Sheer Abandon

by Penny Vincenzi

  She rang him again the next morning. “I’m sorry,” she said, “about yesterday.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Look, if I pay for the holiday would that help?”

  Fergus felt a flood of rage towards her. “No, Clio, it wouldn’t. In the first place, I still need to be around, I’ve got this client now, and in the second, I’ve no wish to be beholden to you.”

  “That’s ridiculous! I’d like to pay for you.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t like it. However kindly it’s meant. I’m trying to run a business, Clio. I know you have trouble recognising it as such, and you see it as little better than running a brothel—”

  “Of course I don’t!”

  “Well, that’s the message that comes over very loud and clear. You obviously don’t realise it. So let’s cool it for a bit, OK?”

  “Absolutely OK. I just wanted to relieve you of feeling you had to put any pressure on Kate.”

  “That’s a filthy thing to say!” he said and rang off.

  Jocasta was wandering aimlessly round the supermarket when it hit her. Hit her with the force of a rather large truck. And left her almost physically reeling.

  She was feeling very miserable. It was the middle of August and everyone was away; she couldn’t have seen any of her old friends if she’d wanted to. She really must make contact with them all in September; she couldn’t avoid them forever. Even if it did mean admitting to everyone that her marriage was over.

  Even Clio seemed to be avoiding her; she had been rather odd, almost distant, said she wasn’t coming to London this weekend, when Jocasta had asked her, and hadn’t invited her down to Guildford, either.

  She had heard nothing from Nick: not even the promised postcard. Every day she told herself she’d ring him in the morning and every morning she didn’t. She mustn’t. She wasn’t going to appear to be chasing him.

  She had heard nothing from Gideon, either, not even from his solicitors; but there had been a picture of him, in the Evening Standard, the day before, smiling and looking rather pleased with himself. He looked a lot happier than she was. The caption said he was going on a business trip to the East Coast of America. She had thought of the houses she had lined up for him to look at there and just for a moment she felt sad instead of angry. She could have gone with him and they could have seen them at the same time, maybe even chosen one; that would have given her something to do.

  And then the really dreadful thought came, that perhaps even now it wasn’t too late. She had crushed it hastily, but it had still disturbed her. She must be feeling very bad.

  Come on, Jocasta, concentrate. Coffee, tea, better get some milk; the last lot had been off. Bread, got that. Toiletries—shampoo, soap, Tampax—and that was when it hit her.

  Now, this was absurd. One day, one day late: well, two. Actually, she could remember that last time so clearly, it was the night she had walked out on Gideon, that terrible Thursday. Two days was nothing. Nothing.

  Actually, though, it was, when you were so regular you could literally set the clock by it. Well, that was the pill of course. No need to worry, she was on the pill. You didn’t get pregnant on the pill. You just didn’t. Unless you forgot to take it. Which she never, ever did, it was too important.

  Or—and this was the second ramming by the truck—you had a stomach upset. Which she’d had. A truly terrible one. Throwing up, diarrhoea, the lot, for two days. And hadn’t even taken the bloody thing for one day. Actually, two. She decided there was no point, especially as she wasn’t having sex.

  Only—she had, hadn’t she? Sex with Nick, amazing sex with Nick, a few days after the stomach upset, right bang in the middle of her cycle.

  Oh God. Oh—my—God!

  Calm down, Jocasta. You’re one day late. All right, two days late. It’s nothing. It happens sometimes. Maybe not to her, but to other people. So it could perfectly well happen to her too. That was all it was: she’d missed a period.

  Anyway, no need to worry about it. She could do a test. You could do them on the very day your period was due, and it was something like ninety-eight percent accurate. She’d go to Boots, buy a test, take it home and it would be negative and then everything would be all right and her period would probably start straightaway.

  She looked at her watch: five twenty. If she legged it over to Boots now, or to the chemist in the North End Road, she should be just in time.

