Secrets and Lies

by Joanne Clancy

  “Oh my goodness!” Kerry clutched her mouth and dissolved into helpless giggles.

  “You haven't laughed like that in a while,” Conor smiled, planting a kiss on her head when she'd finally recovered.

  “You always could make me chuckle,” Kerry grinned, reaching up to give him a hug.

  She leaned against his strong, broad chest for a moment and wrapped her arms tightly around him.

  There were many wretched days when technology let her down, when her head ached, her spine pained, her eyes strained, when she could feel a tingling in the dowager's hump she'd developed from slumping over the keyboard but Kerry knew that her writing life offered amazing highs too.

  Yet again, she was standing by the French doors in the living room of Ballycotton House, looking out over the bay and the headland fields. One of the neighbouring farms' lemony calves cavorted, stopped, seemed to think for a second, then bucklepped a half-turn and rushed to butt at its dozy mother. “Wake up, mommy, wake up, it's great to be alive,” Kerry imagined the little calf saying.

  Yes, indeed it was a great day to be alive. The coffee was strong and good. It was March fourteenth and only a few short days until their “holiday of a lifetime” to Japan. Kerry had finally completed work on her lost book and had just emailed it to Nuala. Her work was done, albeit a few weeks late, but it was in Nuala's capable hands now, and there was no going back. The sun, already warm on her face, had started to burn off the sea-mist that shrouded Kinsale Bay which jutted over the wild Atlantic Ocean. The crisp air was diamond-clear and she could hear the shrieks of the seagulls calling to each other far out over the calm water.

  It was an exhilarating morning and although it was only a few minutes past six o' clock, already there were a few people out walking and jogging. The sunny morning reminded her of the exciting travelling she'd enjoyed in connection with her last book. There'd been promotional book tours to Australia, New Zealand and South Africa and research trips to France, Britain, Canada and, of course, America. Research on her novel called for a drive through the lush, posh Cotswolds with her editor and close friend, Nuala. They'd spent a weekend savouring glorious red wine and divine cheeses at the heavenly village of Collioure, which was the next village down from the Corniche from Argeles-sur-Mer in the Languedoc in France.

  Nuala accompanied her to the fire-red earth of Prince Edward Island off the coast of Canada, for another of her novels, where they'd found themselves tripping over coachloads of happy-snappy Japanese tourists who were immersing themselves in the home and lore created by the wonderful “Anne of Green Gables” series. This was where Nuala and Kerry also discovered that alcohol was sold only during limited opening times in state-run shops.

  Nuala was also there for the first week of Kerry's week-long trip to research her tenth novel, “Clouds,” in the vast, glorious emptiness and beauty of Montana. Although Kerry loved and greatly appreciated Nuala's company and they travelled well together, the three weeks she spent alone traversing its plains and the Rockies cemented that huge state permanently into her dream time. Another cast of Kerry's characters was taken through the vast canyons of Arizona.

  She drove almost three thousand miles through high desert, lush forest, snow bowls, brick-red rock lands and dunes of blinding white gypsum on the White Sands Missile Range. She climbed through forests of saguaro, those amazing cactus oddities that take two hundred years to become the three or four-armed icons of so many Westerns. She visited pistachio farms and was amazed to discover that the reason they cost so much was that they take eleven years to mature and each nut has to be harvested by hand!

  The choice of those specific locations in America was not arbitrary. Kerry had always been fascinated by local and very specific Irish emigration patterns; for instance, many Connemara and Aran Island people clustered in Chicago. The connection between Kinsale in County Cork and Montana is copper mining; the miners from the Beara peninsula travelled to the mines of Butte.

  Kerry extended her interest cross-border into Canada, well, into the ocean off its coast, because the antecedents of many residents of Prince Edward Island were from County Monaghan. Shortly before the Great Famine of 1845, a priest from County Monaghan learned that in an effort to populate their empty territories, the Canadian authorities were giving away fertile plots of land. He went to Prince Edward Island to investigate and wrote back, extolling the virtues of the island and assuring his parishoners that the offer of free land was genuine. Many of his flock took him at his word and went to settle there.

