‘My baby,’ I say as he leaves, forcing the words from my dry, swollen throat. I have to ask. To know at least whether it was a boy or a girl. But I cannot bring myself to ask.
‘He’s a little on the small side, of course. But otherwise fine. The nurse will bring him to you later,’ he says. ‘Assuming we are satisfied with his progress.’
I press my hands over my mouth but a silent sob escapes. Dr Silverman turns away, unimpressed, perhaps, by this display of emotion for my baby. After all, he will not be mine for long.
I’d spotted a pub on the way, so we stop off there as we head back to the cottage.
‘How do you feel now?’ I say to Gloria.
‘Better now we’re away from that place,’ she says, adding tonic water to her gin.
‘You don’t regret going back, do you?’ I’ve been worrying all the way that I talked her into doing something she didn’t really want to.
‘No!’ she says, indignant. ‘Certainly not. It was . . . strange. But it made me see that place for what it is. It’s just bricks and mortar. Smaller than I remember it, too. It doesn’t have any power over me. The nuns who were there when I was, they’ll all be long dead now.’
‘Good,’ I say, relieved. ‘Not about the nuns, I mean. It’s just, I was worried it would bring back painful memories . . .’
‘Well, it did,’ she says. ‘Literally in this case. Agonizing, in fact.’
‘Is it always that painful?’ I ask nervously. ‘Giving birth, I mean?’
She stares at me. ‘Why do you want to know? You’re not planning to, are you?’
‘No.’
‘You haven’t changed your mind? You’re not planning to keep the baby, isn’t that what you said?’
I shake my head.
‘Then can I ask you something?’
‘Of course.’ I try to look calm and relaxed, but inside my heart is thumping.
‘If you’re so certain you want to terminate the pregnancy, why haven’t you just gone ahead and done it? You’ve known you’re pregnant for . . . how many weeks is it now?’ She fishes out the red book. ‘Well, you’re almost eleven weeks. Is that right?’
I had, in fact, got a text from Kat as we passed fleetingly through somewhere that had a mobile-phone signal that said: Hats, I tried to call u earlier. I looked up the 11 weeks page and it’s all about scans. Not being funny but if u haven’t already you need to decide what you’re doing and get on with it coz ur running out of time. Sorry. I’ll try and call u again if I can. Hugs xxx
I’d remembered Mum coming back with her fuzzy black-and-white scan pictures of the twins again – that was at twelve weeks, wasn’t it? – and had a second of sheer panic. And then I’d switched my phone off. I couldn’t face that conversation with Kat.
‘Something like that,’ I say, as if it’s unimportant.
‘Well then, why haven’t you? Why hang around if you’re so sure you want to terminate the pregnancy? You’ve had plenty of time. I know I would have done if I’d had that choice.’
‘Would you?’
‘Yes, absolutely. I almost did, even though I knew it was dangerous. Louise took me over to east London to somewhere she’d heard about.’
‘You mean a backstreet abortion?’
‘We got right to the door. And then I thought about what Dr Gilbert had said and I couldn’t do it. You haven’t got any of that to worry about. So why haven’t you done it?’
‘I don’t know.’ I feel my cheeks flush. ‘Putting off the inevitable, I suppose,’ I say lamely.
‘But it’s not inevitable, is it?’ Gloria says.
I take a sip of my coffee, which is too hot and scalds the roof of my mouth. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well,’ she says, patiently, ‘there is a choice, isn’t there? There is an alternative?’
‘What, you mean having a baby? It’s not really a possibility, is it?’
‘Well, obviously it’s a possibility. Biologically, I mean. If you don’t have an abortion, you will have a baby. What I don’t understand is why, if you’re so desperate to avoid having a baby, you haven’t already done something about it?’
I’m silent. I don’t know and I don’t want to think about it. Every time I start to, everything gets so muddled. I want to keep it simple. I want everything to be how it was, for the future to be the one I’d planned. University. Travelling. Career. Reuben. Not as a couple (probably). As a friend. All of these things seemed impossible with a baby.