  When she got to Boots it was shut. So that meant either one of the late-night chemists, or waiting till tomorrow. It was no contest. There was one in Wandsworth, open until seven, she was sure. But when she got there, that was closed too: from one o’clock every Saturday, a sign informed her, with an infuriating smugness. She drove home and started frantically leafing through the Yellow Pages.

  Kate was getting ready to go out with Nat.

  It was extraordinary how much happier she felt all of a sudden, knowing Josh was her father, knowing he had wanted to tell her, wanted to be her friend. He’d actually said that: “I don’t feel quite like your father, not yet anyway, it seems so—odd. Maybe we could start by being friends.”

  Kate had liked that so much; she had never entertained any ideas about falling into her birth parents’ arms, she had simply wanted to know who they were and to find out how it had all happened. Of course it wasn’t exactly nice to discover you were the result of what amounted to a holiday romance, but they’d been awfully young: only a bit older than she was now.

  She could tell from some of the answers Josh had given her about Martha that he really hadn’t known her at all well. She’d have preferred it to have been some passionate, forbidden affair. But Josh was so nice, even if he was a bit silly, so she was sure he must have liked Martha quite a lot, it hadn’t been just sex. And if he’d known about—about her, he would have helped Martha. She could tell. She’d never know why Martha hadn’t told him, she’d never know an awful lot of things, but she was discovering that a great many people had liked Martha, thought a lot of her. Which was nice. You didn’t want your mother to be a one hundred percent bitch. You wanted her to be nice. And Ed, that gorgeous Ed, he was so nice too, and he’d really loved Martha. She’d never seen a man cry like he did at the funeral; it had been very upsetting.

  Anyway, feeling happier had made her want to see Nat again. There seemed some point in it. There seemed a point to quite a lot of things. She thought she might even go and see Fergus, and really talk through the contract with Smith. Maybe it wasn’t too late. He’d said something about the door still being open. Three million dollars really was a lot of money to turn down. She’d already told him she’d do the Style cover, which had seemed to cheer him up a bit. She was quite looking forward to that, mostly so she could talk to the photographer.

  She was just trying to untangle her hair, when Jilly rang. “Hello, my darling, how are you?”

  “I’m fine. Mum told you about Josh? Jocasta’s brother?”

  “She did indeed. What an extraordinary coincidence. Although not really, when you think about it. Just imagine, Kate, if I hadn’t fallen on the step that night, none of this would have happened.”

  “Yeah, I know. I was thinking that.”

  “And I hear you like him?”

  “I do. I really like him. He doesn’t feel like my dad, exactly, but he’s good fun and it’s lovely talking to him and everything. He can’t answer all my questions, but he tries. He’s well posh, Granny, you’ll love him.”

  What had her mother said? Oh, yes: “Just wait till Granny knows where he went to school, she’ll have a heart attack with excitement.”

  “There’s more to liking someone than their social class,” said Jilly slightly stiffly.

  “Course there is,” said Kate.

  Jocasta stood in her bathroom, her heart thudding so hard she felt her body could hardly contain it. She had gone to Boots in Piccadilly in the end, because it was always open round the clock. The pregnancy test had cost her £90 so far, because she couldn’t fi
nd anywhere to park, and so she’d left her car on a yellow line in Jermyn Street with a note on it thinking she’d only be five minutes, and of course she had been about fifteen, by the time she’d found the wretched things and read all the instructions and decided which one would be best and then queued to pay for it. It had been a long queue. A long, hot queue, composed largely of tourists. There was also a very long queue at the pharmacy end, presumably all the druggies getting their stuff. Anyway, by the time she got back to her car, it had a ticket. A self-satisfied-looking female warden was just placing it on the windscreen.

  Anyway, she had the test. She would go home and use it and get the matter settled. Maybe she was getting her period anyway, she felt a bit…achy.

  She did the test.

  The instructions were very clear; you had to hold the end of the stick thing—it looked a bit like a thermometer—into your pee for five seconds only (this bit was in bold type) and then keep it pointing downwards for one minute. There were two little windows at the other end of the stick. At the end of the one minute, a blue line should appear in the end window and then you could read the result window. A plus meant pregnant, a minus not.

