Expecting Emily

by Clare Dowling

  “It was Mary.”

  His knuckles were white on the steering wheel, but he didn’t say anything more. He offered no bluster or excuses. And he didn’t look relieved that it was finally out in the open, either. She’d have slapped his face for him if he had.

  They sat like that for a while. Emily was dry-eyed, cold. Somehow she had thought that it would be different. She had anticipated some emotional release, a catharsis of sorts. Not this dry, barren silence that was more frightening.

  “Conor, have you nothing at all to say?” she said at last. “Am I to sit here and drag it out of you bit by bit? Like I always bloody do?”

  “Sorry.” He seemed at a loss. “I just figured the gory details wouldn’t make you feel any better.”

  She looked at him, askance. “Don’t you dare try to tell me how I feel.”

  “What do want me to do? Sit here and fling platitudes at you, Emily?”

  “Platitudes would be something! Platitudes would be a start!”

  He sat up a bit straighter. “I can tell you that it wasn’t an important relationship, which it wasn’t. I can tell you that I’m desperately sorry, which I am. I can assure you that it won’t happen again, which it won’t.” He looked at her. “But I figured those were easy words to say right now, Emily.”

  His rationale made Emily angrier than she had ever been in her life. “So you just thought you’d say nothing at all?”

  He buried his face in his hands. “Look, I know how much I’ve hurt you.”

  “You don’t. By God, you don’t.”

  “I’m sorry, Emily. I’m so sorry.”

  “So why did you do it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? It just happened? One of those things?”

  “No, of course not . . .”

  “I’m sorry if this analysis is upsetting you, Conor. I know how much you hate unnecessary chatter, but I find it quite important.”

  She stopped. It was just the same old pattern endlessly repeating itself, even with the topic and the emotions involved spiced up a bit. They might as well have been discussing Mrs Conlon-next-door’s kitchen extension. ‘But they won’t pass it in planning permission, will they, Conor?’ ‘I don’t know, Emily.’ ‘But she can’t build in our garden, Conor!’ ‘Let’s just wait and see.’ And on and on and on.

  The taxi driver got into the car next to theirs. He nodded and waved enthusiastically at Emily. She tried to ignore him.

  “Who’s he?” Conor asked.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  The taxi driver reversed out. Emily looked at Conor, her face detached. It wasn’t a show. She felt right now that the two of them were so far from understanding each other that they might as well be on different planets.

  “I’m worried about the baby,” she said.

  “I am too. I’m sorry you had to find out now. It doesn’t help.”

  “Indeed.” She looked at the dashboard. Had Mary been in this car? Of course she had. She must have been. “I’d like to keep the upset to a minimum. For my own sake too.”

  “Of course.”

  “So . . . there isn’t anything more I should know, is there?”

  “No.”

  “Mary Murphy’s not pregnant too, by any chance?”

  “Emily. Please.”

  “Well, let’s be thankful for small mercies. It would just be too ironic if you had to visit two wards at the same time. Not to mention the maintenance payments.”

  Conor shifted unhappily. Now that she had her pound of flesh, Emily decided to call it a day.

  “I think you should go home now, Conor, before we both say things we’d regret. I’ll ring you, of course, and let you know what Mr Chapman says.”

  “Do you want me to move out?” he asked quietly.

  “Why?”

  She saw that she had surprised him, perhaps for the first time in years. Oh dear. Things were worse than she’d thought.

  “Well, I suppose because you couldn’t bear the sight of me,” he offered.

  “Not right now,” she agreed. “But I don’t have to look at you, do I? I’m in here.”

  “But you might be out today. What’ll we do then?”

  Emily felt pressure bearing down on her hard. This hadn’t figured in her confrontation scenario either. Who would have thought it was all so practical and domestic, with decisions needing to be made immediately? Decisions that somehow seemed to come down to her? Didn’t the offending party have to do anything except say they were sorry and look guilty?

  “Whatever you want, I’ll do it,” he said fervently, compounding the injustice of the situation.

  “Oh, do what you like, Conor!”

  A car eased into the space the taxi driver had vacated. She looked over and locked eyes with Mr Chapman. She rolled down her window.

  “Be in in a minute!”

  She rolled the window back up quickly before he could say anything.

  “By the way, Neasa is on to you,” she told Conor.

  “What? How . . .?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said quickly. “But just be prepared.”

  He gave a small sigh. “Right. Thanks.”

  “I’ll try and keep her away from the house, but you know what she’s like with drink on her.”

  “I’ll leave the dogs out.”

  She adjusted her bunny slippers for the trip back into the hospital, and retrieved a packet of mints she had left in the glove compartment.

