It felt very bad to be discussing Mr Chapman like this, and Emily leaned in eagerly for more. It was a kind of escape.
“He heads up the maternity unit down in Cork. Did you know that?” Petra hissed.
“I didn’t.”
“Oh yes. He can’t wait for this place to close so that he can get his hands on even more women. Some people say that he was one of those lobbying hard for the closure. For his private practice, you see. We’ll all end up paying him instead of O’Mara or Dunphy.”
“No!” Emily was amazed at her capacity to still feel shock.
“I’ll tell you, it beats the hell out of brown envelopes.” Petra stubbed out her cigarette authoritatively and reached for another. “I have O’Mara this time. He’s very good, except that his hands are always cold.”
“I’ve got Dunphy,” Cathy confided to Emily. “He’s great with a needle. Stitch you up good as new.”
Emily was feeling a bit light-headed. Either it was tiredness or the second-hand smoke. “I think I might go back to bed, see if I can sleep.”
“Good idea,” Cathy said. “Although you won’t have much chance of that. The kitchen girls are setting up for breakfast now. They bang around a good bit, don’t they, Petra?”
“They do,” Petra agreed. “Did you order an egg?”
“What?” Emily was mystified.
“You’ll only get Weetabix and brown bread so. Take my advice, fill in the menu forms as a matter of priority. Otherwise they’ll just give you whatever’s handy.”
“Okay, thanks.” Emily stood. “I’ll see you around.”
“You will, girl,” Cathy said. “And come up and see the baby tomorrow. I’m in Elizabeth’s Ward – I’ll let you look after her for a few minutes.”
Who was looking after the baby now was unclear. Emily nodded and smiled some more and left.
Her own ward seemed oddly familiar and safe. She got back into bed and pulled the covers up tight around her and listened to the snoring, the crashing of breakfast utensils, the nurses’ chatter outside.
“Are you all right?” someone whispered.
It was Maggie, peering in the side of the curtain.
“Fine, thanks,” Emily whispered back.
“I’ve got half a sleeping tablet left – I could slip it to you and they’d never know.”
“You’ve very good, but I’m not allowed.”
Maggie nodded and smiled and let the curtain drop back. Emily fell asleep instantly and dreamlessly.
Neasa heard the news the next morning. Conor had phoned at the crack of dawn, after first trying Neasa’s house. But Neasa had stayed in Gary’s overnight, as she did every Monday, Wednesday and Friday night. Gary stayed at hers on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday nights. It was only fair, they assured each other. Equal. Sunday was a day of rest, which they were both secretly grateful for.
“Isn’t that just the worse luck?” Neasa said to Gary. “She must be in bits. After losing the partnership too.”
Gary shifted uneasily. He wasn’t used to this feeling of guilt. “But it’s just for observation.”
“All the same, I’ll go in. Tell them in work that I’m taking the morning off,” Neasa ordered.
“Right . . . are you sure you can take off just like that, honey?”
Neasa observed that a new note of loyalty had crept into Gary’s voice when it came to Crawley Dunne & O’Reilly.
“You’re a partner now. You can okay it,” she said, sweetly.
“Of course,” he said quickly. “Not that you’ll be taking any liberties now that I’m a partner.”
“Will I heck,” she said. “You’re as good as a sick note from the doctor.”
She left Gary at the breakfast table looking slightly worried. She wouldn’t rush straight over to Martha’s, of course. Eleven o’clock would be a perfectly acceptable hour to be by Emily’s bedside. She had time to get her roots touched up at the hairdressers’ first, and see if they had any decent make-up in the chemist. It was very high maintenance being in love, she had discovered over the years. You constantly had to be on your guard against underarm hair and wayward cuticles, not to mention bikini lines. Expensive too: all the new clothes and underwear, romantic meals out and little spur-of-the-moment presents. It would nearly be a relief to slide into domestic cosiness where chipped nail varnish was just that, not some indication of a slovenly and weak character. She might actually be able to save some money, too.
Immediately she regretted her thoughts. Imagine turning into Emily and Conor, for example! Lovely, lovely people, God knows. But like two old comfortable boots at the end of the day. Finishing each other’s sentences and forgetting to kiss each other every time they left the room! How could they have let themselves slide like that? They had been married six years, true, but that was no excuse.
Neasa and Gary had made love on the kitchen table the night before. Then they had opened a third bottle of wine and taken it into the living-room. It hadn’t occurred to either of them for an instant to turn on the television. Instead, they had talked and talked. Neasa couldn’t remember for the life of her now what they had talked about, but it had all been very deep and meaningful. Gary had actually cried at one point. Naturally, so had Neasa. Then he had puked. Neasa hadn’t been a bit offended; in fact, she had felt very tender and maternal, unusual for her, and had cradled his smelly head as he bent over the toilet.
