‘Of course not—’

‘I thought,’ she said diffidently, ‘that you might think you’d been very unlucky’. ‘No. No—’

She gave a little laugh.

‘I did wonder if I’d been unlucky’.

He stopped mopping his face and looked at her.

‘Don’t you want a baby?’

She stared down at the tabletop.

‘I don’t know. I think I do. I think I want – your baby. But it wasn’t what I planned’.

He said, a little more sharply, ‘Does it upset your plans?’

She looked up.

‘Well, it upsets those ones. But those aren’t the only ones’.

‘Aren’t you pleased?’ She hesitated.

He said, more insistently, ‘Aren’t you pleased, that you can be pregnant?’ ‘Yes, I suppose—’

‘I think,’ Matthew said, leaning forward, sniffing, ‘I think it’s wonderful to get pregnant. I think it’s amazing to make a baby’.

She said, ‘It wasn’t very wonderful alone in the bathroom looking at that little blue line’.

‘No’.

‘And it still isn’t very wonderful not knowing what will happen. Not – knowing how you feel’. Matthew pointed to his face. ‘Look at me’.

‘Matt—’

He said quickly, ‘Don’t hurry me, Ruth, don’t push, don’t want answers now this minute’. ‘OK,’ she said reluctantly.

Matthew blew his nose into a clump of napkins.

‘It’s just knocked me out. This news’.

‘Yes’.

He looked at her.

There was a pause and then he said, ‘It’s wonderful, you – you’re wonderful,’ and then he picked up her nearest hand and kissed it and returned it to her as if he was afraid of becoming responsible for it.

When she and Matthew first met, Ruth reflected now, staring unseeingly at her half-finished email to Laura, Matthew had often told her she was wonderful. Her hair was wonderful, and her body, and her laugh and her driving and her taste in music. She was wonderful to him for what she was, for the package of a person that seemed to him desirable enough to warrant persistent and energetic pursuit. But, sitting at that café table with him and listening to him tell her she was wonderful, it had come to her, with a kind of glow, that she seemed wonderful to him at last for something she had done, rather than something she was. She felt, and had felt ever since, that Matthew had awarded her a recognition, that he had acknowledged an admiration and a pride at what she had done, in becoming pregnant. She couldn’t remember if he had ever looked at her professional efforts and accomplishments with the respect and approval he seemed all too ready to accord her now. She was inclined to think that if he ever had she would indeed remember, recognition of achievement being about as basic to human need as food and drink, and thus this extraordinary glow of approval in which she was tentatively basking was not only unexpected, but was also probably a first.

She couldn’t, of course, blame Matthew for withholding admiration in the past. For as long as she could remember she had, as so many of her girlfriends had, worked assiduously at relinquishing recognition. When she fell in love with Matthew, and the discrepancy in their earnings inevitably dictated the mechanisms of their life together, she had almost unconsciously played down her achievements, withdrawn all visible evidence of her paying power behind a barrier of standing orders and direct debits as well as ceding any available attention to Matthew whenever possible. It was only when this curiously primitive need to own her own flat expanded to become something she could not give up that she confronted him – no, both of them – with the bald fact that she did not want him to hold her back just because he couldn’t do what she could do.

And the consequence of that determination to buy the flat was that she had been made to feel – or, she thought truthfully, just found herself feeling – that in behaving in a way that was not automatically self-deprecating and deferential she had surrendered the chief defining quality of femininity, that of being the giver. Essential womanliness, that warmth and tenderness and loyalty that makes girls conventionally desirable, was, apparently, something that Ruth had turned her back on, thrown down and stamped on. Never mind the unfairness of it, never mind the way that most cherished traits of femininity always seemed to be defined within a relationship, as if possessing no value unless to others, that was how it had seemed to her. She had acted with all the self-reliant, decisive independence that would have been so much applauded in a man, and felt her very sexuality had been assailed in consequence. She might be endorsed most heartily at work for what she was achieving, but what was that endorsement worth when spread thinly across the whole of her life outside work? Who would care, in ten years’ time when all her contemporaries had families, that she was earning, at thirty-eight, more, annually, than her father had ever earned in all his working life? The Victorians had described women who were hell bent on higher education as agamic, asexual. How many people still, Ruth thought, including a shrinking part of her own outwardly accomplished self, would have agreed with them?

