The Thin Pink Line Read online

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Dodo, Jane, I forgot to mention that I’d also invited Darius Lynch and his wife, Pamela,” said Colin.

  The bikini-clad duo looked to be in their early thirties and, even from across the far side of the pool, as they waved their highball glasses at us, I could see that they were impossibly tanned, impossibly spoiled—witness the gold chains on both—and impossibly yuppified. Sotto voce, Colin added, “I’m sorry, but it couldn’t be helped. Darius is my investment counselor and if I hadn’t done something to thank him for all the money he’s saved me this past year, well, it just would have seemed churlish. Still, I don’t suppose you’d expected to have to share your weekend in the country with perfect strangers.”

  No, I for one certainly hadn’t, but as Colin left for the airport himself shortly afterward, it would have seemed churlish on our parts to issue complaints at this late date. Besides, what could we do? Drive back to the city in the beastly heat? Kick the Glitter Twins out?

  As it was, we decided to make the best of a bad job.

  Dodo approached the bronzed couple, hand out for a firm shake, determined to begin as she meant to go on. The problem, from my point of view, was how she began.

  “Hello, I’m Lana Lane, Colins editor, but people often insist on calling me Dodo, so you might as well, too, and this is my assistant, Jane, who’s four months’ pregnant.”

  And that was all it took to ruin the entire weekend.

  Turned out that, in spite of having everything else that money could buy, Pamela Lynch hadn’t as yet been able to buy herself a pregnancy and that was what she desperately wanted most. Even trying the fertility treatments that had yielded positive litters for women over in the States had resulted in nada for Pam, as she familiarly insisted on me addressing her, conversely insisting on calling me J.T. no matter how I tried to discourage her. This meant that the entire weekend was spent with me playing Mary to her little lamb. If I took an early morning walk in the gardens, there she was, regaling me with stories of those sexual encounters she’d had that involved thermometers. If I snuck down to the massive kitchen in the middle of the night to see if there was any pudding left over from dinner, there came Pam, scaring the shit out of me by sneaking up behind me at the fridge, ready with her turkey baster stories, the likes of which were enough to keep me from falling asleep again.

  Of course, the bottom line in all of this was that she desperately wanted to know where I, J.T., had managed to succeed where she had somehow failed. It was patently inexplicable to her that lowly J.T.—“an assistant editor and not even a real editor,” as I couldn’t help but overhear her complaining to D.L., her husband, over their cocktails—should succeed at anything she had failed at, particularly since I wasn’t even married, an addendum that I failed to see the significance of.

  She really, really made me hope that the world never got the chance to learn what she’d be like as a mother.

  And Dodo, was she any font of sympathy?

  Hardly.

  “Oh, Jane,” she said, not even bothering to glance up from the manuscript she was reading, a village comedy of manners that she was seriously thinking of acquiring, “don’t you think it’s part of your duty? I mean, isn’t that part of the pregnancy package—the sharing of information among pregnant ladies as well as those unfortunates who would merely like to be?”

  “All right!” I finally shouted later that same night. Having been practically accosted in the kitchen, I was hoping that a little exasperation would buy me some breathing space. “I’ll tell you how I did it—I had sex, okay? I had sex, one time, missionary style, no bells or whistles or bows, and I got pregnant!”

  But even that wasn’t enough. Pam wanted to know things like how long the man’d kept it in for and what meal I’d last eaten and how long before.

  God! The way the woman just went on and on and on about it, why, you’d think she was doing research for her own book!

  Still, I suppose that even I would have been inclined to feel sorry for her, what with her seemingly endless desperate attempts to conceive, were it not for a conversation I heard between her and Dodo early on. Dodo, who may not have been a font of sympathy for me, was positively oozing it for Pam. As she covered Pam’s bronzed and be-jeweled hand with her own beautiful one, she soothingly half asked, half suggested, “Have you and Darius considered adoption? Surely, there must be an endless supply of simply marvelous children who need—”

  “God, no!” Pam had shrieked, practically tearing her hand out from under Dodo’s. “Do you really think that I would ever be caught dead raising someone else’s whiny brat? My God, if a baby doesn’t come out of your own body, if it doesn’t share your own blood, then what in hell would be the point in taking care of it?”

