Expecting Emily

by Clare Dowling

  “How am I going to tell Emily?” Neasa said a bit tearfully.

  “I know. Poor Emily,” Gary said quickly. “Isn’t he a right bastard?”

  “Totally.”

  Gary was cheering up immensely. “For all his airs and graces. He’s a right fucker.”

  “Yes, yes,” Neasa said. “But what about Emily?”

  Gary shook his head in a great show of disgust. “I know.”

  “I think she knows already,” Neasa said. She was feeling better now. Gary was a great comfort. Well, the important thing was to share. “But I found out that the pair of them stayed in a hotel in Germany and I’m supposed to confirm it to her.”

  Well, well, Gary thought to himself, stuck in a groove now. No seedy B & Bs for Conor Collins. A hotel in Germany, no less. He must have been very anxious to keep it quiet.

  “What do you think I should do?” Neasa prompted. “She’s seven months pregnant, Gary.”

  Gary reluctantly stopped thinking about Conor and Mary and schnitzel, and moved on to the problem of Emily. He wondered why it was that Emily Collins, whom he’d blithely ignored for years, seemed to rouse all kinds of uncomfortable feelings in him these days.

  “Can you lie?” he said bluntly.

  “No!”

  “Don’t look at me like that. You know you’ve thought about it.”

  “It doesn’t mean I’ve entertained it!” Neasa looked disgusted.

  “Then you’re going to have to tell her.”

  “What kind of a solution is that?”

  Gary sat up a bit straighter, the way he did at meetings where sales were being closed. “Look at it like this. If I were having an affair on you, and Emily found out, would you like to know?”

  Neasa didn’t like the way this argument was progressing. “But you’re not.”

  “If I were.”

  Neasa thought of the cross-dresser and the sexist and the chat-room junkie. This was a bit too close to the bone.

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “Would you like to know the truth about me?” Gary insisted.

  Jesus Christ, was he going to drop some kind of bomb on her? Was he going to reveal that not only was he having an affair, he had also been born a woman?

  Not another wacko, please God, Neasa implored. She really liked this one. “Yes! Yes, I would like to know!”

  “Even if it meant that it was over?”

  Her throat felt a bit tight. “Even if it meant it was over. I would still like to know the truth about you.”

  Gary nodded slowly. Then he slapped the table energetically. “There you go. Tell her.”

  Neasa took her first breath in minutes. Gary hadn’t been about to reveal anything unsavoury about himself after all. It was just her imagination.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes, yes,” she said, relieved. “I suppose something like this makes you think, that’s all. About your own relationship.”

  “It does,” Gary said, who hadn’t been thinking anything of the sort.

  “I mean, Conor and Emily . . . they seemed so stable and happy, didn’t they? You couldn’t imagine anything going wrong between them.”

  “You never know what goes on behind closed doors, do you,” he said sagely, putting his big, bear-like arm around her.

  She nestled into him, hating this treacherous feeling of relief that everything was great with her own relationship. But sometimes it took someone else’s unhappiness to make you appreciate what you had.

  “Let’s have that gin & tonic,” she said fervently. “Make mine a double.”

  “Can we not just hug for a minute?”

  “Of course we can.” She laid her head on his shoulder sadly. “I suppose it’s over now. The marriage.”

  “Well, you don’t know that,” Gary said.

  “He cheated on her, Gary. God Almighty! You don’t expect her to take him back, do you?”

  “Well, obviously it’s something they’ll have to talk about. And now with the baby . . .”

  Neasa drew away a bit. “I wouldn’t forgive something like that.”

  Gary laughed and kissed her hair. “That’s because you’re a tough old bird, Neasa.”

  “What?”

  “Look, what Conor did was awful, I totally agree. But, come on, at the end of the day, it was probably only a roll in the hay.”

  “So it’s not that serious?”

  “It’s an affair, Neasa. Unfortunately it happens quite a lot. But people don’t throw everything away because of it.”

  “We’ll have to agree to differ, won’t we?” Neasa said lightly. What was she getting so uptight about? People were entitled to their opinions, weren’t they? It wasn’t as though Gary had had the affair. “You’d never do something like that, would you?”

  “On you?” Gary said. “Never! I wouldn’t dare.”

  He had been joking. But Neasa looked terribly serious. “You wouldn’t want to.” Then she snuggled in again. “Anyway, I believe you because you’re perfect.”

  The trouble was. Gary was not. And he knew it, and he was worried.

  Emily rang Conor after tea. She kept the curtains pulled back so that everyone could see her. She did not want to risk getting angry. And she wanted to deny him the courtesy of talking to him in private.

  “Emily.” He picked up on the second ring.

  She did not say hello. She just told him what Mr Chapman had said in even, rehearsed tones.

  “He’s keeping me in indefinitely.”

