Chapter Ten

With the arrival of her mother looming, Natalie found a long list of things to do after she left Meg’s that would delay her having to go home and face up to that particular reality.

First of all she went to see Jess, woke her up to be precise, and asked her if she would like to come with her on her mission to cheer up Meg in the morning, not mentioning that it was also a mission to cheer up Jess too. Natalie had waited guiltily in Jess’s baby-clothes-strewn living room while Jess had gone to wash her face and wake herself up.

‘God, I’m sorry,’ Natalie said when Jess finally returned. ‘I can’t believe how inconsiderate I am to barge in unannounced. You must think I’m a thoughtless cow. I am a thoughtless cow, clearly.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Jess said, pushing a pile of clothes off what was, it turned out, a stylish azure blue sofa and gesturing for Natalie to sit down. ‘Sorry about the mess. Funny thing is that I am not an untidy person. The flat is quite small and normally I like it to be neat, but every now and then I have a sort of go-slow and it all piles up until I can’t stand it any more and I have to tidy up in a frenzy.’

Natalie looked around the room; it was modern and light with full-length windows. It was a nice apartment, a proper first home for a young family. The kind of place that made Natalie wonder how, and more importantly why, she’d acquired her big old place just for herself until Freddie came along. Yes, her house was quite grand now she had renovated it and she was very proud of it, but somehow this flat, this home, bought together by two hopeful people looking towards the future seemed far more appealing than her place just then.

‘Oh, I don’t care about mess,’ she told Jess, shrugging off the sensation of jealousy. ‘I’m far more interested in getting you to come out on an adventure with me and Meg!’

But like Meg, Jess had not been instantly enthusiastic about the project, which had surprised and disappointed Natalie. She couldn’t believe that any red-blooded woman with a pulse would pass up a chance at free shopping, not to mention hot sex. But Jess had looked hesitant and non-committal.

‘It will be fun!’ Natalie said, feeling her attempt at rousing enthusiasm drop like a lead balloon. ‘Remember fun?’ she asked Jess.

Jess’s smile was wistful.

‘I want to come,’ she said, her words elongated on a yawn. ‘But what about Jacob?’

‘What about Jacob’s dad?’ Natalie replied instantly. ‘It’s Saturday tomorrow. He’ll be at home, won’t he?’

‘I haven’t left him before,’ Jess said.

‘I haven’t left Freddie before either, but we all need a bit of time away from them and any mothers that might be coming to stay. It’s not wrong, you know, to have a break. And it will do Lee good to see exactly what you have to cope with on your own all day. Come on, Jess, you need a pick-me-up!’

‘You’re right,’ Jess said, seeming to steel herself at the prospect. ‘Of course you are right.’

Technically Jess’s flat was on Natalie’s way home, but she walked right past her own house and on into Stoke Newington without even a sideways glance.

It was almost dark by the time she headed into the bookshop on the high street, remembering the title of the book that Alice had told her she simply must read several months ago, and deciding that now was the very time to finally buy it. And for a moment on the way back she even considered taking Freddie for a twilight walk around the park, but then decided that no matter how much she wanted to delay going home and seeing her mother she was not prepared to brave muggers and druggies to do it. After all, she would have to go home sometime. Even if she booked her and Freddie into the Ritz for the night Sandy would still be there in the morning, waiting like some shadowy old blinged-up spider.

Natalie chided herself as she walked home; perhaps she was being too harsh on her mother. The woman she had spoken to last night had seemed different. Not too judgemental and even quite motherly at one point. Perhaps it was possible that in the months since Natalie had last seen Sandy she would have grown out the brassy gold highlights, toned down the tan and begun to realise that cleavage is much less alluring when your skin looks like an aged orange crocodile’s. It was possible that Sandy might have realised that the years she’d spent dragging Natalie from town to town and school to school as if she were an inconvenient piece of luggage that got in the way of her social life, and telling anyone who cared to listen how hard it was being a young widow on her own, had been a terrible mistake. Perhaps Sandy was planning to try to rectify her failings as a mother before she died of lung cancer or skin cancer or liver failure, or all three. Just maybe, Natalie dared to hope as she put her key in the door of her house, the woman who was waiting for her might be wearing a twinset and letting the grey grow through her hair and chewing Nicorette gum.

