery cupboard she was aware that the midwife was unlikely to conduct a full kitchen inspection, and probably wouldn’t make judgements on whether their unborn child should be put on a wait list for fostering based on the condition of the cutlery drawer, but she couldn’t help it. Housework wasn’t really her thing, and James usually did a lot of it. But really he was a tidier, not a cleaner. As long as everything looked to be in place that was enough for him, he didn’t seem to notice the dust and grease and dirt. She did, but that didn’t mean she got around to doing something about it, except when they had people coming.

During the Christmas and New Year limbo period she’d had more than a week of sitting around and doing nothing in their little terraced house in Neasden. She could’ve gone at the place with a vengeance then, but it had just seemed too early to start on this nesting business, and she was pining for work. Not that she was exactly passionate about her job as a senior associate at a Harrow law firm, it was more that she loved the office on those in-between days at Christmas when the phone never rang and she could watch seasonally appropriate old movies on the computer and eat mince pies all day. But her office now closed down at this time of year, so that was the end of that lovely tradition. And now she’d had to take an extra day to be at home for this; it was a demanding little squirt already.

Waiting for this appointment had added another element to the floaty, on-hold, feel of the week as they were still not yet properly in the system – the pregnancy was not yet official. She’d gone to the doctors before Christmas, but that hadn’t really got the ball rolling, nothing was written down. Despite three, no four, tests – two on the day they found out, one the next day, just to be sure, and one taken a few days later because she was bored, and it was there – the nurse at the GPs had taken yet another one, told her the same result she’d had the four other times, and then sent her away with a number to ring for someone to come around for a booking appointment. The lady on the phone had been very cheerful, as though it was a lovely surprise that someone was calling her up to tell her they were pregnant, rather than something she must hear dozens of times a week. However the first slot she’d had available was after the holidays due to staff shortages, with priority going to those ‘about to pop’, as she’d put it. Rebecca figured she’d be over ten weeks gone; a quarter of the way through her pregnancy without any medical intervention at all. It almost felt Victorian – she’d be having the baby on a factory floor if it carried on at this rate.

She realised she was getting distracted from the task at hand and that time was running out and she hadn’t even bleached the draining board yet, or dusted the high shelves. She had a vision of the midwife putting on a soft white leather glove and running her finger along surfaces for evidence of unseen filth that was somehow harmful to foetuses. Then she thought if the midwife did need to put on gloves, it’d be those rubbery plasticky ones, and it wouldn’t be the mantelpiece she’d be fingering. Sticking out of the cupboards beneath the sink, her bottom wriggled uneasily.

Rebecca banged her head on the underside of the cupboard shelf as the doorbell rang. She stood up and swept the cleaning products under the sink. Glancing around the suspiciously clean-smelling kitchen, she wished they’d had a proper drinks cabinet. The over-full wine rack topped with spirits wasn’t a great look, but too late now. She tried throwing a tea towel over it, but that just looked messy. Worst came to the worst she’d have to say that she never touched the stuff and James was an alcoholic.

As she reached the door, Rebecca wondered if her mental image of a midwife looking like the scary big-boned blonde woman that used to do the house cleaning show was going to be accurate. She wondered if she was really going to be fierce, with a heart of gold, or just fierce. Here we go, she thought as, for the first time since she’d got pregnant, she absently stroked her tummy.

With the door open she’d adjusted her eye level a good eight inches down as she found the less-imposing-than-expected figure behind the door. False alarm, it was a schoolgirl collecting sponsorship pledges for a new school building.

‘Hellooo! I’m Suzanne? The midwife?’

Either nurses are getting younger, or the local sixth form’s work experience programme is getting more ambitious, Rebecca thought.

‘Hello. Do come in,’ Rebecca said with a sweep of her arm along the corridor past James’s neatly wall-mounted mountain bike.

‘Ooh, thanks!’ said Suzanne, a spasm causing her elbow to twitch out. As they headed into the living room Rebecca wondered to herself what was happening to her; she’d never said something like ‘do come in’ before in her life. Today the nerves were expressing themselves as a traditional housewife. And nothing brought out her nerves in social situations more than someone who was even more nervous than she was. The two women stood by the old fireplace looking at each other expectantly for a few seconds.

‘Would you care for a cup… Sorry, would you like a tea or coffee?’

‘You wouldn’t have a gin would you?’ asked Suzanne before hurriedly adding, ‘Sorry, sorry, a joke, not appropriate. Humour can be welcomed but in a neutral non-threatening tone, on non-contentious topics, and in an environment where it can be reassuring for the mum-to-be.’

Rebecca began to think the midwife might have forgotten she was in the room, until she stopped looking up at a point on the ceiling and mumbling, composed herself, and smiled apologetically.

‘I am sorry. Obviously I didn’t mean that. It was inappropriate and unprofessional. Unless you’re having one.’ Suzanne winced, and slumped down into an armchair.

‘Maybe now would be a time for me to go over with you the government health recommendations, which are that pregnant woman should refrain from alcohol entirely during pregnancy. The lack of evidence that one or two units a week does any harm at all apparently outweighing the potential for worry and guilt a responsible woman will inflict on herself for the occasional glass of sauv blanc in contravention of the official line.’

The room fell silent again.

‘Maybe I’ll just have a glass of water,’ said Suzanne.

Rebecca headed into the kitchen to get the water for Suzanne. She’s clearly mad, she thought. The job is so stressful she’s just flipped. Or maybe she’s a nut who goes door to door impersonating a midwife, like one of those people that rocks up to hospitals pretending to be doctors and that are only found out when they’re halfway through performing an appendectomy and making buzzing noises like they’re playing Operation. But what are the chances of her knocking on the right door at the right time? She’s nervous, she’s just nervous. I should go back in and help her relax.

As Rebecca walked into the living room, Suzanne was standing again, facing the wall and bending sideways from the waist so her head was almost at a right angle to the floor.

‘Your water?’ said Rebecca, causing the midwife to spring up straight and her elbow to flip out again.

‘Sorry, force of habit. Checking out the DVD collection. I always do that at parties. Who’s the Sam Raimi fan? Love a bit of guts and gore, me, probably why I like this job.’ Suzanne’s face scrunched up again, her eyes closed as if she was trying not to be there. ‘Not that… Birth is a beautiful natural thing, and I’m here to allay any worries you might have about the journey you are on, and the process of giving birth to your baby.’

‘So, busy day so far?’ asked Rebecca.

Suzanne took the water and dropped back into the chair.

‘I’m not supposed to tell you, but it’s my first day working alone. I’ve been shadowing Maureen for the last few weeks. We have different ways of looking at things. She’d have you believe I haven’t a clue what I’m talking about.’

‘Oh no, not at all,’ said Rebecca, somehow refraining from adding ‘my dear madam’ to the end of the sentence. She hoped the midwife wasn’t going to start crying.

‘Maureen’s a bit of a stickler for the rules and guidelines and client choice. She’s into choice as long as the mum-to-be has been properly educated to know the best choices out there, which just happen to be identical to Maureen’s choices from her Good Pregnancy leaflets. This morning I met my ten o’clock appointment on the steps outside her house on a fag break. She’s got four kids already – three of them boys, all but the eldest under five – and I’m supposed to discuss an enlightened approach to enjoying her pregnancy, and push the benefits of healthy eating and birthing pools? Tell her what’s happening in her body at this exciting but natural time? After two minutes she excused herself and went to have a nap while I was there to keep an eye on the kids. I ended up doing ironing and telling a three-year-old about the lovely opportunity to share experiences at the pregnancy yoga classes at the community centre.’

Rebecca wasn’t really sure what to say. She settled on ‘That sounds jolly difficult for a first day.’

