The Baby Verdict

by Cathy Williams

  ‘Bruno.’ Jessica looked at him firmly. ‘Pregnancy is a natural occurrence. I feel well enough, apart from the odd bout of morning sickness and that’s on its way out. I’m sure everything is all right. There’s absolutely nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Who ever said anything about worrying?’ He stabbed a piece of fish with his fork and treated her to a watered-down version of a glare.

  Why did he have to be so damned cute? she thought irritably. Why couldn’t he be cold and detached all the time? Cute undermined her. His mood swings undermined her.

  She felt a sudden gust of misery sweep over her. It was all such a parody of what should have been.

  ‘You brought me here to discuss arrangements...’ she reminded him unsteadily.

  ‘Arrangements. Yes.’ He seemed as relieved as she was to find their conversational footing back to where it should be. ‘There’s no need, first of all, for you to continue working out your notice.’

  ‘You mean I can continue working until I’m ready to...have the baby?’ Now that he knew the reasons for her resignation, there seemed no point in resigning after all. She knew that she would have to tell everyone at the office that she was getting married, having a baby, and that Bruno Carr was the man responsible, and she knew that there would be a buzz of gossip for a while after. But gossip died eventually. And she wasn’t afraid of gossip. They were a good bunch of people, and after the initial shock and ‘who’d have thought it?’ remarks, they would accept it.

  ‘I mean,’ Bruno said patiently, ‘you can leave immediately, without bothering to work out your notice at all.’

  ‘And do what?’ She looked at him questioningly, as though he had suddenly started talking a different language.

  ‘Do nothing. Relax. Put your feet up. Plan a nursery. Whatever,’ he finished irritably, watching her face.

  ‘I intend to do no such thing,’ Jessica informed him flatly. If there were one or two things to be ironed out, then they had hit the first major crease. ‘I’m not going to sit around doing nothing. I’d go mad.’

  ‘Lots of women do it,’ he said impatiently. ‘And there’s no financial need for you to work. As my wife, you’ll have whatever you need, and whenever you need it.’

  Which, she thought, brought them swiftly to crease number two.

  ‘Look, let’s get one or two things straight here.’ She abandoned her attempts to enjoy what remained of the food in front of her, and closed her knife and fork. ‘I am not going to be giving up work from now and sitting around on my butt doing nothing, just because you think it might be a good idea. I am going to carry on where I am and when the time comes I shall have the baby and then go back out to work. I have no intention of becoming a financial burden to you.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, woman—’

  ‘And furthermore, while we’re on the subject of money, I intend to keep my flat and rent it out.’

  ‘As a bolt-hole?’

  ‘As a source of income!’

  ‘You don’t need a source of income!’

  ‘Nor do you, any longer!’ she retorted. ‘But that doesn’t mean that you intend to pack in your job and sit around building shelves and doing the garden!’

  They stared at one another and finally he expelled a long, frustrated sigh.

  ‘It’s a lousy idea. Pregnant women need to rest.’

  ‘According to a man who freely admits he knows nothing whatsoever on the subject!’

  ‘Lord, give me strength...’ he muttered under his breath.

  ‘If you’re beginning to regret your little proposition,’ she said hopefully, ‘then now’s the time to retract it.’ If she was going to go along with this so-called business arrangement, then she intended to lay down a few ground rules before she found herself swept up into a world in which she had no say. There was no way on the face of the earth that she would follow in her mother’s footsteps and become the silent partner in an unfair dictatorship.

  She thrust out her chin belligerently, and he looked at her with a shadow of amusement.

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of doing any such thing.’

  She noticed that he had similarly closed his knife and fork, and she wondered whether this blast of reality had affected his appetite as well. If it had, then all the better.

  ‘Now, the wedding...’ he began.

  ‘Business arrangement, you mean?’

  ‘Pick your choice of words. The sooner the better as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘Why?’

  She felt a nervous flutter in her stomach at the prospect of fixing a date, but her expression remained unchanged.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to become accustomed to our home before the baby comes along?’

  No, she was tempted to say. She thought of sharing a home with him and was attacked by another queasy sense of anxiety.

  ‘Oh, getting accustomed to some bricks and mortar doesn’t take very long,’ she said with conviction. If only, she thought, she didn’t feel something for him. She wasn’t too sure what she felt, but she could sense it there, deep inside, for ever stirring. A business arrangement involved two dispassionate strangers, but they weren’t, were they?

  ‘Stop being so damned obstructive. It won’t work.’

  ‘What won’t work?’

  ‘Trying to put off the inevitable.’ He signalled for some coffee. ‘And I don’t want you getting cold feet at the last minute. We both know what the outcome is going to be and you might as well face the facts.’ He sipped some of his coffee and regarded her calmly over the rim of the cup.

  Those eyes. Those fingers curled around the handle of the cup. However much she tried to persuade herself that she found him unreasonable, lacking in the milk of human tenderness and ruthless to the core, her body still responded with eagerness at the mere sight of him. Why? Why? Why?

  ‘So we’ve agreed that I continue working until the time comes.’

