The Child Inside

by Suzanne Bugler

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I correct him, which is true; I am hungry, with that sudden, light-headed hunger that you only get when you’re pregnant. I look at him and our eyes lock and hold.

  ‘We’ll eat,’ he says. ‘We’ll go out. I’ll be ready in five minutes.’ But he keeps his hands on my hips and his eyes on mine. I wonder what he sees, because he is certainly searching for something. I wonder if he is thinking what I am thinking: that we need to have sex first. We need to just do it, however awkward this suddenly feels.

  I try to smile, but I am a whisper away from tears.

  ‘Fine,’ I say. I half-close my eyes and lean towards him. I put my hands on his chest and he reacts as I want him to; he starts kissing me, touching me, unpeeling my clothes. He pushes me down to the sofa, moving fast; as if, like me, he wants to get it done. My head is swimming with hunger and hormones and a deep, intangible misery. I cling to him, but I cannot get a grip; I cannot feel where I am. I am detached, my arms, my legs, my body as distant as if the cords have been snapped. I so want to lose myself in him. I press my face against his chest, fill my head with the scent of the skin. The tears are brimming in my eyes now, and running sideways into my hair. I feel that I am starting to drown.

  When it is over he rests his weight on his elbows and looks down at me. He studies me with his beautiful, opaque eyes and says, ‘I am not making you happy.’ He states it as a fact, and the acceptance of sadness in his voice brings the tears to my eyes again.

  ‘I am not making you happy,’ I reply, but that isn’t what I want to say at all. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘You have made me happy. You’ve made me so happy. I don’t know what I’ll do when this is over.’

  He looks down at me, and I have no idea what he is thinking. What I want him to say is, It will never be over, but he doesn’t. He trails the fingers of one hand across my face, wiping away the tears, smoothing back my hair. He looks down at me with such concern.

  But he doesn’t say it.

  And so I tell him, ‘I think I’m pregnant.’

  I say it for a reaction, and my God, how I wish I could take the words back. In a split second I know I have killed it. His hand stills on my hair. He is naked above me; naked and vulnerable as a boy. His eyes freeze on mine. Those eyes, so blue, so like his sister’s . . . How I wanted those eyes to look at me. How I would have done anything to have them looking at me.

  Slowly he removes himself.

  He rolls onto his back, and we are side by side on the sofa, each of us staring at the night sky.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asks.

  And irritation at the question has me saying, ‘No, I’m not sure. I said I think’

  ‘But . . . why would you think?’

  ‘Oh, come on . . .’ I roll over and face him, thus hiding my nakedness.

  ‘I mean . . . how ?’ he says, his voice both thin and sharp with incomprehension. He does not look at me now. He is staring into space, his mouth twisted in shock.

  I know exactly what he means, but even so I say, ‘How do you think?’

  ‘But I mean . . . My God ...’ He flips himself over so that he is facing me. ‘Rachel,’ he says. ‘I’ve got a family . . .’

  ‘So have I,’ I say, hot tears burning my eyes again. ‘Simon, I didn’t do this on my own.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘No, I know. But . . . I mean, surely you would have said if . . . I just assumed you’d taken care of things—’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t just assume,’ I snap.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘I shouldn’t. But surely . . .’

  ‘Look,’ I say. ‘I didn’t think I could get pregnant. I lost a baby a few years ago. I thought that was it.’ I cannot meet his eyes when I tell him this, though I feel him looking at me in a kind of . . . horror. Sometimes I had wondered if I would ever tell him about my baby, and if I did, what the circumstances would be. I imagined a deep and intimate closeness, his arms around me, protecting me from pain – So that is why you were moved so much by my mother, he would say, understanding at last.

  Now, he almost laughs in disbelief. ‘You mean you left it to chance?’

  The outrage in his voice makes me flinch.

  ‘I didn’t think I could get pregnant,’ I repeat.

  ‘You didn’t think . . . Oh Jesus.’ He sits up, and pushes his hand through his hair. ‘Oh Jesus!’

  And so we go on. How? Why?

  On and on.

  Eventually, when it is apparent that we will not after all be going out for dinner, I have to say, ‘Look, I’ve got to eat.’ And I am feeling so sick, and my blood sugar is so shakily low, that I have to pull on my clothes and go over to his fridge and eat whatever I can find; the needs of my body taking over, proving my point. I stand there, half-dressed, shoving down rye bread and ham, while Simon watches me, quizzing me, looking for holes in my claim, looking for an escape.

