“It’s not. Your fault, I mean. It’s all of ours.”
“True. What’s in those?”
“Mozzarella and tomato. They’re hot.” She glanced in the bag. “Lukewarm. And a bit soggy.”
“Lukewarm and soggy is good.” Ian smiled and slung his free arm around her shoulder. Eve let her body sag into his. Maybe everything would be all right, after all. She would tell him now. For once she had to seize the moment.
“Let’s sit for a second,” she said. “I have something to say.”
Ian’s expression was hard to read, but then it usually was. She’d grown used to that. Ian sat and waited in silence. He was so different from her, Eve thought. In a way it was curious that they’d ever gotten together. If the situation had been reversed, she’d have been pestering him to tell her what he had to say, bouncing up and down with anticipation and nerves. Driving him nuts, probably. Eve had never been one for the waiting game. Ian, on the other hand, reached for a panini and chewed in silence.
After a while, he said, “Lukewarm was a bit optimistic,” and squeezed her hand. “Are you all right?” he added. There was concern in his eyes.
Eve felt another surge of hope. He did still love her. It was going to be all right. Now that the moment was here, she felt sick. If she folded her arm under her swelling breasts, she could feel her heart pounding against her ribs, as if trying to get out.
“I am,” she said. “We are.”
He looked at her. “We? I’m glad.” He hadn’t gotten it. Why would he? There were plenty of “we’s” in Ian Newsome’s life already, and not one of them was the new life inside her.
“Not you and me we…” Eve watched her breath frost in the air, as if she might speak her words and they’d be frozen there forever. How different from what she’d planned; from what it would have been if she’d done it on New Year’s. Then, she was sure, it would have been hugs and champagne and celebration, after the initial shock, of course.
“Me and the baby.”
He stared at her, his face giving nothing away.
“Ian, I’m pregnant.”
There was silence. A helicopter banked overhead. A police siren wailed on Park Lane. A gaggle of European students trudged across the grass toward where the ice rink had been over Christmas and New Year. Eve could have told them they’d be out of luck, it had been taken down weeks ago. But she didn’t.
“Ian?” she said. “Say something. Please.”
“How?”
Eve suppressed a smile. “Erm, I think you know.”
“Don’t mock. You know what I mean. We always use something.”
“That night in the kitchen,” she said. “When you came in to find me. The timing’s right and we didn’t use anything then.”
He nodded slowly.
She took a deep breath. “Aren’t you at least a little bit pleased?”
“Pleased? No, I wouldn’t say that’s my dominant emotion right now.”
“What is your ‘dominant emotion’?” She couldn’t keep the anger out of her voice. Dominant emotion?
“Shock, since you ask. How long?”
“Eight weeks, nine.”
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I was going to…and then I didn’t because I wanted to be sure…and then, well, there was Hannah and I couldn’t find the right time.”
Dumping his soggy panini on the ground at his feet, Ian wiped his fingers on his jeans. “And now is the right time?”
“No,” Eve smiled weakly. “Clearly not. But I had to tell you sometime. Before…” She shrugged. “Before I was too far gone.”
“So you realize we can’t have it.” It wasn’t a question. Just a bald statement of fact.
“Sorry?” Eve couldn’t take in what he’d said.
Ian looked at her, his face serious. “But you just said, ‘Before you were too far gone.’”
Eve’s voice was shaky. “I meant before I began to show. Before you or the children noticed, not before it was too far gone to…”
His expression was entirely legible now. Horror, disbelief and shock, all rolled into one. “You’re not thinking of having it? We can’t. It’s not a good time. In fact, it’s a terrible time.”
A terrible time?
Eve stared at him. “I thought you didn’t really approve of abortion?”
Ian shut his eyes.
“Well?” Eve demanded.
“I don’t…not really. But come on. Don’t tell me you think this is great timing.”
“Of course I don’t think it’s great. I didn’t plan it. Why do you think I was so nervous about telling you? But…” She faltered, forcing a smile onto her face. “No time like the present, eh?”
