Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [66]
‘Course I don’t. I need a sibling for Hector. Someone else for him to torture.’
By this time, the spherical baby they had christened the day she’d met Simon again was a spherical toddler, who wouldn’t have been out of place in the front row at Twickenham, and bit everything that came within ten feet of him. Last week he’d bitten the family dog. Natalie had serious fears for the new baby.
‘And thanks to you, I move a step closer to him.’ Natalie was being ‘promoted’ into Stella’s job as producer.
‘You should move too. You don’t even need to do anything as drastic as getting yourself pregnant.’
Natalie was remembering the certainty she had felt that this job was temporary. That she was treading water, bringing home an okay wage that could just about stretch to keeping her and a fledgling doctor with ambitions, and waiting. Waiting for Simon to marry her. Waiting to have babies, who would be beautiful and wouldn’t bite people or animals, with him. That she could put up with Mike being a shit, and with doing the same thing day in and day out, because it wasn’t for long. Because soon her real life would be starting, and this would all be just an unpleasant memory that she could make sound much funnier when she talked about it at coffee mornings than it actually was.
Jesus.
They were sitting down now, and Tom had just put a large drink in front of her. ‘Talk me through it, then. Tell me how you ended up settling for this, Natalie.’
He sounded like someone’s dad, and for a second she was annoyed.
He was right, though. She had settled. And it was unsettling to admit.
At school she had wanted to be a television presenter. She used to ‘do’ programmes all the time. Tom vaguely remembered being an extra in some of them. She used to talk to herself, whenever she was working at something – give a running commentary; Natalie bakes cakes. Natalie washes her dad’s car. Natalie tidies the Wendy house.
Susannah had spoilt that. She was going to be the actress and Natalie could see that Susannah had something she didn’t even as a teenager. Susannah was luminous and engaging, and people wanted to watch her. If you looked at family photographs – always taken by Dad – Mum, Bridget and Natalie were at the back, and Susannah, in some stage-show pose, was draped along the front of them. Natalie couldn’t compete.
She wasn’t bitter about it. She never had been. It was simply something she’d known. How could you not love Susannah, and delight with her in all her small triumphs? And keep your fingers crossed that, one day, she would get her big break.
And Bridget had always wanted to be a nurse. She’d had a little uniform when they were kids and called herself Nurse Bridget. From when she was about eleven, she’d used her pocket money to buy the Nursing Times.
Natalie used to wait for a sense of vocation to fall on her. But it never did. So, once she’d given up on wanting to be a television presenter, she spent ten years wanting to be, and she wasn’t sure of the exact order, a hairdresser (to the stars), a landscape gardener, a corporate lawyer, a tea-shop owner and a marine biologist. These ambitions were usually informed by what she was watching on television, or reading about in books and magazines. None of them got off the drawing-board, except for hairdresser, but that fringe trim she’d done on Bridget had not been universally acclaimed.
At university, like many of her contemporaries, she had read what she was best at, which was French and German – even though German was always a bit of a struggle. She didn’t like the way it sounded, or the way her mouth moved when she spoke it. She loved French. She was always the one who got sent into the boulangerie on family gîte holidays in the Dordogne. The others could muster a question, but were flustered by the stream of French response and gave up.
She hadn’t done a great deal of work at university reading French and German, of course, but she’d had a lot of fun. Except for the falling-in-love-and-getting-her-heart-broken stuff, which had happened about twice a year. She’d fall