  It wasn't until the characters appeared in her stories that Kerry realised how many scenes she had stockpiled from her memory banks. Even the layout of Ballycotton House fed into some of her novels and it was only having finished her latest book that she realised that her great grand-aunt, who was sent into domestic service in her late teens, subconsciously provided the model, fictionally embroidered to a high degree, for one phase of her character's life.

  Writing offered Kerry many small joys too, such as when characters she had created bit back unexpectedly and insisted on taking their own course. There was the pleasure of waking up to the realisation that, while she had slept, a knotty plot problem had unravelled and the solution was suddenly revealed. There were other moments when she glanced at the clock after writing, for what she assumed was only an hour or so, and found that six hours had suddenly passed.

  It was wonderfully affirmative when someone approached her and told her that they'd read all her books and wondered if she might have another one coming out soon. Those were the moments that made it all worthwhile for Kerry.

  Chapter 17

  Hope stared at the four pregnancy tests, which were neatly lined up in the bathroom sink, in stunned silence. This isn't possible. It can't be happening now. The timing is completely wrong! I'm not ready to become a mother yet, not now, maybe never. It's difficult enough to look after myself most days, let alone be completely responsible for a tiny baby who will depend on me for everything. If I just ignore it and pretend it isn't happening, the whole thing might go away.

  Hope's friend, Rosanna, had given birth to her first baby two months previously and she was still a complete mess. She hardly ever left the house anymore and when she did it was only to make a mad dash to the grocery store to buy essentials. Every time Hope had seen her since baby Claire arrived, her usually glamorous friend was up to her eyeballs in nappies! She told Hope that showering was a luxury these days and she couldn't care less about how she looked anymore; grabbing a few precious hours of sleep here and there was her main priority.

  The usually svelte, figure conscious Rosanna had, by her own admission, turned into a “beached whale” during her pregnancy. She joked that she hadn't been eating for two that she'd been eating for at least five! Somehow, she'd been convinced during her pregnancy that the weight would simply fall off shortly after the baby was born, but that obviously hadn't been the case.

  Two months later and poor Rosanna had hardly lost half a stone with at least another four stone left to lose! She didn't have the energy to exercise and she was so tired most of the time that she found herself constantly comforting eating and stuffing her face with chocolate and all sorts of junk food. She lived in tracksuits and trainers and wore her hair scraped back in a ponytail on top of her head and she simply didn't have the time or the inclination to be bothered applying makeup.

  Gone was the slim, sexy, sophisticated, controlled woman who Hope secretly wanted to emulate and in her place was a sleep-deprived, half-crazed milk machine! However, Rosanna insisted that the overwhelming tiredness, weight gain and sore breasts were all worth it when baby Claire squeezed her hand and cooed at her in recognition.

  Hope wasn't so sure. She was thirty four years old but she still didn't feel old enough to be a mother. She wondered if she ever would feel ready. Now here she was staring at four positive pregnancy tests that lay discarded in the bathroom sink. There was no doubt about it, she was pregnant. Her heart sank at the thought of te
lling Niall. They'd been going through a bit of a rough patch in their relationship anyway, and the last thing they needed was the added stress of an unplanned pregnancy. Everyone knew that having a baby put a lot of strain on any marriage and Hope wondered if she and Niall would be able to handle the extra pressure.

  They'd built their lives around themselves and Hope worried about the change in the dynamic of their relationship with the arrival of a baby. She didn't know if there was room for anyone else. She couldn't imagine Niall thinking there'd be time for someone new. Their lives would suddenly be revolve around nappies, night feeds and brightly coloured plastic toys.

  He'll be gobsmacked, she thought. She was utterly astonished herself.