Ian shook his head sadly. “No. I think the present is the worst possible time. Hannah…”
Eve leaped to her feet. “Enough of Hannah. What about us? What about you and me? What about…?”
“Eve, calm down.” Ian was on his feet too. He grabbed her shoulders, but she shook him off. A passing cyclist veered off the path and onto frosted grass to give them a wide berth.
“I’m not saying not ever,” Ian said, “I’m just saying not now. We haven’t even discussed it and we’re barely surviving as we are. We have to give Hannah and Sophie and Alfie more time to adjust to us, before giving them another brother or sister to get their heads around.”
His face was ashen. He was holding himself so tightly that Eve thought he looked as if he might shatter like glass at one touch.
“There might not be another time,” she said, leading him back to the bench. “I’m thirty-two, thirty-three soon…”
“Precisely.” He tried to smile. “There’s plenty of time. When things have settled down a bit, when we’re married…”
“But it might not be so easy next time. What if…” She couldn’t bring herself to say the words. “What if we have this chance…and blow it.”
“We won’t blow it,” Ian said. “We conceived easily enough this time, didn’t we? Think how much fun we’ll have trying.” He wasn’t a kidder. The attempt at levity didn’t suit him.
Eve felt sick. This was worse than her worst nightmare. She’d expected Ian to be shocked, reluctant even. And he was right; they hadn’t so much as touched on the subject. But never had she imagined he’d ask her to have an abortion.
“No,” she said, her voice firm. “I won’t do it. I want this baby. Our baby.”
Ian looked at her, his light blue eyes unnerving. They were so…so cool. “But I don’t,” he said. “Not yet.”
His words hung in the air around them.
“I’m sorry, Eve. I do want us to have a child. But this…it’s so out of the blue. You can’t just get pregnant and hang the consequences. I love you, but we have responsibilities. We have the kids to think about. We can do this, I swear, in a year or two. Just not yet. Life’s not a movie, you know.”
No, Eve thought, as she lay in a bath later that night, turning the hot tap on and off with her toes. Her life was not a movie. Or if it was, it was not the kind of movie that starred Reese Witherspoon and ended happily ever after. It was more of a Tilda Swinton affair, where the heroine’s adolescent misdemeanors came back to haunt her decades later with bleak results.
If she believed in divine retribution, which she didn’t.
You make your own destiny. That had always been her belief. Wasn’t Eve living proof of that? Through sheer force of will she’d dragged herself from being an ordinary pupil at an ordinary Leicester comprehensive to the top tier of one of the country’s top magazines.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” her grandfather had always said. And Eve had that in spades. It was the Owen genes, even if they’d only begun to show when she’d left home to go to university. They’d been there before, of course, it was just that no one had paid much attention. Eve had just been the brainy, dumpy girl at the front of the class whom boys hadn’t liked and who’d gotten picked last for games.
So
far, so normal.
But in Manchester she had evicted her outer wallflower and begun turning into the person she was now. Quietly confident, determined, ambitious.
Accidentally pregnant. Again.
Her ambition had amused the others in the student house she’d shared in Didsbury, Clare more than most. But then Clare, a year older, had always affected a slightly world-weary air. Not that she hadn’t earned it.
“You’d think differently if you had one of those to worry about,” Clare had said countless times as Louisa, then just a toddler, had slept on the settee between them. Not expecting Eve to pay attention to her words of wisdom. Little had Clare known that Eve had taken every word she’d said to heart. Babies change everything. She’d never have let “one of those” throw her life off-course the way Clare had.
It had been obvious that Clare had adored the toddler in a way Eve had been unable to imagine until Alfie had entered her life. Even if offered the chance, Clare would never turn back the clock to make a different decision, no matter what.
