In London, where the pace was frenetic and her rate of disillusionment had become as insistent as a drumbeat, her jitters had been permitted to flourish. Yet here in Hvar, where life lay sprawled like a sleepy sunbather and where Kate had finally stumbled across a pastime she was actually good at, her anxiety had receded – swept away into the deepest recesses of her mind. The thought of returning home, even to James, was becoming increasingly unfathomable, yet what choice did she have? She could not stay here on this island forever, not if she wanted the future she had set her heart on long ago.
And she did still want it. She must not allow herself to forget that.
Realising that she had ended up in a street she had never walked along before, Kate paused in an attempt to get her bearings and saw a woman she recognised pushing open the door to a pharmacy a few feet away.
‘Nika,’ she called out, but the dark-haired woman was already in the shop and, for a reason that she would later agonise over, Kate decided to follow her inside.
The pharmacy was brightly lit and smelled faintly of antiseptic. Kate pretended to examine a display of nail varnishes while she waited for Nika to turn around. The hostel’s newest recruit was at the counter, chatting away in Croatian to the white-haired female vendor on the opposite side. As Kate listened, comforting herself that it didn’t count as eavesdropping if you could not understand a single word being said, the older woman clapped both hands to her cheeks and began to croon in delight.
Kate heard the word dijete repeated several times and slipped her phone from her bag.
It took her a few tries to get the spelling right, but eventually the translation app confirmed what she had guessed but did not want to believe.
A sickness engulfed her, tightening her chest and jabbing pins into her eyes. Kate took a breath, then another, aware that she was reeling but unable to pull herself together.
It was just a word. One little word couldn’t hurt her.
She stared at the phone in her hand, painfully aware of the hard edge of the shelf digging into her stomach. Her flat stomach. Her empty, hollow, useless insides.
Dijete was the Croatian word for baby.
Chapter 19
Kate stumbled along the lane, her head down and sandals slipping on the smooth cobbles.
She would not cry. She must not cry.
It was no good, though. There was a tidal wave of despair gathering pace inside her that she knew would soon burst forth, and so she concentrated on getting away, on being alone, on hiding her pain from anyone who might be watching.
She was happy for Nika, of course she was – but she was so very unhappy for herself. Of all the things that Kate had tried and failed to do in her life, falling pregnant was the one that hurt the most. She could have dealt with being made redundant if there was a baby on the way, would have laughed away her ineptitudes if motherhood were wonderfully imminent. But it wasn’t. And it likely never would be.
She emerged not far from the church at the bottom end of the town harbour, but instead of heading up the hill towards the hostel, Kate followed the horseshoe shape of the small inlet around and continued on along the coast. She had no idea where she was heading, only that she must keep going, keep moving. To stop would be to collapse, to bash her fists against the ground and rage at the unfairness of it all – of life’s decision to withhold from her yet another thing that she wanted.
For a number of years Kate had had no reason to think there was anything amiss regarding her fertility. Ever since coming off the pill in her early twenties, she had always been as regular as clockwork, never had an irregular smear result or caught a sexually transmitted infection, and with these facts had come an assumption that when she was ready, when they were both ready, she would be able to conceive naturally.
Then came the scare.
Kate had always hated that phrase. The scare. As if there weren’t things far more frightening in life than becoming a parent. As a teenager, she read articles in magazines and letters in advice columns that talked about ‘the relief’ of finding out that you weren’t pregnant after all, as if it was a disease or affliction. It had not felt like a relief to Kate when her ‘scare’ turned out to be nothing more than a skipped period.
‘Most likely caused by stress,’ the doctor had reassured her. Kate and James had just moved in together and, a few months prior to that, her granddad had suffered a mild stroke. It made sense biologically that her cycle would have been upset by these external factors, but Kate was still crushingly disappointed to learn that it was a blip and not a baby. There was nothing that made you yearn for something like having it snatched away from you.
The friendly waitress at the waterside café waved at Kate as she hurried past, but still she did not stop, could not stop, was compelled to put more distance between herself and the pharmacy, as if the place itself was tainted by the same cruel misery that was now coursing through her. She knew it made no sense; there was no escaping this kind of sorrow. Yet, she had to do something; had to show her heart a willingness to escape so that it might not break irretrievably.
She wished that she could speak to James, that he were here, or she were there. It seemed ridiculous now to recall how apprehensive she’d been three years ago, when she thought she might be pregnant and that he would be furious about it. James had surprised her then, perhaps for the first of only two times since she had known him and reacted with excitement. They had sat together on the edge of the bath, the test held between them, waiting for those two pink lines to appear as if they were the final winning numbers of the lottery. When it did not happen, with either that or the following two tests from the box Kate had bought, it had been James who insisted that she see the GP.
‘These tests are wrong all the time. It’s probably too early or something. I know you’re pregnant. I have a good feeling about it.’
But it wasn’t. And she wasn’t.
Afterwards, when she was cradled sodden-cheeked and miserable in his arms, Kate apologised for telling him; for getting his hopes up only to dash them down again. James had said nothing for a long time, his thumb rubbing a circle on the top of her arm; an attempt to soothe that made her feel even more like a burden.
