Bridget Jones is having a baby - but who's the father?

Our favourite lovelorn heroine is back.

For those of you who have followed Bridget’s story, you’ll know that in the previous installment, Mad About the Boy, we were introduced to a widowed Bridget and her two children, Billy and Mabel.  

We also actually know who the father of the kids are (don’t worry - we won’t spoil it for you if you don’t know), but what we weren’t given insight into, were those years before Mad About the Boy. You know, back to the time when Bridget first got pregnant.

What was she thinking before she got pregnant? Was she ready for a baby? Was she even ready to be a mother?

Well in Helen Fielding’s latest, we get another hilarious peek into the life of the fictional heroine we’ve all come to love and find out how she adjusts to the idea of impending motherhood.

INTRO

Dearest Billy,

I have a feeling that you’re going to find out about all this, so I thought you’d better hear how it all began, from your own mum.

These are the excerpts from my diaries and other bits and pieces from that rather confused time.

Please don’t be shocked. Hopefully you’ll be old enough by the time you read them to understand that even your parents got up to this sort of thing, and you know I’ve always been a bit naughty.

The thing is, just as there is a big gap between how people think they are supposed to be and how they actually are, there’s also a gap between how people expect their lives to turn out and how they actually do.

But if you just keep calm and keep your spirits up, things have a habit of turning out all right – just as they did for me, because having you was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Sorry about all this and everything.

Love, Mum x
(Bridget)

Saturday 24 June
Noon. London: my flat. Oh God. Oh God. Am beyond late and hung-over and everything is absolutely terrib— Oooh, goody! Telephone!

 ‘Oh, hello, darling, guess what?’ – my mother. ‘We’ve just been at Mavis Enderbury’s Brunch Time Karaoke and guess what? Julie Enderbury’s just had her...’
You could practically hear the screeching of tyres: like she was about to say the word ‘fat’ to a morbidly obese person.

 ‘Just had her what?’ I muttered, frantically putting the remains of a slice of goat’s cheese log in my mouth followed by half a protein bar to ease the hangover, whilst trying to pull some sort of vaguely christening-friendly outfit from the mess all over the bed.

 ‘Nothing, darling!’ she trilled.

 ‘What has Julie Enderbury just had?’ I retched. ‘Her boobs made even more gigantic? A lithe young Brazilian?’

‘Oh, nothing, nothing, darling. She just had her third, but what I was really ringing to say was...’

Grrr! Why does my mother always DO this? It’s bad enough anyway careering towards baby deadline without...

‘Why are you avoiding the subject of Julie Enderbury’s third?’ I rasped, jabbing wildly at the TV remotes for some sort of escape, only to ping up an advert showing an anorexic teenage model with a baby playing with a toilet roll.

‘Oh, I’m not, darling,’ Mum replied airily. ‘Anyway, look at this Angelina Jolly. She adopted that Chinese baby...’

‘I think you’ll find Maddox was Cambodian, Mother,’ I said, coldly. Honestly, the way she talks about celebrities you’d think she’d just had an intimate conversation with Angelina Jolie at Mavis Enderbury’s Brunch Time Karaoke.

‘The point is, Angelina adopted this little baby and then she got Brad, and had all these other babies.’

‘I don’t think that’s why Angelina “got” Brad Pitt, Mother. Having a baby is not the be all and end all of a woman’s life,’ I said, struggling into an absurd floaty peach dress, which I last wore at Magda’s wedding.

‘That’s the spirit, darling. And some people have marvellous lives without them! Look at Wynn and Ashley Green! They went down the Nile thirty-four times! Mind you, they were a couple, so . . .’

‘Actually, Mum, for once in my life, I’m very happy. I’m successful, I have a new car with satnav and I’m freeee...’ I gushed, glancing out of the window to see – bizarrely – a group of pregnant women walking along the road below the flat, fondling their bumps.

‘Hmmm. Anyway, darling. You’ll never guess what?’

‘What?’?

There were three more pregnant women walking along behind the first lot now. It was starting to get weird.

‘She’s accepted! The Queen! She’s doing a Royal Visit on March twenty-third to celebrate the fifteen-hundredth anniversary of the Ethelred Stone.’

‘What? Who? Ethelred?’

A veritable throng of pregnant women was now walking along the street below.

‘You know? That thing in the village by the fire hydrant where Mavis got her car clamped. It’s Anglo-Saxon,’ Mum autowittered on. ‘Anyway, aren’t you supposed to be at the christening today? Elaine told me Mar—’

‘Mum. Something very strange is happening,’ I said eerily. ‘Gotogobye.’

Grrr! Why does everyone try to make you feel stupid about not having babies? I mean, pretty much everybody feels an element of ambivalence about the whole thing, including my mother.

She’s always saying, ‘Sometimes I wish I’d never HAD children, darling.’ And anyway, it’s not that easy to pull off in the modern world, as men are an increasingly unevolved primitive species, and the last thing you want is . . . Gaah! Doorbell.

12.30 p.m. Was Shazzer – finally! Buzzed her in, then darted, freaked-out, back to the window, whilst she clopped across the room to the fridge, dressed in a wildly christening-inappropriate little black dress and Jimmy Choos.

‘Bridge, come the fuck ON. We’re beyond late! Why are you hiding under the window dressed like a fairy?’

‘It’s an omen,’ I gabbled. ‘God is punishing me for being a selfish career woman and thwarting nature with contraceptive devices.’

‘What are you the fuck on about?’ she said cheerfully, opening the fridge. ‘Have you got any wine?’

‘Didn’t you see? The street is full of pregnant women. It’s a multifaceted portent. Soon cows will be falling from the sky, horses born with eight legs and . . .’

Shazzer wandered over to the window and glanced out, pert bum tightly encased in the little black dress.

‘There’s nobody down there except one vaguely hot boy with a beard. Though actually not hot. Well, not very. Maybe without the beard.’

I leapt up to the window and stared down at the empty street in confusion. ‘They’re gone. Gone. But where?’

‘OK, calm, calm, lovely calm, calm,’ said Shazzer, with the air of an American cop talking to her eighth gun-toting lunatic that day. I blinked at her, like a rabbit caught in headlights, then bolted out of the door and down the stairs, hearing her clattering behind me.

Hah! I thought, once out in the street. There were TWO MORE of the pregnant women, hurrying along in the same direction.

‘Who are you?’ I boldly confronted them. ‘What is the meaning of you? Where are you bound?’

The women pointed to a sign outside the closed-down vegan cafe. It said POP-UP PREGNANCY YOGA

Heard Shazzer snort behind me.

‘Right, excellent, jolly good,’ I said to the women. ‘Have a lovely, lovely, afternoon.’

‘Bridget,’ said Shaz, ‘you are so insane.’ Then we both collapsed in slightly hysterical giggles on the doorstep.

Extracted from Bridget Jones’s Baby by Helen Fielding, published by Penguin Random House South Africa, available for R290 at all leading bookstores. © Helen Fielding 2016.

To purchase a copy of Bridget Jones’s Baby: The Diaries, visit Takealot.com.