Читать книгу The Family Way - Tony Parsons - Страница 7

‘Oh, you’re far too young to be having a baby, dear,’ Megan’s mother told her. ‘And I’m certainly too young to be a grandmother.’

Megan estimated that her mother must be sixty-two by now, although officially she had only been in her fifties for the last six years or so.

In Megan’s surgery she often saw grandmothers from the Sunny View Estate who were the same age as Cat and even Jessica – all those ‘nans’ in their middle and early thirties, who started child-bearing in what Mother Nature, if not the metropolitan middle class, would have considered their child-bearing years. But it was true – Olivia Jewell didn’t look like anyone’s idea of a grandmother. And Megan thought, why should she? She had never really got the hang of being a mother.

Olivia Jewell still turned heads. Not because of the modest fame that she had once enjoyed – that had evaporated more than twenty years ago – but because of the way she looked. The massed black curls, the Snow White pallor, those huge blue eyes. Like Elizabeth Taylor if she had won her fight against the fat, or Joan Collins if she had never made it to Hollywood. An elderly English rose, wilting now, it was true, but still with a certain lustre.

‘They take over your life,’ Olivia said, although her voice softened as she contemplated her youngest daughter. ‘Darling. You don’t want anyone taking over your life, do you?’

When their parents had met at RADA, it was Olivia who was the catch. Jack was a tall, serviceably handsome young actor, ramrod straight after two years’ National Service in the RAF and moonlighting as a male model (cigarettes, mostly – the young Jack looked good smirking in a blazer with a snout on the go).

But Olivia was a delicate porcelain beauty, like that other Olivia, Miss de Havilland, already a bit of a throwback in those years of post-war austerity, when large-breasted blondes were suddenly all the rage.

Olivia was swooned over by her teachers, her classmates and, later, the critics, who loved her as a petulant, foot-stamping Cordelia in Stratford. It was widely predicted that Jack would always work, but that Olivia was destined for true stardom. In the mocking passage of time, it had worked out very differently.

After a few years where he scuffled around in the background of British films nostalgic for World War Two – playing the pipe-smoking captain in a chunky sweater who goes down with his shipmates, or the knobbly-kneed POW who gets shot in the back by the Hun while attempting to escape, or the RAF squadron leader with the gammy leg anxiously scanning the blue skies of Kent – Jack Jewell stumbled on the role of a lifetime.

For almost twenty years he played a widowed father in the long-running BBC fishing drama, All the Fish in the Sea – played it for so long that Megan, his youngest child, had little memory of her father being around when she was growing up, he was so busy playing a doting father to his screen children. By the time they reached their teenage years, Jack Jewell’s kindly, knowing face had become one of the cherished icons of the nation, while Olivia’s big starring roles had never materialised.

‘Dad would be pleased,’ Megan said, deliberately provoking her. ‘Dad would be happy to be a grandfather.’

Olivia shot her daughter a look. ‘You didn’t tell him, did you?’

‘Of course not. But he would be happy, I bet.’

Olivia Jewell laughed. ‘That’s because he’s a big soft bastard. And because he doesn’t care what it would do to your life. Not to mention your lovely young body, dear.’

Megan and her mother were in the café in Regent’s Park, ringed by all the white Nash houses, the most beautiful buildings in London, Megan thought, like architecture made out of ice cream. They were on one of their dates – drinking tea and watching the black swans glide across the lake, smelling freshly cut grass and the animal mustiness of the nearby London Zoo.

Megan was the only one of her daughters that Olivia saw on a regular basis. Contact with Jessica was sporadic – Jessie was too easily hurt for a sustained relationship with someone as selfish as Olivia – and Cat hadn’t spoken to their mother in years.

You had to make an effort with her, Megan always thought. That’s what her sisters didn’t get. Their mother was all right if you made the effort.

‘In the early sixties there was a darling little Maltese man off Brewer Street who used to take care of girls who got into trouble.’ It still mildly surprised Megan every time she heard her mother’s voice. She had a self-consciously cut-glass accent, the kind of accent that made Megan think of men in Broadcasting House reading the news in their tuxedos. ‘God – what was his bloody name?’

