Expecting Emily

by Clare Dowling

  “I take it you don’t want to know the sex?” Mr Chapman enquired.

  Emily was a bit torn. Part of her would love to know. She felt very strongly recently that it was a girl, even though they’d bought all yellow Babygros in case she was wrong. But she wasn’t. A mother knew these things.

  “I don’t want to know,” Conor said quite definitely.

  “I suppose not,” Emily said.

  “Best to keep it a surprise,” Mr Chapman agreed, manoeuvring carefully over Emily’s greased belly. It would be just his luck to inadvertently reveal the baby’s genitals. It was a boy in any case.

  Now he was concentrating on the placenta. As far as he could see, everything was intact. Good. They would be able to leave the baby alone for a while longer.

  He snapped off the monitor and checked his watch. If he left now he would make it back in time to talk to Marion Spencer in Cork. She would know all there was to know about adoption. He wanted to be able to offer as many options as he could to Henry Maher and his daughter Andrea. But he knew that he might as well be talking to the wall.

  His disillusionment wrapped itself around him now familiarly.

  “What do you think?”

  “What? Oh, sorry.” There was Emily Collins, eager for information about her baby. He gave himself a little shake and put on his professional face.

  “We’re not looking at a section right now,” he declared. “If there’s more bleeding, I’ll have to reconsider.” He busied himself with her chart, adding as an afterthought, “The medical term for the bleeding is antepartum haemorrhage.”

  “Yes, I know,” Emily said.

  “Oh. Right.”

  He had been prepared to leave it at that. That was all most people wanted to know anyway. The minute you started to get into unpronounceable names, they backed off. But she was waiting.

  “Well, you see, there are three reasons why there might be blood.”

  “Yes,” Emily agreed again. “But they’re quite rare, aren’t they? When the placenta starts peeling away and that kind of thing?”

  Those nurses must have been filling her in. Half of them believed they knew more than the doctors. “Ah, yes, but that’s only one reason. The other reason is when the placenta is positioned low. Which yours isn’t.”

  “That’s right,” Emily said encouragingly, and Mr Chapman had the bizarre feeling that he was a medical student again and that she was putting him through his paces.

  “The third reason is that the blood mightn’t be placental at all, but has come from a urinary tract infection. Which you don’t have.” He went on fast before she could get her spoke in again. “So I’m inclined to think it’s none of these things, and that in fact it was simply the loss of the mucus plug that often happens after the thirty-sixth week and which is perfectly normal.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Emily said with relief. When Conor had brought in her clean clothes, she’d had him bring all the medical books in too and had read them cover to cover, even the boring technical bits. And it was very interesting really, all that was happening to her body. She felt much less afraid now that she knew exactly what to expect. She wished she had read much more after the miscarriage. It would have helped to know that there were medical explanations, and she would have felt less like it was all her own fault.

  “Anything else you’d like to know?” Mr Chapman asked warily.

  “No, no, that’s fine, thanks.”

  He was relieved. Some of these people read so much that they became self-styled experts in their own condition. Not that Mr Chapman was against information. He was just against too much information in the hands of lay people.

  He put away his bifocals. “So we’ll leave the baby where he is.” Damn. “Or she, of course. I always call babies him.” Shit. Now he was a sexist. He cleared his throat loudly. “We’ll be moving you to Cork at some point today or tomorrow.”

  Best to have Emily Collins where he could see her, for a number of reasons.

  “Oh,” Emily said. For some reason she thought that Cork would never happen. She felt safe here in Martha’s. She knew all the staff. She trusted them.

  “Martha’s is closing on Monday week anyway,” Mr Chapman said crisply. He shot her a look to let her know that he was on to her and her petitions.

  “Will you be there for the caesarean?” Conor finally spoke and Mr Chapman jumped. He’d forgotten all about the husband. Jesus, was he a solicitor too?

  “I never said there would definitely be a section,” Mr Chapman said quickly. “It’s just a possibility. There is no reason why this shouldn’t be a natural birth.”

  “The delivery then, whatever. Will you be there?”

  Mr Chapman was neither contractually or legally obliged to be there for Emily Collins’ labour, even though she was paying him as a private patient. Most times he did attend the labour of his private patients, of course, but there were some instances where he could not. If he were sick, for example; if he were delivering another baby; if he had family circumstances or if he were on holiday. There was any number of reasons why he did not attend births.

  But he knew that if Emily Collins were to go into labour at four o’clock in the morning on the top of a mountain, he would feel obliged to be there.

  “Yes,” he said heavily.

  Emily and Conor did not go back to Brenda’s Ward. Instead, Emily led the way to the visitors’ room. She switched on lights and the heater, and closed the door. She wished now that she had not been so excited and vocal during the scan. She felt as though she had given something away. She resented him again, for robbing her of some of the joy of their baby.

