by Lucy Diamond
He was silent for a moment, his expression anguished. His whole demeanour had changed. Now he was looking at her without his guard up, without that filter of resentment, and it was as if they could see each other’s real selves for the first time. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said eventually. Sincerely honestly. ‘If I’d had any idea—’
She cut him off, not wanting to hear excuses. ‘I still had to give birth to her, you know. Did I mention that bit? Yeah. It wasn’t the easy option, by any means. Or – what was it you said? – the coward’s way out. If only.’
‘India, I am so truly—’
‘I had to go through all that pain, knowing she was going to die anyway. Knowing that she couldn’t survive more than a few breaths. Does that make me a bad person? Does that make me someone to judge and sneer at? Go ahead, if you want, but you couldn’t make me feel any worse about it, believe me.’ Her breath was coming in short ragged bursts, and she clenched and unclenched her fists, trying to regain some equilibrium. ‘I called her Alice, if you were wondering. Alice May Burrell. We had a funeral for her and everything. And not a single day goes by without me thinking about her. Not a single bloody day, Robin. Thinking how old she would be now, what she might be doing, if she’d lived, if she’d been well.’
He was staring at her, as if a penny had just dropped. ‘She’d have been twenty, just like . . .’
‘Yeah. Got it. Just like Alice Goldsmith. Don’t you love a coincidence?’ She gave a mirthless laugh, wondering how on earth they’d got to this situation, where she was baring her soul to him, of all people, decades too late, in a crappy old boozer in town. But he’d pushed her to this. He’d backed her right into a corner. And if he didn’t like what she was saying, then frankly he only had himself to blame.
‘And that was why you were at the funeral . . .’
‘That was why I was at the funeral.’ The rage had gone out of her again, dropping away like a tide. ‘Yeah. Because it brought everything back. Because I’ve not been able to think about anything else recently.’ India clenched her fists under the table, deciding that she wouldn’t bother telling him how desperate she’d been for this other Alice to make it, for her to be all right. How obsessive she’d been about the situation, how it had seemed – stupidly – that this young woman could offer some form of redemption for her. Or not, after all, as it had turned out. ‘Anyway. There we are. All caught up. Feel free to sneer. I know you want to.’
‘I don’t. I’m not going to. I wouldn’t sneer when you’ve just told me that.’ He was silent for a few moments, staring down at the table. ‘I did feel angry,’ he confessed in a low voice eventually. ‘When you didn’t show up that night. I thought you didn’t love me any more. That you didn’t care.’
She shook her head slowly, remembering that he, too, had been so young. Eighteen and anguished, trying to do the right thing, driven by that wild passion of his. Of course he would have taken it as a personal rejection. ‘I did care,’ she told him, replaying how scared she’d been that night, how she hadn’t slept at all, wondering if she was making a terrible mistake by not meeting him, not taking the chance. ‘But I was freaking out, too. And trying to work out how I felt about being pregnant and what the hell I was going to do.’ She finished her drink, feeling wrung out. Spent. ‘But it wasn’t that I had stopped loving you. Not at all.’
There was a moment’s silence, then he tilted his head towards her empty glass. ‘Can I buy you another?’
‘No, thanks. I don’t know if there’s anything left to say.’ She waited for him to make some barbed comment about her running off to her husband, but he didn’t, mercifully. ‘Well,’ she went on, getting to her feet. ‘I wish I could say it’s been lovely, but . . .’
‘India, wait. Don’t go like this. Can’t we just – remember the good stuff, first? With affection?’ Robin’s face was the most earnest she’d seen it. Was that a note of pleading in his voice even? ‘Once upon a time, we meant everything to one another. This is probably the last time our paths will cross. Can we at least try to end on a good note, so that it wasn’t all . . . in vain?’
‘Well,’ she said again, then hesitated. Her overriding instinct was to go home, to throw her arms around her husband and count her blessings, but then again, maybe he had a point. ‘Is that even possible?’