‘It doesn’t matter, I’ll be all right,’ Megan said, pushing a napkin halfway across the table. Olivia covered her daughter’s hands with her own, and gently rubbed them, as if to make them warm.

‘Well – anything I can do, dear.’

Megan nodded. ‘Thank you.’

‘A woman’s body is never the same after giving birth. I had a body like you when I was young. Not petite like Jessica. Or skinny like Cat. More like you. All curves.’ Olivia squinted at her daughter. ‘Perhaps not quite so plump.’

‘Thanks a million.’

‘Did you know that Brando once made a pass at me?’

‘I think you mentioned it. About ten thousand times.’

‘Dear Larry Olivier admired my Cordelia. The dress I wore to the premiere of Carry On, Ginger caused a sensation. I was the Liz Hurley of my day.’

‘Then that makes Dad Hugh Grant.’

‘Hughie Green more like. That man. I dreamed of Beverly Hills. He gave me Muswell Hill.’

It was strange, Megan thought. Their mother was the one who walked out. Their mother was the one who shacked up with a second-rate ham in a rented flat. Their mother was the one who left the raising of her children to their father, and whoever he could hire, and to Cat. And yet their mother was the one who acted bitter. Perhaps she could never forgive their father for becoming a bigger name than she would ever be.

Her career had been a peculiarly English affair. If Olivia Jewell had ever needed a job description, then plummy crumpet would have just about nailed it down. In the fifties she had screamed her way through half a dozen Hammer Horror movies – strung up in her nightdress in a Transylvanian dungeon, the mad doctor lurching towards her, wicked experiments on his mind – and then moved into whatever ramshackle provincial theatre would have her when the times and the accents changed, and the public wanted actresses to be more working class and northern (the kitchen sink dramas), or exotic and foreign (James Bond and his bikini-clad harem).

Although only twenty-two when the sixties began, Olivia Jewell seemed to belong to another era. But she would never admit to the long years of rep and resting. In her conversation, and perhaps even in her feverish head, she was all that her teachers at RADA and Kenneth Tynan had predicted she would ever be.

Olivia’s star burned brightest the year after she left home for ever. Fleeting fame, when it came for their mother, arrived late. She was pushing forty – and admitting to thirty-two – when she landed the part of the posh, nosy neighbour in the mid-seventies ITV sitcom, More Tea, Vicar? The man in the back of the cab was the male lead, playing a diffident young priest who had an electrifying effect on his female parishioners, and in the sweltering summer of 1976, while London seemed to melt in the heat and Cat cooked for her sisters and tried in vain to find this new group the Sex Pistols on the radio, Olivia and her dirty vicar appeared together on the cover of the TV Times.

Then her star faded, and within a few short years the humour of More Tea, Vicar? swiftly seemed as though it came from some older England that was now embarrassing, racist, and ludicrously out of time.

The characters in it – the eye-rolling Jamaican, the goodness-gracious-me Indian, the bumbling Irishman and, yes, the plummy old crumpet from next door, who must have been a bit of a goer in her time – were all swept away on an angry tidal wave of jokes about Mrs Thatcher and bottoms.

Eventually the man in the back of the cab left Olivia alone in the rented St John’s Wood flat and went home to his wife and children. But somehow Olivia never seemed cowed by time and experience. The haughty grandeur she had mastered in the fifties had never deserted her. Megan believed in her.

‘What am I doing, Mum?’

‘You’re doing the right thing, dear.’

‘Am I? I am, aren’t I? What else can I do?’

‘You can’t be tied down, Megan. You’ve got your whole life in front of you. And what if you meet some young buck? Some handsome young surgeon?’ Olivia’s huge eyes twinkled with delight at the thought of this Harley Street hunk. Then she scowled, furiously stubbing out her cigarette, angry with her youngest daughter for throwing away this perfect match. ‘He’s not going to want to take on some other man’s child, is he?’

‘It’s not a baby yet,’ Megan said, more to herself than her mother. ‘Jessica wouldn’t understand that. That’s why I can’t tell her. Or even Cat. It still has a tail, for God’s sake. It’s more like a prawn than a baby. Admittedly, it would grow –’

Her mother sighed.