‘Ah, not too bad when you think about it. I didn’t have much chance to screw it up with her, she knew what she was doing. Except on the smoking thing. Difficult to quit, I know. Lord I know. But still, they show us the pictures? What can happen if things go wrong? You don’t want to know, I tell you. But basically that’s it, boom, the next thirty years of your life accounted for. Same with the alcohol to be honest, but you have to really work at overdoing it. Jesus, what am I saying? You don’t have a history of alcoholism do you?’

Both Rebecca’s hands went to her stomach. ‘No.’

‘Smoke?’

‘No.’

‘Thank God. I’m sorry I’m being massively tactless again. One extreme or the other with me, but you’re a very good listener!’ Suzanne jerked upright in her seat and lunged into her briefcase.

‘Now,’ she said, her head obscured by the case lid, ‘we need to get you booked in.’

Suzanne and Rebecca ran through the basic vital statistics covering age, height, weight (Rebecca used her normal weight before all the Christmas goings-on as that was probably the truest real figure for that), date of her last period, contact details for her and James, that kind of thing. While she attached and set up a futuristic-looking blood-pressure test, the midwife then reached what she called the box ticking section of the process.

‘We’ll whiz through these, we’ve covered most of it. Smoking, no. Drinking, no. I won’t tell if you don’t… Intravenous drug use, no? No. Domestic violence, no. Got all the leaflets? Yes.’

As her upper arm was squeezed by the digital pump, Rebecca felt like she should intervene at this stage – she wasn’t a junkie or being knocked about but felt like she should at least be given the option. The Velcro of the armband was unstrapped and the midwife jotted down a couple of numbers. Rebecca could see Suzanne running through a checklist in her head, almost counting things off on her fingers.

‘I told you about the yoga. Maureen gets upset if you don’t mention the yoga. The hospital will be in touch for the scan…you’ve got the phone numbers…checked you’re happy with everything…’

Rebecca watched as Suzanne took a survey of the room peering around her to look through the knocked-through dining area out towards the kitchen and giving a big tick. The cleaning had been worth it.

‘Done, done, done. Now are there any questions you’d like to ask me?’ Suzanne asked.

Rebecca paused as if she was thinking about whether she had any questions, while she was actually just thinking about how long she had to leave it before saying no to make it look like she’d given the subject due consideration.

‘Sex!’ Suzanne jumped in before Rebecca even had time to finish her fake thinking. ‘You’ll want to know about it but be afraid to ask. Go for it, fill your boots is the short answer. Too late to do any more harm now anyway. Can’t do anything to hurt the baby, and if your husband – sorry, supposed to say partner – is worried he can bump the baby in some way he’s either delusional, or should be making a fortune in mucky movies.’

Rebecca admitted to herself she had been wondering about that sort of thing, but hadn’t planned to mention it. It hadn’t been the fear of James taking the baby’s eye out though. More just she was worried about her own physical reactions, the idea that while whatever it is in there had such a tenuous hold on life, any hormones or bodily chemicals she set off down there could cause disruption. Crazy she knew, but so was the way she was tensing her muscles in the region all the time as if making sure nothing fell out, and she couldn’t stop that either. She noticed that Suzanne had started putting the paperwork and the piles of leaflets scattered about her chair back in her bag, and everything seemed to be moving a bit quickly.

‘Don’t you need to…examine me, or something?’ she asked.

‘God, no!’ said Suzanne. ‘I mean, no offence, not that you’re repulsive to the idea of touching or anything, you shouldn’t feel like that. At least not at this early stage, that usually comes later. No, just there’s nothing to look at really.’

‘Oh.’ After all the nerves and excitement, the experience was becoming a bit of an anti-climax for Rebecca.

‘Tell you what, I could try the Doppler. Would you like to hear the baby’s heartbeat?’

Rebecca’s own heart rate quickened at the idea.

‘Can you do that already?’

‘With your dates? It’s early days, so tricky, but I can usually do it. This is the one piece of kit I was near the top of my class for. Not that I was really bad at anything – promise I’m fully qualified and did learn how to use everything. Eventually. Just I was a whiz with this. Now pop open your jeans and lie back on the sofa.’

Rebecca wondered if she should draw the living room curtains, but decided the back of the sofa was under the window so it was only somebody snooping in the front garden that would spot her being tended to by a frizzy-haired health professional.

‘You’ll love this,’ said Suzanne, ‘it’s like real evidence there’s something going on in there. All the worries that it’s not really happening? That something’s gone wrong and you just don’t know about it? Gone. Awful when that happens though, even at this early stage – the state some women get into, horrible to see. You have to feel for them.’

With a clatter of plastic Suzanne removed what looked like an electronic oversized stethoscope from her case and switched it on, sparking a howl of feedback as the microphone grazed against the small speaker.

‘After this we could try some karaoke,’ she said, adjusting the volume and giving the microphone a rub to take the chill off. She put the Doppler unit on Rebecca’s abdomen, gently pushing under her belly button. So this was what she had coming to her, thought Rebecca, strange people prodding me with strange devices in areas I’m a bit sensitive about. There was a rolling pulsating growl as Suzanne turned up the speaker.

‘Heavy lunch was it?’

Rebecca smiled and blushed slightly at the sound of the internal fart. Her belly quietened a little, and the midwife continued her probing; pausing, listening and moving on when getting nothing more than a background throb of Rebecca’s own raised heartbeat, and the occasional gastrointestinal bubble.

Suzanne looked at Rebecca with an awkward smile. ‘They like to play hide and seek sometimes. Let’s try the other side.’

More pops and gurgling followed, and Rebecca stiffened slightly as the midwife pushed the device a bit harder into her belly. Suzanne tutted irritably and tried another angle.

‘Nope, nothing,’ said Suzanne, snapping the Doppler off, and standing up with a click of the knees. ‘You win some, you lose some. Me that is, you’re fine, there’s nothing to worry about. It’s normal.’

Rebecca lay there, looking up at the midwife now looming over her.

‘It would happen like that a lot wouldn’t it? Nothing there at this stage?’ Rebecca asked nervously.

‘You’d know, and I’d know if there was something up. It doesn’t mean anything at all – don’t worry about it. Unless you get some bleeding more than spotting. And that’s just what we say anyway. You knew that. Nothing’s going wrong. The scan will be brilliant. Don’t worry, watch one of those movies and forget all about it. Maybe not Alien though.’

Suzanne held a hand out to pull Rebecca up to a sitting position, where she kept numbly looking up at a mole on the midwife’s chin.

‘Right, I’d best be going. Two more to do before home time,’ Suzanne said.

‘Of course, you must be very busy,’ said Rebecca distractedly, getting to her feet.

‘Thanks for being a great appointment,’ the midwife said, flicking her hair out of the back of her coat collar. ‘I’m sorry, mad week, bit frazzled, but I’ll calm down. See you in a few weeks, and you’ve got my number if there’s anything you want to ask. It’s going to be fun. And seriously, I may joke but check out the yoga at the community centre, it’s supposed to be brilliant.’

‘Mind how you go now,’ Rebecca inexplicably said as she opened the door to let Suzanne out. The midwife gave her a big wave, jumped as the neighbour’s cat leapt from the front yard, and then again as the metal gate banged shut behind her.

Rebecca gave a cheery wave back, shut the door, and burst into tears.

Chapter 6

‘She’s mad. It’s much too early. You haven’t even had The Quickening yet,’ said James as he sat on the arm of the couch and stroked Rebecca’s hair.

When he’d got home Rebecca had seemed fine, although the house did smell alarmingly of bleach and furniture polish. She was sitting, feet tucked up under her, on her place on the couch for watching the telly. Then he realised the television was switched off.

‘Hey darling, how’d it go?’ he’d asked softly and the tears had started again.

