‘Hungover, eh? Better make it dry sherry and a quick bunk-up in the rhododendron bushes. That’ll get you spiffy again.’
‘Darling, there’s something I think you should know.’
‘Yes, darling?’
‘Well, darling.’
‘I’m listening, darling.’
‘You see, darling…’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m pregnant, darling.’
‘Crikey.’
They grinned at each other, breaking out of ‘Sebastian and Jemima’. James stretched across to give her knee a squeeze and hold her hand while the traffic was stopped.
‘How did that happen, eh?’
‘You were there at the time, chum.’
‘I remember it well. I’ve taken some notes so I don’t forget for the 21st birthday party.’
‘How lovely.’
‘Told you we should have recorded it on my phone.’
‘Mum was as damp as we expected about the whole thing,’ said Rebecca.
‘Damp? She was torrential! You were upstairs, we were bailing out the kitchen with buckets. It was how the turkey was so moist. Basted with a grandmother’s tears.’
‘Well that could’ve been because of…’
‘Come on. We’re focusing on us today,’ said James.
‘The three of us,’ said Rebecca.
‘Or possibly four. Or five.’
‘What do you think you married? A Dalmatian?’
‘There’s a word I could use there about you, but it would be demeaning and sexist and I respect you too much as a human being,’ James said, imitating the way they pretended his parents spoke.
Speaking of some kind of bitch, thought Rebecca.
No, that wasn’t fair she said to herself, her problems with her mother-in-law were of her own making, not Margaret’s. She had strong views, and how Rebecca dealt with them was to do with her own insecurities. And maybe Margaret’s sensitivity to expletives and insults linked with the female gender could be explained by the fact she was probably called every single one of them on a regular basis.
Come on now – behave, Rebecca told herself. Rebecca had felt awkward and stuffy from the first time she met James’s parents. Actually she’d felt a bit of a plodder from as soon as she heard what they’d done with their lives, and how he was a journalist and she was an artist. But it was when they’d met for drinks that first summer and she was the only one wearing a bra that it really crystallised. Afterwards James had said if he realised it would have been that much of a problem he would have worn one too.
Now every time they visited his parents she ended up getting all tongue-tied about what she could and couldn’t say, second guessing anything that might be deemed inappropriate, or ‘typical of middle England complacent thinking’. Usually she got it wrong when she was trying to say something polite about whatever horribly overseasoned ethnic cuisine of the month they were attempting to cook. Could she say ethnic in that context? Did that have connotations? She knew ‘minorities’ was out as subliminally imperialist but she assumed ethnicity was a good thing.
God, she hated how a trip to the Winfield-Smallings made her feel like her dad, who was always complaining about courses and policies about what he was supposed to call ‘them’. Still, she couldn’t imagine that Eritrea’s answer to Nigella would be willing to say whatever it was that Ben and Margaret did with okra, pulses and the less palatable parts of a sheep was the essence of modern, convenient dining for the busy African family.
They drove along not speaking for a while, James singing the bass guitar riffs for the songs on the radio at first, before going quiet, which suggested he’d started thinking. On the way to his parents it always seemed to happen after they’d come through Wembley. The predictions of doom and sarcastic questions would probably start next.
‘My mother’s going to want me to have a vasectomy now because of the world population crisis,’ he said.
‘Give me a few months and I’ll probably be up for doing it at home myself.’
‘I wonder what it’ll be we’re doing wrong already,’ he said.
‘I’d swear you lose a year off your mental age every mile closer we get to your parents,’ she said.
‘Eh? I do not! We’re not the ones that are stuck in a lost youth.’
‘I know, I know, you never asked to be born. I wonder if ours will always regress into teenager-dom when we guilt them into visiting for holidays.’
‘We’ll be the cool parents the kids will want to spend time with, even though they have their own lives with lots of cool friends. The friends will love us too,’ he said, before adding in a mock-huff, ‘And I do not turn into a teenager, thank you very much.’
‘You so do. I’m permanently worried you’re going to disappear and lock yourself in the toilets for a wank.’
‘Well if Dad will leave his National Geographics lying around open at the dirty bits.’
Rebecca didn’t answer, and he glanced across at her gnawing on a thumbnail. He made a note to himself to watch out for any conversational directions that could end up leading to her thinking about sex acts in lavatories.
‘Fucking hell,’ she said.
‘Do you think they’ll have made an effort and cleaned up for our visit?’ he asked, trying to distract her from yesterday’s news with the miserable afternoon ahead.
His parents’ house was not one where bourgeois ideas of cleanliness and order got much of a look in, to James’s endless frustration. They’d spent much of his childhood on the move around Europe doing seasonal work or with his dad’s occasional journalism posts, and when they’d finally come back to London when he was eleven he’d hoped to instil a bit of order into their home. A tidy kid, he’d still never made an impression beyond the border of his bedroom door. The disarray got to him most at this time of year, when the decorations came out. Believing in no religion, they paid tribute to all of them. Christmas baubles (ironic) would hang from Hanukkah candle holders, and Diwali mementoes clashed with Kwanzaa souvenirs brought back from the US’s poorer states. The living room at this time of year gave an impression of the offices of an opportunistic fortune teller who was covering all the mystical bases. It drove James absolutely nuts.
‘Oh I forgot, we’ll be alternating fussy old lady with sulking adolescent,’ said Rebecca as they pulled up outside the ramshackle Victorian terraced house. ‘Come on, like you said, this is a happy time. Let’s try and focus on spreading that joy.’
‘Are you keeping it?’ was the first thing Margaret had said.
‘Of course! I mean, not that there’d be anything wrong with taking charge of your reproductive, um, destiny, but yes, we’re keeping it,’ said Rebecca.
‘No, Mum, we came all this way just to share with you the joy of a woman’s right to choose,’ James grumbled to himself, drawing a glare from Rebecca.
‘You know the assumption of joy is one of the main tools of guilt and shame rolled out by the religious fanatics to foist unwanted pregnancies on women,’ said Margaret.
‘And we all know how inconvenient they are,’ muttered James.
‘But if you’re embracing the opportunity that’s wonderful news,’ Margaret said, smiling broadly at the couple, before