‘Darling, you can’t have some screaming little shit-machine holding you down. That’s what went wrong for me. No offence, dear. But you can’t have this brat.’

Megan’s eyes stung with unexpected tears.

‘I can’t, can I?’

‘Not now, darling. Not after passing all those exams. And being such a clever girl at medical school. And emptying bedpans in those horrid hospitals in the East End.’ Her mother looked pained. ‘Oh, Megan. A baby? Not now, chicken.’

Megan knew exactly what her mother would advise. That was why she had wanted to see her. To hear that she had absolutely no choice. To be told that there was no other way out. That there was nothing to even think about. Perhaps the reason that Megan was closest to their mother was because she remembered her the least.

The last meeting of Olivia and all of her daughters had been more than fifteen years ago. Megan was a bright-eyed, still boyish twelve-year-old, Jessica a shy, pretty sixteen, pale and quiet after getting mangled on some school skiing trip – at least, that’s what they told Megan – and Cat at twenty was clearly a young woman, emboldened by two years at university, openly bitter and keen to confront their mother over the designer pizzas.

When their mother casually informed them that she would not be attending the prize-giving day at Megan’s school – Megan was always the most academically gifted – because she had an audition to play a housewife in a gravy commercial (‘Too old,’ they said when she had left, ‘too posh.’), Cat exploded.

‘Why can’t you be like everybody else’s mother? Why can’t you be normal?’

‘If I was normal, then you three would be normal too.’

Megan didn’t like the sound of that. Her mother made normality sound scary. Maybe if she was normal then schoolwork wouldn’t come so easily to her. Maybe she wouldn’t be collecting a prize from the headmaster. Maybe she would be as slow and stupid as all the other children.

‘But I want us to be normal,’ Jessica sobbed, and their mother laughed as though that was the funniest thing in the world.

‘How is my little Jessica?’ said Olivia.

‘This is a tough time for her,’ Megan said. ‘She’s been trying for a baby for so long. She would feel terrible about – you know.’

‘Your abortion, yes.’

‘My procedure.’

Olivia never asked about Cat, although she sometimes offered an unsolicited, and unflattering, opinion on her eldest child.

‘I tried to speak to Jessica on the phone recently. Pablo said she was sleeping. Bit of tummy trouble, apparently.’

‘Paulo. His name is Paulo.’

‘Of course. Lovely Paulo with those gorgeous eyelashes. Like a girl, almost. I heard they were taking away her womb or something.’

‘That’s not it. She just needs some tests. She gets these excruciating periods. God, Mother, don’t you know that?’

Olivia looked vague. ‘I never really had much to do with Jessica’s cycle, dear. But you’re right, of course – you can’t talk to her about your, you know, condition.’

Megan stared out over the lake. ‘This should be happening to Jessica. This should be happening to her. She’ll be a terrific mum.’

‘Who’s the father?’ said Olivia, lighting a cigarette.

‘Nobody you know.’

And Megan thought – nobody I know, come to that. How could I have been so stupid?

‘My baby,’ Olivia said, and she touched her daughter’s face. Unlike her sisters, Megan had never doubted that her mother loved her. In her special way. ‘Get shot of the bloody thing, okay? You’re not like Jessica. The little woman who can’t be fulfilled until she has a couple of screaming brats sucking her tits to the floor. You’re not like that. And you’re not like Cat – determined to be a spinster wasting herself on some inappropriate man.’ Her mother smiled triumphantly. ‘You’re more like me.’

And Megan thought, is that really what I am?

Paulo hadn’t been expecting the magazines. They were a surprise. Who would have thought the NHS would provide you with a bit of porn to help you fill your little plastic jug?

Their attempt for a baby had been so overwhelmingly unsexy, so stripped of anything resembling passion or lust – saving up your sperm as though they were points in Sainsbury’s, only doing it when the ovulation test decreed, his wife’s tears when it turned out that the act had all been in vain – that Paulo was stunned by the sight of what he thought of as dirty magazines.

Blushing like a teenager, he grabbed one called Fifty Plus and headed for his cubicle, wondering if that was their chest size, their age or their IQ.

