by Lucy Diamond
By the time Lewis had dropped her off, Grace and Sophie had already been whisked away by India (for which Eve sent up a silent prayer of thanks). She then proceeded to have a minor flap about Lewis being stranded far from home – oh, she was so selfish, she hadn’t been thinking! – before he calmly pointed out that there was a perfectly good bus stop down the road and he was a big boy, he could manage to get home all by himself.
Having said goodbye, Eve with fervent gratitude for everything Lewis had done, she let herself into the house and exhaled shakily into its expectant silence.
Okay. Now for the hardest part.
After showering and changing, she wandered through the quiet house, gazing at the family photos lovingly hung up around the walls. The girls as babies, toothy and cute. Her and Neil on their wedding day, wreathed in smiles. Holiday snaps and snowy-day pictures and her favourite, a Christmas Day photo from five years ago or so, with the girls holding up their presents, shiny-eyed with joy. So much happiness, she thought, reaching out a finger to touch their faces. So many good times. She wasn’t ready for all that to be taken away from her yet. She couldn’t bear the thought of future Christmases without her, future holiday photos with an empty space where she should have been.
She sank into a chair, still dwelling on her daughters’ beautiful smiles. Had she been a good enough mother? Had she filled them with enough confidence, enough love? She had done her best, but sometimes she got the distinct feeling that her girls wished she was more like India, laid-back and quick to laugh when things went wrong, rather than uptight and naggy like her. Then she remembered what Lewis had said about spontaneity, about leaving room for it in life, and frowned to herself. Was that what was missing in her? The fun that came from the unexpected? The liberation of just . . . letting go? If she could have another chance at life, a second try, maybe she’d do it all differently, she thought with a sigh. She’d do it better, appreciate every moment with them.
Goodness knows how long she stayed sitting there in silence, but then the front door was opening and Neil’s voice floated through, jerking her out of her thoughts. ‘Eve? I’m back. Are you there? Eve?’ He appeared in the doorway, looking pale and worried, his hair standing on end a little where she guessed he’d been raking through it anxiously whenever the traffic seized up. ‘What is it, what’s wrong?’
This was it: the moment of truth, as they liked to say on The X Factor. No going back now. She looked at his dear, troubled face and felt sick that she was about to change everything; shake the safe, careful structure of their marriage, with what she had to say. ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ she suggested nervously. This was the kind of news that needed the support of a sofa before it could be released.
Once she started talking, she couldn’t stop. She told him everything from start to finish, her fears, her hospital visits, the diagnosis . . . out it all came, her quiet words filling up the space between them, his expression changing from concern to alarm to shock, with each new turn in the tale. She could read the disquiet on his face every time Lewis’s name came up, his evident confusion that his wife had chosen to confide in a stranger rather than him – her own husband – and guilt cut through her because he was right, of course, and she had no good way of explaining herself. ‘So I should receive a date for surgery in the next few days, but the consultant thought they’d want me in pretty soon – a week or thereabouts,’ she finished. ‘And that’s . . . that’s my news.’
‘Oh, Eve,’ he said, and then he was hugging her, for a long time, tight and comforting, and he was promising that they would see this through together, that he’d be with her every step of the way. And then, because he was Neil and it was in his DNA to try to solve a problem, he started googling and researching, and telling her all the positive things he could find about her condition: that it was eminently curable. Very early cancer. Full recovery.
Yes, she said, feeling tired and tearful, and too wary to dare let herself believe any of it just yet.
It was only later on, when the girls were back home and in bed, and Neil had had time to digest what she’d told him, two glasses of whisky down, that he started to become – not angry, exactly, but noticeably hurt in regards to her previous silence. ‘I wish you’d told me,’ he blurted out. ‘I can’t believe you went through all of that, for weeks and weeks, without saying anything. I’m not having a go at you, but . . . You went to some guy you didn’t even know, before you told me? I don’t understand. Is something going on between you two?’
‘No!’ she cried. ‘I promise. It’s not like that.’
‘So then . . . why? Why him and not me?’
She hung her head because there was no rational answer that would satisfy him, and because this, in one short question, was the nub of all that was wrong with her. She flashed back to the triumphant day of her GCSE results, when her dad had praised her – for the first time ever – and how it had meant precisely nothing. When she’d thought, actually: do you know what, Dad, you can’t affect how I feel about myself any more. When she had begun bricking up the wall, thinking it was self-reliance and admirable independence, when instead . . .
A tear rolled down her cheek. When, instead, she had become the sort of woman who went to hospital appointments with random strangers because she was so damn afraid of appearing vulnerable to her loved ones. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, twisting her fingers together, too ashamed to look at his face. ‘I don’t know why.’
He sighed, his confusion evident and then, perhaps heightened by the whisky, his emotions got the better of him. ‘Look, you’ve got to let me in, Eve. You never let me in! What is the point of me being your husband if you never tell me how you’re feeling? You never let anyone help you.’
