The Yorkshire Pudding Club Read online

  ‘You just caught me telling Helen to keep clear of the gin–she’s been feeling a bit off,’ Simon said in his plummy posh voice. He reached over and gave Helen’s hair a stroke and Janey tingled for her.

  ‘You as well?’ she began without thinking. ‘We had a dodgy Chinese last night and I’m…’ She stopped herself just in time before she launched into a full rundown of her confused digestive system in front of Love-God Man and showed herself up totally ‘er…better now, thank goodness.’

  His little sneer wasn’t lost on Elizabeth, but Janey missed it. She was too engaged in watching him move fluidly over to the coat-hooks on the wall through her rose-tinted spectacles. He slipped on a brown leather jacket which looked butter soft, not like the cheap one George had that was so stiff he needed five minutes’ notice to bend his arm. The CD-player in the background was oozing out Sade’s ‘Smooth Operator’. Appropriately so, thought Elizabeth, watching Simon shmooze back across to his wife.

  ‘Right, darling, I’m going and leaving you girls to it.’

  ‘Off to watch the football?’ Janey asked.

  ‘Football?’ He said it like the word was not in his vocabulary. ‘Not really interested in it, to be honest.’

  ‘What’s cooking? Smells gorgeous,’ said Elizabeth to Helen, thinking how very pale and wispy she looked.

  ‘Prawn cocktail, scampi and Black Forest gâteau,’ said Simon.

  ‘Ooh, lovely!’ shrieked Janey.

  ‘He’s joking, it’s just a pasta thing,’ Helen replied, flashing him a look. Janey nodded but would have preferred Simon’s menu, especially the Black Forest cake. It never got any easier fighting the urge to indulge her sweet tooth.

  ‘I’m going.’ Simon kissed his wife quickly and whispered something in her ear that had a bit of an odd effect on her. She looks like she’s just had a bucket of cold water poured over her head, Elizabeth thought, wondering what that was all about.

  ‘Enjoy yourselves, ladies.’

  ‘Oh, don’t you worry, we will!’ Janey trilled, sounding just like the crocheted-hat woman of Blackberry Moor in the presence of Laurence.

  ‘I wish George was like that,’ she sighed as the door closed behind Simon and puffed the wake of his expensive aftershave in her direction. ‘He’s so romantic, just like Mr Darcy.’

  Elizabeth fought back the desire to stick her fingers down her throat. Whatever he had just whispered to Helen before he went out didn’t look like flaming sweet nothings to her.

  Helen didn’t comment; she just reached for three glasses and said, ‘Gin, girls?’

  ‘Oh, go on then, just a treble,’ said Elizabeth keenly. If she was going to be running to the loo all night, she might as well make it worth her while. Janey shook her head then thought better of it and relented, asking for a small one–so long as she had plenty of slimline tonic in with it.

  ‘“Just a small one”,’ mimicked Elizabeth. ‘“With minus calories, no fat, and a no-carb tonic, please!’”

  ‘I don’t care; you can take the mick all you want. I have no intention of putting all that weight on again after it took me all that time to get it off!’ said Janey, taking the glass.

  Helen thought Janey had put a little weight on since she last saw her at Christmas, although she didn’t say that aloud. Janey looked nicer with a bit of flesh on her bones. She had always been a big, red-haired girl with a great curvy body and a round friendly face, and she looked scrawny and pinched now she had become a diet convert. She was built for ‘comely’ and used to exude a sexy earthiness that she had somehow lost with the lard. Elizabeth thought the same. Not that either of them wanted to start World War III off by telling her so.

  ‘So how’s work?’ asked Helen. Before Elizabeth could answer, Janey butted in with, ‘Oh, don’t get her on that subject; she’ll depress the backside off you.’

  ‘Thanks, you!’ said Elizabeth with an indignant laugh.

  ‘Honestly, I don’t know why you don’t leave if it’s so bad.’

  ‘Because, Smartarse, if there is to be a buy-out and they don’t want my excellent services, I might miss out on a redundancy package, for one thing. Plus, I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of driving me out like they have all the other poor sods.’

