Caroline Anderson, Josie Metcalfe, Maggie Kingsley, Margaret McDonagh

by Brides of Penhally Bay Vol. 03 (li

  And that child was their son.

  She looked out of the window, across the bay to the headland where Nick had found her staring out to sea, her body drenched and buffeted by the wild storm, her eyes straining into the darkness. Not that there had been any hope. Even the coastguard had given up, at least for the night, but she hadn’t been able to tear herself away.

  So Nick had taken control—taken her back to her house, stripped off her sodden clothes, dried her—and then somehow, suddenly, everything had changed. It could have been put down to that old affirmation-of-life cliché, she thought, but it had been more than that. She’d loved him since she’d been fifteen, had wanted him for ever, and it had seemed entirely natural to turn to him for comfort.

  And it seemed he had felt the same, because, laid bare by their emotions, when the world had been falling apart all around them and it had seemed as if they were the only people in the world left alive, they’d finally done what they’d come so close to before he’d gone to university and met Annabel. The timing had been awful, but maybe it had been because it was so awful that they’d been able to break through those barriers and reach for each other. And in that moment, when they’d both been too racked with grief and guilt to know what they were doing, they’d started another life.

  Like it or not—and he clearly didn’t—Nick Tremayne would have to acknowledge the result of their actions that night, and learn to live with it every day of his life, just like she had for the past ten years. After all, it had given her a son, a child she’d never thought she’d have, and he’d brought her so much joy.

  So she’d learned to live with herself, with the shame she felt at having given in and taken comfort from Nick at that dreadful time, and she’d slowly, painfully, learned to forgive herself.

  Now it was Nick’s turn. He’d have to learn to live with himself, too, and maybe, with time, forgive himself.

  And perhaps, in the end, he could even learn to love his son.

  ‘Fran!’

  She heard the knock, heard the voice calling and went to the window, leaning out and seeing Kate there, to her surprise. ‘Kate, hi! Come in, the door’s open. I’m just changing Sophie’s sheets—Come on up, I’m nearly done.’

  And then she wondered why on earth she’d said that, because the house wasn’t looking fantastic and Kate wasn’t a close friend, not the sort of person who you just invited in—although maybe she was exactly the sort of person, she amended as Kate arrived in the bedroom with a smile, got hold of the other side of the quilt cover and helped her put it on.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Pleasure. It’s always easier with two.’

  Fran plumped up the pillow and straightened up. ‘I only did it yesterday, that’s the frustrating thing, in time for Sophie’s next visit, but the dog sneaked up here last night with filthy feet, and I didn’t realise till this morning. So—what brings you here on a Tuesday afternoon?’ she asked, finally voicing the question that had been in the forefront of her mind ever since she’d heard Kate calling her.

  ‘Oh, I was just passing. I’ve been to see Ben and Lucy and I popped in at the farm shop. I thought I’d say hello and see how you are. It’s always so busy at school and I haven’t seen you for ages, not to chat to.’

  Not since before the miscarriage but, then, you didn’t really need antenatal care when there wasn’t going to be any natal to worry about, Fran thought with a sharp stab of grief.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  She scooped up the washing and carried it downstairs, leaving Kate to follow. She ought to offer her a cup of tea, but that would open the door to all sorts of things she didn’t want. A cosy chat. A more penetrating ‘How are you’. A ‘How are you really, now your dream’s been snatched away’ sort of ‘How are you’.

  But the teapot was there on the side of the Aga, and the kettle was next to it, and without being offered, Kate went over to it, lifted it and raised an eyebrow at Fran. ‘Got time to give me a cup of tea?’ she asked, and put like that, it would have been too rude to refuse.

  She gave in.

  ‘Of course. I’ll make it.’

  ‘No, you deal with the washing. I can make a cup of tea. I spend my life making tea and drinking it. That’s what midwives do—didn’t you know that?’

  ‘Really? I thought they interfered.’

  Kate met her eyes and smiled. So the gloves were off, their cards were on the table and they could both start being honest.

