Lost Dogs and Lonely Hearts

  ‘Right, Bertie,’ she said, when Johnny had left the house and the day stretched endlessly ahead of her. ‘Let’s get you walked.’

  They took their usual route along the canal, past the ducks and swans that Bertie arooed at, and into the park, but once there, Natalie’s legs still twitched to walk further. She wanted to walk off some of the tension that Johnny’s unusual mood had coiled into her.

  ‘How about a visit to the kennels?’ she asked, eyeing the route up to the hill. It would double their normal outing, but what did she have to get home for? As if someone was reading her thoughts, she saw Megan heading down into the park with an assortment of terriers, trotting perfectly on their leads.

  Natalie waved as if she’d just arrived herself, and was strangely consoled when Megan cheerily called her and Bertie over.

  An hour and a longer walk later, Natalie was back in the warm kitchen up at Four Oaks, Bertie was in a basket by the Aga with Gem, and she was helping Rachel insert copy into the new Second Chance Dogs website.

  It was like being in an office and being at home at the same time – a pretty good combination, Natalie thought, helping herself to another biscuit.

  They’d made heartwarming profiles for Treacle the Lab and Lucy the Staffie – making each other well up with tears at the messages they were posting on behalf of the dogs – when Rachel took a break to make them some elevenses.

  Natalie had only taken a sip of her coffee when Rachel pulled a face and stopped her. ‘Sorry, don’t drink it! The milk’s off.’

  Natalie smelled her mug. ‘Is it? Tastes perfectly fine to me.’

  ‘No, it’s foul. I thought there was something wrong with it on my Weetabix this morning, so I opened a fresh pint but this is the same. It tastes really nasty. Eurgh.’ She shuddered dramatically. ‘It actually turned my stomach. I thought it was that bug of Megan’s making me feel pukey, but it’s the milk.’

  Natalie scrutinised her. Rachel seemed even paler than usual, and drawn, as if she hadn’t slept. Cogs began to turn in her mind, little boxes that she’d tried really hard to check herself each month, starting with that elusive metallic taste, ironically brought on by folic acid tablets.

  It wouldn’t be fair. It would be so unfair.

  ‘It tasted sort of metallic?’ she asked, unable to resist.

  ‘Yes!’ Rachel pointed with her pen. ‘Like someone had left ten-pence pieces in it. Can you taste it? Is it just local milk or something?’

  Was she being obsessive? Should she say something?

  ‘What?’ Rachel demanded. ‘Why are you looking at me like that? You think I’m going mad, don’t you?’

  Natalie shook her head. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but do you think you might be pregnant?’

  Rachel laughed. ‘No! I don’t. Why? Is it a sign? Milk tasting like spare change?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Natalie and watched as Rachel’s face fell. ‘Is your period late? Do your breasts feel too big for your bra? Are you spotty?’

  Rachel’s hand went automatically to her chin, which was, Natalie noticed with a sinking heart, caked in the palest concealer she’d ever seen.

  The number of spots she’d almost celebrated, wanting to believe they were a hormonal shift inside.

  ‘No,’ said Rachel, almost to herself. ‘Oh . . . no.’

  Silently, Natalie reached into her handbag and pulled out her emergency test, the one she hid in the zip pocket for moments of total weakness. ‘Easy way to find out.’

  Rachel was shaken out of her bewilderment by the foil-wrapped sachet. ‘You carry pregnancy tests around with you?’

  ‘When you’ve been trying as long as we have, you have to hide them well away from the loo,’ said Natalie. ‘How late is your period?’

  Rachel gazed at her with big, scared eyes. Natalie thought she’d never seen such long lashes – round and dark, real sixties go-go girl eyes.

  After a moment’s pause, she laughed lightly and said, ‘I don’t know. Isn’t that awful? I don’t really notice. But, Nat, it’s not going to be that. I’m nearly forty – I thought it was pretty much impossible to get pregnant at my age, unless you were on IVF and shipping in eggs from students.’

  ‘Apparently not.’ Natalie chewed her lip in an effort to stop it wobbling. ‘Cherie Blair, Mariella Frostrup, Jerry Hall. All older mothers.’