  “Goodbye then,” she said formally.

  He didn’t want to leave it now. He wanted to talk. Wasn’t that just typical?

  “Emily, we’ve had six years together. We have a baby on the way. Don’t write it all off.”

  “Let’s not paper over the cracks either.”

  She saw that she had shaken him to the very core with this. Herself too. Neither of them had really entered into this discussion believing that parting was a real possibility.

  Emily got out of the car quickly and walked fast towards the front doors. She bent her head so that the smokers didn’t see her face, and slipped into the lift as Mr Chapman started to climb the stairs.

  Conor sat in the car, staring at the grey pebbledash wall in front of him until the car fogged up so much that he was looking at his own breath. He wanted to smoke but wouldn’t let himself.

  Emily had left the glove compartment open. He reached over and shut it carefully, because he had to, because he wanted to finish off an action she had started.

  She could not have meant it, could she? About it being over? Emily often threatened things in Conor’s experience, but her innate good sense and conservatism usually won out. She sometimes threatened to drown the dogs, for instance, when they dug up one of her plants in the garden. Conor had never been unduly worried for their safety. Sure enough, ten minutes later she would be cuddling them and talking about buying them water bowls with their names on them.

  But her face had been different this time. Emily was one of those people who wore their feelings on their face. You could nearly tell what she’d had for breakfast just by looking at her. There was something hard about her today, like an animal who had been kicked one time too many and had made its mind up to run away.

  He wouldn’t let her. He just wouldn’t.

  He shut his eyes tight now, trying to blank out the image of her face: that terrible, wounded look, the white pinched skin around her mouth. The shock and revulsion in her eyes. For a moment he thought he was going to be sick.

  He did not know how she had found out. Not that it mattered. He had pictured this moment for months and months now; had lived in dread of it, even though he had done his best to cover his tracks. But that was the awful thing about betrayal – you can never be sure that it will not catch up on you. A loose word here, a chance meeting there. And you do not realise this until long after the affair is over, when the guilt and fear of discovery do not abate but only grow stronger with each passing week. Conor felt that he had b
een living with a terminal illness since the day he and Ffion had broken up.

  He wondered how he had ever thought at the time that the affair was worth it, because he must have thought that. He must have weighed up the illicit excitement against the awful feelings of guilt and betrayal, and gone ahead anyway. At some point, he must have faced the possibility that Emily would find out. Or that he would tell her, which he very much wanted to do afterwards.

  But that would only have been selfish. In the end, there was nothing he could do except bury it and hope that it went away. It hadn’t and now she was talking about leaving.

  Stupid. Stupid.

  Conor did not fear being on his own. He had always been on his own anyway. He feared being on his own without Emily. He saw no contradiction in this. Without her he would be scratching about on the outskirts of civilisation with no one to help him step in.

  He remembered that day all those years ago, the very first day they’d met at a mutual friend’s wedding. He had misplaced his date for reasons he could not even remember now, and had ended up hanging around the bar on his own like the proverbial spare part. A big boisterous group had rolled in, the kind of people who always made Conor feel grey and dull. He had noticed Emily immediately, small and darkly pretty, and chatting animatedly to a big handsome fellow with a ruddy face – her own date. She hadn’t noticed Conor at all, of course, until her date had collapsed with suspected food poisoning and was carted off. Conor had approached her with the help of seven pints of Guinness. She had invited him to join her group at the bar, and he had felt like he was coming home.

  Even back then, she had talked and he had been content to listen, delighted and charmed by her, and quite unable to believe his luck. It wasn’t that no other woman fancied him. They did, lots of them, because he was good-looking, and intelligent, and his career seemed very glamorous. But he felt he didn’t have to try with Emily. There wasn’t that awful forced falseness of early dates, all that careful questioning about background and family, as though each were attempting to eliminate a psycho or hopeless case from their enquiries. Emily took him to her heart straightaway like she did every other eejit, and it all felt so right. Or maybe so easy.

  They were different, of course. They wore jokey badges: she was the expressive one, whereas he would intellectualise things. He had felt that it worked very well, in the beginning at least. They had been fond of saying that it was a classic case of opposites attracting.

  But he often thought back to that wedding in Paulstown, and the big handsome fellow with the loud laugh. He wondered what would have happened had the egg mayonnaise not been off that day. Would Emily have ended up marrying him instead?

  He wondered about these things because sometimes it seemed to him that Emily had come to him purely by virtue of luck. Luck, and his own perseverance. He was the one had done the chasing; he was the one who had put himself on offer. She’d only had to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

  In his more insecure moments, he would wonder whether she regretted her decision. It was the way she would look at him sometimes. Oddly. With disappointment?

