Chapter One
January and the Big Fat Positive
Two pink lines. Beatrice was sure of it.
She took the test apart and held the little strip up to the light to make sure, and there they were, faint, barely there, but there all the same. What they call in the pregnancy and baby magazines a ‘BFP’: A Big Fat Positive.
At first, when she saw it, she had screamed, then had a cup of tea to calm down and immediately started to worry whether you’re allowed tea when you’re officially, incontrovertibly WITH CHILD.
The warmth of the knowledge spread through her and she found herself in front of the living room mirror peering at her face and wondering what the magazines were talking about when they said the first things you noticed in pregnancy were the sore boobs and the morning sickness. Beatrice felt great, better than great, and she looked to see if she was glowing yet, wondering when it would kick in.
She hadn’t exactly glowed recently, and not at all during the recent few miserable months of doing not very much, other than eking out her redundancy pay, searching for work, and trying to chase away the feeling she was probably being a bother to her sister. Angela was in her own baby bubble, enjoying the last few weeks of her precious maternity leave with little Clara, and was, Beatrice worried, possibly too polite to tell her that the daily visits might be getting too much.
She wanted to let Angela and her partner, Victoria – Vic for short – know the good news first, but told herself she had best wait until Rich knew. He was, after all, the daddy.
She smiled to herself, wandering around the house that afternoon. Unable to settle to reading her book or to concentrate on job applications, she started clearing out a bottom drawer to pass the time and let her mind wander back to all those years ago when she and Rich were straight out of college and intent on double incomes and exotic travel and had spent years tryingnotto get pregnant. Then there had been that period after the wedding where they were constantly dodging everyone’s questions about when they were going to start a family and she’d grown used to hearing the remarks about how she wasn’t getting any younger – mainly from Rich’s dad, to be fair. And Beatrice couldn’t forget last year, the one leading up to her thirty-ninth birthday – the awful year in which she had lost not only her job but her lovely mum as well, a year she couldn’t think about without her chest tightening and her breathing growing shallow and quick – when certain work colleagues, friends and Rich’s dad had unanimously stopped enquiring about her plans for her uterus as though it were everyone in the world’s business and started looking at her either sympathetically or like she was some sort of baby-avoiding witch. You guessed it, that last one was also Rich’s dad.
‘Well, aren’t we going to surprise them all?’ Beatrice said to herself as she cleared the drawer of clutter, making a charity shop pile and a recycling pile, trying not to glance at the clock and count down the minutes until Rich got home.
Only just back to work after the New Year, poor old Rich had another late meeting and another stressful, cramped commute on the eight o’clock train back from London where he worked in distribution rights for big screen movies, which sounded more glamorous than it actually was, to their two-bed new-build in the sprawling Warwick suburbs.
She couldn’t account for the little prickle of nerves that buzzed up her spine at the thought of telling him tonight. He’d be made up. How lucky can one couple get? A baby on their third month of trying. That is, if you don’t count that week in Madrid back in September when Beatrice forgot to pack her pills and they got a bit reckless after a night of rebujito cocktails and a touristy flamenco show that had ended in a drunken conga line through the beach restaurant’s kitchens. They’d had to have the whole conversation on the plane home about how maybe it wouldn’t be a disaster if they actuallyhadmade a holiday baby, and since they were both approaching forty it might be a case of ‘now or never’.
There had been no holiday-cocktails baby after all, but its brief hypothetical existence had kick-started an intense few months of Really, Actually Trying, which, although she didn’t admit it to anyone, was accompanied by a big sigh of relief at the end of what could only be described as an embarrassingly long dry spell.
In the quieter, lonelier moments during her days at home scouring theGuardianarts jobs pages and mailing out CVs to every arts organisation within commuting distance, she would get to thinking and could admit to herself that Madrid hadn’t been the start of it at all.
Beatrice had known at least two summers ago that she had begun to change her mind about not being all that fussed about babies; around about the time she’d detected a slight hollow tone in her jokey, deflective answers to questions from those nosey enough to ask why she had been married for so long (eight years at that point, ten years now) andstilldidn’t have kids.
