Luckily for Dan, my second wind arrives when we open the door of what I was expecting to be a regular bedroom, only to find the hotel has upgraded us to perhaps the most luxurious suite I’ve ever seen in my life. And let me tell you, working for Calden, I’ve seen some luxurious suites in my time, but nothing compared to this.
“Oh, my God!” I stand openmouthed in the doorway. “This is our room?” I look around at the plush carpets, huge sofas, twinkling crystal lamps, champagne, and chocolates waiting for us.
“Our suite,” Dan corrects, leading me through a large doorway and into the bedroom, where rose petals have been strewn upon the bed and my silk La Perla nightgown is draped across the pillow.
“Now come here.” Dan pulls me toward him and, wrapping our arms around each other, we both fall, giggling, onto the bed.
Linda and Michael phone the next morning at eight o’clock. First the hotel phone rings and I refuse to let Dan answer it, knowing it can only be my in-laws and furthermore knowing they will want to come and see us to say good-bye. Then Dan’s mobile rings, and then mine.
We ignore them all.
At nine o’clock, as Dan is stepping out of the shower and I’m finishing my makeup, reception rings again to say we have visitors downstairs. Not that I’m surprised. This is a woman who thinks nothing of pulling me out of meetings when she wants to talk to me, so I hardly think she’s going to be put off by our not answering the phone. And of course Linda and Michael are downstairs. Where else would they be, for heaven’s sake?
Nor am I put out. How could I possibly be, given what she is like, and given what a wonderful wedding she threw for us yesterday?
Because the truth is, that although my wedding had almost nothing to do with me, although I was merely a participant and not a particularly important one at that, even I have to admit that Linda did an amazing job.
And so we talk on the phone to Linda and Michael, and ten minutes later we are on our way downstairs to have the final breakfast with them before going off on our honeymoon.
And over our final cup of coffee and last croissant Linda smiles at me. “One day,” she says, “you will have a daughter and she will get married, and then, please God, you will get to have your wedding.”
“You mean I was right all along?” I shake my head as I laugh in disbelief, not at what she is saying, because the words don’t surprise me in the slightest, but at the very fact that she makes no bones about admitting it. “This wasn’t my wedding; it was yours?”
“Of course you were right.” Linda smiles. “Just as I never had a wedding until now. When I married Michael, whose wedding do you think it was? Mine? No, don’t be silly. It was my mother’s wedding. But your time will come.” And she puts her arm around my shoulders and gives me a squeeze.
“What if I only have sons?” I muse out loud, trying to catch Dan’s eye as I wonder whether now might be the right time to tell them about the baby, now that the wedding is over, now that, as if by magic, the stress and duress of the past few months seem to have completely disappeared.
And, more than that, I want to give Linda a gift, want to thank her for everything she’s done, find a way of apologizing for not being as grateful as I could have been. And her first grandchild is the very best gift I can give her.
“If you only have sons,” Linda says, taking a sip of coffee and winking, “then you’ll do as I did and offer to pay for everything.”
“Mum.” Dan shakes his head. “You’re quite the operator, aren’t you?”
“See what I have to put up with?” Michael smiles and shrugs, aware that he is only a minor player in his marriage, that he is only allowed the odd comment such as this, that he takes center stage in the courtroom, and that that must be enough.
“Linda. Michael.” I catch Dan’s eye for a second and I know he knows what I’m thinking and he nods, almost imperceptibly, and reaches under the table to take my hand.
“We have something to tell you,” I continue, a smile spreading on both our faces.
And now it really is like watching a movie. Linda appears to freeze, looking first at Dan, then at me, then back to Dan, while Michael merely raises an eyebrow and waits.
Dan grins. “We’re having a baby.”
Linda screams, bursts into ecstatic tears, and flings her arms around Dan, then disengages to hug me.
“I don’t believe it,” she says through her tears. “No wonder you put on so much weight!”
“Oh, thanks, Linda.” You could never accuse my mother-in-law of not knowing what to say.
