The Almost Wife: An absolutely gripping and emotional summer read Read online

  Dolly’s face has dropped even lower than it was when she arrived and she lets out a long low sigh like she’s just been told that Brides magazine has gone bust. But Helen is undeterred.

  ‘What you have there is nothing compared to what’s coming. You’ll get so big there will be no room to breathe. To eat even. Your body will stretch so far you’ll wonder if it will ever bounce back. You’ll be your heaviest, flabbiest and saggiest.’

  ‘I’m not sure I want to hear any more of this.’

  ‘Stay with me Dolly because this is important. When your body does these incredible things, you’re not meant to look like Barbie, are you?’ Helen has shifted her position so she is facing Dolly now, making sure she is hearing all of this. ‘When you are holding your baby, drenched in happy hormones, trust me, you will feel nothing but proud of what your body has just done for you. This is not about who can be up and in the park with the pram the quickest. But when you do eventually get tired of elasticated waist bands, that’s the time to do something about it.’

  ‘If I’m holding my baby…’

  Helen feels the sadness of what Dolly is saying thump through her. Her hands drop into her lap, her shoulders sink but she’s not quite defeated yet. She knows she shouldn’t but her next words are out before she can package them up into something less definitive.

  ‘Don’t do it, Dolly. Have this baby. Learn what an incredible gift you have been given. If I hadn’t had my children to help me through my very darkest times I’m not sure I…’ She trails off, not wanting to make this conversation about her. Dolly is about to make the biggest decision of her life and Helen is going to do everything she can to ensure it’s the right one.

  ‘I’m frightened, Helen.’ Dolly is on her feet now, it looks like she’s heard enough. Helen needs to end this on a high, give her hope.

  ‘I know you are. Who wouldn’t be? But that’s OK, I was too. I was much younger than you, Dolly. And maternity care was nothing like it is today back then. I remember thinking in the labour ward when they put the tightly bound bundle in my arms that what I had just done was seen as so normal, expected, nothing exceptional. No one was shouting about it from the rooftops, handing me a medal for what I’d achieved. And they should have been.’ It’s Helen’s turn to look a little deflated now.

  ‘No one is going to throw you a parade for having the courage to go it alone but you are on the precipice of something extraordinary – and I would say don’t deny yourself the chance to experience it.’

  As she bends to pick up her bag, a sadness creeps back across Dolly’s face like a shadow snuffing out any lightness in its path. ‘I’ve got no one to go to antenatal classes with.’

  ‘What?’ Helen is talking about the rigours of childbirth and all Dolly is interested in is the networking opportunity?

  ‘You know, the classes where they teach you all about pregnancy and labour. They’re full of happy young couples learning massage techniques. How to write a birth plan together. What needs to go in your hospital bag. I’ve looked into it and most of the classes are for couples because, naturally, everyone expects the man to give a toss. My family live miles away and most of my friends are likely to flake out at the important moment. I can hardly ask them to get up at 3 a.m. and drive across town when my waters break. I don’t have anyone to do that with me.’ She’s walking towards the door now, mind apparently made up. Helen needs to say something.

  ‘Yes, you do. You have me. I will be there for you, Dolly. I will see you through this if you’d like me to. Because I’ll do everything I possibly can to support you so that you can have this baby – if that’s what you decide, of course.’ Helen’s chest is swollen with purpose and pride, if she was that sort of woman there would be an air punch or a high five happening about now. Because while she barely knows this girl, she does know what two days of labour feels like, the sort of agony that will take you to the very threshold of your capability and hold you there for hours and hours while you rise and fall in and out of your own private world of pain. She can’t bear to think of her, or any woman, going through that alone.

  ‘Thank you, Helen, truly, that is an amazing thing for you to offer, it really is but keeping this baby may mean losing Josh and I need to be one hundred per cent sure I can do that.’ Dolly’s fingers are turning the door handle now. ‘It’s an impossible choice, and one I never imagined I would have to make. Perhaps there is the slimmest chance he will come around to the idea, but I doubt it. Unless he has a complete change of heart then it’s Josh or the baby. But I won’t give up hope just yet, not without one last try.’