Yes, she had first heard it two summers ago, the persistent little voice she’d tried to ignore for the sake of their careers and her busy, exciting working life, which had been nothing but fun and fulfilling and which she wouldn’t change a thing about – apart from her recent redundancy, of course.
That was way back when her sister Angela and Vic had started the process of finding a donor service and embarking upon what turned out to be a long, expensive journey involving seven rounds of assisted intrauterine insemination, Angela’s hopes for a growing family coinciding fatefully with their mum’s cancer diagnosis.
Beatrice slid the empty drawer shut, flinching at the resounding bang it made.
‘I’m not moping today. Here I am,a whole day lateand with a BFP!’ she announced to the empty house, gathering up a bundle of old payslips for the recycling bin.
Earlier that afternoon, she’d tried out an online due date calculator, which had told her that this baby would be making its appearance around the twentieth of September, just days after the big birthday she’d been dreading for months. But all that trepidation had melted away at the sight of those pink lines.
September would be beautiful this year, a time for long walks with a pram, lattes in hand. Rich would take paternity leave and they could plan a Welcome to the World party with cake and bubbly and look forward to introducing baby Clara, who’d be a wobbly toddler by then, to little baby Halliday.
September didn’t seem very far off at all. There would be so much to do before then. Rich’s Audi would need upgrading to a five-seater with room for a baby carrier, and she didn’t fancy broaching the subject of converting his gym into a nursery quite yet but maybe in a few weeks she could plant the seed in his mind, get him mulling it over.
She wasted no time in getting straight online and ordering aYour Pregnancy: Week by Weekbook, remembering how her mum had given something similar to Angela when she was having Clara and how they had all pored over it together. Beatrice had the strongest recollection of the discovery that Clara was the size of a sesame seed at four weeks.
‘A sesame seed. Imagine that!’ Beatrice had said to her phone as she watched the book appear in her online shopping cart and she made the payment. She hadn’t let herself think for too long about how her mum wasn’t going to be around to look through this baby book with her, instead letting herself be distracted by the appealing buzz of shopping online for cute little things.
There was a whole bewildering world of baby accessorising opening up to her and it was all only a click away. She ordered a teensy tiny white baby hat and matching blanket with little clouds and embroidered rainbows all over. It was expensive but, she told herself, you’re only newly pregnant once, and she wanted to celebrate.
That was what the empty drawer was for: squirrelling away sweet little things. Her body tingled at the idea of all the research she’d get to do and lovely long lists she’d get to draw up during her pregnancy. Beatrice was a long term devotee of list-making and had, in fact, already started drafting her first baby list. So far it included white newborn sleepsuits and those muslin cloth things Angela and Vic said theyhadto have hundreds of. God knows what for. It was still all a wonderful mystery and she couldn’t wait to find out all about it.
‘Oh come on! Is it only six thirty? Are you actually going backwards?’ she accused the kitchen clock as she folded laundry, warm from the dryer. She’d grown used to talking to herself these last few months of job-seeking. Soon she’d have a bump to talk to and she’d feel less like a crazy, pyjama-wearing shut-in. Talking to a sesame seed whose existence she’d only just had confirmed felt alittlepeculiar but she resolved to keep giving it a go over the coming days until it felt more natural.
Rich would be all right, wouldn’t he? Once he got over the surprise. She recalled reading that some men take a bit longer than women to adapt to the idea of being a parent. It’s biology and the fact they don’t have the whole BFP hormone spike and the sense of a tiny bundle of living cells bedding in for a long stay. They’re less invested, at first. ‘He’ll be all right,’ she said, glancing down to her stomach. ‘I hope he will, anyway.’
Wondering if shaking hands were an early pregnancy symptom, she resolved to go and wait in the lounge and drink some water until she could research the whole tea thing properly. She carried the dismantled test with her, mentally rehearsing how she’d show it to Rich when he walked in the door, and hoping he’d had a good day at work and would be in the mood for surprises. She clasped the test to her chest.
‘Maybe I do feel a bit sick, actually,’ she told the little seed.
