by Lilian Darcy
‘I told you it wasn’t the end of the world,’ she said. Then she went on, more honestly, ‘Oh, Pete, I thought you were going to tell me you and Annette were getting a divorce. I was all prepared to hold your hand, but—’
‘No,’ he groaned. ‘If only it was something as easy as that!’ Then he caught himself up and gave a bark of complicated laughter. She saw the shadows of fatigue and stress beneath his light blue eyes. ‘Listen to me! That has to be the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever said!’ he jeered at himself. ‘The only good part about this is that Annette has been fabulous.’
‘You mean…?’
‘Yes, we’re back to square one financially as well. No more early retirement for me, and Annette will have to go back to full-time work.’
‘So you’ve known about this since…?’
‘Yesterday. But we sat up practically all night, talking about it and looking at the numbers. I—I can’t believe I got you into this mess, Aimee.’
‘I don’t quite understand,’ she admitted. ‘I thought you’d put it into some sort of fund, incredibly safe and conservative. You told me that was what you’d done. There’s been nothing in the news about the collapse of any—’
He groaned again, gave another shuddering half-sob and told her how, yes, at first he’d placed Alan’s life-insurance money into something very secure, but the percentage return had been so slow that he’d felt bad on her behalf and had become convinced that he could do far better for her elsewhere. He’d hated the fact that the payments weren’t enough to keep her from having to go back to work.
Then he’d had a very sound tip about a new internet company. The usual forecasts. Not improbably rosy. Peter really wasn’t a fool. The forecasts had struck the right balance between steadiness and a quick return. He’d planned to make a respectable profit over two or three years then re-invest the enlarged capital in something steady, giving her a much healthier monthly income.
Only, of course, there hadn’t been a profit. Another more established company had beaten this one to claim this particular share of electronic pie, and the upstart enterprise was in receivership, with no assets and many, many debts.
It would have been easy to be angry with Pete if Aimee had been less fond of him, and if he’d been suffering any less than he obviously was, both on his own behalf and hers. Ultimately, she couldn’t be angry for long, or let him see it in the moments when she was.
They talked about it all morning, looking at the figures and what they would mean.
What they meant came as a shock.
‘I can’t see any other choice, Aimee,’ Peter said quietly. ‘You’ll have to sell the house. The council rates in this area are so high now and you’ve been planning to get a new roof put on and the back fence and driveway replaced. Those things really do need to be done, but you’ve no capital for it now.’
‘No, I can see that.’
‘And if there’s any way you can increase your hours at work…’
She nodded, and hid her appalled reaction. ‘That shouldn’t be a problem. About the work hours. They’ve been wanting me to work full time. As for the house…’ She painted on a smile. ‘It’s only a house.’
But it was the place where she’d brought up her children and lived through Alan’s death. The old swing set was still in the back garden, and she’d been planning to spruce it up for Sarah’s baby. The line of marks that Alan had drawn on the back of the laundry door to measure each child’s height as they’d grown were still there, too.
And what Peter didn’t know, of course, as he sketched some new plans for her future, was that the house wasn’t hers…
Alan had been fourteen years older than her, which had given him a maturity and dependability, at thirty-four, which she’d valued when she’d married him at twenty. On the other hand, she could now see, he’d never learned to treat her as an equal. Almost every decision in their marriage had been made by him alone, and by the time she’d matured enough herself to question this, the pattern had been set and had been impossible to change.
Alan had died four years ago, and she’d grieved with a degree of pain that had occasionally surprised her. She hadn’t known that grief could be so physical! Her hair had turned completely silver in the course of just eighteen months.
Then she’d pulled herself together and got on with her life. For the first time she’d had to make her own decisions, although even when he’d been dying Alan had been unable to relinquish control and had made plans that affected her life on into the future. Since his attitude had come from his love for her and their children, Aimee hadn’t questioned it.
