Forget Me Not

‘I’m Katie, this is my fiancé Jake and we’re expecting twins.’ A shiver of sympathy went round the room.

Then it was the turn of the large red-haired woman. She waited until silence had descended, a patient little smile on her lips. ‘I’m the journalist, Citronella Pratt.’ Now I realised why she looked familiar. She wrote a weekly column in the Sunday News. ‘And this is my husband, Ian Barker-Jones,’ she added unctuously.

‘I’m an investment banker,’ he said.

I was so taken aback by the Pratt-Barker-Joneses’ self-satisfied introduction that I forgot it was now my turn. Felicity prompted me with a little cough and I felt all eyes swivel towards me.

‘Oh. I’m Anna Temple,’ I began. ‘My baby’s due on the eighteenth of June and … erm …’ There was an air of expectation – so I did this cowardly and, as it was to turn out, stupid thing. ‘My other half’ – I swallowed nervously – ‘Xan … works overseas, as a TV reporter. In Indonesia,’ I added, aware that my voice sounded an octave higher than normal. ‘In fact, he’ll be out there for a few months, and so …’ I twisted my ring back and forth. ‘I’ll be coming to these classes on my own.’

I looked up and saw Citronella cock her head to one side and smile at me, but it was a shrewd, knowing sort of smile that made my insides coil.

Then the woman who’d just arrived spoke up.

‘My name’s Jenny Reid,’ she said confidently, in a soft, Northern Irish accent. ‘My baby’s due on June the fifth. And I’m here on my own because I don’t have a partner – but I’m fine about it.’

I saw Citronella’s eyes widen with something like excitement; then she collapsed her features into an expression of conspicuous solicitude.

In the coffee break she waddled over to Jenny and me. ‘How brave of you,’ she said to Jenny, clasping her fat, spatulate fingers over her massive bump. ‘I just want to say how much I admire you.’

‘For what?’ Jenny asked with a brittle smile.

‘Well.’ Citronella shrugged. ‘For going through such a momentous thing as childbirth alone.’

‘Thank you for your concern,’ Jenny replied evenly, ‘but as I said at the beginning, I’m perfectly fine.’

‘No really,’ Citronella persisted. ‘I think you’re marvellous – honestly – both of you,’ she added, nodding at me. I struggled to think of some retort, but a suitably sharp put-down eluded me.

‘Well, I think you’re brave,’ I heard Jenny say.

Citronella’s nostrils clamped shut. ‘Why?’ she demanded.

‘Well – having a baby so late. I think that’s very brave,’ Jenny went on pleasantly. ‘But, you know, hey – good for you!’

As Jenny turned back to me, her flushed cheeks only now betraying her emotion, I made a mental note never to offend her.

For her part, Citronella looked as though she’d been slapped. Then, determined to recover, she smiled, revealing large square teeth the colour of Edam and walked away. And though nothing was said about it by either Jenny or me, we both knew that a bond had been formed between us that day.

Over the next six weeks of the classes Jenny and I became natural allies. We’d do the exercises together and chat in the breaks: but though she was always friendly, Jenny seemed very self-protective, never revealing anything personal. When, after a month, I confided that I wasn’t really with Xan and that I found it very hard, she touched my hand and made sympathetic noises, but offered no confidence in return. All I knew about her was what she’d told me at the first class – that she’d grown up in Belfast, had moved to London in her teens and until last year had taught History at a ‘very tough’ comprehensive in north London, but had given it up to train as a counsellor.

Jenny seemed so resolutely single that I wondered if, like me, she’d become pregnant after a short relationship and the man had gone off. But she didn’t radiate the air of disappointment and vulnerability that I knew I did – instead she projected a determined calm that bordered on defiance. This made me wonder if she’d got pregnant deliberately, by a friend, or on a one-night stand, or even by donor sperm, though at thirty-four she seemed young to have made such a choice.

Citronella, on the other hand, I soon knew all about, both from her boastful pronouncements at the birthing classes and from her columns, which a kind of horrified curiosity prompted me to look at on-line.

I was struck, most of all, by their vulgarity. No detail of Citronella’s life seemed too personal – too disgusting even – for her to share with her readers: that her breasts were already ‘leaky’, that ‘sex was uncomfortable’ and that her bowels ‘could do with some help’. The overall theme of Citronella’s weekly bulletins, however, seemed to be how ‘fortunate’ she was. That she was ‘fortunate enough’ to have a ten-year-old daughter, Sienna, for example, who, ‘fortunately’ was ‘extremely intelligent, popular, and beautiful’ and who ‘fortunately’ was ‘thrilled’ at the prospect of a new brother or sister. I learned that Citronella’s first marriage to a nappy manufacturer had sadly ended eight years before, but that she had then been ‘fortunate enough’ to meet her ‘banker husband, Ian’ shortly afterwards, with whom she was ‘much happier’, she’d added smugly.