  ‘It could be your husband’s,’ he says.

  ‘It couldn’t,’ I say.

  ‘But it could be,’ he insists, leaving me in no doubt of how easily he has gone from his wife to me and from me back to her, able to switch and change without a thought.

  ‘It is not my husband’s,’ I say.

  He stares at me. ‘How – how far gone are you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not long.’

  ‘It could sort itself out then,’ he says, and what a fine choice of words that is. ‘If it’s early days.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say stiltedly. ‘It could sort itself out.’

  He nods decisively, as though evaluating the odds. I see the lawyer in him, weighing things up. ‘And have you thought about what you will do if it doesn’t?’

  How carefully he says these words, and yet I know full well what he would have me do. And, surely, it is the only thing to do. Just whip it out and carry on; each of us going our separate ways, he back to his perfect little arrangement with his family, me back to the emptiness within mine. How I longed for another baby. How I longed and longed, till the life seeped out of my marriage like the air from a balloon. The irony leaves me numb. I am unable to speak.

  ‘Rachel,’ Simon pleads gently, desperation lifting the pitch of his voice, ‘this could ruin me.’

  We talk into the night. I regret my decision to stay. My overnight bag sits by the door, intrusive, out of place. But I cannot go home. I am stuck here, trapped within my lie.

  Simon works his way though a bottle of wine. I could not drink even if I wanted to; the mere thought of it makes me feel sick. He puts on his bathrobe and calls down for sushi, but now it sits uneaten on the counter on its takeaway tray.

  He starts talking about his family. He tells me Alistair was born two months premature; for the first three weeks of his life he was in the neonatal unit at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital.

  Queen Charlotte’s? In Chiswick?

  Yes, he says. We lived in Hammersmith then, before we moved out.

  Before we moved out.

  Somehow I never thought of it as a joint decision, that she should be closeted in the country with the children and the horses, while he should stay up here. But he talks about it now and I picture them, making that decision together. I see them, holding hands over a bottle of wine. And what they did, Isobel and Simon, is save themselves from the grief of a marriage slowly dwindling. Who cares what goes on midweek; they have the weekend. They have each other anew. How I envy them their foresight. How I envy them, and how I loathe them now, too.

  And he tells me how he worries about Theo, who will be going away to school soon. The school is good for tennis, he says, and Theo is excellent at tennis – well, he would be; these children, these perfect children, they’ll be good at everything – but is it right to send him away? And do I even care? He tells me all this, walking about the flat with this nervous energy driving him, distracting him; he tells me, as if he actually thinks I might want to hear.

  Do I care? Of course I don’t care. The more he talks about his family, the more I hate them. And not once does he ask me about
mine. About poor Andrew and poor Jono, stuck at home in Surbiton, so badly dealt with by me. I would not talk about them if he did ask. I would not talk about them and I cannot think about them. Instead I sit there on the sofa as he tells me how adorable Charlotte is, with her penchant for riding, and her love of owls.

  ‘You see, I love my family,’ he says at last, as if it is necessary to stress this point. ‘Please understand, Rachel, please . . . I can’t do this.’

  And I want to say to him: but what about Vanessa? What about the fact that I knew her and Isobel didn’t? What about us, and the history that we have? All those parties and all those laughs when we were kids still . . . what about that?

  But I don’t say it. I look at him, pacing about the flat, and I know that it isn’t the past that really matters to him. It is the now. It is his wife, his children. My little part in all this is not so important after all.

  Eventually I can talk and listen no more and I have to go to bed. I pick up my overnight bag and take it to his bedroom, and now it sits on the floor there, beside the bathroom door, still equally out of place. I realize that I do not know on which side of the bed I should sleep, so I assume the left side, nearest to the bathroom. I am so tired now, to my very bones. I go into the bathroom to shower, and when I come out I can hear Simon talking on the phone.

  ‘It was dull as hell,’ he is saying, his voice miserable and flat. ‘I wish I hadn’t gone.’

  The bedroom door is ajar. I creep over to it and I can see him, sitting on the arm of the sofa. He is hunched over with his elbows resting on his knees. The hand that isn’t holding the phone is rubbing at his head. He looks pale, and forlorn.

