Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [73]
‘Another beer?’
‘I can’t be arsed to get up and get one.’
‘I’ll go, old man.’ She stood up and collected their plates.
‘You do want kids, though, don’t you?’ she asked, when she’d come back with the beer, and settled on the sofa.
Tom put his feet, uninvited, on to her lap. ‘Haven’t got the energy, just this minute. Wait until after Match of the Day, will you?’
She pinched his little toe.
‘Ouch!’
‘I mean, eventually – they’re part of your plan, yes?’
‘Yes and no.’
‘That’s cryptic. Explain.’
‘Well, with me it’s not a biological thing. I don’t yearn for them for their own sake. I don’t think about sitting around in sixty years and figure that I have to, have to, must have had them.’
Natalie wondered whether she did. She supposed so.
‘For me, they’d be part of the right relationship. Do you know what I mean? I’d have to meet the mother of my children before I knew for sure that I wanted them. Does that make sense?’
‘Yeah.’ It did. ‘It must be different if you haven’t got a uterus.’
‘I suppose. Although I don’t think having one neces sarily means you have to feel that way – it’s a bit prescriptive, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah, of course. I don’t know. I guess I’ve always assumed I’d have them. That probably isn’t the right way to go about it, though.’
‘You’d be a great mother. You should have kids.’
‘What makes you say so?’
‘Your wide hips?’
‘And?’ She did not have wide hips, so he could just about get away with that.
‘Everything about you. You’re kind and warm, generous, smart and creative. You’d be a natural.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I do.’ He was smiling at her.
Then the phone rang.
‘That’ll be Patrick or Lucy. I told them not to check up on us.’
Natalie stood up, tipping Tom’s feet off her lap. ‘I’ll give ’em hell.’
But Tom had already reached behind him and picked the telephone out of its cradle on the table next to the sofa. ‘Don’t you trust us?’ was his opening gambit.
Then he sat up and didn’t speak for a long time. When he did, his voice didn’t sound amused any more. He said, ‘Okay. I’m sure she’ll want to come right away. Okay. Hold on. Goodbye.’
Natalie felt frightened. Tom took her hand, and pulled her down beside him. He didn’t know how else to say it so he just said it: ‘It’s your dad, Natalie. He’s in hospital. They think he’s had a stroke.’
L for Luvvies
‘Luvvies.’
‘Luvvies. Yes, Luvvies. You know, theatrical types. Susannah and Casper have invited us to a wrap party. It’ll be heaving with thesps and luvvies.’
‘Sounds horrendous.’
‘Sounds great. Apparently Hugh and Jemima are going to be there. He had a cameo in Casper’s film.’
‘You mean the one he shot in Morocco?’
‘No – they finished this one last summer so I suppose it isn’t technically a wrap party, only the director had to go to America straight away after they finished it to do this other film, and this is the first chance they’ve had back in London, since most of the cast and crew are British, they’re having it here and we’re invited!’
‘Tenuous, Nat, very tenuous.’
‘So, Saturday night. We need to leave in the afternoon, I guess. And we can crash at Susannah’s, she says. Oh, and dress glam. Very glam.’
‘Do you mean as in the Sweet glam?’
‘No.’ Natalie spoke very slowly, as if Tom was a half-wit. ‘I mean smart and trendy. Take Serena shopping at lunchtime – let her choose you something.’
‘I can do smart and trendy without Serena’s help, thanks very much.’
‘Well, see that you do. People are going to assume we’re together – I don’t want you showing me up.’
Susannah and Casper had a basement flat in Arundel Gardens. It was tiny, a little damp and quite dark. But it was Notting Hill, and it was rent-free. Casper’s grandmother, a wonderfully eccentric Jew, had lived in it since the war, collecting lovers, and Chinese pottery for the stall she had in Portobello Market, and had left it to her grandson when she died in 1995. They’d stripped it out, painted the whole thing white and fitted a thousand-pound IKEA kitchen that looked like twenty thousand pounds’ worth of Poggenpohl. Against this neutral