Sacking the Stork Read online

  ‘New rules as of the start of this year – apparently the old boys have been forced to move with the times and allow in the weaker sex. So do you want to risk it?’

  Several years previously I’d had a particularly humiliating experience at a similar club. I’d been curtly refused entry to its bar, where I’d arranged to meet a colleague who was new to the club and as unaware of the rules as I. As a result, I’d vowed to boycott all such places forever more.

  I struggled with my conscience for at least a second. ‘Sure, that sounds great.’

  Some female rights activist I would have been, I thought guiltily. I probably would have unchained myself from the gates of parliament if a good-looking man had asked me to join him for a coffee.

  ‘Have you been a member for long?’ I asked as we walked, surprised and a little put off that Max belonged to that type of club.

  ‘Well, you can have the truth or an elaborate lie, which would you prefer?’ Max replied, producing that grin again.

  ‘Definitely the lie,’ I smiled.

  ‘They approached me several years ago, begging me to be their only honorary member for my good deeds to humanity.’

  ‘Okay,’ I nodded with mock seriousness. ‘And the truth?’

  ‘It isn’t my membership. My boss has a corporate membership and in a fit of generosity last week suggested that I borrow it sometime. I figured I’d do well to take him up on it and see how the other half lives before my popularity diminishes.’

  As we entered the oak-panelled foyer a stern-looking man with a ramrod-stiff back held out his hands to take my jacket.

  ‘Ah, no thanks, I’m fine,’ I stuttered.

  The man raised his eyebrows, my uncivilised behaviour obviously only confirming his opinion of the new rules.

  ‘Planning to make a quick exit?’ Max asked out of the corner of his mouth as we walked into a high-ceilinged room filled with overstuffed leather chairs grouped in small circles.

  ‘I can’t take my jacket off,’ I whispered.

  ‘Why?’ he whispered back.

  Reluctantly I opened my jacket to reveal the tan stain stretching from my collar to my waist.

  Max threw back his head and laughed. A few heads turned. Obviously, unrestrained laughter wasn’t heard around here terribly often.

  ‘How about we sit under the airconditioning vents?’ he suggested.

  It may have been a meeting of the minds, or it may have been the numerous gin and tonics we each drank, but from the second we sat down, Max and I seemed to have a lot to say to each other and it was late before we finally left.

  When I was recounting the evening to Debbie the next day, I was mortified to realise that despite telling Max all about my job and the golf event I’d just organised, I had no idea what he did.

  Debbie instantly decided that Max was hiding something.

  ‘He must have a dodgy job – he’s probably a drug courier or maybe a parking inspector.’

  ‘How many parking inspectors do you know who wear a suit and work in the city?’

  ‘All right, so maybe he isn’t a parking inspector,’ Debbie conceded. ‘I’m going with the drug courier theory then. What do you know about him?’

  ‘Well, he’s thirty-one and he grew up in a little town in western New South Wales and he still visits his parents a lot.’

  Debbie dismissed this. ‘Could just be part of the front – anyone can fabricate a solid family background. What else?’

  I hesitated, and she looked at me shrewdly.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Promise you won’t laugh?’ I knew even as I said the words that I was wasting my breath.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘When he was fourteen he used to play the guitar in a Kenny Rogers tribute band.’

  To her credit, Debbie tried hard to suffocate her laughter behind a cushion. Hearing her muffled choking I couldn’t help but join her.

  ‘I didn’t believe him either until he recited all the words to “The Gambler”. Do you need any more proof than that?’

  That fact alone convinced Debbie that Max wasn’t hiding anything. Despite my worry he’d be too embarrassed by his confession to see me again, he called the next morning and I was able to report to Debbie that he held a perfectly respectable job at a large advertising agency.

  Max and I were soon seeing each other regularly and discovered we both enjoyed heading out of the city at weekends. We rarely knew exactly where we were going when we left and would stop wherever we felt like it.

