Expecting Emily

by Clare Dowling

  “Yes, but I meant women in general –”

  “And that Eamon Clancy dumped all the responsibility onto her and that if he wanted to bury his head in the sand, then he could do it somewhere else.”

  “Now, I did not say that.” Liz had made that deduction herself, and an excellent one it was too.

  “And now she has nothing!” Pauline finished up.

  “That’s ridiculous, Mam. She has self-respect, hasn’t she?”

  “Self-respect!” Pauline wasn’t just a pre-feminist, she was a pre-pre-feminist.

  “Mam, you wouldn’t want her to stay with someone who couldn’t face the music, would you? Come on. That’s no life for anyone. Or for those children either.”

  “Children! Children! And your own with no father and it not even born yet!” Pauline was almost screeching now.

  “Keep your voice down, Mam.”

  “I will not keep my voice down. Who are you to tell me to keep my voice down, you little pup? And you bandying your business all around Paulstown, like you’re someone to look up to! Mistresses and petitions and court cases! Oh, yes, I heard about that too!”

  “Stop it, Mam. Now!”

  Pauline did stop. She put her hand up to her crucifixes uselessly and let it drop again. She was crying, Emily saw. That generally tended to happen when you’ve spent your whole life toeing the line and the shit still hits the fan. Emily finally had something in common with her mother.

  “It’ll be all right, Mam.”

  “How can it be all right?” Pauline cried. “Two of you with broken marriages, six grandchildren deprived of good, stable homes.”

  “With cowboys and adulterers,” Emily said.

  “Nobody would have noticed if you hadn’t gone poking your nose in!” Pauline bawled inconsolably. “I only ever wanted the two of you to be happy.”

  “Were you happy? With Dad?”

  “Don’t try that with me, Missy. Who are you now, Dr Anthony Clare?”

  “Were you, Mam?”

  “Your father was the most inoffensive man God ever put on this earth! You couldn’t dislike him!” Pauline shouted, with the air of one who had spent many years desperately trying, but had given up and spent her life with a man she merely liked. Pauline cried harder now at the waste of it all.

  Emily let her. She didn’t feel particularly good about reducing her mother to tears. But anybody who lived life by a collection of hoary old sayings would some day get a rude awakening.

  Pauline eventually looked up, red-eyed.

  “I suppose you have it all worked out. You’ll get that solicitor’s office of yours to file for a divorce and get maintenance for that child, and you’ll be as happy as Larry.”

  “I thought you wanted me to be happy?”

  Pauline just didn’t want to believe that people could be happy outside the system. If that was the case, what had she been going to Mass for all these years, and attending the funerals of crusty old feckers that she didn’t even know? Her reward was supposed to be at the end of it all, and now here was Emily sitting up and telling her that all her little insurance polices were null and void.

  She looked a bit bitter now. “I hope you can explain yourself to that child inside you.”

  “I’ll certainly do my best,” Emily said.

  Pauline had one more crack. “He’s not a bad man, you know,” she said defiantly. “Conor. I don’t care what you say, he’s not a bad man.”

  “He certainly isn’t,” Emily agreed, peeving Pauline further. “And I’m not filing for divorce.”

  That really took the biscuit, Pauline thought darkly. She goes and smashes everybody else’s comfy little world for them, and then goes back to exactly that herself! Talk about the cat that got the cream!

  Pauline drove home in the darkness in a rage, forcing three cars, a truck and a tractor to drive up into the ditch.

  Ever since LKR’s evening news bulletin, the nurses’ station outside Brenda’s Ward had been a hotbed of intrigue and gossip.

  “Go home, Christine,” Vera commanded.

  “I will not.”

  “And you too, Darren. Your shift finished three hours ago.”

  “So did yours,” Darren retaliated.

  Nobody would go home. They were all waiting to see what would happen next. Apparently there had been an emergency meeting of the hospital board an hour ago. Someone said that a legal team from the Health Board had shown up too. But nobody told the nurses anything, as usual. They didn’t care. Weren’t they a mere thirty yards from the centre of all the attention, and she sitting up in bed in Brenda’s ward playing cards? For once, the nurses had got it from the horse’s mouth.

  “Isn’t it delicious,” Christine sighed. “I’ve never been part of a court case before.”

  “You’re not part of it,” Karen said. “It’s Emily Collins’ case.”

  “It involves the whole hospital,”Vera said diplomatically. “I think we can all consider ourselves involved.”

  This was just like ER, Christine thought, Ibiza all but forgotten. Maybe she would be called to give evidence. Wouldn’t that be something?

  “Right, girls and boys,” Vera commanded. “Empty your pockets.”

  “What?”

  “This is going to cost money. And, as we’re agreed that we’re involved, we should contribute.”

