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‘The last time I saw him he was making eyes at another woman,’ Deborah told her mock mournfully. ‘And André was helping him,’ she added mischievously. ‘Babies,’ she explained when Stephanie raised her eyebrows questioningly. ‘A pair of them … twins …’
‘Ah, yes, Blake Hamilton’s children. Mark’s still eager to become a father, then?’ she asked Deborah.
‘Very,’ Deborah admitted, her smile dying away.
‘But you don’t want children?’
‘Yes … yes, I do,’ Deborah admitted, surprising herself a little by her admission. Seeing Mark enthusiastically if rather amateurishly clutching one or other of their friends’ present crop of babies had given her a funny little feeling inside, a mixture of pain and pleasure, an odd, bittersweet twisting sensation which, although she had not told him so, had lent a new depth and intensity to her sexual responsiveness to him.
‘But it’s just not feasible, not at the moment, what with the way we’re expanding and the fact that you and I are away so much …’
‘Mmm. But Mark’s at home and since you live right next door to his office …’
Deborah and Mark had bought the pretty stone town house next to Mark’s office eighteen months ago, and, since Mark had been the one to urge its purchase, Deborah had remained firmly unsympathetic with his complaints that she had deliberately arranged for the builders to carry out the majority of their work while she was away …
The house was virtually finished now, its furnishings an eclectic mixture of things she had bought on her many trips abroad with Stephanie—silks and damasks from Florence, sturdy, simple cherrywood furniture from France which mingled easily with the antiques she and Mark had bargained for together at antique fairs and country markets …
‘Yes, I know. Mark has said the same thing, but …’
‘But you don’t feel you’d want to leave him in sole charge …’
‘Oh, it’s not that. Mark will make a far better parent than I shall. But my career means so much to me. I do want children as well but I’m not sure if I’m ready yet, if it would be fair to the company, the baby or myself …’
‘Mmm, that’s a pity … I was thinking only the other night what a good thing it would be if we could manage things so that we were both pregnant at the same time … give or take a month or two, of course …’
‘Both pregnant?’ Deborah stared at her. ‘You’re not …?’
‘Not yet,’ Stephanie told her. ‘But soon, I hope. What’s wrong? I’m forty-four now, and if André and I are going to have children it will have to be soon … or don’t you approve?’
‘Of course I approve; it’s just that I never imagined …’ Deborah paused, struggling for the right words. It had been hard enough getting Stephanie to admit how much she loved André and how little she wanted to lose him, so to hear her say now that they were planning to have a child …
‘I’ve warned André that we’ll have to time things so that he or she arrives during our quiet season,’ she added. ‘And I thought that if things worked out that way and if we could find the right kind of nanny, she and the babies could travel with us … If they don’t, I suspect we’re going to have two over-besotted fathers on our hands.’
‘You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?’ Deborah asked the older woman incredulously.
‘Uh-huh … Think how good it will look in our PR handouts,’ Stephanie told her mischievously, ‘the two of us heavily pregnant, photographed in a field full of flowers … us and them blooming!’
‘There is no way that I’m going …’ Deborah began, and then stopped and laughed. ‘OK, I know when I’m being wound up. You said we’d time it so that we had these babies out of season …’
‘Mamma Nature sometimes chooses her own season for these things,’ Stephanie told her slyly.
‘Not if I have anything to say about it, she doesn’t,’ Deborah objected. ‘You really think it would work …?’
‘Yes, if we wanted it to. I’m not going to pretend I’m an advocate of anyone, man or woman, being able to have it all—that’s a PR myth that reality has well and truly exploded. I told myself I’d never marry again, that I was too old and too cynical to be foolish enough to fall in love, and yet I’ve done both and been happier for having done so than I’ve ever been or imagined being. I can’t pretend, though, that the business doesn’t mean one hell of a lot to me, or that I’d ever want to give it up, for anyone or anything. But I’m not going to pretend either that I don’t want André’s child, that some tiny idealistic, idiotic part of me doesn’t want that very specific kind of female fulfilment.
‘You’ve got plenty of time left to make those kind of decisions, Deborah. I haven’t. Rightly or wrongly, I want to have a child.’
* * *
‘Sorry … have you been waiting for me …?’
Smilingly Mark handed the baby back to Philippa.
She was a pretty little blonde with soft flaxen curls and dark blue eyes, and when she turned and looked roguishly at Deborah over her mother’s shoulder Deborah looked hurriedly away, already dangerously aware of the far too strong hold those small, pudgy baby fingers could have on a vulnerable heart.
‘They aren’t all like that, you know,’ she told Mark as she took his arm. ‘Some of them are quite ugly; they cry a lot and smell … and they’re sick …’
‘What makes you so sure it’s going to take after you?’ Mark teased her.