The doctor had assured Paulo that his sperm test wasn’t really a test at all.

‘I don’t want you to feel under any pressure. Nobody expects you to actually fill the little plastic jug.’

But just like any other exam, a sperm test came with the promise of either success or failure. Or it wouldn’t be a test, would it?

So Paulo prepared. But instead of practising three-point turns or studying the Highway Code, he did everything to increase the number of potential lives swimming about inside him, and everything he could to ensure that they would be heading in vaguely the right direction.

Loose pants. Cold baths. Zinc, vitamin E and selenium, all purchased in health shops where both the staff and the clientele looked uniformly and spectacularly unhealthy.

He read all the literature. And there was an amazing amount of it. The human race was forgetting how to reproduce itself. Tap in ‘sperm’ on the search engine, and you almost drowned in the stuff.

The vitamin pills, the roomy pants, the nut-shrinking cold baths – apparently all these were good for the number of sperm, and their motility – their ability to wiggle around in the required fashion. But what was the pass mark? How many million did you need to get the nod?

Surely, Paulo thought, when the sperm hits the egg, all you really need is one?

The examination room was the toilet in an NHS hospital. Paulo had heard rumours that if you had your sperm test done in Harley Street, your wife was allowed to go in there with you and give you a hand.

But in this sprawling NHS hospital, which felt more like some untamed frontier town than a place of healing, where cancer patients in their dressing gowns hungrily sucked cigarettes outside the main reception, and tattooed men with head wounds regularly attacked the young nurses who were caring for them for not caring quite quickly enough, you just went in the toilets and made sad love to your little plastic jug.

And yet the event seemed momentous to Paulo. This was something new. This was masturbation for some greater good. After years of doing it behind locked doors – and how he recalled the shame and the fear that his parents would catch him red-handed emerging from the bathroom with a copy of a Sunday paper stuffed down his shirt – he was actually being encouraged to strangle the one-eyed trouser snake, choke the monkey and beat the meat. The world was saying, go ahead, Paulo. Wank yourself stupid.

There was a list of instructions – as if any man needed advice on how to fiddle about with himself – but basically it was just you, your jug, and some pornography, provided by the state.

So much was riding on this ridiculous act. It didn’t feel like his sperm they were testing. It felt like his future, and the future he might have with Jessica. He unzipped his trousers, then immediately zipped them up again, taking deep breaths.

He had it easy. He knew that. He had to ejaculate into a little plastic jug, and he was allowed to do it in the privacy of an NHS toilet. Jessica had had so many examinations that she said she felt like her private parts were now in the public domain.

All these tests, all these judgements – as if it wasn’t up to them if they loved each other, but to some much higher power, ancient and cruel.

Paulo flicked through the pages of Fifty Plus. He hadn’t seen any of this stuff for years. At school, there was a boy known as Spud Face, a cackling, habitual masturbator – thick specs, red cheeks, always giggling inanely by the corner flag during games – who had regularly brought to class what he pronounced ‘good wank fodder’.

Paulo, a shy, thoughtful boy who preferred magazines featuring motors, had always stayed at his desk, reading the latest edition of Car. But one day Spud Face had called Paulo across to the leering, cheering mob that always surrounded his dirty magazines during break.

‘Oy, Baresi, come and look at this, you big poof. Here’s something you can’t get from cars.’

Paulo had caught a glimpse of the magazine and almost fainted – a bearded Asian man with no clothes on was doing something unbelievable to a goat who clearly couldn’t believe his luck. While all the other goats in the neighbourhood were no doubt being beaten and mistreated, this goat was getting a blow job. That goat must have felt like he had won the goat lottery.

It was enough pornography to last Paulo a lifetime. He didn’t like it then, and he didn’t like it now. There was just something a bit too gynaecological about it for his straightforward tastes.

Paulo closed his copy of Fifty Plus. Although he felt like he was semi-retired from his sex life – making love and making babies were clearly two very different things – the women in Fifty Plus did not remotely stir him.

Paulo closed his eyes. He got a grip of himself. And he thought about his wife.

Which made him a different man to all the other wankers in there.