  One Friday night before my twenty-eighth birthday, Max pulled up outside my flat driving a rented 1950s MG convertible. I had thought we were heading out for dinner but he told me he was kidnapping me for the entire weekend.

  ‘You have five minutes to pack your bags. You need to take something to wear out to dinner, something to wear during the day and something to swim in.’

  I opened my mouth to ask a question, but he held up his hand imperiously.

  ‘No, that’s all the information I’m authorised to disclose. Oh, and everything needs to fit in a very small bag because the boot in this car is about the size of Debbie’s makeup case.’

  Half an hour later, feeling rather like I was 99 to Max’s Maxwell Smart, we were on the road and heading west. As we left the city Max slipped a CD into the portable player he had set up on the back seat and Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’ filled the car.

  Catching my look of disbelief, he laughed. ‘Yeah, all right I borrowed the CD from a woman at work. I thought you might like it better than Dolly Parton.’

  Three hours later, we turned onto a rough dirt track.

  ‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ I asked. After I’d directed him into three wrong turns, Max had relieved me of my navigational duties and for the last half hour had been both driving and reading the map.

  He held the map up and twisted it around to try to catch some light, doing the same with a brochure he’d been keeping in his top pocket. Being a city car and not exactly built to go off the road, the MG had no internal light and its headlights were almost useless.

  ‘I think this has to be right. If it’s not I have no idea where we are.’

  After several hundred bone-jarring metres, we reached a rusty gate. I could just make out a sign for Oboloo Springs Cottage.

  ‘Bingo!’

  Max looked like he’d just won a Boy Scouts’ prize for orienteering.

  As I left the car and opened the gate, I was struck by how much darker it was here than in the city.

  ‘I told the woman who runs this place that we’d be in late,’ Max said as I rejoined him. Glancing at his watch he added, ‘Although not quite this late. She said she’d leave the cottage door unlocked and we could check in properly in the morning. I hope it’s as good as it looks in the brochure.’

  Rounding another corner we saw a small stone cottage set back from the road. The lights were on inside and cast a welcoming glow.

  ‘This is it,’ Max announced, pulling up to one side of the cottage. ‘Let’s leave the bags until later,’ he said as he turned off the ignition. ‘They’re wedged in so tightly, I don’t actually know if I’ll ever be able to get them out again anyway.’

  He bounded up the stairs and opened the door, ushering me in before him.

  Although the cottage was lovely, with a vaulted timber ceiling and a stone fireplace, the most striking design feature was the amazing collection of lace doilies. I had never seen so many crocheted doilies in one place. There was one under every item on every shelf, on the back of each chair, and even an enormous one covering the round table.

  ‘Well, at least this answers one of life’s universal questions,’ Max said, trying to keep a straight face. ‘Doilies do in fact breed if left together for too long.’

  Further exploration revealed that the door off to one side of the living room opened onto a bedroom containing a huge wooden bed covered by a patchwork quilt – and mercifully fewer doilies.

  Max’s head was bur
ied in the fridge when I returned to the lounge and he directed me sternly to sit down on the deck, which stretched in front of both of the cottage’s rooms. Settling into a canvas easy chair, I tipped my head back and gazed at the stars, finding it hard to believe it was the same sky I could see at home.

  Eventually Max emerged bearing a wicker tray on which balanced a bottle of champagne, two glasses, a baguette and a plate filled with an enormous wedge of cheese and an equally large slab of pâté. We managed to finish all of the food and the best part of two bottles of champagne before falling into bed.

  We woke the next morning to the sound of kookaburras and, after an enormous country breakfast at the main house, spent the day exploring. We had a fantastic evening at one of the well-known restaurants in the area, despite the fact I had forgotten to pack any evening shoes to wear with my silk slip dress. Faced with the choice between ankle-high leather boots or sandshoes, I’d opted (against Max’s advice) for the boots, which looked distinctly odd.

