by Susan Napier
The little girl clapped her hands.
‘More!’
Drake obliged until there was another square of perfect towers, which he joined up with mounded walls. Kate doggedly worked on the original castle as he and his helper dug a moat and filled it with buckets of sea water.
‘I think I need to hire a decorator,’ he said to Kate, noticing her sneaking sidelong glances at the expansive grey walls. ‘Would you like to help?’ He picked up a single strand of pussy willow from the bunch of grasses she had gathered in the sand-dunes earlier and held it out to her, the delicate, pale golden catkin at the end of the stalk quivering and dancing in the gentle sea breeze.
It was too reminiscent of an extended olive branch and she opened her mouth to coldly refuse, but then she saw the girl’s innocent blue eyes, alight with eagerness, fixed on her face.
She reached out to reluctantly accept the offering.
‘I suppose I could.’ Her voice was like broken glass but the little girl listened to the words, not the jagged tone, and as Kate poked the stalk into the top of one of the new towers she began pulling her precious collection of shells from the sagging pocket of her shorts and handing them over one by one for Kate to press into the base of the walls.
Watching her crawling around on her hands and knees, Drake said with a curious edge, ‘Should you be doing that? What about your pulled muscle?’
She didn’t understand his concern. After all, he had been the one to turn his back on her grief-stricken admission. He must have realised how shocked and upset she was, how devastated by her humiliating mistake. He hadn’t cared then what she was going through.
‘The doctor gave me an anti-inflammatory. The pain relief was pretty well immediate.’
He frowned. ‘Don’t those things have harmful side-effects?’
‘I’m sure the doctor wouldn’t have prescribed it if it was dangerous,’ Kate told him tartly. ‘But if you were so worried about it perhaps you should have asked me about it at the time instead of running off like that. But then, that’s fairly typical behaviour for you, isn’t it?’
She hadn’t meant to let that slip out, but when she saw the skin tauten over his cheekbones she was glad. There was no reason now to hold back, no secret baby to protect. She was on her own.
‘Oh, yes, that’s a pretty one, isn’t it, darling?’ she said as the little girl poked a small paua shell with its pearlised blue and green interior under her nose.
‘Here, Kristin, put it in your bucket,’ said Drake, handing it over with the spade tucked inside, startling Kate with his use of the girl’s name.
‘You know who she is?’
‘Of course I do, they’re locals. Look, Kristin—your mother’s getting ready to take you back up for your tea.’
The woman whom Kate had briefly spoken to earlier had repacked her beach bag and was shaking out her towel. Seeing them looking towards her, she waved, yelled out a greeting to Drake and her thanks to Kate, and called to her daughter, who skipped off without a second glance at the result of all their hard work when she heard the words ‘spaghetti’ and ‘ice cream’ floating on the breeze.
‘There’s gratitude for you,’ murmured Drake as she got stiffly to her feet. ‘Never mind, the tide’s still on its way out and the local school kids should be getting off the bus about now. Your monument will get plenty of admiration before the sea comes back to demolish it. Here…’ He sought and found a stick from amongst the heaps of seaweed strewn along the high watermark and wrote ‘Kate and Kristin did this’ in large capitals alongside the crenellated towers.
Kate found it interesting that he had added the little girl’s name without prompting, but not his own.
‘For someone who doesn’t want any children, I’m surprised you’re so good at handling them,’ she said, unable to curb her resentment. ‘Most people who haven’t had much contact with children find it hard to relate to them.’
Herself included. She had never been interested in babies or young children until she had thought she was pregnant, then they had turned out to be the subject of a profound, and hitherto inadmissible fascination. Again she felt that deep, wrenching sorrow, the sense of loss that she had no right to feel. She began to walk quickly back along the beach towards the house.
Drake had tensed at her words. ‘In the kind of group homes I was in there are always plenty of kids coming and going.’ He shrugged, turning to follow her, easily keeping up with her swinging strides. ‘It’s supposed to be part of the “family experience” to get the teenagers to help look after the younger ones.’