  Perhaps it’s the memory of the disappointing date with Roger – which reminds her, she really must decline his last two texts asking for another one – or the realisation that she has been coping alone herself for so long now, but Helen doesn’t feel like making any allowances for a man like Josh. One who helps create a problem and then lacks the courage to deal with it.

  ‘I think it’s a very cold man who can look into the eyes of his newborn baby and not want to protect and nurture it in any way he can,’ Helen adds. ‘It’s a decision only you can make. But please don’t think you’re alone, Dolly. I’m here and I’m ready.’

  As she watches Dolly walk slowly back down the path, head bowed, missing all that the garden has to offer at this time of year, the magnitude of what just happened hits her. There is a moment of hesitation and self-doubt while Helen questions if she’s up to the job, then she is distracted by the pillar-box red light flashing on her phone, telling her there’s a new voicemail. It’s the first time she’s noticed it. How long might it have been there? It must be Emily, she thinks. She hits the button and hears the strained sound of an unfamiliar man’s voice. He’s struggling to string a sentence together, can’t even force out his own name through what sound like muffled tears before he gives up and ends the call. How disturbing, thinks Helen, clearly a wrong number. She hits delete.

  23

  Dolly

  ‘This doesn’t have to be a big deal, Dolly,’ Josh is shouting at her in between mouthfuls of toast and hot coffee. ‘I’m not saying no to a baby, just no to a baby right now. That’s a pretty good compromise, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes! Unless you happen to be the one with the baby in your belly!’ Dolly’s words are screaming back through the air, powered by the frustration of weeks of trying to chisel her way through Josh’s wall of stubbornness. ‘Are we really going to try to solve this in the eight minutes before we both have to leave for work?’

  ‘No we’re fucking not because I’m sick of going over old ground, it’s getting us nowhere.’ The door slams so loudly behind him that it sends a framed message that she bought him for Valentine’s Day last year crashing to the floor. I want all my lasts to be with you. Just as well she’ll have to bin it now, thinks Dolly, every morning she looks at it is a horrible reminder of how much their relationship has nose-dived since he’d sat in bed that morning opening it, before apologising for not quite getting you anything yet.

  And now she’s going to be late for work again, not that she particularly cares. She needs somewhere – someone – to vent all this anger at and the office at least offers the perfect candidate.

  * * *

  What is about to happen has been a painfully long time coming. But that is only going to make it all the more sweet. Dolly is standing outside The Dick’s office, hand edging towards the door handle while she glances sideways at his latest trumped-up career advice. Last week’s poster was a corker: ‘If you’re offered a seat on the rocket ship, don’t ask what seat! Just get on.’ As if anything that exciting could ever happen in this graveyard for broken careers and unlikely ambitions. This week The Dick has opted for something simpler, more prosaic by his standards, ‘Don’t feel sorry for yourself, only assholes do that.’ Dolly wonders briefly what HR might make of that if they cared enough to get out on the floor and see how the troops are coping.

  As for The Dick, could the man be any more crass,
any less impressive? thinks Dolly as she brushes the pain au chocolat crumbs off the front of her dress, smearing chocolate down it as she does. Then without bothering to knock, she throws his door open, making The Dick jump guiltily. She watches as he quickly closes the Mail Online, but not before she sees the picture of some minor celeb bending all over a beach in Barbados.

  ‘What is it, Dolly, I am very busy!’

  ‘Richard! Everything OK? You look a bit sorry for yourself today,’ Dolly is fired up, ready to let him have it.

  ‘Be very careful, Dolly, I have three new business pitches in my inbox that need assigning. All three of them could very easily make it to your desk.’

  ‘I’m so pleased you raise the subject of pitches actually, Richard.’ Dolly is striding backwards and forwards in front of his desk, sergeant major-like. ‘I know you were keen for me to be in the pitch presentation to McVities this afternoon—’

  ‘No, you are in the pitch presentation this afternoon.’ The Dick’s chair is swivelling in her direction now, his arms folded across his pigeon chest. She has his full attention and can see the irritation locking itself across his face – a face that is starting to flush unattractively like it does when he’s had one too many Proseccos at lunchtime.

