The Child Inside

by Suzanne Bugler

  ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘Sorry if I’m late.’ He puts down his umbrella, shakes it and kisses my cheek.

  ‘Do you want to go in here?’ I ask doubtfully because it seems all wrong suddenly, after the earlier intimacy of his flat, for us to be meeting here, like strangers, in such an anonymous, public place. I want him to come up with somewhere else. I want him to say, Look, there’s a little place I know nearby, much cosier; we’ll go there.

  And then, maybe, the evening would be okay.

  But he just says, ‘Yes. Sure. Might as well, now we’re here’ and walks in ahead of me, and up to the bar.

  There are just locals inside, just the few determined ones on such a foul night as this. They watch us as we order our drinks, more bored than curious, but suddenly I am self-conscious. We take our drinks and sit at a table as far away from the bar as possible, by an unlit fire. Simon has his briefcase with him; he places that, and his raincoat and his umbrella, next to him on the spare chair.

  ‘Did you come straight from work?’ I ask, stating the obvious.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Actually it was hard to get away. I didn’t get to my mother’s until nearly nine. A bit of a short visit.’

  I wonder how I could have missed him.

  But then he adds, ‘There was a huge queue for taxis at Richmond. There always is when it’s raining. I should have realized and come on the Tube.’

  He must have got to her house just before I did, then. I wonder how he would have reacted if he’d got out from his taxi and seen me there, parked up outside. Shame at the thought whispers through me, and I pick up my glass, and drink.

  And then I say, ‘How is your mother?’

  ‘Fine,’ he says automatically. Then he shrugs and quantifies, ‘As fine as she ever is.’

  ‘Did you talk to her about your plans for Easter?’ I cannot keep an edge from creeping into my voice. I want to know his plans for Easter. I want to, and yet at the same time I don’t. I really don’t.

  ‘She won’t come and visit us, if that’s what you mean. She won’t do anything, go anywhere. She just sits in that house, hiding herself away.’ He picks up his gin and tonic, pretty much downing it in two gulps. ‘Still, I expect we’ll have a better time without her.’

  We. He says, We’ll have a better time . . . Does he not realize what he is saying? It isn’t we – it’s him and his wife.

  ‘It must be hard for her,’ I say.

  ‘She makes it hard. For all of us.’

  ‘Yes, but to be constantly reminded of Vanessa—’

  ‘Look,’ Simon says, ‘I really don’t know if I want to talk about it tonight.’

  My insides tighten as though I’ve been punched.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m tired.

  And so we try to talk about other things, but there are no other things.

  I should never have suggested meeting him. I drive back to Surbiton angry with myself, angry and tearful, sobbing out my frustration in the car with no one to see, no one to hear. I’m losing him. I’m losing him and I can’t bear it; I don’t know what I’ll do, what I’ll be when this is over.

  And it will be over. It never could last.

  He’ll just get on with his life, but what will I do? How can I go back to before? How can I grow old knowing that that was it for me; my fantasy, my dream of escape, all gone?

  When we’d finished our drinks he asked if I wanted another. He asked me politely enough, but it was written all over his face that he hoped I’d say no. And so I did.

  And then he had to walk me to my car, before he walked himself back to the Tube.

  ‘I can drop you back at Richmond,’ I said. ‘Won’t that be quicker?’

  But he replied, ‘I am not very good company tonight. I think I’d better just let you go.’

  ‘When will I see you?’ And I could hear it, scratching at the edge of my voice: desperation.

  ‘Soon,’ he said – wearily? Gently? I don’t know; I could not tell. ‘I’m taking a couple of extra days off next week—’

  ‘You didn’t tell me!’ I flinch when I think how I sounded, barking at him in the street like a harridan.

  ‘I didn’t realize I had to,’ he replied. But then he must have seen my face, how hard I was trying not to cry, because he said, ‘Rachel, it’s just a couple of days. I’ll be back on Thursday.’ And maybe that would have consoled me a bit, but then he went on, ‘I just need to be with my family for a while. Can’t you understand?’

  I stood there beside my car, my throat tight, unable to answer, unable to breathe.