His voice petered out, as if he expected her to interrupt with a question, but Kate merely quickened her pace, the breeze against her face making her eyes sting as she pulled ahead.
‘I came back, didn’t I?’ he said roughly, digging his feet into the sand to regain her shoulder. ‘That must count for something.’
‘You think?’ she said sarcastically.
‘I was only gone a couple of days.’
Eternity times two. He was very efficient at his disappearing act, though, for he had even arranged for a man in a pick-up to come and collect Prince and lock up the house. When Kate had seen that happening she had wished that falling in hate was as easy as falling in love. At least she had still had Koshka to stroke and to hold, and to lick away her tears. The little cat had slept on her bed, curled up on the turndown of the sheet, her soft motoring purr a comforting reassurance that Kate had not been left entirely alone in the world.
‘Yes, that’s quite a record turn-around for you. I thought you’d be away much longer,’ she said truthfully. ‘But I forgot that you have a work in progress. You had to come back for that—you have a lot of writing to do. And of course that always takes precedence over everything else!’ She could hear herself getting shrill and was relieved to see her front lawn. She almost broke into a run.
‘Kate—That’s not why I came back.’ He leapt up on the grass and shadowed her to the scene of her fall. ‘I only went as far as Craemar—the Marlows’ holiday place—Steve put me up there—’
‘Oh, I see, and I suppose you told him all about me,’ she said with one foot on the step. ‘Cried into your beer and gave chapter and verse on how I almost tricked you into having to behave like an ordinary human being—’
‘God, Kate, no,’ he said, snagging the sleeve of her top to hold her back, ‘it wasn’t like that—his whole family were there—’
She had thought her humiliation was complete; now she discovered there was fresh reason to cringe. ‘You mean they all know about it, now, too?’ she cried in horror.
‘I haven’t told anyone, Kate. I didn’t go there to get drunk and rave; I just needed to get away to think.’
She pulled her sleeve out of his grasp. She didn’t know what to believe any more. She didn’t trust him—or herself—to know what was really true. ‘Excuse me, I think I’m going to go inside and be sick,’ she flung at him, and rushed up the stairs, hoping that would be enough to make him think twice about harassing her with his unwanted attention.
Unfortunately her words had the opposite effect and after scarcely a moment of hesitation he charged into the house behind her, following her trail of sandy footprints right into the sanctuary of her bedroom where she had fled to shed bitter tears.
‘What are you doing in here?’ she said thickly, backing away from him, glad that she hadn’t yet succumbed to the building pressure behind her eyes.
‘You said you were going to be sick.’
Just as the doctor had predicted they would, the physical symptoms of her pregnancy had vanished, so she couldn’t blame her savage burst of fury on a hormonal mood swing.
‘And you wanted to what? Enjoy watching my misery?’
‘I thought you might need some help.’
She was infuriated by his strained gentleness. ‘You haven’t been much help so far—why start now?’
‘Calm down, Kate, it isn’t good for you to get all wrought up over trifles.
’
Trifles? Kate’s mouth fell open at his sheer gall.
He looked around the room, which was in a defiant mess very different from her normal, fastidious requirements, and frowned.
‘Are you packing?’
She recovered from her momentary speechlessness. ‘You wish! Unlike you I don’t choose to run away from my problems.’ No, she ran to them. That was her problem!
‘Then what’s all this?’ He nudged a foot against a stack of carrier bags by the door.
‘Just some things of mine I’m putting out for the rubbish.’
One of the packages slumped, spilling out books, and he bent to tuck them back in the bag, jerking upright as if he had been burnt when he saw the colourful titles.
‘You’re throwing out your books on child-care?’
She gave a bitter laugh at his fierce frown. ‘Well, I won’t need them now, will I? Do you think I should give them away to charity? Feel free to take as many as you like.’
His body took on a dangerous lean. ‘What do you mean you won’t need them, now?’ he said warily.