  She timed the five-second dip into the pee she’d collected (in a clean dry container as they had said, a large breakfast cup actually) and dipped what they called the absorbent sampler into it. And then waited. For one minute. In one minute she’d be fine, in one minute a nice neat minus sign would tell her she was not pregnant, and—God! It was there! Unmistakably a minus. She wasn’t pregnant. She was fine. For heaven’s sake. How ridiculous to think she could have been! How could she? Of course she wasn’t. She felt quite dizzy, light-headed with relief. She—The doorbell rang. She stuffed the box into the cupboard under the bathroom sink and went to answer it. It was a young man, asking her to sponsor him on a trek over the Himalayas. Jocasta gave him £25 and then opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

  “You look rotten.”

  “Thanks. I expect it’s the heat. You know how much I hate it.”

  Gideon was not on a business trip in the States, as he had told the reporter at Heathrow, he was in Barbados.

  “Possibly.” Aisling Carlingford shrugged her slender, pale brown shoulders, took a sip of her crushed fruit cocktail. “You didn’t have to come.”

  “I know that. I wanted to see Fionnuala.”

  “Well, you’ve seen her now. There she is, swimming up and down. So you can go again, back to the rainy mists of Ireland. She does look lovely, doesn’t she?”

  “Very lovely.”

  Fionnuala saw them admiring her, got out of the pool, dived neatly back in again, and swam the length of it underwater. She surfaced near them and smiled, inviting him to join her. He refused irritably.

  Aisling looked at him rather intently. “So where’s the lovely young wife?”

  “I told you. In London. Possibly in Berkshire. Not sure.”

  “And why did you leave her behind?”

  “Aisling, I was hardly going to bring her here.”

  “It’s gone wrong, hasn’t it?”

  Gideon hesitated, then said with great reluctance, “Yes. It has.”

  “You shouldn’t have married her. It was a terrible mistake.”

  “I think it probably was. She hasn’t turned out as I hoped.”

  “I meant it was a terrible mistake for her, Gideon. Mistake on your part. Wrong of you, you know?”

  “I think that’s a little unfair.”

  “Is it? Anyone could see, just looking at her, she was completely overwhelmed by you.”

  “Aisling, she wasn’t some naïve child. She was a very sophisticated girl, a successful journalist. Her father is a rich and successful man.”

  “Oh come on, Gideon. What did she know of your life? Of what it meant? She’s nearly twenty years younger than you for a start. Marriage has come to mean something very different in the last twenty years, for girls like her. There’s no way she could be expected to understand her role as your consort. I feel very sorry for her.”

  Gideon raised his eyebrows. “This is a ridiculous conversation.”

  “Don’t start losing your temper. Just think about it for a bit. I suppose you thought you were in love with her.”

  “I was very much in love with her. I still am.”

  “Rubbish. You’re in love with love, you always have been. You’re a romantic old thing, that’s why I fell in love with you. And I’m sure it tickled your fancy, having a lovely trophy like that on your arm. ‘Look what I can still catch,’ that’s what that said. Honestly, Gideon, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. I suppose she was more impressive as a wife than a girlfriend, but still—”

  “She was very anxious to marry me,” said Gideon. “It was all her idea, she practically dragged me into the registry in Vegas.”

  “Oh, yes, and you’re such a pushover, aren’t you? It’s so extremely easy to make you do something you don’t want! Gideon, honestly, you can’t expect me to believe that. It’s all horribly plain to me. And then the honeymoon was over and that wonderful party, that sounded fun, I’d have liked to be there, and you got back to work, and she was left alone twiddling her pretty little thumbs. Feeling all the worse for the fact that she’d actually had a career before. So what are you going to do?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. She wants a divorce.”