‘Yes! Because we had good times, as well, didn’t we? We had so many laughs. All those awful love-songs we wrote together . . .’
A long-distant memory surfaced in her head: the pair of them sitting on his bedroom floor, leaning against each other and hooting with mirth as they came up with filthy lyrics and put them to music. Despite herself, she felt a tiny smile twist her lips. ‘I’d forgotten those,’ she admitted.
‘And the parties – Jesus! Remember the one at Craig’s house where we accidentally set fire to his dad’s shed?’
‘You set fire to it, you mean – it wasn’t me, mucking around with lighter fuel—’
‘And that college trip to Scarborough, remember?’ His face had become animated, his hands gesticulating. ‘Those stupid dares we did: everyone drinking Thunderbird and going skinny-dipping. You getting in trouble with that policeman . . .’
‘I so didn’t!’ she spluttered. ‘What about you, getting us chucked out of that café when you decided to start an argument with those evangelicals?’
The mood had shifted somehow, and then, as memory after memory rose unbidden, the tone of their conversation became friendlier, softer, and it was as if the years seemed to roll back, magically, to a time when everything had been okay; when they had been young and in love and had whole worlds of opportunities stretching out before them. Was this what forgiveness felt like? she wondered. Was this finally closure? Whatever you called it, she was glad of this evening, all of a sudden. Glad that she had told her story at last, unpacked it before him and looked him, unblinking, in the eye. What was more, Robin understood and he was sorry, and now they had come out through the other side, just about in one piece.
‘You were such a beautiful golden shining girl,’ he said suddenly, eyes misty.
‘Stop that,’ she said, embarrassed. ‘All teenagers are.’
‘No, but you were different. You were special. And talented.’ He took her hands. ‘I’m sorry about . . . everything. I should have come back earlier, made sure you were okay. We could have made the decisions together, if I hadn’t been so . . . so stupidly proud.’ He fiddled with a set of keys, jingling them between his fingers. ‘I thought you’d be wafting about at your fancy music college, though, falling in love with another musician and – I dunno – joining an orchestra and travelling all round the world.’ He hung his head. ‘I’m sorry if I . . . ruined that for you.’
‘Oh, Robin,’ she said, with a sigh. ‘It’s all water under the bridge. It doesn’t matter now. I’m fine.’
‘Are you? Really?’
‘Yes,’ she said firmly, looking him in the eye. ‘Yes, I am.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
If Laura was coming down with something, as Jim had suggested after the washout that had been Gayle’s birthday drinks, it was a very strange something that resisted all her attempts at self-diagnosis. A horrible dragging lethargy settled on her the whole weekend, as if she were battling a low-level virus, leaving her feeling washed out and weak.
‘Heartbreak,’ her mum diagnosed briskly when they spoke on the phone. ‘That bloody Matt, I could kill him with my bare hands, I really could. Bloody men, honestly, they’re all as bad. I’m waiting any day for Jo to tell me that her new fella has turned out to be some murderer or a paedophile or—’
‘He’s not a paedophile,’ Laura groaned wearily. ‘And I’m pretty sure he’s not a murderer, either.’
‘You keep telling yourself that,’ Helen said, with a meaningful sniff. ‘But they’re all the same really. Bastards.’ She made a huffing sound. ‘And I still haven’t met him yet, by the way. It’s like your sister’s ashamed of me or something.’
‘I can’t i
magine why,’ Laura replied. Heartbreak, indeed, she thought later, blinking awake after she’d dozed off on the sofa in front of some cheesy game-show. Her mum was so quick to blame men for everything that went wrong in the world. Car broken down? Bloody men. Council tax going up? Bloody men. Pouring with rain? Somehow this would be the fault of a brainless, useless man too, no doubt about it.
Deciding to ignore her mother’s diagnosis, Laura turned to Dr Google instead, but scared herself so much by researching ‘ME symptoms’, and then ‘brain tumour’, that she ended up phoning her local surgery first thing on Monday morning to book an appointment. That would make Matt sorry, wouldn’t it, if she was dying, when he’d been so cold with her on the phone, she found herself thinking. Imagine the guilt he’d feel then, for the rest of his life. And serve him right!