  ‘You could get a job with less money that’d make you happy. I mean, it’s not as if you need the money for a mortgage,’ said Janey.

  ‘I might not have a mortgage but I’ve still got bills and my loan for the kitchen to pay off and important stuff, you know, like food and shoes,’ she retorted.

  Yes, there were other jobs, as Janey was always telling her, but she had been there so long, it was the devil she knew. Change scared Elizabeth to death.

  ‘Work is crap as usual, Hels, thanks for asking. So now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about something jollier, like world famine,’ said Elizabeth.

  ‘Okay then, how’s the house coming along?’ asked Helen to Janey.

  ’Oh, slowly but surely,’ said Janey. ‘You know George–he might take his time but whatever he does is spot on.’

  Elizabeth nodded in agreement, wishing quietly that she had someone like George to come home to. You did, though, didn’t you? her head threw at her and she quickly fought the rogue thought back into its cage and doubled the lock on it.

  Helen filled up her own glass and Elizabeth noticed she had only put tonic water in it and felt duty bound to point this out.

  ‘What’s up with you not drinking on your birthday?’

  ‘Honestly! You miss nothing you, do you?’ said Helen with amused exasperation. ‘Anyway, it’s not my birthday till tomorrow.’

  ‘So?’

  Helen kept her eyes down and she shrugged. ‘I just don’t feel like one, that’s all.’

  Helen was rubbish at lying. Elizabeth looked at her, really looked at her and though it sounded stupid, there was definitely something different about her. And Elizabeth instinctively knew what that something was.

  ’ Stop staring, you!’ Helen said. She had a laughing sparkle in her eyes.

  ‘I don’t believe it; you’re pregnant, aren’t you?’

  ‘What–’cos she hasn’t had a glass of gin?’ Janey scoffed, but Helen was not denying it and looked very much like a woman trying to keep in a secret that was in danger of bursting out of her seams.

  ‘You’re not?’ said Janey her jaw opening wide with surprise and shock and joy. ‘Are you? No? Are you?’

  Then suddenly they were all bouncing around the room.

  ‘You’re not, are you? Embarazada? Do you remember that “embarazada”?’ said Janey, who remembered everything. The three of them launched into giggles at the memory: Janey telling that Spanish waiter that she was too embarazada to go off for a drink with him in Lloret. She thought it meant shy until they looked it up in the Harper’s phrasebook trying to work out why he ran off so fast that smoke was coming from his heels. The fact that it actually meant pregnant probably had a lot to do with it.

  ‘Christ, you’ve still got a memory like an elephant, even if you haven’t got the figure of one any more,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Ha flaming ha,’ said Janey, hands on her thin hips.

  ‘I’m not supposed to tell you!’ said Helen, swinging between nervous fear and explosive joy like a metronome gone berserk.

  ‘You didn’t tell us–I guessed,’ said Elizabeth, with a Cheshire cat grin.

  ‘Simon will go nuts if he finds out you know,’ Helen whispered, flicking a frightened-rabbit pair of eyes towards the door as if he were there listening.

  ‘Why the hell should he?’ shrieked Elizabeth. ‘We’re your best mates and as such we should have known before him!’

  ‘Oh, he told me not to tell you until I was twelve weeks’, because a lot of people miscarry before then.’ Helen squeezed them both tight. ‘Oh God, I’ve been dying to come round and see you. I had a feeling I was pregnant when I was late, because as you know I am never late. I wanted to be sure, though, and I knew if I saw you I woul
d not be able to keep the secret.’

  ‘When’s it due?’

  ‘Well, by my calculations the twenty fourth of September but I’ll get a scan to confirm that in a few weeks.’

  ‘Oh, that’s fantastic!’ Janey laughed. ‘I suppose Simon’s dead chuffed.’

  ‘Yes,’ Helen said without elaborating, which Elizabeth thought was a bit odd for someone who could gush more than a burst pipe about the milkman leaving an extra pint.

  ‘So sitting on Chalk Man’s willy worked then,’ said Janey. ‘Just so long as he doesn’t come through for me, that’s all I can say.’