‘What would he say? If he knew you were pregnant?’
‘Who, Reuben?’
She nods.
‘He’d be horrified! He’d be . . .’ I try to imagine it. What would he be? ‘Terrified. He’d run for the hills.’
‘Is that why you don’t want to tell him?’
I shrug. ‘I suppose it is,’ I admit.
‘Is that why you want an abortion?’
I stop. I realize I don’t know. Is that why I want an abortion? Just so that I don’t have to tell Reuben I’m pregnant? Just so that it won’t change things between us?
‘I want to go to university,’ I say. ‘I want to travel. I want to see China and India and Laos and Vietnam. I want to get on the Trans-Siberian railway at Vladivostok and I want to go to Thailand and I want to drink Manhattans in Manhattan.’ I run mentally through my checklist of ambitions. ‘I want to visit Pompeii and Crete and—’
‘The Maldives.’
‘Yes, exactly. The Maldives. And I want to be the first-ever internationally acclaimed film director who’s also an archaeologist and international human rights barrister.’
‘Is that all?’
‘Oh and tap dancer. And chess champion.’
‘Can you tap-dance?’
‘In my head.’
‘Can you play chess?’
‘I play with Alice sometimes.’ She looks at me, questioning. ‘My little sister,’ I remind her.
‘Who wins?’
‘Alice does.’
We sit there for a while then go to the picnic benches outside so that Gloria can smoke.
‘So all of that . . .’ She waves a hand to signify education, parties, travel, Oscar-winning, a role on Broadway, chess-playing, injustice-fighting and the digging up and dusting off of old bones. ‘That’s why you want an abortion?’
I think about it, about each of my treasured dreams and hopes, and I want to say to her, that’s who I am, it’s who I always thought I’d be. Okay, not the tap dancing perhaps, not really. Or the chess. And I guess being an archaeologist is less like being Indiana Jones than you might hope. And at some point I’d probably have to decide whether to be Atticus Finch or Ridley Scott, rather than aiming to be both at the same time. But uni, a job that wasn’t remotely pancake-related but was actually something I really felt excited about, something I cared about, something I was good at and made some kind of difference, even if it wasn’t glamorous or going to earn me loads of cash – that was the me I’d always thought I’d grow into one day. Sure, that me might have a baby or two, in some unimaginable future time and place, after she’d got all the high-powered jet-setting tap dancing and all that out of her system. And now that me was threatened. She was flickering and fading. If I had a baby, I’d have to let her go.
‘People do go to university with babies, you know,’ Gloria says. ‘There are lawyers and archaeologists with children, I believe. You could stick a baby in one of those – what do they call them? – papoose things and merrily tap-dance your way along the Great Wall of China. If you really wanted to.’
‘I’d be responsible. For another human being. I can’t do that. I’m not ready.’
She smiles.
‘So, don’t. Make the appointment and that’ll be that.’
‘Will it?’ I so want her to be right.
‘If you let it.’
‘It’s not that simple, though, is it? Some people think abortion is murder. Some people think it’s just an operation.’
‘It doesn’t matter wha
t other people think. It matters what you think.’
I look out across the pub car park and the fields to the hills, dark against the silver-grey sky.
‘I just want to make a decision I know I won’t regret.’
She smiles, a bit sadly.
‘No one can do that.’
‘What, you think regret is inevitable? That’s a pretty gloomy way of looking at things.’
‘That’s not what I said. I said you can’t know whether you’ll regret a decision or not when you make it. That’s the whole point. That’s the joy of being alive, isn’t it? The not knowing.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes.’
I try to decide whether I find this any less depressing.
‘Although,’ she says gently, ‘in this particular instance I think you may regret whichever decision you make.’
‘Great,’ I say. ‘Brilliant.’
‘I don’t mean you’ll necessarily wish you’d made a different decision. Regret doesn’t have to mean wishing everything had been different. But taking one path means not taking another. It’s only human to think sometimes about the other path, the life we would have led if we’d have done things differently, perhaps even to grieve a little for the person we would have become, who disappeared when we made our choice. You can’t be scared of regret. All you can do is make the choice that seems right at the time.’
