The Thin Pink Line Read online

  “You could, of course, resort to the truth, Jane.”

  I didn’t even bother to dignify that with an answer.

  Then I explained to David all about the rosy place that being pregnant had come to represent in my mind. “You see,” I said, finishing up, “I just can’t give that up.”

  “You can’t give up this rosy place of pregnancy? But you’re not even pregnant. Don’t you think that maybe you’re putting the cart way too far ahead of the horse?”

  I impatiently shrugged off his objection. “Details.”

  “Details?”

  “Yes, details.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “Meaning I’ll just get pregnant. So the order of events is a little screwed up. It’ll work. You’ll see.”

  David shook his head. “I’ll never understand why you want to marry him so badly, anyway, that paragon of manhood. Just out of curiosity, what did Trevor say when you told him?”

  The First Trimester

  The First Month

  So, you see, actually, when you really think about it, this was all Trevor’s fault in a way, since he was the one who suggested that I get the at-home pregnancy test kit in the first place.

  If what follows smacks a bit of being something of an apologia, I think it only fair to point out that most people never see their own tragic flaws. For my part, I am fully aware of what my shortcomings are. Does that mean I should be instantly forgiven them? Hardly. But at least I’m willing to be honest about who I am, and if who I am is a fairly small-minded person who wastes most of her days in silly-minded pursuits, nothing about who I am has ever been quite so bad as to add up to Jack the Ripper.

  Anyway, I’ve always been what you might call a selfish person, always been fairly free about admitting it, at least to myself. Oh, now mind you, I don’t mean selfish in the grab-for-the-last-slice-of-pizza-when-with-friends way; that would be bad for what little image I have. Nor do I mean selfish in the willing-to-push-old-lady-out-of-way-to-secure-last-seat-on-tube-even-if-it-is-next-to-stark-raving-bonkers-loon sort of way; ditto above. No, I mean selfish in the garden-variety, monkey-see, monkey-do sort of way that’s been the bane of my existence ever since I was three years old. That was when I first saw my sister playing with a doll—a Kewpie doll, mind you, with messy red hair and a tongue that shot out at you like a snake when you poked its stomach, the kind that would normally give me nightmares—and knew I had to have one myself. Even if it meant biding my time until she was asleep and easing it out of her arms, telling her when she woke screaming in tears, “She wasn’t yours anyway, you know. You only dreamt that Mummy and Daddy gave her to you.” Here I cradled my new baby in my arms. “There, there,” I lullabyed her, before looking down once again at my crying sister, Sophie. “Now that you’re awake and not dreaming any longer,” I pointed out sternly, “you can see that the baby isn’t yours at all. It’s mine.”

  Ah, Sister Sophie: I guess I sort of think of her as a nun—a golden, beautiful, sort-of-mean nun. One year my senior and perfection itself in nearly every way, it was in fact a rare occurrence indeed for me to get the better of her. She was a real blonde with razor-straight hair, always got good grades, always had dates, always had the lion’s share of anything on offer in life, including our parents’ attention. In fact, as had once been explicitly stated to me by them, the only reason they’d ever conceived me in the first place was as a playmate for her.

  It is a matter of public record that I was always the more aesthetically challenged of the Taylor girls. They say she never even drooled as a baby. I, on the other hand, had a steady stream of saliva running from lower lip to chest from the get-go, family legend holding that they had to keep me in bibs pretty much well from birth until grade school. In short, then, being Sophie’s younger sister was about as bad as having the Queen for one’s older sister without one’s older sister being the Queen. You might say that Sophie and I had the biggest case of sibling rivalry in the world since Liz and Maggie, except that Sophie didn’t even appear to know about it. Am I exaggerating when I compare my lot in life to that of the Queen of England’s late sister? Perhaps. But I can honestly say that, based on firsthand knowledge, I can certainly understand why Maggie drank.