  “Right. Well, I suppose he’s the doctor.” You couldn’t tell anything from his voice either. He must be able to hear the television in the background and know that she was ringing from the ward.

  “So, there you have it,” Emily said, trying to make her side sound normal to anyone who cared to listen.

  “Can I come in and see you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Please, Emily.”

  “No.” She hoped he wouldn’t ask again, because it was difficult to keep saying ‘no’ in this high, breezy voice.

  “Charles Crawley called around this evening,” he said eventually. “To see how you are.”

  Emily didn’t reply. It would be dangerous to start discussing trivia. Before you knew it, you were involved in entire conversations. Conor had learned that much from her, the sneaky, sly bastard.

  “I have to go now,” she said instead. “Goodnight.”

  He spoke fast. “Emily. I’ve resigned from the orchestra. Just so you know that.”

  He hung up without putting her through the charade of a public reaction.

  Emily put her mobile away and tried to sort through the confusion of her emotions. He was making her a gesture. He would not be consorting with Mary Murphy even in a professional capacity. It was a clear and forthright effort to lay the groundwork for trust again.

  She could not fail to see what this had cost him. People were hardly crying out for professional pianists. He’d given up a steady job, some good colleagues, the buzz of performing in large venues. He’d probably have to go back to playing in restaurants where he would compete for attention with pan-fried trout.

  It was too much. And too soon. Emily felt overwhelmed. She needed things to stand still for a while. Conor had lived with this much longer than she; he was at a different stage. It wasn’t fair of him to pressure her like this.

  At the same time she was desperately glad that Mary Murphy had gone from their lives. Mary Murphy, that long streak of misery, with her peculiar, starey eyes and bleached moustache.

  This wasn’t really true. Some people found her eyes quite intense, and you’d have to look closely to see the moustache. Strangely, Emily found that she had no heart for denigrating Mary Murphy. And it seemed rather fruitless to compare Mary’s physical attributes with her own – as though the affair had started purely on the basis that Mary had bigger breasts than Emily. Which she did. And longer legs. But Emily had a much better bottom and a neat little waist when she wa
sn’t pregnant. No, all in all, Emily did not feel inferior to Mary Murphy in that way.

  In fact she found that she did not care about Mary Murphy at all. Mary Murphy had not made Emily promises and broken them. It wasn’t Mary Murphy, Ffion Rivera or whatever the hell she liked to call herself, who had let Emily down. Stand up, Conor, and take a bow.

  Emily felt that she would never stop being angry with him. She couldn’t imagine it fading, like other emotions did eventually. But then again, when they had married she had felt that she would never stop being totally engrossed in him to the point of grinning foolishly every time he walked into the room. She tried to think now how long that had lasted. A good while. But you couldn’t keep that up, for heaven’s sake – all the touching and kissing and having showers with each other. You could never get the shampoo out of your hair properly in any case. No, the time naturally came to pass when they took separate showers and did not eat off each other’s forks.

  Emily felt she had been realistic on the romance front. She had assumed that it would make way for something deeper, a greater knowledge and understanding of each other. And she had believed that it had in a way. She thought she knew Conor to his predictable core.

  And now he had done this. Emily forgot about her hurt for a moment. She thought of those Saturday mornings when he played the piano, lost in some secret, passionate world from which she was excluded, and she wondered whether she had ever really known him at all.

  Obviously not. Obviously there was some part of Conor not fulfilled by their marriage. By her. Otherwise why would he have turned to Ffion Rivera? To her shock and hurt, Emily added a layer of self-doubt and defensiveness.

  Trish ambled in. She smelled of the takeaway curry her husband had brought in and which she’d just eaten in the visitors’ room.

  “Any joy?” Emily asked sympathetically.

  “No. And it was a vindaloo and everything. It brought on my youngest two.”

  The vindaloo was a last resort. They were going to induce her in the morning.

  “I suppose I’d better shave my legs,” she said, going to her locker. “It’ll take ages. They’ve not been done since the last one.”

  “It’ll all be worth it in the end,” Emily said consolingly.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Trish said with a sigh. “It was a mistake, you know. A burst condom. Blew out like a tyre.”

  Emily was mildly shocked. She wouldn’t dream of sharing such a personal detail with a stranger. Her heart always went out to those poor souls who were lured onto Jerry Springer-type shows and informed that their boyfriend was in fact their biological father. Emily fretted now as she thought about Conor’s affair getting out. She could not bear to have her personal business dissected by the staff of Crawley Dunne & O’Reilly down in Milo’s of a Friday night, or doing the rounds of the weekend dinner parties, every hushed sentence prefixed by the words ‘Poor Emily’. But these things had a way of getting out. They always did.

  She wanted to strangle Conor now for violating her privacy.