The way Megan found out that her boyfriend was sleeping with somebody else was that she caught him with his hand on her arse. And Megan couldn’t say that he looked exactly unfamiliar with the territory.

Will and Katie were on the up escalator at Selfridges just as Megan was coming down – perfectly placed for a view of Will’s hand casually exploring the valley of the little tart’s bottom. Katie had the decency to gasp when she saw Megan. Will went white, his hand frozen on Katie’s rear, like someone caught with his fingers in the till.

Megan thought, what am I going to do? I just lost my best friend.

‘A woman’s biological destiny is to have a baby,’ Will said. ‘A man’s biological destiny is to plant his seed in as many women as he can. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you.’

This is what he told her. He told her all the other stuff too – that it didn’t mean a thing, that he loved her, that they had been together for too long to chuck it away because of one mistake. And they had been together for a long time. Megan and Will had been med school sweethearts, living together when most of their contemporaries were playing doctors and nurses at every opportunity. But what it came down to in the end was that he had slept with Katie because the survival of the human race depended upon it.

‘What can I do? I’m programmed to spread my seed. It’s the biological imperative.’

‘That’s on your hard drive, is it? Sticking your miserable dick in strangers?’

‘Katie’s hardly a stranger. You’ve known her since med school.’

‘She was a slapper there, too. Plenty of junior doctors did their advanced biology on Katie.’

‘We grew very close working in accident and emergency at the Homerton. These things happen. You get thrown together.’

‘You mean – oh, no, I’ve slipped! And now my penis has got stuck in Katie! How on earth did this happen? Is that what you mean, you rotten bastard?’

Megan thought that she should have expected something like this. She had noticed a sudden decline in Will’s sex drive when he was doing those six months’ vocational training at the Homerton, while she was off doing her six months’ VTS in paediatrics at the Royal Free.

She had put it down to Will witnessing stab wounds on a regular basis, for the Homerton is in Hackney, and their A & E is busy every night of the year. Now Megan felt she should have guessed that Katie was wagging her tail in the doctors’ mess during tea break. One of the first things that every medical student learns is that the average hospital has the sexual mores of a knocking shop when the fleet’s in. All those extremely young doctors and nurses working all hours of the day and night in a highly stressed environment, most of them too busy for a proper relationship – it did something to the hormones.

As part of her vocational training, Megan had done six months at the Homerton’s A & E herself, and it had done nothing for her libido. She had felt as though she was seeing the world as it really was for the first time in her life. But perhaps she had more imagination than Will and Katie.

He attempted to put his arms around her but she shrugged him off, almost baring her teeth. He really didn’t understand that it was over. How could he? He wasn’t like Megan. His parents had stayed together.

Nobody left in his home. Nobody decided to cut their losses and bolt. He had never seen the rotten, messy aftermath of fucking around.

Will had grown up as the youngest child in a tight, loving family in Hampstead Garden Suburb. That was one of the things she had loved about him. The intact, secure world that he came from, the long Sunday lunches and the gently mocking humour and the years of unbroken happiness. At weekends, and at Christmas, he took her home to his parents and they made her feel like she belonged, and she wanted to be a part of this other family, this other life, this better world.

These kids from their nuclear families made her laugh. Will thought he would always be forgiven, he thought that trust could never be broken and love could never be pissed away. Like all the saps from happy homes, Will believed in his right to a happy ending.

But she snapped the suitcase shut, hefted it from their bed and placed it at his feet.

‘Megan? Come on. Please.’

She saw him now as the rather pathetic figure he had always been. Will was one of those good-looking short guys who are destined to a life of discontent. Sweet enough but totally unreliable, bright but lazy, socially charming but academically listless, he truly wasn’t cut out for a career in medicine. He desperately wanted to be, and his parents – a silvery, gym-fit eye surgeon father and a blonde, well-preserved paediatrician mother – desperately wanted him to be, but during the long years of training their good-looking boy had struggled at every stage.

Will had been one of the unhappy minority of medical students who have to resit their finals, finally scraping a pass only to discover that dealing with death, sickness and gore on a daily basis gave him a funny tummy, and minor league depression. Even his depression was half-hearted. Now a part of Megan wanted to strangle him. But she also felt sorry for him. Poor Will. He was wrong for this life. Just as he was wrong for her.

