by Lilian Darcy
Caroline could easily feel the desperation in the way she made love to him that afternoon. Just as Sandie was consciously storing up precious moments with her boys, in case the worst happened, she herself was staving off the future by making the present count as much as it possibly could.
Today she used her hands to pin Declan’s wrists against the pillow above his head and explored his naked, utterly masculine body with her mouth. She drew a hissing breath of response from him as she sucked on the tiny buds of his nipples, and shudders as she ran her lips down the centre of his chest, and brushed her body in sinuous ripples over his.
She felt tears threatening to brim over, and grabbed for the sheet to wipe them away before he saw them. A few minutes later, he was so tender with her, his kisses like rain-soaked blossoms or berries falling on her skin, that she wondered if he had seen the depth of her emotion after all.
They showered together, lathering each other’s skin with soap, and he aroused her with such an innocent air of not intending to do any such thing that she was laughing even while begging him, with the press of her body, to take her back to bed.
They arrived twenty minutes late at the restaurant they’d booked, and then stumbled into their seats in the dark two hours later to watch a nine-thirty movie, when the coming attractions had already begun. Leaving Canberra at twelve-thirty the next day, after an early lunch at the botanical gardens, Caroline wished she could roll back the clock and repeat the past forty hours over again, as many times as she wanted.
After picking up the boys from Comden Reach, they didn’t get back to Glenfallon until almost seven, and it seemed sensible for Declan to come in with her and help put together a quick meal of eggs and bacon and grilled tomatoes and toast. They lit the slow combustion stove again, and even though, with the boys around, the evening didn’t resemble their last one in front of the fire, it seemed just as precious, just as important.
‘I don’t want you to feel any obligation to stay on as long as we originally planned, Declan,’ Tom told him.
It was a Friday morning, and the senior pathologist had summoned him just a few minutes ago to give him the news that Dr Sharma had accepted the employment offer made by the hospital, and would be ready to start work at the end of next month.
‘You’re speaking too hastily there, aren’t you, Tom?’ Declan suggested gently. ‘Don’t you want to keep your own options open?’
Caroline had told him of Tom’s desire to take early retirement, but he knew Tom himself didn’t want his feelings widely known just yet.
‘Dr Sharma can’t carry the whole workload on her own when you go,’ he continued. ‘Since I’ve come on board, we’ve got several more doctors in the region sending us their pathology when they used to send it elsewhere. Let’s not risk losing that momentum.’
‘Are you saying you’re not in a hurry to leave?’ Tom asked, narrowing his eyes.
‘I’m not in a hurry, no,’ Declan said cautiously. ‘I have until the first of December next year to take up my old position in London again.’
He’d said this to Tom before, but this time it had a different ring to it in his own head. It sounded like the deadline on his relationship with Caroline, and he didn’t like to think of it that way. He couldn’t let things drift for that long, with nothing said. That had been such a large part of what had been wrong in his misguided yet oddly necessary affair with Suzy. There had been no structure to it. And structure wasn’t always limiting. Sometimes it could free you.
His awareness snagged on that word ‘necessary’ that he’d just used in his mind. Why on earth would he consider that Suzy had been necessary? Because she’d brought him here? Not really. He had the growing understanding that she’d been necessary before Sydney had ever entered the picture. She’d jolted him out of certain assumptions, she’d stirred up his life, and he knew the dust hadn’t settled yet.
He’d have to tell Caroline what he wanted very soon.
‘Let me know when you’ve made a decision, then, Declan,’ Tom said. ‘Meanwhile, I may put a few more feelers out. Dr Sharma has encouraged me to think we may have a chance at getting another pathologist to commit to Glenfallon permanently, if we’re patient.’
‘I’ll keep you posted. For now, I’m expecting a frozen section from Bren Forsythe, on a breast tumour, and he’ll want the result on that as soon as possible.’
‘Get to it, then. And we’ll talk again when we need to.’
