Chapter 31
Ben and Tom fidgeted impatiently at the breakfast table, desperate to be off. Since they had shovelled down their cereal at record speed, Holly’s notion of a misty-eyed romantic announcement was fast evaporating, somewhat compounded by the debris from their impromptu supper last night.
‘Taffy and I have some news,’ she began again, making sure she caught their full attention this time.
Tom looked smug. ‘Told you. We’re getting a puppy,’ he told his twin bossily.
Taffy pulled a face at Holly, this constant line of barter for another four-legged friend in danger of making their own momentous news splutter on landing like a damp squib.
Holly shook her head with a smile and crouched down between them, laying out the ultrasound photo on the kitchen table. ‘Can you guess what this shows?’ she asked gently. ‘Can you see who’s coming to live with us?’
‘A potato?’ asked Ben drily.
Taffy snorted with laughter and Ben grinned cheekily. ‘Only jokesing – it’s my baby, isn’t it, Mum?’ He turned to Tom. ‘I win.’
‘Well actually, you both win—’ said Taffy excitedly, loving their easy banter.
‘Because it shows not one, but two babies,’ Holly finished.
‘One each?’ clarified Ben with a frown. ‘We don’t have to share?’
Holly nodded. ‘Kind of. Two babies for us all to share.’ It was a little surreal how this conversation was developing, but if Holly had learned one thing with her properly switched-on boys, it was to let them follow their own train of thought and work things out for themselves.
‘Can they sleep in our room?’ Tom asked, intrigued despite himself, squinting at the picture with great concentration.
‘Once they’re a little bigger, maybe. To begin with, they might not sleep as much as you do,’ Holly replied easily. This was hardly the time to drop the moving-house bombshell to boot. One surprise at a time was plenty, she figured.
Ben just nodded. ‘Cool.’ He elbowed his twin. ‘Can we go and play now?’
And they were off, hurtling through the back door into the garden, elbowing and nudging each other for right of way.
‘That went well,’ laughed Holly as she watched them flinging plastic balls at each other in a rather violent rendition of ‘tag’ as though nothing had actually changed.
‘Better than expected,’ Taffy agreed amiably, forever thrown by these two boys and their ability to adapt to almost any changes in their lives with ease, so long as they had each other. He walked over and wrapped his arms around Holly, the boys’ excitable shrieks providing the perfect soundtrack to their morning – although probably not to their neighbours’. ‘I feel weird that I haven’t seen Elsie to say thank you about the house,’ he pondered. ‘I daren’t think how we’d be feeling about this little bombshell if we didn’t know there was a little more living space in our future.’
Holly nodded. ‘We’d be flipping a coin to see who got to sell their soul to private practice, I reckon. Based on the ratio of Mercedes and Lexuses in the clinic car park the other day, there’s money in medicine if you know where to look.’
‘Ah, but could you look at yourself in the mirror?’ Taffy said with feeling. ‘Knowing you’d sold out on your principles, wouldn’t every measly pound be tainted?’
‘Not so very measly,’ Holly replied, mentioning an annual stipend that made Taffy’s eyes go wide and unblinking, ‘but I take your point. That’s not how we do things, right?’
‘Right,’ he replied. ‘Nothing wrong with a few hand-me-downs and beans on toast.’
Holly kissed him gently, not wishing to point out that, thanks to Elsie’s incredibly lavish gesture, they really weren’t doing too badly on the hand-me-down front! And he made a valid point: they were able to celebrate right now, and enjoy this blindsiding news, because of Elsie. They weren’t pulling out their hair and tapping numbers into a calculator in a state of anxiety, they were content to roll with the punches and their principles – the NHS and state schools all the way.
Swinging by Lizzie’s house on the way to work, Holly was fizzing with excitement. If only Elsie had answered her phone, Holly would have been able to tell all her nearest and dearest in one fell swoop. Elsie’s recorded voicemail message had made Holly snort with laughter – ‘I’m sorry I can’t come to the phone right now, but I don’t want to talk to anyone. Even you. Leave a message and I might call you back – no promises.’
She knocked on Lizzie’s door, braced as always for Eric to come bounding out and knock her flying. Instead it was a doleful Eric who greeted her, lead firmly attached and a guilty expression in his dark brown eyes. Lizzie was still in her pyjamas and clutching a large espresso. ‘Don’t be nice to him; he’s been rogering Mrs Jennings’s pedigree miniature beagle already this morning. She is not a happy bunny.’
‘Mrs Jennings or the beagle?’ quipped Holly tactlessly, earning herself a very stern look from her friend.
‘I’m phoning Rupert later. We can’t let him become the sex pest of Larkford, can we?’ Lizzie said sadly, miming a pair of scissors. ‘Even though Missy was so whipped up by her hormones she broke into our garden and presented herself for servicing, Mrs J is majorly on the rampage. Don’t suppose Tom would like a crossbreed puppy, if it comes to that? Might be rather cute?’
Holly shook her head. ‘No puppies for us. We’ll have our hands full already.’
Lizzie blinked hard. ‘Oh God, shoot me now, Holls. I can’t believe I forgot – how did the scan go last night? All hale and hearty and we can start spreading the news?’
Holly couldn’t help the grin that spread across her face as she silently passed Lizzie the photo, the yin-yang babies crystal-clear to her now well-practised eye.
Lizzie looked up and then down again, checking that her eyes were not deceiving her. She seemed to swing from shocked, to delighted, to falling about laughing within moments at the prospect of what lay ahead. It seemed to be a common theme, this amusement at how Holly and Taffy might juggle two new arrivals at once, Holly realised.
‘Oh my God!’ Lizzie shrieked in excitement, startling even Eric from his self-imposed purdah of shame. ‘This is just brilliant. What did Taffy say? Did he cry? Did you cry? When are they due?’