And there was something else he was wrong about. It was true that she was not led around by a part of her anatomy, the way Will’s penis apparently dragged him around like an insane tour guide, taking him to places he had never in a million years planned to visit.

But there were times when Megan’s craving for that kind of human contact was just as urgent. There were days when her yearning – for love, for sex, for something better than both – was far stronger than anything Will could have felt when he bent Katie over in the darkened doctors’ mess at three in the morning. She had a biological imperative of her own.

The big difference was that Will’s craving was determined by a little pink courgette that was on call twenty-four hours a day, vulnerable to the whim of anything in a mini-skirt that took a shine to him. And when it came, Megan’s craving was determined by something far more powerful than that.

It was on one of those craving nights, about two weeks after she had sent Will home to his bitterly disappointed parents in Hampstead Garden Suburb, that Megan went to a party for the first time in ages, and met a young Australian who, after taking a look at the world, was soon to go home to sun and surf, Sydney and his girlfriend.

What was his name again? It didn’t really matter now. She was never going to see him again.

Where Will was small, dark, with cheekbones that really belonged on a woman, the man at the party was tall, athletic, with a nose that had been broken twice playing rugby in college, and once falling off a bar stool in Earls Court.

Not really Megan’s type at all.

But then look what her type had done to her.

Cat Jewell loved her life.

Every time she entered her Thames-side flat, Tower Bridge glittering just for her beyond her windows, it felt like she was taking a little holiday from the world.

Almost twenty years after leaving home, she had finally found a place of stillness and silence and fabulous riverside views, a place that felt like the home she had been looking for all these years.

In an underground car park, there was her silver Mercedes-Benz SLK, and although her brother-in-law Paulo, who knew about these things, made gentle fun of her – ‘That’s not a sports car, Cat, it’s a hairdryer’ – she loved zipping about town in a car that, rather like her life, was built for two. At the very most.

It was true that her flat was the smallest one in the riverside block, and the car was five years old and etched with a beading of rust. But these things filled her with a quiet pride. They belonged to her. She had worked for them. After escaping from the prison of her childhood, she had made a life for herself.

When she had come back to London after university, the woman who gave Cat her first proper job told her that you could get anything in this town, but sometimes you had to wait a while for a good apartment and true love. At thirty-six, she finally had the apartment. And she believed she also had the man.

Over the years Cat had had her fair share of sloppy drunks, premature ejaculators and the secretly married – on one memorable occasion, all on the same date – but now she had Rory, and she couldn’t imagine being with anyone else.

Cat had met him when he was teaching Megan wado ryu karate. He was standing in the corner at a party celebrating Megan’s end of term at medical school, and Cat had taken pity on him. You could tell he didn’t have it in him to start a conversation with anyone.

To Cat he had seemed an unlikely martial artist – soft-spoken, socially awkward, no swagger about him. Then as the party rapidly degenerated into what Megan said was a typical med school do, full of legless nurses and young doctors off their faces on half an E, Rory explained to Cat how he came to the martial arts.

‘I was bullied at school. The tough guys didn’t like me for some reason. They were always pushing me around. Then one day they went too far. I had concussion, broken ribs, a real mess.’

‘So you decided to learn – what is it? – kung fu?’

‘Karate. Wado ryu karate. And I enjoyed it. And I was good at it. And soon nobody pushed me around any more.’

‘And you mashed up the bullies?’

He grimaced, wrinkling his nose, and she realised she liked this man. ‘It doesn’t really work like that.’

Thirty years on, you could still glimpse the quiet, bullied kid he had once been. Despite his job, all those days spent teaching people to kick and punch and block, there was a real gentleness about him. A strong but gentle man. The kind of man you might want to have children with, if you were the kind of woman who wanted children.

Which Cat Jewell was most certainly not.

Rory’s body was fit and hard from the endless hours of wado ryu karate, but there was no disguising the inner wariness of a divorced man in his forties. He had done the whole happy families bit for so long, it hadn’t worked out, and he was in no rush to do it all again. He had been there, done that, and was still paying the child support. And that was fine by Cat.