“But I should have known,” Linda says, wiping the tears away, a smile now etched on her face. “I can’t believe I didn’t guess; I can’t believe you kept this a secret. Oh, my goodness, Michael!” She turns to Michael, who has finished hugging us, and who may not have said anything but is smiling just as hard as Linda. “Michael! We’re going to be grandparents!” And the tears start all over again.
“Er, Mum? Are you sure you’re happy about this?” Dan says doubtfully.
“Happy? This is the greatest day of my life!” Linda laughs. “I just didn’t expect it quite this soon. How far gone are you, Ellie?”
“Ten weeks.” I grin.
“And how are you feeling? Any morning sickness?”
“Nope. Nothing. Just starving.”
Linda sits back down and shakes her head. “I can’t believe I didn’t guess. Oh, my goodness, a baby! A grandchild! What do you think, Ellie?” She turns to me excitedly. “Is it a boy or a girl?”
I shrug. “I think it’s definitely far too early to tell.”
“But you must have a feeling,” Linda says. “I knew with all my three. Tell me, what do you think?”
“Honestly, Linda.” I shake my head. “If I had a feeling, I would tell you, but I don’t.”
Linda sits back and studies me, then nods. “It’s a girl. You’re definitely carrying a girl.”
“Mum, you couldn’t possibly know that,” Dan laughs. “That’s ridiculous.”
“I do know. And trust me. I’ve never been wrong.”
Twenty minutes later we all say good-bye just outside the hotel. Dan and I climb into a taxi that will take us to Heathrow, where we’re catching a one-thirty flight to Antigua.
“Look after my grandchild,” Linda says, waving furiously from the pavement. “Be careful and keep away from the rum.”
“How about have a wonderful time, Mum?” Dan shouts out the window as he closes the door.
“Don’t be silly; of course have a wonderful time,” Linda says, and she and Michael stand on the street, clutching each other, still in shock, long after the taxi has turned the corner and disappeared.
Dan and I cuddle up in the taxi and smile at each other, and we talk softly about their reaction, about this new child coming into the world.
And I realize that there are some people who might take a while to adjust to being grandparents, especially when they’re as young as Linda and Michael, too young surely to fulfill the roles of gray-haired grandmas and grandpas, but I just know that Linda cannot wait to be a grandmother. By nature maternal and warm, Linda, I know with absolute certainty, cannot wait to hold a tiny baby again, to inhale deeply at their wobbly delicate necks, to smell that unique baby smell. She cannot wait to push a pram proudly into the village, to turn their spare room into a nursery, to fill it with mobiles. After all, it’s been decades since her own children were toddling around, bumping into walls, and leaving sticky finger marks all over every window in the house, and yet she still says it feels like yesterday.
As our taxi pulled down the street, I turned round and saw something I’d never seen before: Michael had his arm around Linda. And it was only then that it occurred to me that I so rarely saw any warmth or love between the two of them. I was so used to hearing Linda picking at Michael—because she didn’t like the way he ate, or the way he sat, or she wished he was more this, or less that—that it was incredibly odd, and heartwarming, to see them looking happy tog
ether.
And perhaps, I thought, as the taxi headed on to the West-way on its way to the airport, perhaps a grandchild is exactly what they need. Perhaps it will be a new start for everyone.
10
Can I just say that I love being pregnant! I completely adore every second of it. Initially, when we first got back from our honeymoon, I was dreading putting on all the pregnancy weight, and I found the beginning, the first trimester, so exhausting and debilitating that I couldn’t wait for it to be over.
But as soon as I hit week thirteen I began to feel fantastic. It helped of course that the crocuses and daffodils started sprouting, and the sun made a welcome appearance after such a long, cold winter. And mostly it helped that I was finally able to tell everyone I was pregnant. Fortunately, most assumed it was a honeymoon baby, so that became our story. I stopped feeling fat and awkward and started feeling deliciously womanly and voluptuous and feminine.