My head feels a bit spinny. I’ve not seen this side of Gloria before: reflective, thoughtful. I’d always thought of her as a To Hell With The Consequences sort of person. But thinking about her past, about the baby she had and never knew, I suppose she’s had a lot of time to think about this stuff.
‘Did you ever regret giving up your baby?’ I ask.
‘That was different.’
‘How?’
‘It just was.’ She takes my hand. ‘Don’t be guided by fear of getting it wrong, that’s all I’m saying. Make a positive choice and know that whatever you choose it is the thing that seemed right at the time. You can’t worry about whether in the future you’ll see things differently. You can’t know. And who cares? That’s what I think.’ She blows out smoke through her nose. ‘Mind you, you’d be mad to take advice from me. I’m not exactly a shining example of how to live your life.’
‘Have you been happy?’ I say, curious suddenly about Gloria’s life.
‘Yes, very. And sad too. Which is how lives are. Even happy lives. No one’s happy all the time, are they? And if they were, they’d be incredibly irritating. I loved acting.’
‘What sort of acting did you do?’
‘All sorts. I was in West End musicals and gloomy Russian plays. Shakespeare. You name it, I’ve done it.’
‘That’s amazing! I had no idea.’
I look at Gloria thinking about all the stuff she’s done, all those memories stored in her head that she’ll lose one by one.
‘Tell me about your husbands.’
Gloria makes a snorting sort of noise.
‘Oh, come on,’ I say. ‘They can’t have been that bad. What did they do?’
‘Well, there was Russell. He was a penniless artist. I was his muse and I’d always had the idea that I really ought to be someone’s muse at some point. I thought we’d live a creative life together wearing black polo necks and smoking marijuana and French cigarettes. It was the late sixties, after all.’
‘So what went wrong?’
‘Well, for a start, being penniless and living in a freezing garret isn’t as romantic as it sounds. In fact, it’s deeply tedious. Also Russell was a terrible artist. He blamed his lack of success on me, as his muse. Thought I must be insufficiently inspiring, because obviously it couldn’t have anything to do with his complete lack of talent—’
She stubs out her cigarillo rather violently.
‘Then there was Gordon. He was unbelievably rich. A tycoon. I was attracted to the idea of luxury after that garret. He thought he was much more interesting than he really was. That lasted about three years but only because we were living in different countries for most of it.’
‘Right.’
‘And then there was Gianni. Italian. Very easy on the eye. He was much later. He was twenty years younger than me.’
‘A toyboy?
‘Mmm.’ She drifts off into a happy reverie.
‘You never really told me why it didn’t work out with any of them?’ I try to imagine Gloria with a husband and find I can’t.
‘Because they were all, in their different ways, completely unsuitable.’ She thinks. ‘And because I was me, I suppose.’
‘Do you think that it was because they didn’t live up to your idea of how things would have been with Sam?’
‘I don’t suppose Sam would have lived up to my idea of how things would have been with Sam.’
‘Do you know what happened to him?’ I ask. ‘Did you ever track him down, make contact?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Some things are best left behind. I don’t suppose he’d have been too pleased to hear from me, do you? The past is best left behind.’
‘But you had a child together—’
‘It’s starting to rain,’ she says. ‘Let’s go.’
* * *
Before I start the car I decide that as I’ve got a mobile signal I should probably check my voicemail. There are, as promised, plenty with Mum yelling and Alice swearing. There are a couple where the person just hangs up – Reuben, perhaps? And finally there is one that only arrived this morning, from Carl.
There’s a long pause, so long that I think maybe his phone’s cut out or something, and then I think, Oh God, what if he and Mum have actually split up? What if it’s really over between them and he’s phoning to say a tearful and emotional goodbye? My stomach flips at the thought. I don’t want Carl to say goodbye. For all his general annoyingness, I’d really miss him.