  ‘I’ll be back on Thursday,’ he said again. He put his hand on my arm. ‘Rachel, please.’

  Please what? Please understand? Please don’t make a fuss? Or please just let me go?

  ‘Do you want to see me?’ I managed to say.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do.’ He moved that hand on my arm. He stroked it upwards, towards my shoulder. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m very tired. And seeing my mother . . . seeing my mother upsets me.’

  He tilted his umbrella and it knocked against mine, sending the rain spilling off, a sharp downfall between us. It reminded me of the first time I met him at that restaurant in the City. Then he was the one full of doubt, not me.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ I said. ‘All this creeping around . . . it isn’t enough.’

  ‘Rachel . . .’ Now he was pleading. ‘Don’t let’s argue.’

  ‘I want to spend a night with you. A whole night.’

  ‘Rachel, you will.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When I come back,’ he said. ‘Whenever you want.’

  ‘Next Friday,’ I said.

  ‘I go home on Fridays.’ Home, he said. I go home.

  ‘Yes, but you will just have been home, for several days. And it can only be a Friday. It’s the only night I can be away, all night. That or a Saturday.’

  How tired he looked. How cornered.

  ‘But please,’ I said, turning away, and opening the door to my car, ‘don’t let me force you.’

  He grabbed my arm again. ‘Don’t let’s part like this,’ he said. ‘Next Friday . . . next Friday will be fine.’

  And I cling to that. I cling to it with open, clumsy hands, grabbing, clutching at air.

  I cling to it when Andrew, Jono and I plod our way across the Surrey fields, the three of us in walking stretched out in a line, Andrew at the front, then me, then Jono. Each of us concentrating on the walk, and the effort of keeping ourselves apart. See how we smile for the benefit of passers-by, Andrew and me. See how we smile at all those other families taking in the air and the view; those sprawling, rambling families with their uncles and aunts and cousins and dogs scattering out across the path.

  ‘So how was it this time?’ Andrew asked me when I got home the other night, and I was so upset and so distracted that I merely stared at him blankly. ‘Your class get-together,’ he said with emphasis. ‘How was it?’

  He knew I’d lied. He knew there was no class get-together. I could see it in his face, and yet I didn’t care. Whatever he thought, I just didn’t care.

  This time of year is always hardest. Easter is a time of fecundity. The sun is out now, there are buds everywhere, blossoming, bursting into life. After our walk we stop for lunch at a village pub complete with pond, a whole variety of ducks and a large white goose. The ducks have chicks, and the goose soon will have; she waddles by the water, her belly weighed low and swollen. It is warm and we sit outside. It seems that everywhere I look there are pregnant women, stripping off the disguise of their winter coats and showing themselves off. Pregnant women with glowing skin and ripe, able bodies, everywhere.

  I can’t stand it.

  Jono wanders over to the pond and starts feeding his chips to the ducks. I watch him and I am choked with tears. How sad he looks throwing chips half-heartedly at the water, such an awkward parody of his younger self. He used to love to feed the ducks. More bread! he’d squeal. More bread! He�
�d chase after them, holding a crust out in his hand, and the faster they ran, the faster he would too. And Andrew and I, how we laughed with joy as we watched him. We could never get enough of watching him; our hearts would burn with love.

  ‘That’s our son,’ Andrew says.

  ‘What?’ I am not sure I heard him right.

  ‘That’s our son,’ he says again, quietly. ‘We made him. Doesn’t that count for something?’

  I look at Andrew and he is watching me with dark, unreadable eyes. A sudden flush rushes upwards, into my face.

  ‘Of course it does,’ I say quickly, dismissively.

  I turn back to Jono now, but Andrew is still watching me. I can feel his eyes practically boring right into me, and my heartbeat picks up its pace and starts skipping inside my chest. There was a time when we could read each other’s minds, finish each other’s sentences. I remember this and try to blank all thoughts from my head.

  ‘Then where do you go when you go away from us?’