  ‘I miss you,’ he says. ‘I should have just come home instead.’ And then, ‘I will, yes. I’ll get the earlier train. I love you.’

  I sit down on the edge of the bed. My heart is thumping and there is a cold, hard pressure deep inside me. I love you, he tells his wife, but he doesn’t love her so much that he couldn’t screw me. Anger, fast and fleeting, rushes into my head, but very quickly it is followed by fear. This is it. We are over, Simon and me. We are over, and I am pregnant.

  I sit there for a long time, and he stays where he is too, long after he has said goodbye to his wife. The flat is silent. The clock up on the chest of drawers flashes past the minutes in neon green: 12.20, 12.21 . . . I dare not move. I can barely breathe. The pressure inside me spreads and grows into panic, fierce and raw.

  What will I do?

  I grip my hands in my lap, digging my nails into my skin, hurting, hating myself.

  Eventually I hear him move, and he comes into the bedroom and stands there, just inside the door. His hands are in front of his chest, not folded, but loosely clasped, as if he is about to pray. I stare up at him, though my eyes are burning with hot and useless tears. His own face is anguished. He wants me to speak first, to bail him out and make this easier for him, but how can I? How can I just let him go?

  ‘Rachel,’ he says at last and his voice is thin and pleading. ‘I’m sorry ...’

  He opens his hands in a what-can-I-do? gesture. I stare at him. I cannot speak.

  ‘Please try and understand,’ he pleads, and I do understand. I understand that he does not want another baby. He does not want a broken home. He wants to keep his wife and children in Kingham, and for me now to disappear. It was an affair we had, that’s all. A fantasy; nothing more.

  Nothing real.

  ‘I should go,’ I manage to say at last.

  ‘Rachel, you don’t need to go,’ he says. ‘It’s late. You’re tired.’ He comes closer to me and sits on the bed beside me. He puts his arm around my shoulder and pulls me towards him. I lean against him, wooden, too numb to yield. He sighs into my hair. ‘I will support you,’ he says, and then quickly, in case I mistook his meaning, he adds, ‘while you . . . do what you have to do. If the . . . problem doesn’t go away.’

  I close my eyes. I squeeze them tight. Inside my head I see with cinematic clarity every moment that I have spent with Simon, every look, every movement, every word exchanged. Already I am replaying it as I will, no doubt, replay it again and again, for evermore, torturing myself. And then, bizarrely, another image springs up, sudden, grotesque: I see my baby girl, but not as I usually imagine her to be, had she lived, with her brown eyes laughing and her cheeks all pink and fresh and plump. Oh no. I see her as a doll instead; a porcelain doll, brittle-faced and chipped, with empty dark holes where her eyes should have been.

  We sleep side by side without touching. I didn’t think I would sleep, but exhaustion swoops down like a blanket, blotting me out. I wake up with a jolt in the early morning; for seconds I have forgotten everything, forgotten even where I am.

  And then consciousness claws me back.

  Simon is already up and dressed, clearly anxious to be gone. His travel bag is open on the bed and into it he is putting a book of some sorts, and a small, square package from Liberty. I watch him for a second before he looks up at me, and sees that I am awake. I sit up, pulling the duvet up over my chest. I am horribly aware of how unattractive I must appear, sleep-blurred and tear-stained, whereas he, of course, is as immaculate as ever.

  ‘I didn’t want to wake you,’ he says, and I wonder if he was hoping to sneak off and leave me there. But would he want to do that; would he want to leave me in his flat on my own, now that it is over? And we have unfinished business. There is no avoiding that.

  ‘I can make you a coffee,’ he says, but he glances at his watch.

  ‘Don’t let me keep you.’

  He flinches at my tone. ‘Rachel, I’m sorry. I didn’t want it to be like this.’ He looks at me beseechingly, but all he wants is for me to let him go. He zips up his bag, presses closed the lock. ‘We’ll talk,’ he says. ‘Next week. Things will be clearer then. This might all . . . go away.’

  ‘And would that make a difference?’ I ask bleakly, and I draw my knees up under the duvet and hug them to my chest. I cannot stop my body from trembling.