  Her stomach heaved again. Why can't I be one of those lucky women who sail through their pregnancy, or is that just a myth? Will there be complications? She worried about having her first baby at the ripe old age of thirty four, going on thirty five by the time the baby was actually born. Didn't doctors recommend that women have their first baby by the time they were thirty? She tried to recall from the many magazine articles she'd read over the years. I'll probably be the oldest mother on the maternity ward, she thought ruefully. “Where's your bus pass and pension book, grandma?” she imagined the other mothers mocking her. Will I need special care? Will the doctors have to run additional checks on me and the baby? She propelled herself forward to when the time finally arrived to deliver. She envisioned herself in a ward with young mothers, hopeful mothers, women who were nothing more than babies themselves.

  What will happen to my life after the baby is born? Her acting career was going from strength to strength at long last and she'd probably have to quit, just when her dreams were finally coming true.

  She gathered up the pregnancy tests and shoved them to the bottom of the bathroom bin. The last thing she needed was Niall to find out before she'd decided what to do next. She needed to get her head around the situation before she told anyone else about the pregnancy. She and Niall would have even less time alone together. She'd be stuck at home with the baby all day every day and it would be forever before they'd have time to go out again as a couple, just the two of them. There'd be no more weekend breaks away or fancy foreign holidays.

  Her new life would consist of changing nappies, sterilising bottles and mixing feeds, interspersed with minimal sleep. Niall would be utterly useless. He liked his sleep and she couldn't see him sacrificing his full eight hours for a crying baby.

  Hope couldn't quite believe that she was pregnant. She'd had an upset stomach for the past week and at first she'd dismissed it as minor food poisoning, but when the cramps and empty retching continued she decided to take a pregnancy test just in case. When the first test came out positive she'd rushed straight out to the chemist and bought three more, absolutely convinced that the first one was somehow damaged. No, it was conclusive, she was pregnant.

  She felt another violent heave in her stomach and rushed to the toilet bowl where she threw up uncontrollably. When the vomiting finally subsided, she sat shakily on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor and wiped her face with a damp towel. She leaned against the bath for support and tried to focus on her breathing to calm her rattled nerves. She desperately wanted a drink of cool fizzy water or a cracker to help settle her stomach but she was too weak to make the effort to drag herself downstairs to the kitchen. “This can't be happening to me!” she cried aloud, suddenly gripped with panic. “I don't want to be pregnant now. Why couldn't you have given this baby to someone else, God?” Tears rolled down her face.

  Eventually, she forced herself up off the floor and crashed into the weighing scales that were near the sink. “I won't need you for a while,” she kicked them out of her way. “I've just lost a stone on that bloody Atkins diet too, what a complete waste of time!”

  She'd spent the last month obsessing about carbohydrates and proteins and counting every minute calorie. She'd been so ruthless about her weight loss that she'd even been cooking separate meals for herself and Niall, whenever he was home, not that he had a spare pound of fat on him anyway. Here she was, a stone lighter, feeling trim and toned with her lovely flat stomach and in a few short months she'd be the size of a house and shopping for maternity clothes. How unfair!

  She splashed water on her pale, tear-stained face. “Get a grip, woman,” she ordered herself in the mirror when the nausea finally seemed to have abated. “Stop being gloomy and negative. This is a miracle!” She dotted concealer on the dark circles under her eyes and brushed a little pink blusher on her ghostly pale cheeks. She stared at her reflection in the mirror, trying to imagine herself as a mother. When the baby was twenty-one she'd be fifty-six. Fifty-six years old! What the hell would it be like to be in her fifties and dealing with teenage temper tantrums?

  The new baby would be due in September, a Libra baby, the same star sign as Hope. She couldn't help smiling at the thought of already having something in common with her baby. Reality hit her again when she envisioned the darkening nights of winter that would be looming ahead when her baby was a newborn. The evening would be dark early and the mornings wouldn't be bright until late, making the darkness of night seem almost interminable.

