Three In a Bed Page 8

  ‘Have you told your parents yet?’ Tania asked.

  ‘Well no. You’re the only person who knows apart from Don, oh and the doctor, obviously.’ Shit, she still hadn’t rebooked the last cancelled appointment.

  ‘You should tell your mum and dad,’ Tania told her.

  Bella let out a heavy sigh. ‘I know, I know. I’m absolutely dreading it. You know how weird mum is about pregnancies and they still haven’t met Don yet. I just don’t want to make things worse than they already are.’

  ‘Well, try not to worry about it,’ her friend said. ‘It will work out, I promise. Grandchildren seem to have this way of resolving all kinds of problems.’

  ‘Ha, well . . . we’ll see,’ Bella replied.

  ‘Gosh you are looking well. They’re obviously taking care of you over at Merris Group.’

  This was Susan’s idea of a hello when Bella met her for lunch a few days later.

  Her boss was obviously desperate to say: Look at the weight you’ve piled on. Are you eating too many business lunches? Just to make her point, Susan ordered salad. But there was no way Bella could restrain herself, she was permanently starving. She ordered carrot soup with crusty brown bread, then followed with salmon steak, new potatoes drenched in butter and a side salad.

  She would have loved to eat dessert too but Susan had looked so horrified at the suggestion, Bella decided to pass.

  She had thought a cosy lunch with the boss might have given her the opportunity to break the baby news, but Susan was in a dreadful temper and just wanted to talk shop. She wanted a detailed progress report on Merris Group and then asked Bella about moving over to the Danson’s job in the spring, much earlier than planned.

  Bella couldn’t believe it. How the hell was she to fit maternity leave in? ‘I thought Danson’s didn’t want us in till August at the very earliest?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, they’ve had a rethink,’ said Susan. ‘They now feel they have the budget to go ahead in May or June. Are you expecting Merris to overrun? Is that the problem?’

  Bella tried to fudge it: ‘Well, obviously I should be available if Merris doesn’t overrun. But you would be best to tell Danson’s if they really want me, they should make it August. I suppose I could do some preliminary reports, but get down to it in late July, August. I really want that job, Susan, I worked very hard to get the contract.’

  ‘Merris is never going to run past April. Have you got something else lined up for Spring?’ Susan asked sharply.

  ‘Well . . . er . . . there is something I haven’t mentioned to you because it is in the very early stages,’ she began, but then her courage deserted her ‘It’s . . . um . . . someone I’m trying to woo over to us and they already have consultants booked in for May/June, so I’m trying to pinch that slot.’ She willed herself to shut up, she was making this worse.

  ‘So who’s that then?’ Susan looked interested.

  ‘Well, I’d rather not say.’ For a dangerous moment, Bella thought Susan was going to press the point but instead she dismissed the subject with: ‘Well, OK, I’m sure you’ll tell me when necessary.’

  How right she was.

  Susan snapped shut her dinky laptop and flicked her Amex onto the table to pay the bill.

  ‘You’re a very able consultant, Bella. You are going to be one of the best. I don’t want to lose you. If anyone makes you any offers, please come and talk to me first. In the meantime, you’re getting a healthy raise come January and I promise you won’t be disappointed with your Christmas bonus.’

  Bloody hell, thought Bella. ‘Thanks Susan, that means a lot,’ she said.

  OK, she hadn’t told her about the baby, but generally the lunch hadn’t gone too badly.

  When she got back home that evening, Bella stripped down to her underwear and looked in the mirror. Her breasts were enormous: they were spilling out over the top and sides of her C cups. Her stomach stuck out in an alarming pot belly and her waist had completely disappeared.

  She didn’t look pregnant, she looked fat and frumpy and she wasn’t happy about it at all.

  She heard the front door slam. Don was home. ‘Bella?’ he called.

  ‘I’m in the bedroom.’

  ‘Lucky me.’ He stood in the doorway looking at her.

  ‘I’m depressed.’ She threw herself down on the bed. ‘Look at me, I’m fat all over. My clothes are straining at the seams.’

  He flung himself right down beside her.

