Giselle's Choice

by Penny Jordan

  ‘I’ve come to take you home,’ was all Saul said to her, but he was looking at her in a way that made her heart turn over in a mixture of intense love and raw agony. ‘We need to talk—about everything.’

  Her aunt broke in unexpectedly to ask Giselle directly, ‘You want this baby, don’t you, Giselle?’

  The directness of the question undermined Giselle’s defences.

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I do. The creation of a new life is such a special thing.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘A gift, a privilege. My baby—our baby—has the right to live.’ She took a deep breath and lifted her head to look at them both, but especially Saul. ‘I will see the professor, but I’ve decided that…that I want our child to be born—even if it means that for its own safety and happiness another woman has to bring it up. I’d rather that than risk hurting it.’

  Giselle wasn’t sure how she had come to this painful decision, she only knew that having come to it she now felt an overwhelming sense of peace, a sense of having given her baby safety and security by the best means she could.

  ‘Giselle!’ Saul protested, stunned by the stark reality of what her words had revealed to him.

  But she simply shook her head. ‘It’s the right thing to do,’ she told him tiredly. ‘I love you, Saul, but I love our baby too. I am going to have our baby, and nothing you can say will make me change my mind.’

  ‘I don’t want you to change your mind.’

  Giselle stared at him, convinced she must have misheard.

  ‘Go with him, Giselle,’ her great-aunt was begging.

  The energy to resist them was seeping relentlessly from her, and as though she was being propelled by a force greater than she was herself she found that she was walking towards Saul. Because she wanted to be with him, Giselle admitted to herself weakly. She ached and longed to be with him. She wanted the strength of his arms around her, the comfort of his shoulder to lean on, the love she knew he had for her to support her.

  Tiredly she gave in to her own weak longings and nodded her head, kissing her great-aunt on the cheek before going to Saul’s side.

  ‘I’ll have to cancel my room at the hotel,’ she murmured.

  ‘Already done,’ Saul told her, making it plain that he hadn’t intended to return to London without her. ‘Come on, the chopper pilot’s waiting. I’d have hired a helicopter and flown it myself for you, but I didn’t dare trust myself to concentrate on flying and not worrying about you.’

  As she listened to Saul guilt filled Giselle, but she didn’t say anything. How could she? Whichever decision she had made someone would have suffered, and she knew she would always feel guilty about the decision she had chosen to make. How could she not?

  Once they were inside the helicopter, with Saul sitting up-front with the pilot and acting as co-pilot, there was no real opportunity for them to talk privately. And Giselle felt so exhausted and drained by the events of the day that she was practically asleep by the time they landed at City Airport.

  From there it was only a short taxi ride to their Chelsea house. The hallway was filled with the scent of the morning’s new delivery of lilies and the brilliant light from the chandeliers—so carefully chosen by Giselle because they’d been made at a start-up factory in Poland, which trained and employed young apprentices who had previously been out of work. The light illuminated the just off-white paint she had spent such a long time choosing, to make sure that its grey-blue undertone added just a hint of colour to the hallway that she felt chimed with the colour of Chelsea’s sky and river backdrop. But tonight the atmosphere of lived-in elegance and comfort reflected by her interior design choices failed to have its normal restorative effect on Giselle’s senses.

  ‘You look dead on your feet.’ Saul told her. ‘Go and get ready for bed, and I’ll make us both a drink and bring it up.’

  Much as she longed for a warm bath, Giselle had to make do with a shower, half afraid that she was so tired she might actually fall asleep in the bath. She was exhausted really, but she desperately needed to understand if Saul had actually meant what he had said at her great-aunt’s about wanting their baby.

  Saul came into the bedroom just as she emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a thick towelling robe.

  ‘Cocoa?’ she exclaimed in astonishment, as she saw the milky drinks he had made.

  ‘They always used to make it for us at my boarding school if we were feeling low,’ Saul told her simply.

  ‘I didn’t know we had any in the house.’

  ‘We didn’t. I bought it this afternoon.’ He placed the mugs on his bedside table and turned to face her. ‘Giselle, you can’t mean what you said about giving up our baby for someone else to raise.’

  ‘I do mean it,’ she assured him. ‘At least that way it will have life, and…and safety.’

  ‘And its mother’s love?’ Saul demanded fiercely.

  Giselle’s whole body shook. She knew how Saul felt about a child’s need for its mother’s love, because he had been denied that. ‘I shall always love our child. But for its sake…’

  ‘We are going to see the professor, Giselle, and I won’t take no for an answer. You will be a wonderful mother, and I can’t allow you to even think of depriving our child of its mother’s love and presence in its life.’

  ‘It will have you—if you meant what you said at my great-aunt’s?’ Giselle trembled as she phrased her words as a question.

  ‘I did.’ Saul’s voice was firm. ‘I shall be there for our child, Giselle, and I promise so will you.’

  ‘I’d love to believe that, but I dare not let myself. I want our baby so much, Saul.’

