Goodnight, Beautiful: A Novel Read online

  “Now, how can I be of assistance?” she asked, back in work mode.

  “I’ve got something for you,” I said. I pulled out the bag and handed it over. “I thought you might find it interesting.”

  She frowned quizzically at me and took it, her bangles clattering. Her eyes widened as she saw what was in the bag. Her manicured fingers pulled back the creases and folds of the clear plastic tightly over the test.

  “OH MY GOD!” she screamed suddenly and loudly. “OH MY GOD!” She threw herself across the cash desk, knocking aside the pink wrapping paper and the spool of ribbon and roll of tape, as she threw her slender, tanned arms around me, the bangles clattering loudly in my ears as they met around my shoulders. “OH MY GOD!” She squeezed what she could of me. “OH MY GOD!”

  She let go and ran around the desk. “OH MY GOD!” she screamed again and hugged me properly.

  “Can I feel, can I feel?” she asked, almost bouncing up and down in excitement. I hadn’t expected this reaction. I knew she’d be happy. I knew she’d be ecstatic, but not that she’d lose all semblance of Stephanie. I liked this person. I loved this person. It was a shame I had never seen her before.

  “Yeah, sure, but there’s nothing to feel at the moment.”

  She dropped to her knees, pressed her hand inside my coat. “Oh my God,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes. She pressed her cheek to the square of fabric over my stomach. “Hello, little one,” she whispered. “Hello, baby.”

  At that moment, the owner of the shop appeared. She’d heard the screaming and had come to see what was going on. She was dressed far more soberly, in jeans and a cream twinset, obviously a woman who liked fashion but wasn’t a slave to it. She stopped behind the counter when she saw her assistant manager on her knees, pressing her face against the stomach of a customer.

  “What is going on here?” she asked. Her voice came from money. Probably how she could afford a boutique that never seemed to have any customers.

  Stephanie got to her feet and grinned at her boss as she hooked her arm through mine. “This is my best friend, Nova. And she’s just found out that she’s having a baby,” Stephanie said.

  “I see,” the owner said. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” I replied, feeling like a fraud. I was also overwhelmed by what Stephanie had said. Me, her best friend. Me. She had stopped being suspicious of me and was starting to accept me.

  “We’re having a baby,” Stephanie said, a huge grin lighting up her face.

  The owner shook her head. “I can see I’m going to get no more sense out of you today,” she said. “Why don’t you take your friend out for a celebratory cup of tea and some cake?”

  “Oh, thanks,” she gushed. “I’ll just get my coat and bag.” Stephanie dashed out the back.

  “Is this your first?” the owner asked me.

  I nodded, feeling like a fraud again. I’d have to get used to this. When everyone could see I was pregnant, they’d quite rightly assume the baby was going to be mine. They’d ask about due dates, baby names, the sex of the baby, and all the other questions you asked a pregnant woman because of course she was going to keep the child. I hadn’t worked out, yet, what I was going to say. To strangers and to the people I worked with. How I was going to explain what I was doing and why it was the right thing to do.

  “Oh, wonderful. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Steph so happy. That happens a lot, though. Friends become so happy and caught up in your pregnancy that it’s almost as though they’re having the baby, too.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “I can understand that.”

  When Stephanie returned, she hooked her arm through mine again. “Thanks so much, Arabella,” she said. “Come on, let’s go tell Mal.” She stopped, looked at me, desperation and anxiety in her eyes. “Or have you told him already?”

  I shook my head. My first instinct had been, of course, to pick up the phone and call him, because he and Cordy were the first people I always called. But as I’d dialed his number I realized that I had to tell Stephanie first. Out of the three of us, she was the one who hadn’t had anything to do with the baby so far. She had hovered like a moth around a flame, but she wasn’t part of the flame. Telling her first would be a way to bring her in, reassure her that this was about her, too. “You’re the first person to know after me.”

