Runaways

by Carolyn McCrae

  Perhaps she was more involved than I had known.

  I wanted to ask her why she was so interested but the phone rang.

  After she had put the phone down she looked at me and said, coldly, “That was Charles. Holly has left him. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

  “Why is that anything to do with me?”

  She didn’t answer, simply fixing me with a look that showed no friendship, only contempt.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Oh shut up Charles.” Holly was not in the best of moods.

  “What have I done now?” Charles was not ready to put up with any of his wife’s petulance without fighting back.

  “You’ve done what you always do. You’ve taken the easy way out.”

  “What choice have I got? What did you want me to do?” Charles had spent most of the past five years trying to do the right thing but he had felt increasingly between a rock and a hard place. He had been drifting apart from Holly, he knew that, she spent weeks away from him without saying where she was though he knew she was with another man. He hoped he didn’t know who that man was.

  “Susannah has always had her own way, lived her own life, and left you to pick up the pieces.”

  There was some truth in what Holly said. Charles had taken some responsibility for his niece and nephews over the years, either because his sister was not well or because she chose not to have anything to do with the children she neither loved nor wanted. Josie had coped better than the boys. There had been a time when she could remember a family with a father and a mother, living together apparently happily. The boys had no such memories, their early years were spent with a nanny who could give them neither the love nor the discipline that energetic, enquiring young boys required.

  “I’ve always thought it was my job….”

  “You’ve loved it. You’ve loved visiting them and being part of their lives.”

  “Of course I have.”

  They sat in silence a few more minutes, the weight of their failure hanging over them.

  “You don’t need a child of your own do you? Not as long as you have them?” Holly began to speak the unspeakable, put into words the thoughts they both had but could never admit. “It’s never been a problem to you has it? Not having children? You’ve never bothered because you’ve always had them.”

  Charles was about to say ‘of course it matters, of course I care.’ But he knew that there was some truth in what Holly said. Their childlessness mattered much less to him than it did to Holly. He always felt responsibility for Josie, Jack, Al and Bill and had always cared for them as if they were his own.

  The one desire Holly had had when she had married Charles five years earlier was to have a baby. She had still been recovering from her disastrous marriage to Graham and a miscarriage but she had been young and the doctors all said it would be only a matter of a short wait before she was pregnant again. And there was no reason, the doctors had said, why any pregnancy should not be brought to a successful conclusion.

  Holly didn’t believe them.

  She knew she had been pregnant at least five times since then. She had been late, she had been tender, she had known she was pregnant. And then a month later she would feel the familiar, nagging pain and know she was not. Any more.

  She had gone to a doctor in Liverpool, and one in Oxford where she stayed with Linda’s brothers Crispin and Oliver, several in Cambridge where she met up with Carl, and finally one in London. They all said the same thing. There was no reason why she should not conceive and carry till full term. She was the only one who knew they were all wrong.

  Through 1977 and 1978 they had tried to have the baby she needed so much. Every month when she realised she had failed she had to get away, back to Crispin in Oxford or Carl in Cambridge. She began meeting Linda’s husband in London. With Carl she could relax, he could not father children, he was safe and it was a relief to have the pleasure without the failure. With Crispin and Ramesh she would take her chances. At least she was away from the pressure of temperature charts, and optimal positions which dictated her relationship with Charles.

  In that summer of 1976 she had been so relaxed and happy, getting to know Charles, learning to be herself and using her intelligence to earn a living. Charles had looked after her, had shown he loved her, had been supportive and caring. He had loved her and she had loved him in return.

  But love was not enough.

  For two glorious months in late spring 1980, when the sun shone and the weather was warm, she was pregnant. The doctor confirmed it, she got her National Health Service card saying she qualified for free treatment, and she had a card with her hospital appointments. She walked around Mothercare and bought orange maternity dungarees which she wore despite all her normal clothes still fitting her. She planned for her Christmas baby. She had been born on Christmas Day and she wondered whether this baby would be too.

  In the evenings she and Charles would walk to the local pub and she would sip virtuously at an orange juice as he drank his two pints of lager and they would relax with each other. Everything was right with the world. They had overcome the violent death of her mother and father; they had risen above the disaster of her marriage to Graham, his assault on her and his subsequent imprisonment. They were pregnant and they were happy through the spring of 1981, knowing that everything, at last, was turning out right.

  “He’ll be a Christmas baby, I just feel it.” Charles said one morning as they sat drinking their morning tea in bed. He leaned over and patted her stomach, still flat and trim as it had always been. He would have expected her to hold his hand and press it down on her tummy, including him in the changes that were happening to her body. He was surprised when she brushed his hand away without a word.

  They listened to the early morning radio, trying to ignore the silence between them. The view from their bed, out through the picture window across the fields to the line of bushes that marked the top of the cliffs, with the river and the hills of Wales beyond, was magnificent and one of the reasons Charles had paid so much money for the house in Caldy.

  But neither of them looked at the view that morning. Holly could not bring herself to say why she was so worried and Charles couldn’t ask.

