Chapter Twenty
The next day Lucy got dressed for work in a navy shift with a black belt and some strappy gold sandals. It felt good to be back in her routine. She didn’t even mind the early, piercing wake-up call from her alarm clock. She had missed Lettie, Simon, Jack and the rest of her colleagues and was looking forward to catching up on all their news. She was especially looking forward to seeing Jack. She had missed his company. She wondered how he was getting on, whether he was back in the family home or not.
She was relieved that no one approached her to talk about the break-up. There were no insensitive comments and the prying eyes and pitying looks that she had been dreading barely made an appearance. Jack came over to find out how she was and to talk to her about the latest updates on their social enterprise project: a campaign to promote a telecoms brand that was aiming to connect thousands of people in rural Africa. It sounded like they had made great progress with it in her absence.
At midday Lettie and Simon announced that they were taking her out for lunch to the local Leon. They filled her in on all the office news, including the big scandal that arose when the head of Human Resources, Sandra Wysowski, had been caught in the stationery cupboard kissing bald Alan, her underling. Lucy cackled with laughter, trying hard not to regurgitate her lunch at the thought! It felt good to be back.
Lettie and Simon were both dating. Simon was still seeing the man that he had been dating since March, a Spanish guy called Andre who worked in IT. It seemed to be going well and Simon was optimistic, for once, about the future. He was even talking about moving to Spain, which Lucy thought was a bit drastic. Young love, she reminded herself, was very fanciful. Lettie was dating a string of men that she had met on match.com and spent most of lunch regaling them with stories of the dates that she had been on so far, ranging from the bizarre to the outright extraordinary.
‘You guys are not going to believe this one!’ Lettie said with glee. ‘Last week I went on a date with a guy called Mark. He seemed perfectly normal when we were messaging but seriously… he was anything but!’
‘Go on!’ urged Lucy, taking a slurp of her Diet Coke and leaning closer in anticipation.
‘Okay, so we met at this bar in Soho. I spotted him immediately and went over to meet him, he bought me a drink and it all seemed to be going quite well.’
‘And?’ asked Simon, intrigued.
‘Well we sat down at a table in the corner and he took a deep breath and said, “Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but you don’t really look like your profile.” I didn’t really know what to think seeing as it’s a close-up of my face and it looks just like me, so I asked him to clarify exactly what he meant. He replied that he had hoped that I would be larger than I was, explaining that he wasn’t really in to “slim women”, apparently he only fancies women that are in the unhealthy/obese category of the BMI scale!’
‘No!’ exclaimed Simon.
‘Maybe he’s one of those feeders that you see on TV!’ shrieked Lucy. ‘What did you do?’
‘Well I couldn’t leave with a full drink so I apologized for being too slim, secretly congratulating myself on the compliment, and decided to pry into this bizarre fat fetishist a little further. He told me that he was extremely attracted to the sight of rolls of fat. I began to feel a little queasy and started downing my wine in bigger gulps. He proceeded to explain a particular fantasy of his where he would lift up a fat roll…’
‘Nooooo!’ shrieked Simon and Lucy, wincing at the thought.
‘…insert a slab of cheese, wait until it had melted slightly and then eat it!’
‘Aaaah!’ screamed Lucy. ‘Noway!’
‘Eurgh, I’m going to be sick again at the thought!’ Lettie shuddered.
Apparently Lettie had almost vomited on the spot and knocked over a table in her haste to get out of the bar. Lucy was encouraged to find herself really laughing, a deep, belly-rippling laugh that she hadn’t emitted in a long while.
That afternoon she ploughed through the rest of her emails and made sure that she popped into see her boss, Jill, to thank her for her understanding, for letting her take the time she needed. She bumped into Jack again on the way back to her desk. He seemed to have resumed his old flirtatious manner, giving her a cheeky wink as he passed her, no doubt encouraged that Lucy was now single once more, but she was determined not to encourage him. Ignoring his complicated home life, she was so focussed on her plans for motherhood that she didn’t want or need any distraction.
As the weeks rolled by, Lucy settled into the routine of work, running home once or twice a week, catching up with friends, seeing her granny and spending her free evenings researching.
One Saturday in late July, she met with her GP. As she sat in the chair and the doctor asked her what she could do to help, Lucy almost wimped out. She felt embarrassed to say that she was interested in finding out about donor insemination. She was worried that the doctor would judge her somehow, that she would think her naïve or foolish, that she should wait until she met a man like everyone else before having a child. She steeled herself and tentatively broached the subject, her desire to find out exactly what her options were overriding her embarrassment. Her doctor was surprisingly sympathetic. She asked her whether she had thought carefully about proceeding down this path, then recommended various websites that she could go to to get advice and support.
Feeling slightly more positive about the choices that lay ahead and armed with some literature that the doctor had given her, she set off to meet Tor in the park. The sky was a warm, cobalt blue. A light scattering of cloud streaked above the horizon as if a piece of white chalk had been dragged across it. Even the pavement beneath her feet seemed to radiate with the dry heat of the day. Lucy fumbled in her bag for her sunglasses, squinting against the bright light of the sun.
As she walked through Holland Park she inhaled the floral fragrance that permeated the air, noticing with joy that the towering delphiniums and scarlet oriental poppies that blossomed at this time of year were out in full force. She telephoned Tor, who was en route, to find out what she wanted to eat and then went inside the cafe to order, carrying her tray full of sandwiches and crisps out to their usual table in the sunshine.
About five minutes later she saw Tor approaching, pushing her enormous pram, looking slightly dishevelled but grinning happily and waving as she spotted Lucy. Putting the brakes on the pram, she gave Lucy a hug, plonking herself down on the chair and saying, ‘Phew, I made it!’ with a sigh of relief.
Lucy peered into the pram and admired the sleeping baby.
‘I’m telling you, Luce, it’s a bloody nightmare trying to get anywhere with one of them!’ she moaned, pointing at the pram.
‘I can imagine!’ said Lucy. ‘I’m going to push him around the park later, see if I can steer it. It looks like an awkward contraption to manoeuvre!’
‘It is! It’s supposed to be top of the range, but surely they can come up with something better than that. I mean, in the first few weeks, I’m not exaggerating when I say that it took me about five minutes to work out how to stop at the pedestrian crossing and press the button to cross without letting the pram slide into the road!’ she laughed, rolling her eyes at her own hopelessness.
‘I honestly don’t know how you do it!’ laughed Lucy.
‘It’s trial and error, that’s all,’ confided Tor. ‘I haven’t really got a clue! Anyway, much more importantly, tell me how it all went with the doctor this morning.’
