Sunny Days and Sea Breezes

by Carole Matthews

  ‘It’s been a pleasure to have you around. It’s nice to have company for a change. Even though you did fall asleep,’ he teases. His eyes meet mine when he says, ‘Let’s do it again, Jodie.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  As we walk back through the meadow to the woods, I want to slip my hand in Ned’s, so I keep them firmly in the pockets of my jeans where they can do no harm.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The journey back to Sunny Days goes too quickly and Ned drops me off by the gangway.

  ‘Thank you again,’ I say. ‘It’s been brilliant.’ As I’m not sure what else I can add, I get out of his car and make my way to the houseboat.

  ‘See you in the morning for yoga,’ Ned calls after me.

  Grinning, I shout back over my shoulder, ‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world!’

  I might even mean that.

  He drives away and I give him an awkward wave. Then I let myself into Sunny Days. Marilyn’s stamp is on it – the smell of Mr Sheen and Zoflora competes with the sea air. She’s left a cheery note for me on the table.

  Hope you had a nice time. See you tomorrow. George left his book here rather than leave it with Ida. Looks saucy! Mxxxxx

  She’s underlined ‘saucy’ three times and has drawn a line of emojis too – a heart, a smiley face, a flower.

  Sure enough, George’s neatly typed pages are sitting next to it. Wild at Heart. I smile to myself and flick through the first pages, hoping that it’s not too steamy or I’ll never be able to look him in the eye again.

  If I’m honest with you, I wasn’t sure how I was going to fill the rest of my day so this is a very welcome gift. I thought I was good with my own company. It turns out that I’m not.

  Making myself comfortable on one of the steamer chairs on the top deck, I settle down to read George’s novel. I don’t know what to expect, but soon I’m right into the story and the words whizz in front of my eyes as I devour some more. It looks as if there’s a lot more depth to George than he makes out and I hope that a publisher will take him on.

  A while later, I hear a car pull up and realise that Ned has returned. I check my watch and two hours have gone past since I started George’s novel. Not that I know anything about book publishing, but I’d say that he has talent. When I’ve struggled to settle to anything, George’s book has had me so engrossed that time has just disappeared.

  I shiver and decide to make a cup of tea. Not that I’m looking, but I can see Ned pottering about on his boat and wonder should I offer him one too. I’m aware that I’ve already taken up a lot of his time today, but he’s such easy company to be with and I’m finding my own company considerably lacking. Perhaps I could cook him dinner tonight.

  As I’m dithering with indecision, another car pulls up and Ida gets out. She glances towards Sunny Days as she knocks on Ned’s door and waits for him to answer. And, for some silly reason, I duck back out of view. I don’t want her to think that I’m a curtain-twitcher, spying on Ned and who visits him – even though I actually am. I could offer dinner to both of them, though I somehow get the feeling that Ida wouldn’t be overly thrilled about that. I’m sure she’d like Ned all to herself. She’s still sporting her trademark eclectic and wacky clothes, but she looks a bit more scrubbed-up than I’ve previously seen her. She’s wearing a very short dress covered in cornflower blue flowers with over-the-knee suede boots in a caramel colour and a washed-out denim jacket. Her long dark hair is flowing loose and is topped with a cowboy hat. Her legs are slim and tanned. I envy her casual, distinctive style.

  While I’m still playing Peeping Tom, Ned opens the door and she throws back her head and laughs. Perhaps they’re having a date night. I don’t like how that makes me feel. I was beginning to think that Ned and I had a special connection between us, but perhaps I’m wrong. Maybe it’s his way to make everyone feel like they’re the only person in the world. He puts his arm round Ida’s shoulders and pulls her to him as he leads her inside. My stomach turns to liquid. It doesn’t look as if Ida will be leaving any time soon.

  Well, I’ve been warned about him and I’d do very well to listen to that advice.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I can’t even settle back into George’s book. So it’s another evening with just me and the telly. I put something on and watch it, mindlessly, while trying not to think what might be going on in the houseboat next door. That’s none of my business. It really isn’t.