But from the moment Clare and little Louisa and their endless bags of stuff had turned up at the front door, Eve had been able to see that life, as Clare had known it, had stopped the day she’d decided to keep her baby. Eve had respected Clare, admired her. And she’d been besotted with Lou, but she hadn’t been Clare and she hadn’t wanted a Louisa of her own. Eve hadn’t been able to imagine a circumstance in which she might have made the same decision.
Then Eve had let Steve get too close, get too drunk, and they’d both become careless. (Careless, what an innocuous word for such a life-changing mess.) And suddenly she’d had to imagine those circumstances. When Eve had gotten pregnant at the end of the spring term of her second year, her whole life had hung in the balance.
That was what she’d told herself.
She could not have, would not have, let this happen to her.
It was almost like discovering her real self, Eve thought now, watching the tips of her fingers prune. Not necessarily a nice self, but competent and very, very determined. This other competent Eve had taken over, bought a pregnancy test, bought another to be sure, and another; and then, without telling her best friend, her parents or the boy who’d gotten her pregnant, had phoned a pregnancy clinic in London to fix an appointment the following week, and bought a single from Manchester to Euston, and another from Euston to Leicester, where her family lived. She’d arrived home three days early, claiming a stomach bug. And no one had ever known she hadn’t come straight from uni.
When Eve had come to…back in Manchester, after the Easter holiday…the problem had been gone, as if it had never been.
And so too her boyfriend, dumped by a phone call that had said nothing except it had been over and she hadn’t wanted to see him again. Steve hadn’t understood, of course. How could he have known, when he hadn’t known why she’d left so abruptly the previous term?
Eve had liked Steve, a lot.
But the new Eve had come to stay. And how could she have stood to look Steve in the eye every day, knowing what she’d done? What she’d known and he hadn’t? So Eve had ended it, and then worked solidly for her finals. Clare and the others had grilled her on Steve’s vanishing act. But, eventually, faced with Eve’s constant stonewalling, they’d given up.
If Clare had noticed that Eve, who’d always been fond of Lou, had lavished unreserved attention on her surrogate goddaughter after that term, she’d never mentioned it.
Honestly, Eve thought, she had made that decision, back when she was nineteen, and she had never looked back. Never once wondered, What if? Well, not consciously, not in the daylight hours. But lying in the bath at Ian’s house, imagining her tummy was already beginning to curve, Eve couldn’t help thinking that if she’d made a different choice, her daughter—or maybe son, but she’d always believed daughter—would have been twelve, nearly thirteen. Not that it mattered. She’d done what was right for her at the time and had never regretted it.
But do it again? She couldn’t.
Once was enough. Once was an accident. Especially if you were nineteen. But twice, and when you were thirty-two, and with a man you loved, and with whom you had always just assumed, rightly or wrongly, you would have children? That was just plain negligent.
The trouble was, Eve had never told anyone about that first abortion.
Not even Clare. All right, Clare was her best friend, but how could she not have judged Eve when she’d made the opposite decision herself? Eve had always feared the revelation would destroy their friendship, and so she’d kept it to herself. Even when she’d fallen in love with Ian and agreed to marry him, she hadn’t said a word. It hadn’t been deception; it just hadn’t arisen, and she hadn’t considered it significant enough to mention.
So why did it suddenly matter so much now?
The creak of floorboards outside the bedroom door interrupted Eve’s doze. The TV in the sitting room was off, the corridor outside in darkness. It was almost 1:00 a.m. Finally, Ian was coming to bed. Obviously hoping he’d left it late enough for her to have fallen asleep. And she nearly had; if not for that floorboard, she might have missed him.
Eve listened to a rustle as he shucked off his clothes and slid into bed before she spoke.
“Ian?” She felt his body jump beside her.
“Thought you were asleep.”
“Can’t sleep.” She rolled over to face him and propped her head on her elbow. “Washing-machine head.” All those thoughts going around and around.
In the darkness, his silence dragged for several long seconds.
“Ian, we have to talk.”