I feel for the first time that my body is doing exactly what it has been designed to do. I love my ballooning breasts and rounded protruding stomach. There are no tents in this wardrobe, so proud am I of my new body; I’m showing off rather than trying to hide my burgeoning figure, and I feel sexy and gorgeous in my tight sweaters and low-cut hipster maternity trousers.
And my pregnancy glow seems to be catching. Everywhere I go people smile at me, comment on how “fantastic” I look, and, much to my surprise, I seem to be generating far more male attention than I’ve ever had before. I’ve never been one of those women whom men have particularly looked at. I’ve never even had to dread walking past building sites because the worst that’s ever been offered is a polite “good morning.” But all of a sudden I’m getting wolf whistles left, right, and center. At first I thought it must have been someone else, a blond beauty who was getting all the attention, but I quickly realized it was me, and I am loving finally being the sort of woman who can attract all these men.
Not that I want any of them, not when I have my wonderful Dan, but it is so strange and so wonderful that pregnancy can do this.
“I swear all these men must have pregnancy fetishes,” I said once to Fran, when Dan and I had gone out to lunch one day with her and Marcus, and the boys had taken off in front of us, leaving us to dawdle in the May sunshine, looking in shop windows and idly chatting.
“Not at all,” Fran had said seriously. “You look amazing. Really. You just look”—she paused, searching for the word—“lush! That’s the word! Lush! Completely fertile, and sexy and delicious. And you have the pregnancy glow that everyone talks about. A man would have to be nuts not to fancy you.”
“Hear, hear,” echoed Marcus as we caught up with them and he heard the tail end of Fran’s sentence.
Fran had laughed. “But seriously,” she said, “you’re bloody lucky. I looked disgusting with both my girls. Greasy hair; covered in acne. I threw up for the best part of nine months and felt like shit. You’re probably having a boy, looking the way you do. Don’t they say that you look fantastic with boys, whereas girls sap your energy?”
I rubbed my twenty-seven-week-old bump. “My mother-in-law swears I’m having a girl and apparently she’s never been wrong,” I say seriously.
“Well, everyone told me I was having a boy and a girl when I was pregnant with the twins, and funnily enough none of them had ever been wrong either.”
I laughed. “And what did they say when you had the girls?”
“That next time I would definitely have a boy,” and Fran laughed too.
Dan is convinced it’s a boy, and I have no idea whatsoever. I’ve quizzed everyone I know with children on whether they had known, and if so, how, but I have no idea. Some days I wake up and have a very strong feeling that I’m carrying a boy, and other days I am equally convinced it’s a girl.
When I’m seven months pregnant, the nesting instinct starts to kick in, and suddenly all I want to do is decorate. I am filled with an extraordinary energy, and spend hours at Homebase choosing paint colors, even more hours in John Lewis mooning over nursery furniture and baby clothes, but not daring to buy anything, superstitious person that I am, waiting to buy baby’s first outfit just as soon as I get back from hospital.
But when I’ve done as much as I can do, when all the walls are painted and all the furniture has been rearranged and I still have energy to expend, Dan suggests a housewarming party.
Admittedly, it’s rather late, but then again the maisonette took far longer to buy than we had anticipated—two other buyers came in at the last moment and we found ourselves in a bidding war we couldn’t afford. Dan eventually sat down with the vendor and told him that he was acting with no integrity, that his behavior was unacceptable, that he had agreed to the price and the sale with us, and that if he was a gentleman he would stick to it. Dan stressed the word “gentleman.” Which is one of the things I love about Dan. He has an incredibly strong sense of right and wrong, and is not the slightest bit scared of confronting people if he feels they have acted immorally, or have somehow done him wrong. And it worked: Dan shamed him into selling to us, at less money, clearly, than he wanted. But what goes around comes around, and if he had sold the flat to one of the other buyers, the karma would eventually have come back to bite him, Dan said, or words to that effect.