  Elizabeth thought the same, although she didn’t say it aloud. Not that there was any reason why she should be worried about anything like that, since she always made Dean wear a condom however much he protested, plus they hadn’t had any penetrative sex since before Christmas. Plus her periods had been present and almost correct.

  ‘I couldn’t believe it when I did the test.’ Helen’s chirruping brought her back into the real world. Now the secret was finally out they could not shut her up–not that they wanted to anyway.

  ‘What did you think?’ said Janey.

  ‘I can’t put it into words, honestly I can’t!’

  Elizabeth smiled. She knew what she would have said, had it been her, but Helen swore less than Anne of Green Gables.

  ‘I thought we’d eat in the kitchen rather than the dining room if that’s okay with you guys,’ said Helen.

  ‘Fine by me,’ said Elizabeth, who liked her friend’s long, thin, cold dining room marginally less than her minimalist, masculine, cold kitchen.

  The kitchen table had been laid out beautifully though, with a green table cover and matching place mats and linen napkins rolled into golden rings. There was freshly grated parmesan waiting in a dish, and a huge polished wooden saltmill and an enormous pepper pot which Elizabeth could never resist picking up and twisting whilst saying in a saucy-Italian-waiter accent, ‘Beautiful laaaady like the big one, nice and grindy grindy and plenty of it, ah?’ The others expected it and then groaned afterwards. Helen’s kitchen was very different to Elizabeth’s cosy little den in Rhymer Street. This was a room straight out of Homes and Gardens but it wasn’t Elizabeth’s idea of a dream cooking space–and she damn well knew it wasn’t Helen’s. They shared chintzy tastes, displays of cottagey teapots, big squashy sofas and pictures of cats, not stark white walls and flaming horrible abstract paintings with squares on. This room reflected nothing of Helen’s personality and everything of Simon’s–hard-lined and clinical and, until the news today, Elizabeth would have added ‘sterile’ to the list.

  ‘So when do you reckon you caught on then?’ said Janey, when they were seated and eating.

  ‘New Year’s Eve,’ said Helen without any hesitation as she knew this for a fact.

  ‘Ooh, George and I had a bit of an evening then too,’ said Janey, remembering how George had managed to rev up his engine with gusto that night. He’d even taken her from behind and he hadn’t done that for years. ‘You went to a party, didn’t you, Elizabeth?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh yes–I remember you said you were going. How was it?’

  ‘Not much cop, really. Came home early. This is delicious,’ said Elizabeth, shovelling a mouthful of food in so she couldn’t talk any more.

  ‘So what happens now? How far on are you?’ asked Janey.

  ‘Well, they count it from the date of your last period, so that means I’m nearly seven weeks’ pregnant. I start antenatal classes when I’ve missed my second period.’

  ‘That can’t be right!’ Elizabeth said. ‘That would make you about two weeks’ pregnant before you’d even had the fateful bonk.’

  ‘Trust me, it’s right,’ said Helen.

  Janey gasped, ‘Jeez, seven weeks! That’s like being nearly two months’ pregnant!’

  ‘Yes. Well done, Carol Vorderman.’

  Janey stuck her tongue out at Elizabeth then turned back to Helen. ‘Are you feeling sick then?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid so, but even worse than the nausea is the sensitivity in my chest. If you’ve ever had your nipples rubbed with sandpaper, that’s what it feels like.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t–she probably will have had,’ and Janey thumbed towards Elizabeth.

  ‘…and tired,’ Helen went on. ‘I’m so dreadfully tired all the time.’

  Elizabeth’s ears pricked up, although she was being silly. She’d had a period since New Year–a light one, but a period all the same, thank God.

  ‘Is that a symptom then, being tired?’

  ‘Apparently so, at the beginning. And at the end, obviously.’

  ‘I thought you got sick and fat and that was it,’ said Elizabeth, who had never had any reason to read up about what happened during pregnancy.

  ‘No, no, no!’ said Helen. ‘My gums won’t stop bleeding either and I feel like I need the loo every five minutes.’

  ‘I think you must be pregnant as well then,’ laughed Janey, nodding her head towards Elizabeth. ‘Sounds a right laugh so far, Hels.’