By a stroke of luck, the receptionist had just had a cancellation that very evening for a locum doctor, and so Laura was able to go there straight from work. Dr Munroe, the locum, turned out to be an avuncular sort of man with a craggy, serious face, who listened closely as she poured out every random symptom she could think of – the fainting and dizziness, the exhaustion, the general feeling of being unwell. Afterwards Laura found that she was holding her breath, dreading him giving a grim nod and booking her in for blood tests and a brain scan at the hospital. Instead he asked, ‘Is there a chance that you might be pregnant?’
Ha. She almost laughed in his face. If she’d been seeing her usual doctor, Dr Daniels, who was Welsh and motherly, who knew all about the miscarriages and had the kindest, most sympathetic face, then such a stupid, cruel question would never have been asked, let alone with this mild banality. She pressed her lips together, trying to compose herself. ‘No,’ she replied flatly.
‘And you’re sure about that?’
Laura clenched her fists at the side of the chair. Was he deliberately trying to torture her, to rub her nose in her sad, single, childless situation? ‘I’m sure,’ she said through gritted teeth. ‘I had a period last month as usual, so . . . So, no.’ Let’s move on.
He nodded. ‘It is not impossible to have what looks like a period during the early months of pregnancy,’ he replied. ‘Are you currently using any form of contraception?’
Only my husband leaving me, she almost quipped, but managed to shake her head without any sarcastic remarks. This was ridiculous, though; a definite case of barking up the wrong tree. She knew she wasn’t pregnant because . . . well, she didn’t feel pregnant, for starters. And as an expert on the subject, who had thought about it fairly obsessively in recent months, it wasn’t as if she wouldn’t have noticed. I think I know my own body, she felt like telling him.
‘Okay, well, let’s just find out for definite – if only so that we can rule it out before going any further.’ He went to a cupboard and produced a see-through plastic pot. ‘If you wouldn’t mind providing me with a urine sample, please? The Ladies is out in the corridor.’
She stared at the plastic pot in disbelief, then took it from his hand, her cheeks burning with a sudden rush of humiliation. For goodness’ sake! Was he some kind of sadist? There was no way Dr Daniels would have been so insensitive as to put her through this, after everything that had happened, especially when Laura had just sat there and said point-blank that she wasn’t pregnant.
‘Is there a problem?’ asked Dr Munroe, and she felt like throwing the pot in his stupid, craggy old face.
‘No,’ she mumbled, rising to her feet. What the hell, she thought in resignation, heading for the Ladies. She would get this over with, prove him wrong and then let him proceed with the job of telling her that actually she had a brain tumour – sorry about that.
Returning to the doctor’s office a few minutes later, bearing a warm pot of her own pee, she was so certain of what the test would show that she didn’t even bother getting her hopes up. Not so much as a flicker. She didn’t even watch as he dipped the stick in to see the result. And there she’d been, worried that she might be wasting his time, she thought scathingly, when in fact he was the one who was wasting—
‘Ah,’ he said, nodding. ‘So according to this, you are very much pregnant, as it happens. Which would explain the dizziness and tiredness and – well, all of your other symptoms, too, basically.’
Laura stared at him for a full five seconds, then shook her head. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I . . . There must be a mistake. I’m definitely not pregnant. I mean . . .’ Her head moved again, side to side, no, no, no. ‘I know I’m not.’
‘These tests are highly accurate,’ he told her in a gentler voice, as if he was dealing with a simpleton. ‘And even though you might not feel pregnant, I can assure you that you are.’
It was as if the world had shrunk down to a very small space, just her and this man in his tweedy jacket, looking steadily and seriously back at her. ‘If this is a joke . . .’ she gasped, unable to comprehend.
‘It’s not a joke.’ He steepled his fingers together and leaned forward a little. ‘Am I to take it that this is . . . unwelcome news?’