The Quickening – the first fluttering feeling of the presence in your womb. When they’d first read about it on a pregnancy website James had said it sounded like the name of a horror movie, and it did feel a bit like that to Rebecca, a sign that something overwhelming was about to happen. Since then whenever she had hiccupped, or her stomach had rumbled, he’d say in a hammy voiceover voice ‘Was it gas? Or was it…THE QUICKENING?!’ and walk around stiff-legged and arms out like a zombie. This time he didn’t do the all-out production, deciding it might not quite be the time, but it raised a smile.

‘Der-derr-derrrrrr,’ managed Rebecca, blowing her nose.

This is what he’d worried about. James had wanted to be there for the first appointment but had been persuaded it wasn’t too big a deal and there’d be other times they’d need to take leave for things he couldn’t miss. He hadn’t minded too much, seeing the sense in that, but did a little bit feel like this was the precursor to years of missed school concerts and sports days. And now his wife had been sitting by herself for hours on end dealing with the stupid things this moron of a midwife had done, leaving her thinking she’d had a miscarriage or something.

‘I’m sorry. I’m just overreacting. It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with the baby,’ Rebecca said. ‘It’s just she was…I feel like I’m going to be doing this on my own and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.’

‘I’m calling her boss now, and getting someone else to come around.’

‘Don’t. Don’t. You can’t. She’s all right, she’s just learning…’

‘I don’t want our baby used for a practice session.’

‘It’s not like that. And it’s not like I want that either. Do you think I’d let that happen?’

‘There must be a patient charter somewhere we can just quote and they’ll have to send someone more experienced. I’ll do it, you won’t have to speak to her again or anything.’

‘I said no! You’re not listening!’

‘You had such a good time you’ve been reduced to tears, is that it?’

‘Look, I’m fine.’

‘Clearly.’

Rebecca’s eyes narrowed and she started to say something but thought better of it. James put his hands behind his head and huffed slightly.

‘It just wasn’t what I expected, that’s all,’ Rebecca said, breaking the silence.

‘And I just want to make sure it goes all right for you. That you don’t get too stressed out.’

‘Yeah. Well.’

James walked across and tried to give his wife a hug, but she was too low down and ensconced in the corner of the bulky sofa. He settled for a kiss on the top of her head.

‘Let’s have a beer, eh?’ he said, massaging her shoulder gently. Her head leaned into his hand.

‘I shouldn’t, really…’

‘Even your mad midwife said it was all right. Come on, I’ve got a weekly email from Babycentre we can look at, see what that creature is up to now, whether he’s planning on keeping that tail.’

‘We need a better name than “That Creature”,’ Rebecca shouted as James headed for the fridge.

‘You’re right,’ said James, handing over a Heineken. ‘Jeff?’

‘Jeff? What if it’s a girl?’

‘It’s not their real name. I don’t think we’ll be planning on calling a boy Jeff either, it’s not going to come out aged fifty-three and ready to join your dad at the golf club.’

‘It might stick though, and we’d end up taking Jeffrina to her ballet classes. Try again.’

‘The Thing?’ he suggested, ‘Fifi Foetus?’

Rebecca rubbed her hand over her belly again while she was pondering, trying to feel a difference.

‘We could go for one of the classics and just call it the bump?’ she said. ‘Will be one soon.’

‘Who put the bump in the bump-a-lump-a-bump? It was the man with a rama-lama ding dong,’ sang James. ‘I think I could live with that.’

‘But we’d have to live with your singing. Bompalomp’s cute though…’

‘What do you think, Creature?’ asked James as he sat on the couch and rested his head in Rebeca’s lap. ‘Would you rather be Bumpalump?’

‘Bompalomp. I don’t need to be associated with being a lump, thank you.’

‘Bompalomp then. What do you think, give your tail one swish for yes, two swishes for no. I think that’s confirmed it. It’s christened.’

Rebecca smiled down at her husband with his ear pressed against her tummy, and gave his neck a pinch.

‘Spoken to your mum yet?’ he asked.

‘She called earlier. Apparently I had it easy. In her day it was creepy pervy doctors and ferocious uncaring nurses. Turns out I was carried to term in a Carry On movie.’

‘And how’s your dad?’ James asked cautiously.

‘Getting on with his projects, usual self. Like it’s gone away.’

‘Maybe it will.’

Rebecca sighed and massaged James’s head.

‘Now what can I and Loyd Grossman get you for dinner?’ he asked, ‘Thai? Indian? Italian? The world is your oyster in a range of delicious sauces.’

‘Thai curry I think. Would be nice with the beer. And I’ll have some crisps as an appetiser.’

‘Salt ’n’ vinegar?’

‘Thanks, love.’

James propelled himself to his feet with a thump, and headed back to the kitchen, loudly singing a range of half-remembered doo-wop songs from adverts. Rebecca sipped her beer and pulled a face as a metallic taste flooded her mouth. She’d been dying for just a regular end-of-a-long-day drink for weeks, and now it tasted like licking a battery. What a shitty day. Sometimes James just wasn’t the person to talk to about something difficult. Maybe it was her because she couldn’t explain herself properly. The midwife had been quite funny really when she thought about it. But it had seemed scary at the time, and she didn’t know why she’d been apologising for freaking out a bit. She wasn’t sorry.

And of course it just had to have been more difficult for Mum.

She sipped the beer again, but she was going to have to give up on it. She was tired and it had been a big afternoon, she had to get over herself and this ‘no one ever listens to me moaning’ nonsense. Maybe a nice tea and another early night would help.

‘And here’s your hand-crafted chicken rogan josh and delicately microwaved naan, as requested,’ said James as he came into the living room. ‘Now what shall we watch on the telly?’

Coming back from a layout meeting on the paper, Ben Smalling hadn’t been surprised to see the note to call Howard Collins on his desk. Although it had been happening less frequently since he’d left the council, still there was the occasional demand from the old Tory toad that coverage remain fair and impartial, or rather, more partial to his views. He knew already how the conversation would go. Howard would be rather chummy and jolly but there’d usually be some reference to dinner with a big-advertising local estate agency and serious concerns about the effect on house prices. That was a best case. Ben hoped it wasn’t a call proposing some sort of ghastly middle-class dinner party to celebrate their offsprings’ fertility. A feast for the foetus. Guess Who’s Come Before Dinner? Abigail’s Partum?

It didn’t sound like a social call, he supposed. Howard’s message was just that he wanted to speak to Ben about a grave injustice that he thought would be of interest to his readers, and probably right up his street too. Probably some ‘PC gone mad’ rant to do with his business. Well, if it was important he’d call back, Ben decided, doodling a few more dinner party puns along the margins of the copy for this week’s restaurant review.

Chapter 7

‘I’ll have an ESB and a bag of crisps, I’ve just got to make this call,’ said Kam.

James turned back slightly from his position at the bar, and glanced at his friend and colleague while keeping one eye out to make sure the harried barman didn’t miss him.

‘ESB? On a school night?’ he asked.

‘Been a long day,’ said Kam bouncing on his heels. ‘Hey gorgeous, it’s me… Don’t ask – I’ll tell you later. Is she having her dinner? Yeah, great, pop her on.’

James raised a finger, but the barman, partially obscured by gleaming pipes for the beer taps, was ambushed at the other end of the long wooden bar.

‘Jimmy, I’m just going to take this outside… Hello, Hannah-Banana, are you being a good girl for mummy…?’

By the time Kam got back James had finally got served, and found a small wobbly table with two tiny stools at the back of the pub near the gents. It wasn’t ideal, but for a Holborn pub at six o’clock on a Thursday it wasn’t bad – although the proximity to the toilets did mean there was a good chance they’d have to be polite to every other sod from the office who was in there. Still, it was gloomy enough back there to be private, gave them both the chance to clock what was going on across a large section of the bar, and didn’t feel as seedy as lurking by the one-armed bandit by the Ladies.