  “Really?” she said, then bit her lower lip as more tears blossomed in her eyes. She hugged me again. “Thank you,” she whispered against my ear. “Thank you so much for doing this for me. I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to thank you.”

  CHAPTER 22

  P ink, blue or white?

  I held each of the rompers in my hand in turn, trying to decide which one to buy. Yellow was out. No one should ever wear yellow, although I had to sometimes for work. Pink, blue or white?

  White was the safe option, obviously, but it was sort of noncommittal. Buying one of the other colors would show I fully believed in this.

  Although we were only ten weeks pregnant and buying clothes could jinx it, I couldn’t help myself. Every lunchtime, sometimes on the way home, I’d go for more baby clothes. My heart fluttering, my stomach dancing, with every soft piece of material I caressed.

  I liked the attention, too. The way other women would assume that I was like them, that soon my belly would protrude and show under the pressure of my growing baby, my ankles would become swollen, I’d maybe have to wear my wedding rings on a chain around my neck instead of jammed onto my bloated fingers. No one asked when my baby was due, I simply noticed the surreptitious way they would glance at my stomach and back at my face, then would look away, their minds made up that I was pregnant. I belonged to their club. I decided to buy all three rompers. I could always team the blue one with a pink bow or sew a football motif onto the pink one.

  “I was thinking Malvolio for a boy, and Carmelita for a girl,” Mal said that night. Our legs were intertwined, the broad muscles of his limbs surprisingly light on mine. The bedside lamps created a pool of light around us, and piles of baby books shared the bed with us. We were as bad as each other, buying baby books, thinking about the nursery colors. (Mal didn’t know about the clothes, I hid them in what would become the nursery.) He had a week-by-week planner splayed open on his stomach, and was nuzzling my shoulder, stroking my stomach as he spoke.

  “Why?” I replied, genuinely mystified. I knew how he truly felt about his name, and Carmelita?! What the—?!

  “Malvolio because it’s tradition, and I like the sound of Carmelita. Carmie … Come on, Carmie, eat your sprouts.”

  “Tradition? Since when have you been a traditionalist? Men are so arrogant, naming children after themselves. You don’t get women doing it. You won’t get a Stephanie Wacken, Jr., for example.”

  “We do it to carry on the name.”

  “And it’s not enough that your surname is usually carried on? If that was the case, then it should be women doing that. Because our surnames are obliterated by marriage and bearing children, we should make sure our names are honored by naming our first-born girls after ourselves.”

  He pressed his finger on the tip of my nose before he followed it with a kiss. “You’re being silly. It’ll never catch on.”

  “Sadly, I think you may be right.”

  “Besides, Carmelita is a wonderful name.”

  “Yes, yes it is, but not for our daughter.… Can you believe it? We may be having a daughter.”

  “No, it’s a boy.”

  He spoke with such certainty, I raised my eyes to look at him. He was staring into space, a blissful half-smile smoothing out his features and unfocusing his eyes. “Oh? Do you know something I don’t know?”

  “No, not really. Nova told me. She has a feeling she’s carrying a boy.”

  My heart dipped a fraction. Only a touch. Nothing horrendous. It was a momentary flutter that dissolved an instant after it touched my heart. Why hadn’t she told me that? “When did she tell you that?”

  “The ot
her day. I was asking if she was going to find out the sex, and she said she didn’t need to as she knew it was a boy.”

  “But we agreed not to find out the sex during the scan,” I reminded him.

  “I know, but just because we don’t want to know doesn’t mean Nova won’t want to know.”

  I pushed myself away from him, looked at him. His handsome features, all strong and angular lines, still soft from his blissed-out mood, stared back at me. I frowned at him. “It doesn’t matter what she wants to know. It’s got nothing to do with her, Mal.”

  It was his turn to frown as he blinked at me a few times. “She’s having the baby,” he reminded.

  “For us. It’s our baby. We make the decisions about the scan and finding out the sex. She’s only carrying the baby. Growing it. We’re going to be its parents, which means we need to make the big and little decisions.”

