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‘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 (#ud707eb4c-7e91-5735-b5d5-a03577ffdb61)
‘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 (#ulink_461a3239-75c5-5da8-b05a-da5d882bcfb7)
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.