Rory was more than ten years older than Cat, living across town in Notting Hill with a son who came to stay, usually when he had argued with his mother and stepfather.

Since his divorce, Rory had dated plenty of women who all seemed to have the alarms ringing on their biological clocks – women in their early thirties who had yet to meet Mr Right, women in their late thirties who had met Mr Right only for him to turn out to be Mr Right Bastard. It was too much. The last thing a man wanted to hear about on the third date was how much the woman wanted a husband and a baby. It would turn off any man. Especially a divorced man. After all of that, Cat was a sweet relief.

She didn’t want him for a husband, or a father. She loved her life, and didn’t need some ageing Prince Charming to change it. If their relationship was going nowhere, then that was fine. Because they were both happy with the place that it had arrived at.

And that was just as well, because Rory wasn’t in the position to give any woman a baby. Cat had heard all about it the night, a month after Megan’s party, that they had slept together for the first time.

‘I’ll wear a condom if you want me to, Cat. But there’s not really the need.’

She stared at him from the other side of the bed, not trusting him and wondering what line she was being spun.

‘I mean, I’ll wear a condom if you want me to. Of course I will. But you don’t have to worry about getting pregnant.’

He wasn’t going to promise to pull out before he came, was he? Yeah, right. And the cheque’s in the post.

‘I’ve had the cut,’ Rory said.

‘What?’

‘The snip, the cut, the operation. You know. A vasectomy.’

For some reason she knew he was telling the truth. There was just something about the way he hung his head, smiling ruefully, saying the words that she knew he must have rehearsed.

‘I had it just before my marriage broke up. My wife and I – well, things were bad. We were both getting older. We knew we didn’t want any more children. So I had it done. And then she got pregnant by her tennis coach.’ The rueful smile. ‘So it was perfect timing, really.’

‘Did it hurt?’

‘A bit like getting your balls caught in a nutcracker.’

‘Okay. We don’t need to talk about it any more. Come here.’

It was strange at first – the feeling of a man coming inside her, and knowing she didn’t have to worry. Cat had spent so many years trying to avoid getting pregnant, enduring the various indignities of coil, cap, condom, pill and pulling out, that it was a load off her mind, and a load off her menstrual cycle, to be able to stop worrying about all of that. Rory was a considerate, experienced lover, and yet not one of those men who absolutely insist on the woman coming first, as though anything else would be awfully bad manners. They even had their own running gag about their contraception arrangements, or lack of them.

‘How do you like your eggs, madam?’ Rory would ask, and Cat would cry, ‘Unfertilised!’

She began to see his inability to have children as another one of the good things in her perfect life. Like the flat with the view of Tower Bridge, and the beat-up little sports car, and her job as manager of Mamma-san, one of the most fashionable restaurants in London, where tables were in such short supply that, when you called the reservation line, they just laughed at you and then hung up.

Unencumbered – that was a word Cat liked.

She was free to lie around all Sunday in her dressing gown, reading the papers, or jump on a plane and go to Prague for the weekend, or stay over at Rory’s place when the mood took her. Unencumbered – and that was just how she wanted it. Because after their mother had walked out, her childhood had been as encumbered as can be. She never wanted to be that tied down, that domesticated, again.

She didn’t want children, and could go for, oh, months, without even thinking about the subject – until someone implied that it was somehow abnormal to want to hold on to a life you loved – and she was too successful, and too fulfilled, to feel as though she was missing anything. Cat didn’t consider herself childless, she considered herself childfree. Big difference.

She wasn’t like those other women. She wasn’t like her sister Jessica. Cat didn’t need a baby to make her life worthwhile, and her world whole.

Where did it come from, that addiction to the idea of motherhood, that need to be needed? Cat knew where it came from – it came from men who didn’t love you enough. Men who left a hole in your life that a woman could only fill with some adorable, eight-pound crying and crapping machine.

So she lay in the dark with Rory sleeping by her side, and she thought to herself, this is perfect, isn’t it? This is a good, unencumbered life. Unencumbered – the most beautiful word in the English language.

Why would anyone ever want anything more?