  ‘It gets better later on. When I get to twelve weeks some of the nasty things, like the nausea and the tiredness, should all have gone. Actually, I don’t feel too bad this evening for a change,’ Helen said brightly, ‘but in the mornings I could just crawl back into bed. In fact, I did today.’

  ‘These part-time workers!’ said Janey, stretching out for more parmesan, and then withdrawing her hand when she remembered its calorific value. ‘I’d love to crawl back into bed some mornings, especially at this time of year.’

  ‘Well, you know what to do–get pregnant.’

  ‘Drop dead!’

  ‘I always thought you would have children, or at least one child,’ said Helen.

  ‘We’ve left it a bit late now,’ said Janey, wriggling like a worm on a line anxious to change the subject before they started talking about what a great dad George would make. She was forever batting away the guilt at denying him the chance to be a daddy, even though she knew that it was what he wanted more than anything.

  ‘I really liked working fulltime,’ sighed Helen absently, ‘but Simon put his foot down. He hates coming home to an empty house. Silly thing is, he works such long hours I could have done a fulltime job and still have been back in plenty of time for him.’

  Selfish swine, thought Elizabeth. However had someone as lovely as Hels landed up with a prat like him? Well, she knew the answer to that really; he had nipped in when she was at her most vulnerable and taken her over, just like the evil spirit in The Exorcist took over Linda Blair. She had wondered for a long time whether Simon was just hanging on in there until Mrs Luxmore snuffed it and Helen inherited the whole of the family fortune, but such thoughts were hardly a conversation-starter with Helen. She was a suspiciously closed book about their relationship, even to them–her best friends.

  ‘So what if you give birth to a chalk outline with an enormous willy and a club?’ Elizabeth said, stabbing a piece of chicken and nodding appreciatively.

  Helen brightened. ‘I’m quite prepared to believe it could be coincidence, but it does make me feel less of a nutter if I believe he worked for me, and less guilty for dragging you two all that way.’

  ‘We’ll never know if it was the magic of the Chalk Man then,’ said Janey, although really, she knew better than to believe all that rubbish.

  Helen had made the most enormous chocolate cake for afters.

  ‘You sure you’re not Doris Day reincarnated?’ said Janey.

  ‘She’d have a job on, she’s not dead,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Having some?’

  Janey hesitated. ‘Re-educating her stomach’ hadn’t happened, and whenever it was within grabbing distance of foods like this, it never failed to loll its greedy tongue out and cry, ‘Gimme gimme gimme’. Working for an international cake and confectionery company hardly helped, with offers to go on market research food-tasting panels left right and centre. She would tu
rn them down every time whilst trying hard not to sob.

  ‘I’m full to busting,’ she fibbed. ‘Just a teeny tiny piece and I mean a teeny tiny piece.’

  ‘I think I must have two stomachs,’ declared Elizabeth. ‘I’m full to busting with pasta but I’m starving for pud.’

  ‘It’s called being a pig!’ said Janey, and Elizabeth snorted at her and tried to eat her hand.

  The cake looked delicious–but then everything Helen did turned out to be impressive, Elizabeth thought, unless you count marrying Slimy Simon, that was.

  ‘So…fortuna dies natalis, Helena!’ said Elizabeth, lifting up her glass in Helen’s direction.

  ‘Wow, Miss Ramsay would be proud of you,’ said Helen, giving her an impressed clap.

  ‘So she bloody should be after what she started to put me through twenty-three years ago, is it?’ Elizabeth totted up the years. ‘Chuff me, it’s more than that, it’s over twenty-six!’

  ‘How time flies when you’re enjoying yourself,’ said Janey dryly. ‘Anyway, we’ve suffered far more than you have since that day. I was quite happy sitting with Brenda Higginthorpe.’

  ‘Glenda Higginthorpe, wasn’t it?’ said Helen.

  ‘Aye, she was such a great mate you can’t even remember her name,’ scoffed Elizabeth, but Janey was too distracted by the mighty cake to want to reminisce over that particular historical school-day any more.

  ‘Not sticking any candles in that?’ she asked.

  ‘I haven’t got any,’ said Hels.