  But back to the Kewpie doll. It didn’t even phase me when I had raging nightmares about that darting serpentine tongue every night for the next month, until the doll was finally irretrievably lost somewhere—probably into the void behind the big blue couch in the living room, the black hole of our very early childhood—and Sophie acquired the next thing that I simply couldn’t live without.

  Now that I’m an adult—in years anyway—working for a London publishing company, not all that much has changed. Oh, I don’t mean that I’m still stealing my sister’s dolls; nothing like that. I’ve moved on to much more mature levels of envy; I’ve taken to coveting on a higher plane: ohm. No, no more childish things for me. Teetering on the cusp of thirty, for the past year the object of my grasping jealousy has been matrimony—much to the chagrin of Trevor Rhys-Davies, the suspenders-snappingly handsome stockbroker I’ve been sharing a place in Knightsbridge with for the past two—a state that sister Soph has been blissfully wedded in for exactly that length of time. To Tony. Who cooks Italian on weekends and who lovingly encourages her to put her feet up whenever she gets tired, which she does much more often now, her being—suck it up and tell it all now, Jane! Tell the worst!—five months’ pregnant.

  So I guess that, technically, you’d have to say that matrimony was last year’s rivalry problem. After all, it was last year that I won the Bad Sportsmanship Award for Inability to Throw Rice Nicely; last year that I used to sob uncontrollably at all of the weddings of friends and acquaintances, not out of happiness for them but out of sheer misery for myself; last year that I’d sniffled onto Trevor’s shoulder as he led me around the dance floor after the bride had cut the cake, had a garter put on her in a salacious manner and thrown the bouquet to some other guest whom I’d tried to tackle. “It’s not fair,” I sobbed. “Why isn’t it ever me?” To which Trevor would caress my fashionably spiky dark hair as best he could, sigh heavily and say, “Oh, Jane.”

  Technically, then, this year’s problem is no longer matrimony. Technically, the green-eyed-monster dilemma for this year is pregnancy.

  Pregnancy envy, for those of you who have never heard of it, is something akin to penis envy in that the appeal lies in what is represented by the physical shape of the thing itself. It’s sort of like wanting to wear a cross around your neck without ever being at all sure that you’d want to set foot in any kind of church.

  Notice that I don’t say a thing about babies. This is very specific, so pay attention.

  It was only April, and I had already been invited to, and guiltily felt compelled to attend, seven baby showers that year: three for people at work, only one of whom I knew in a more than passing way; two for people whose weddings Trevor and I had attended the year before (eager little rabbits, weren’t they?); one for a woman whose name I hadn’t recognized at all but whose invitation said that the shower was being catered by Food by Gloria (I love catered food); and one for a woman that I had grown up with. My mother always remembers her as being my best friend as a child and had wrangled a spare invitation for me out of the girl’s mother under this pretext. I, on the other hand, remember myself as having despised the girl intensely for her Tory views—perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration of my political precocity, but she was an annoying girl. Still, I went anyway, in the hopes of more catered food, and with what I thought of as a generous gift certificate to A Mothers Work: The Breastfeeding Emporium tucked inside my purse, fighting with my mother the whole way to Brighton: “She was your best friend!”—“I hated the twit!” And, even if no more showers loomed in my immediate future, I still had Sophie’s to look forward to in about three months’ time.

  Yes, with me teetering on the cusp of thirty, you could say that technically my lust had turned toward pregnancy, except tha
t there was really nothing technical about it and it had in fact become a fact:

  I was determined, in a big way, to join the pack and fast. But how?

  Well, we all know now about the first failed pregnancy and me telling Trevor that I was pregnant and him telling me to pick up a kit. Before I did that, though, I figured I’d better do some preliminary research.

  First off, I bought a copy of that book that every woman who’s gotten pregnant in the last eighteen years always buys: What to Expect When You’re Expecting. In light of the book’s ubiquitous popularity, one really had to hope that Eisenberg, Murkoff, and Hathaway—the book’s three authors—knew what the hell they were talking about. If not, we were all up a creek.