‘It will happen one day,’ she’d whispered. ‘One day I will have your baby – our baby.’
She had felt him smile, felt the vibration of his voice as he spoke.
‘What are we waiting for, Kate? Why don’t we start trying now?’
There were loose stones beneath her feet now; the road had climbed up away from the sea. Scraggy pines clung to cliff faces bleached white by the sun, the water below a rich blue tapestry threaded with gold. Kate gazed out towards the horizon, seeking comfort from beauty, but today it remained elusive. The darkness, the blackness, was too great, too all-encompassing, too much.
Kate had always thought of James as a traditionalist, assuming he would want to get married before starting a family, but parenthood was the only thing he was proposing back then. When she had queried his decision, making a joke of it as she habitually did whenever she was too timid to tackle a weighty topic, he had disregarded her question with a lift of his shoulders.
‘So, we do things the other way around,’ he’d said. ‘At least then, our kid will be at our wedding. We’ll have a ready-made flower girl or page boy.’
She had loved his idealism and believed in his confidence. Agreeing was easy, but what came next would end up breaking both of them.
Almost as if her body somehow knew what she wanted and had decided to withhold it, Kate’s periods promptly became as erratic as her frustrated mood and she would veer from panicked to positive every few days. James was patient for the first year, staying on her side and blaming the timing, the stress, the temperature in their bedroom, the angle at which she lay after sex. He downloaded articles, read books, bought thermometers and drew circles on the kitchen calendar around the days he thought she would be most fertile. Kate went along with all of it, in part because she w
anted to please him, but mostly it was due to her own desire to have a baby. She had decided that motherhood would be her thing, the role she was destined to have, the reason she could not settle into a job doing anything else. This baby was going to give her a purpose, make her useful at last, change the way that James and her friends and family saw her – no longer an aimless, ambitionless fool, but a someone, a mother to a child.
After eighteen months had passed, Kate returned to the doctor. More tests followed, and eventually, a diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome.
‘PCSO is a hiccup, not a final nail for fertility,’ the gynaecologist assured her, and Kate began her first course of tablets full of renewed optimism. Months passed, and still nothing.
Frustrated with herself and tired of being the one who must continually be poked and prodded, Kate became impatient.
‘Maybe you should get tested too?’ she had suggested to James, being careful to use the same tone that she might when asking him if they should roast chicken or beef that Sunday. Her boyfriend had frowned, his forehead wrinkling like a book dropped into a bath.
‘The issue isn’t with me,’ he replied, illustrating his annoyance by closing the fridge door so hard that the sauce bottles rattled.
‘How can you be so sure?’ Kate had demanded. ‘It’s not as if you’ve ever got anyone pregnant, is it?’
But, as it turned out, he had.
Her name was Kirsty, and James explained that he had slept with her during Freshers Week at university, on a night when he was too drunk and irresponsible to use protection. The girl had apparently later asked for a chunk of his student loan to pay for an abortion, and James – relieved, he admitted sheepishly, to be let off the hook – did not hesitate to comply. Hearing this story for the first time, Kate had needed to sit down and take long steadying breaths, her emotions in a tangle of sadness for the poor girl, annoyance at her boyfriend for not telling her sooner, and lastly pity, for the younger and presumably scared James who had, after all, lost a child.
‘I’ll go and see my doctor if you insist,’ James had grumbled, relenting, Kate suspected, only because she refused to let the topic drop. ‘But I’m telling you, there’s no point.’
Kate was not unkind enough to confess the truth to him – that she’d been secretly hoping he was the reason they could not conceive. James was good at everything; he had never failed at anything, whereas she was the opposite. Why couldn’t it be his turn for once? Why did it always have to be her who was holding life back from progressing?
True to his word, James did get tested, his triumph suitably muted when he informed her that there was nothing amiss. Kate responded by gathering all the information she could about alternative options, such as IVF, surrogacy and adoption, the last of which James refused to even consider.
‘I want my own child,’ he said, which she had snappily corrected to, ‘You mean our own.’
Kate was still walking, and as she diverted her mind back to the present, she became aware of sweat running in rivulets down her back. Her hair beneath the straw hat was damp and itchy, while the tears she had finally allowed to fall were making it impossible to see through her glasses. Kate pulled them off, rubbing at her eyes as her surroundings fell into soft focus. There was a sharp bend ahead and once around it, she could just make out a small cove in the distance, its white-stone beach the shape of a vast grinning mouth. Somewhere to sit for a while in the shade of a tree, pull herself together and find a way to dam this faucet of self-pity.
It was only as she approached the final stretch of the road that Kate replaced her glasses and noticed Alex’s boat bobbing not far from the shore, instantly recognisable due to its overflowing cargo of old cans, curls of rope and assorted bags of who knew what. As she stared down at it, the cabin door at the front opened and the man himself emerged, his dreadlocks flattened upwards at the back, as if he had been sleeping. He was wearing a pair of red shorts, but the rest of him was bare.