  ‘Don’t let’s part on bad terms,’ he says, but how does he expect us to part? With a shake of the hands and a pat on the back, and off we both go on our separate merry ways? It’s so easy for him.

  ‘What about Vanessa?’ I ask; I can’t stop myself.

  For a moment he looks confused. ‘What about her?’ he asks, but then surely he sees the horror on my face, because he sits down on the bed for a second and touches my arm. ‘Rachel, I am glad you got back in touch,’ he says. ‘Meeting you again was . . . well, it meant a lot to me. Really, it did. But I have to think of my family.’

  My throat is so tight I cannot speak.

  He stands up again and looks at his watch, more obviously this time. ‘I have to go,’ he says. ‘But please, take your time. We’ll talk soon.’ And then he adds, as if he had just remembered, ‘Oh, but my housekeeper will be here soon. I think she normally arrives just before nine.’

  And that is my cue to be gone, before then.

  How strange it is, to be leaving this flat for the last time.

  As though I am an automaton, I check the cupboard in the bathroom, his wardrobe, the drawers, the shelves in the living room; I need to be sure that I will remember every detail, every single detail, exactly as it is. I find that he has seven pairs of socks, neatly rolled in his drawer, and another five pairs in his laundry basket, along with an equal number of pants and shirts and various items of gym kit. He has two tickets for a show at the Lyceum in May in the letter rack on the shelf next to his hi-fi in the living room, and a bill for a recent trip to The Ivy. I do not want to find these, but I hunt, and I do. I also find a note from his precious daughter, folded in half and used as a bookmark in an old A-Z, stuck up on the top shelf, wedged in right at the end: to Daddy, it says. I love you lots and lots and lots. From Charlotte.

  It strikes me as strange that he would leave me here alone, for however short a time. He must know I will look. I can only think that he doesn’t care.

  At hal
f-past eight I am standing in front of that window, wallowing in the view. My heart, now, is a cold, hard place. I am merely observing, recording it all, locking it all in.

  I am gone before the housekeeper arrives. Perhaps I even pass her, down on the South Bank. Maybe she is scurrying in as I am scurrying out; maybe I pass her among the early-morning tourists anxious to beat the queues, and the newspaper vendors, and the party-goers – some high still, some just coming down – staggering their way home through the shift workers and the office cleaners and all these other faceless, unknown people, hurrying by.

  I walk against the tide, slowly, on legs of clay.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Jono and Andrew are out when I get home. It is just gone ten; I assume they will have gone swimming, as they often do on a Saturday morning if there are no school sports matches to attend.

  I walk into the house, grateful for the silence. The familiar smell of my home hits me. I step over Jono’s shoes in the hall and Andrew’s briefcase and go straight upstairs, to my bedroom. And there I look in the mirror and see my face, pale and taut and haunted, my hair a wild, slept-on mess. I did not shower again this morning at Simon’s. When he had gone I stayed there in his bed, gripping my knees to my chest in a tight, hard ball for ten, maybe fifteen minutes. And then I quickly dressed, and made my last mental inventory of his things.

  I collapse down on my bed now and close my eyes, just for a second. My heart is a heavy, leaden weight. I would like to sleep. I would like to sleep and sleep for a very long time and let all of this be gone, but how can I? Andrew will be back soon, with Jono. I need to compose myself. I need to cut out my heart, and carry on.

  And so I drag myself together. I quickly shower, and dry my hair, and cover the pallor of my skin with make-up. And then I gather up an armful of washing from the basket and take it down to the kitchen, and stuff it into the machine. Andrew has cleared away the breakfast things, but left a trail of crumbs along the counter and an empty milk bottle, unrinsed, in the sink. The sight of the cream congealed around the rim of the bottle and the milky streaks on the glass makes me retch, but I cannot use the sink without moving the bottle; I turn on the tap, full blast, and water gushes into the bottle and splashes up and out again, spattering the metal of the sink with milky spray. My stomach clenches and heaves and I have to lean on the edge of the sink, gulping in air, waiting for the sickness to pass. And I’m angry then; angry that Andrew could just leave this bottle here for me to deal with. He knows I can’t stand milk at the best of times. And why does he half-clear up, but leave me the dirt? There is a splodge of jam on the surface just next to the sink – surely he must have seen it there. How hard is it to wipe the surfaces down, as I do, constantly?