‘Sorry about that. Ended up having a quick fag with one of the guys. Miserable bastard makes me seem like Olly Murs.’

Kam slouched down into his seat and tore into his packet of crisps, ripping the bag apart down the seam and smoothing the packet flat against the table, before repeatedly jabbing at the contents.

‘Rough day?’ James asked.

‘First week back from holiday and just all about the merger, corralling two IT teams into one vision of an integrated networked backbone at the core of our shared goal of being the best little medium-sized accountancy in the country. I don’t know if I’m supposed to get everybody to cheer and high-five after setting out that utopian vision. There was one chap with tears in his eyes, but that’s because the room we were in had a window and he’s unaccustomed to daylight. And there was some whooping, but that was this other guy’s condition which we’ve been told we have to accommodate, but also never mention. I’m supposed to be inspiring and organising this new team, and I’ve got two dozen people arguing about who’s got the worst company-issue keyboard.’

Kam paused in his rant to down a quick third of his pint of strong bitter.

‘So anything new with you?’ he asked with a soft belch.

‘Oh, you know, nothing much, still fairly quiet. Leonard is being an arse, all aloof with his additional power. Got the new Sherlock box set you’ll have to borrow when we’re done.’

‘Cool. The winner was the guy who had had all the letters worn off, by the way. With the keyboards. He has to find the Q by trial and error and mentally works out everything else from there.’

‘Sounds like an IT Jedi exercise,’ said James, before casually adding, ‘and I might need to put in for a bit of paternity leave for late August.’

Kam picked up the significance of what James said with a pint halfway to his crisp-stuffed mouth.

‘Eh? Congratulations, mate! You’re finally coming over to our side! Brilliant. Go straight home now and start storing up some sleep.’

‘Rebecca’s sleeping enough for three. She just texted she was going to stay up late and catch the end of EastEnders but then hit the hay.’

‘What is she, about ten weeks?’

‘Eleven.’

‘That’ll happen. So how come I’m only just finding out now?’

‘You know, early days, Rebecca didn’t want to jinx anything. It’s still on the QT, so you can’t start gossiping about it yet.’

‘Had the scan?’

‘That’s Monday week.’

‘That’s brilliant, you’ll love it. Won’t have a clue which way is up on the pictures. I remember with Hannah what I’d been telling everyone were her tiny little tootsies were actually kidneys, but you kinda see what you want to see. So you kept this all a bit quiet, when did you start?’

‘Not long ago really. You know we’d been talking about it for years, but it was around Guy Fawkes we thought we’d give it a proper try.’

‘Fireworks eh? Quick work. So I suppose it was our good example that inspired you, was it? My joyous exterior and blissful demeanour made it look like something to aspire to?’

‘Right, that’ll be it,’ said James. ‘Your two must have loved Christmas, did they?’

‘First year Hannah’s really got what’s going on. Bossing me around to make sure I’m following the correct etiquette to hold up our side of the bargain with Santa and the reindeer. Checking for his spies everywhere to make sure we’re not caught being naughty. Will’s still mostly oblivious, but we’ve got this great picture of him looking absolutely terrified of this weird-looking stranger in red he’s been abandoned with at the grotto in Debenhams.’

‘Was he OK?’ James asked, trying out his voice of fatherly concern.

‘Ah, he was fine. He’s terrified of his own shadow half the time, and fearlessly trying to hitch a ride on the back of the neighbour’s nasty dog the rest of the time,’ said Kam, his voice a mixture of insouciance and pride. ‘Horrible animal. Nice to everyone else, but always growls at me. I think he’s prejudiced.’

Kam knocked back the end of his beer. ‘Pint?’ he asked glancing quickly at his watch.

‘Sure.’

‘Good man.’

While his friend went to the bar, James sat agitatedly playing with his beer mat, worrying away at an edge damp and sticky with spilt lager. He looked up when a rowdy bunch of young lads, trainee somethings still not at home in their workwear suits, gave out a large camp ‘oooh!’ as two of their gang headed towards the Gents at the same time. As they came out again they were playing along with the joke, the first dabbing the corners of his mouth as if he’d swallowed something tasty, and the second walking as if doing so was causing him a degree of discomfort. By the time Kam got back with their pints, the beer mat was in tiny pieces on top of the empty crisp packet.

‘I didn’t tell you,’ said Kam sitting down, ‘there was this other guy with a keyboard that had a small little plant growing in the dirt and hair and dead skin collected underneath his Escape key. Claimed it was from a seed on a roll he’d eaten at this desk, but there was a suggestion he’d fixed it and brought one in he’d been working on at home. I would’ve believed it was genuine though, grubby bastard that one.’

James went quiet for a bit, and sipped on his beer and nibbled crisps for a while.

‘Did you ever have any trouble with your parents because of you and Kate?’ he finally asked, ‘Y’know cultural differences? Prompting a family crisis?’

‘Nah. Kate was a smart girl anyway, got gran on her side early on, and that cut out any “I don’t mind, it’s just what poor old nana-ji thinks” bollocks that anyone else could come up with. Anyway, we’re Hindus, which is like the C of E of Indian religions, anything goes most of the time.’

‘Kate’s parents were OK with it too?’

‘Pff,’ exhaled Kam leaning back on his stool, ‘I reckon they were horrified but too embarrassed to say so.’

‘And with the kids coming along no fall-outs there?’

‘Happy families, mate. All happy families. It’s like we’re colour-blind and living in one of Michael Jackson’s songs.’

‘So you’ve not had any major falling outs with parents or in-laws at all in the past ten years? That’s no help at all.’

‘Now I didn’t say we hadn’t had our tiffs. I was only talking about the racialist stuff.’

‘Oh really?’ James said perking up a little.

‘Kate and her mum have blazing rows. Totally out of nowhere they can just explode in front of everyone, one’s all “you never thought I was good enough”, the other’s all “you always try and push me away”. One thing I’ve learned is you don’t try and get in the middle of them when it kicks off though.’

‘And these rows, they can fester and linger after the event?’ asked James hopefully. ‘Loads of tension that’s never acknowledged?’

‘Nah. After about half an hour the blubbing really kicks in and they’re all huggy and kissy and telling each other “I love you”. Why you’d need to do that with people in your own family I’ll never know, but that’s their way. When the whole thing starts me and Dave usually just go into another room and watch football without talking much.’

‘Oh,’ sighed James, disappointed.

‘Family problems huh? Whose side?’

‘Well, it’s like this. It’s Rebecca’s dad.’

Pausing only briefly halfway through to get more drinks, James told Kam about Christmas Day, and the news about Howard’s arrest. He explained how she’d been upset about it, but didn’t usually want to talk about it much, but then got angry when her parents were acting like nothing had happened. He told Kam how Rebecca was pissed off because she was pregnant and everything should be about that right now, but there was this thing spoiling it a bit. And how he felt kind of the same way.

‘And do you think he was doing it?’ Kam asked.

This was the second time James had been asked that question. The first time it had been Rebecca, when they were sitting in together on New Year’s Eve. They’d been talking about the year ahead of them, and thinking that this time next year there would be three of them, and being up at midnight would probably be a daily occurrence. Then, in the middle of romanticising sleeplessness, Rebecca had gone quiet and asked him did he think her dad was gay.

His mistake had been how he’d reacted. He said, ‘What? Gay? I hadn’t really thought about that…’ in such a way that it was obvious that it was something he’d been thinking about a lot, and that he thought that Howard probably had done it. To him it had felt like the sort of thing you hear about all the time, the stuffy conservative family man with a double life, having angry self-loathing encounters in public parks. But he hadn’t wanted to let her know he was thinking that. It would have felt like providing proof that that was precisely what everybody who ever heard about it would think.