  Kate lifted the hotplate cover and put the kettle on the hob. ‘Fran, I haven’t seen you for ages—not since the miscarriage. I’m worried about you,’ she said gently.

  Fran looked up from the washing machine, slammed the door on it and stood up. ‘Don’t be.’

  ‘I am. You’ve got a lot of pressures on you. Sometimes talking them through can help.’

  ‘Kate, I don’t need counselling,’ she said firmly and a little desperately.

  ‘I never said you did. But a friend who understands the pressures you might be under and the choices open to you might be a help—a sounding board, someone to rant at that isn’t your husband?’

  Had Mike been talking?

  ‘I don’t rant at him.’

  ‘But maybe you want to. Maybe you need to—not because he’s done anything wrong but just because you need to rant, to let out your anger. It’s all part of the grieving process, Fran. And you have to grieve for your baby.’

  Fran swallowed. ‘It was just a failed embryo—just like my other miscarriage. There was no baby.’

  ‘But there was—there were two, and you loved them,’ Kate said gently, and that was it. The dam burst, and Kate took the washing powder out of her hands, wrapped her arms firmly around her and held her tight. At first Fran could hardly breathe for the wave of pain, but then it got easier, just slightly, so she could actually drag in the air with which to sob.

  And sob she did, cradled against Kate’s comforting bosom, her hand smoothing rhythmically up and down her back, telling her without words that it would be all right.

  ‘That’s it, let it go,’ Kate murmured, and when the tears had slowed to a trickle, when the pain had eased to a dull ache instead of the slice of a sword, Kate let her go, and she sat down at the table and groped for a tissue.

  ‘Sorry—heavens, I must look a wreck,’ Fran said, sniffing and patting her pockets until Kate handed her a clump of kitchen roll. She mopped her face, blew her nose, sniffed again and tried to smile. It was a wobbly effort, but it was rewarded by an answering smile and a mug of tea put in her hand.

  When had Kate made it? In the few seconds she’d been mopping up? Must have. God, she was losing it.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, wrapping her nerveless hands around the mug and hugging it close.

  ‘Better now?’

  She nodded, and Kate smiled sympathetically.

  ‘Good. It always helps to get all that backed-up emotion out of the way. Helps you see things more clearly. Was that the first time?’

  ‘Since April? Yes. Properly, like that, yes. I’ve always tried to stop it before, because it didn’t help with the first miscarriage, and I cried so much then. Silly. I might have known it would come out in the end.’

  ‘And Mike’s too close to allow him to see it. Because he’s hurting, too, and you don’t want him to feel bad for you.’

  ‘When did you become so clever?’

  A fleeting shadow passed over Kate’s face, and Fran was so preoccupied she nearly missed it. Not quite, though, but she had no idea what had prompted it, and Kate was smiling now.

  ‘Oh, I’m not clever, Fran,’ she said softly. ‘Just human. Maybe I just try and put myself in someone else’s shoes, and I know the difference Jem’s made in my life, so it’s not hard to imagine how I would feel if I’d been unable to have him.’

  Fran didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t been in Penhally when Kate’s husband had died, but she’d heard about it from her parents, and how sad it was that he couldn’t have known that Kate
had been pregnant after several years of marriage. But she didn’t feel she could say anything about that now. It had been years ago, intensely private and nothing to do with her.

  So she sipped her tea, and sniffed a bit more, and blew her nose again, and all the time Kate just sat there in a companionable silence and let her sift through her thoughts.

  ‘Have you noticed,’ Fran said finally, as the sifting came to a sort of conclusion, ‘how just about everybody seems to be pregnant at the moment? I don’t know if it’s just because I’m hypersensitive, but there seems to be a plague of it right now, especially among the school mums. Every time I look up, there’s another one.’

  Kate nodded. ‘And it hurts.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Fran said very softly. ‘It really hurts. You have no idea how much I want a baby, Kate. It’s like a biological ache, a real pain low down in my abdomen—No, not a pain, it’s not that sharp, but a sort of dull awareness, an emptiness, a sort of waiting—does that sound crazy?’