  “More tea?” Charles broke the uncomfortable silence as the pips for eight o’clock sounded. Neither of them listened as the headlines were read about huge Conservative gains in the local elections. They should have been interested, Charles had worked hard for their local candidates having turned down the opportunity to be one himself. He had felt he couldn’t though he had been reminded by many people that his father and his grandfather had both been active in politics. ‘Maybe in a year or so’ he had said ‘the electorate likes man with a family.’.

  “Not all fucking women are mothers!’ Holly almost shouted at the radio before re-tuning the radio to a music station. “They’re always saying women shouldn’t work they should stay at home and look after their children. There are two sexes men and mothers. Women without children don’t exist. They have no reason to exist. They shouldn’t exist. They are a waste of space. They are useless.”

  Charles realised something was seriously wrong. Why would Holly be so bitter? She was about to be a mother. Wasn’t she?

  “Are you feeling sick? Can I get you anything?” He asked before he got back into bed beside her.

  “No.” she answered as if she were miles away. “No. I’m fine.”

  They sat sipping their mugs of tea, not listening to the radio, not looking out at the wonderful view, not facing up to what was worrying them both.

  Eventually Charles spoke. He had rehearsed the words many times in a few minutes. He didn’t know how to weight the words, what to say first. All he knew was that he was going to have to say something. Holly was not well.

  “You’re not all right are you?” he eventually heard himself saying.

  Holly didn’t answer.

  “Holly. Please, darling, what’s wrong? I know something is.
”

  Holly put her mug down carefully on the bedside table without speaking.

  As she turned to face him he realised for the first time that there were tear streaks down her cheeks.

  She didn’t speak, she simply pushed the bedclothes away from her and he saw that she was lying in a pool of red.

  He went to put his arms around her but she shrugged him away. She just sat looking at him, tears running slowly down her cheeks, and he realised that things would never be the same again.

  It was over an hour before she let him move her. He led her into the bathroom and gently took off her tee-shirt, handing her into the shower. She didn’t say a word as she stood under the sharp spray turning her face to the fierce jets.

  Charles tried not to think what she was feeling. He was grieving too, but he knew his pain couldn’t be the same as Holly’s.

  He didn’t want to leave her so he sat on the side of the bath and watched her through the shower screen. She didn’t move, she just stood in the water jet, the pink water swirling around her feet.

  It was at least ten minutes before she suddenly crumpled, her hands wrapped around her stomach, into a heap on the shower floor. Charles was with her in seconds, feeling the convulsions in her body. He didn’t know whether they were pain or sorrow until he heard the whelp she gave as he touched her.

  He should have called an ambulance earlier. Holly had been three months pregnant. She was miscarrying. She needed a doctor. He hadn’t been thinking of her, only of his own loss.

  “We’ve cleaned her out and there’s no infection.” The doctor told him showing no understanding or tact. “She’ll be ready to try again in a few weeks. Just leave her alone for a month or two.”

  “But this isn’t the first time…” Charles wanted to hear more than platitudes. “Is there an underlying problem of some kind?” If the Doctor wasn’t going to be professional he was going to try.

  “Oh I doubt it.” The doctor replied, not looking at Charles, but seemingly paying attention to a speck of dirt on the sleeve of his white coat. “She’s still young isn’t she?” Charles was conscious, not for the first time, of the difference in age between himself and Holly, she was 29 and the ten years between them sometimes seemed like 20. He half expected the doctor to ask if she was his daughter.

  “She’s nearly 30.” Charles didn’t want to talk to this doctor. He wanted someone sympathetic who would listen to his explanation that Holly had been pregnant several times and had miscarried each time.

  “Has she ever had a non spontaneous abortion?” The doctor was blunt. “If that hadn’t been done properly it might affect her ability to carry.”

  A slight movement in the bed indicated Holly may not be asleep, as Charles had thought.

  “I was raped.” She said matter-of-factly.

  “That could have done some damage.” The doctor seemed more interested. “Was it violent?”

  “What sort of bloody question is that?” Charles was suddenly angry. “What rape isn’t? Of course it was violent.”

  The doctor seemed to think that perhaps he had overstepped the mark. “What I meant was…”

  “I think we all know what you meant and I don’t think now is the time to discuss it.”

  “Don’t be so fucking pompous Charles. I want to know if I was damaged by what Graham did to me. He certainly wanted to. If he did then I want to know. Then I can stop getting my hopes up every month. I want to know so I can start getting over it. And now is as good a time as any? What do you need to know doctor?”

  He seemed to back down when faced with the matter-of-fact tone of Holly’s voice. “Perhaps your husband is right, perhaps another time.”

  “What’s wrong with now? Why can’t you tell me?” Holly’s voice rose as panic and fear and disappointment mingled. “I need to know.”

  The doctor, a young man whose heart was probably in the right place decided it was time to move on. “I’ll come to see you tomorrow, you need some sleep now.”