But the point is that by the time we moved in we were both so exhausted by the cumulative stress of the wedding, the possibility of losing our dream flat, and then the actual move itself that we could barely unpack the boxes, let alone think of decorating.
Linda offered to unpack for us every time she came over, looking round the flat in despair at the books stacked in piles against every wall, at the pots and pans that were rarely used still in boxes in a corner of the kitchen. Each time I politely but firmly declined her offer, saying that I had to do it myself or I’d never find anything.
So of course no one could be happier than Linda that the nesting instinct has now kicked in and the flat finally lives up to her oh-so-high standards, and no one could be more excited than me at the prospect of organizing a housewarming party.
We invite friends who have been to our wedding; neighbors we have come to know surprisingly quickly, and people who are, as Dan puts it, friends-in-training—the couple we bump into as they walk their dog in the early evening (we’ve only ever exchanged a smile and a hello with them, but we agree they look like our kind of people); the girl who works in the lingerie shop who always comes out to say hello when I pass and to ask how I’m feeling; the other customers at the Polish café every Saturday morning—people we like despite not really knowing them, people with whom we haven’t been able to establish true friendships because of lack of time and energy. And what better way to initiate something further than to invite them to a party?
I’m in charge of the lights, and, after carefully consulting various books, I decide to line the paths with luminarias—brown paper bags weighted down with sand and containing a small tea light—place large torches all around the garden, string white fairy lights through the two apple trees at the bottom, and drape Japanese lanterns above the patio.
Dan downloads dozens of recipes for cocktails, and, once we’ve picked our favorites, he makes huge pitchers of mojitos and caiprinhas, setting up a bar in one corner of the garden, a huge bucket of ice resting underneath.
I wanted to cook. Really I did, but even with the nesting instinct at full force I know my limitations, so instead I hit Sainsbury’s and Marks & Sparks, buying ready-made salads, garlic bread that I just have to warm up in the oven, and delicious-looking cakes; then, on the day, artfully laid out platters of prosciutto, Parma ham, cold chicken, carpaccio; Brie, Camembert, Roquefort, and chèvre; olives, stuffed peppers, and bright green cornichons.
Dan has regressed to his music-and club-obsessed early twenties. I knew about his former obsession with music, but I didn’t really know it, not in the sense that I now know, having seen him spend hours hunched over his CD player, carefully and methodically choosing the music,
starting off with mellow Ibiza beats and gradually picking up the tempo to ensure that everyone will dance.
And I’m so excited, we’re so excited, it’s all we can talk about in the weeks leading up to the party itself. Don’t get me wrong, both of us spent our respective twenties going to hundreds, if not thousands, of parties like this, but the parties gradually tapered off as we hit our thirties, our friends still entertaining but in a different way.
Those without children seem to have graduated to cosy supper parties. Not as formal as the dinner parties our parents might have thrown, these tend to revolve around the kitchen, all of us standing around chatting, usually helping to cook the meal before sitting at the kitchen table with several bottles of good wine.
The people with children tend to have lunches, or summer barbecues in the afternoons, or else they do nothing at all, the concept of socializing and looking after children at the same time being simply too large a concept for them to handle.
But, either way, people don’t drink, dance, or have fun in the same quantities or with the same regularity as they once did, and Dan and I are determined to change that. Particularly me.
Oh, bugger. Am I imagining it or is that the doorbell? And who’s coming over while I’m lying in the bath like the heavily pregnant whale that I am an hour before the party’s due to start? “Dan!” I yell from the safety of my bathroom. “Doorbell! Can you get it!”
No response, the only sound being very loud salsa music from the stereo in the garden, which is almost as loud in the bathroom as it is outside.
“Dan!” I scream again as the doorbell sounds, eventually huffing and puffing as I heave my body out of the bathtub, wrap Dan’s robe around me (the only one that still fits), and drip my way to the front door. I’m really not expecting anyone for at least another hour—two if, as I suspect, no one shows up at the appointed time.