She still couldn’t take it in. There had to be a mistake. When had she conceived? Because she’d been having periods! Plus she’d been eating all the wrong things – chips and ice cream, and round after round of buttery toast. No folic acid. No supplements. And . . . Oh my God. She’d been drinking so much wine. Far too much wine! ‘I’m . . .’ She could hardly speak because her head was seething and swarming with questions. ‘I’m just a bit shocked.’ She blinked, but this wasn’t even a strange too-much-cheese dream, it was actually happening. It was real. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure. We could do another test if you really wanted to, but after everything you told me, all the symptoms you described, it does seem pretty cut and dried.’
Laura put a hand up to her mouth, remembering with horror just how many bottles had gone clanking into her recycling box lately. ‘I haven’t been looking after myself, though,’ she said anxiously. ‘I would have stopped drinking if I’d known – and my husband has left me, so I’ve been . . .’ The guilt was terrible. You heard such hideous things about Foetal Alcohol Syndrome. ‘I didn’t know,’ she whispered, a tear rolling down her cheek. ‘I mean, I’m not saying I’m an alcoholic, I don’t have a problem, but I . . . I have been drinking more than usual. And eating Brie. And I had prawns last week and . . .’
‘Okay, well, we are where we are, try not to—’
Her voice was rising. ‘When I was pregnant before, I did everything right,’ she gulped. She felt a desperate urgency to convince him of this, that she wasn’t just some feckless headcase who didn’t care about her own babies. ‘I took folic acid, I ate really healthily, I didn’t take any risks . . .’ She dashed the tears away. Shock was still thumping through her. She was pregnant, she thought dazedly. When it had seemed impossible. When she’d been considering a sperm donor and going it alone. And now . . . A thought struck her belatedly. Oh Lord – Matt. This was how they would get back together! He would be so thrilled when she told him. And they would live happily ever after and . . .
She was dimly aware of the doctor speaking again. ‘. . . book you in for an antenatal appointment with our team of midwives, and perhaps a dating scan, so that you can find out how far along you might be . . .’
‘Yes,’ she managed to say. Midwives. A scan. The antenatal clinic. These were words she hadn’t been expecting to hear so soon, perhaps not ever again. It was as if she’d been bestowed with the most precious and unexpected of gifts. One last chance. ‘Wow. I mean – thank you.’
‘And in the meantime, you could try eating more iron-rich foods or taking a supplement to combat the dizzy feelings . . .’
She couldn’t quite comprehend the enormity of this conversation, hardly able to hear the advice the doctor was giving her. I’m pregnant. This is happening. There is a tiny baby growing inside me right now. She put her hands on her stomach in wonderment. Hello, in there. I’m your mummy. I’m sorry about all the wine. That will be comi
ng to a stop right now, don’t you worry. ‘Thank you,’ she said again, the words not intended solely for him, but to her own body as well, and to the world in general, to the glorious, crazy twist of Fate that had made this happen. Hope swelled inside her and it was the most joyful and wonderful sensation. Hope – oh, how she had missed it! Welcome back, old friend. Any minute now she would hug that doctor and – no. Calm down, Laura. No hugging.
The doctor was eyeing her beaming face with bemusement. He must think she was a complete lunatic, crying one minute and then exuberant to the point of near-derangement in the next. Hey, that was hormones for you, though, right? At least she had a good excuse for her mad behaviour. ‘So if you’ve got any further questions?’ he asked.
She shook her head because she had three different pregnancy books at home, plus the entire Internet at her disposal, and of course she had been here before. And then she sobered up almost completely, because yes, she had been here before, and it had gone wrong every time so far. Who was to say this wouldn’t happen again? Who was to say there wouldn’t be a further cruel twist yet to come, that her hope wouldn’t be doused with another low, digging pain and blood in her knickers, that this wouldn’t all end in further heartbreak? ‘I think I’ve got everything I need,’ she replied. ‘Thanks. Very much.’
