Sorrow and Bliss(19)

It was only a half moment, but I did not know where to look as the laughter rose so I kept looking at Jonathan, who was also laughing, although real sweat had formed on his brow.

He did not want children. He told me at the sushi restaurant. I told him I didn’t either and he picked up his glass and said, ‘Wow, the perfect woman.’ It felt decided from the beginning, there had been no need to revisit it. And I was glad, but not happy. The idea of being pregnant was not funny but people were laughing. I did not want to be a mother but the thought that I might, or the image of me becoming one shortly, they appeared to find hilarious.

Except for Patrick, solemn in his place. While the laughter went on, I had met his eye and he smiled, sympathetically – for which bit, I didn’t know – but my mortification was complete. The school friend felt sorry for me.

Before Ingrid and I separated, I said thank you, ‘I love you,’ and lifted my face, a brilliant smile already on it for anyone who might be looking at me.

They were all up from the table. Jonathan and I were brought back together, enveloped in their congratulations. He said, ‘Thanks guys. Full disclosure, I don’t think I’ve been happier in my life. Look at her for God’s sake.’ He picked up my hand and kissed it.

I went into Jonathan’s en suite as soon as I could and was shocked by the unfamiliar version of myself in the mirror. Huge-eyed, with a smile on my face that looked like it had been there when I died and had been hardened by rigor mortis. I put my hands on my cheeks and opened and closed my mouth until it went away. By the time I went back out, Ingrid had gone home.

*

Late that night I took a taxi back to Goldhawk Road. Jonathan apologised for having to go to bed instead of helping me clean up. He hadn’t expected a grand romantic gesture to be so knackering.

As I was being driven over Vauxhall Bridge, Ingrid called and told me to please listen to the reasons she didn’t think I should marry him. ‘This isn’t even all of them, but he never says yes. Always a hundred per cent. Listed among his chief likes, coffee and music. Always says full disclosure before revealing information about himself – usually boring, e.g. I love coffee. Most shots in that slideshow were just of him. Asked you – you of all people – to marry him, in public.’

I said that was enough.

‘He does not know you.’

I asked her to please stop.

‘You do not love him – deep down. You are just a bit lost.’

I said, ‘Ingrid, shut up. I know what I’m doing and anyway, Oliver beat you to it. I don’t need your reasons as well.’

‘But the baby thing, him saying ha ha ha, she better not be.’

I said he was being funny. ‘That’s just what he is like. Underneath he’s incredibly loving. Did you hear what he said immediately afterwards, for God’s sake look at her?’

That one charming thing said or done by Jonathan was sufficient for me to forgive him, Ingrid said, was incredible.

‘I know.’ I hung up, choosing to believe that by incredible, she meant amazing.

That every time I had to dispense forgiveness in the following weeks, I loved him more afterwards and not less, was also incredible to her and eventually to me.

*

If my daughter thinks he’s good enough, then so do I, was all my father said when I asked him if he liked Jonathan, the morning after the dinner. My mother said he absolutely wasn’t the kind of man she had imagined I’d choose and consequently, she adored him. I told her I couldn’t tell, especially not from the way she had flung her arms around Jonathan’s neck and tried to initiate some sort of dance in the foyer as we were all standing around saying goodbye, or the fact that she’d laughed so hysterically when he’d leaned in to kiss her cheek and by some wrong angling of their heads, they had caught the corner of each other’s mouths.

I moved in with him the following weekend.

*

Because Ingrid’s children look like her, they look like me. People in the street – older ladies who stop me and say you have got your hands full or, alternatively, he is too big for a pram – do not believe me when I say I am not their mother, so I keep walking and let them think that I am.

*

There were two en suites attached to Jonathan’s bedroom and he came into mine on Sunday morning as I was pressing a pill out of the sheet into my hand, saying he was bored and had started missing me the second I got up.

Before, we’d been lying in bed; Jonathan drinking a tiny espresso produced by the expensive coffee machine he’d bought himself as an engagement present the previous day, while I studied the engagement ring he’d chosen on the way home and just given me, sliding it onto my finger with ease because it was too big.

Now, in the bathroom, he picked something of mine off the sink, then seeing the pill in my hand, asked me what it was. I said birth control and told him to please go out. Jonathan pretended to look wounded but left. I swallowed the pill and put the packet back in my make-up bag, a hidden pocket.

I came out and saw him back in bed, propped up against his European pillows, apparently in the throes of an epiphany. He patted the space beside him. Before I was all the way there, he grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the bed.

‘Do you know what Martha? Fuck the birth control. Let’s have a baby.’

I said, ‘I don’t want a baby.’