  I should get a hobby – something all-consuming. That’s what I need. I’m beginning to realise that work shouldn’t be my everything. Apart from going to the gym, I don’t do anything. I go to work, I eat, I sleep, I repeat. Again, Ned has inspired me to do something creative. But what? I used to paint a bit, when I was doing my degree in design – a dabbler, nothing more. But I haven’t picked up a brush in years. Or perhaps I could take up crochet or knitting – they’re trendy at the moment, aren’t they?

  Then I think that, if I’d had those skills, I could have been making cute little baby clothes and that plunges me down into darkness once more. I close my eyes and push away the images that haunt my days and nights.

  I might as well be straight with you as I can’t go on like this. You know that I’ve lost a baby, don’t you? I’m sure you’ve guessed by now that there was more to my flight than an errant husband. That, on its own, I could maybe deal with. It was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. Or as Marilyn would probably say, ‘broke the chicken’s leg’.

  I’m sorry that I’ve been keeping it from you, but I can’t even vocalise it. I had months of people – friends, colleagues – looking at me with pity and I couldn’t bear it any longer. I even felt strangers were staring at me, knowing my pain. I’ve been a nightmare to live with. I realise that. Folks, even the kindest of them, soon tire of a weeping mess and that’s what I’d become. I bet even you’re thinking these things happen, get over it. I’d like a pound for every person who said that they’d had one, two, three miscarriages, before they managed to carry a child to full-term – as if that would make me feel any better.

  It wasn’t any old miscarriage. It was my miscarriage. It was a child we’d fought hard for.

  Chris and I spent our thirties having fun. We went to all the places, did all of the things, experienced all the joys that life could offer and lavishly too. I’m the big hitter when it comes to earnings, but Chris has a good salary too. Money was no object. We never thought about children or wanted our lives to be interrupted by the patter of tiny feet. We were having funfunfun.

  And then I saw forty looming and like every cliché there ever was, I started to look in every baby buggy that passed me. It was like a switch had been flipped in my head and I longed to feel soft, pudgy skin against my breast instead of Chris’s muscular chest. Chris was initially horrified when I broached the subject of a baby. It had never been on our agenda and he didn’t see any reason to change.

  But the more I talked about it – and, once it was in my heart, it was a subject that I couldn’t let go – the more he came round to the idea. The thought of having a child consumed every cell inside me. Yet in all our rose-tinted conversations about what having our own child would be like, I don’t think we every really touched on the practicalities of it all. We thought about what great joy a child would bring us and all the wonderful things we could offer it, but the actual nitty-gritty of day-to-day child-rearing never troubled our vision. We assumed parenthood would bring us nothing but pleasure and it would be a walk in the park. We didn’t think about sleepless nights or the end of our social life. Colic or chickenpox didn’t cross our minds. It was all just going to be lovely.

  Like everything else, we assumed that conceiving our child would be a breeze. It used to be one of the things that Chris and I did best together. Another reason why I never saw Meg as a threat. Our sex life had never wavered. We might have been like ships in the night for most of the working week, but whenever we were in bed together we made the most of it.

/>   Consequently, we’d thought we’d only have to drop in the idea of having a baby and one would automatically appear. Neither of us considered what hard work it would be even to get pregnant. I think it was a terrible blow to Chris, to his ego, when ‘low sperm count’ was mentioned. He’d always succeeded at everything he tried and this, something at the core of his masculinity, was the first thing that he couldn’t do. Perhaps that was the initial chink in our armour. Did it affect his confidence more than I realised? In all honesty, I never really knew how he felt as we didn’t really talk about it. It seems that we didn’t talk about much that mattered.

  Fast forward and two harrowing rounds of IVF proved to be fruitless. Yet, third time lucky, and we’d struck gold. When it finally happened all the anguish that had gone before – the heartache, drugs, the injections, the expense – all disappeared in a moment. I was pregnant – miraculously pregnant – when I was beginning to give up all hope of holding my own child in my arms. Chris and I were the happiest people in the world at that moment. I’m sure we were. What a future we would have with our own little family. At forty-two, I was terrified it would be my last chance of having my own child, and I’d been blessed.