  His forehead creased a little more. “That sounds … I don’t know, cold-blooded,” he said.

  The heart flutter returned, lasted a little longer this time. Only a fraction longer, nothing to worry about. “She has to be cold-blooded about this, Mal. Don’t you see? If she starts making decisions like finding out the sex of the baby, or even if she’s involved in those sorts of decisions, how is she going to be able to give him or her to us at the end of the pregnancy? The more involved she gets, the harder it’s going to be.”

  Mal shifted in bed, gently but precisely moved me off him, so he could sit up. I noted the movement, though, the slight pushing away. It wasn’t me he was pushing away, it was the thought he hadn’t completely explored before. The one thing he hadn’t wanted to consider: how this would affect Nova. He’d just assumed it would be easy for her because she was doing this thing for us. That, her being her, she was doing it for someone she loved and there’d be no complications.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted.

  “If she starts to think of this baby as anything other than something she’s growing, then she won’t want to give him or her up,” I said.

  “You make it sound like she’s growing a yeast infection and has to get rid of it at the end of it.”

  “No, she’s made it that way. I don’t know how anyone could do what she’s doing. I think it’s wonderful and I’ll never be able to thank her enough, but I could never give up a baby.”

  A momentary look, a flitting-through thought, crossed Mal’s face. The thought of the one I’d left behind, the baby that never was.

  “That was so different to this, Mal,” I said, drawing my knees to my chest. One of the books toppled off the bed, landing with a loud thump on the rug. “I didn’t even know who the father was. It could have been one of three men and I don’t even remember it happening.” I spoke quickly, loud and defensive, trying to remind him of the futility of my situation. “I was fifteen and ill. I wasn’t healthy and fit and capable of looking after a child. And I had no choice. They made me do it.”

  “I know,” he said, reaching for me.

  I moved out of reach, not wanting him to think for one moment that he had appeased me when he had just thought what he did. “No, you don’t,” I replied. “You just thought I’d given up a baby. Like it’s the same as this. But it wasn’t.”

  “Yes, I know, I’m sorry, I didn’t really think you’d given up a baby, I just … I had a momentary fuckwit thought. I’m sorry.”

  “I could never do what Nova is doing. I’m in awe of her, honestly. I’m in awe of any woman who could do that for someone else, but I’m not one of them.”

  He nodded, rubbed at a spot behind his right ear. He was troubled. Worrying about Nova, worrying about what this would do to her. She wasn’t one of those people who could shut off from something like that, either.

  My eyes ran slowly over my husband’s gorgeous, concerned face, each line a reminder of how and why I loved him. This hadn’t occurred to him. Not even when he’d made her be our friend again, he hadn’t thought that this could permanently damage her. While I, I had always known her love for Mal would destroy her.

  “We’ve got to look after her,” I told Mal. “That’s why I take her things. We have to make sure that she’s OK. Not just for the health of the baby, but for her. So that she’ll be all right with this. And we have to make sure she doesn’t start to think of herself as the mother, because that will destroy her.”

  I snuggled into him, let him put his arms around me now. I was suddenly scared that he might change his mind about all of this, that he might decide that Nova was more important than having the baby. Even though she was already pregnant, he might give her the opportunity to change her mind.

  “She seems OK now, though,” I said.

  “Yeah, she does,” he agreed.

  “Blooming, apart from the sickness.”

  “Yeah,” he breathed. “It’s bizarre that despite how sick she’s being she still looks like she’s doing really well.”

  “And we can help her stay that way.”

  “Yeah.”

  “OK, so, as I was saying, Stephanie for a girl, Angelo for a boy …”

  Mal smiled, and I ignored the flutter that him saying she looked like she was doing well caused me. It wasn’t the words, it was the slightly wistful look in his eye when he said it.

  CHAPTER 23

  I lay on the sofa listening to Mal move around my kitchen, making me dinner. He’d taken to doing that on his way home from work.