  ‘That makes two of us.’ Saul’s smile was slightly slanted and wry. ‘I don’t know how it happened myself, Giselle, but all I’ve been able to think of since you told me was you saying how much you’d have wanted our children, my children, had things been different. Gradually, almost without me knowing it, as the baby has grown inside you, so a protective love for it has grown inside me. I felt such a tug of fiercely paternal love inside me that it stunned me, robbing me of the ability to say or do anything. I was shocked, I admit it. That was why I didn’t say anything to you there and then. How I felt was so totally contrary to everything I’d always thought I would feel if I allowed myself to imagine our child. The resentment, the jealousy, the fear of losing you I’d suspected I’d see in myself just weren’t there. I was in a daze.

  ‘I should have told you. I wanted to. But I was afraid that if I did it would put even more pressure on you, and that you’d be even more afraid of being like your mother. That’s why I want you to see the professor—so that he can reassure you and tell you what I already know. You will be a wonderful mother.’

  Hope, belief, joy, life. Like stars glimmering in a dark night sky, the words lit up in Giselle’s mind until the light from them and from her own relief dazzled her.

  ‘You’ve changed your mind? You want our baby?’ Giselle’s words were soft with all that she felt for this most wonderful of men—a man strong enough to show his weakness to her, strong enough, too, to allow the course he had chosen for his life to be diverted for the sake of the tiny spark of life they had ignited together.

  Saul nodded his head.

  ‘Don’t ask me how it happened, because I don’t have an answer. I only know that inside my head I have an image of the two of you together that does things to me I thought impossible.’

  ‘Oh, Saul, you don’t know how much this means to me—knowing that you will be there for our baby even if I can’t be. Knowing that he or she will grow up with you to love them and protect them.’

  ‘Don’t speak like that, Giselle—as though you aren’t going to be part of that. Because you are.’

  ‘You can’t say that. We don’t know that. No matter how much I want it to be so. But I feel so much better now, Saul, so much stronger. Knowing that our baby will have your love gives me that strength. I will see the professor now, and we can tell him that no matter w
hat happens to…to me, you will always be there for our child. That’s if he will see me after I didn’t keep the appointment you made.’

  ‘He will see you. I’ve already spoken to him, and he said to tell you that he perfectly understands how you feel. We will both be there for our child, Giselle. I know it.’ Saul’s voice was raw with emotion.

  He reached for her hand and held it whilst they looked at one another.

  ‘We’ll find a way through this, Giselle. We’ll find a way to make it work—and there will be a way. What happened with your mother was appalling and tragic, and I can’t begin to imagine the trauma you must have gone through—a six-year-old having to cope with something like that without help.’

  ‘I had my great-aunt,’ Giselle reminded him gently. ‘She was wonderful. She explained everything to me as I got old enough to understand.’

  ‘But her explanations didn’t stop your fears, or the grief you felt inside yourself, did they?’ Saul challenged her, equally gently. ‘They didn’t stop you feeling guilty even though you should have been the last one in the whole situation to feel that.’ His hand tightened over hers. ‘You have no need to be anything other than what you are,’ he assured her fiercely. ‘You are everything you should and could be already. You are the wheel on which my life turns, Giselle, the heart of everything I do. I promise you that somehow we will find a way to set you free from your fear. Medical science has improved dramatically since your mother gave birth.’

  ‘So you keep saying. But postnatal depression still strikes down many, many mothers. I’ve seen it on the internet. I’ve read stories of those women who have suffered from it.’ When Saul shook his head she said, ‘Yes, I know it might have been better for me to avoid reading them, but I had to, Saul. I had to know.’

  She had read so many heart-rending stories from mothers who had suffered postnatal depression. And read many too from mothers who had overcome it, with medical and family help.

  ‘My mother’s depression was more a psychosis. I found out from my great-aunt that my father was told she should have been sectioned, but he had refused—both out of love for her and out of fear for the effect it could have on his patients if it became known that he couldn’t cure his own wife.’

  ‘Well, I promise you this, Giselle. I intend to fight as hard now for you to have our child as I would once have done to prevent its conception. As I have discovered, the reality of a conceived child is very different from the concept of a child that only exists inside one’s head. The truth is that neither of us can reject the life we have created. We are already connected to it and it to us by the strongest of human ties. It is part of us and we are part of it.’

  ‘Oh, Saul,’ Giselle whispered as he took her in his arms and held her tightly. ‘If there is such a thing as a guardian angel then mine must have been watching over me today. I am so grateful, so lucky, so truly blessed. How did you know I’d gone to my great-aunt’s?’

  ‘Where else would you go? I couldn’t raise you on your phone, and you didn’t come home. I guessed that you’d head for Yorkshire and your great-aunt, so I telephoned her and she agreed that she’d let me know if you turned up. She rang me whilst you were talking to the warden, who’d alerted her to your arrival. Here.’ Saul released her to pick up one of the mugs and hand it to her. ‘Drink this before it goes cold. It will be all right, Giselle,’ he assured her, his voice full of certainty. ‘I promise you that it will.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘WE WILL FIND A WAY,’ Saul had promised her just over six months ago. And he had certainly done everything any person could be expected to do and more to find that way, Giselle acknowledged.