Rebecca didn’t say anything after his overly-mannered denial, but she seemed to shrink a little.

‘Would it be a problem if he was?’ he’d asked her.

‘He’s my dad,’ she’d told him. She said it wasn’t the gay thing that was the problem, it was the cheating aspect. If it was true. But what else could he have been doing?

He is the sort of man who would talk to strangers in a lavatory, James had pointed out, although he was pretty sure it took more than a remark about the weather and a bit of a peek to get arrested for cottaging these days.

‘It just makes everything complicated,’ she’d said.

James had told her that everything was going to be fine. He didn’t mention he’d been having sleepless nights waiting for something to appear in his dad’s paper. That he thought they’d dodged a bullet with the crime news in brief round-up that just mentioned several men had been arrested in the station toilets as part of a crackdown. Still, he knew in local newspaper terms, an ex-councillor in the nick was going to be trouble. He assumed Rebecca hadn’t made the connection yet. She wouldn’t have spent years hearing about how these stories got put together in the same way he had, the little battles between all the personalities involved. The likelihood that someone, somewhere, with a grudge would be out to stitch him up.

But it hadn’t happened yet, and so he just had to keep positive. There were topics he’d been getting good at avoiding. He was keeping quiet about all the crap going on at work, and focusing on the good stuff with the baby. He’d deleted from the laptop’s browser any trace of the research he’d done on the problems stress can cause during pregnancy – reading what he’d read about stress looked like it could be so stressful it would just make the risks they talked about in the articles all the more likely. No, he was going to make sure that Rebecca got through this as serenely as possible, and that was an important part of what being a good dad was going to be all about.

‘Well,’ James finally said in answer to Kam’s question, ‘I think if he was going to do that kind of thing he’d be more of a local park or common guy. Bit of fresh air and dog-walking to go with his blowing strangers. “Exercise, James! Important to get your exercise!”’

‘Ah but if he feels like degrading himself, wouldn’t a glory hole in a filthy public bog be the place to go? “As a successful businessman I’ve always appreciated a bit of rough trade!”’

‘But as he’s often told me, he’s a man that likes to do things face-to-face,’ said James.

‘Might be tricky if he’s on his knees or bending over…’

‘Good eye contact and a firm handshake are his watch words.’

‘What’s the hand shaking?’ asked Kam.

The two men spent the duration of the rest of a pint with smutty gags about Howard’s predicament, each more tenuous than the last, and each getting a bigger laugh. James couldn’t quite help thinking: what if Rebecca could hear him now? Or his parents, who’d endlessly made sure he knew better than the macho bullshit that goes around homophobia? But Jesus he’d needed this.

‘Bloody hell,’ said Kam, as they ran out of steam, ‘I thought your folks were screwed up, but poor old Becky’s trumped you, eh?’

‘Yeah, I guess so, said James. ‘Hey, what’s the angriest button on the keyboard?’

‘It’s the “alt grrr!”, pops, I told you that one in the first place.’

‘Oh yeah, fair enough. Pint?’

Chapter 8

‘Well congratulations, that’s lovely news! Of course we can’t really be friends any more, but I’ll try to remember to keep sending you a birthday text. Although I’m making no guarantees about one for the baby.’

‘Thanks. I live for those texts, whatever random month they come in. Last year I was blessed with messages in both April and October.’

‘I always get your day mixed up with the queen. Or somebody else, anyway…’

Rebecca knew they weren’t officially telling people outside family about the pregnancy for another week, but it wouldn’t count telling her old pal Sophie. She wouldn’t classify it as good news, and conceivably wouldn’t remember it at all as it didn’t make a direct impact on her life.

The two women had met at university, and their friendship had been one not quite of opposites attracting, but rather opposites reassuring each other that they were making the right decisions so they didn’t end up like the other. In Sophie, Rebecca had a friend who would do a lot of the things she wouldn’t, someone who took chances, would be spontaneous, inhale glamorous drugs when offered, and get involved in complicated affairs. And seeing the messes that Sophie ended up in as a consequence – how she felt her friend was trapped with an obsession with status and looks, constantly wrestling with the nagging idea there might be something else better out there – these made Rebecca feel happier about herself and her choices. It helped her remember she was getting what she wanted from life.

Sophie meanwhile had always said she couldn’t imagine how Rebecca didn’t go mad with the restricted life she lived. Looking at the wealth of experiences she’d had compared to those of her stay-at-home friend confirmed to Sophie that the drama in her life was worth it. However, all of Sophie’s other friends were people she’d met while pursuing her career or some form of excitement and were more like herself. It was nice to have somebody she could talk to about her latest trauma, who wouldn’t take the conversation and make it about themselves, or wouldn’t store up any admission of insecurity as a weapon for the next time they had a falling out.

‘You know you’ll never pass the birthday knicker test again now,’ Sophie told her.

Sophie had, since the age of nineteen, had a ritual. The annual Knicker Test. Back then she’d prepared for a big night at a university ball by spending money meant for books and food on lingerie from Agent Provocateur to impress her new boyfriend. But even money for books and food could only stretch so far, and all she’d bought had been a pair of knickers. Rebecca, who had the room in halls next to Sophie and would soon move into a student house with her, remembered being stunned at the price of them. It was more than she could imagine spending on pants for a lifetime. But they had looked and felt beautiful when she was examining them on Sophie’s cluttered desk, after her big trip to the shops to get them. They looked pretty amazing on Sophie too, Rebecca had had to concede, when her friend had walked out into the halls corridor wearing just them, a pair of heels, and a ratty old T-shirt bunched and tied above her waist. One of the other girl’s boyfriend’s, who’d popped over to revise a bit of French literature, seemed to think so too, much to the evident displeasure of his girlfriend.

The bra that would go with the pants would need to wait until she got another cheque from her parents or the student loans people, Sophie had said at the time. ‘Or you could just pop down to the by-pass looking like that, and make the money in no time,’ Rebecca had suggested. The rest of the big end-of-term night out had been fabulous for Sophie, and Rebecca remembered she’d had a pretty good time at her first ball too, although it did seem mainly to be a typical night of getting pissed and snogging the same people you always did, just in prettier clothes. The boys in their dinner jackets had seemed even more inclined than usual to pretending their fingers were guns and they were James Bond. Sophie and her boyfriend hadn’t lasted, and the bra had never been bought (‘Let’s face it, I don’t really need one with these bee stings anyway,’ Sophie had reflected), and the knickers had been wrapped up in the crepe paper and box they had come in. But every year they were taken out on Sophie’s birthday and tried on, to make sure she was managing to look as good as she had at nineteen. And she’d pretty much managed it. There was a year in her late twenties when the heels had started getting a little higher to get the same effect, and she wouldn’t do the test without just a touch of make-up, but she was still happy with the outcome.

Sophie seemed to be under the impression that this test was something everybody did. For years Rebecca had wondered how Sophie could even imagine needing to do such a thing every birthday, and what it was her friend was worried about. Sophie always looked great – a walking advert for the slimming effects of a vodka diet. But, at about the same time there was an increase in the height of the heels that Sophie needed to get the right level of bum pertness, Rebecca had noticed maybe not everything in the mirror was where it had once been. It gave her more of a jolt than she expected, never having been that worried about her looks, and always assuming that what she had she’d keep and she’d keep what she had. Her reaction to this development had been that maybe it was another sign that it was time to start thinking about a family, rather than to reach for the taller stilettos.

‘I’ve got tits!’ said Rebecca.