He’d advised her to turn to Peter for help in handling her finances, which she’d done. He’d also told her, ‘I’ve left the house to the children, in trust for you to live in for your lifetime or until you decide it should be sold.’
Since he’d inherited the house from his own parents, and Aimee’s name had never been on the title deeds, it hadn’t been an unfair decision.
‘Keep that to yourself,’ Alan had advised. ‘They don’t need to know yet that they’ll have a nest egg. They’re still too young to handle it sensibly.’
So she hadn’t told the children, or Peter. Alan had always been a very caring father. He’d wanted to give the three children a security that couldn’t be taken away, hence his decision to leave the house to them. It had, indeed, worked out as he’d wanted, in a sense that Alan could never have predicted, and each of the three of them would receive gratifying nest-eggs following the sale, but Aimee herself would be nearly penniless.
‘You’ll be able to buy a nice two-bedroom unit,’ Peter enthused, ‘and still have enough left to invest for your retirement—only don’t trust it to me this time, Aimee,’ he interrupted himself with a bitter groan.
Aimee just nodded. She wasn’t going to tell Pete the truth about the house, or her children the truth about her investments, because she didn’t want to give Pete any more pain and remorse, and because she knew her children would refuse to accept that the house and its proceeds were theirs if they realised this was all she had left.
She was on her own in this, in a way that she’d never been on her own in her life. She’d moved straight into this house from her parents’ home on her marriage to Alan. She’d never had to support herself fully. But there was a first time for everything, and she was going to deal with it, she vowed inwardly.
Pete was staring at his fingernails, as if wondering which one to chew on. He’d bitten them as a child and hadn’t broken the habit until his teens. Aimee’s heart ached for him. This wasn’t easy for him either.
‘Pete, I’m glad I was wrong,’ she teased him gently.
‘Wrong?’
‘About you and Annette getting a divorce. That would have been much, much worse.’
He looked up at her. He didn’t speak, but his expression was a little less tortured at last and his nails were still intact.
‘Thanks, Aimee,’ he said at last. ‘You’ve always been able to put things into perspective. ‘I—I appreciate it…appreciate having you as a sister…more than I’ll ever be able to say.’
What was it that people said? Things came in threes?
When Marshall phoned, just after lunch, Aimee fobbed him off for the rest of the weekend, trying to make her voice as breezy and normal as she could. ‘I—I’m not going to be able to see you today or tomorrow after all, Marshall.’
‘Is everything all right? You sound—’
Not normal at all. She could hear it, but couldn’t control it, and seized on the first excuse that came to mind.
‘Sarah’s not feeling very well.’ Which, at least, had the virtue of truth. ‘This pregnancy is hitting her hard. I’m going to stay with her overnight. You left your glasses here,’ she gabbled on, ‘so I’ll just drop them round on my way to her place.’
‘Don’t worry about them. Bring them into work on Monday. I have a spare pair.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘
It’s fine. Your daughter needs you.’
‘Thanks, Marshall.’
With her mind still in turmoil over the sudden looming change in her circumstances, she knew it would be unfair to see him. Dangerous, even. She was aware of a gritty determination growing stronger within her every moment to deal with this all on her own. Marshall, of all people, must not know of it.
She hadn’t fully analysed why she knew this so strongly, but it had something to do with maintaining her independence and the footing of equality on which their relationship had begun. She wasn’t going to relinquish that. She wasn’t going to set up the same pattern she and Alan had fallen into. She wasn’t going to lean on anyone. Perhaps she should have fought Alan’s insistence on her dependency years ago!
It was funny, really. So many of the old taboos had broken down. Everyone talked about sex and scandal and childhood adversity, but money troubles were still something you kept to yourself. Absolutely and definitely, she didn’t want Marsh to know.
And she knew he would have seen in her manner that something was wrong, just as he’d understood the fact at once on the phone. But she didn’t like lying to him about why she couldn’t see him, so she did phone Sarah immediately afterwards and found that she’d been even more truthful than she’d known.