On the way to the lab to prepare a section of the biopsied material for the technicians to freeze, Declan almost collided with Caroline, who was returning from the department’s bathroom. She looked tired today, and as if she wasn’t feeling one hundred per cent. ‘OK?’ he asked.
‘Not quite,’ she answered.
She was making her usual drive out to the farm that afternoon. Declan himself was on call all weekend, so he couldn’t offer to come with her, but he urged her, ‘Take it easy, then. Could Chris come and get the boys?’ He wished they weren’t spending the weekend apart.
‘I’ll be all right. I’m finding it hard to get going in the mornings at the moment, but I perk up by lunchtime.’
He saw a frown crumple her brow, then clear again, but didn’t have time to push her further on whether she really was all right. She never complained about the boys, or the driving. She’d reluctantly turned down his suggestions for last weekend, and had spent the entire time at Comden Reach, helping with whatever needed to be done. This week, she planned to do the same.
When he pushed her, as he’d done a couple of times over the past week or so, she admitted that she was overdoing it, but he knew he wouldn’t get her to slow down until Sandie’s remaining three cycles of treatment were finished. He’d picked up Thai food or pizza a couple of times and brought it to her place, to feed everyone and give her a break from cooking. No real private time—doing the dishes together didn’t count—but he’d enjoyed the family time almost as much.
In the lab, he asked Irena, ‘Is my breast biopsy here yet?’
‘Just arrived a minute ago.’
Glancing back along the corridor, he saw that Caroline was heading for the bathroom once again.
‘This isn’t right,’ Caroline said to her reflection.
She’d lost her breakfast in the sink about five minutes ago. Now she felt fine. This wasn’t like the virus they’d all had three and a half weeks ago, when she’d felt achy and washed out for hours afterwards.
The virus.
The boys had had it in the night, but it hadn’t hit her until after breakfast, when she’d already drunk her coffee and eaten her cereal and washed down her contraceptive pill, as usual, with a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. None of that had stayed down.
None of it. Including that tiny blue pill.
Surely…
She hadn’t even thought about it at the time. She’d been too concerned with Sandie, and whether the boys would be contagious on the weekend. She’d been thinking about Canberra, too, anticipating in her imagination a weekend that had been every bit as good in reality.
Surely…
She’d been so outrageously fertile at twenty-one that missing her pill by less than half a day had given her Josh. At thirty-four and a half, she couldn’t possibly still be that way, could she?
Could she?
She thought about how she’d felt the past few days. Queasy as soon as she got out of bed, struggling in the shower to keep her stomach where it belonged, craving a hot piece of dry toast. She’d had other symptoms, too, which she’d found good reasons for.
Fatigue. Couldn’t that be explained by the extra work she’d taken on to help Sandie and Chris?
Sore breasts. Well, they’d received a fair bit of attention lately from Declan. They weren’t used to it. She hugged her arms around herself for a moment and, yes, her nipples rebelled and her breasts ached. She thought about Declan, wished he was there and felt glad that he wasn’t, both at the same time.
Sensitivity to smel
ls. OK, what could she do with that one?
It stood out in her memory from when she’d been pregnant with Josh. Laundry detergent, tomato ketchup, toothpaste, dog food. Strong scents that she normally tolerated or even liked would ambush her out of nowhere and send her gasping for fresh air or a glass of water before nausea overtook her.
Cautiously, she squirted a generous blob of liquid pink soap into her palm from the dispenser above the basin. She brought it to her nose, inhaled and gagged, then had to take several deep, careful breaths out in the corridor before she could get her stomach under control.
Five minutes later, she told Natalia, ‘I’m going to leave fifteen minutes early today, if you don’t mind.’ Their in-tray wasn’t piled too deeply.
‘Are you feeling all right?’
‘Uh, no, I think I might have a bit of a bug.’ Or a bit of a baby. Was it really possible? ‘I’m going to stop in at the chemist before I pick up Sam.’
Self-conscious, although she didn’t know the young woman behind the counter, she paid for a home pregnancy testing kit and dashed home. The new ones were so accurate. You could use them at any time of day, and the result only took a minute or two to appear.
