Heffelfinger?’ A young blonde woman with a neat, slicked-back ponytail has appeared in the waiting area. Nadine leaps up eagerly. She and Rob follow her down another short corridor and into a small room, where the sonographer greets them with an automatic smile.
‘Hi,’ she says, ‘I’m Kirsty, now if you could hop up please, Nadine …’ Jacket and hat are quickly handed to Rob. He takes a seat as Nadine lies down, with belly exposed and a faint curve of a baby bump, or is Rob imagining that? And in an instant it appears on the screen: a blur of white like the snow outside and there, as clear as day, his child. Head, legs, arms. A beating heart.
‘Look,’ Nadine murmurs, her eyes wet with tears as she turns to him. ‘Look at our baby.’
‘I can see,’ Rob manages to say, although he’s finding it hard to speak. So it’s real. It actually happened, that night with the lemon cake and all that vodka.
‘We’ve got a good, strong heartbeat here,’ the sonographer says, dragging the white plastic gadget across Nadine’s blemish-free skin.
‘Oh, thank goodness,’ Nadine says. Without thinking, Rob reaches up to grasp her small hand; she coils her fingers around his and squeezes. How could he have wished that this wouldn’t happen – that they’d come here to be told there was no heartbeat at all? ‘Rob, are you okay?’ Nadine smiles at him.
‘Yes. Yeah, I’m fine.’
‘Well, everything looks as it should be,’ the sonographer says, ‘but I know it’s an emotional time for both of you.’ She smiles kindly, this freckle-faced girl who barely looks older than Nadine, and nothing about her suggests that she’s judging Rob for fathering this little blur in the snow. Here in this darkened room, he doesn’t feel judged or ashamed. If only, he thinks wildly, they could stay here until the baby comes.
He and Nadine are still holding hands as measurements are taken and dates calculated, and for those few moments, Rob can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ Mia asks, making her rubbery mermaid plunge through the meringue-like suds in the bath. She and Freddie are still happy to share bathtime, for which Kerry is hugely grateful; so much easier to sluice them both down at once.
‘It’s a girl, stupid,’ Freddie retorts from the tap end. ‘Mermaids aren’t boys. They have boobies.’
Kerry is perched on the loo seat while Buddy dozes on the bath mat at her feet. She is aware that, if she were truly efficient, she would be using this opportunity to fold towels, or scrub out the bath toys box where slimy stuff lurks. Instead, she is leafing sleepily through a nine-day-old Sunday supplement. She flicks to the food page, studying a celebrity chef’s ‘warming family lunches’. Mia and Freddie would probably delight in pumpkin risotto with crispy sage if she were a proper mother who’d trained them to enjoy such sophisticated flavours from birth. On this count, she’s failed. Most of Freddie’s vegetables are abandoned or flicked off his plate, and what hope is there if he won’t even tolerate sweetcorn? It’s bright yellow – and sweet, for God’s sake. The perfect child-friendly food.
‘I don’t mean mermaids,’ Mia says carefully. ‘I mean Daddy and Nadine’s baby.’
Kerry shuts the magazine. Nadine. The mention of her name triggers a small, sharp pain, like a little tinfoil spear being jabbed into her teeth. Freddie and Mia have yet to meet her, and of course they’ll have to at some point, as Rob seems to be ‘seeing her’ properly now. Spending most of the week at her place, by the sound of it. ‘I’d rather be honest with you,’ he’d said, during their last brief conversation, as if expecting one of the ‘well done’ stickers which Mia is always so proud to receive at school. Yet, maybe things will be easier when they have met her, as at least the questions will stop: What’s Nadine like, Mummy? I really don’t know … When can I meet her? Soon, darling, I promise …
‘I said, is it a boy or a girl?’ Mia repeats, scowling up at her mother.
‘I don’t know,’ Kerry murmurs. ‘We’ll have to wait and see.’
Mia scoops up a handful of bubbles and blows them in Freddie’s face. ‘I don’t wanna wait.’
‘I want a boy,’ Freddie announces.
‘Well, I want a girl,’ Mia counters.
‘We don’t know yet,’ he adds sagely, glancing at his mother, ‘’cause it’s in her tummy.’
‘That’s right, sweetheart.’ Kerry blinks rapidly, hating the fact that she still loses control of her tear ducts occasionally, always without any warning.
‘How big is it now, Mummy?’ Mia wants to know.
‘Er, I’m not sure. About the size of a grape, I’d imagine.’ Kerry kneels down on the floor to scrub at a lump of hardened toothpaste with a wodge of loo roll.
‘When’s it out?’ Freddie asks.
‘Oh. Um …’ How long until the joyous birth, he means, when Kerry will have to pretend to be at least interested, if not awash with delight, this child being a little half-sister or brother to Mia and Freddie. How will she pull off that one? What if he or she looks just like a newborn Freddie or Mia, despite having nothing whatsoever to do with her? ‘I’m not sure exactly,’ she replies finally, picking off the last of the toothpaste with a fingernail, ‘but there are a few months to go yet. They had a scan at the hospital and saw its heart beating.’
She sweeps her hands over her eyes on the pretence of brushing hair out of her face. A week ago now, Rob called to tell her about it, sounding all choked up and emotional. She still can’t shift the image of a blurry scan from her mind. What had he expected her to say – congratulations, or, ‘Ooh, I’d love to have a look sometime, if Nadine wouldn’t mind?’ Maybe she should. That would be the modern approach, wouldn’t it? She could start knitting some little baby bootees while she’s at it …
‘What’s a scan?’ Mia asks.
‘A picture of the baby in the mummy’s tummy,’ Kerry says curtly.
‘Can I see it?’ Freddie asks.
‘Er… . it’s not really up to me, Freddie.’
He glares at her, as if slowly deciding that she’s not quite the fabulous mother he’d once thought she was. ‘Why not?’
‘Because … it’s their baby. You’ll have to ask Daddy if you can see it.’
‘I wanna see it!’ he yells. ‘I wanna see the picture.’
Taking a deep breath, Kerry strokes the top of Buddy’s head. ‘Fine,’ she mutters. ‘I’m sure you can.’
‘How do they do it?’ Mia muses. It’s only now that Kerry realises her daughter has been carefully snipping away at her mermaid’s hair with the nail scissors. Synthetic blonde clumps are floating on the soft clouds of foam. ‘Do they put a camera in her, Mummy?’
‘No, it’s a special gadget that can sort of … see through skin.’ Kerry is sweating now, whether due to the steamy bathroom or the children’s line of questioning, she’s not sure.
‘How?’ Freddie demands.
‘Er …’ Kerry tries to figure out an explanation, even though she’s never been especially adept at telling the children the things they really want to know: how the TV works, why the sky is blue, where planets go in the daytime.
‘Does it make her bleed?’ Mia asks.
‘No, darling, it doesn’t actually—’ Kerry is relieved to snatch her ringing mobile from her pocket.
‘Hi, Kerry? My name’s Harvey. I called you a couple of months ago about piano lessons …’