‘It’s about . . . Well. Something properly important. Something . . . about you, Hattie. That I think we need to discuss. I found something, under your bed. I wasn’t prying, honest, I was just hoovering—’ I remember with a sinking heart Alice’s comment about Carl trying to win back Mum’s heart through obsessive housework—‘and I found . . . something else. Do you know what I’m saying, Hattie? I haven’t told anyone about this, love—’ Carl NEVER calls me ‘love’—‘and I don’t want you to worry or anything because I’m not going to give you a hard time or anything like that, I just . . . I’m worried about you, Hats, and I think we need to talk about this. Or, you know, if you don’t want to talk to me you definitely need to talk to someone. Your mum would be a good person to start with. But I’m here any time, Hats. If you need me. Any time. Please call.’
Oh, shit. Oh, Jesus. Oh . . . I sit down on the bed, my palms prickling cold with sweat, my insides in a tight little ball.
That’s it. He knows. Carl knows. He must have found the tests I stashed under the bed. Why didn’t I throw them away? Why? If Carl knows, everything’s changed. The reality of it all comes hurtling towards me. All my looking in the other direction and pretending everything’s okay and distracting myself with things that happened fifty years ago (yes, I realize in a blink, Gloria was right that is exactly what I’ve been doing) . . . All of that is over.
Even if Carl hasn’t told Mum yet, it can only be a matter of time. I guess he’s waiting to see if I’ll tell her myself, but I know he could never keep a secret like that from her for long.
And when I tell Mum . . . It’s time to face up to things. Time to tell Reuben. But how can I? He’s in . . . I don’t even know where. Mykonos? Santorini? What am I supposed to do, just drop it in an email saying: Hope you and Camille are still enjoying your summer of island-hopping and amazing sex. All well here. Weather uncharacteristically good. Oh btw I’m pregnant.
‘Everything okay?’ Gloria asks, jolting me from my panic.
‘No,’ I say.
‘Was it him? On the phone? Whatsisname?’ She consults the red book. ‘Reuben.’
I glanc
e over her shoulder and note that she’s written quite a few notes under his name, but I only glimpse Hattie, pregnancy, and Arrogant Narcissist? before she snaps it shut.
‘No,’ I say. ‘It was Carl. You know, Mum’s fiancé-not-fiancé. Mint-green sweaters. Bingo Wings Buster. Obsessive wedding-planning disorder.’
‘Ah, yes. And that was enough to make you go white as a sheet?’
‘Well,’ I say, with a limp smile. ‘The jumpers are pretty offensive. But no. It wasn’t that. Just hormones probably.’
She watches me.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t born yesterday. What’s up?’
‘He knows,’ I say flatly. ‘Carl knows I’m pregnant. He must have found the pregnancy tests. I was going to throw them away and then . . . I dunno. I never got round to it.’
‘Was he angry?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘He’s just worried. But that’s it. Now he knows, it’s real, isn’t it?’
That night, I can’t sleep. I try more pillows and then get rid of them all. I take off the heavy patchwork quilt and then put it back on again. I wriggle and toss and turn until the sheets are all tangled up and eventually I give up and tiptoe down the creaking stairs to the kitchen. It’s warm because of the Aga, and I sit down at the heavy wooden table. I know why I can’t sleep. Gloria and Kat are right. Carl’s message only confirms it. I have to do what I haven’t done so far: I have to face up to the fact that I’m pregnant. I’ve been saying this journey would be a chance to think it all through properly but really I’ve just been running away. That’s the truth. And now I can’t run any more. In two days we’ll be in Whitby, the end of the journey.
And then we go home and everything will be real again.
I think about my conversation with Gloria. Is it true? Will I regret whatever decision I make? I imagine those regrets: an older me regretting the child I could have had, and another older me, longing for the freedom and adventures I missed out on. But Gloria’s right. Neither of those is real. The only one that’s real is the present me, the one with big dreams and her whole glorious, unknown, life ahead of her. The one who has a cluster of cells growing inside her that would, left to their own devices, eventually grow into a person who would be part Reuben and part Hattie and entirely someone completely new. The whole thing is mind-bogglingly terrifying.
How Not to Disappear Page 22
