The Family Game(51)

‘Do I look fine, Edward? Do I? Having been chased around and felt up by a motion capture guy? Do I look like I’m avoiding stress like Dr Leyman said?’

And so on, and on, in circles, until sleep caught up with us.



* * *



Lying on the scanning table, warm goo spread liberally across my only slightly swollen belly, I try to calm my mind, to think positive thoughts.

‘Today is just an initial look to check everything is going to plan with the pregnancy,’ the sonographer tells me. ‘And hopefully we should be able to ascertain a due date.’ Her hand finds my shoulder. ‘Now, I need you to know, in case you have any concerns, that if we don’t pick up a heartbeat today, that doesn’t necessarily mean there is a problem. Okay? So, bear with us. There’s always a chance we have our dates slightly wrong; it happens every so often. We wouldn’t expect to hear a heartbeat until at least six weeks, okay?’

It’s like she can read my mind. Or, on second thoughts, maybe it’s just my face she’s reading.

Edward shifts beside me too. I can feel his concern, his expectation, as keenly as my own as I look up at the Styrofoam ceiling, like innumerable women before me, and wait for the sonographer to find life.

After a moment she turns her screen, wordlessly, around to show us. My eyes dance across the black and white trying to make sense of the undulating picture. And, like an optical illusion, you appear.

A tiny butter bean, a sea creature, a little life wriggling and squirming inside me – of me, but independent from me.

I hear a gasp and I cannot tell if it’s Edward’s or my own. The sound kicks in now. The aortic whoosh, whoosh, whoosh like a deep-sea vent, pumping life in and out, hard and fast. And somehow, even though I’ve only just met you, I already love you.

An imagined future for you spools out ahead of us in my mind. Baby, toddler, child, teen and adult. I see you, though you flick between genders, heights, looks and ages, but I love every iteration of you. Birthdays, Christmases, fun and heartbreak. All of it. I want it all for you. Everything, all at once.

The sonographer smiles and turns the screen back deftly. ‘Congratulations, mom and pops,’ she says, carefully wiping the goo from my stomach. ‘We’re at eleven weeks plus two today. You’re welcome to get dressed and we can book you in for your next scan and a gender blood test as early as next week if you want to?’



* * *



On the subway journey home, we sit close, our argument now forgotten, our hands entwined. The game last night, so important before, has already slipped into memory, a funny story to tell our child one day. The bracelet on my wrist a Holbeck rite of passage. A talisman of how brave I can be when it is required.

Back at the apartment I help Edward pack for another work trip; his dinner with the Chinese investor last week went well, necessitating a trip to Hong Kong. We let name ideas flow between us. Our quiet contentedness morphing into full-blown excitement at the idea of knowing our child’s sex a few days after Edward returns, the speed at which this is all happening thrilling and daunting.

I push the tape and Robert from my mind. I do not mention it to Edward. I won’t until I have spoken to Samantha, until I know what this new game is.



* * *



‘I’m serious when I say this,’ Edward tells me later, as he lugs his bags into the building’s elevator. ‘If you don’t want to be so closely involved with them, if it’s too much – which I think anyone might agree it could be – then we can step back from them. You’re my family now. Both of you,’ he says, placing a warm hand on my slowly doming belly.

I think of the family – of Lila, Billy, Eleanor and Matilda, their friendship, their glamour and their approval – and I can’t help but feel a pang at the thought of losing what we could become. ‘Can we play it by ear?’ I ask him. ‘I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as they say. Once we pass the twelve-week mark and tell them about the pregnancy, they might settle down, right? Besides, I want our child to have a big family – grandparents, uncles, aunties. If they don’t get yours, then they don’t get any.’



* * *



I watch from the building’s lobby as Edward’s cab pulls away and disappears into the flow of traffic.

I have three days on my own; three days to decide if I want to be part of this family, three days to work out exactly what Robert’s game is and how I can beat him at it.





25 What the Nanny Saw




Monday 19 December

Samantha Belson looks surprised as I catch her eye across the busy service station cafeteria. Perhaps she was expecting someone different, someone older or less whatever it is I am.

I recognized her as soon as I entered the food court, her once blonde hair now dyed a natural brunette, her petite shoulders bundled up thick against the Pennsylvanian weather. I don’t know where she lives but I agreed to meet her here, at a busy freeway service station, just outside of Philadelphia, a two-hour drive from Manhattan.

Up close she looks younger than her sixty years; good bone structure I guess; a simple, stress-free life. After the Holbecks, I’m sure that’s what she would have wanted.

She rises to shake my proffered hand.

‘Harriet?’