  ‘Hey, gorgeous,’ he said, kissing her mouth tenderly. ‘Look at your cleavage though, it’s fantastic.’

  He slipped her bra straps down over her shoulder and kissed the tops of her breasts.

  ‘I look fat,’ she wailed.

  ‘You look perfect to me and you’re doing a great job. You’re making a whole new person in there.’

  Funny how she hadn’t even begun to think of it like that. She wasn’t just ‘pregnant’, she was actually making a baby. It was very weird. She pulled him close and smelled the slightly sweaty, grimy scent of a day’s work on him. It was very sexy snogging him when she was naked and he was still dressed in his suit.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, I’m OK, I’ve got some very nice things I’m going to cook you for supper.’

  ‘Oh yeah. I think your kitchen skills are the sexiest thing about you,’ she teased.

  ‘Really . . . well, in that case, I’m going to chop, grate and stir-fry.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ she pretended to pant. ‘And what about marinading or casseroling? I’m getting shivers down my spine!’

  Her naked body was pressed close up against his and as he tasted his way around her mouth, her hands were undoing his belt. ‘What can I do to make you feel better about your lovely body?’ he asked.

  ‘Mmmm, I can think of a few things,’ she answered.

  On Saturday they went shopping together because she needed new bras to accommodate the increasingly heavy breasts.

  Don perched on the little stool inside the changing room with instructions to be quiet. But the sight of his wife slipping in and out of underwear in a semi-public place proved too much to bear. He kept pulling her over, whispering, ‘Bella, you have no idea. I’m living out one of my favourite fantasies here.’

  For someone hitting 42 next year, he had an impressive sex drive, she thought, looking at the bulge in his trousers.

  There she was in the most white and frumpy bra she had ever tried on in her life – welcome to the ‘maternity’ section – and she suddenly felt the need to thrill Don, to let him know she was still the shockingly sexy girl he’d married.

  So she knelt down beside him and unzipped his trousers, freeing the large hard-on inside. Moments later, he came quickly with an impressively quiet gasp.

  Bella thought of England and swallowed. Before either of them could say anything, a shop assistant was at the cubicle curtain wanting to know how she was getting on.

  As Don fumbled with his zip, Bella stood up and put her head round. ‘Haven’t you got anything a bit less, well, maternal? These are just hideous,’ she said.

  The assistant stepped into the cubicle and eyed Don sitting self-consciously in the corner, then she looked at Bella, dressed in a white bra that seemed to stretch from way below her bust all the way up to her collarbone.

  ‘You will need the support over the next few months,’ the saleswoman said, adjusting the donkey pannier sized bra cups.

  ‘The breasts get very heavy and if they’re not supported, they will droop. We don’t recommend underwiring, so you’ll have to wear a supportive soft cup.’

  ‘Right,’ Bella said, somewhat shaken at the thought of inducing breast droop. ‘I’ll take two of these monstrosities for day wear then, but I want the nicest, silkiest underwired 34DDs you can find me for special occasions.’

  The woman came back with an armful of bright satin and lace. This was more like it.

  Bella chose lime green, peach and cappuccino all with matching G-strings, to make up
for the horror of the maternity wear.

  Don scooped the lot up to take to the till: ‘My treat, Bella,’ he said, still completely bemused.

  Chapter Nine

  BELLA WAS IN the doctor’s waiting room flicking anxiously through old copies of Tatler. What for? God knows, she had stacks of files in her bulging briefcase she could be looking through instead. But she was on the verge of being nervous now and she knew she wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the finer points of the Merris Group investment return figures.

  She was four months pregnant and had been cancelling doctor’s appointments almost every week because she had been so busy at work. Finally, overwhelmed with guilt, she’d taken a whole day off to coincide with antenatal day at Dr Wilson’s surgery.

  But she was fidgety at the amount of time she was wasting.

  ‘Miss Browning,’ the receptionist called. ‘Dr Wilson is ready for you now.’

  She gathered up her handbag and briefcase and strode over to his office, saying ‘It’s Ms’ to the receptionist as she passed.