  “Oh.” Christine wasn’t sure she wanted to be that involved. But she stumped up five pounds anyway. Darren only had two pounds fifty on him. Karen wondered if she could get a sub, otherwise her contribution would be a bus ticket and a half-eaten packet of Polos.

  “Right, well, thanks anyway,” Vera sighed. She would put in fifty quid herself. It was the very least she could do for Emily Collins – that and bring her extra cups of tea and bonus diuretics. Emily had had her blood pressure read four times in the last hour too, and a thermometer had been popped into her mouth every time she drew breath. Everybody was taking extra good care of their champion. Nothing could be allowed to happen to her. At least not on their shift.

  “She’s being very cool about it all, isn’t she?” Darren said, and they all peered in the door of Brenda’s ward at Emily Collins. Maggie and Dee and the rest were perched on the end of Emily’s bed. Bridge, again.

  “She’s that type,” Christine said. “She’s a solicitor. She probably files court cases every morning before breakfast.”

  Only Vera could see Emily’s fear. It wasn’t belligerence or a need for attention or even a huge belief in Martha’s that was driving her now, but personal factors that Vera could not even guess at.

  Not that Vera was overly concerned. She wouldn’t mind if Emily Collins was in this purely for compensation. Let her have it. The important thing was that this closure would not go unchallenged.

  Here came Conor Collins now, walking towards them with two bags. He nodded at them all curtly and went into Brenda’s Ward.

  “I think he’s gorgeous,” Karen offered.

  “So do I,” Darren agreed.

  “He’s after having an affair,” Christine said airily.

  “What?”

  “Someone was saying it in Milo’s. With another opera singer, apparently.”

  Vera looked up sharply. “Since when did we go discussing patients’ private business?”

  Well, all the time, actually. But the girls and Darren knew when not to cross Vera.

  “Now. Everybody who is not on shift is to go home this instant,” Vera ordered. Herself included. She wanted to see whether the national media was picking any of this up.

  “Will we go to Dublin tomorrow?” Darren asked impulsively. “And sit in the High Court?”

  “Let’s!” squealed Christine.

  “We are all down for shifts in the morning. Nobody is going to Dublin,” Vera said sternly.

  Conor peered at the piece of toilet paper Emily had handed him.

  “What does ‘posset’ mean?”

  “Posset?” Emily peered too.

  “It sounds like a
small animal.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing to do with animals.” Emily was quite definite about that. She searched through more of the shiny, hard toilet paper upon which she’d made notes at Angela’s class. “Oh, here! It’s when a baby pukes up some of its milk. Apparently, that’s the baby’s way of sorting out an over-full stomach.”

  “No Rennies then,” Conor said.

  Emily laughed. It sounded a bit incongruous. She stopped. “Where were you all day, Conor?”

  Conor did not tell her he’d been to Cork. He couldn’t. “I just had a few things to do.” He looked at her. “As indeed you had yourself.”

  “Yes,” Emily said. She didn’t make any further explanation, just looked at him a bit defiantly.

  “You’ve taken on a lot there,” Conor just said.

  “I know, but Neasa will be doing most of the work,” Emily said. She gave a little defensive laugh. “I just have to pay for it.”

  She waited for Conor to say something very practical and very sensible, and therefore very soul-destroying. Reason was anathema to the idealism of sit-ins and court campaigns.

  “Well, do what you have to do,” he said. “You will anyway, whether I agree with you or not.”

  “I did try to ring you, Conor,” Emily said, feeling very guilty now.

  “After the event. Oh, look, it doesn’t matter, Emily.”

  He could not let her see just how much it mattered. Instead he went on quickly, “I’m moving out.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Out of the house. I’m going to rent out on the Cork Road. It’s just two miles from home – obviously I want to be near to you and the baby when you get out of hospital.”

  Emily was totally shocked. She had not seen this one coming. Somehow she had thought that it would be her call.

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because things are wrong, Emily. You’re not happy. I’m not happy. What’s the point in bringing a child home to that?”

  Emily’s face felt a bit numb. He had organised all this and she hadn’t even made any decisions yet! How could he have swung so quickly from wanting to move on to wanting to move out?

  “I’m not even in the house – why can’t you stay there for the moment?” she asked, hoping it didn’t sound too desperate. This was too sudden, too severe.

  Conor shook his head impatiently. “That’s just a half-measure. And I’m sick of half-measures.”

  “So what are you saying. You’re leaving me? It’s over?”

  “Sorry, I don’t think I’ve made myself clear. I want us to start again, Emily. Independent of the baby. That’s why I’m moving out.”

  He seemed very definite about this and Emily would do no more pleading with him to stay. She wondered how or when the tables had turned.