  I placed the copy in the bottom drawer of my desk at work, so that whenever I wasn’t terribly busy doing anything on behalf of Churchill & Stewart, the publishing firm at which I was titularly an assistant editor ever since I’d graduated with a first in English Literature from the University of Essex, I could read up on what I could expect to expect. I was just reading about what I was most interested in at the time, The Home Pregnancy Test, on page 4, when…

  “Taylor!” I heard the sound of my immediate boss, Lana Lane, calling my name.

  Lana Lane was the kind of woman for whom misogynists like Chandler and Hemingway first designed sentences that began with the portentous writing-school words: “Madame X was the kind of woman…”

  In Lana Lane’s case, Lana Lane was the kind of woman other women hated, strolling around in the kind of clingy sweater dresses that made her look like a cartoon knockout come to life, and all men feared. In fact, it was a good thing that my physical appearance was one of the few things I felt secure about, since Lana was the impossibly drop-dead-gorgeous kind of woman who could make Cindy Crawford start looking for zits. And, as far as men went, they feared her not only because she was far more beautiful than anything they could ever hope to be worthy of in their wormy little lives, but because she was also more successful than any of them in what had once upon a time been a man’s game. For all of her sins, then, the men had christened her Dodo, and the women in the office all went along with them. Since she was a gorgeous blonde and since all gorgeous blondes were historically stupid but she was not, they guffawed about it as if it were some kind of flatteringly ironic pet name. I, for one, am not sure that I get the joke.

  Truth to tell and feminism be damned, Dodo was not an entirely inaccurate sobriquet for Lana. For despite the fact that she had the kind of publishing acumen that would have made Bennett Cerf and Monsieur Gallimard tip their respective hats and chapeaux, when it came to real life she was something of a social moron. Never having had a genuine girlfriend in her thirty-five-year-old life, I was the closest she’d managed to come. And, if she was going to have to rely on me, whose boss she’d been for the past seven years, to teach her social skills…

  “Taylor!” she screamed again from her office to mine, the receptionist that all of us in Editorial shared having called in sick because it was Friday morning and Dodo being as inept with the new office phone system as she was with social skills. “Do you think you could pick up line two? It’s Colin Smythe. He’s going something fierce about his latest while doing what I think is meant to be some kind of a John Wayne imitation, and I can’t make heads or tails of it. Could you please, please take this one?”

  I tucked the Lion Bar wrapper that I was using for a bookmark in between the pages on home testing and lab testing. Intrigued by what I’d read about the former, I stowed the book back in my drawer before picking up on Colin Smythe. He was the respected author of five scrupulously researched historical bestsellers on Regency England, none of which had even a smidgen of romance in them but which had oddly struck a nerve with a book-buying public who clearly felt that they were getting enough sexual stimulation these days from the daily newspapers. He’d also written a sixth book, against all of our best editorial advice, about a California surfer who moves to Chicago and finds love in a spectacularly odd place. Loosely based on a story he’d heard while attending the Windy City wedding of one of his wife’s relatives, it had been published here last year and had not become a bestseller, although the critics had for some reason liked it. Now it was due to come out in paperback here at the same time it was due to come out in the States for the first time in hardcover. It was hoped that sales in the U.S., where Colin had a respectable following among the Maeve Binchy set, would be favorable enough to give the paperback sales here a shot in the arm. After all, the Americans were quite good at persuading the rest of the world into wanting something that it hadn’t occurred to them to want before; just look at what they did for Arnold Schwarzenegger.

  “Yes, Colin.” I always felt as though I should be calling him Sir Colin, and he clearly thought so as well. Still, in spite of the fact that his readers thought of him as a male Dame Barbara Cartland minus the kisses and pink robes and cats, the Queen, though she was a fan and had invited him to more than one of her garden parties, had not as yet made him a knight. “Jane Taylor here. What can I do for you today?”

  “Have you seen the Times yet?”

  “Yes, of course I have. I can’t believe that Blair really said that. Don’t you think sometimes the reporters just make some of this stuff up?”