After all, if there was a chance she could get Meg into a pair of camiknickers then anything was possible.

‘Hello?’ Natalie called out as she pushed the door open and eased the buggy over the front step. The hallway was quiet and empty except for Gary’s tools which were neatly stacked just to the left of the door, his collection of dust sheets carefully folded beside them. It looked like he had finished early for the day, but then if he had why was his stuff still here waiting to be loaded onto the van?

‘Hello?’ Natalie went to the bottom of the stairs and looked up.

‘We’re up here, darling!’ The sound of Sandy’s voice echoed down the stairwell. ‘Your gorgeous electrician is helping me with my luggage.’

Her hopes plummeting, Natalie scooped Freddie out of the buggy and hurried up the stairs to the peals of her mum’s flirtatious laughter.

Poor Gary was standing by Natalie’s bedroom door, the palm of his hand on the back of his neck, looking like a fly caught in a web, utterly powerless to flee.

‘Sorry,’ Natalie said, hurrying past him into the room. Sandy was laying her clothes out on the bed.

‘You’ll need to move some of the stuff out of this wardrobe,’ she told her daughter without looking up. ‘I’ll never fit all my things in.’

Natalie looked at the size of her mum’s suitcase with dumb horror. It was not an overnight bag.

‘Mum, this is my bedroom,’ she exclaimed, all too aware that she sounded like a petulant teen. ‘You are going in the guest room.’

For the first time since she had arrived Sandy looked up at her daughter.

‘There he is!’ Sandy dropped an armful of clothes with a clatter of coat hangers. ‘There’s my very firstborn grandson.’ She rushed around the bed and before Natalie knew it she had Freddie in her arms.

‘Oh look at him, isn’t he handsome? He must take after his father – if only we could get a look at his father.’

‘Mum!’ Natalie hissed. ‘Don’t be so stupid.’

‘I’ll be off then,’ Gary said, looking longingly down the stairs.

‘No you won’t, will he, Natalie?’ Sandy’s commanding tone stopped him in his tracks. ‘You’ll stay for dinner, won’t you, Gary? Let me thank you for all your help. The cabbie wouldn’t take euros, Natalie, and as my own daughter wasn’t here to greet me I had to rely on the kindness of strangers to get me out of a fix. You owe Gary forty-eight pounds and seventy pence plus tip.’

‘Oh God, I’m sorry.’ Natalie looked apologetically at Gary. ‘I’ll get that for you right now.’

‘No you won’t because Gary isn’t leaving now, Gary is staying for dinner,’ Sandy insisted, flashing him a capped-tooth smile. ‘I’m going to cook paella and bring a little Spanish sunshine into this gloomy old mausoleum my daughter insists on living in, Gary. And you absolutely have to stay because if you leave me alone with Natalie we shall fight and fall out before midnight. It’s guaranteed, isn’t it, dear?’

‘Is it any wonder?’ Natalie mumbled, glancing up at Gary. ‘Mum, it’s Friday night, Gary’s probably got something on haven’t you, Gary?’ she said, surprising herself by the sudden hope that he hadn’t. Anything, even sitting through her mother’s attempts to cop off with him, would be better than being alone with her.

‘Um.’ It was obvious that Gary was trying to make up an excuse, but he delayed too long to sound convincing and eventually had to concede that he hadn’t. ‘Just telly and a takeaway,’ he admitted.

‘Then you’ll stay won’t you, Gary?’ Sandy all but shouted. ‘Dinner with two beautiful women over a quiet night in – there’s no contest is there?

‘Um,’ Gary said again uncomfortably, clearly caught between the desire to be polite and the urge to run several hundred miles away. ‘Well . . .’

‘Good, that’s settled then,’ Sandy said, stitching Gary up with the flourish of an expert. ‘It’s so nice to have a man at a dinner table. It gives cooking real meaning, I always think.’

‘Right.’ Gary looked down the stairs at his neatly stacked tools. ‘I’ll just go and tidy up.’ And he was gone.