Holly laughed. ‘We’re both completely over the moon and utterly shell-shocked. Not to mention the fact that I’m already sixteen weeks gone!’
Lizzie clasped her arms and leapt about like a mentalist spaniel. ‘This is going to be hysterical! And, erm, obviously, lovely and wonderful and—’
Holly shook her head, laughing. ‘Between you and me, hysterical is probably more like it. I’m trying not to think about the practicalities and just wallow in the excitement, to be honest.’ She grinned. ‘And now I have to go to work and pretend I don’t secretly want to curl up in my office and sleep.’
Lizzie pulled her into a rib-crushing hug and Eric insinuated himself around her ankles. ‘I’m so bloody happy for you,’ she whispered.
‘Me too,’ replied Holly gleefully, not feeling even a scrap of guilt at her hard-won contentment.
Walking into the doctors’ lounge, Holly felt a sudden wave of nerves overcoming her; there was no way she was going to make an official announcement at work until she’d tracked down Elsie. In her mind, it would be the height of rudeness to leave her beloved friend out of the loop, even if that meant yet another day of walking on eggshells.
She needn’t have worried.
Grace was bustling about sticking task allocations for the auction preparation on the staff noticeboard and Taffy and Dan seemed to be fighting with the new coffee machine.
Grace saw her come in and paused. ‘Morning,’ she said with a subtle smile. ‘How’re you feeling?’ she asked quietly, no need to be briefed about discretion.
‘Queasy, excited and terrified in equal measure right now,’ Holly replied, her eye falling on the sheaf of papers in Grace’s hands. ‘Going up or coming down?’ she queried.
Grace blushed. ‘Coming down. Quite what Jason was thinking putting up all these photos of himself without his shirt on—’
‘Aw,’ said Holly. ‘He was probably feeling left out not to have been invited to be in the “paramedics and pilots” calendar. Bless him – maybe these were his audition shots?’
Grace flicked through them again. ‘Oh God, I think you’re right. Although, to be honest, some of them are a little X-rated.’ She discreetly flipped over one of the photocopies, only for Holly to get an eyeful of Jason’s admittedly pert and well-rounded buttocks in all their naked glory.
‘Well, at least he’s committed to raising morale,’ Holly offered, feeling all unnecessary. ‘Maybe we should offer him December after all? He does look rather good in that Santa hat.’ The fact that the only thing he was wearing was said Santa hat, plus a come-hither smile, whilst clutching a gift-wrapped package over his, well, package, made Holly wonder whether she was the only one who found the image both mildly erotic and a trifle distasteful at the same time.
‘Hmm,’ said Grace darkly, ‘I think raising morale might not be uppermost in his mind, to be honest.’
‘Well, I bet Chris Virtue won’t let the side down, photogenically speaking anyway,’ teased Holly, watching Grace blush. ‘He seems to be such a lovely chap, Grace. And God knows he’s rather useful when it comes to getting the full story about what’s going on over there.’ Holly grinned. ‘I think we all appreciate you taking one for the team there.’
Grace looked aghast and Holly realised how her ill-chosen words might have come across. ‘Not that you’re taking one, I mean, not that he’s . . . Oh God, you know what I mean . . .’ Holly’s words petered out as she tried to dig herself out of the hole.
Grace shook her head. ‘I know exactly what you mean. Relax. And yes, he is a really lovely chap—’ There was a but just hanging in the air between them, Holly thought, and she didn’t mean Jason’s photo. There was a reservation in Grace’s voice that suggested her gorgeous pilot-suitor might not be quite the catch they all assumed he was. At least, maybe not for Grace—
A shout of laughter echoed across the room and both women looked up in surprise. ‘They’ve been fannying about with that new coffee machine for ages,’ Grace said in confusion. ‘It’s not exactly rocket science – go and give them a hand Holly, would you? I’ve got a million and one phone calls to follow up from my data request. But I mustn’t grumble, it’s just wonderful how many rural trusts are jumping on board.’
Holly nodded and wandered over, only to find Dan almost crying with laughter as Taffy took yet another go at securing his morning espresso.
‘One es-press-oh,’ he said, sounding out each syllable precisely, but unable to avoid the Welsh lilt to his voice.
The coffee machine sat stubbornly silent.
Holly leaned forward and read the instructions affixed to the machine: ‘Simply press the red button and speak clearly into the microphone.’ There followed a list of the coffees available, ranging from a simple espresso to a caramel cappuccino with extra foam.
‘Try something more complicated and see if that works?’ suggested Dan.
Taffy frowned and pressed the red button firmly. ‘Makey-ah-to.’
Nothing.
‘It’s your wonky accent,’ said Dan, shaking his head. ‘Here, let me try.’ He stood in front of the machine and cleared his throat. ‘One espresso,’ he said, never having sounded more plummily English in his life. The coffee machine obligingly erupted into life, pouring a heady stream of thick black coffee into the little cup, a perfect crema settling on top.
Holly turned her head away, biting hard on her bottom lip to stop herself laughing, knowing that Dan had perfectly angled himself to prevent Taffy seeing the flick of the all-important power switch on the side, before pressing the red button. Dan flicked the machine to ‘off’ again. ‘Here, have another go and try to speak clearly this time—’
Taffy frowned, leaning forward to read the instruction label one more time.
He paused, then narrowed his eyes, the top corner of the label beginning to peel fractionally away. ‘You utter bastard!’ he guffawed, knowing he’d been had, knowing deep down that there was no such thing as a voice-activated coffee machine, knowing that Dan was always a little bit faster on the hoof. It didn’t stop him chasing him right through the lounge and out into the car park though, until both of them were breathless with laughter.