  ‘I can hardly drag you to my house and chain you to a piece of furniture.’

  ‘So you won’t pass the word down that my employment with your company is terminated.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You sound as though you should be adding Sir to the end of that question. For God’s sake, can’t you relax a bit about this whole thing?’

  ‘How do you expect me to do that?’ she almost shrieked. ‘I feel as though I’m on a roller coaster all of a sudden. How easy is it to relax on a roller coaster?’ She looked at her coffee with distaste.

  ‘Life is going to change for the both of us,’ he said coolly. ‘You’re not the only one who’s going to be feeling the repercussions of this, are you?’ He called for the bill, but kept watching her, as though half expecting her to make a sudden dash for the door.

  ‘I can take the underground back to my place,’ she said, once he had paid.

  ‘We’re going back to my house.’ He steered her towards a taxi and she helplessly allowed herself to be ushered in.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Because I say so.’

  ‘You’re not my lord and master,’ she protested grimly under her breath.

  ‘If you want to be involved in joint decision making, then you’re going to have to act in a more mature manner. Circumstance has put us both in a situation we hadn’t banked on, and now that we’re here we might just as well make the best of it.’

  ‘That’s easier said than done!’

  ‘Only if you don’t wake up to reality.’ He looked at her with steely-eyed hardness. ‘You can either make things difficult for yourself, or else you can accept the situation we’re both in and enjoy it.’

  ‘“Enjoy it?”’ she asked incredulously. ‘Are you enjoying it? Are you looking forward to marrying someone you’d rather not marry? Does your heart thrill at the prospect of sharing a house with a woman who was meant to be a temporary blip?’ Just uttering the words brought on an attack of self-pity, and she turned away and glared out of the window.

  Her horm
ones were up the spout. Every word he had spoken was true and she knew that if a friend had come to her with a tale of pregnancy and marriage to a man whom most women would give their eye-teeth to have, her advice would have been to take it in her stride and enjoy it. She would have said that things could have been a whole lot worse. She would have counselled her friend to see the best in a man who was prepared to adopt the mantle of responsibility when he had no need to. Such men were few and far between.

  It wasn’t even as if she had nurtured romantic notions of white weddings with fairy-tale endings. This marriage of convenience was a logical step in a logical life, and as such she should have embraced it wholeheartedly.

  So why couldn’t she?

  She wasn’t going to make things easier for herself if she insisted on fighting him every step of the way.

  The taxi drew up in front of his house and she looked at it curiously. She had pictured him as a man who lived in a penthouse suite at the top of an exclusive block of apartments somewhere very central. She couldn’t have been further from the truth. His house was set back in gardens in a quiet street in the St John’s Wood area, and as they entered it she was struck by a feeling of cosiness. It was no sprawling mansion, but neither was it a box. Warm, red brick, ivy clambering to touch the window-panes, and inside rich, deep colours and furniture that was old and comfortable.

  ‘I thought all top businessmen who lived on their own inhabited apartments with lots of chrome and black,’ she said eventually, gazing at the paintings on the walls and trying to place a couple of them.

  ‘Yet another of your hare-brained notions.’ He led the way to the sitting room, which was small and had, a rarity in London, a wonderful fireplace with the original tiles on it. On the wall above the fire was an exquisite mirror, and, flanking either side, two paintings that looked disturbingly familiar. Everything she had seen spoke of wealth, but wealth without any accompanying fanfare.

  ‘The house has been in my family for generations,’ he said, following her gaze and picking up on her surprise at her surroundings.

  ‘It’s...’

  ‘A far cry from chrome and black?’

  ‘Absolutely splendid.’

  ‘Well, that’s hurdle number one over,’ he said dryly. ‘Would you like something to drink? Tea? Coffee?’

  ‘Tea would be fine, thank you. Milk, one sugar.’ There were so many basic things he didn’t know about her, and yet, every so often, she was struck by the strangest feeling that she had known this man for ever. She sat down in the sitting room, waiting for him to return, and thought that they should be writing down their CVs for each other to read. Filling in all the gaps which were normally filled in between two people during the period of courtship, when they got to know one another. They were doing things the wrong way around. The baby before the marriage and the marriage before the relationship. The scope for things going horrendously wrong was so enormous that she couldn’t even dwell on it.

  The most she knew she could hope for was the thing he saw as perfectly acceptable. That they would have the baby and would be able to communicate without friction. With no love to confuse the issue, their relationship would never soar to any great heights, but they might eventually become friends. Two friends sharing a house. She would turn a blind eye to his sexual adventures elsewhere, and presumably he would turn a blind eye to hers.

  Not, she knew, that she would have any.

  She had never considered marriage, but now that she was being forced to she might just as well face facts. She was no twentieth-century woman who carried the torch for sexual freedom, whether there was a ring on her finger or not.

  For her, marriage was a commitment.

  She stared blindly through the bay window at the glimpse of sky and garden outside.

  It was all about love.

  All about being in love.

  Her mind began to travel back down the past few months, but this time all the connections were made. It was as though she was seeing her life, for the first time ever, with absolute clarity.