It took Natalie quite some time to persuade her mother to move out of her bedroom and into the guest room. In actual fact she didn’t bother to try to persuade her. As Sandy hung things up in her wardrobe Natalie took them out again and relocated them to the other room. Finally, Sandy realised what was happening and admitting defeat wheeled her gigantic suitcase across the hall.

As Natalie sat on a chair in the corner of the spare room with Freddie, watching but not listening to the constant stream of sound that came out of Sandy’s mouth, she realised that she should have known that seeing her mother again was always going to be the same, devoid of all emotion or sentiment. But despite everything that Natalie had experienced in her relationship with her mother she felt disappointed, which in turn made her feel like an idiot for expecting anything about Sandy to be different. For some reason, after years of parting and then reacquainting herself with the woman, she still half expected a reunion with her mother to involve hugs or kisses, or at least some sign that the two of them were emotionally connected to each other in some way. Instead, Sandy was acting as if they had last seen each other only yesterday, and that the grandson she had only just found out existed was merely a pleasant diversion. Natalie had no idea who the kindly and concerned-sounding woman she had spoken to on the phone yesterday was, but it was not this woman, not her mother.

On the way down to the kitchen Natalie paused on the stairs and looked back at her mother. ‘By the way, Gary thinks I’m married to Freddie’s dad who works abroad,’ she told her bluntly.

‘If you say so,’ Sandy said simply, and Natalie knew in this one respect she could trust Sandy. After all, her mum was a woman who built almost her entire life on a series of what Sandy called ‘little white lies’, from her real age to how much she had in the bank. Natalie knew that Sandy – the original mistress of disguising the truth – wouldn’t blow her cover story or even bother to ask why she had one in the first place.

Why, Natalie found herself wondering as she lowered Freddie into his cot, had she invented a cover story in the first place? What exactly was wrong with the bare facts of her life? She was a woman on her own who’d had a brief affair that had resulted in a baby. She lived in the twenty-first century. Nobody really cared about her circumstances, so why did she feel this subterfuge was necessary? Natalie had a stack of reasons and excuses she could trot out blithely to anyone who asked, but the reality was that she was concealing a deeper truth. She had never been very sure, not even when she was a tiny girl, that the real her was good or interesting enough to be loved by anyone, certainly not her father and possibly even her mother. Maybe even especially her mother.

Dinner was amazingly pain-free.

Natalie’s mother had been right. With Gary there they did not fight, principally because Sandy was far more interested in Gary than she was in her daughter. All Natalie had to do was to sit back and let her single allotted glass of wine numb her nerve endings while Sandy flirted with Gary. Or rather at him.

Occasionally Natalie considered rescuing the poor man from Sandy’s barrage of compliments and innuendo. But it was a dog-eat-dog world and frankly she’d rather not focus her mother’s attention back on her. Instead, Natalie used the time to try to collect herself. She felt as if she had been blown in a million different directions and couldn’t quite remember where it was she had started out.

This gradually increasing sensation of slipping out of control of her own life had begun the minute that Alice had called her to tell her that Jack was back in town, Natalie decided. Until that moment she had been keeping a tight lid on top of all the unresolved issues and emotions she had concerning Jack, even in the face of Alice’s relentless questioning. But it now seemed that Jack was back and there was a very real threat that she wouldn’t be able to control what happened next. It was too much.

Natalie could cope with the electrics being ripped out, she almost enjoyed her long nights sitting up with Freddie. She welcomed her tentatively new relationship with the baby group members, and even her mother was manageable as long as she was preoccupied with Gary and half-cut. But the thought of seeing and speaking to Jack made her want to run away and hide in the airing cupboard. She was terrified of seeing him, almost as afraid as she was of not seeing him.

It wouldn’t be so bad if she had any idea what he was really like or who he really was. Instead, all she knew about him seemed to be based on lies, on some kind of elaborate performance. He wasn’t that sometimes shy, sometimes eccentric man determined to act on uncharacteristic impulse to spend time with Natalie. He couldn’t be that man she had talked to more honestly about herself than she had ever done with anyone, let alone any man, before. Because if he was that man, then he wouldn’t have disappeared without even bothering to call and apologise. The man she had such trouble forgetting didn’t really exist. And yet it was that man that Natalie couldn’t stop thinking about.