  And still she came after me for procreation tips.

  Of course, the worst thing about all of this me-and-my-shadow stuff with Pam was that I wasn’t even able to enjoy the one thing I’d really been attracted to by Colin’s place: the pool.

  After all, I was in my fourth month. If I put on a bathing suit—a one-piecer, a bikini, really anything involving latex—people would see in an instant that I was still skinny. And if I tried to stuff my suit? Well… What would happen if some of the stuffing leaked or, worse, I actually got the suit wet and people could see the outlines of something very unbabyish? I just couldn’t take the chance.

  Thus I spent the weekend by the pool fully clothed: baggy pants, artistic oversize man’s shirt, sunglasses, big hat. Very Katharine Hepburn, the only problem being that it wasn’t the soignée Katharine of The Philadelphia Story, but rather it was the entire-body-covered beekeeperish Kate from On Golden Pond.

  “Aren’t you sweltering in that?” Dodo asked, coming poolside in a bikini so small and of such a clingy material even when not wet that I could have counted the tiny bumps around her nipples if I hadn’t been too embarrassed to continue staring.

  “Course not.” I tried to sound as if I meant it. I couldn’t remember the last cloudlessly sunny July day when temperatures had risen over ninety, but I would certainly remember this one. If only I hadn’t promised Alice that I’d write that blasted book…

  Not for the first time, I wished that I could confide in Dodo about the book contract. Dodo truly was a great editor and I’d been having some problems with building sufficiently credible character motivation into the story. I knew that Dodo would somehow magically be able to spot the solution that I was too close to the project to see, but if I told Dodo about the book contract, then I’d have to tell her about the fake pregnancy, too, and if I started telling people about the fake pregnancy then the raw material for the book would disappear. Not to mention that they’d all go back to treating me as Unimportant and Unpregnant Jane again. Well, except for Tolkien, of course. And David. And Christopher.

  “Aren’t you going to put on your suit to go swimming?” Dodo asked.

  “God, no! It’s horrible for the baby!”

  Dodo looked at me as though I were daft. “What are you—daft? Pregnant women swim all the time. I’m almost certain they do. It’s supposed to be the perfect nonstressfully gentle exercise….” She paused, seeking a higher authority. “Why, look at all of those Jane Fonda women. I’m sure they—”

  I cut her off. “Oh. Well. If you want to talk about Jane Fonda…”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing.” I exhaled, studying my nails. “Just that her books came out in the early eighties. For God sakes, Dodo, you’re in publishing—you must know that.”

  “But what’s that got to do with anything? I just don’t see—”

  “No, of course you don’t, dear—” I could afford to be patronizing here “—but that’s because you’ve never been pregnant.”

  “So?”

  “So, as every pregnant woman knows, the technology and knowledge is changing all the time, faster than the Internet. Oh, sure they say now that smoking can be harmful, but a couple of years from now? Some doctor in Singapore�
�ll prove that low birth weight is a product of eating carrots. It’s just a matter of time. Same thing with swimming. Used to be, people thought that swimming was the perfect thing for us pregnant ladies, just like you thought, Dodo. But that was the early eighties, when people were still listening to U2 for the first time and it actually seemed as though they had legitimate things to whinge about. This, however, is, oh, about two decades later, and now anyone who knows anything about pregnancy knows that swimming pools are strictly taboo for pregnant ladies.”

  Well, I didn’t actually say, “So there,” but I might as well have done.

  And Dodo, to give her credit, did not say, “Well, I still think you’re out of your fucking mind, Jane,” as she might have done. After all, she didn’t know anything, not really, and these nonpregnant friends of Colin Smythe certainly didn’t know anything, so who was there left to argue with all of my quantum leaps of illogic?