  Trish went off as Maggie arrived in, her husband Tiernan in tow. Maggie handed Emily two sheets of grubby paper stapled together.

  “I got some signatures for you,” she said.

  “Me too,” Tiernan added fervently.

  “What?”

  “The petition,” Maggie explained. “I saw it on the end of your bed. I went around Jude’s Ward. They all signed.”

  “And I got a few people as they were coming in,” Tiernan said. “At least somebody’s doing something.”

  And they looked at her expectantly, confidently. This was because Maggie had discovered during conversation that Emily was a solicitor. Further probing had revealed that Emily had sold Maggie’s brother’s house for him last year. Apparently her brother spoke very highly of Emily. “She didn’t treat us like idiots,” he had declared warmly.

  Emily looked at the petition. She didn’t need this. “It’s not mine. I mean, it wasn’t my idea.”

  “I know, but you’ll get things done,” Maggie said confidently. “Right, I’ve to go practise my breathing. Well, it’s for Tiernan, really. He always goes much too fast, don’t you, Tiernan?”

  “I do,” he said cheerfully, pulling the curtain around Maggie’s bed.

  Emily looked at the petition with its handful of signatures. Even total strangers had her marked down as the kind of person who would get the grunt work done. ‘Conscientious’, ‘Hard-working’, ‘Disciplined’ were words that had routinely appeared on her school reports. Once, her English teacher had run out of superlatives and had simply put down, ‘Emily is a Good Girl.’

  It sounded vaguely insulting now.

  Emily lunged over in the bed and scrabbled in her locker. She took out a can of Neasa’s Guinness and cracked it open. It tasted foul, warm and yeasty, but she took another slug anyway. And that was how her mother found her.

  “Hello, Mam,” she said defiantly.

  “Well, love,” Pauline Ryan said, plonking herself down on the chair, the three crucifixes around her neck rattling. “I used to drink Guinness too when I was expecting. A can every night.”

  Emily deflated and put down the Guinness.

  “How are you, Mam?” she said before she could help it.

  “All right,” Pauline said, doubtfully.

  “Liz said you had palpitations yesterday morning.”

  “I did,” Pauline confirmed. “Liz told me that you thought it was the new postman.”

  Thank you, Liz.

  “What’s this you have then?” Pauline enquired.

  “Pre-eclampsia.”

  “We didn’t have that in my day,” Pauline declared. “The big worry was high blood pressure and water retention. Oh, and protein or something in your waters.”

  “That is pre-eclampsia.”

  “Well, now, you learn something new every day,” Pauline said, delighted at being able to use another of her favourite phrases.

  Emily looked at her mother, finding it hard to believe that she was only sixty. She always thought of her as an old, old woman. Would Emily’s own child look upon Emily the same way, with a mixture of curiosity and pity? The thought was so hurtful that she sat up straighter and tried to look at her mother with new eyes.

  “What was it like for you, Mam? When you were pregnant?”

  “What?”

  “You know, did you feel tired and puffy and did the waiting kill you?”

  “I suppose.” Pauline looked unsure. “It’s such a long time ago.”

  “I know, but you must remember something. You remembered the Guinness for example.”

  “That’s true,” Pauline agreed with more spirit.

  Emily was eager now. “And what about childbirth? Don’t people say you never forget the pain of that?”

  “We didn’t have epidurals in those days, that’s for sure.”

  “Did it last long? Each labour? Was it awful?”

  Pauline looked adrift again.“I honestly can’t remember, Emily . . . I think Liz was the longest, but she was the first. You should ask her, you know. If you need to know anything. She’ll be able to tell you.”

  “I know, but I’m interested to know what it was like for you.”

  But Pauline just looked hunted. “Oh, Emily. Do you have to make such a song and dance about things?”

  Emily was terribly hurt. “Mam! When do I ever make a song and dance about things?”

  “Such a chatterbox as a child,” Pauline said with relish. “Now that I do remember. Always wanting to know things, to talk endlessly about things. Like, where did birds go to die!” She laughed.

  Emily looked at her, wondering was she finally going senile.

  “And what happened to snake’s skins when they shed them? As if you’d ever seen a snake!”

  Definitely there was something loose. Emily could not remember this person she was talking about.

  “You had us driven demented,” Pauline finished.

  “And did I ever find out?�
�� Emily enquired. “Where birds went to die?”

  “Oh, we knocked sense into you in the end,” her mother said, smiling with the satisfaction of having squashed an annoying bug.

  Emily vowed fiercely that if her child wanted to know where birds went to die, then Emily would take him or her to the woods where they would camp out in a tent for as long as it took for a bird to pop its clogs. They would go to the jungle in South America and wait for a boa constrictor to shed its skin and see what happened to it. She would, of course, organise all the necessary vaccinations first.