  Of course, I did everything I could to protect the growing life inside me. I ate the right things, read the right books, went to all the appointments, made copious notes of what they told me so that I wouldn’t get a single thing wrong. I would be the world’s most perfect mother. I breezed through morning sickness with a surfeit of ginger tea. Work was busy. Maniacally so. Maybe I should have slowed down, but I felt fabulous, like a powerhouse, full of energy and in awe of the tiny miracle inside me. I was blooming. I was an Earth Mother. Pregnancy suited me. Everyone said so.

  But it turns out that I was too hopeful, too smug, too complacent, too sure that everything would all be all right this time.

  Chris was attentive – much more so than usual – but his late nights continued. Work, it seemed, didn’t slow down simply because his wife was pregnant. The business trips with Meg didn’t seem to abate. He was always in Birmingham, Belfast, Belgium – always meetings that were crucial for him to be at. I thought he was trying to cram all his work in so that he could relax a little when the baby came, so I didn’t think to take him to task about it. Why would I? I was floating on my own little cloud.

  We cleared out our spare box room – our general dumping ground – and painted it ourselves. We’d normally get decorators in, but we wanted to do this ourselves, together. After much deliberation over a mountain of colour charts we picked delicate shades of lemon and barely there grey. No pink here. My girl was going to be feisty and fierce, not a fairy princess or a unicorn fancier. She was going to be a plumber or a concert pianist or prime minister. But above all she was going to be happy. And loved. We laughed at our lack of skills with filler and paint, but we had fun trying. I got emulsion all over my enormous maternity dungarees that had plenty of room for expansion once my bump really started to burgeon and cared not one jot. I agonised over the choice of cot and buggy. I wanted my child to feel secure, loved, cossetted. I couldn’t wait for her to see it all.

  Everything in my world was wonderful.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  When the pains came unexpectedly and much too early, Chris rushed me to hospital. We both sat white-faced, unspeaking as all the traffic lights were red and against us. I felt my child’s life ebbing away and was unable to do anything to stop it.

  My baby, my beautiful child, too fragile for life, was almost twenty weeks old when she died. To me, she was a perfect, tiny person who just hadn’t made it and I never thought that it was possible to feel so much pain.

  Everyone tells you that the first twelve weeks are the most risky time for a pregnancy. Once past that, I assumed I would sail through until I had a healthy, bouncing baby in my arms. Just another few weeks and my baby might have had a viable chance of survival. Yet the sudden end of my pregnancy, the end of my hopes, was classed as nothing more than ‘late foetal loss’. How cold is that? I know the medical community have to have their terms, but some seem too stark, too brutal. When they told me that they couldn’t feel a heartbeat, I think that my own heart stopped too and it hasn’t ever fully restarted. There’s nothing but a gaping void where it used to be.

  Losing a child who came silently into the world was one of the most traumatic experiences I could ever imagine. I was too numb, too distressed to know what was happening. In the depths of my darkness, Chris dealt with everything. He had to as I’d simply ceased to function. It was if my brain had shut down in order to block out the emotion.

  If my baby lived just a little bit longer to that crucial twenty-four weeks old where she would have been classed as stillborn, she would have had a name, a birth certificate, a death certificate, a proper funeral. She would have been buried somewhere nice where we could have visited her. We’d have had some record of her being here, however briefly. As it is, I have nothing to say that she ever existed.

  We were told that there might not even be a reason that she couldn’t stay, that it happens horribly frequently. I was convinced we had done something wrong, missed some crucial thing that would have saved her. One of the nurses told me that as a ‘geriatric’ mother I’d have a higher chance of miscarriage, which only made things worse.

  We were dismissed from the hospital and told to wait until I felt ‘emotionally able’ to try again. But when would that be? A month, a year, never? While I floundered in my pain and loss, Chris seemed unaffected. The very next day, he left me alone and went back to work. As time went on and I still struggled, he worked later, stayed away more often. I felt everyone was looking at me and instinctively knew that I’d lost a child. I dreaded people pussy-footing around me or smiling at me with pity. I’d sit at my desk and be unable to stop the tears. My grief was like a raw, open wound.