And what galled her the most was that she, a veritable expert in changing the person she was to fit all circumstances, had been fooled by someone playing exactly the same game whilst she – for once in her chameleon-like life – had been simply herself.

If only, Natalie wished, there was some way she could find out what Jack was really like before she had to tell him about his son. If she could just see him again, give herself a chance to let the scales fall from her eyes and examine his true identity, she was sure she would be able to manage her mixed feelings for him. The problem was that she knew, because all the evidence pointed that way, that he was no good, not for her and probably not for any of the many women he must approach on a regular basis, she knew that. But she didn’t feel it yet, because her overriding memory of him was entirely different. It was a memory of a man she thought she could have fallen for, given the chance.

Natalie had barely spoken to her dinner guest when just before ten the baby monitor crackled into life and Freddie began to cry.

‘He probably needs feeding,’ she said as she pushed her chair out from the table. She was surprised to find that her one largish glass of wine had gone immediately to her head and somewhere in the general locations of her knees. For a moment the corners of the room dilated and then contracted back into right angles as she sat down again unsteadily.

‘Bit of a dizzy spell,’ she said to Gary and Sandy who were watching her.

‘You stay put, love, get your sea legs back. He might just need a cuddle and a bit of a rock,’ Sandy said, brandishing the cigarette she had been threatening to light for the last five minutes. ‘Oh go on, darling, let Nana Sandy have a go.’

‘Nana Sandy?’ Natalie blinked. ‘Good God.’ She exchanged a smile with Gary, who seemed relieved that the glare of Sandy’s attention was no longer focused on him. ‘I suppose you can have a go, but just for the record if you take that thing,’ she jabbed her fork at Sandy’s cigarette, ‘within five miles of my son you will be on the first flight back to Spain. No smoking ANYWHERE in my house, understood?’

To Natalie’s surprise, having half expected her mother to choose nicotine over her grandson, Sandy placed the offending article regretfully on the table.

‘I’ll call you up if he won’t go back down,’ she said, turning the volume down on the monitor as she went out of the door. ‘After all, this is why I’m here, darling, isn’t it? To give you a break.’

‘Breakdown more like,’ Natalie mumbled as Sandy left the room.

‘Your mother certainly is a force of nature,’ Gary said with a small smile.

‘Trust me, there is nothing natural about that woman,’ Natalie told him bluntly.

‘You two always like that with each other?’ he asked her, lifting one eyebrow rather rakishly, Natalie thought. Gary was quite attractive after a glass of wine. Possibly even before it if you liked solidly built, capable-looking men who were a little shorter than average. It would certainly be hard to find a man who was more different from Jack. Whereas Jack was long-legged and lean, Gary was possibly only two or three inches taller than her, with broad shoulders and a muscular torso. He must be little bit vain, Natalie decided, otherwise he wouldn’t wear his T-shirts quite so tight, but in Gary she found it quite a charming quality. Jack had a surprisingly fair complexion despite his dark hair and eyes, while Gary’s skin was darker, a lightly tanned tone that contrasted well with his light grey eyes. As Natalie’s wine swilled around her momentarily empty head she decided she liked the look of Gary. He could be the perfect antidote to almost thin, stringy Jack – a broad, well-muscled, uncomplicated antidote.

‘I suppose we are,’ she answered with a one-shouldered shrug. ‘I haven’t really seen her that much since I was old enough to be able to escape her. It was because of Tiffany that I rang her. She made me realise that there was a vague possibility that I didn’t have the worst mother on the planet after all. Do you know how Tiff got on with the social worker today, by the way?’

‘She’s getting it all sorted, I think,’ Gary said. ‘But it’s a lot for her to manage on her own. She says she’s coping, but how can she be when she’s just a kid herself? Actually, I was thinking that maybe you could keep an eye on her if she needs an older woman to talk to?’

Natalie was surprised and rather touched that Gary had thought to ask her to watch out for Tiffany, even if he did take the edge off with the ‘older woman’ comment.

‘Of course I will,’ she said. ‘The alarming thing is that technically I am actually old enough to be her mother.’

‘You don’t look it,’ Gary said quietly, instantly redeeming himself from his previous minor indiscretion. ‘You look really great.’

Natalie couldn’t help but beam at the compliment.