‘I know,’ she said miserably. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘It makes me feel marginalized, you know. Like I’m not important. Like I don’t matter!’ His voice rose and then he broke off, looking uncomfortable, as if remembering why it was they were having this discussion in the first place. Oh yeah. Wife with cancer. Better rein it in. ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. ‘I’m not having a pop. Wrong time and place for this conversation, yeah? But . . .’ He shrugged. ‘That’s just how I feel.’
She reached over and took his hand. This hand, which had held hers on their first dates, and as they stood there making their marriage vows in the registry office, and as she had laboured with both their girls. His strong steady hand that she knew so well. Yet lately she had ignored that hand and what it signified, even though it had been hers for the taking this whole time. ‘It’s okay,’ she said quietly. ‘You’re right. And we do need to have this conversation properly some other time – I hear what you’re saying.’ Her voice rose in anguish. ‘It wasn’t because I didn’t love you though that I didn’t say anything. I just . . .’
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You’re used to being able to cope; I know that. But – please. Talk to me. I want you to be able to talk to me. To trust me with your doubts and worries. The whole world knows you’re strong and capable, Eve. But sometimes . . .’ He swirled his whisky around in his glass, struggling to find the words. ‘Sometimes it takes the most strength to admit that you’re a little bit scared. To say: I need help. To say: I can’t manage on my own. And you can always lean on me, Eve. Please take that into consideration. You can always lean on me.’
She nodded, the words resonating with truth. Then she looked him in the eye and took a deep breath. ‘I’m scared,’ she told him. ‘I . . . I need help. I can’t manage on my own.’
And then he was hugging her again and they were both crying and he was saying, ‘I’m here. I’ve got you. I’m here.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
According to the dating scan, Laura was already fourteen weeks pregnant. Fourteen weeks, and she hadn’t had the faintest clue! She still couldn’t quite get her head around it, waking every morning and thrilling all over again to the news, when she remembered. Hey – I’m pregnant. I’m really, really pregnant!
Jo came to the scan with her and held her hand as the sonographer moved the device across her belly. Both sisters gasped as they saw the outlines of a tiny new human there on the screen. A baby. Her baby, floating in its dark watery world like a pale mystical sea creature. ‘Hello, baby,’ Laura whispered, eyes glued to its moving form. ‘Hi there.’
‘My first niece or nephew!’ Jo cried, blowing her nose with uncharacteristic soppiness. ‘I can’t believe it, Laur.’ And then they were both sniffling and damp-eyed at this miracle, this extraordinary feat of nature, this wonderful gift from nowhere.
Laura had sobered up in the very next moment, though. ‘Does everything look . . . okay?’ she asked, remembering with trepidation all those glasses of wine – bottles of wine, rather – that she’d drunk, in ignorance of the baby’s presence. The dread she had felt ever since, the crippling fear that she might accidentally have caused some developmental damage to her own child – she’d had to ban herself from Google for a while because her hand kept typing ‘Foetal Alcohol Syndrome’ and clicking the results, in some horrific self-punishing way.
But ‘Everything looks great,’ the sonographer replied with a smile, and it was, without question, quite the best sentence she’d ever heard.
‘I’ve never got so far along in a pregnancy,’ she said, her voice thick with emotion. She knew, from all her reading on the subject, that thirteen weeks was a sizeable milestone in pregnancy; that the risk of miscarriage dropped considerably once the baby had made it that far. And now it turned out that the two of them had already surpassed this mark, swept casually over the line together, as if it was the easiest thing ever. ‘I never expected this to happen.’
Jo squeezed her fingers and Laura beamed at her, feeling dazed and blessed and oh, so happy. Wildly, deliriously happy. And hungry too actually, now that she thought about it. Insanely ravenous seemed to be her default setting these days.
‘So, when are you going to tell him?’ Jo asked later on, as Laura tucked into a round of ham sandwiches in the hospital coffee bar, followed by a banana, followed by – sod it, she wasn’t nearly full yet – a damp and gooey chocolate brownie that she’d smuggled along in her handbag, in case of emergencies. They had both taken the morning off work to be here for Laura’s ten-thirty appointment and it was now most definitely elevenses time. ‘Matt, I mean. I take it he still doesn’t know?’
Laura licked a chocolatey crumb from her finger. ‘I was waiting to see if everything was okay first,’ she admitted. ‘I was so paranoid that I’d gone and ruined everything with all the booze, dreading them doing the scan and telling me that something was wrong. I thought: why tell him if – if, you know, there’s bad news, or it all turned out to be a massive false alarm.’ It was silly of her, especially when the doctor had assured her how accurate pregnancy tests were, but she’d been so convinced that she would show up for the scan, only to be told there had been a mistake and she wasn’t really pregnant at all, that she had gone on to take three more tests in her own bathroom. Just to be certain. Even then, it wasn’t until she saw the baby on the ultrasound screen that she was able to feel convinced. Okay, you are there. Good. Message from your mother: please stay right where you are, make yourself comfortable and let’s see this through together. Got it?
‘So now you know it’s not a false alarm and everything is okay . . . ?’ prompted Jo.