  At home Chris and I stared at each other blankly and wondered what had happened. There was nothing there but an empty nursery and a crib that’s never been used. Nothing but the memory of a baby called Little Bump. And that’s what I can’t come to terms with. Everyone else has moved on and yet my arms still physically ache to hold her.

  I can’t tell you any more. I can’t bear it.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  When I wake the next morning, the gloom is still upon me. Yet, in the midst of it, I decide that I have to be more positive. You know the extent of my pain now, but wallowing in it isn’t helping anyone – least of all me. I don’t want this to be my child’s legacy – leaving nothing behind but the hollow shell of a mother. I have to do something to climb out of this dark hole.

  It’s a small thing, but it’s a start. Ned invited me to do yoga with him and I’m bloody well going to make myself do it. I peer out of one of my porthole windows and the day is bright and sunny. That has to be a good omen, right?

  I can do this. Yoga could be the answer to everything. So I put on my joggers and lurk about in the kitchen, trying to see if I can catch a glimpse of him heading to the beach. I make a coffee and a piece of toast, all the time keeping one eye out for any movement on Sea Breezes.

  When Ned eventually appears, it’s with Ida. So it looks as if she’s spent the night with him. I don’t know why that should bother me but I can’t tell a lie, it does. A little of my determination to be more positive seeps away. I should be pleased for them. It’s clear that Ida is more than besotted with him and perhaps there’s hope that Ned feels the same. Unrequited love is a bitch. I should know.

  Ida flings her arms around him as she leaves. She makes quite the display of it, in fact. Ned watches her, leaning on the doorframe as Ida bounces away down the gangway and into her car. When it splutters away, he goes back inside. At that point, Marilyn rocks up – or more accurately, roars up – in the lean, mean custard-coloured machine. She screeches to a halt outside Sunny Days.

  I open the door. ‘Hey, Marilyn.’ Her outfit is so bright that, once again, it makes me want to reach for my sunglass
es. Her trousers match her car and a turquoise T-shirt is accessorised with beads that bounce enthusiastically on her chest.

  ‘Morning, sweetheart!’ she trills.

  As usual, she’s laden down with a bag full of cleaning materials in one hand and a bag brimming over with the shopping in the other.

  ‘Blimey,’ she says as she bowls in. ‘You’ve got a face like a wet week in Weymouth, lovey. What’s the problem?’

  At that, I burst into tears.

  ‘Now, now, now.’ Marilyn dumps her cleaning stuff and the shopping on the floor. ‘What’s all this about?’

  Before I can ward her off, she comes and wraps her arms around me and crushes me to her bosom – and the beads – while I sob. I can do nothing but succumb to her ministrations. She rocks me as you would a child, patting my back, stroking my hair.

  ‘You can tell me all about it,’ she says. ‘I know all about everything.’

  Which sounds like a sweeping statement, but I can well believe that Marilyn does. She is a wise woman in gold wedge-heeled sandals. I did one counselling session, after the baby, with a pinched-faced woman who seemed to have no heart. It left me more depressed at the end than I was at the beginning.

  The cold counsellor told me I should talk about it. But to whom? In the following months, Chris and I were barely communicating. We couldn’t even face looking at each other. I did nothing but weep while he looked at me dry-eyed as if I was a stranger to him. Perhaps I was, but surely any normal person would cry at the death of your longed-for child? I blamed him and he obviously blamed me. I could barely get out of bed in the morning. He spent twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours a day at work. Or so I thought.

  I’d gone early to ante-natal classes as I was so eager to learn, but all the women I’d met there had now either had their babies or were due imminently. I was the only one who’d walked out of the hospital alone. They sent a condolence card that each one of them had signed. So I assumed they’d been out to coffee together. A get-together to which I hadn’t been invited because it would be too embarrassing, too traumatic, too awful to contemplate. They couldn’t face me and my empty arms. I wouldn’t have gone even if they’d asked me. I didn’t have a baby, so I couldn’t be in their club.