  Each word came out like a bullet. “I’m—not—talking—about—our—Times.” He resumed a more normal speech cadence although one could still detect the strain. “I’m talking about their Times, the New York Times.”

  “Oh dear,” I said, consulting my watch as if the minute hand might help. “Have I got my dates mixed up? Did the book come out already?”

  He didn’t exactly begin his sentence with “you ninny” but it was definitely in the air. “Yes and yes. And the Times, their Times, has already gotten their hooks into it. Sometimes I swear they assign books to be reviewed by reviewers they know will hate them just so that they can be provocative. Did you see the hatchet job they let the editor-in-chief of Briefcase Woman magazine do on that first mystery where the sleuth was a housewife and former cheerleader?”

  “Yes. It was positively cruel.”

  “And did you ever notice how if their daily reviewer loves a book it gets trashed in the Sunday edition and vice versa?”

  “I believe it has been commented upon in the trade before.” Much fun as this was, I wanted to get back to the crux of why Colin was calling because the sooner I did that, the sooner I could get back to What to Expect. “This really is loads of fun, Colin, as always, but what exactly did the Times say about Surf the Wind?”

  I could hear the newspaper rustling over in Duck’s End, Colin’s country weekend estate, and the little throat-clearing cough that I knew always accompanied the donning of his reading half glasses. “Are you ready?”

  What could I possibly say? I knew it was going to be awful. “I can’t wait.”

  “By the way, the reviewer is an American historian, educated at Oxford. His name’s not familiar to me. I think he might have some sort of ax to grind. Anyway, here goes—’It is always a literary crime evincing the highest hubris, when a citizen of one country presumes to set a story in another country of which he has never been a resident. Such a circumstance is certainly egregious enough when the author is content to confine himself to a strict narrative form; however, when he commits the further, grosser, offense of assuming to understand the nuances of speech patterns native to the country he is purloining, he makes it impossible for any serious reader to take his efforts seriously. Such is the case with Colin Smythe’s most recent effort, Surf the Wind, a preposterous romance so seasoned with the word reckoned that one can only assume that Mr. Smythe erroneously believes all Americans to be equally at home on the range. If anyone who knows Mr. Smythe happens to read this review, kindly do us all the favor of disabusing him of this notion. Contrary to the beliefs of certain Caribbean countries and, apparently, a small percentage of Englishmen, every American is not from Texas. We do not all walk through life ta
lking around the hay stalks we have jammed in our mouths. Nor does each region of the United States speak in the same idiomatic fashion any more than one would expect, say, a Liverpudlian and a student of Cambridge to make the exact same verbal use of the letter h—’ Do you need me to go on?”

  I had to admit that the American reviewer had something of a point there. It seemed to me that the idea of an English person trying to impersonate Americans was potentially just as offensive as if, say, an American were to think that he or she could mimic an English novelist merely by throwing in a handful of “ex-directory” and “off-license” references every now and again. But I couldn’t very well point that out to Colin Smythe, now, could I?

  “Was that the daily Times or the Sunday Times?” I asked instead, sympathetically, the implication being that whichever one had trashed him, it surely meant that the other one would canonize him. Hopefully, it was the daily, since the Sunday carried more weight with booksellers.

  For once he didn’t sound a bit bombastic; more like deflated, really, as I heard the sigh that accompanied the removal of his glasses. “Both.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “I spliced the two reviews together and read them to you as though they were one. The Sunday reviewer added something to the effect that ‘it would be a relief to see Mr. Smythe turning his attention to something other than those insipid historicals he usually writes if only one could persuade him to remove the ten-gallon Stetson he is metaphorically wearing while doing so.’ I thought I’d leave that part out because it depresses me so.” Sigh. “I did so like America when I was there, and I had thought that it liked me. Don’t they understand that I wasn’t trying to mock or imitate anybody? Don’t they understand that we all talk like that all the time, and that it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Western drawls, six-guns, or corn in Nebraska when an Englishman says ‘I reckon’?”