  ‘Hello, Bella, how are you?’ Dr Wilson didn’t look up immediately.

  ‘I’m fine, thanks.’

  ‘So . . . Four months pregnant. You’re not showing it at all,’ he said when he saw her.

  ‘Believe me, my bra is about five sizes bigger and every waistband is straining,’ she replied.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘I’m feeling fine. I’m over the sickness and I feel normal, my usual energetic self.’

  ‘Hmmm,’ was his reply. ‘OK, you lie on the couch, I’ll do a quick examination then I’m going to turn you over to Declan.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ she said, arranging herself on his couch and lifting her top, so he could feel her stomach.

  ‘Our midwife,’ the doctor answered gently squeezing and pressing down on her lower abdomen which felt surprisingly tender.

  ‘Oh right,’ she said, wondering why she felt slightly strange at the prospect of a male midwife.

  ‘The midwife will see you now, Mzzzzzzzz Browning,’ the receptionist said after Bella had spent another ten long minutes flicking through more magazines in the waiting room then reading all the uplifting notices on the walls: ‘How to spot meningitis’, ‘How to treat a heart attack’, ‘Saturday appointments are for emergencies only. A cold is not an emergency.’

  She opened the door at the end of the corridor and clapped eyes on Declan, who was not at all what she had expected. He was a wiry little elf of a man with short frizzy hair and twinkly eyes.

  ‘Bella Browning. Lovely name,’ he said, instantly revealing which side of the Irish Sea he was born on.

  ‘Hello.’ She shook his outstretched hand. ‘You don’t look nearly old enough for this job.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m 31. I’ve been doing this professionally for ten years,’ he replied. ‘But I actually delivered my first baby when I was 12. Sit down and relax. You’re not due for months, so we’ve plenty of time to get acquainted and go through your options. Now, first of all do you mind explaining exactly what you’re doing pitching up here at sixteen weeks, when you should have had a booking appointment with me a month ago?’

  ‘Well, I’m a very busy girl.’

  ‘Yes, you and every other woman who pokes their little Italian shoes into this surgery.’ That surprised her. He went on: ‘Antenatal care is a serious business, for which you are entitled to official time off work.’

  ‘Yeah, if you’ve told your work you’re pregnant and if they don’t dismiss you on the spot for showing “lack of commitment”.’ She wondered why this was irritating her so much.

  ‘I’m sure you’re aware there are laws against that kind of thing.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re aware that there are ways around those laws,’ she shot back.

  ‘OK, so let’s put a big S for stressed in your book here, shall we?’ He turned back the cover of a blue booklet.

  ‘Was the pregnancy planned?’ he asked.

  ‘Is that anything to do with you?’

  ‘Look, I’m trying to fill in your maternity book here, this is an official question. You don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to.’

  ‘Yes, it was planned,’ she snapped, still not sure why she felt so angry. She watched him tick the ‘yes’ box.

  They went through the list of questions – age, allergies, illnesses – then he asked if she smoked. To her astonishment, Bella found herself bursting into tears.

  When Declan instinctively put an arm round her and asked if she was OK, out it all tumbled – the guilt at telling Don it was an accident, the terrible worry that she would have miscarriage after miscarriage like her mother, not even wanting to tell her mother about the pregnancy because it would upset her. All the fears Bella had not even properly admitted to herself and here she was coughing them out to a complete stranger.

  ‘Have you been pretending to yourself that you’re not really pregnant at all?’ Declan asked in the kind voice which had made her crack up in the first place.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so.’ She was frantically dabbing at her eyes and trying to stop the tears.

  ‘Smoking too much, because you’re so stressed about it?’ he asked.

  She nodded, starting to weep again.

  ‘Drinking too much?’

  She put her head in her hands.

  ‘Look, it’s OK.’ He patted her back. ‘You’ve got to 16 weeks, that’s a really good sign, there’s no point worrying about what you’ve done. But it’s time to look after yourself a bit better now. If you can’t stop, cut down, OK, and try not to worry about everything so much.’

  As she calmed down, they talked about hospitals, screening tests and scans and he rolled up her sleeve to take blood.