Neasa herself never puked. She had a very strong constitution that way, even if the head was falling off her this morning. They really must buy better wine next time -you couldn’t drink three bottles of that Spanish stuff without some ill-effects. More expense.
“Do you think I should call by Conor on the way to work?” Gary enquired, having followed Neasa into the bathroom. He looked a bit green.
“What for?”
“I don’t know, to offer a bit of support or something.”
“He’s probably on his way to the hospital now,” Neasa said.
Gary was relieved. Conor didn’t like him. He never gave the slightest indication of this, but Gary just knew. He seemed to irritate him or something. And all the effort Gary made too, just because Emily was Neasa’s friend! He was just trying to be nice, for heaven’s sake. Asking Conor what it was like being a pianist and all that and even asking to see Conor’s piano. Conor had dutifully shown it to him and had pointed out the difference between the black and white keys. You’d think he was taking the mick except that he looked so serious. Gary had then tried to talk about football to him, a sure-fire safe bet. But Conor had no interest in football. He wasn’t normal in that respect. Gary secretly thought of Conor as a bit snotty and removed, content to stand on the sidelines and observe other people, and looking as though he were enjoying some private joke.
He sometimes wondered what Conor was like in bed. Oh, nothing sexual, you understand. Gary was a man’s man only in the pub, nowhere else, and anybody who suggested otherwise would get a black eye, all right? No, Gary only wondered about Conor in bed because he’d love to see him out of control for once. Abandoned and lustful and roaring, “Come get it, baby!” Gary tittered.
“What?” Neasa said.
“Nothing, sweetness.” He was applying Neasa’s cover-stick to a spot on his chin. All this drinking with Neasa was taking its toll. But apparently copious amounts of red wine went hand in hand with romance. “Just thinking how lucky we are, that’s all.”
“I know, I’ve never met anyone like you,” Neasa said fervently.
“Would a touch of powder over this be too much?” Gary wondered.
“Not at all,” Neasa said tenderly. “Although, really, you’re gorgeous enough.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“Am not!”
“Awww.” He kissed the back of her neck. Neasa sighed in bliss. She must not let this one slip through her fingers like all the others had. Not that it had been her fault, of course. None of them had turned out to be what she thought they were. Take Fintan, for examp
le; the nicest, sweetest, most romantic man you could ever hope to meet. That had lasted four heady months, until Fintan had revealed himself to be a chat-room junkie on the Internet. Then there was Michael, the secret cross-dresser. Neasa had thought that she could live with it until he confided that he would like to walk down the street just once in one of her dresses. He’d swiftly been dumped on the refuse heap along with Darren the sexist and Neil the guy who didn’t believe in washing. There had been others too, whose infractions had been less dramatic but none the less unpalatable. She always seemed to go for men who let her down in some fundamental or deeply embarrassing way.
Gary was blissfully normal. The others had started out normal too, but the cracks had appeared much sooner. Neasa had six months with Gary under her belt and it was looking good. In fact, it had never looked better. She hated to say it, because she had said it so often in the past, but this time she knew she was right: Gary was The One.
“Got to go, baby,” she said.
“All right, chicken. See for you lunch?”
“Great. Crawley’s office?”
“I suppose. Although we could just go for something to eat.”
Something to eat? They always had sex in Crawley’s office on a Wednesday because he took a half-day. “We could,” she said slowly.
Gary saw that he had displeased her but wasn’t sure why. “Crawley’s office it is,” he said easily. “I’ll buy two Mars bars.”
Neasa beamed at him. Everything was great.
Nurse V Mooney woke Emily at a quarter to eight.
“Do you work here all the time?” Emily asked. She wondered what the V stood for.
“Eight to eight, the night shift,” the nurse informed her crisply. “Now, let’s see how the blood pressure is this morning.”
It wasn’t much better from the look on her face.
“The urine came back, by the way. It’s clear.”
Some good news at last.
“So I won’t have to go to Cork?”
“No use asking me. Nobody tells us anything.” She added notes to Emily’s chart. “Mr Chapman will make the final decision. But he’s not a man to take risks with other people’s health.” She made this sound like a bit of an insult. “Now, up you get and have some breakfast. Oh, and there’s a man out there who says he’s your husband.”
“Right.”
“He’s been here since seven.” The nurse didn’t look at her. “But I thought you needed your sleep.”
She was gone before Emily could thank her. Emily got out of bed and put on her dressinggown. Then she brushed her hair back rigidly and found herself hunting for her powder to take the vulnerable shine off her nose.
She leaned against the bed heavily. What was she doing, armouring herself against her own husband? Against Conor, her plain-clothes garda, the man who couldn’t even bring himself to double-park? The very idea of Conor and Ffion, Conor and Mary, seemed ludicrous in the cold bright light of the morning.
