There was a moment then when neither of them quite knew what to do. They’d been good friends but now that seemed like a long time ago, and as if they’d forgotten the language of familiarity there was an awkwardness, a shyness even. Finally JJ broached it, laughing and saying, “What are we meant to do here? Kiss? Hug?”
“How about a bit of both?” she said, kissing him on the cheek and holding herself against him for a few seconds, stirring the thought of Esther’s Judas greeting earlier that day. When she pulled away she smiled at him and said, “Boy, do you have some explaining to do!”
“Tell me about it.”
“Come on then, let’s have tea.” She led him through to the kitchen, showing him the other downstairs rooms on the way, one of them still undecorated. It looked like her place somehow, no indication that someone else lived there, raising the question of the expected baby’s father, the suggestion that perhaps JJ wasn’t the only one with a recent history worth telling.
He sat at the heavy wooden table in the kitchen, a rustic look to the room like part of her wanted to go back and live in Somerset. As she made the tea he said, “So when’s the baby due?”
“Second of December.” She turned and patted the bump. “So it looks like I’m in for a family Christmas.”
“It’s amazing,” he said, staring at her stomach. “It’s just hard to believe you’re pregnant, you know, grown up, having a child.”
“I don’t know about grown up. But I am twenty-nine, not exactly a schoolgirl mother.” She poured the water into the teapot and brought it over to the table, then the mugs and milk. Sitting down she said, “Do you want to touch it?”
“Do you mind?”
“Why should I mind?” She smiled and lifted the sweater and T-shirt under it to reveal her rounded, marble-smooth stomach.
“I should warm my hands,” he said, rubbing them together. He pulled his chair out and reached over, putting his palm flat on the skin and moving it slowly across the curved world of her body like it was a piece of living sculpture.
There was no kick, no movement, but an overpowering sense all the same of another life enclosed there, another heart beating, another mind already subconsciously recording its mother’s moods, environment, sounds, perhaps even the touch of his hand. Unexpectedly he felt himself moved, ambushed by the emotional power of it, his eyes welling up a little without him knowing why.
He looked at her, bemused by his own response to something so commonplace, an unborn child that wasn’t even his own, in which he had no investment.
“Well?” Jools could see he was moved, and she looked touched in turn by his response.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. “I don’t know why but it’s really beautiful.”
She smiled, pleased, and said, “A man who’s not afraid of his emotions—now there’s a rare thing.”
He smiled back. It was a compliment that made him uneasy though. Maybe he wasn’t afraid of his emotions, but it was a lack of fear that also manifested itself in ways she would have found completely alien.
Shifting away from himself he said, “What about the father?”
“Shall I pour?” she answered with awry smile, confirming what he’d thought earlier. She poured the tea but continued dismissively, “To be fair, it was a fling, nothing more, fun for a couple of months but not someone I would have wanted to stay with. It had already fizzled by the time I found out I was pregnant.”
“Did you tell him?”
“Oh I told him and he was fine about it, offered to support me and everything, which I declined. Rather thankfully, he seems quite happy to have nothing further to do with it.”
He wondered if she was putting a brave face on it, but she seemed at ease with things, too relaxed to be covering her true feelings. He could understand it too from the way she looked because there was a completeness about her, like they hadn’t known the whole person back at college but there she was now, all her promise delivered. It made him warm to her even more than he had in his memory.
“Will you be okay financially?”
“Yes I think so,” she said, nodding. “I may not look high-powered but I am, and the City’s been good to me. Frankly, I could retire now and not worry about holidays or school fees or anything else. As it is I’ll work part-time or freelance, employ a good nanny It’s incredible really; my parents are still baffled as to exactly what it is I do and yet I get paid huge amounts of money for it.”
“I know what you mean.”
Her face was transformed suddenly by another thought. “God, how are your parents? And your little sister!”
“Oh they’re all fine,” he said, finding it strange to be with someone again who’d met his family, who had access to the lumber room where he kept all those other parts of himself. “My sister’s not so little anymore. She’s a journalist for Reuters in Hong Kong. My parents are still the same though.”
She laughed, overcome with memory, and said, “Remember the summer we came over to your parents’ place? What did we call it? The Schloss Dunstoned!”
“The Schloss Dunstoned,” he repeated, transported back briefly. “God that seems like forever ago.”