  We spent Sunday morning lounging around the cottage drinking coffee, reluctantly wedging our bags back into the car around midday. Neither of us felt like heading home straightaway and I happily agreed to Max’s suggestion that we try to find the farm we’d been told made the fabulous goat’s cheese we’d eaten on our first evening.

  The road to the farm looked like it had never seen a grader and we parked the MG off to one side of the unmarked gate and let ourselves through, heading towards the farmhouse we could see on a rise.

  ‘What the hell are you doing in here?’

  I turned guiltily towards the sound of the voice to see an old man striding towards us. Although he wasn’t carrying anything, he looked as though he wished he had a shotgun in his hands.

  ‘Just what do you think you’re doing?’ he bellowed again, despite the fact that he was now only a couple of paces away.

  Max answered – rather bravely, I thought.

  ‘We’ve been staying at the Oboloo Cottage and tasted some of your cheese. We really enjoyed it and thought we’d drop in and see if we could buy some more to take home.’

  If anything the compliment seemed to make him even more aggressive. ‘Does this look like a supermarket to you?’ he demanded.

  ‘Well, no,’ Max admitted.

  ‘Exactly, so kindly go back the way you’ve come and stop scaring my goats.’

  Chastened we retraced our steps, half expecting to hear shots whistle over our heads. ‘Bloody hell,’ Max muttered as we climbed back into the car. ‘That guy isn’t exactly into customer relations. What’s his mission statement? Keeping city folk in the city?’

  Despite this experience, we often speculated about what it would be like to own one of the guest-houses or wineries we came across on weekends away. The idea of taking a few years out to run a small business in one of the beautiful spots we discovered appealed to both of us.

  However, blissful thoughts of making my own jam, while gazing at Max tilling the fertile soil of our farm, were a long way from my mind the day I discovered I was going to have a baby.

  TWO

  There is only one thing worse than being pregnant to a boyfriend who breaks out in a sweat if there is a baby in the same room as him. And that is being pregnant to someone like that who is no longer your boyfriend.

  Max and I had broken up four weeks before I ran into Debbie’s room brandishing the pregnancy test.

  It had been coming for a while. After two years together, I was sick to death of carting my clothes between flats and worrying about whether leaving a change of underwear and a toothbrush at Max’s place would be overstepping the mark.

  I’d decided that Max was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with and had been hoping that he would come to the same realisation. While I didn’t want a wedding ring, or even vows of eternal love, I did want him to be able to tell me that I was the one he wanted to be with and that he was willing to make plans past the next Friday night. Max, however, still very pointedly avoided any discussion of the future, and we both looked uncomfortably at our feet whenever someone tactlessly asked when they could expect an announcement.

  A couple of months before we broke up, Max and I had been on a boat on Sydney Harbour celebrating a friend’s thirtieth birthday. A girl I didn’t know had reached a messy stage of drunkenness and had collapsed into tears right next to the group of people we were talking to. Although we all pretended not to listen, it was impossible not to hear what she was saying.

  ‘He . . . he said that he thought he loved me,’ she sobbed. ‘But he said he couldn’t get over the feeling his Elle Macpherson was going to walk around the corner one day.’ It was several seconds before she could speak again.

  ‘He said that he didn’t want to miss out because he was with someone else,’ she finished, burying her face in her hands.

  I raised my glass to my mouth to try to hide my discomfort and caught sight of Max’s profile. Ignoring the conversation we were part of, he was staring at the girl, a look of surprise on his face. My first thought was that he knew her, or her boyfriend, but a split second later it dawned on me that it was the boyfriend’s feelings he recognised.

  I lay awake beside Max that night, trying to convince myself that we had a future. Finally I had to face what I’d really known all along – I could spend the next ten years waiting for Max to decide if it was me he wanted, and even if he did, I would never be sure that I wasn’t just a consolation prize.