‘Well, I think I’m doing quite well as long I remember not to turn into her.’ She nodded at the silenced baby monitor.

‘I quite like your mother in a way.’ Gary, who had visibly relaxed since Sandy had left the room, leaned back in the chair and stretched his arms over his head, not like the rather formal and shy man she was used to at all. ‘She’s very . . . ah . . . friendly,’ he added, pulling one corner of his mouth down on the last word. Natalie laughed.

‘Well, Gary, if I can promise you one thing about my mum it is that at some point before you finish working here she will ask you to have sex with her. That’s a given. You are exactly her type: younger, broad, strong and good-looking . . .’ Natalie trailed off as she realised her list of compliments had caused Gary’s shyness to return.

Natalie was warming rather dangerously to Gary. She hadn’t noticed any of those things about him before tonight – in fact, if anyone had asked what she thought about him she would have told them he was nice-looking, in that he looked ‘nice’. Nothing more than that. But now as she looked at him she found herself imagining the weight and mass of him under her hands.

‘The thing is,’ Natalie continued, ‘I don’t think Mum sees her prey as younger. I worked out a few years ago that she somehow got mentally stuck at her peak, somewhere in her forties I think. And since then whenever she looks in the mirror she still sees that woman, not the wizened old crone she is in reality.’

‘She looks all right for her age!’ Gary said gallantly.

‘Careful, Gary,’ Natalie teased him. ‘She’ll lure you into her boudoir yet!’

The pair of them laughed and Natalie felt quite floaty and mellow. Quite confident and womanly again. She had almost forgotten the still-sore place where her stitches had been, and the fact she was still wearing her stretch, wide-legged trousers from the gym that did absolutely nothing to restrain her failing tummy muscles. In fact, she felt quite good about herself when Gary Fisher smiled at her, and the spectre of Jack Newhouse that had haunted her all this time briefly diminished.

‘It’s nice that you stayed,’ she told Gary, hearing the drop in the tone of her voice, feeling the flutter of her unmade-up lashes and sensing that she was perilously close to flirt mode. ‘Thank you.’

Gary looked down at the table top.

‘Thanks for having me,’ he said, apparently enormously interested in his place mat. ‘Besides, although I’m quite a good cook it’s nice to be cooked for now and again. And it would have been a shame if you and your mum had fallen out on her first night here.’

‘Oh, there’s still time,’ Natalie said, glancing at the clock and then back at Gary. The two of them looked at each other across the table, and Natalie thought she must really be drunk because she felt the irresistible desire to lean across the table and kiss her electrician – with tongues and everything.

‘So when will you be finished?’ she said instead, forcing herself to sit back in her chair and wondering if Gary had noticed her moment of desire for him.

‘Another week and a half ?’ Gary hazarded a guess. ‘Maybe even a bit sooner.’

‘Oh really?’ Natalie was surprised. ‘That soon?’

‘I’ll miss coming here,’ Gary told her, tipping his near empty wine glass around and around so that the remnants of the liquid inside circled the bottom of the glass.

‘You will?’ Natalie said smoothly, almost flirtatiously, finding herself on the edge of that now so familiar precipice, the one she always seemed to climb just before she flung herself into some new, needless complication.

‘Yeah, I’ll miss this lovely old house. I hardly ever get to work on places like this. It’s really great that you’ve kept it as a house. If a developer had got his hands on it . . .’

And then all at once Natalie was free-falling again, plummeting downwards without any hope of reversing the action she was about to take, even though she knew in the seconds before she spoke that it was doomed to fail.

‘But the real question is,’ she said, hearing her soft purring voice as if it were an entity entirely detached from her brain, ‘will you miss me ?’

And then she leaned across the table, put her hand on the back of Gary’s neck and tried to pull his head, his lips, towards hers.

Gary, eyes wide with fearful mortification, resisted, his neck and shoulders resolutely rigid with horror.

Two or perhaps three seconds of excruciatingly perfect embarrassment passed as Natalie gradually came to her senses and realised too late what it was that she had done. It seemed to take an age for her to remove her hands from Gary’s person and sit back down in her chair.

For the first time in her adult life she was glad to see Sandy walking through the door.