  “So what are we going to do, draw up a little roster of times when you’ll come by and see the baby?” She sounded a bit brittle.

  “I certainly want to do more than just see the baby,” Conor said. “Just because I won’t live there doesn’t mean I’m not going to get involved in looking after it.”

  “Very noble,” Emily said. “And what about me? Do I figure in this at all?”

  “Well, we’d have to work something out there too. If you want to.”

  “You mean, like, we’d meet up for dates? Oh, Conor, please!”

  “You were the one who said the problems went right back,” he pointed out. “So maybe we need to do the same.”

  “I think you’re being very simplistic,” she said. “We can’t make it all candlelight and roses again, Conor, however much we want to! That time has gone!”

  “I never mentioned candlelight and roses.”

  “But you think it can all be worked out by you running off.”

  “I am not running off.”

  “You are! Like you always do! Only this time you’re actually moving out as well!”

  Conor looked a bit tired. “I don’t blame you for thinking that. But that’s not what I’m doing, Emily.”

  “Really.”

  “I’m moving out because before we know it, you’ll be home with the baby, and we’ll be too tired and stressed to think about anything else, and we’d just find some acceptable way of living together without sorting out anything really because it would just be easier.”

  Emily took this as a direct insult. “You mean I’d find it easier!”

  “I might too.”

  “But you really meant me. Well, let me tell you, my days of putting up with the second-rate are well and truly over!”

  She hoped that this sounded very decisive and dramatic.

  “Good,” Conor said. “That goes for both of us.”

  So now he thought she was second-rate? It was a wonder he didn’t piss off to Australia or somewhere.

  “There’s a pair of us in it, Emily.”

  “No, there is not. I didn’t try and solve the problems by having an affair.”

  Conor gave a small sigh. “You see, this is what I mean. You’re still angry. I’m still feeling guilty. There’re all these feelings going around that are not going to be resolved while the baby possets in the background.”

  He had a point and she hated him for it.

  “What are we going to do, hire a baby-sitter while we go off and discuss feelings?”

  “That’s obviously something we’ll have to think about.”

  “They don’t grow on trees, you know!” She flung herself back in the bed and looked at him belligerently. “And you’re not a bit frightened that once we start living apart, we’ll find that we like it better?”

  “That’s a possibility,” Conor said.

  “And it’s a risk you’re prepared to take?”

  “Yes,” he agreed, annoying her further.

  She would not let him see her own anxiety. “Are you sure now that you wouldn’t like an open relationship while we’re at it?”

  “Oh, Emily.”

  “Mind you, I don’t know where I’d get time for other men, what with trying to keep a newborn alive, having meaningful discussions with you, and finding my waist again. All on my own!”

  “You won’t be on your own.”

  “I will be! You’ve just said it! You’re leaving me to cope on my own!” She blinked a bit fast. “Look, this is stupid idea, Conor! I need you back in the house when I come home!”

  She had laid herself on the line. Conor said nothing for ages.

  “For practical things, Emily. That’s all.”

  “Yes, for practical things!” She didn’t want to get beyond this, she hadn’t sorted out her own feelings yet. “They’re legitimate enough when I’m about to have a baby!”

  “Okay,” Conor said. “If that’s what you want.”

  “It is,” she said, less sure at his sudden capitulation.

  “And neither of us will ever know whether we stayed together for any other reason except practicalities,” he finished.

  There had to be a catch of course. Blast him anyway for being one step ahead. Emily tried to fight it, but hadn’t she already come to this impasse herself? Whether they loved each other enough at the end of the day?

  “Oh, go then!” she said.

  He told her that he would be moving out the day after tomorrow. Then he asked when he might come in and see her again. Like he was making a confounded date! Like this whole ridiculous nonsense had already started! Emily had presented him with the back of her head and he had left.

  She seethed for ten minutes and then it came to her. Of course! It was so obvious! He was calling her bluff! By declaring that he was moving out, he was hoping to make her all jittery and insecure, fearful that she would actually lose him unless she proclaimed her undying love for him and that really, everything was fine and she’d only been pulling his leg about being unhappy. It was the oldest trick in the book!

  The trouble was, Conor wasn’t one for calling anybody’s bluff. He couldn’t even pull off a simple joke with any aplomb. He always ended up letting the punchline sli
p halfway through.

  He really was going to move out.

  Emily felt angry again. How come he had ended up in the driving seat? She’d love to be able to announce she was moving out! She still might! Why not? Why should she sit around the house waiting for a visit from him? With the added confusion of whether he’d come to see her or the baby? She’d be a nervous wreck!

  Deep inside was an insidious feeling of relief. She could go home when all this was over and not be hurled into more drama. She would have enough of that, what with sterilising bottles and changing nappies. No, let him move out! She needed her ‘space’ too!