He rolled over so his face was just inches from hers. In the faint glow of a streetlight she could just see its outline. Tentatively, she reached out to touch his cheek, feeling soft bristles over the hard line of his cheekbone.
“I’m sorry.” He put his hand up to stop hers. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“At least sleep on it.” Eve tried to keep the pleading out of her voice. She felt rather than saw Ian shake his head.
“There’s no need,” he said. “I’m not going to change my mind. Not tonight, not tomorrow night, not next week. We can’t have it. Not right now. Things are too rocky. I think it would…” He stopped. “In a year’s time, I promise you, it will be a different story.”
Freeing her hand from his, she rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. In a year’s time, she couldn’t help feeling, their stories would be very different indeed.
The next day limped past, and the next. Tuesday became Wednesday and Wednesday became Thursday. They crossed in the kitchen, passed each other condiments and compared the children’s schedules. Unspoken words stagnated in the air and, Eve imagined, piqued Hannah’s interest as she felt the tension thickening. If it hadn’t been so melodramatic, Eve would have sworn the girl scented blood. Tomorrow was Friday. And then what? The weekend. Forty-eight hours of this? Or worse, would Ian just assume she’d decided to go along with it and want to know if she’d made an appointment?
Eve didn’t think she could bear it.
Throughout the usual chaos of a Friday morning, Eve tried to pretend everything was the same, although Ian didn’t comment—he merely threw her a quizzical glance—when she gave Alfie Cocoa Pops, his weekend-only breakfast. Hannah didn’t appear at all, simply shouted to her father from the hall that she didn’t want breakfast before slamming the front door behind her.
So far, so normal.
Then Inge drove Alfie and Sophie to school and Ian headed to Harlesden for a shoot. By eight thirty, silence filled the house. Eve stacked the plates into the dishwasher and tried not to think about what she intended to do. Then, instead of picking up her bag and heading to the office, she went upstairs and packed.
What to take and what to leave wasn’t the problem. After packing up her flat, leaving here was fairly painless. In a material sense the ties were slight. So much of her stuff was still in boxes, probably no one would even noti
ce her things were gone from around the house.
It wasn’t the material things that nearly made her stay.
It was Alfie.
What if she never saw him again?
The thought hurt, physically. Alfie had wriggled and squirmed his way into her heart. Could she really just walk away from him? None of this was his fault. None of it was anyone’s fault, not really.
Elaine’s words echoed in her head. Cornwall felt like a lifetime ago. Had it really only been August, six short months? Eve pictured the woman’s face, her eyes kind but her words harsh. What Ian’s mother would think of her, Eve couldn’t bring herself to contemplate.
Probably, it would only be when she didn’t arrive home at the usual time and hadn’t called to say she was going to be late that Ian might begin to worry. Unless he went to their room to change. Then he’d see her note on his bedside table, which was where she planned to leave it.
For a moment her resolve wavered. Maybe she could still talk him around?
Then she remembered his words: I’m not going to change my mind. Not tonight, not tomorrow night, not next week.
And she knew in her heart he was beyond persuasion.
Eve returned her attention to the note. She had no idea where to start. But then she’d never imagined having to write a letter like this. Always one for grabbing bulls by their horns, she’d done plenty of dumping before and had never had any problems saying it to their faces. But then she’d never had to leave anyone she loved before. Sitting on Ian’s side of the bed, she found she didn’t know how to.
In the end it was easier not to try to say all the things she wanted to say. Surprisingly, Eve wasn’t even angry with him for refusing to see it her way.
How could he? When he didn’t know what her way was.
Just sad. Sad and lonely, with an ache in her stomach that had nothing to do with morning sickness. But she’d been lonely in this house for weeks. So being lonely out of it wouldn’t make much difference.
Ian, she wrote, I’m sorry too. So sorry. But I can’t do it, not even for you. I love you. Give…she paused, about to write Alfie…the children a big hug from me. I’ll miss them, so much. I’ll leave it to you to decide what to tell them. Eve x
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