  ‘Have you been researching into . . .’ Rachel stopped. ‘Oh, Nat, you’re only thirty! You and Johnny are going to have kids any minute now!’

  ‘No, we’re not!’ Natalie tried, but she couldn’t stop it bursting out of her. She had no one else to tell, who wouldn’t give her a hard time. ‘We got the results at the weekend. Johnny’s not . . .’

  She couldn’t. That was too private. And saying it out loud made it more real. They were going to need help to conceive.

  Natalie looked down at the First Response pregnancy test in her hands and felt something stab through her heart as she remembered the times she’d held her breath, waiting for the magic line to appear. All those months! All those tests and charts and nerves, when every single time there had been absolutely no chance of the lines turning blue, because there weren’t even any sperm to try. The money she’d wasted on tests when there had never been a thing there to test.

  ‘Here,’ she said, pushing it towards Rachel. ‘Have it. I don’t need it any more.’

  ‘Natalie.’ Rachel stared at her, lost for words.

  ‘Please.’ Natalie tried to smile. ‘You’ll know one way or another. And honestly, I won’t go mental if you are. I haven’t reached that stage yet. I can still be happy for other people.’

  Rachel opened her mouth, as if she was about to say something, then thought better of it, and slipped out of the room.

  Natalie made herself focus on small details to block out the darkness creeping up in her chest. The radio was playing ‘Clocks’ by Coldplay, and there was a bright jug of lemony daffodils on the windowsill, catching every ray of morning sun. Bertie was gazing at her, with two dark rings around his eyes like liner, and two bright orange eyebrows above his mournful eyes.

  She stretched out her fingers to him, wanting to feel his soft head.

  Bertie ambled over, thinking she was about to offer him something to eat from the table. Instead, Natalie held out a hand so he could shove his cold wet nose into her palm, and as he did, laying his trusting head against her knee, a fat tear dropped from her nose onto his.

  ‘Oh, Bertie,’ she whispered. ‘You’re going to have to be our baby now.’ She stroked the warm velvet of his ears and loose dewlap and her head tightened against the sheer unfairness of life.

  Bertie took the opportunity to spring up and put his massive white paws on Natalie’s knee, and for once she didn’t push him down, or tell him she was worried about his spine. Instead she hugged him exactly as she’d have hugged a toddler to her and squeezed her wet eyes against his ears.

  It suddenly occurred to Natalie that Bertie would have to go on the website too, so a full-time family could find him. She’d have to write a really amazing page for him, so someone would take him home and love him just as much as she and Johnny did already. She wasn’t prepared for the wrench in her chest at that, and had to hug Bertie even tighter.

  Natalie clung motionless to her dog until the song had finished, then she put on a stern face and made him drop back down to the floor. ‘Not good for your back, Bertram,’ she said.

  Somewhere deep in the house the ancient pipework announced the flushing of a loo, and after a moment, Rachel appeared in the door, looking sheepish.

  ‘Didn’t work!’ she said, marching over to the side to put the kettle back on.

  Natalie quickly wiped her eyes. ‘What do you mean, it didn’t work? It’s really simple, you just have to . . .’

  ‘I know, pee on the stick. I think I peed on the wrong bit.’ Rachel waved her hands disparagingly. ‘Sorry, Nat, I’m not used to controlled urination. But I’m sure there’s nothing – I’m so old it’s probably th
e menopause, not a baby. My periods have always been a bit irregular, and there’s been all this stress.’

  ‘Mm.’ Natalie looked at her closely. There was something not quite right about Rachel’s face but right now she didn’t want to deal with it.

  ‘You’ll go to the doctor, though?’ she said, because she had to say it.

  ‘What? Yes, absolutely. Yes. Another cup of tea?’

  ‘Um, I’m OK, thanks.’ Natalie turned her attention back to the screen and the dogs who needed homes. She put Bertie to the bottom of the list. ‘OK, who’s next? Chester? Have you got some photos of Chester?’

  When Natalie and Bertie had gone home, Rachel dragged on her trainers and set off across the fields.