  I think this is what he says. It could have been Where did you go on Wednesday? or Where did you really go on Wednesday? I don’t know. I cannot be sure, because suddenly I feel unwell. The flush in my face turns to pins and needles, creeping its way across my head, and a wave of nausea rises up inside me. I don’t know if I am going to faint or be sick. I have to rest my head on my hands on the table and keep swallowing, keep swallowing hard. Through cotton wool I can hear Andrew saying, ‘Rachel? Rachel, are you okay?’

  Soon it passes. Soon I can raise my head again, but the sunlight is too bright, too harsh in my eyes. I feel wiped out, nauseous still.

  Andrew is still looking at me, but with concern now. Are you okay?’ he asks again.

  ‘I need to go to the loo,’ I say, and carefully, on legs that feel too weak, too feeble for good use, I make my way through the crowded tables dotted about the garden, and into the pub, to find the ladies’. Once there, I lock myself in a cubicle and sit down. My heart is thumping. An impossible, shocking suspicion is beginning to dawn on me. Another wave of nausea washes over me. I cannot, I will not think.

  At the sinks I wash my hands and pat cold water onto my neck and my cheeks. I look at myself in the mirror and my eyes stare back at me, wide and startled as a rabbit’s. I try to look normal. I try to compose myself, to brace myself to go back outside to Andrew, but I am shaking, light-headed with panic.

  I have been gone a long time. Jono and Andrew are waiting to go. Jono is sitting with his back to the table, his body slunk down in the chair and his arms folded across his chest. He scowls when he sees me and says, ‘Where’ve you been?’

  And Andrew’s concern is tempered with irritation now. ‘You were gone over ten minutes,’ he says as he fiddles with his car keys, clearly itching to go. ‘What were you doing in there?’ As if he wants details, as if he should even ask.

  His irritation sparks mine.

  ‘What do you think I was doing in there?’ I snap at him. ‘I must have a bug or something.’

  The drive home is unbearable. I feel every bump, every curve in the road. Jono is sulking, and between Andrew and I the tension is stifling. No one talks. I close my eyes and shut myself into silence, and the minute we get home I go upstairs to our bathroom and throw up.

  I was sick like this with Jono. And with . . . her.

  But I cannot think like this. It isn’t possible.

  I sit on the edge of the bath, appalled.

  How hard we tried,Andrew and I. For months and months and years and years. Screwing each other dry until every ounce of hope, every ounce of love and joy, was gone. I thought my fertile days were over. I pictured my insides withered and useless, like so many rusted old pipes. My periods came, but as irregular and unpredictable as a cruel joke, their purpose merely to taunt me. I have not had one for quite some time.

  And now this. It cannot be so. It simply cannot be so.

  TWENTY

  And yet it would appear that it is so.

  At first I try to convince myself that I am merely suffering from a bug, but for much of the time I am okay. Then all of a sudden the sickness will swoop, a fast surge of hormones, stampeding their cling to my womb. My nipples hurt. Far quicker than I could ever plan to – literally, within hours, it seems – I am losing weight.

  For the remainder of the Easter weekend I lie in my bed, or move slowly, trance-like around the house. Andrew and Jono think it is a bug. They avoid me, lest they should catch it themselves.

  What am I to do?

  The full horror doesn’t sink in. How can it sink in when I am too numb, too out of it, simply too plain shocked to think?

  Andrew goes back to work on Tuesday and there is just Jono and me, filling the hours of our days. Jono needs a haircut, and new shoes; we have the dentist to see. I stretch these trips out, planning one destination for each day, taking us to Thursday.

  I am seeing Simon on Friday. The necessity of seeing him now flashes up, marking the end of the week like a beacon. He cannot back out.

  And yet what will I say to him? Should I even say anything at all when this could all be over so soon, no more than a false alarm? I dare not think how he will react. I didn’t use contraception because I didn’t think I needed to, yet how foolish that sounds now. But look at all those that times I thought that I was pregnant before, with Andrew; all the times that I hoped, and kidded myself, only to be so cruelly disappointed. I didn’t think I could get pregnant; I thought my body was done, finished.

