‘At NCT,’ Amber says. ‘We were the youngest women there. Clueless.’
I listen to her tell the story with a smile on my face. Back then I didn’t even know what NCT stood for. The reality of becoming a mother, what it really meant, hadn’t penetrated as deeply as it perhaps should have done, considering I was six months in. I was still partying with my non-pregnant friends, full of energy and plans that didn’t include babies. I knew not to drink alcohol or eat unpasteurized cheese, but even those things didn’t come close to preparing me mentally. It wasn’t that I was actively refusing to accept the situation – there wasn’t a situation. Even the kicks felt surreal.
I remember standing outside a converted school in Brixton staring at the labels beside the buttons and wrinkling my brow. Someone came out, so I went in. There was no clue to where the class was, just a flight of concrete stairs. After two aborted attempts that had me backing apologetically out of a small advertising agency and an accountancy firm, I pushed open a door and found a group of women seated in a semicircle, gossiping amongst themselves while a midwife unpacked a wheelie suitcase. Several of them turned as I came in, and one of them was Amber. She smiled, and it was such a beautiful smile, like a blast of light and colour and warmth. Everything seemed better, heightened and more real. I remember she was wearing a stripy top, French style, the stripes curving over her neat bump; black leggings and trainers. Her hair was blonde, the dirty kind, and shaggy. I sat next to her.
I found out that Amber was half German – her father left when she was a baby, went back to Frankfurt to visit his family and never returned – and that her mother, an alcoholic, died when she was seventeen. She told me months later that she had never forgiven herself for not getting home in time to raise the alarm. I can only imagine what it must be like to carry that burden.
I smile and pick up the story. I tell Jenny about the irritating woman who kept interrupting the midwife with her opinions on natural labour, about struggling to contain our mirth when someone silently broke wind.
‘And look at us now,’ Amber says. ‘Still kindred spirits.’
I don’t tell Jenny how desperate I was not to lose sight of Amber, how worried I was that she wouldn’t come back the following week, how I had racked my brains over how to ensure this without coming across as needy. I don’t tell her because I’ve never told Amber. I had old school friends down in Sussex and I had my university friends who had started careers in London, but they couldn’t get their heads around what was happening to me. In the end though I needn’t have worried because when we wandered out into the sunshine, it was Amber who suggested we go for a coffee.
We found a table at the back of Costa. Amber had a cappuccino and I had a hot chocolate. I used a spoon to eat the cream off the top and the sugar hit made my baby kick.
‘Do you worry about this at all?’ she asked.
I looked round. ‘What? Loitering in coffee shops?’
‘No,’ she laughed. ‘That you’re going to be a good mother.’
I stirred my drink, watching the creamy swirls dissipate into the chocolate. ‘I don’t really think about that side of it. I suppose I sort of assume it’ll happen and I’ll do what I’m meant to do. Why? Are you worried?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m fine.’
‘My mum was a disaster, but I’m all right. Not too traumatized by the experience. Children are very resilient.’
‘Are they?’
I paused, unsure again. ‘Yes. Well up to a point, obviously.’
She sat back and placed her hands on her bump, slim fingers splayed. Her engagement ring was a square-cut sapphire surrounded by diamonds. ‘How long have you been married?’
‘A month. I looked like a white van.’
I pulled out my phone and showed her the photograph of me and Tom outside the register office, beaming with happiness, my voluminous white dress flapping in the January wind.
‘You do not look like a van,’ Amber said, taking the phone from me. ‘You look gorgeous.’ She flicked through the pictures.
‘Who’s that?’
‘That’s Mum.’
‘Your mum? That’s your mum?’
‘Yes.’ I wasn’t surprised by her reaction. I got it all the time.
‘She looks too young.’
‘She was only seventeen when she had me. She’s thirty-nine now and totally underwhelmed by the idea of becoming a grandmother.’
Amber hung on to my phone, gazing at the picture. Then she handed it back with a grin. ‘You will come next week, won’t you?’
Jenny gets up to leave soon after that and I feel guilty. I should have explained that Mum is fiercely independent, kind, loving and the best of neighbours. When we moved down to Bognor, into the house on Waterloo Square that she had bought on impulse at auction, there was barely anything there; no heating, no electricity and no water, but by the end of the first day the house was buzzing, candles lit, buckets filled from neighbours’ taps, broken windows blocked with plywood and resident pigeons and seagulls dispatched. And that was because of her personality; because, for all her moments of bad judgement, she has a genuine and generous interest in other people. She gives more than she gets. I wish I had got that across.
Amber waits in the kitchen with Josh while Vicky shows Jenny out. She could have left at the same time, probably should have, but two things made her hang around. One was that she liked to be seen by other friends as being completely at home in the Seagraves’ house. She’s aware that this is pathetic, but it doesn’t stop her from needing that feeling of being one of them. The other reason is that she sensed Vicky’s puzzled uncertainty over the article and is already wondering if she went too far, if it wouldn’t have been better to have changed the subject rather than allow Vicky to suspect she was needling her or deliberately trying to make her feel guilty. The last thing she wants is to drive a rift between them.
She hears Jenny hoot with laughter. They’re still talking on the doorstep. Jenny is chatty and friendly, and sometimes difficult to dislodge. Amber finds it hard to imagine her in her other guise as a family lawyer. She’s too big and jolly.
Josh plays with her fingers with his good hand, laughing as Amber waggles them up and down. He gets overexcited and forgets about his arm, knocking it against the side of the table. His eyes widen with surprise and then his face crumples, reddening in an instant.
‘Little man,’ Amber coos.
She pulls him out of his high chair before he starts wailing, not wanting his mother to come running just yet, enjoying having him to herself.
‘There there.’ She kisses it better then blows a raspberry on his cheek and licks the residual saltiness from her lips.