‘I’m so glad you rang, Mum!’ her twenty-eight-year-old daughter said. ‘I feel dreadful. So bloated. No energy at all.’
‘Shall I come over? I could even stay the night…’
‘Yes, please!’
Aimee packed an overnight bag and watered some plants, thinking in the back of her mind that if she was going to be putting the house on the market in the next few weeks, the garden ought to be looking its best. She’d have to get some tradesmen in, too, to spruce the place up a bit. At Sarah’s, an hour and a half later, she was greeted by Sarah’s husband, Jason.
‘She’s asleep, thank goodness!’
‘I’m starting to worry about her, Jason.’ Aimee sighed, after she’d waved aside his offer of tea. ‘I kept telling her she’d feel better soon, and she isn’t. I really am worried.’
‘So am I,’ her son-in-law admitted. ‘We’ve talked to a few people, and no one else seems to have been hit quite so hard, especially not in the second trimester. She’s supposed to be feeling great. And at the supermarket this morning someone said Sarah looked like she ought to be heading straight for the hospital, she was so big, but she’s got another three months to go.’
‘Why hasn’t she talked to her doctor about it?’
‘She has, over the phone. He agrees she’s having a hard time and maybe something’s going on—too much amniotic fluid, he mentioned as a possibility, but we don’t know what that means. Anyway, he doesn’t think it’s urgent. The ultrasound at twenty weeks was normal, so were the results of some blood test. Her blood pressure’s normal, so are her urine testing strips, her glucose tolerance test, all that. She hasn’t had any pain. He’s going to see her on Monday morning, first thing. I kind of wanted her to push a bit harder with him, but she doesn’t want to come across as a complainer or a troublemaker.’
He gave a shrug that wasn’t nearly as offhand as it seemed. Aimee was very fond of her son-in-law. He and Sarah had been together as a couple since university, where they’d both studied law, and they’d married two years ago. Fair-haired, big-shouldered Jason was steady and caring, occasionally hot-tempered, very much in love with his wife and inclined to get stubborn and frustrated about anything he couldn’t control.
‘Do you think she’s just being a complainer?’ Aimee asked him.
He looked at her and said bluntly. ‘No. I think there’s something wrong. But what do I know? I’m just the dad-to-be. All anyone can expect of me is that I’ll faint at the delivery.’
He stomped off into the garden to mow the lawn.
Oh, dear, Aimee thought as she felt another heartburn-inducing ingredient add itself to the rich mix already bubbling away inside her. First had come the syrupy afterglow and fluttery nerves she felt when she thought back on last night…Oh, it already seemed like so long ago! Then there was the gnawing worry about her financial security and now, worst of all perhaps, the growing intuition that Sarah’s pregnancy wasn’t proceeding according to plan.
Sarah woke an hour and a half later. Aimee had busied herself giving the kitchen a thorough clean, including scrubbing the terracotta-toned tiles behind the sink and emptying spilled crumbs from the cutlery drawer. Its grimy state was a tribute to Sarah’s fatigue, as she was normally a fastidious housekeeper.
‘Oh, Mum!’ said a groggy voice in the kitchen doorway, just as Aimee was finishing. ‘You didn’t have to do this!’
‘I wanted to,’ Aimee said. ‘I knew it must be getting to you.’
Sarah looked vast, and vastly uncomfortable. Her light brown hair was a mess that was long overdue for a stylish cut, and she burst into tears before she even made it across the room.
‘Everything is getting to me,’ she said. ‘Don’t I look a lot more than twenty-seven weeks pregnant to you?’
‘Could the ultrasound be wrong? Is it twins after all? Occasionally, mistakes do get made.’
‘Well, I could only see one set of everything. But what do I know?’
Unconsciously, she’d echoed Jason’s irritable expression of helplessness, and Aimee felt just the same. With her nursing training, she knew that some women had a buildup of too much amniotic fluid, which could cause the symptoms that Sarah was having. This excess of fluid might signal a problem…or it might not. And she was certainly not enough of an expert to do more than agree with her son-in-law that something felt wrong.