  So it seemed that I had to either accept the situation or break up with him. But each time that I resolved to finish the relationship, we would have a fantastic night out, or a great Sunday doing nothing but reading the papers and wandering along the beach, and it would seem stupid to throw away something so good.

  It was Max’s ability to get on well with people from all walks of life, as much as his creative talent, that had propelled him quickly through the ranks at his advertising agency, but a promotion to art director was something he still expected to be a few years away. So when he came to the flat one evening to tell me he’d just been offered the job, it seemed like a major cause for celebration.

  I was halfway to the fridge to pull out the bottle of champagne that always lived in the crisper (a habit of Debbie’s I wholeheartedly agreed with) when Max said, ‘There’s more, Sophie.’

  It was his tone of voice rather than his words that made me turn around slowly.

  ‘The position is in San Francisco.’ Max was watching my face carefully.

  ‘Oh,’ I replied, leaning on the kitchen bench and looking down at my hands.

  ‘They want me there by the end of next month,’ he continued apprehensively. ‘But you could come and visit me and I’ll be home for Christmas.’

  It was blatantly obvious that I wasn’t being asked to go with him.

  Taking a deep breath, I looked up. ‘You’re right, Max, I could,’ I said. ‘But you know, having a long-distance relationship with someone who doesn’t know what he wants out of life, or even who he wants in it, just doesn’t sound that great to me. It really doesn’t seem like there’s much point in us being together any more.’

  Max looked as though I’d slapped him in the face.

  ‘Sophie, it’s not that I don’t want you in my life. I just don’t think I’m ready to have you move to another country because of me. I don’t even know if you’d be able to work in the States. Why don’t we just give it some time and see?’

  Strangely, more than anything else I felt relief that we’d finally got to this point.

  Shaking my head firmly, I replied, ‘Max, it’s not just this move. I don’t want to get married or even move in together, but I do need to feel that we have some kind of a future, that I’m the person you want to be with.’

  To my great frustration I always cry when I am in an emotional situation, but I forced back the tears which threatened, determined to say what I wanted to. ‘It’s just not enough any more. It’s over, Max.’

  I’d never seen him look so sh
aken.

  ‘But Sophie, I’ll be here for another six weeks or so. Why don’t we talk about it some more and see what happens?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Max, I just can’t do that,’ I replied.

  The celebration champagne stayed where it was. Despite Max’s efforts, I hadn’t changed my mind by the time he left half an hour later.

  Although I had been determined to make a clean break, I saw Max several times over the next few weeks. He tried to convince me not to make any big decisions until he was home at Christmas, but I figured that if after two years he still didn’t know what he wanted, another couple of months wouldn’t make any difference.

  And nothing had changed by the time I found out I was pregnant.

  My first instinct was to pick up the phone and tell Max. But even in my panic-stricken state I knew I had to think things through before having that conversation. Over the next couple of weeks I picked up the phone to call him dozens of times, but always hung up before the call connected.

  My first visit to the obstetrician was scheduled for the day before Max was due to leave and Debbie had agreed to come with me.

  If it is possible to have a phobia of all things medical, Debbie has one.

  While my home breast-check regime has never consisted of much more than feeling guilty when I read an article about cancer or saw a mobile mammogram clinic, I do manage to get to a doctor for periodic checkups. Debbie, on the other hand, claims that going to a doctor for anything less than a life-threatening injury is a waste of time and she has never set foot in a doctor’s surgery unless forced to do so.

  Although I realised the significance of what I was asking of Debbie, I was feeling in definite need of some moral support. Anyway, as I’d assured her, I’d seen enough episodes of medical soap operas to know that in order to see the baby, all they had to do was run a scanner across my stomach.

  Debbie paced the waiting room nervously while I pretended to be absorbed in a two-year-old copy of Cosmopolitan. I have always wondered why doctors don’t feel they can spare ten dollars a week to provide reading material that is in any way current. Flicking through the pages, I realised that several of the glamorous courting couples that were pictured had already been married and divorced.