Laura bit her lip, not wanting to tempt Fate. Having miscarried in the past and experienced all the anguish that came with it, she knew she wouldn’t feel completely relaxed that the baby was okay until he or she had actually been born and was in her arms, breathing and perfect. ‘I’m not counting any chickens,’ she told her sister. ‘Things could still go wrong. We’re not out of the woods yet.’
Jo gave her a suspicious look. ‘What, so you’re going to wait until you’re huge and waddling, and practically in the delivery room, before you give poor Matt – the baby’s father – the wink, are you? And what if he’s back in Manchester and you bump into him? You’ll have a job talking your way out of that one.’
She had a point. Annoyingly. ‘Yeah, all right. I will tell him,’ Laura said defensively. ‘Obviously. I feel a bit weird about it, though. I mean, after all the things he said at the end, how certain he was that he wanted us to split up. He thinks he’s made this clean break, and I’m going to be running after him, tapping him on the shoulder, saying, Guess what? Me again. I have news!’ She rolled her eyes. ‘It’s been something of a roller coaster lately, as they say.’
‘Luckily, you love roller coasters,’ Jo reminded her drily. (This was true. Laura was one of those people who tried to sit right at the front of the ride and spent the whole time with their hands in the air, screaming breathlessly, before getting off, jelly-legged, and queuing up to go straight back round.) ‘Anyway, he’ll be over the moon. Proud as punch. And then you two can have a big romantic reunion and it’ll be like it never happened. Happy families.’
‘Do you think?’ Jo seemed very certain about Matt’s reaction; more certain, in fact, than Laura herself was.
‘Of course! That’s what you want, isn’t it?’ Jo eyed her over her mug of tea and there was just a second too long of silence. ‘Laur?’
‘Yeah. Yeah! Definitely. You know me, always love a happy ending.’ She licked her lips and patted her stomach, which was definitely starting to take on a more rounded shape. Although that could be all the baked goods she’d been scoffing, mind. ‘I’ll ring him later.’
‘You’re going to tell him on the phone?’ Jo frowned. ‘Isn’t it kind of gigantic news to say on the phone, when you’re miles away?’
‘I guess so. But . . .’ Laura scrunched up her face. ‘I’m not sure he really wants to see me right now,’ she confessed in a small voice. ‘Last time we spoke he sounded fed up with me, as if I was getting on his nerves. Anyway, as you pointed out, he’s miles away. He might not be back here for weeks on end.’
Jo looked unimpressed by her cowardice. ‘Then you’re just going to have to go up there and find him, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Come on. Matt loved you, for years and years and years. Nobody can switch that off overnight.’ She poured herself more tea and pointed the teaspoon at Laura. ‘Besides, he’d want to know. It’s his child. So stop being such a wuss and do the right thing.’
As was so often the case, Laura had the nagging feeling that Jo might just be right. The problem buzzed insistently in her head over the next few days as she told her colleagues the news and then her mum. (‘I’m going to be a grandma!’ Helen had cried, sounding surprisingly choked up and maternal, for once. Then she’d spoiled the soppy moment by adding, ‘Well, bugger me sideways’, which was a lot less motherly, let alone grandmotherly.) Not-telling-Matt had seemed much easier when it had just been Laura herself in the know, but now that the secretary in the finance office at work knew, and Matt still didn’t, she was becoming increasingly twitchy about this state of affairs.
Yes, okay, so she did really owe it to her ex to give him the news face-to-face, rather than for him to hear it down the end of a phone, all alone in his no-doubt-soulless rented place, she concluded, walking through town the following Sat
urday. Not least so that she could work out, from his expression, exactly how he felt about the situation. And about her, too. But not this weekend, though, not today, because Eve had suggested getting together for brunch at Rico’s, an Aussie-style café in the Northern Quarter, and Laura was not about to pass up the opportunity of telling the other two her big news in person. Matt would just have to wait a bit longer.
She put a hand on her belly as she walked up through town, still delighted by the novelty of the small hard bump that was taking shape there beneath her pink T-shirt. The thought of saying the words, ‘I’m going to have a baby’ out loud to her favourite women when they, of all people, would know just what a massive deal that was, made her smile to herself at her sheer good fortune. Earlier in the week she’d met India for Pilates as usual and she’d felt so keyed up during the class that she’d hardly been able to concentrate. I’m going to tell her in the pub, she kept thinking. I’m going to sit her down and tell her, and then, knowing India, she’ll probably scream out loud with excitement and everyone will turn round and stare at us hugging, and I won’t care a bit, because I’m pregnant and don’t care about things like that any more.
Except then the class had ended and, instead of raising an eyebrow and saying ‘Pub?’ like she normally did, India had been in an odd sort of mood, saying she was knackered and going home for an early night. So that had put the kybosh on that little announcement. Which was a double shame, actually, because Laura had been dying to know how India had got on with her old flame.
Still, maybe it was for the best, she thought, enjoying the feeling of her newly washed hair bouncing lightly on her shoulders as she turned off the High Street. (Her hair had never felt so great! She might still be tired and prone to dizzy spells, but her hair felt amazingly thick and lustrous and swingy, which was a source of huge joy.) Telling India and Eve both together today would be nicer anyway. Imagine their faces! They would, to a woman, be over the moon for her.