  Charles sat by Holly’s bed in silence, trying to understand what it would mean to them if Holly couldn’t have children. He would be disappointed, of course he would, he had been looking forward to being a father, he had pictured him taking his son to cricket matches, watching him do all the things he had wanted to do himself. Now there wouldn’t be a baby. He knew that there would never be a child. And, looking at Holly’s back as she ignored him, he knew she knew that too.

  “I’m not being silly.” Holly sat staring at her hands folded in her lap.

  “Yes you are, you know you are.” Charles had been very patient in the months since Holly had left hospital. They had had many tests and several consultations that Charles found excruciatingly embarrassing but the resultant diagnosis was that there was no problem and they should ‘keep trying’.

  “No I’m not. I can’t help the way it hurts.”

  Charles tried to be gentler, more understanding though his patience was running thin. “Look Holly, we’ve got a lovely life together, this house, everything. We should look at the positives. We have a wonderful life together, it doesn’t matter that we don’t have children.”

  “It does.”

  “A child would change our lives so much, we can enjoy being together can’t we? Just the two of us?”

  “I thought you wanted a baby as much as I do?”

  “Of course I do, you know I do.”

  “Well then!” Holly’s tone implying that there was no more to be said.

  “But that doesn’t mean it’s the end of everything if we don’t.” Charles persevered, determined that she should not withdraw into her bubble of pain. She did that so often now, refusing to enjoy anything in her life, completely absorbed in her need to conceive and keep a baby. He did not want the familiar argument to end in the same way it always did, with him feeling that he had failed.

  As each month passed the regular cycle of hope and despair became part of their lives. They cried together, argued together and reassured each other, they asked each other for forgiveness for blaming where no blame was deserved, appropriate or required.

  But Holly spent more time away from her home than in it. She would drive to Cambridge to be with Carl or, when he was away, to Oxford to see Crispin. She knew it wasn’t fair going to Crispin because he loved her and had since she could remember. She knew he read more into her visits than she meant but he was kind and gentle and adored her, and she needed someone to love her uncritically.

  It was when she lay in bed with Ramesh that she had some small qualms about hurting another person. Linda and Ramesh had been the third couple of the summer of 76. They had met and fallen in love at the same time as she and Charles had got together and Susannah and Carl had been reunited. She didn’t really know Susannah so she couldn’t feel guilty about sleeping with Carl. But Ramesh was married to Linda who had been her best friend since she had first come to England. Crispin and Carl became habits, but Ramesh was exciting. That was a proper affair as she didn’t always go to London to meet him, he spent time in the Wirral and came to her house when Charles was out. They made love in the same bed she slept in with Charles, in the same sheets, and sometimes within minutes. It was exciting because she knew that if she became pregnant by him it would be obvious that Charles would not be the father. And that didn’t matter.

  She didn’t consider herself to be promiscuous. Meeting and sleeping with four such different men was her only way of coping with the growing knowledge that she would never, ever, have her own child.

  In late August 1981 Charles came home from his afternoon walk to an empty house. It was too quiet and too still. No radio played as it always did whether they were home or not. Her car was in the drive but there was no sign of Holly. He walked through the rooms, closing curtains and switching on lights.

  He found her in the bedroom.

  “I was so sure this time.” She cried. “I really thought it was OK this time. I was five days late. I thought it was really it this time.”

&n
bsp; “I love you.” It was the only thing he could say.

  “Well I don’t know why. I can’t give you what you want.”

  “ I can’t give it to you.”

  “It’s just not fair.”

  “No one said life should ever be fair.” Charles remembered what his mother had told him many years before. It was the only time he had ever talked seriously with her. “Holly, my mother told me this and I believed her. No one ever said life should be fair. Don’t expect it to be and you won’t be so disappointed. Life isn’t fair. Life has never been fair and life will never be fair. It’s not what life is for. Life is supposed to be unfair. Life is unfair to see what you can cope with. Life will give you all the trials and tribulations you can stand. The worse it gets, the stronger you become and the stronger you become the more is heaped on you because you’ve shown you can cope.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Yes. Yes I do.”

  Holly tried to explain to Charles that every month she was losing part of her life. Every month, unstoppable, regular, immutable, unforgiving, irresistible, unchanging, she was being excluded from the fecund world.

  “Everyone in the world is pregnant.” She said as they walked around the supermarket. Charles, who was the only one listening replied, pedantically, “No. Everyone is not pregnant.”

  “Well all women seem to be.”

  He realised that she had not seen the funny side of her comment but he did not see that as the portent of real trouble. He could not catch her eye to smile and make things better. He could not reach her hand to squeeze it.

  He followed her as she pushed the trolley, too fast, between the baby foods and the shelves filled with disposable nappies. When they reached the biscuits and the instant coffee she was talking nonsense about how many different sorts of biscuit there were, what sort of biscuit she should get and why one was more expensive than the others. He watched as she pushed the trolley defiantly along the aisle and picked up box after box of tampons. They walked through to the aisle lined with alcohol where a young woman with a toddler and obviously pregnant again was putting plastic bottles of red wine in her trolley.”