‘No, it’s no good, he needs feeding,’ her mother said, stopping short as she entered the room as if she could somehow smell the atmosphere.

Natalie blinked to clear her vision and saw the look of naked terror still frozen on poor Gary’s face. She saw her mum trying very hard to stifle a giggle.

‘Oh well, thanks for trying, Mum,’ she said quickly, getting up from the table with a little stagger. ‘I’ll settle him.’

Gary stood up too.

‘And I’d better be going. Thanks for dinner, Mrs . . .’

‘Sandy, darling, and please – stay for coffee. I could use some company.’

Natalie was horrified to hear her mother use almost exactly the same tone with Gary as she just had. Sort of drunken and lecherous with a definite edge of needy desperation.

‘Ah no, I really have to go and feed the . . . fish. I’ve got fish.’ Natalie heard Gary mumble a succession of hurried and worried excuses as she left the heat of the kitchen and felt the cool sobering air of the hallway soothe her blazing cheeks.

‘I can’t believe that I’ve just made a pass at the help,’ she said to Freddie as she lifted him out of his cot. ‘I mean, he’s not even my type really. I don’t even fancy him and he certainly wouldn’t fancy me at the moment. The Blob from the Fat Lagoon, that’s what I am, little man.’ She unhooked her nursing bra and put Freddie to her breast, desperately wishing that she could somehow undo the last few minutes of her life.

What had she been thinking? She had not been thinking clearly at all, that was the problem. The wine had temporarily magnified her unresolved feelings about Jack, and for a minute or two there she had wanted somebody, anybody who was not Jack, to want her. It couldn’t have backfired worse. When she had touched him Gary had looked as if the thought of her advances had shrivelled his manhood entirely.

‘Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as I think,’ Natalie muttered, settling back in the feeding chair. ‘I mean, perhaps I didn’t come off as a sleazy desperado, just as a friendly employer.’ She remembered her hand on the back of Gary’s neck and the mortified look on his face.

‘Oh, who am I kidding,’ she said to Freddie. ‘It wasn’t as bad as it looked. It was worse. It’s my mother’s fault. She’s only been here five minutes and already she’s turning me into her. She’s a witch, Freddie. Your “Nana Sandy” is a witch.’

Natalie looked down at her son who had stopped suckling and was fast asleep, his tiny mouth a newly opened rosebud. ‘This has got to stop. I’m not just me any more. It actually does matter now what sort of trouble I get myself into. I might not feel like a grown-up but I have to act like one.’

Natalie put the palm of her right hand over her heart. ‘From now on I, Natalie Louise Curzon, absolutely promise you, Freddie . . . um . . . Mercury Curzon, here and now, that I will not turn into my mother and I will break free from the cycle. I will be the kind of mother you are not ashamed to have pick you up from school. I will buy a faux-fur gilet and a polo-neck top. I will never either have sex or attempt to have sex ever, ever again. And . . .’ Natalie took a deep breath. ‘I will deal with Jack Newhouse in a mature and rational way for your sake. I will be a good mother to you, Freddie Mercury Curzon, this I solemnly do swear. I absolutely will be the very best mother you can possibly have, considering you’ve got me.’

Natalie raised Freddie’s forehead to her lips and kissed him gently, breathing in his scent as she did so and finding that small oasis of peace that was always present whenever she and Freddie were alone and relaxed like this.

‘What I’ll do is just go downstairs,’ she told her son in a whisper as she laid him neatly back in the cot. ‘And act as if nothing happened. Like that time I accidentally had sex with the silk salesman in the stockroom. Then we can both forget about it and everything will all be fine again.’

But just as Natalie was at the top of the stairs she heard the front door gently closing as Gary made his escape.

‘He’s gone,’ Sandy said, appearing at the bottom of the stairs.

‘I can see that,’ Natalie said irritably.

‘The thing is, darling,’ her mother called up as Natalie turned on her heel, deciding that now was a good time for the oblivion of sleep, ‘if you’re going to have a fake husband it’s probably not a good idea to try to get off with your real-life electrician. Do you see?’

Natalie would have happily slammed her bedroom door shut, except for the fear of waking Freddie.

Somehow a really quiet and careful push did not achieve nearly the same satisfaction.