And here it was, almost the same pinky-purple colour as the stainings she saw under the microscope every day.
Very pretty, and very, very positive.
Caroline had to collect Sam from child-care in ten minutes, and it was a five-minute drive. Picking up the telephone with her mind in a whirl, she keyed in Declan’s office number but cut off the call at the first ring. She couldn’t tell him yet. Not when they had no time to talk. Not when she hadn’t thought through what this meant.
Grabbing car keys and bag, she set off to pick up Sam, her brain still churning.
How would Declan feel about her carelessness? She should have remembered that a stomach upset could render the Pill ineffective for that month. She probably would have remembered if she hadn’t had both Sandie’s health and the weekend in Canberra to protect.
Thirteen years ago, Robert had been angry with her because the accidental pregnancy had disrupted their plans, even though they’d been married and had talked about having children eventually. She and Declan didn’t even know if their futures lay in the same hemisphere.
Would he think she was trying to trap him with this baby? Would he think she’d done it on purpose? A pregnancy could be a potent weapon. Loving Declan, she knew he wasn’t the kind of man who’d easily desert the mother of his unborn child, even if his motivation for staying was duty far more than love. Did she want to be the object of his sense of honour?
That, at least, was easy to answer.
She didn’t.
She wanted love, honesty and a hundred per cent commitment, or nothing at all.
At child-care, Sam had paintings and collages to show her, but it was hard to inject sincerity into her voice when she told him, ‘Mummy will love those. We’ll take them to the farm this weekend to give her, shall we?’
They went home and had toasted sandwiches for lunch. The phone sat silently on the desk in the corner of the sun-room. She could ring Declan now. She could put Sam in front of a video, and he’d sit there, happy and oblivious, while she and Declan talked.
But she still had to pack for the weekend. She still had to come up with a plan for the rest of her life, so that when she did tell him her news, Declan would understand at once that she didn’t intend to make any demands or any assumptions.
For the first time in an hour, her mind slowed down enough to let other images come to the surface. This wasn’t just an unplanned pregnancy. It was a baby, already growing inside her, already containing the tiny bud of its future personality, waiting to blossom.
She remembered the euphoric three days she’d spent in hospital after Josh’s birth, and what a miracle he’d seemed to be. Even Robert had been awed, more emotional than she’d seen him before or since. She remembered how thrilled she’d been by Josh’s first smile, the first time he’d shown interest in a book and the day he’d sat in his little bath and discovered splashing.
She’d had the usual difficult months of sleeplessness, the times when she’d felt like a failure because he wouldn’t stop crying, the days when she hadn’t even seemed able to finish a sentence, let alone the dishes or the vacuuming, because of catering to Josh’s needs. Despite all of that, however, she’d loved having a baby and discovering herself as a mother. Simply remembering it, now, twelve years later, could flood her with a yearning sweetness she hadn’t experienced since that time.
It didn’t make sense, but already she wanted this baby.
She washed up the few lunch dishes she and Sam had created, thinking that he was playing in the spare bedroom with his cars, but when she went to look for him, she discovered him ‘packing’. In other words, he was throwing dozens of random items into a canvas overnight bag, which she had to gently persuade him he didn’t need for two nights at the farm.
By the time she’d undone the play packing and done the real packing, it was a quarter to three, and almost time to collect the big boys from school.
Declan and I can’t possibly talk properly until after the weekend, she realised. She didn’t know whether this was a reprieve, an excuse or a life sentence.
Caroline and the boys arrived back from the farm at five on Sunday afternoon.
She’d managed to hide the tell-tale symptoms of her new pregnancy and had given Sandie and Chris some useful help, but she felt exhausted, and daunted by the need to prepare dinner and make a start on last week’s dirty laundry. She’d have to hang the most urgent things in the lounge-room on a drying rack in front of the wood-burning stove, or Josh and Mattie wouldn’t have school clothes for tomorrow.