  There had been consultations, examinations, discussions, research, and further consultations. At the end of them, the eminent expert in the field of postnatal depression, Professor Edward Green—whose manner had melted away the last of Giselle’s fears for their baby the minute he had shaken her hand and she had seen the compassion and understanding in his eyes—had devised what he and Saul both considered to be a foolproof programme of care for Giselle and her baby. They had both reassured her it would make it impossible for even the slightest symptom of postnatal depression not to be noticed and dealt with promptly.

  Their son—for the baby she was carrying was a boy—would be delivered by Caesarean section in five weeks’ time, at full term—Professor Green did not hold with the fashion for mothers to want their sections performed early for the sake of their figures—and from that moment onwards, whilst she was in the expensive private maternity hospital in London and afterwards when she went home to the Chelsea house, she would have a live-in specially trained nurse on hand to monitor the situation for as long as she and Saul and the professor deemed it necessary.

  She was indeed, Giselle believed, truly blessed to have such a loving husband, to be carrying a healthy baby, and to have the medical care of such an understanding and compassionate expert.

  Although Giselle wanted to look after their baby herself, she had agreed that it made sense to have a nanny as well as her own special nurse. In fact if she was honest, she admitted, she had been a little afraid of refusing in case either the professor or Saul thought that her refusal might indicate a burgeoning hormonal problem within her even before she gave birth.

  Giselle put down the clothes she had been packing ahead of their departure for a brief three-day visit to Arezzio, for Saul’s coronation. Saul had told her that he would understand if she preferred to stay in London, but she had insisted that she wanted to be with him—which she did.

  The trouble was that Saul, being Saul, had now immersed himself so completely in every aspect of postnatal depression that Giselle sometimes felt as though Saul and Professor Edwards were on one side of a fence watching her, whilst she was on the other on her own. She had seen the expression of concern on Saul’s face when she had told him that she would prefer not to have a nanny and instantly had felt anxious and wary, unwilling to tell him about her intensely powerful surge of maternal possessiveness over the child that was growing within her. She wanted to be the one to care for their son. She wanted to hold him and bathe him, to mother him in all respects, instead of simply being allowed to feed him.

  In the early stages of their discussions with the professor, when Giselle had asked him what would happen if she did develop severe postnatal depression, he had told her that the very worst-case scenario would be that she would be hospitalised for treatment, and that if things did come to that he would arrange for the baby’s nanny to have a room at the private clinic where she would be treated, so that Giselle could continue to see her baby under supervision— ‘So the baby’s bond with you isn’t prejudiced.’

  She had been relieved, of course, to know that no matter what her child would be safe, but at the same time the closer she got to full term the more anxious she became that she might inadvertently do something that would signal to the two men watching over her that she wasn’t fit to look after her own child. Giselle didn’t think she could bear that.

  As her baby had grown inside the safe protection of her womb, so her love for it had grown, and now she felt as fiercely protective and possessive about her baby as a tigress might over its young. Sometimes in her darkest and most lonely moments she even wondered if the depth of her emotional maternal feelings towards her child might not in itself be a sign of something darker—a hint of postnatal depression to come. But that was something she couldn’t discuss with anyone—least of all Saul, who had turned into the kind of father-to-be that she suspected most woman would want. He was tender and loving towards her, putting the needs of her pregnancy to the forefront of everything he did. Because of the number of consultations they had had with the professor, and his advice that the baby should be delivered in England, Saul had even insisted they stay on in the London house and he would work from there.

  And that had been another problem. She had had to fight very hard indeed to get Saul to accept that she was perfectly healthy enough t
o work, and even harder to make him understand that she actually needed to work. In fact her pregnancy had made her even more anxious to press on with their plans for those in need. Reluctantly Saul had given way.

  At least he had agreed that she could continue to travel with him, so she had been able to witness the preparations for his coronation, which had been timed to take place in the same month as his long-ago ancestors had first ascended the throne.

  Giselle smiled ruefully to herself. She knew she would never forget the expression on Saul’s face when they had first been told that their baby was a boy. Whilst her own feeling had been one of relief that at least this child would be spared the genetic inheritance she feared, Saul’s expression had said all Giselle needed to know about men and their pride in creating sons.

  ‘I meant what I said about the country becoming a democracy,’ Saul had told her that evening.

  ‘Good,’ Giselle had responded truthfully.

  ‘The business will be there for our son if he wants to go into it, just as there will be a place for him as Head of State if he wants that. But he will not be the country’s absolute ruler.’

  ‘Neither of us would want that for him,’ Giselle had agreed. ‘That kind of inheritance can be as much of a burden as it is a benefit.’

  ‘I want him to grow up to be his own man—to form his own opinions and to be…’

  ‘Like you?’ Giselle had suggested mischievously.

  They had made love that night, Saul tender and careful, and everything he felt for her and their coming child had been there in his touch and his words of love to her.

  Now, though, sometimes in her most anxious and despairing moments, she wondered if he loved the child she was carrying more than he did her.

  She had seen both the professor and her obstetrician and midwife yesterday, to check that she was all right to fly now that she was eight months pregnant, and they had reassured her that everything was perfectly in order.