He wasn’t usually so obtuse. ‘Well, if I’m not going to be a parent, I don’t need to read books on how to develop good parenting skills,’ she choked.
Did he think she would want to keep the reminders of her foolishness around for next time she thought she was pregnant? She was twenty-seven, and in love with a man who had brutally rejected the very essence of her womanhood—at this rate there would never be a ‘next time’.
His wariness gave way to stark tension. ‘What are you going to do? Give the baby up for adoption?’
Kate gasped, shaking her head helplessly.
His face greyed. ‘God, you haven’t decided to go for a termination after all?’ He heeled his chest with his hand, as if massaging the flood flow through his heart. ‘Kate, you’re not thinking straight. You can’t abort your baby…you’ll never be able to live with yourself. It’s not the right decision for you—’
He didn’t know!
Kate stood frozen, inwardly reeling with shock.
He didn’t know there was no baby! She’d thought he had understood—outside the clinic when she’d told him it was all a false alarm—she had thought he’d realised that she meant the whole pregnancy. But he had obviously thought she meant the threatened miscarriage!
He still thought that she was pregnant.
And he didn’t want her to abort his baby.
No, not his…‘your baby’, he said, not ‘my baby’ or ‘our baby’. He was firmly separating mother and child from any connection with himself.
‘But it is my decision,’ she said cruelly. ‘Unless you want to go to court and fight over the right to the foetus—drag out our past, present and future for the world to gloat over…’
He flinched, but stood his ground, the muscles grinding along his jaw. ‘Kate, don’t make any decisions on the basis of the hurt and anger you’re feeling right now. Believe me, I know how badly that goes—how irrevocable some acts of bitterness can be. Every life is precious, because life is so fleeting we have to treasure it while we can…I came back because you’re important to me, and this baby doesn’t change that.’
Again, it was ‘this baby’ not ‘his’, thought Kate, growing icier with every word.
‘The fact that it was unplanned by either of us doesn’t have to be a disaster.’
So he was prepared to concede that she hadn’t tried to trap him with the oldest trick in the book. How generous!
‘I’m a wealthy man, I can set up a trust fund to support you and the baby for the rest of your lives, so there’ll be plenty of money for child-care if you want to continue your career.’
Ah, there it was, the pay-off!
‘And we can buy you a house, one with plenty of room that you won’t have to share.’ He was growing uncharacteristically nervous at her silence, speaking more quickly and persuasively. ‘It’ll be much more convenient than your town house and more private than my hotel—no need to be self-conscious if you ask me to stay overnight…’
If? That big, fat, horribly pregnant ‘if’ sent a huge chunk of fractured ice shearing off her glacial heart.
Now he was prepared to take on her and the baby, albeit stashed in an expensive love-nest somewhere? Now, when it no longer mattered! If he had once mentioned love instead of ticking off his convenient boxes she might have reacted differently, but this was too little and too late.
She marched out of the bedroom and threw open the front door in a furious gesture of repudiation.
‘Get out!’
‘Kate, I’m only trying to make you see—’
‘Get out of my house!’ She would have liked to have told him that she wanted him to never darken her door again, but as well as being horridly clichéd it would have been a lie.
He hesitated and she thought that if he pointed out that it wasn’t actually her house she would hit him, but fortunately he brushed past her, turning on the doorstep to warn her.
‘OK, I’m going—but I’m not going away, Kate. Not again. And you’re not leaving Oyster Beach, either, until we work things through. Sooner or later you and I are going to have to deal with the consequences of our actions—together, rather than individually. Our baby is as much a part of me as it is of you, because, after two years, you’re part of me…’
He couldn’t have said anything more calculated to play on her conscience.
After vowing to be honest in all her future dealings with him she had just been vindictive and cruel. She had let him go away thinking she was holding his baby hostage in her barren womb.