Emily was embarrassed at her conjecture now, mortified by her emotion last night. She wouldn’t even tell Conor about this. He would be outraged by her suspicion. She would be if he thought the same about her.
But the heavy feeling in the pit of her stomach wouldn’t go away, like she had opened some Pandora’s box and would be sorry ever after.
She stepped out past the curtain and into the ward. The two other women and Maggie were sitting at a small table under the television, munching their way through Weetabix and boiled eggs. Emily hadn’t even introduced herself to them yet, and she didn’t now either. She slipped out into the corridor and found Conor sitting stiffly on a hard chair by the nurses’ station, his feet sharply drawn in for fear of tripping up anybody.
“Hi.”
“Hi yourself,” Emily said, trying out a smile.
He looked at her belly. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay, I suppose. Tired. It’s hard to sleep in here.”
He nodded. He hadn’t had much sleep either from the look of him. And he hadn’t shaved either. He came over and awkwardly embraced her. It was very public here – nurses were everywhere as the shift changed over.
“Can we go somewhere?”
Emily thought of the smokers’ room. “Not really. Just back to my bed, I suppose.”
The other women didn’t even look up as Conor arrived in. Like Emily, they had been poked and prodded and palpated throughout their pregnancies and were past embarrassment at being seen in their nighties by strange men. They’d been seen in a lot less.
Emily pulled the curtain tight around them again. It gave some small illusion of privacy.
“You have the chair,” she said.
“No, no, you must be sick of the bed, you sit in the chair.”
“Conor, take the blasted chair!”
She didn’t know who was more surprised, her or Conor.
“Sorry. This is all a bit odd. Being here, I mean.”
“I know. You should have rung me, left a message or something. Remember, we agreed that I’d check the answering service at the interval?”
“I know, I know.” Emily felt as though she had broken the rules.
“I’d have come straight up.”
“I didn’t want to worry you.”
“Oh Emily. I don’t know why you do this. Try and take everything on by yourself.”
“I know,” Emily agreed. “I should be shot really.” Oops. There she went again. She breezed on quickly. “How did the concert go?”
“What? Oh, fine, fine. Look, have you talked to Chapman?”
“No. They might be transferring me to Cork. I don’t know yet. Nobody tells the nurses here anything.”
“Neasa will be in later.”
“Why did you have to go ringing her?”
“What? She’s your friend. I thought you’d like some company, that’s all.”
He was feeling under attack. This was pointless and silly, Emily knew. And very unfair.
“I didn’t get the partnership, Conor,” she said.
“Ah.” This explained everything. He looked very sympathetic. “I’m sorry, Emily.”
“Yes. Gary got it instead.”
“Gary?” Conor’s face said it all. “Well. They’ll be sorry.”
“Maybe.” Emily was unable to shake the feeling that she was making conversation.
Conor produced a plastic bag that she hadn’t noticed before.
“I brought you some supplies. You know, 7UP and stuff. And some magazines.”
He must have stopped by the Spar that stayed open all night. A bunch of flowers stuck out the top of the bag, the ones you see in buckets outside garages.
“It was all they had,” he said apologetically. “But I wanted you to have something nice to look at in this place.”
“Oh, Conor.” She took the bag and held it tight to her chest as though it were some kind of shield, and looked at his square, handsome, confused face.
“I do love you, you know,” she said.
He looked a bit embarrassed. “Ah, I know. And I love you too.”
He got up and sat on the bed beside her and stroked her tummy, their baby. Emily laid her head on his shoulder and they sat for a while like that.
“It’s just a precaution, Emily. Chapman’s covering his ass. They’re all terrified of litigation these days.”
Emily tried to find solace in his predictability but couldn’t.
“You’ll be out today, I bet you anything. And I’ll take you home and everything will be like normal.”
“I suppose.” Reluctantly, she lifted her head off his shoulder. “Conor, I have to eat breakfast now. Then the house doctor will be around again and they’ll have to see about transferring me to Cork and all that.” She didn’t look at him. “Maybe you should go on home and get some rest.”
“I’m staying here.”
“There’s nothing you can do. I’ll ring you as soon as I know anything. I promise.”
Conor wasn’t happy at all about t
his. “I can just sit quietly in that chair – I won’t be in anybody’s way.”
“You’ll be more use at home.” Emily appealed to his practical side. “I might need more clothes and things for Cork and I’ll need you to get them for me. And people will be ringing. Someone should be at home to tell everybody that there’s no panic.”
Conor looked at her for a moment. “Okay. If that’s what you want.”
“It is,” she quickly assured him, adding brightly, “and who knows, I might be ringing in an hour’s time to ask you to come and drive me home!”
Expecting Emily Page 8