  ‘Well, no, sadly I’m not. The bad news is I’ve got another personal appointment this afternoon that I’m afraid I really can’t miss – you’ll recall the doctor’s note I gave you recently?’

  ‘Dolly, I need you in that pitch this afternoon. Whatever this appointment is, you need to refix it. It can’t be that bloody important. And can I remind you that a doctor’s note is not something that should be used as an excuse to bugger off for another bout of wedding planning.’

  Dolly winces slightly at the mention of her wedding then regains herself quickly, determined not to give him the satisfaction of glimpsing a moment of weakness.

  ‘It is very important actually. I’ve made HR aware of it and of course they are being nothing but supportive, please feel free to have a chat to them if you need to. I’ll be leaving the office at 2 p.m. and won’t be back until tomorrow. You’ll need to find another sucker to take my place – someone else to stand in front of a room full of people looking for great marketing ideas that they’re not clever enough to come up with themselves. I can highly recommend Rachel, she’s brilliant at bullshit and for reasons none of us can work out, is desperate to impress you.’ Dolly knows antagonising The Dick like this is high risk. While being a single mum is still an option, she needs this job and its pathetic salary more than ever. But she’s feeling so emboldened. It’s false confidence and bound to be short-lived but while the assertiveness is pulsing through her, she can’t help herself, she’s going for him.

  ‘If I could just add one thing, please, Dolly, before you go back to your desk to shuffle paper for the rest of the morning. A quick glance at your employment contract will remind you that it is important to dress professionally at all times in a manner befitting the job you largely pretend to do.’ He’s about to hit her where it hurts, she can feel it coming. ‘Well perhaps a quick trip to the ladies’ might be in order because if I’m not very much mistaken, that looks like the remains of breakfast stuck to the front of your dress… and there is a hole in the back of your tights.’

  The smug bastard, he’s hardly one to talk about sartorial standards. I can’t be the only one who’s spotted the yellowing circles under the armpits of today’s once-white shirt.

  ‘Perhaps you should consider retiring that dress altogether, it looks like it’s straining at the seams a little. Off you go.’ He waves a hand dismissively and Dolly has no choice but to slump back to her desk – via the kitchen where she makes a giant mug of tea with two sugars and helps herself to a handful of chocolate digestives. If someone is stupid enough to leave them lying around that’s not her problem, is it?

  By the time she fires up her computer the little digital display in the top right hand corner reads 10.15 a.m. She logs straight on to the BabyCentre, the site where she roughly calculated her due date before her first scan confirmed it. As she enters her password a message blazes up on the screen in front of her: Your Baby at 18 Weeks! In between biscuit dunking and sending a shower of soggy crumbs that will never get cleaned away into the cracks between the letters on her keyboard, Dolly scrolls downwards. Within five minutes, she’s sucked right in, absorbing every detail about what’s going on inside her right now.

  The progress being made by something – someone – so little, so innocuous, so theoretical until now, is astounding. There’s some gross stuff about how the top of her uterus is now reaching her belly button that she quickly skirts over. And then, whoa! This baby is already about fourteen centimetres long, it’s swallowing, has the beginnings of its first hair-do and it’s starting to hear and feel. Before she realises it, Dolly is skipping on ahead to the more advanced weeks where there will be eyebrows, eyelids, tiny little tooth buds.

  She is only vaguely aware of the office goings-on around her. People reluctantly making phone calls, filing determinedly into The Dick’s office and then out again like they’ve had the wind knocked out of them but mostly killing time with chat about Bake Off and Strictly. Someone comes to her desk at one point and asks for a client’s contact details so they can return a series of increasingly irate phone calls that she hasn’t found time to respond to yet. But she’s in her own world, flitting between the incredible story being told on her screen and sad flashbacks of what’s going on at home.