All in all, it wasn’t a great weekend, and once or twice Aimee was tempted to bail out, say goodbye and phone Marsh to suggest to him that they go sailing, or climb the Harbour Bridge, or something equally daring and frivolous. But she held back the impulse with a foreboding certainty that she’d regret it deeply if she gave in to it, although she didn’t quite understand the strength of this feeling.
Peter’s news about her finances wasn’t so disastrous, was it? Ultimately, money was so much less important than family. She could keep it to herself, put it out of her mind. It would be far worse if something was wrong with Sarah’s pregnancy.
But comparisons like that weren’t exactly cheering!
She didn’t sleep well on Saturday night in the spare room at Sarah’s and Jason’s, which would soon—oh, please, God—become their baby’s nursery. Memories of last night, and Marshall, kept threading their way through her body. The fresh smell of him, like sandalwood soap. The strength of his thighs. The patterns of hair on his arms and chest. His tenderness and his hunger. The way he breathed when he slept, his head still pillowed on her arm.
And when she wasn’t thinking about Marshall, she was worrying about Sarah. She heard bare, female feet padding to the bathroom several times in the night, and once she heard her daughter’s voice say, ‘I feel like I can’t breathe, Jason. I’m suffocating!’
The next day, she stayed on until late afternoon, helping Jason in the garden and tackling the bathroom, which Sarah also hadn’t managed to clean properly for several weeks. The tile grouting was a model of rather frighteningly vigorous biodiversity which would only respond to detailed attention with an old toothbrush and an abrasive cleanser.
Downstairs, the fridge was packed with food and Sarah explained tiredly, ‘I took a couple of days off work last week, and I had this stupid idea that I was going to cook some meals to freeze because the last thing I’ve felt like lately is making dinner when I get home, and Jason can’t cook a pot of water. But, of course, I felt too rotten to do it, and now it’s all going to go bad.’
So Aimee cooked as well, making three different dishes and dividing each of them into meal-sized portions so that there were two weeks’ worth of dinners in the freezer to ease Sarah’s load over the next month or so.
At home, finally, she again thought of phoning Marshall and actually got as far
as putting her hand on the telephone and holding her finger over the first digit. What would he say if he knew that she had his number committed to memory? That was such a schoolgirlish thing to do, wasn’t it?
And at the last moment she decided not to dial it after all, which didn’t stop her from hoping that he’d ring her, but he didn’t and the phone stayed silent.
Instead, she rang Pete. After having his news churn round and round in her brain for more than twenty-four hours, she had questions and she wanted answers. Not that she liked them when she got them!
‘What about the dividends I’ve been getting? There’s been money going into my account regularly, the same as before. Where has that come from?’
From Peter himself, it turned out. He’d been so confident in the ultimate success of the company that he’d tided her over financially until the real dividends came in, certain that they would eventually do so.
‘But why didn’t you tell me what you were doing? Why did you keep me in the dark like that?’
Because of Alan, Alan’s attitude and what he’d said to Peter as he’d been dying, it turned out.
‘He told me categorically not to bother you with money matters, to take the whole thing onto my own shoulders,’ Pete said. ‘He said you knew nothing about finances, and didn’t want to learn, that he’d made all the money decisions during your marriage, and that was the way you’d want it to continue.’
That’s not true! she wanted to say. I was never given a chance!
But it wouldn’t have helped to say it, and perhaps it was her own fault for not insisting to Alan years ago that things change, so she held her tongue and offered only a murmured, ‘Of course. I see,’ in reply.
When the alarm went and Aimee had to get up to go to work the next morning, it was actually a relief.
‘How’s Sarah?’ That was the first thing Marshall said to her, and she practically cried at the knowledge that she wasn’t alone in this worry at least. There was someone else who cared. But she didn’t want him to see the tears, and quickly blinked them back.