Now or Never

‘A month?’ Nicki stopped. An expression Maggie couldn’t recognise crossed her face. ‘Four weeks! Have you any idea just how vulnerable a pregnancy is in its early stages, Maggie, especially at your age?’ They could all hear the bitterness and the fury in her voice as she warned, ‘You could quite easily wake up tomorrow morning and discover that your dreams of a baby are over!’

‘Nicki!’ Alice stopped her quickly, giving Maggie’s white set face an anxious look. The open and unexpected hostility in Nicki’s voice had shocked them all, especially Maggie, who started to protest shakily.

‘Nicki! What are you saying? What’s wrong?’

Nicki knew that she was overreacting; that she was letting the anger she felt against Kit spill over into a safer escape by venting it on Maggie, and that she should have found a kinder way of expressing her feelings. But it was too late to call back her sharp words now. And besides …

She could feel her stomach churning with a mixture of moral outrage, shock, and anger at Maggie’s blind selfishness, and, worst of all, sheer, raw jealousy, streaked with a pain she had told herself she had managed to control.

Out of the corner of her eye she registered the silent looks that Stella and Alice were exchanging, whilst Maggie looked at her as though she couldn’t believe her ears. Her red-gold curls were a wild halo around her head, her delicately boned face almost childishly flushed, the dark blue eyes that Nicki had secretly envied all the time they were growing up rounded with shock.

‘What’s wrong?’ Nicki repeated, her voice brittle. ‘Do I really have to tell you? Maggie, you are fifty-two years old! During the thirty-odd fertile years you had in which to become pregnant you chose not to do so. You weren’t into babies, you told us all—remember? I’ll bet that Dan does. He would have given anything to have a child, but you didn’t want one! Then!

‘But now things are different—apparently. Now, when you’re in a relationship with a man who is considerably younger than you are, you’ve changed your mind! I don’t want to be unkind, but, let’s be honest, statistics prove that such relationships rarely endure. I’m not saying that Oliver doesn’t love you now, we can all see that he does. But when you bring a baby into the world, if you have any forethought, any maturity, you surely want to provide it with the best emotional environment you can, and once again statistics prove that this entails a baby having two parents in its life. Yes, countless thousands of children have been brought up successfully and happily by heroically selfless and devoted single parents, but those parents often did not have a choice! You do. And not only do you have freedom of choice, Maggie, supposedly you also have wisdom and maturity as well. If you were a young girl … but you aren’t, no matter how much you might be trying to behave like one.

‘Which brings me to something else. Doesn’t the fact that nature has declared that she no longer considers you physically able to produce a child mean anything to you?’

‘What are you trying to say, Nicki?’ Maggie interrupted her with quick defensiveness. ‘That only naturally fertile women have the right to have children?’

‘Of course I’m not, but you have to admit that there’s a huge difference between a woman who is medically unable to conceive, and one who has rejected the opportunity to have children, until she is through the menopause and then decided, Oh, I’ve changed my mind. I want a baby after all. What do you think a baby is, Maggie? Some kind of status symbol? The fertility equivalent of a course of Botox and a face-lift? A way of gaining instant youth?’

‘That’s not fair,’ Maggie protested. ‘This has nothing to do with anything like that!’

‘No? I’m sorry but I don’t believe you! I think the only reason you’re having this baby is because of Oliver. Because you think …’

‘Because I think what?’ Maggie challenged her angrily. ‘Because I think that by having Oliver’s baby I’m going to keep him?’

As their glances clashed it was Nicki who looked away first. A dull flush had spread up over the smooth column of her throat. As she reached out for her wineglass her fingers trembled slightly when she picked it up, the immaculate glossy darkness of her manicure reflecting the richness of the red wine.

As she took a deep swallow Alice murmured, ‘When is the baby due, Maggie?’

‘October. Not for another eight months. They do a blood test a fortnight after … after. I was very lucky. Some women go through several unsuccessful attempts before they actually become pregnant.’

‘I’ve read about the procedure,’ Stella commented, resorting to practicality in an attempt to lower the emotional intensity level a little. ‘But what is actually involved?’

‘What is involved is that a healthy, young fertile woman is tricked into believing that her voluntarily given eggs are going to be donated to another young woman,’ Nicki told them angrily before Maggie could respond.

‘The woman whose egg I received had made no stipulation about the age of any donee,’ Maggie informed them all quietly.

‘It’s a very big step to take,’ Alice said gently.

‘I know,’ Maggie agreed, with quiet dignity. ‘That was why I was counting on having your support, and your help.’