  I send Simon a text, a reminder. I will see you at seven-thirty, Friday, I say, and that is all I say. Oddly enough, all other words have left me.

  And more oddly still, as though he senses some crisis, he texts me back, simply, Okay.

  I tell Andrew I am staying at Janice’s. This should not seem too odd, as I have done it before, several times. We might go out for dinner, Janice and I; see a film or a play.

  And when Andrew starts to question me, to repeat my words back to me as if he hasn’t heard me right, You’re going to stay with Janice . . ., I am so fraught, so tense to the point of wrapped-up, inverted hysteria, that I snap for a second.

  ‘Yes,’ I screech at him. ‘I have been ill . . . I have been at home all week . . . Is it too much that I have a night off, a night away?’

  And he looks at me as he always looks at me when I rail at him so. He looks at me as if he loathes me.

  ‘No,’ he says, his voice as dead as fallen wood. And that is all.

  The irony is that part of me wishes I wasn’t staying with Simon for the whole night now. The idea has lost its appeal. It would suit me more, now, simply to curl up under my duvet and bury myself away. I cannot think ahead, but I cannot think what to do right now, either. If I am pregnant – and how I torment myself with the word if – the chances are that it will not hold, it will not last. It could all be over at any moment, before anyone need know. Before even I need know, for sure, if I can just keep my head blank. It is but a cluster of cells at this stage, after all. A cluster of cells that my body will, most likely, expel.

  And wouldn’t that be the best outcome? It is the only viable outcome.

  I do not want to, but I cannot stop myself thinking about my baby daughter and picturing her tiny limbs, doll-like, smooth as plastic. I picture her eyelids half-closed over blind eyes, the lashes perfectly formed. I picture her curled up inside me, her thumb in her mouth, so far grown from a mere cluster of cells, so far grown and yet so dead.

  I could not bear that to happen again.

  I arrive at Simon’s with my overnight bag at bang on seven-thirty. I am feeling tired, and queasy, and more than a little anxious. We have not made any plans as such and I don’t know what I am expecting, but when he opens the door to me he is still in his work clothes and he is on the phone.

  With his free hand he gestures at me to be silent. I stand just inside the door, with my bag at my feet.

  ‘I know,’ he says into the phone. ‘Yes. I’m on my way there now. I will, yes. I’ll cal
l you later. Bye, sweetheart.’

  Sweetheart?

  He clicks off the phone and sighs. And to me he says, ‘That was Isobel. She thinks I’m going to some law function. I told her I’d just come back to get changed. I didn’t expect her to call.’ And then he adds, ‘I hate lying to her.’

  What does he expect me to say to this? Does he expect me to sympathize with him? To apologize, even? It is not much of a greeting, and not a good start.

  ‘I don’t exactly enjoy lying, either,’ I say.

  ‘Of course not,’ Simon says quickly. ‘I’m sorry. None of this is ideal.’ And now he kisses me on the cheek politely, far too politely, and says, ‘How are you?’

  I do not reply. I walk further into the room, and automatically my eyes are drawn to the window, to the million lights brightening up the darkening city sky. I have not yet decided if I will tell him tonight that I might be pregnant. Should I tell him, when I am not even sure myself?

  There will be a thousand ponderables, a thousand things to explain. Not least of all, how could I let this happen? And what will I do about it now? A ripple of foreboding works its way down my spine. I think of Jono at home, and of Andrew. I think of my life in a multitude of small, banal and familiar details: the roughness of the carpet under my bare feet in my bedroom, the jagged edge that I have to avoid on the shelf in the airing cupboard where I keep the sheets and towels, the pocket of cold air that collects in the corner of the windowsill in the living room, causing a constant draft. I think of these things and I am swamped with sorrow.

  How did I ever think I could possibly belong here, in this transient bubble of a place, so far removed from the reality of my world? I wanted so much to be here. I wanted so much to have this one whole night.

  I cross my arms across my chest and try to suppress a shiver.

  ‘You’re cold,’ Simon says, coming over to me and putting his hands on my hips, a restrained and hesitant embrace. He looks at me closely now, alert to my mood.