  She never said anything. But as the years went by, those looks became more pointed and he became more defensive and guarded. She had become less bubbly anyway, and more critical in a sort of irritated way. He listened to her chatter less. It was just married life.

  He believed they would have trundled on like this, content enough, had not two things happened. Firstly, Emily had the miscarriage and everything fell apart at the seams.

  Secondly, Ffion Rivera, with whom he had become friendly, was suddenly plunged into marital difficulties of her own. Everything that followed seemed inevitable.

  The affair had not lasted long. A matter of weeks only. Conor had tried to treat it as a brief lapse, a minor fall from the straight and narrow. He blamed his own weakness rather than his own unhappiness. And with Emily pregnant again, he was gripped by a great need to make things work the second time around. He had to. He and Emily were going to be parents.

  Well, Emily was, anyway. For all his determination to become involved, his function seemed to be almost entirely to support her, the person really having the baby, if everything he had read and learned in antenatal classes was to be believed. He was forced to laugh at ‘hilarious’ jokes about men being confounded by the sight of a dirty nappy, and endure that stupid Liz’s remarks about him nipping to the pub while Emily gave birth. This wonderful opportunity to forge something new between them, to make amends to Emily for his behaviour, was whipped from him by doctors and nurses and medical books and hospitals, all of whom seemed to have a great deal more to contribute than him. Even Emily herself sought to exclude him, poking fun at his efforts to educate himself. As if he hadn’t felt foolish enough talking to the baby through her belly button.

  He went through her pregnancy feeling like this, resentful and jealous and inadequate. And the guilt was always there, poking and prodding away at him,. These were not feelings he could admit to Emily. Or to anyone. He had tried once to talk to his brother Mark about impending fatherhood. Mark had two kids himself. But Mark had only seemed embarrassed. They did not talk about feelings in their family. They never had.

  Conor reached for the key now and started the car. But why would he go home? His wife and baby were right here – if indeed either of them belonged to him in any sense any more.

  He turned off the engine anyway and sat.

  The whisper started at the general reception desk on the ground floor.

  “He’s here.”

  “Where? Here?”

  “No, he’s going up to Brenda’s Ward. Emily Whatsername.”

  “The bunny slippers?”

  “Her. Tommy-the-porter saw him arrive. In a brand new car.”

  “They always have brand new cars, don’t they?”

  “A convertible.”

  “What, in this weather?”

  “You know Tommy, it’s probably just got a sunroof. But he swears it’s new.”

  “Well! What’s he doing, a tour of the place before it closes?” This was said very bitterly.

  “No, no. It’s just to see her.”

  “What is she, a blue-blood or something?”

  “No bed for her in Cork apparently. Tommy saw them talking in the car park.”

  “What was she doing in the car park?”

  “Chatting away with him – her and the husband. Parked side-by-side, very friendly.”

  “So he knows them?”

  “I’d say she must be a relative or something. I’d better go see if the girls up in Bernadette’s know.”

  They didn’t.

  “A cabriolet. He must have had it imported. Probably from Japan or somewhere.”

  “He asked Tommy to park it.”

  “He didn’t!”

  “How else would Tommy know that it was a Japanese import with automatic gear stick and a sunroof?”

  “Must have cost a fortune.”

  “They can afford it, those consultants. I suppose she’s loaded as well. Emily.”

  “Of course she is. Look at those slippers and that tatty dressing-gown. Only the very rich dress like that. They don’t need to bother, you see.”

  “Is she from his wife’s side?”

  “I don’t know. I think she looks a bit like Chapman himself.”

  “What, have you seen him?”

  “No, just his picture in the medical magazines. But she’s the spit.”

  “The girls in Brenda’s say that she never sleeps. Just walks the corridors all the time.”

  “Weird.”

  “And as for the husband . . .”

  “What about him?”

  “Someone said that they saw him in the Cork Opera House last night.”

  “He dropped her here and went off to a concert?”

  “No, no, he was on stage.”

  “He’s an opera singer?”

  “I suppose. Didn’t bother his barney showing up last night at all. Highly strung.
”

  “Not as highly strung as her by the sounds of it.” A beat. “Did anybody tell them in Brenda’s that he’s coming up to them?”

  Nobody had. The girls in St Jude’s Ward volunteered to pass on the information. By the time Mr Chapman arrived at his destination, he was the proud new owner of a stretch sports car with a retractable roof, bonnet and wheels, which did a hundred and ten miles to the gallon and which his Japanese chauffeur drove. Emily Collins was his rich eccentric niece who had ended up in Martha’s after a fight with the ambulance men, Joe and Liam, and whose opera singer husband was recording an album and was too busy to visit.