  Choosing a seat was a minefield. If she sat opposite, it would look like she was going to attack him. Side-by-side was out. In the end she chose a chair at a right angle to him, with a large, shabby armchair between them as a buffer.

  She resisted the urge to fill the silence with words. It was such an effort that she had a pain in her throat.

  “So, Cork today,” Conor said, as a fairly harmless opener.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “I need the baby’s bag. And my own bag.”

  “Of course.” He nodded vigorously. “I’ll bring them in straightaway.”

  “Tomorrow or the next day will do. If you want to come and see me in Cork.” She didn’t want to encourage a flood of visits until they knew where they stood.

  “If that’s what you want.”

  He didn’t go on any more about practicalities. Instead he looked at her directly.

  “How have you been?”

  “All right, I suppose.”

  Conor himself didn’t look too rough at all, she suddenly noted. Not thinner or older or paler. In fact, he looked a bit too healthy and bright-eyed for someone who should have been sitting at home applying a rod to his own back. His fingers were tapping his knees in some silent tune, and she felt obliged to say, “How’s the job search going?”

  “Oh, I’ve got some weekend work in Baccaro’s.” Baccaro’s was a restaurant two streets away from St Martha’s. It was a very upmarket restaurant, but still a restaurant, where his music would compete for attention with penne napoletana. He must hate it. She found that she didn’t feel too sorry for him.

  He stopped tapping his fingers on his knee. It was a nervous thing, she realised. “Emily, I wish I’d never done what I did. It was awful and I’m truly sorry.”

  She said nothing.

  “But I can’t keep saying sorry.”

  “You’ve hardly said it at all,” she pointed out. “Twice, actually.”

  “Is that all?” He seemed genuinely puzzled. “I keep having these conversations with myself, you see. Well, with you. Well, not actually with you, because you’re in here . . .”

  “I know.” She’d had many imaginary conversations too. Most of them had been blue.

  He looked at her. “Do you think there’s any way we can move on?”

  “We haven’t discussed the affair yet, Conor.”


  He seemed a bit puzzled. “What do you want to know?”

  “I don’t know . . . why you did it, I suppose.”

  “Emily, it was the most stupid thing I’ve ever done in my life. I was a fool. That’s the only excuse I can give you.” He seemed to think that this was a satisfactory response.

  “Come on. Surely there was more to it than that, Conor?”

  “Look, do we really need to go backwards here? It’s history.”

  He was making her feel unreasonable. But she persisted anyway. “I really feel I need to know what happened.”

  He shrugged. “We were going through a rough patch. You and me. I gave into temptation. It was stupid. Simple as that.”

  She saw that she was not going to get anywhere. Perhaps he hadn’t figured it out for himself yet.

  “I want to put all that stuff behind us and make a fresh start here, Emily.” At least he’d declared his intentions. “What do you say?”

  She looked at her slippers. The bunny ears were sagging sadly from all the wear and tear.

  “I don’t know. I feel now that I wasn’t getting what I wanted from us. I wasn’t happy, Conor.” She felt she’d hurt him more with this statement than she’d been hurt by the affair. It wasn’t intended for that purpose.

  “Well, at least you’re being honest,” he said, after clearing his throat.

  “We have to be, Conor.”

  “It’s the talking thing, isn’t it,” he said. “I can go to lessons, you know.”

  She realised that he was having a little joke, and was amazed at his audacity. Then she found herself smiling. His dry humour had always appealed to her. She didn’t go so far as to joke back, though.

  “We don’t seem to connect any more,” she said. “Not really.”

  A small silence followed this. Conor eventually looked up.

  “We did once.”

  “I suppose we did. But everybody makes the effort when they’re dating.”

  “The whole thing didn’t collapse the moment we walked up the aisle,” he said.

  “Well, no, of course it didn’t. It was more like a dry rot.”

  “It was the miscarriage, Emily.”

  “No, it was earlier than that.”

  He seemed quite annoyed. “You can’t negate our whole past because I had an affair.”

  “I’m not negating it.”

  “You are. You make it sound like you were suffering in silence for years.”

  “Conor!”

  “What, can I not have an opinion because I’m the one who had the affair? And martyred you even more?”

  Emily was furious. “I am not a martyr!”

  “If you were so unhappy, why didn’t you say something?” Conor was red in the face now. She couldn’t remember ever seeing him like that. “Why are you telling me now that you were unhappy, making me feel like a fool?”

  He felt like a fool? Emily was so angry that she could hardly speak.

  “I didn’t know I was unhappy!”

  “What do you mean, you didn’t know?”

  She was momentarily blind-sided. “I did know, I . . .”

  “But you just didn’t want to say anything about it? You expect me to understand your unhappiness by osmosis?”