  She smeared some lipstick on her lips, anything to add some colour and life to her drawn face. I don't look thirty-four, do I? She studied her reflection carefully. I've been mistaken for someone in their mid-twenties before. Sometimes, she was even asked to show identification when she bought alcohol, much to her delight! She pulled at the edges of her face to tighten the skin a little. There were a few fine lines around her eyes, but nothing too remarkable. Maybe it was time to invest in some anti-ageing creams, just to be on the safe side. What was it her mother was always saying? Prevention is better than cure.

  She ran her hands through her thick, dark hair, which despite her thirty-four years didn't have a single grey. Some of her friends were already spending a small fortune on having their roots touched up every month so Hope was delighted that she had so far escaped that tedious task. Her hair was her favourite feature and it shone in the bright evening sunlight that was streaming through the bathroom window. She stopped brushing her hair for a moment and tried to summon some feelings of happiness about her pregnancy. She wanted to be happy and felt guilty about how much she dreaded impending motherhood.

  I'll be happy if Niall's happy, she decided. If he turns out to be supportive and understanding and if he thinks the whole thing is an absolute miracle then I'll be able to see it the same way. She desperately prayed that he wouldn't see her pregnancy as an intrusion into their lives together because she didn't know how she'd cope with that reaction.

  She forced a smile on her face and tried to see the positive. This is a miracle, she told herself, a miracle and a blessing. How can I be this upset about a miracle?

  She pulled her cashmere sweater over her head and surveyed herself in her favourite skinny jeans, not that she'd be able to wear her jeans for very much longer, but right now, at least, they still fitted her perfectly. She stood to the side and studied her flat stomach. There was no sign yet that she was pregnant. Maybe she could pretend for another while, until Niall got home from his business trip, that she wasn't really pregnant at all. It would be her little secret for now.

  She wandered downstairs and began to sort through the mountain of laundry that she'd allowed to build up while Niall was away. She wasn't in the least bit domesticated and only did the bare minimum unless she absolutely had to do more. Niall liked a clean and tidy house so she made an effort for him, but if she was left to her own devices the place would be a lot messier, messy but not dirty. “I'm a creative spirit,” she would laughingly protest, when Niall jokingly bemoaned her lack of domestic skills. “I can't waste my creative energy on something as menial as washing dishes.”

  She smiled at the memory and sighed when she imagined how much more domesticated she would be forced to become when the baby arrived. Rosanna was obsessed with cleanliness. She'd almost f
reaked out last week when Hope had refilled one of baby Claire's used bottles and tried to feed her. “What the hell are you doing?” Rosanna had shouted, snatching the bottle from Hope's hands before it had even touched Claire's lips. “You have to sterilise EVERYTHING!”

  Hope checked her mobile phone for the umpteenth time that day, still no message or call from Niall. She was annoyed because he'd been away all the previous week and four days of the week before that but she was relieved in a way that she didn't have to tell him about the pregnancy just yet. Her thoughts were all over the place and her feelings were equally haphazard. She needed time to be alone. However, it seemed to her that since they'd been married his work was taking him away more and more often and the part-time nature of their relationship was beginning to bother her.

  His absences hadn't concerned her at first. She'd enjoyed the peace and quiet of having the apartment to herself and liked the fact that they were independent people who didn't need to be joined at the hip to be happy. She'd enjoyed going on weekend breaks away with her friends without him. Their reunions were always passionate and welcome, and last month she'd even given him a gift of a little teddy bear holding a heart which was inscribed with the words “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” He said he'd put it up in pride of place in his office.

  Niall had tried to explain to her that he needed to be away more on work trips because the business was expanding rapidly and it was a crucial time for the company. He'd promised her time and time again that he'd try to slow down, but if anything he seemed to be getting even busier. She needed to have a serious discussion with him about his absences, especially now that she was pregnant with their baby.