That was one of the main things she liked about talking to Sophie. She could say things like that without either of them batting an eyelid, whereas everyone else looked at her as if their sweet old nan had told a filthy joke, causing her to blush like a schoolgirl.

‘That can happen when you get hideously fat I hear,’ Sophie replied.

‘But that’s the thing! You wouldn’t notice the difference right now, weight-wise. I look exactly the same as I always do. Except I’ve got these breasts that have appeared out of nowhere.’

‘An instant boob job?’

‘Yep.’

‘Lucky bitch.’

‘It’s terrible really,’ Rebecca said. ‘People have been noticing them. It’s like being thirteen again, I’m walking everywhere with my arms folded across my chest trying to hide that they’re there.’

‘Would you like me to take you shopping for a training bra?’

‘Twice different guys in the office have asked if I’ve got a new outfit.’

‘Meaning, I hadn’t noticed them before.’

‘I know! I’ve seen them sneaking peeks as I walk past. This is entirely new for me.’

‘Well dear,’ said Sophie, ‘if you hadn’t been the only non-virgin in the country to insist that Wonderbra’s weren’t for you because they wouldn’t be as comfortable as your ratty old ones, you might have experienced this when you had a chance to do something with it.’

‘I think some of the older women in the office have noticed too and they’ve worked out what’s going on.’

‘Trust an embittered old hag to spot these things. Shouldn’t you tell someone before they sack you first to save on the maternity pay?’

‘They couldn’t do that could they?’ asked Rebecca. The silence at the other end of the line made her think it was the sort of thing Sophie might try and do.

‘I’m telling them next week, after the scan,’ Rebecca continued, ‘they’re always lovely about these things. At least, they always seem to be lovely.’

‘And so what else is new with you?’ Sophie asked. ‘Aside from that husband of yours being like a fumbling adolescent around your new jugs?’

Rebecca thought about mentioning that the whole issue of sex with James had got a bit cagey since the pregnancy was discovered. Sophie would be horrified and fascinated, but she didn’t want to confirm her friend’s suspicions of the horrors of family life too much. The stuff with her dad, Sophie would love too, and want all the gory details of. Rebecca would be able to say anything she wanted about it, without any judgements or repercussions from her friend, just her usual blunt ‘telling it like it is’ declarations getting to the heart of the matter. It might be helpful, ahead of the weekend’s Sunday lunch playing Happy Families. She could tell her everything she’d been bottling up for the last month.

‘No, that’s it. Nausea, knockers, not much else,’ she finally said.

The part of the conversation about her was now officially finished. Sophie could get on to the main purpose of her call, without fear of interruption.

‘Well, work has been hell for me. There’s this horrible sexual harassment case with my boss going through internal procedures at the moment. I mean really, it’s just a bit of fun, and if he doesn’t like it he shouldn’t dress like he does around the office. But of course, you can’t say that to them…’

With the careful precision of a bomb disposal expert who’s just had five pints, James guided his house key towards the front door lock. Just a couple of goes dinked the metal disc of the Yale lock before he heard the crunch of the key finding its home. He turned it 360 degrees for the first click, and again for the double lock, before gently leaning his frame against the door to ease it open silently. Inside he twisted the knob to retract the locking mechanism into the door as he closed it gently, and then slowly released it into the jamb before slipping down the snib with a muffled click. He worried that maybe coming into the house so quietly might actually be a bad idea – that Rebecca might get a fright if the first she heard of him coming in was when he got to the bed. She might confuse him with a silent cat burglar. Then he walked into the coat stand, kicked over her heeled boots, and sent two umbrellas clattering onto the wood floor.

‘Sorry! Sorry,’ he whispered as loudly as he could, ‘just me. I’ll get some water. Sorry!’

Navigating the kitchen, the stairs and a wee sitting down, James crept into bed next to his wife.

‘Good work, darling,’ she mumbled into her pillow, ‘if you hadn’t knocked over the plants, I’d have been worried you were a rapist.’

‘Thanks. It was umbrellas.’

‘Your knees are freezing.’

‘You’ll help me warm up,’ he said softly into her hair, snuggling into her back. A low guttural growl emerged as he slid his arm over her side and his hand found a home on her breast.

‘How was Kam?’

‘Good, good. Seething slightly about everything as usual.’

‘Did you tell him?’

‘Yep.’

‘Was he excited?’

‘Oh y’know, he squealed, we hugged, we both cried. Guy stuff. How was your evening?’

‘Sophie.’

‘You tell her?’

‘Yep.’

‘Excited?’

‘Same reaction as Kam. Although she did also mention I’m stuck with you now I’ve ruined myself for other men.’

‘I did that to you a long time ago,’ he said, squashing his groin in closer to her bum.

‘Easy, tiger,’ she said. She knew that he knew that any time spent talking to Sophie was likely to get her a little…revved up. But she had just been in a lovely cosy snooze when he’d woken her with the constant tip-tapping of his key against the edges of the lock when he was trying unsuccessfully to hit the target to get the door open. That doesn’t bode well, she smiled to herself, as she backed further into him, her foot sneaking between his calves.

‘Everything all right in there?’ he asked as his hand trailed down from her breast, and over her belly. He wasn’t going to mention it at a time like this, but he was pretty sure Bompalomp was making his presence felt now on her lower half as well as on the top.

‘All good. Ben & Jerry’s with crumbled ginger nuts on top makes us both happy.’

‘You seem pretty awake now,’ he said, his hand travelling further down towards her thigh, ‘and sexily un-nauseous’.

‘What’s that?’ she asked as an insistent nudging presence reached her lower back.

‘Well, you know. I’m awake, you’re half-conscious, it’s been a while.’

‘You’re not too…?’

‘Worried about waking up Bomp? I was being silly. The blighter’s big enough to look after itself now. Isn’t it?’

‘I was going to say pissed.’

She turned around to face him, slipping her hand into the elastic of his underpants.

‘So all it takes for you to get over being a bit squeamish is four pints and a bit of male bonding?’ she said with a smile. ‘Wish I’d known earlier.’

‘Five pints actually. And some crisps. And Maryland Chicken from outside the station.’

He leant in and they kissed. He thought that he couldn’t remember the last time they’d had a proper snog. He couldn’t understand why they’d left it so long as he manoeuvred his hand around her pajama buttons.

Then he jerked his hips slightly as she snapped the waistband of his briefs back in place.

‘Go brush your teeth first,’ she said, and smiled as he hopped out of bed and across the cold floor to the bathroom, tail wagging ahead of him.

Chapter 9

‘Gay men are being prosecuted in a way that’s almost Victorian – no, worse than that, it’s positively Thatcherite,’ said Margaret.

‘I think the point is rather it’s not gay men, it’s just men,’ Howard replied. ‘Ordinary decent men. And it’s this post-New Labour Tory party that are kowtowing to the arse-backwards political correctness, which is getting us caught up in it.’

‘Funny you should mention the word Victorian,’ said Ben. ‘Of course it was the architecture of the public lavatory system they built, with typically twee facilities that looked like traditional countryside homes, that gives us the term cottages for public toilets. This evolved into the term still used today, although the internet is making it somewhat obsolete.’.

‘Kids were flashed all the time when you were at school, Becky,’ said Howard. ‘I didn’t see it doing you any harm. You had a shriek and a giggle and ran away from the funny little men. They’d be on the comedy shows all the time, being chased around the park.’

‘Not that your father is a flasher of course, Becky. He’s not a flasher, James,’ Penny chipped in.

‘I was wearing my mac on the night mind you. Maybe that’s it, they were prejudiced against my coat!’

‘With all this emphasis on family values that this throwback Prime Minister throws about to justify his raping of the social security system, ridiculous prosecutions such as this were just waiting to happen,’ said Margaret.