  She wasn’t even sure if Gem was following her to begin with. She wasn’t sure where she was going either, only that she needed to run and run and not think. The trouble was, she couldn’t stop thinking. The same thought stuck in her brain, not getting any more real: she was pregnant.

  She’d lied to Natalie. The test had worked; she hadn’t even had to wait the three minutes for the blue cross to appear in the window. It had pinged up there at once, as if it couldn’t underline enough how stupid she was not to know already.

  Rachel had lied partly because she couldn’t get her own head around this startling new fact, and partly because she hadn’t wanted to put poor Natalie in the position of having to react one way or the other. It made Rachel feel even worse than she already did: Natalie wanted a baby so much and couldn’t have one, while she, who’d never even allowed herself to imagine her own baby while her heart was tied to a man who made it very clear a secret second family wasn’t on the agenda, had managed to do the statistically improbable and get pregnant without even trying.

  It wasn’t that she hadn’t thought about children over the last ten years. She’d often wondered what it would feel like to say those words that seemed to reduce everyone else to tearful ecstasy: ‘Darling, I’m having a baby.’

  But Oliver, the lying bastard, had been clear that he had all the family he wanted already. ‘I’m not some Tory politician who secretly likes the idea of fathering kids everywhere,’ he’d said, the first time the conversation had drifted within discreet distance of the topic, ‘so don’t ever put us in a position where we might have to have a conversation neither of us will like.’

  That had been the choice: their affair, or her having children. If she was honest, Rachel had never felt broody enough to sacrifice the easy life she had. Whether that was self-protection or not, she didn’t know. She’d never allowed herself to go beyond imagining the mess and disruption, just in case it turned out to be dangerous.

  Rachel ploughed on across the field, making her lungs burn with the effort of running on the uneven ground. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real.

  If it was real, shouldn’t she feel different somehow? She hadn’t been fudging the truth when she’d told Natalie she wasn’t sure how late her period was. She never bothered to keep track, since stress at work often threw her off, as did stress with Oliver. Recently, her whole body had gone haywire, but with the benefit of that little cross, she saw other signs: the itchy, sore breasts that she’d put down to – Rachel almost laughed at her own idiocy – cheap washing powder. And that sickly feeling in the morning she’d assumed was Megan’s lurgy – apparently not.

  She stumbled over a molehill and broke her stride, coming to a staggering halt. Gem suddenly shot forward from his discreet following position, and bounded ahead to check she was all right, anxiously circling her as she bent over to get her breath back. Her heart was pounding and she felt aware of every part of her body now, except her stomach, which felt no different at all.

  You couldn’t hide anything from your body. Even now, that solitary cell was dividing into heart, fingers, hair, making decisions, moving on while she stood there unable to take it in.

  Running away, thought Rachel, wasn’t going to change anything. This was one decision that she couldn’t duck out of. One way or another, she would have to deal with it because it was actually happening inside her.

  She straightened up and looked out over the fields to the thick pine forest behind Four Oaks’ neat Mr Men house façade, and tried to make it feel more tangible. She dredged through her half-forgotten biology knowledge, ashamed at how little she actually knew. When? How?

  Well, not how exactly . . .

  A tiny fantasy crept into her head like ivy. What if it was Oliver’s?

  Their Last Time, though she hadn’t known it then, had been the week before she’d found the Paris receipts. That made it . . . Rachel tried to work backwards. Time seemed to pass differently here. Six weeks ago? But Oliver had always been so careful. Despite his claims to the contrary, he really wasn’t a spontaneous man. Even when they’d done it on his desk in the office, there were condoms suspiciously to hand.

  But what if it was his? Did that trump Tara the tennis coach – or Kath, and his three existing kids? Rachel tried to play the scene in her head but it was too messy. She just couldn’t imagine Oliver melting with delight; she’d tried for years to picture that, but he’d made it hurtfully clear he wouldn’t. And what about Kath? She couldn’t keep up that patronising ‘you’re so old!’ routine if she was pregnant with Oliver’s baby. She’d fight tooth and nail to stop Rachel getting any money.