Kate paced the house as the sun sank lower in the sky, running her hands constantly through her hair, as if she could brush away the sticky tendrils of guilt clinging to her mind and disordering her thoughts. She couldn’t stomach the idea of food, but since her strange cravings and loathings had vanished with the baby she made herself a good, strong, black and bitter cup of instant caffeine.
Taking her coffee out to the verandah, she couldn’t help glance wistfully up at Drake’s shuttered office window. The light was on and the shutters were slanted open, a motionless black silhouette standing, staring down at her through the tilted slats, a lonely, brooding figure who sent a hot needle of pain searing through the ice encasing her emotions.
A boy who had been abandoned by his father, suffered the ultimate fatal rejection from his mother; shadowed by a teenager who had been bounced from pillar to post in foster care; shaded by a man who had never had—or permitted—anybody but a mangy dog to possess a piece of his soul. How could she condemn him to mental torture for merely being the product of his environment?
Leaving her half-finished coffee steaming on the kitchen table, Kate put a bowl of canned cat-food down for Koshka and walked around to Drake’s front door.
Her knock was answered so quickly she realised he must have seen her coming. She also realised that she was still barefooted and wearing the sandy, salty clothes she had worn to the beach whereas Drake had obviously not been brooding so hard that he hadn’t taken the time to shower and shave, and change into clean jeans and a short-sleeved white linen shirt.
‘Come in,’ he said, his deep voice quiet and inviting as he stepped back and to one side, but she didn’t move.
‘There is no baby.’ She could hardly hear herself over the thunder of her heart in her ears.
‘I beg your pardon?’ He greeted her bald announcement with a puzzled tilt of his head, as if he thought he hadn’t heard her correctly.
‘I’m not having a baby. That doctor confirmed it. I’m not pregnant. That’s what I meant when I told you it was a false alarm.’ She lifted her chin when she saw a red flare in his eyes, an instant before they turned as black as pitch. ‘So you see, you can stop worrying—there are no consequences for us to deal with after all,’ she continued in a steady monotone. ‘I just came over to tell you that—’
‘Oh, no, you didn’t,’ said Drake, grabbing her around the waist
as she turned to leave. He hauled her inside the door and slammed it shut, engaging the dead-bolt.
His arms caged her against the door on either side of her sun-flushed shoulders, his face a series of jagged angles under the flare of the overhead light in the vaulted entranceway, his velvet voice as abrasive as sandpaper in his bewilderment.
‘I don’t understand. Explain it to me, Kate. Are you saying the initial test was wrong? And that your own doctor never noticed?’
So she was forced to drag it out, to tell him all the gory, embarrassing details that had been picked over by the doctor in Whitianga, including the damning fact that she had never consulted her own doctor.
Mired in her guilt, she waited stoically for a celebratory cheer of relief, followed by a justifiable outburst of anger and contempt, but Drake’s response was so muted it could have been called a non-response.
‘So you could have been pregnant a few weeks ago, but we’ll never really know,’ he said quietly when she had mentioned the chemical pregnancy theory.
She shrugged, her bare shoulder blades rubbing against the wood of the door. ‘The doctor said that apparently around half of first pregnancies end in a miscarriage, sometimes so early that the woman doesn’t even know about it.’
‘But you knew,’ he said, dropping his arms and straightening up.
‘I thought I knew,’ she said, free to move past him into the big, unlit living area where she could safely avoid his all-seeing gaze. Someone had lit a bonfire at the far end of the beach and through the big picture windows she could see the fiery sparks leaping up into the sky, reaching out for the cool sprawl of stars that were just beginning to prick through as dusk teetered on the edge of night. ‘As it turns out I was only pretending…’
‘I’m sorry.’ His voice was soft as the night as he came up behind her.
The breath shivered out of her lungs and she wrapped her arms around herself, wishing she were one of those sparks, dancing up into nothingness. ‘Why? You never wanted the baby—’
‘Not for the baby. For you. For your loss. Because it was so much more than a pretence for you, wasn’t it, Kate? For weeks you thought you were having my baby…’