There was a look in her eyes that made Alice ache for her.

‘Of course we’ll help you,’ she assured her.

‘I’m sorry, but I just don’t want anything to do with this,’ Nicki exclaimed, finishing her wine and putting her glass down. Beneath her immaculate make-up her face looked strained.

‘Nicki,’ Alice intervened softly, ‘I’m sure that Maggie has considered everything.’

‘Has she?’ Nicki’s voice was cynical. ‘Or is she simply following another trend? What is it exactly that you want to prove, Maggie? Or can we guess? First a young lover, and then a baby. It’s all so easy for you, isn’t it? You just decide what you want and then you go out and buy it, whether it’s a new car, a new man, or a new life!

‘Has it occurred to you to wonder how this baby is going to feel when he or she gets laughed at and taunted at school for having such an old mother? Has it even occurred to you that you might not be there when he or she most needs you, when they reach their teens?’

Alice couldn’t bear to look at either Maggie or Nicki. The silence between them was bad enough, armed with spikily dangerous emotions. Stella, she could see, was frowning, and looking as though she was about to give them both a lecture.

Desperate to avert the disaster she could see looming Alice burst out frantically, ‘I’ve got some news to tell you all as well!’

‘Don’t tell us that you’re pregnant too!’ Stella demanded, giving her a wry look. ‘Mind you somehow in your case it wouldn’t be that surprising, Alice. You’ve always had that earth mother look about you, and as we all know your Stuart is very highly sexed!’

Whilst Alice blushed, Maggie made a brave attempt at a slightly crooked smile, but Nicki’s face still looked as though it had been turned to stone.

‘We always used to have to ring you before coming round, in case Stuart had slipped home and taken you to bed,’ Stella reminded her dryly.

‘Yes, he put a lock on the inside of the bedroom door to keep the children out,’ Maggie agreed.

‘Remember that water bed he wanted to buy?’

‘Stop it, all of you,’ Alice protested, but she was smiling now as well. ‘That was years ago, when we were young,’ she reproved them all mock primly. ‘Anyway, I’m not pregnant! It’s nothing like that. I’ve applied for and been accepted on an Open University course.’

There was a small silence whilst they all looked at her with varying degrees of amused kindness.

Because they thought her news wasn’t important, or because they thought that she simply did not have what it took to carry her plans through?

Why, when they were her friends, did she sometimes feel as though secretly, inwardly, they felt that she was inferior to them; that they treated her more as a junior member of their group than an equal? Why was it that people just never seemed to show respect for her and for her needs?

‘Goodness, Alice, if I’d known you’d got that kind of spare time I’d have co-opted you onto one of my committees,’ Stella was saying briskly.

‘What good news. I’m so pleased for you,’ Maggie offered warmly.

‘You’re a lot braver than I am,’ was Nicki’s slightly terse contribution. ‘I find it hard enough keeping up with Joey’s homework—just one of the pleasures of motherhood that’s going to come as quite a culture shock to you, Maggie,’ she added grimly.

‘Well, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time,’ Alice admitted, valiantly trying to ignore Nicki’s barbed comment. ‘More for my own satisfaction than anything else.’

Her own satisfaction; those years and that sense of self she had suddenly started feeling that her early marriage had robbed her of? Once she would have immediately expressed those feelings to the others, but now somehow she felt reticent about doing so, and about revealing her small dreams for their probably critical inspection. After all, they had hardly greeted her news with any degree of awe or admiration, had they? If anything, it had fallen rather flat.

‘I need the loo,’ Maggie announced, pink-faced, as she stood up. As she made her way across the restaurant she refused to allow herself to mourn the little daydreams she had been entertaining of having her friends reminisce about their pregnancies, bonding with her in her joy and excitement; teasing her for her shy uncertainty about things they were experts on.

Tensely Nicki watched her go.

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ she said grimly to Alice and Stella. ‘You know I’m right! If Maggie had wanted to be a mother she had ample opportunity to do so when she was married to Dan. Look, I’m going to go. Here’s enough to cover my share of the bill,’ she told Stella, pushing some money towards her.

‘Nicki …’ Alice protested unhappily, but Nicki simply shook her head and got up.

‘Oh, dear,’ Alice sighed, watching her leave.

‘I can understand how she feels, but she did go a little bit over the top,’ Stella pronounced judicially. When Alice looked uncertainly at her, she explained, ‘The probabilities are that Maggie is having this baby for all the wrong reasons. She has always been inclined to be impetuous, we all know that. She should be acting her age.’