  But this has been a productive morning, as far as Dolly is concerned. She now knows where all the local nearly new baby sales are in her area, what she can expect to spend every month on formula if she chooses not to breastfeed and the extortionate cost of nappies, bearing in mind that a newborn can get through fifteen a day.

  As Dolly sits there, surrounded by the drum of dull office life, she’s wondering if there is a future for her, Josh and the baby? A way back through all the rage, to the man who loved her so much, once. Can she see it? She’s going to work that out on her way to her antenatal appointment. It’s time to go.

  * * *

  The maternity waiting room at the Central Cotswold Hospital is really not the best advert for motherhood. It’s full of worn-out, heavily pregnant women, grappling with bored toddlers sick of waiting their turn and now pulling wallpaper off the walls, breaking the pathetic selection of toys on offer or bellowing for food at the top of their tiny lungs. The body language of each of them gives away the length of time everyone’s appointments are clearly over-running. Swollen bodies are slumped low in chairs, legs have flopped absent-mindedly wide open, one woman is reclined so low she is resting the back of her head on the chair, teetering on sleep – although God knows how with the noise level in here. Exhaustion, that’ll be it. As Dolly checks in at reception a clearly stressed midwife who doesn’t have time to make eye contact tells her they are over-running by two hours.

  ‘What! Why didn’t you just call me to tell me that? I’ve left the office early to get here.’ OK, she doesn’t actually give a toss about that but still, she could be sitting in a comfortable coffee shop instead of in what looks, feels and sounds like the seventh circle of hell.

  ‘Take a look around you. Does it look like we have time to manage everyone’s personal schedules? Take a seat and you’ll be called when it’s your turn.’ The entire conversation happens through the top of the midwife’s head as she hasn’t taken her eyes off her keyboard to visually acknowledge Dolly.

  Christ, is this what I will become? wonders Dolly as she takes a seat. Part of this pack of women for whom life is one enormous hassle, dictated by the useless scheduling system of the antenatal clinic or the demands of their aggressive toddlers or needy newborns. She’s looking around the room – at the posters on the wall warning of still-birth, at the selection of changing bags, contents strewn across the floor leaving an untidy trail of nappy sacks, pots of indistinguishable creams, wipes, wipes and more wipes and spare baby clothe
s – everyone having long since given up trying to contain their own belongings. She watches one woman whose belly is so enormous Dolly is questioning how it stays suspended out from her. Her boobs have been pushed sideways by it so that they are hanging udder-like either side of what probably used to be her ribcage. It’s a very different picture of motherhood to the one so beautifully painted on Dolly’s computer screen earlier today.

  Finally Dolly’s name is called and she is led in to a small soulless room. It’s dimly lit and contains not much more than a hospital bed, what looks like some scanning equipment, a monitor and a small desk and chair.

  ‘Pop up on the bed for me.’ The midwife is so young Dolly is tempted to ask where the real one is. ‘Dolly Jackson, isn’t it? And you’re eighteen weeks?’

  ‘I think so.’ Dolly is suddenly hit with a wave of nerves about what they are going to discuss and what she is about to see.

  ‘OK, we’re a bit early for your next scan but we’ll take a look anyway and see where we are with everything.’

  ‘Yes, this baby isn’t exactly planned I’m afraid.’ God, why is she blurting this at her – and why is there so much shame attached to that one simple statement?

  ‘You’re not the only one, don’t worry!’ Although apparently it doesn’t bother the midwife. ‘Lie back and we’ll check the heartbeat first, then I’ll take all of your baby’s measurements.’ She’s dolloping the cold jelly on Dolly now, taking little care to avoid her clothes.

  Having let the weeks slip by, and with the number of unsuccessful attempts to convince Josh about their future sharply rising, Dolly is suddenly overcome with the fear that she really can not do this alone. Even just coming for the scan solo feels wrong. What if she’s about to hear bad news? There is no one here to hold her hand, wipe her tears away and tell her everything will be OK because if nothing else, they’ve got each other. Oh God, oh God, maybe it’s not too late to consider the alternative?