Not wanting him to see her in such a state, Kate was about to hurry past when Alex looked up and their eyes met, an understanding of sorts passing between them. He did not say anything, nor did he move, but she read concern in his expression; knew that if she requested it of him that he would be there to help her.
But it was wrong of her to ask. The fact was Alex could not help her. Nobody could.
Kate softened her features into what she hoped was a smile, or at least a good imitation of one, then turned to walk away from him.
‘Hey.’
Alex raised a hand.
‘You want some company?’ he called.
And to Kate’s complete surprise, she did.
Chapter 20
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
Kate shook her head, unable to look at him.
‘Not really, no. Sorry.’
‘No need to apologise,’ Alex told her. ‘As long as you’re OK, like?’
Her sigh of reply came from such a depth that it seemed to rattle her insides.
‘I will be,’ she assured him. ‘I just heard . . . Well, actually overheard some news and it reminded me of something sad. I’ll be OK,’ she said again, with far more confidence than she felt.
Because she had to be, didn’t she?
Alex had brought a T-shirt with him from the boat and pulled it on now as they walked on towards the white-stone cove. Kate had become so accustomed to seeing him in baggy, paint-splattered overalls that she had forgotten how tanned he was, how broad his chest and shoulders. The hair and accompanying beard remained unwelcome additions, as far as she was concerned, but for the first time, she could appreciate why Robyn had been so taken by him, and why her friend had compared him to one of the hunky, horsebound warriors in a fantasy adventure series.
‘I’m not a bad listener,’ he said now, a final attempt at persuasion. ‘Anything you tell me will remain strictly between us. You don’t have to worry that I’ll go shooting my mouth off to your brother or anything like that.’
‘I didn’t think you would,’ she said, meaning it. She may barely know Alex, but she trusted him – perhaps more than she did a lot of people.
‘You’re not a big believer in the “a problem shared is a problem halved” philosophy then?’ queried Alex, to which Kate shrugged noncommittally.
‘Maybe in some cases – but sometimes I think the more you talk about a thing, the more airtime you give it, the bigger it grows. What begins as a tiny scab becomes a nasty scar if you keep picking at it.’
Alex bent the arm nearest Kate and showed her his elbow, which was crisscrossed by white lines.
‘Fell off a scooter in Italy years ago,’ he said. ‘Got myself a nasty tarmac tattoo for my troubles and picked at it for months. Now look at the state of it.’
‘Exactly!’ she exclaimed, happy to have her point proven. ‘And don’t you wish now that you’d left it alone?’
‘No.’ Alex grinned at her scandalised expression. ‘Scars that you can see are never as bad as the ones you can’t.’
‘Ain’t that the truth,’ she muttered darkly.
They had reached the boundaries of the beach now, but every available space seemed to be taken by sunbathing tourists, sun-cream-caked children and overflowing picnic hampers. There were long queues snaking out from the only two beachside cafés, while a further area had been colonised by a company offering kayaks for hire. Upon spotting Kate and Alex, the man in charge beckoned them over with a wave of his clipboard.
‘All right, Al?’
He was British, that much was clear from his accent, but if she’d been asked to guess, Kate would have taken one look at his Billabong board shorts, shoulder-length blond curls and easy manner, and opted for Australian. He and Alex clearly knew each other well, and soon the man was telling them both a long and entertaining story about a pod of dolphins he had followed out so far to sea that he’d got lost.
‘One of the Jadros picked me up in the end,’ he laughed. ‘I’d almost paddled my way right over to Ko
rčula.’
‘That’s another island south of here,’ Alex explained. ‘Quite far south of here.’
‘You’re telling me!’ The man laughed. ‘Listen, do you two want to take a kayak out? Been a slow day today on account of it being changeover.’
‘Changeover?’ echoed Kate.
Again, it was Alex who filled her in.
‘The day flights depart and arrive,’ he said. ‘People tend not to book excursions on the days they travel, in case they get held up.’
‘Makes sense.’
‘So?’ prompted the man with the clipboard. ‘You can have an hour on me. I owe you anyway, Al, for sorting out that problem with my car the other week.’
‘You mean putting oil in the engine?’ Alex laughed. ‘That doesn’t exactly deserve a medal.’
‘Not a medal I’m offering you, though, is it?’
Alex looked bemused.
‘What do you think?’ he asked Kate. ‘Feeling brave enough for a paddle?’
And for the second time that day, Kate surprised herself by saying yes.
The man – who it turned out was called Joe – helped the two of them drag one red and one yellow kayak down to the water’s edge, returning a few minutes later with life vests, oars, a dry box for valuables and two bizarre-looking garments resembling adult bibs, which Joe explained were spraydecks. Once pulled on over her vest top, the wide ladle-shaped part could be stretched around the kayak seat, providing a barrier against any water that might splash inside. Alex showed her how the foot pedals worked, while Joe gave her a short tutorial on how to turn, stop and reverse using the paddle. It was a lot to take in, but Kate did not feel at all daunted. Besides, she would have Alex with her the whole time.
The Getaway: A holiday romance for 2021 - perfect summer escapism! Page 11