  When Bella got home that evening, she was determined not to give in to the desire for a drink and ten cigarettes. In the kitchen, she poured an inch of white wine into a tall glass. She swirled it round so it had coated all the sides, then tipped the wine out into the sink. She filled the glass up with ice and soda water and took a sip. Aargh, it was like the ghost of a white wine spritzer, like the drink had died and here she was at its funeral, trying to relive the good times.

  But no pain, no gain. She was going to smoke less and drink hardly anything, if it killed her.

  Several days later, she was holed up in her tiny office at Merris lost in thought, staring at the graphs on her screen, when her mobile trilled.

  She was irritated at the disruption and cursed herself for not putting it onto voicemail.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello, Bella Browning?’

  ‘This is she.’

  ‘Hello, it’s Declan here.’

  Her mind was blank. Declan?

  ‘The midwife.’

  ‘Oh yes. Hello, sorry about the other day. I’m really fine, I don’t know what . . .’ she felt embarrassed.

  ‘Bella, chill out, will you? We need to talk, is now a good time, or should I call back?’

  ‘Now is fine. What is it?’

  ‘We’ve had the results of your blood tests and I’d like you to come in and discuss them.’

  She felt the hairs stand up on the back of her neck.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ she whispered. ‘I’m HIV positive.’

  ‘Um, no, I don’t think so.’ She could hear him turning pages over. ‘No, you’re not, actually.’

  ‘Oh thank God.’ She slumped back in her chair with relief.

  ‘It’s the screening test. Look, you really need to come in and see me,’ he said.

  ‘Please Declan, just tell me now.’

  ‘Well, it’s come back with quite a high possibility . . .’ he trailed off, then added, ‘I’d really prefer to see you.’

  ‘How high?’ she said immediately.

  ‘One in 50 chance of Down’s Syndrome.’

  ‘Two per cent? That’s small, in fact statistically insignificant,’ she replied, trying to convince herself.

  ‘Well, we consider it
higher than it should be for your age. There are some steps you can take to check. You can have an amnio or a scan. It would be best if you came in and talked it through.’

  ‘I can’t, Declan, we’ll have to do this on the phone.’ He sounded so serious it was making her scared.

  ‘Well, OK, I’m going to give you my mobile number. I’m on duty tonight anyway, so when you get home and you’ve put your feet up and chilled out, call me and I’ll talk you through it.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘OK, I’ve got to go now,’ he said. ‘I’ll speak to you later.’

  ‘Bye.’ Bella clicked the phone off and looked at the screen again. The figures were wobbling around and for a moment she couldn’t think why. She was about to cry. Quickly she put her head back so the tears wouldn’t trail mascara down her cheeks. A 2 per cent chance of Down’s Syndrome. What did that mean?

  There was a tap at the door, so she pressed her fingers under her eyes to blot the tears away. ‘Come in,’ she said, hoping she looked normal.

  ‘Hi.’ It was Mitch. She waved at the spare seat.

  He sat down, then looking at her properly, said, ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes, fine. My eyes are tired from looking at the screen all day.’

  ‘No wonder. You are allowed out of here, you know, you can have lunch, you can take your smokes out to the atrium where you will find other, live people.’

  ‘I know. But I have a hell of a lot of work to do. I’m starting to panic I won’t get it done in time. I don’t want the contract extended.’

  ‘Are things here worse than you expected?’

  ‘I don’t know if it would be professional to comment,’ she said.

  ‘Can I level with you?’ he asked. ‘My wife is expecting our third baby in the spring and I’m not a UK resident. If I’m going to need a new job, I want to know so I can start looking now.’

  Why was he asking her this? It wasn’t fair. It crossed her mind that he was wired up and testing her out for his bosses.

  ‘I really won’t know the full situation until I’ve completed a thorough assessment, then I’ll report in detail to the board.’

  ‘Good grief, you sound like a corporate robot. I’m asking you for your opinion.’ He looked tired and stressed. He was a nice guy, not the type to get involved with industrial espionage. God, she was getting paranoid.