‘My Burberry is a victim of society!’

‘I think I’d like to make a really powerful sculpture piece on this,’ said Margaret.

‘It’s those Lib Dems probably, bit of power and they turn into complete Nazis. See it a lot at work. Never let your secretary take on the title of Office Manager is my advice, this sort of thing happens every time.’

‘“Tea rooms” was another term used by the gay community in the United States, meaning roughly the same thing. It’s interesting that they share a similar somewhat genteel quality.’

‘Would anyone like a cup of tea? Or a sandwich?’

Rebecca and James sat leaning into each other in the middle of the overstuffed sofa in her parents’ living room, watching the grown-ups talk at them; Howard, in one of the big leather armchairs with Penny perched anxiously on the arm rest, Margaret sat across from him on the matching one, and Ben by the window gazing through the net curtains.

‘We’ve just finished dinner, Mum,’ said Rebecca.

‘A piece of cake then? A biscuit?’

‘Don’t think I could even manage that, Penny,’ said James. ‘Overdone it on the Wellington again. It was delicious.’

‘Not generally believed to be named after the warmongering duke, despite public perceptions,’ murmured Ben from the window. ‘It’s a name that really only appeared in the sixties, and was obviously embraced by the social-climbing middle classes for their dinner parties where they wouldn’t want to serve anything too “continental”.’

If James could have reached his dad to kick him in the shins, he would have done.

‘It was fabulous, Penny. A classic,’ he said instead.

‘The secret’s wrapping the beef in a pancake. I saw it on Saturday Kitchen.’

The room went quiet again.

‘So you’ll run an interview in the paper next week then? Respected businessman slandered in police sting,’ said Howard. ‘Hey, maybe PC sting? Police being politically correct and all that?’

‘Tory chief a victim of institutional homophobia,’ said Margaret.

‘These days I’m just an ordinary party member. But I suppose Chief’s a fair description for a headline – they do still look to me to advise on the big stuff. Although I don’t think it’s right I’m a victim…’

‘Top Tory fights prosecution persecution,’ mused Ben.

‘Hey, he’s a smart cookie that husband of yours isn’t he? Wasted on the local rag, he could get a job at the Mail, you know.’

‘He knows people at the Guardian, I keep telling him to call.’

‘He’d run rings around them at the old Grauniad. Say, Lord Beaverbrook, can I offer you a post-prandial cigar?’

‘Oh. I’ve got my own blend thank you,’ said Ben tapping the tobacco tin in his shirt pocket. ‘I prefer the lighter –’

‘What kind are they?’ Margaret interrupted.

‘Montecristos, I believe,’ said Howard.

‘Cuban?’

‘Of course! Viva la revolución!’

‘I’ll have one with you, Howard. Of all the forms for tobacco, cigars are the least dangerous, personally and environmentally.’

‘Is that so? I’ll get you one, rolled on the thighs of some big hairy old communist.’

‘Of course access to them is still often restricted to men in this fragile phallocentric society.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll make it a large one. You’re all right there, Penny? You wouldn’t want one of these filthy things…’

‘I’ll just get the dishwasher loaded.’

‘You know,’ said Ben, ‘the idea of rolling cigars on thighs is something of a myth but does have a basis in cultural…’

The last of the parents filed out of the room, leaving Rebecca and James alone with just the Sunday concert on Classic FM to break the silence.

‘What,’ asked James, ‘the fuck. Was that?’

They hadn’t been told his parents would be joining them for lunch. Presumably because her parents had known there was no way they would have shown up if they did, thought Rebecca. Actually, that wasn’t true, she realised. She and James would have been there early, making a concerted effort to ensure the two sets of parents had no opportunity to talk to each other about anything, especially politics after what had happened the last time.

‘Can’t quite believe Mum tried to discuss spring fashions with your mum.’

‘That was a lecture of sweatshops waiting to happen…’

‘What was that joke Dad tried to tell? Where you needed to have worked out the punchline was an anagram of botulism?’

‘I don’t know what was more painful, the silence or the polite laughing. He didn’t seem to notice, though. Naturally.’

‘And it was great being held up like a specimen. The future of humanity, right here under my jumper.’

‘And urgh! The childhood anecdotes.’

‘Actually that bit was quite funny,’ said Rebecca.

‘I didn’t see you laughing when Howard mentioned how you used to do an all-out ballet performance whenever anyone visited the house. Including the guy who was just there to read the meter.’

‘Shut it, bedwetter.’

‘The vision of you running at the poor bastard, who didn’t know he was supposed to catch you as part of the routine…’

‘Are you worried about that? Is it making you feel anxious? Would you feel better if we got a rubberised undersheet for tonight?’

‘Leave it, twinkle-toes,’ he said in his gruffest Sweeney voice.

‘It was a sweet story, that’s all. And now I know why you’re always so keen to keep on top of the laundry.’

Hearing about an entirely forgotten spate of bedwetting when he was six, and not really coping with a shift from living in France to Germany, had been surprising, thought James. But not as surprising as hearing Margaret and Howard rallying behind the same side of one cause. Well, near enough the same side. Margaret must have let Howard get away with declarations that ‘queers’ could do what they wanted with their private lives because she assumed he was reclaiming the term, while when she mentioned ‘your community’ Howard must have assumed she was talking about Neighbourhood Watch and the golf club, rather than a group running the gamut from TV queens to muscle Marys.

‘Your dad and my mum. There may’ve been weirder coalitions, but I can’t think of any,’ he said.

‘I don’t know what the hell he’s doing,’ Rebecca sighed. ‘I don’t think Dad even knows what politically correct means, he just uses it for anything lefties do that he disagrees with. I mean arresting people in toilets was always more of a Tory thing wasn’t it?’

‘Still, there’s always a chance it’ll break down any minute. All it needs is a casual statement on the world as it is from one of them and boom, the truce is off, back in your respective trenches.’

‘What was it last time? Dad and his “say what you like about apartheid, but…” speech?’

‘I thought it was Margaret and her “she’s not your partner she’s your indentured slave” routine,’ said James.

‘Mum…’

There was a clatter from the kitchen as an overly-full tray of dirty pans grudgingly slid into the dishwasher.

‘I should go and give her a hand…’ Rebecca said.

‘I’ll come too.’

‘You stay there, it’ll be a chance for us to have a chat. You could go and join the grown-ups.’

‘Pff, I think I’ll just sit here gently rocking for a while instead. Thanks for the thought though, Becky.’

She gave him an evil stare for using her hated family nickname.

‘I am so putting your little finger in a glass of lukewarm water while you’re asleep tonight.’

Chapter 10

As Rebecca entered the kitchen, Penny had her back to her at the sink, her shoulders heaving. Rebecca had frozen on the spot not knowing whether to go to her mum and give her a hug, or back away and leave her to her tears in private. Then she heard the splash and the clang of the roasting tin as she manoeuvred it in the water to open a new line of attack on grafted-on vegetables and realised it was scrubbing rather than blubbing causing it.

‘Need a hand?’

‘Oh hi, darling, just getting these out of the way while everyone’s busy. Can I get you anything?’ asked Penny.

‘I’m fine.’

‘James need anything? A beer?’

‘He’ll be fine.’

Penny went back to her pan. As far as Rebecca could see it was clean enough, but her mum was attacking it again with a little green scrubber. She thought it might have been a sign of stress, but acknowledged that it was just as likely the reason all her mum’s kitchenware was spotless after years, and theirs looked like it had been bought fire-damaged.

‘Are you OK, Mum?’ she asked.

‘Me, I’m absolutely fine. Lunch went quite well I thought. Never quite sure what to cook for Margaret and Ben. I thought about a curry, but it didn’t seem right on a Sunday afternoon.’