  She had proudly thought that her background had hardened her, turned any thoughts of romance into cynicism. She had managed to convince herself for years that her career was all she wanted out of life. She had seen it as a positive sign, the fact that her relationships had been brief and pain-free. Men, she had thought, were objects of desire or at least temporary enjoyment.

  She could see where her thoughts were taking her, and was powerless to drag them away from the route.

  Outside, the sky was blue and flawless, undisturbed by clouds. It made the perfect canvas against which to view her life and to see how willingly she had succumbed to her illusions of independence and freedom from the rest of the human race.

  The truth was that she had just never found love. Until Bruno Carr had arrived on the scene. All those intense, conflicting emotions she had felt in his presence had nothing to do with dislike. They had to do with opening her eyes for the first time in her life, and taking her first stretch, and finally coming alive. It was a shock in much the same way, she supposed, that a new-born baby feels the shock of taking its first breath.

  She could feel her breath getting ragged, but she continued staring in an unfocused manner through the window, carried along with her thoughts like a stick floating randomly on an ocean tide.

  When had she fallen? Impossible to tell, but fallen she had. Well and truly fallen in love with him. Little wonder that the pregnancy had caused her no real grief. Subconsciously, she had wanted his baby from the start. She closed her eyes to try and block out her thoughts, but they kept on rolling. She felt sick.

  She didn’t hear him enter the room. The first she knew of his presence was when he asked her if she felt all right.

  ‘You’re as white as a sheet.’

  She opened her eyes and looked at him, and she felt as if she were seeing him for the first time. She accepted her cup of tea and blew gently on the surface, then watched in silence as he sat down opposite her and crossed his legs.

  This terrible realisation would have to be her secret. She would be businesslike and calm because that was the only way to conduct herself without revealing what was inside her.

  He was looking at her, waiting for some kind of response, and she took a deep breath.

  ‘Just some passing nausea. My stomach hasn’t been accustomed to rich food.’ She hazarded a smile which met with a frown. ‘How long have you lived here?’ she asked politely, reaching for the first pointless remark she could think of, and his frown deepened.

  ‘I’ve already told you. The house has been in—’

  ‘Your family for generations. Of course. Forgot.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ He narrowed his eyes, searching to get inside her head, and she met his stare blandly.

  ‘Amnesia and pregnancy. Well documented,’ she told him. She sipped some tea and adopted a more relaxed pose.

  ‘I don’t think we should rush into the marriage thing,’ she said. ‘The baby’s not due for another few months. I think we should take the time to at least get to know one another a bit.’ She would need the time to let her emotions settle a little, or at least to learn to control them. The thought of sharing his house immediately filled her with horror.

  ‘Actually, I think we know each other better than you imagine,’ he remarked. ‘But if you want to wait a couple of months as opposed to a couple of weeks, then that’s fine by me. I take it you won’t object to an engagement ring.’

  ‘Do people still get engaged these days?’ She knew that they did, but an engagement seemed almost a greater show of hypocrisy than the prospect of marriage. Engagements, she thought, were all about being wrapped up in dreams and hope and plans. Rings to be shown off as the glowing proof of love.

  ‘I have no idea...’ he shrugged ‘...and it’s not something that I care about one way or another. But my mother would find it very disturbing if the conventional rites of passage weren’t adhered to. The gesture might mean noth
ing to either of us, but it would mean a great deal to her.’

  His words stabbed into her with the precision of a sharp knife, but she forced herself to smile.

  ‘In that case...’ she shrugged as well ‘...it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other, as you say, and if it would make your mother happier, then that’s fine.’ Things should have been different. They should have been planning a life of happiness, with a baby on the way. But maybe it was better like this. If there were no dreams, then there were no dreams to be shattered.

  ‘Come on,’ he said abruptly, standing up. ‘You might as well have the guided tour of the place.’

  ‘Why not?’

  She followed him into all the downstairs rooms, and murmured favourably, and tried to close her eyes to thoughts of them happily growing old together, sitting on the sofa side by side, sharing laughter in the kitchen, entertaining friends in the dining room.

  When they went upstairs, the beating of her heart quickened. Behind the closed doors lay bedrooms and the thought of bedrooms brought her out in a cold sweat.

  The layout of the upstairs mirrored that of downstairs, with a large, central hall off which the rooms fell. Four huge bedrooms and a large sitting room which had been turned into a television area. Somehow, she couldn’t imagine Bruno Carr finding the time to sit in front of a TV, but she refrained from saying that. Instead, she commented on the furnishings, peering at the paintings and delaying the onset of a further attack of nerves when confronted with the bedroom. His bedroom. Their bedroom. Their bed. God, would he want to touch her? Or would his eyes glaze over with disinterest?

  His bedroom, as it turned out, was large enough to include a sitting area, in addition to a massive en suite bathroom.

  ‘Big,’ Jessica said weakly, not straying from the door.

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ He swung around and stood in front of her, propping himself up with his hands on either side of the doorway.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong with me.’ She licked her lips nervously.

  ‘Does the thought of sharing a house with me frighten you?’ he asked, reading her mind, and she shook her head vigorously.