Yet… he wasn’t alone. Tanya was waiting for him. I didn’t think any reasonable person could mind him getting delayed by a childbirth emergency, even if he’d ‘promised this wouldn’t happen again’, presumably ‘this’ referring to coming home late. Then again, maybe Tanya was a horrible person and he regularly found excuses to stay out, hence the offer to go shopping now. Either way, I didn’t feel at all comfortable about him going out of his way to help me, a stranger, if it meant upsetting his wife or girlfriend.
Having said that, I didn’t feel especially comfortable with fashioning nappies for my newborn baby out of a chopped-up tea towel and Sellotape, which was what I’d be doing if Beckett had no intention of coming back.
After a few more minutes of going around and around in circles, I decided the prudent thing to do was gratefully accept the supplies if he came back, politely make it clear that our unconventional interaction would end there, and pray he wasn’t a psychopath while checking all the doors and windows were properly secured.
If he never returned, then the bigger problem was solved, and the smaller problem was solvable. I’d helped create a successful fashion business. I could certainly channel some of this current restlessness into creating a nappy.
It was almost three in the morning. Bob was still sleeping and I was unable to do much more than shift about uncomfortably on the sofa and stare aimlessly at episodes of This Is Us that I’d watched a disgraceful number of times over the past few months. I’d have dismissed the soft tap on the door as one of the random sounds that accompanied living in an old house if I’d not seen the sweep of headlights across the living-room window a moment earlier. By the time I’d carefully clambered off the sofa and shuffled to the front door, Beckett was already halfway back to his car.
‘Thank you!’ I called, the boost at seeing another human being overruling my decision to shut down any future contact.
He turned around, hesitating as if equally unsure about whether to nurture this microscopic seed of a friendship. When I waited, door wide open – despite my rational mind yelling at me to close it immediately – he strode back over.
‘I didn’t want to risk waking you, if Bob was still sleeping.’
Oh, boy. There was probably some proper psychological terminology for this – helpless victim attaching themselves to a rescuer, developing disproportionate feelings of dependency beyond all common sense or appropriateness.
Whatever it was, the non-rational, baby-hormone-addled, wired-with-exhaustion part of my brain scrambled to find something – anything – to say that would make him stay a bit longer.
‘He’s not stirred since you left. Apparently that’s normal the first night. Unfortunately, I’m currently facing the existential crisis of suddenly being completely responsible for a whole other person, which as you know I’m woefully unprepared for. That, alongside soreness in places I won’t mention, means I’m about as awake as I’ve ever been.’
Beckett nodded, the creases between his eyebrows back. ‘Can I make you a hot chocolate?’
‘Um. This being my house means I’m the one supposed to be offering you a drink. Plus, I don’t have any hot chocolate. Or milk. I probably don’t have a clean mug.’
‘When it comes to new mothers, convention dictates that visitors make the drinks. Which is why I brought this.’ He delved into the shopping bag he’d left on my doorstep and produced a tin of expensive-looking hot chocolate. ‘And these.’
When he followed that with squirty cream and a bag of chocolate buttons, it was all I could do not to drag him over the doorstep.
‘Are you sure this is okay?’ I asked once he’d brought our mugs, topped with three inches of cream, over to where I was perched on a cushion at the kitchen table. ‘I mean… I wouldn’t want to cause upset with you and Tanya. It’s pretty late.’
Beckett sat down and took a sip of his drink, face a blank mask. ‘Yeah. Tanya hit maximum upset about three hours ago. Right now, she’s crashed out on my sofa.’
‘I’m sorry. The last thing I’d have wanted is to cause trouble.’
‘No. The last thing you wanted is to give birth here, alone.’ He grimaced. ‘Or in the back of Razza’s taxi. That car is a biohazard on wheels.’
He did a swift scan of my kitchen, no doubt taking in the dried pasta sauce on the hob, the dirty floor and crumbs on the worktops. I liked to think of my current living standards as relaxed. Seeing the lines appear on Beckett’s forehead made me wonder if I’d taken the midwife’s advice to ‘get plenty of rest, don’t worry about a bit of mess’ too seriously.
‘Do you have any children?’ I asked. The way he’d held Bob as if carrying an unexploded bomb strongly suggested otherwise, but I was attempting to distract him from the dirty pots scattered around the sink. ‘When I asked if you’d been at a birth before, you said about training as a doctor, but not whether you have your own kids.’
‘No,’ Beckett said in a tone that suggested he’d much rather focus on the dust webs trailing across the ceiling.
‘Well, an even bigger thank you for being there today, then. It must have totally freaked you out.’ I used a chocolate button to scoop up the last blob of cream in my mug. ‘The only thing preventing me from deleting my Sherwood Taxis app in humiliation is knowing you’ll have probably seen far worse at medical school.’
‘Glad I mentioned it, then.’ Beckett kept his eyes on a scorch mark on the table. ‘But I was holding your hand the whole time. Yara dealt with anything potentially… personal. And like I already said, that was the least humiliating thing I’ve ever seen.’ He scratched the blue-black stubble on his cheek. ‘People can assume being six-foot three and fourteen stone makes me powerful. But today – I’ve never seen power like it. You, Mary. Fierce and strong and… awesome.’
I shook my head, even as I couldn’t stop smiling. ‘I did feel quite badass at the end, there. Like, “I am woman, hear me roar”.’
‘Everyone in a three-mile radius heard you roar.’
I started laughing then, a semi-hysterical release of pent-up emotion that segued into a giant yawn as the weariness suddenly caught up with me.
‘Come on. Time to sleep.’
Beckett offered to carry Bob’s drawer upstairs, but I didn’t want to put it on the draughty floor and there was nowhere else safe to position it, so we left it on the living-room coffee table and he fetched my duvet from upstairs. Probably sensing my prickle of panic at the prospect of him leaving, he picked Lessons in Chemistry off my small shelf of books, took a seat in the armchair and, in the dim glow of my dusty lamp, started to read.
Finding it impossible to convince myself that I was safer with this man out of my house than sitting two metres away, I used a couple of cushions to find the least-uncomfortable position I could under the duvet, put the momentous events of the past few hours to one side, and succumbed to much-needed oblivion.