And now, look at her. Look at her. Deflected into carelessness about contraception by the urgency of her own need not to seem some unattractive freak, she was pregnant. She was in, by mistake, the most supremely female condition she possibly could be. And Matthew, not appalled as she feared he might be, not jubilant about his potency as men were supposed to be, had been, quite simply, moved. The news had touched him emotionally in a way she would never have predicted, a way she was not at all sure she felt herself. And that reaction meant that he would now certainly do what she had longed for him to do, and ring her.

What she would say when he did, however, she couldn’t be sure. In the perverse way of human things, especially longings, she wasn’t even sure how much she now wanted him to ring. When he did, he would ask questions, want to make plans and, as yet, she wasn’t sure what she wanted, how she saw the way ahead. What was so extraordinary, especially given the fact that babies had not even featured near the bottom of her agenda up to now, was that the painful loneliness she had felt since she and Matthew parted seemed to have subsided. Telling Matthew she was pregnant had given her a sensation of independence, as surprising as it was welcome. To her amazement, the baby, even at this stage, was a fact, and not a choice of any kind. She laid a hand carefully across her flat stomach. Perhaps she had now regained everything she had lost. Perhaps she now, oddly enough, held all the cards, all the approval. She took her hand off her stomach and put both on the keyboard.

‘I am,’ she wrote formally to Laura, ‘very well indeed’.


Rosa thought she hadn’t been to a matinee since she was small, and Edie and Russell used to take the three of them to matinee performances of musicals at Christmas. There had been something exotic about going into a theatre in daylight and coming out in the dark, as if some time travel had happened in those few hours and the world was now a different place. Twenty years later, a matinee didn’t seem so much exotic as out of step, a requirement to surrender and believe, against the evidence of all your senses, that almost amounted to a challenge.

The theatre was only a quarter full. Such people as had come sat scattered about and the girl selling programmes was yawning. Rosa went to the very back of the stalls in a belief that, even if Lazlo could see as far as that from the stage, he couldn’t see in detail. But that afternoon, it would be unlikely he’d be looking at anyone but Edie’s understudy. Edie was never ill, never missed performances, despised people who used health as an excuse for failing to fulfil obligations, but, all the same, Edie was in bed with a severe headache and a determination to perform that evening.

‘Miss me,’ she’d said to Lazlo, silhouetted in her bedroom doorway. ‘Mind you miss me’.

Rosa felt a twinge of disloyalty at seeing Edie’s understudy rather than Edie. But then, it wasn’t Edie she had come to see that afternoon, it was Lazlo, Lazlo with whom she’d made a plan, to meet in the interval between afternoon and evening performances. They were intervals he’d admitted were difficult to fill, as the need to conserve energy had to be balanced by an equal need not to relax down to a point from which it might be hard to rouse oneself up again. Rosa said she understood that, she could see that, and why didn’t they just have a quiet something to eat somewhere, no big deal?

Lazlo looked doubtful.

‘Usually I just read—’

‘Well this time,’ Rosa said, ‘just talk’.

‘OK,’ he said. He gave her his shy smile. ‘Thank you’.

She smiled back, but she didn’t tell him she would watch a performance first. She wanted to watch him in peace for a while, watch how he was without Edie, watch him, as it were, out of context. She wanted to see if she could discover why it was she found him so interesting and, even more, why she should want a man who was not in any way her type, and younger to boot, to think well of her. She settled back into her seat. There was a lot of the first act to get through – including the unwelcome sight of that awful Cheryl Smith acting so well – before the door on the left of the stage opened and Lazlo emerged, with his hat and his pipe, and said, with the hesitancy she had come to find so very appealing, ‘“Oh, I’m sorry – I thought you were in the study.”‘ She glanced down at the programme. He really had a very nice profile.


Vivien was lying on her bed when the telephone rang. She was lying there because she had planned to lie there anyway, to rest before Max took her to have dinner with a new client whom he said he wanted her to impress. So, when he rang and said that he was mortified but the client wanted to have dinner alone with Max because it was strictly business he wanted to discuss, Vivien had decided to go to bed anyway even if for different reasons.