  ‘No,’ Kate murmured. ‘It doesn’t sound crazy at all. I’ve heard it before, so many times.’

  ‘The frantic ticking of my biological clock—except it’s not ticking, is it? The spring’s broken, or it needs oiling or something, but nobody can find out what exactly, and sort it out. And in the meantime we’ve run out of time on the NHS, we don’t have any money to pay for another cycle of IVF privately, and even if we did, Mike’s been so odd recently I don’t even know if he wants a baby with me!’

  Kate studied her tea thoughtfully. ‘Do you want a baby with him?’ she asked gently. ‘Or do you just want a baby?’

  That stopped her. She stared at Kate, opened her mouth to say, ‘Of course I want a baby with him!’ and then shut it again without saying a word, because suddenly she wasn’t sure, and she felt her eyes fill again.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied instead, looking down and twisting the tissue into knots. ‘I really, really don’t know.’

  ‘Do you still love him?’

  Again she opened her mouth, then shut it, then said softly, her confidence wavering, ‘Yes. Yes, I do, but I don’t know if I can live with him like this. And I don’t know if he loves me any more.’

  ‘Then you need to talk. You need to spend time together, find out if you’ve still got what it takes, because there’s no point killing yourselves to have a baby together if you don’t in the end want to be together. If being with Mike, with or without a child, is the first and most important thing in your life, then go ahead and keep trying for a baby. But if it’s not, if the baby’s more important than being together, then you need to think very carefully before you go ahead. And so does he.

  ‘Think about it,’ she went on. ‘Talk to Mike. Take some time together. And play, Fran. Take time out. The weather’s gorgeous now. As soon as you break up at the end of the week, try and find some time away from the farm and all its distractions. Is there any chance you can get away?’

  She laughed, but with very little humour. ‘Not exactly. There’s the milking, and the cheese making, and then we share the weekends with Joe, so they each get one weekend off in four. Well, Saturday afternoon and Sunday.’

  ‘And when’s your next one?’

  ‘This weekend,’ she said slowly. ‘But Mike won’t stop. He’ll just use the time to catch up on paperwork.’

  ‘So stop him. Find a little hotel or a guest house or something, and go away for the night.’

  ‘I doubt if he’ll wear that. Anyway, we’ve got Sophie coming for tea on Sunday because she’s away the next weekend.’

  ‘You can be back by teatime.’ Kate stood up and put a hand on Fran’s shoulder. ‘Try it. You’ve got nothing to lose. And you might have everything to gain. And in the meantime, I’ve heard some very interesting things about miscarriage and diet and the relationship to damaged and defective sperm.’

  Fran frowned. ‘Are Mike’s sperm defective? I don’t think they said anything about it at the fertility clinic—well, not to me, anyway.’

  Kate shook her head. ‘Not particularly, according to the report from the clinic, but although there were a good number, a slightly higher proportion than one might hope for were defective or sluggish. That in itself might have been enough to cause your miscarriage, if it was a damaged sperm that fertilised the ovum. And this diet is supposed to reduce the numbers of defective sperm quite significantly, according to the study I’ve heard about. If you’re going to try again, maybe you need to take a while to make friends again, and while you do that, you could try the diet to boost Mike’s sperm production. It might as well be as good as it can be, and even if you decide not to go ahead and try again, it won’t do either of you any harm.’

  It sounded a good idea, but she wasn’t sure she’d get it past Mike. ‘Is it freaky?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want to start giving him weird stuff. He’ll ask questions or refuse to eat it. You know what men are like. And he’s always starving.’

  Kate laughed softly. ‘Typical man, then—and, no, it’s not freaky. It’s more a supplement to his normal diet rather than any radical alteration. I can let you have all the details, if you like—why don’t you come and see me tomorrow after school? I’ve got time, and we can go through it then properly.’

