Impossible to Forget(38)
‘No,’ disagreed Maggie. ‘This is Leon. It’s just that you’ve always wanted him to be someone else.’
Angie considered this for a moment.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I want him to be true to himself. And this . . .’ She waved her arm in the direction of the street. ‘This is not it.’
Maggie got out of the car and popped open the boot from where she took out a small box exquisitely wrapped in blue paper with white curling ribbon. Angie looked at it curiously for a moment. Then it occurred to her what it was.
‘Shit!’ she said. ‘Am I supposed to have brought a present?’
Maggie looked at her, eyebrow raised. ‘Well, it is a birthday party,’ she said sarcastically.
‘Oops,’ said Angie. ‘It never even crossed my mind. I don’t suppose . . .’ She looked balefully at Maggie’s box.
‘No!’ said Maggie indignantly. ‘This is my gift.’ Then she sighed and rolled her eyes. ‘Oh, I suppose so. I haven’t sealed the card, suspecting that something like this might happen . . .’ She eyed Angie like a schoolteacher with a disappointing pupil. ‘And . . .’ She went back into the boot and brought out a second box identical to the first. ‘I do have this one spare.’
She grinned at Angie.
‘It’s a train and there were some carriages too, so I bought both and got them to wrap them separately. You owe me fifteen quid. Pay me when you’ve got it,’ she added.
Angie felt humbled. Not only did Maggie know her well enough to know that buying a gift would never have occurred to her, but she had fixed the problem for her too. That was why cool, organised, slightly anal Maggie was her friend. Why she was Maggie’s friend she had absolutely no idea.
20
There were blue balloons with Happy First Birthday written on them tied on to the gatepost and attached to the knocker of Leon’s neat front door.
‘I love the way people do that with the balloons,’ said Maggie. ‘It makes the birthday into a real community affair. I always smile when I see them.’
Angie had never seen birthday balloons on houses before. She assumed that this was because having children was so far off her agenda that she had never noticed or maybe it wasn’t something that they did in York, although that seemed unlikely. Then again, Maggie had no children either, so Angie wasn’t sure why it was a practice that had registered with her. They had talked about children from time to time, most recently on the arrival of the birthday party invitation.
‘Don’t you think it’s strange that of the four of us, only Leon has settled down and had a kid?’ Angie had asked.
‘Not really,’ Maggie replied.
‘But I’m thirty-one, and you’re not far behind me,’ Angie had continued, ‘and yet we’re both still single and childless.’
‘Child-free,’ corrected Maggie. ‘Happily child-free in my case. And no, I don’t think it’s strange. Unusual maybe, but not when you look at who the four of us are. None of us has taken the traditional path, except Leon. I’m not saying that it won’t happen. Thirty-one is no age and there’s still plenty of time for you to have a baby if that’s what you want.’
‘But you don’t want?’ asked Angie. She had always assumed that Maggie wanted children, but now she came to think about it, she realised that it wasn’t something she had ever actually said.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Maggie had replied thoughtfully. ‘I love my work and I could only carry on with that and have a child if I employed a nanny. Why have a child if I never see it because I’m always at work?’
‘Plenty of women use childcare,’ objected Angie. ‘It doesn’t make them a bad parent.’
‘Of course not,’ said Maggie. ‘I think it might even make them a better one. I just know that I wouldn’t want to divide my attention like that. And it’s all immaterial anyway because I don’t have anyone to father a child.’
‘Well, that’s easy enough to fix,’ said Angie.
‘How? With carefully timed one-night stands? I’m not sure that’s for me,’ laughed Maggie. ‘What about you? Do you still want kids?’
Angie had thought for a moment. She wasn’t sure that Jax was the fathering kind, but then she didn’t exactly have a lot of experience of fathers in general to know what the fathering kind might be. She did want a baby, though. Or, to put it another way, she couldn’t imagine a future without children in it.
‘Yes,’ she’d said. ‘I think I do.’
Maggie knocked on the door of Leon and Becky’s neat house. They could hear the ear-piercing screeching of small children coming from inside.
‘It’s not too late to change our minds,’ said Angie with a smirk.
The door opened and there stood a harassed-looking Leon, a plastic toy lawnmower in one hand and a disposable nappy in the other.
‘Oh, it’s you two. Thank God. Please, come in and talk to me. If I get caught in another conversation about baby signing or swimming lessons for newborns, I shan’t be responsible for my actions!’ He opened the door wide and ushered them in. ‘And on top of all that it’s the bloody funeral and half the mothers are watching it and bawling their eyes out. I was expecting crying children but not crying parents. Hang on.’