  From where I was sitting, we were even.

  Of course, nothing ever lasts for very long, certainly not in any ongoing relationship. As we loaded up the boot of the car for the return trip back to London late Sunday afternoon, Dodo looked at me critically over the top of her sunglasses. “Are you planning to hit the maternity shops at any time soon? I’m afraid the Kay Hepburn look doesn’t suit you at all and, anyway, I doubt any of our authors would find it comforting. Might make them all start free-associating to The Lion in Winter and who knows what could happen then.”

  The fetus was now four inches, receiving its nourishment from the placenta. It was developing reflexes, like sucking and swallowing. The rate of body growth was now faster than that of the head, making it more balanced looking than it had been. There were little teeth buds, and fingers and toes had become well defined. Now that it was more human looking, it might look complete on paper or in a sonogram, but at this point, it could not survive outside of my uterus.

  Somehow, in just four months’ time, the idea of the baby had become as dependent upon me as I had become upon the idea of my pregnancy.

  The Fifth Month

  Well, Dodo did have a point, bitchy though it might be. It was time I started looking at maternity clothes, although God knows with what I was going to stuff them. I’d been so determined to prove to everyone I was interested in impressing—read: everyone—that I could be better than anyone else in the world at not allowing pregnancy to ruin my perfect figure, that for a moment there I’d actually forgotten that at one point the time would come when I would have to either put up or shut up. After the baby was born, I planned to be equally superwomanish. I would show the world, and Sarah Jessica Parker, how quickly a real woman could bounce back to bikini perfection following the birth of a child. After all, I couldn’t very well go through an entire nine-month pregnancy without ever gaining a visible pound. Could I?

  To procrastinate the problem of what to fill my maternity clothes with, I decided to put the cart before the horse by going shopping first. At Harrods. I figured that if I was a little depressed about my situation, finding out if Vera Wang did any I Love Lucyish maternity numbers with big polka dots and little Peter Pan collars—even though I’d never be able to afford them—might cheer me up.

  As a child and young adult, Harrods had never been a part of my existence, save as a name on other people’s shopping bags and a place to which tourists on the streets occasionally asked me directions.

  It was my mother who’d been the anti-Harrods Taylor, as I seem to vaguely remember my father traipsing me through there on a spree one Christmas season, pre his early demise. I also seem to remember a cloud of alcohol that surrounded him and thus me, the careful-not-to-look-stunned yet still stunned looks of shopgirls, and a spectacular train set that my mother complained about when we got it home even though it had a conductor who looked just like Will Shakespeare. When the conductor pulled the whistle, out came the tune from the song that The Fool sings to the mad king in King Lear; at least, it was the tune most commonly used in modern theatrical productions, the unnotated originals having been lost to history. For my mother’s part, of Harrods she said, “If I needed a store where I could get a silver satin bumbershoot with matching sequined trim for two hundred pounds I would go there, but since I don’t…”

  Well, of course she had a point. But, as I learned from Dodo upon being hired by Churchill & Stewart and being taken to Harrods by her on our lunch hour on my very first day, a person didn’t need to buy a two-hundred-pound silver satin and sequin bumbershoot in order to have fun looking at one. From then on, I was a confirmed Harrodsoholic, but I always obeyed what I perceived as the unwritten dress code to a tee, which brings us to the undeniable fact that:

  There are two distinct types of Harrods shoppers, definable by what they wear when they go shopping.

  Type One is the modern wealthy woman, the woman who doesn’t have to care about what she looks like when she sets out to spend a fortune on nonessentials, since the raised letters on her platinum credit card say something to the effect of HRH The Princess of Wales, or near enough. If she’s going out to purchase a ball gown, it’s fine to wear jeans, trainers and a navy blazer, provided it’s the right jeans, trainers and navy blazer. Type One is also a catchall for everybody who thinks that Harrods is Disney World with clothes, not even wearing the wrong jeans, trainers and blazer, but rather, anything that their McDonald’s-stained hands happen to grab on their way out the hotel room door.