Fertility treatment was another favourite theme. ‘Ian and I would never have had IVF,’ Citronella wrote in early May. ‘We both think it quite wrong that something as sacred as life should begin in a jam-jar of all places! And then of course there’s the cancer risk …’ I hoped that Katie and Jake hadn’t read it – they’d happily admitted to having had help in conceiving their twins. ‘And yes, I know there’s no actual proof of a link,’ Citronella had gone on. ‘But one instinctively feels that such hormonal interference must be doing irreparable harm. Fortunately I conceived naturally,’ she’d continued, ‘though I admit I never expected the enormous blessing of another child. But being pregnant now, at forty-four, does make me feel for my single women friends. They are all roughly my age and must increasingly be aware that they are unlikely now ever to marry, or have children and are therefore bravely facing up to the prospect of a lonely old age.’

With opinions like these it seemed incredible that Citronella had any friends, single or otherwise. In the following week’s column, headed is it really right to go it alone? her theme was single mums.

So far so clichéd, I thought as I scanned it; then I read the next sentence and felt as though I’d stepped into a sauna. There are no less than two single mothers in my antenatalgroup, she’d written. Let me say that no one admires themmore than I do – Citronella liked to dress up her horrible pity as generosity of spirit. But one does wonder – quite apartfrom the social slur – how their children will fare in lifewithout the firm, loving hand of a father to guide them …

‘Did you see what she wrote?’ I whispered to Jenny as we waited for our next birthing class. We were the first to arrive and the room was empty but for us.

Jenny rolled her eyes. ‘Yup! Doesn’t she know it’s “no fewer than”, rather than “no less than”? The woman’s an ignoramus.’

‘But her comments about single mothers …’ I swigged some Pepsodent. ‘As though you and I were the lowest of the low.’

‘Well …’ Jenny gave a philosophical shrug. ‘At least she didn’t name us.’

‘No – but what she said – about our children. What “social slur”? How dare she! She’s evil,’ I added darkly.

‘Evil?’ Jenny looked surprised, affronted almost. ‘Oh no, Citronella’s not evil,’ she said, with a strange kind of authority which puzzled me, until I remembered that she’d grown up in Belfast, where she’d said it was nothing out of the ordinary to hear gunfire and explosions. ‘But you could certainly rearrange the letters and say that she’s vile. Don’t let her get to you, Anna,’ Jenny went on calmly. ‘You’re going to have a baby. That’s all that matters. Your life is about to be filled with unimaginable love …’ Jenny said this with an almost Messianic fervour that intrigued me. ‘And at least we won’t have to see Citronella after tonight.’

At that I felt a frisson of liberation, but at the same time a sadness that the classes were now at an end.

‘You will keep in touch, won’t you?’ I said to Jenny, as everyone left. ‘I’d like to be … friends.’

Puzzlement clouded her features. ‘But we already are,’ she said and I felt suddenly, unaccountably happy. She picked up her bag. ‘I’m due first – so I’ll let you know.’

‘I’ll come and see you,’ I offered.

‘Yes – do come and see me – or rather us.’ She smiled and then to my delighted surprise, she hugged me. ‘Good luck with your exams.’

I grimaced. ‘Thanks.’

In the event my exams were fine – I even managed to enjoy them in part, though every time I felt a twinge I’d panic that my waters were about to break – the baby was due in less than ten days.

In the absence of an Other Half, I’d decided not to have a birthing partner. There was no one I’d want to see me in such a state. It was bad enough for your husband to see you down on your hands and knees, bellowing like a bull, without inflicting that on a friend. I was happy just to have a couple of midwives – I knew many of them from my pre-natal visits – and some Mozart. As I packed my hospital bag I resolved to stay relaxed and to put my faith in Nature. But in the event Nature got completely squeezed out.

On the Sunday morning after my last exam I woke with a terrible headache and a peculiar buzzing sensation in my upper body, as though there was a swarm of bees in my chest. I waited for the sensation to subside, but it didn’t. I staggered to the bathroom and was sick. Knowing that something was wrong, I called a minicab and went to the hospital. The midwives said that my blood pressure was high.

‘How high?’ I asked the nurse as I sat in a treatment room. ‘Are we talking Primrose Hill here, or Mount Everest?’ I felt dizzy and breathless and my head was aching.

‘It’s 140 over 100,’ she replied. ‘And your notes say that it’s been fairly steady at 110 over 70 throughout your pregnancy.’

‘So what does it mean?’

‘It suggests pre-eclampsia. Are your feet and hands normally this swollen?’

‘No.’ It was as though someone had blown them up with a bicycle pump. I winced as the nurse inserted a canula into the back of my right hand.

‘We should be able to get your blood pressure down with this hypertensive medication,’ she went on as she rigged up the drip. ‘So don’t worry.’

‘What if it doesn’t come down?’ I asked after a moment.

‘Then we’ll have to deliver the baby today.’

My stomach did a flick-flack. ‘By Caesarean?’ I hated the idea of being cut.