She was still toiling to get a tuna and tomato spaghetti sauce prepared and a load of washing in the machine when the phone rang at a quarter to six.
‘Are you back?’ Declan said. ‘Tell me if you’re not, and I’ll try again later.’
She had to laugh. ‘Sorry, no, I’m not back. My body is, but the rest of me’s still bumping along the dirt road between the farm and Cargoola.’
‘That’s what I meant.’
‘Right. I thought there’d have to be some strange, nonsensical sort of logic in there somewhere.’ This time, her laugh was more like a sob.
‘You sound shattered.’
Yes, because, guess what, I’m pregnant!
‘Could you come over?’ she said aloud.
Oh, no, you’re not going to lure him here and weep into his shoulder, are you, Caroline?
‘I was going to ask that,’ he said. ‘May I come over?’
‘Um, perhaps we should wait until tomorrow,’ she revised.
Because I’m not going to be able to be strong about this today. I’m going to beg you not to go back to London, I know it, and that wouldn’t be fair, even if you said yes.
‘No, let me come over,’ he said. ‘All the more reason, if you’re as tired as you sound. I wasn’t called out and I had a very relaxing weekend.’
She couldn’t answer.
‘Caroline?’
‘We should talk,’ she said.
‘When I get there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is something wrong, sweetheart?’
Silence. Or at least, she hoped he couldn’t hear how hard she was crying now. She had her fist pressed into her mouth, but her shoulders were shaking like a jackhammer. She had to stop this, because the boys might come in any second, starving as usual. The half-chopped onion on the cutting board might just fob them off, as long as this shaking stopped.
‘I’m getting in the car this minute,’ Declan said, because she still hadn’t replied.
‘OK.’
Deliberately, she left the ends and peel of the onion sitting on the cutting board as a decoy, because she knew her eyes would still be red when he got there. The boys were glued to the television, after a weekend spent mostly outdoors. They hadn’t discovered her emotional
state yet.
She hid her face in the steam that had begun to rise from the spaghetti sauce, thinking what a fool she’d been ever to consider Suzy Vaughan as the impediment to her feelings for Declan. Suzy had dropped out of his life, and that had seemed like a happy-ever-after when she herself had found out about it, but she understood now that she’d been focusing on all the wrong things.
She heard the doorbell ring, which meant he really must have got in his car the moment he’d put down the phone. Josh let him in. She heard the door close, and Declan’s footsteps, and stayed hovering over her sauce, as if it might stick to the pan the second she put down the spoon.
‘Hi,’ he said behind her, and her stomach sank like a stone.
She turned. ‘Sorry to drag you over here. Nothing’s wrong. It was a tiring weekend, that’s all. I’m still worried about Sandie.’
‘Of course you are.’ He took her in his arms and gave her a huge hug, and she could have stayed there forever, wrapped in safety and warmth and care. ‘Want me to light the fire?’ he asked, after a moment.
‘Yes, then I can get dinner on the table. Will you stay once the boys are in bed?’
‘Try getting me to leave.’
Fortunately, the boys were tired. She closed Mattie and Sam’s door at eight, and Josh’s at eight-thirty, and knew she was unlikely to hear a peep out of any of them until morning. They were all sound sleepers.
Declan was waiting for her by the fire when she came back to the lounge-room. He’d put music on the CD player and made them both some tea. Unfortunately, Caroline couldn’t drink tea or coffee any more, because both drinks made her nauseous. She looked at the mug staying warm on the hearth and the man staying warm on the couch, and chose the man.
He held his arm ready to drop around her shoulders, and he was smiling as she nestled into him. ‘Fast asleep?’ he asked.
‘Any minute.’
Caroline lay against him, listening to his heartbeat, trying to find a way to begin, and neither of them spoke for several minutes. She felt him kiss and nuzzle the top of her head, and her hand found the gap between his jeans and his shirt, and she slid her fingers across his skin, thinking that maybe touching him would give her the courage she still lacked, or the fluency to say what she wanted to say in the right way.