  Type Two comprises just about everybody else. Type Twos dress to shop, often having entire outfits in their wardrobes that are never used for anything but shopping. Type Twos are blue-haired ladies for whom Harrods will always be their father’s England; are young women who wish they had credit cards that read HRH The Princess of Wales; are foreigners who have sense enough to know when they’re entering the most elite department store in the world; are ladies who wear suits with matching bags and shoes, frequently pink, the shoes always having a heel. When Royal Ascot Week is in season, they have been known to wear hats. In short, Type Twos look like an army of women dressed just like the late HRH The Princess of Wales, except that no one has seemed to bother to tell them that if you are a real princess, you wear jeans to go shopping.

  Even though I knew the two types—one could say I had been the anthropologist to first isolate them in the wild—I still was a committed Type Two, despite the fact that I was fully aware of the inherent pitfalls of allowing oneself to be classed thus.

  On the day in question, then, I had my pink suit on, with its miniskirt, but not too mini, and fairly low-cut jacket with the three cloth-covered buttons. I had my height-enhancing near stilettos on, whether they killed me or not, and even though Ascot was long gone, I had my retro pillbox with half veil pinned on, if only to cover the incriminating dye line on my scalp that could clearly be seen by anyone snobbish enough to look closely which, given the fact that the place I was in sold strappy sandals at the cost of a good week’s salary, was probably everybody within sight. My matching handbag was of a cute little box shape that hopefully said Paris.

  I would have dearly loved to have tried on a half-dozen pairs of those strappy sandals in various colors, but I was a woman with a mission and so made straight for Maternity.

  The Amerasian woman who tried to wait on me when I got there was so beautiful that I was glad I was just looking, determined to deny her the opportunity of a sale.

  “Can I help you?” she asked coolly.

  “Just looking today.” I breezed by her, sorely tempted to tell her to go retie her navy-and-maroon striped tie or something.

  She tugged on the lapels of her navy jacket to straighten it to perfection and returned to arranging a display of scarves on the counter as I began to move from rack to rack.

  Hey! Some of this stuff wasn’t half-bad. If a person had to be pregnant in this day and age, at least there were plenty of fashion opportunities for not looking hideous. It wasn’t all polka dots, tents and bows anymore. Instead, there were cute little jumpers—well, maybe not s
o little—and funky jeans overalls for bumming around on weekends. There was smart officewear and there were even some stunning ball gowns, should one be lucky enough to be invited to Buckingham Palace before term.

  “Hey!” I said aloud. “Some of this stuff is super. May I try a few of these on?”

  The salesgirl looked up. “I thought you were just looking today.”

  In my hands I held one of the pairs of overalls and a shiny ball gown that was of a dark-pink hue shot with gold; in other words, it was a color that had only been scientifically identified in nature within the confines of a nail polish bottle. “Well, I was just looking. Before,” I added with a tight smile. “Now, I’m just trying.”

  “Very well, madam,” she said, taking the things from me and putting them in a vacant stall. “If there’s anything else I can do for you today—perhaps the same garments in a different size?—please do not hesitate to call.”

  “Please do not hesitate to call,” I singsonged imitatively under my breath as I shut the stall door behind me. I hung the garments on the hook provided and went about the business of stripping down to my undies.

  First I tried on the overalls. My God! What a joke, I thought, studying my figure from all angles. Sure, it made me look different than my usual self, but it certainly didn’t make me look pregnant. Instead, what I looked like was one of those parsimonious people who has lost a tremendous amount of weight but who hasn’t bothered to replace the elephantine garments still left in one’s wardrobe. The ball gown fared no better, although I still loved the color, tacky or no.

  Well, this wasn’t doing me any good. I could buy an entire closet full of new clothes and I’d still be no closer to looking pregnant than I did any other day. I’d just look silly.

  Then my eyes fixed more firmly on something hanging from another hook.