‘It was delicious,’ Rebecca said.

‘It must have been three years since we saw them last. Margaret’s looking very well. She was saying she’s going to be sixty this year. You’d never think it to look at her, and not a spot of make-up. And good for her for still wearing mini-skirts. I wouldn’t dare these days…’

‘You look great,’ Rebecca said.

‘Thanks darling, and you too. Still feeling tired?’

‘It’s getting better. And no real sickness to speak of either. You’d hardly think there was anything wrong with me…’

‘I remember with your brother, my morning sickness didn’t really start until the second trimester, so you might not be out of the woods yet. Awful it was, like an alarm clock. Every time I started getting sick it was time for your father to get up. Then I’d be fine again in the day and then I’d feel a bit queasy when it was time for Nationwide.’

Always about you, Rebecca thought to herself, her inner teenager bristling.

‘Any signs you need a new wardrobe yet?’ asked Penny ‘As soon as you do we’ll go out and get some new things. Nothing too pregnanty just yet. We could invite Margaret if you’d like.’

Rebecca scrunched up her face, her nose an accordion of wrinkles.

‘Perhaps just you and your old mum then,’ said Penny, ‘halfway through a pregnancy might not be the time to be trying the boob-tube look.’

They smiled at each other conspiratorially. ‘My young mum, you mean,’ said Rebecca, feeling a little guilty for her earlier unsaid tantrum. She slid up onto a stool on the breakfast bar and started poking through the contents of the fruit bowl. ‘Are you OK with Dad taking all his dirty laundry out in public?’ she asked without looking up.

There was a blast of water as Penny turned on the tap to fill the kettle.

‘Well, he hasn’t done anything wrong, so he has to get that message across in whatever way he can.’

‘But it must be so humiliating for you,’ Rebecca said, her glance switching back and forth between her mother and a satsuma she was kneading between her fingers. ‘He asked you about it first didn’t he?’

‘Now don’t be like that, Becky, we’re just doing the right thing. And yes. Of course I knew. He mentioned he was thinking of writing a letter to the paper.’

‘A letter to the editor he said? I’m guessing he glossed over his hopes for front-page headlines. Typical. Next thing you know he’ll be dragging you into it – standing next to him in press photos. The loyal wifey standing by her husband.’

Penny paused as she considered her collection of teapots.

‘There’s someone from the Focus coming around tomorrow lunchtime.’

‘Mu-um!’

‘Then that’ll be it, Becky, I promise. He’ll have had his say.’

‘And the police will just go away because he’s got his picture in the press?’

‘Maybe they’ll let him off with a warning.’

‘They tried to do that already.’

‘But that was on their terms, he’ll feel better if he’s in charge of the situation. You know him, he just needs to find a way to feel in control.’

The kettle boiled. Penny warmed the chosen teapot, and reached for the teabags from the porcelain jar proclaiming TEA. Rebecca lifted her hand to her face and was momentarily distracted by the waft of citrus from her fingers; the surface of the satsuma in her other hand was pocked all over by her having absently stabbed it with her thumbnail.

‘You don’t think he did it do you?’ she asked.

‘Becky!’

‘I’m just saying… Soon as it hits the papers, it’ll be “no smoke without fire”.’

‘This is just one of those unfortunate accidents. It’s a misunderstanding, and you know your father’s sense of injustice. He can be very compassionate. He’d be just as cross if it had happened to James, or anybody…’

‘But James wouldn’t be…’ Rebecca stopped the thought before it got any further. That James wouldn’t be loitering in public lavatories because he isn’t…

Penny plucked two clean, matching mugs from the cupboard and gave each one a splash of milk.

‘James has been very good actually,’ Penny continued. ‘He’s been very supportive. Your father was saying he’ll make a very good dad, was even wondering again if he might want to join the company at some point, now he’s going to be a family man.’

‘He’s been talking to James?’

‘Oh you know – not talking. Texting, emailing. Can’t keep your father away from the computer…’

‘He didn’t set this up, did he? With his dad?’

‘That was all your father’s idea. He’s just been bouncing ideas for the wider campaign off him, and you know, probably every other project he’s in the middle of at the moment.’

Rattled, Rebecca stood up. Her husband hadn’t said a word about this. But she didn’t know what to do next. Go and see James? Find out what on earth he’d been doing? What did she mean, there was ‘a wider campaign’? Angry thoughts flashed through her head like a faulty fluorescent light. No one was telling her anything. These ridiculous things were going on in her own family and no one was telling her. They were treating her like…they were treating her like they did her mother. She was about to let rip, and James was going to get the brunt of it, when Margaret came back into the house followed by the men, Howard barking away. Rebecca couldn’t do it in front of her.

‘Tea’s just made,’ said Penny brightly.

‘Would you have any filter coffee?’ asked Margaret.

‘I’ll get the caffetiere,’ said Penny.

James ambled into the kitchen from the living room, alerted to the bustle and voices coming back inside.

‘Finished your plans for world domination, guys?’ he asked.

‘Bloody freezing out there!’ said Howard. ‘Old Fidel had the right idea, he didn’t have to put up with blinking weather like this.’

‘We were just discussing the horror of becoming grandparents,’ said Margaret with an exaggerated grin, used only on the rare occasions when she wasn’t taking herself too seriously. ‘Thrown on the scrapheap of Western culture’s disposable youth culture.’

‘Totally irrelevant, we’ll be,’ chuckled Howard. ‘Maggie was saying we should move to India and we’d be ruling the roost.’

James stood behind Rebecca. She was ignoring him, but not in a way that would make it obvious to their parents in the room. Or even to him.

‘We’re just jealous of you,’ said Penny to Rebecca, ‘getting to become a mum for the first time.’

‘You’re going to have a wonderful experience. Very energising except when you’re exhausted. Your body can do the most amazing things,’ said Margaret.

‘Although I’m not sure I’d want to go through birth again,’ said Penny, ‘but it’s probably different these days.’

‘We don’t have to worry about that stuff too much do we, James, eh?’ said Howard. ‘Thank goodness. What’s that thing they say? About it being like squeezing a watermelon out of the old John Thomas? Excuse the language…’

‘If you’d seen the size of James’s head when he was born – and that I came out if it with barely a centimetre tear – you’d understand how the human body creates its own miracles every day,’ continued Margaret.

James put the word ‘tear’ in the context of what they were talking about. Looking at Rebecca, he tried to ascertain silently that they weren’t really talking about what he thought they were talking about. And also if what was being talked about really was what he didn’t want to even think about ever being talked about, could she do something to just stop it? Rebecca looked back at him with a shrug that said yep, we’re talking about precisely what you’re thinking about. And this is what happens – deal with it.

‘Nothing miraculous about Becky,’ said Penny. ‘I got to know about every junior doctor in the hospital the way my stitches kept popping’.

James bit down on the end of his thumb and tried not to hear what was being said.

‘You had that blow-up rubber ring to sit on didn’t you? I gave it to the kids when they were older for the paddling pool,’ said Howard.

Even Howard’s joining in? thought James. This conversation cannot get any more painful.

‘Of course the labial massages Ben gave me every day throughout the pregnancy helped with that,’ said Margaret.

A sound emerged from James, that was somewhere between a squeal and a whimper. Meanwhile Howard gave Ben a quizzical look. Ben, as usual, wasn’t really paying attention.

‘On that lovely thought, I think it’s probably we time we hit the road,’ said James. ‘Not that it’s reminded me of anything I have to do, just…well, just I need to go and wash out my ears with corrosive acid.’

Chapter 11

It wasn’t as soon as they got in the car that the row started. James at first was too excited to be out of there to notice his cheerful observations were hitting a wall of silence.

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