  This was shockingly unfair. “You’re my husband! If you’d bothered to open your eyes every once in a while, you might have seen!”

  “No, Emily,” he blurted. “Take some responsibility for once in your life.”

  “What?” She stared at him, round-eyed. “I’m sick of taking responsibility! I take responsibility for every bloody thing that ever happens within a ten-mile radius of me!”

  “But not for your own happiness! You blame me instead!”

  She stood up and left. Just like that. She slammed the door behind her – she, who had never slammed a door in her life.

  Her slippers slapped loudly and violently against the polished floors of Martha’s. She didn’t ever want to see him again, ever ever ever! Who was he to sit there and dissect her, to batter her already ailing self-esteem? But that was typical of men who had affairs, wasn’t it? To blame the wife. ‘Oh, the pressure she put me under! Couldn’t keep that one happy. I might as well go off and shag someone else. Someone easier.’ He could talk about responsibility? He couldn’t even take responsibility for his own actions!

  She slowed down. She had to: she was out of breath. The baby’s weight pressed heavily down on her, dragging her, and she wished fiercely that all of this was over.

  “You’re looking well,” Neasa said.

  “You’re not. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I just meant you look tired.”

  “Oh.” Neasa wasn’t a bit pleased. She and Gary hadn’t even had sex last night. She watched as Emily turned over in the bed.

  “God, you’re huge now,” she observed. She might look tired, but she would never let herself get into that state. “Mind you, I’ve seen your ankles worse.”

  Emily seemed to be looking at some point over Neasa’s head. She wasn’t herself, Neasa knew.

  “Has someone been saying bad things to you?” she enquired suspiciously. That Conor yoke had been in. Neasa knew, because she’d seen his car in the car park. Since this whole thing began, Neasa had only met him once. They’d run into each other in the chemist’s, where Neasa had been buying a bumper pack of condoms. Conor had been buying maternity pads. She had contented herself with a ‘Ha!’ before walking out.

  “No, no,” Emily said.

  Things had been a bit tense since Neasa had accused Emily of letting Conor walk all over her. Neasa had regretted her words afterwards. She’d meant them, of course, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t regret them.

  “How’s Gary?” Emily enquired, not giving a thing away.

  “Oh, great! Fine. Not a bother.” Two could play at that game.

  “What’s wrong, Neasa.”

  “There’s nothing wrong. Oh, how do you always know when something is wrong!”

  “Except in my own case,” Emily pointed out.

  “That’s true,” Neasa said. Her lower lip quivered. “It’s horrible! It’s not that Gary and I aren’t in love – we are. But somehow it’s gone a bit funny and forced.”

  Emily listened sympathetically. She’d been down this road many times before with Neasa.

  “Has he done something?” she asked, bracing herself. Still, nothing could be worse than the cross-dresser.

  “That’s the whole point – he hasn’t! He’s being as good as gold. He even came back from the pub at lunchtime after one pint. One pint! He said it was because he missed me.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know!” Neasa wailed.

  Emily sort of did, by looking at Neasa’s hair. It was in an elaborate French plait. It looked terrifically sexy and must have taken her a good hour this morning to do. This was on top of the immaculate make-up job, the buffed nails, the polished shoes and the matching underwear. Neasa was the only woman Emily knew whose bra and knickers always matched. Things must be bad if she was resorting to French plaits.

  “Maybe you need to relax a bit more with each other,” she suggested.

  Neasa thought this was a bit rich coming from someone whose husband had recently strayed. There was relaxing, and there was letting things go to the dogs altogether.

  “I refuse to let romance die,” she declared proudly.

  “Indeed, and we could all take lessons from that,” Emily said. “But maybe you’re afraid of looking past that in case . . .” Well, in case she discovered that Gary was horrible. “In case you mightn’t be all that suited.”

  Neasa said up straighter. “We are. He’s exactly what I want in a man.”

  Not ‘I love him’, or ‘I’d die without him’.

  “I don’t want to state the obvious, Neasa, but none of them are perfect. Neither are any of us.”

  “Speak for yourself.” She sighed deeply. “And now there’s this dinner thing on Friday.”

  “Oh, y
es.” Once upon a time, Emily would have gnashed her teeth in anguish at the thoughts of Gary O’Reilly sitting at the partners’ dinner when it should have been her. Now she just felt sorry for him.

  “Gary’s afraid that if he doesn’t produce someone, they’ll think he’s gay. He’d be very upset.”

  Emily imagined that gay people would be more upset.

  “Why don’t you want to go?”

  “My private life is my own.” Well, it was. She didn’t understand why Gary had such a bee in his bonnet about making it ‘official’. It was like some kind of rite of passage for him. The car, the two mortgages, the partnership, the public girlfriend.