  Rachel’s breath burned in her lungs and she sank down onto the grass. Gem lay down near her, waiting, and without thinking she reached out a hand and laid it on his neck. His coat was rough, not silky like some of the more pettable dogs, but it was warm. Gem had the tough coat for the country rain and muddy fields; he wasn’t a sleek town creature, he was a survivor. He’d survived long enough for Dot to rescue him from his cardboard box.

  The first tears welled at the corners of Rachel’s eyes.

  Inside, she knew it was George’s baby, not Oliver’s. Sod’s Law alone would have made it him. The man she barely knew, on the one night she’d been too drunk to check he’d sorted out the condom properly – but then, as her mother had warned her at sixteen, two careless minutes was all it took.

  She closed her eyes and felt sick, but with regret, not hormones. George was the first proper, promising relationship she’d had since she was twenty-one, with a man who, from what little she knew of him, seemed to be exactly what she needed: amusing, decent, as stubborn as she was. What was he going to say when she told him? Either he’d feel morally obliged to stand by her, or he’d react with Oliver-like horror and demand that she get rid of it. Which was worse?

  The truth slowly sank into Rachel’s bones, as the cold from the earth crept through the material of her trousers. She wasn’t the person she’d been yesterday. But she didn’t even know who that person was. She hadn’t reacted in the way she’d have predicted: no shrieks of horror, no immediate phone call to the nearest discreet clinic. She wasn’t weeping tears of broody joy, sure, but she wasn’t running around desperately trying to get rid of the tiny parasite growing inside her. She felt suspended in mid-air, unable to decide what she felt.

  What did she want? It was so long since she’d seriously asked herself that.

  ‘Gem,’ she said. ‘What am I going to do?’

  The dog leaped up, thinking she wanted him to do something, and then when he saw her despairing face, he dropped to his belly, to lie with his nose on his paws, waiting. Rachel patted the space next to her, and eagerly, Gem sidled over like a crab, to lean in against her side. Slowly, she lay back on the ground and looked up at the clouds drifting across the china-blue sky, feeling the hardness of the field beneath her and the heat of Gem’s body comforting her.

  Even in the wide open air Rachel couldn’t ignore the sense of being trapped by something huge and invisible. The responsibility. The timetable. The emotional tie she’d never be able to sever with George and Longhampton and this spinsterish inheritance.

  No one knows about this baby but me, she thought. No one knows. And it’s not a baby yet. It’s ju
st a few cells. I could go back to London for two days, no one would bat an eyelid. I could put the world on pause, come back, and be exactly the same. She let the idea spin round in her head, as the puffy clouds drifted without urgency.

  Gem might think I’ve abandoned him, she thought. I can’t leave him. I can’t take him with me. I can’t go. That’s it. I can’t go.

  And it wouldn’t be the same.

  An image drifted into her head from nowhere: of Dot carrying Gem and his brothers around in a sling for days while they were still too little to be left. That was a woman who’d replaced her chances of her own biological children with dogs, but had not been able to replace that need to love, and nurture.

  Do I really have that, Rachel wondered. Maybe I am as selfish as everyone makes out. Shouldn’t I know what I want? Didn’t Mum say she cried with joy when she found out she was expecting me? And Amelia, announcing it at some poor upstaged cousin’s wedding, because ‘she couldn’t keep her happiness in’?

  ‘What kind of bloody awful mother am I going to be?’ she said aloud, and stretched out an arm. Gem laid his head along it, waiting patiently.

  Back in the house, Megan was making up some special scrambled eggs for a half-starved pregnant Doberman bitch as if nothing was any different.

  ‘I saw you and Gem up in the orchard,’ said Megan, when she let herself in. ‘Are you going to start doing some agility with him?’

  ‘Agility?’ Rachel looked at the phone messages, her eye skimming for ‘Oliver’ as it habitually did. She blinked it away.

  ‘Yeah. He’d be great. You could do some at this Open Day. There are posts and little jumps in the shed – you want me to get them out? It’d be good for the Staffies too, get some of their energy worked out and it’d make a good display for visitors. I had a look at Natalie’s plans, hope you don’t mind.’

  Rachel could see the notes Natalie had left on the kitchen table. She had clear, precise handwriting, and had marked out boxes and flow lines. That seemed like a long time ago.