  Stephanie had dropped by earlier, and stayed for a little while. She always called first to check if it was OK to drop round; Mal only ever called to check I was in—just like before I got pregnant with their baby. Stephanie would bring flowers, chocolate, a book or some essential oils she thought I might like. She would ask if she could put her hand on my stomach, and I would see the happiness soften her face, illuminate her smile as she obviously felt what she was feeling for.

  Mal would kiss my cheek when I opened the door, and his hand would immediately move to my abdomen, as he said hello twice—once to me, once to the baby. He’d then spend the rest of the night with his hand almost permanently on my abdomen.

  I didn’t know what they felt, because I avoided touching my stomach. My natural instinct was always to reach down and place my hand there, to see if the skin was firmer—it looked firmer—or warmer because my body temperature seemed to have gone up. I was often hot, rarely needed that extra sweater I usually put on, my jeans were tight and my breasts … I’d bought six new bras in the last month. I had gone up three cup sizes and was flirting around an H cup. My back size hadn’t gone up, just my breasts. I always resisted touching my stomach, instead lacing my fingers together under my head whenever the urge took me. I couldn’t touch my abdomen; even when I was moisturizing my skin in the morning, I whisked over that area, not wanting to linger.

  I couldn’t engage with what I was doing. I always had to remind myself that I was growing this for someone else. If I allowed myself to think about it, even for one second … I wasn’t sure I could do it.

  Almost everything I had seen and read said that women who became surrogates should have had children already; should have “finished” with children, should feel their families were complete. Your first child being one that you’re having for someone else could cause problems: you might have separation anxiety, go through the bereavement process in a severe way. Have problems giving the baby to the intended parents. And, of course, what if something went wrong and you were unable to have more children afterwards? That could destroy you.

  I couldn’t imagine not going through all those separation feelings, whether my family was “complete” or not, but I was doing this for two important people and I had to focus on that.

  To do it, I had to stay detached. Removed. Uninvolved. Not do things like touch my stomach, nor give in to the temptation to stand in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom inspecting every new development with my body. Even when Stephanie had held my hand during the twelve-week dating scan and she’d gasped when t
he image had appeared on the screen, I hadn’t looked. I’d stared up at the ceiling, biting my lower lip, willing myself not to look as the sonographer pointed out the baby’s head, the spine, the legs, the arms, which were waving, the heart. She’d asked me if I was OK because I wasn’t looking, and I’d mumbled something about having to concentrate on not releasing the contents of my extremely full bladder, which was why I’d brought my friend, who would remember every detail. Stephanie had been so overjoyed with it all she had hugged me for three or four minutes after I’d been to the loo. She asked if I wanted to see the photo, but I had said no, it was all hers. I couldn’t bear to see him, it would be a connection that I couldn’t afford—mentally and emotionally—to make.

  The moment I indulged myself like that in any way, I’d be lost. I’d be tumbling into this fantasy world where I was going to be handed a baby at the end of the nine months. Where I would be living happily ever after with the father. Where I would have the things I had hoped for in life happening to me a few years early.

  During the past three weeks, I had noticed, Mal had become incredibly attentive. Making me dinner, cups of tea, forcing me to lie down when I was sitting. He’d done things like that before, but something had changed in him, I could tell. I wasn’t sure what it was, but he seemed to be even more concerned than normal.

  I had started to wonder if he’d guessed that I planned to go away for at least a year once the baby was born. The only way I knew I could do this would be to leave afterwards, to get on a plane and see as much of the world as I could. I would need space—a lot of it—and that space lay out there, in the great beyond. When I returned, hopefully I would be able to look at the child as theirs and theirs alone, and would have found a way to put aside the fact I’d had a role in its introduction to the world. I wondered if Mal had guessed and didn’t want me to go. Hence the cooking, the constant reiterating his gratitude, and reminding me how much I meant to him.