  “Well, give it to her. I know you find that hard, but what’s the point otherwise? You’re probably not even properly married, anyway. Think of it as a wedding present for her,” she said, and started laughing at her own joke.

  Gideon stood up and dived into the pool, swam a few lengths, and then settled at the other end, looking at his ex-wife. His second ex-wife. She was a lovely thing—still. Blond, reed-slim, but full-breasted, her sleek body and almost unlined face a testimony to the wonders of cosmetic science. He had loved her so much. As much as he had loved Jocasta. Probably more. Aisling was right; he was a romantic old fool. And he shouldn’t have married Jocasta. Who he still loved—in a way. Enough, just maybe, to set her free again.

  Jocasta sat staring at the little blue plus sign. Plus. Not minus, this time, but plus. Plus meant pregnant. It was very simple. She was plus something. Plus a pregnancy. Plus a baby. Plus Nick’s baby.

  She felt odd, very odd indeed. Not entirely as she would have expected. She felt shocked and horrified and terrified; but she felt something else, as well. Almost—awed. That it could have happened. That she and Nick could have made a baby. They had made love and made a baby. Something that was partly her and partly Nick. It was an extraordinary thought.

  Only, of course it wasn’t a baby: it was a cluster of cells. She was—what was she? Three weeks pregnant. Three and a half weeks. Whatever it was, it was pinprick size. A tiny, pinprick-size cluster of cells. It was not a baby. And she could get rid of it. Quickly and easily.

  She must get rid of it. Obviously.

  What on earth would Nick do or say, if he knew? Nick, who still couldn’t contemplate any sort of commitment, not even living together, certainly not getting married, how would he react to the news that he was a father? Well, not a father, but going to be a father. It was absolutely unthinkable.

  She decided to go and see Clio.

  Clio—of course—gave her all the wrong advice.

  Like she shouldn’t do anything too hasty. Like she should wait a few more days, these tests weren’t entirely reliable, whatever they said, it was very early days. Like was she really sure it was Nick’s. Like she ought to tell Nick.

  “Tell Nick! Clio, are you mad? Of course I can’t tell Nick. He’d be horrified, he’d run away, he’d hate it, he’d hate me. No, I must just have a termination as soon as possible and—”

  “Jocasta, I think you should tell him. If you’re really pregnant and it’s really his, you should tell him.”

  “But why?”

  “Because it’s his baby too. It’s wrong not to. It’s a terrible thing to do, deciding to get rid of a baby, wit
hout telling its father.”

  “Clio, you don’t know Nick and I do. He would not want a baby. He doesn’t even want me. And if you’re even contemplating telling him yourself, you’d better just stop right away, at once, you’ve got to promise me not to, promise, Clio, all right, now, at once, on your life—” She was crying now; Clio went over to her, put her arms round her.

  “Of course I won’t tell him. I promise, on my life, I won’t.”

  “Never, ever?”

  “Never ever. Come on, sit down, have a cup of tea.”

  “Coffee, please. Nice and strong.”

  “Fine.” She went into the kitchen; Jocasta followed her, sat down at the table.

  “You might not be, you know. When was your period due?”

  “Last Thursday.”

  “That’s a very short time. It could all be a mistake. You don’t feel…funny or anything? Sick, or tired or—”

  “Absolutely not,” said Jocasta.

  “I should wait a few more days, then do another test. Go and see your doctor, or your gynaecologist, see what she says. Various things can affect these tests—I presume you’re still taking the pill. Here’s your coffee.”

  Jocasta took one sip of it, put it down, made a face.

  “God, that tastes disgusting. What have you put in it, Clio? It makes me want to heave.”

  Clio looked at her very soberly, in silence. Then she said, “Jocasta, I’m sorry, but I would say that rather clinches it. You definitely are pregnant.”

  Sarah Kershaw confirmed Clio’s diagnosis.

  She had been Jocasta’s gynaecologist for years; she was in her early forties, high-powered, sympathetic.

  “I’ll do a lab test, of course. We can do it now, this afternoon. Think you can pee?”