  Fran nodded slowly. ‘OK. Thanks. I will.’

  And in the meantime, she’d try and talk him into going away. Just a few days, right away from the pressures of the farm.

  She felt a shiver of something that could have been fear and could have been excitement. Maybe both. Probably.

  She’d ask him tonight.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘THIS is ridiculous.’

  Fran stared out across the yard. She couldn’t see the farm office on the other side, but she could see the spill of light from the window, and she knew exactly what he’d be doing.

  Avoiding her.

  Night after night, week after week for months now.

  It was becoming a pattern. He’d get up at the end of their evening meal, kiss her absently on the cheek and thank her, then go out, Brodie at his heels, to the farm office.

  And he’d stay there, wrestling with the accounts and the endless paperwork, until nearly midnight. Sometimes she’d hear him come to bed, sometimes she wouldn’t. And in the morning, when the alarm went at five, he’d get up and go into the bathroom and dress, then go out and do the milking.

  On a good day, or at the weekend, she’d see him for breakfast before she went to work herself. On a bad day, and there were increasingly more of them, she wouldn’t see him at all.

  Tonight was no exception. He’d kissed her vaguely on her cheek, said, ‘Don’t wait up for me, I want to get those quota forms filled in,’ and he had gone.

  Well, she was sick of it.

  Sick of not having a relationship, sick of not having anyone—not even the dog, for heaven’s sake!—to talk to in the evenings, sick of going to bed alone. Even on his birthday.

  No wonder Kirsten had left him.

  She sighed and turned away from the window, sick, too, of staring out and willing him to come back in. It hadn’t always been like this. At first, when they’d started going out together, he’d been able to find time for her, and after they’d married he’d been lovely. OK, he’d worked late and started early, but when he’d come to bed he would wake her, snuggling up, either for a cuddle or to make love to her, slowly, tenderly, languorously—or wildly, as if he couldn’t get enough of her.

  When had it changed? she asked herself, but she knew.

  The miscarriage—the most recent one, three months ago.

  That was when it had changed—when he’d withdrawn from her so completely. When she’d lost the baby she’d thought they’d been so thrilled about.

  Except maybe she’d been wrong. Maybe he hadn’t been thrilled at all. Maybe this last miscarriage had been a lucky escape, a narrow squeak in the midst of all the happy, fluffy stuff—choosing the colour of the paint for the nursery, discussing names, telling both sets of parents. Thank G
od they hadn’t told Sophie, but they’d been waiting till after the three-month watershed, till it was safe.

  Except it hadn’t been.

  She scrubbed away the sudden, unexpected tears and swallowed hard.

  No. She wouldn’t cry again. Not after all this time. She’d cried all over Kate today, embarrassingly, but she wasn’t doing it again. It didn’t help. She’d cried an ocean after the first miscarriage, and it hadn’t done any good.

  And neither had anything else they’d tried, because she still hadn’t conceived again until they’d gone down the IVF route.

  Of course, the opportunity wouldn’t have gone amiss and, looking back on it, she realised that ever since the first miscarriage things had been different. She’d put it down to too much work and the pressure of the farm, but really he’d been avoiding her for years, she thought with shock, and she’d been more than happy to let him, because it meant she didn’t have to confront her fears and feelings.

  Well, not any more.

  She stared out of the window again, and decided it was time to act. If she was going to save her marriage, she was going to have to fight for it—she just wished she knew what it was she was fighting…

  ‘We can’t go away!’

  ‘Why not?’

  Mike stared at her, puzzled by her sudden insistence, but maybe more puzzled by his own curious reluctance.

  The truth was, with Joe already fixed to cover him for the coming weekend there was no reason at all why they couldn’t go away. Sophie was coming on Sunday afternoon, but otherwise they were free—the animals were taken care of, and Brodie would be perfectly content down at Joe and Sarah’s house with their two dogs. They spent a lot of time together anyway.

  So there was no reason, no reasonable excuse he could give, and he wasn’t sure why he wanted to get out of it, but he did.