by Hilary Boyd
He laughed, but he was taken aback by the specific nature of Lisa’s scenario. It was just another depressing example of his wife thinking he was old and frail.
‘You’ve got a heart condition,’ she went on, ‘which you seem to totally ignore most of the time. I bet you had a bacon sarnie in town. And you probably haven’t had a drop of water since breakfast.’
‘Millions of people have AF,’ he said, trying not to be irritable. ‘And no, I didn’t have a bacon sandwich. I had nice, healthy, nutritious mushroom soup. Nothing wrong with that.’ Nothing wrong with the soup, he thought, it’s the company she might take issue with.
‘Where did you go?’
‘Foyle’s. The new caff on the top floor.’
‘Good?’
‘Yeah, not bad.’
She had a frown on her face as her arms still held him close. ‘You know I only worry because I love you.’
Jack bent to kiss her. She was such a strange woman. One minute feisty and challenging, pushing him off as if he disgusted her, the next like a clingy schoolgirl. He couldn’t keep up. And as he bent dutifully to kiss her – her plumped, glossed lips needy against his own – Jack realized with a jolt that he no longer cared to try, as he once had.
They had sex that night. Lisa, perhaps sensing his increasing detachment, had been particularly insistent, dragging him away from a new documentary series on Vietnam, during which she’d texted almost continuously, and putting on one of her most alluring silk negligees to tempt him. Jack was tempted, in a purely lustful way – Lisa’s toned, buffed body would have tempted most men – but as he went through the motions – Lisa giving the orders, Jack attempting to comply – he felt disgusted with himself. What was he doing, treating this perfectly decent, vulnerable woman with such disrespect?
Afterwards, Lisa was snuggly and coy, satisfied that things had gone well between them. But he had faked it, the condom conveniently hiding the truth. He lay awake beside her, listening to her deepening breaths, waiting for the moment when he felt she was properly asleep and he was, to all intents and purposes, alone to think.
After an unedifying trawl through his past relationship history – mostly transient hook-ups, with women he’d barely known – he came to a conclusion he had been avoiding for weeks now. There was only one woman he had ever truly loved: Stella. ‘Follow your heart,’ his friend Howard had advised. But his heart felt damaged after so many years of grief. He wasn’t sure whether, if he did follow his heart in the direction of Stella, it would only get broken again.
47
‘It’s the best thing,’ Eric assured her. But his tone, in her fragile state, seemed too condescending for her liking. ‘If you haemorrhage it could be fatal, Evie. You can’t risk that.’
They were still in bed, early on the morning after her thirty-six-week scan. He was only saying the same thing the doctors, her mother, even her medically clueless dad, had said. And she knew they were all totally right. But it wasn’t their body that was going to be sliced open.
Eve, who had put on a brave face at the hospital and hadn’t quibbled with the doctors about the necessity of a caesarean, knew she didn’t want logic, she wanted understanding. She hadn’t slept a wink last night, imagining the birth: the epidural, the clinical glare of the operating-theatre lights, masked faces, the blue cloth screen obscuring the surgeon’s scalpel, the baby – a girl, they had been told, much to her and Eric’s delight – yanked unceremoniously from the wound. She wouldn’t feel a thing, wouldn’t see a thing, she’d just be a lump, lying there immobile and unable to participate.
She remembered Arthur’s birth, remembered the intense physical involvement, the agonizing pain, the breathless wait for the next contraction, the sight of her son’s dark head as he crowned between her legs. They’d worked together, she and Arthur: a team.
‘Suppose I can’t bond with her?’ she asked now, heaving up her pregnant bulk and swinging her legs over the side of the bed, where she sat cradling her belly between her hands, her back to Eric. It was so bloody awkward, sleeping. Every night she desperately longed for rest, but she could never get comfortable. If she did manage it for a brief moment – propped and bolstered at every angle of her swollen body – the need to pee would disrupt her and she would have to start all over again. She felt exhausted already and it was barely seven o’clock.
Eric pulled himself across the sheets and came to sit next to her in his boxers and white T-shirt. He looked wan and worn out too, but then he always did, even though he slept like the dead most nights. His face was still two-tone where he’d shaved off his heavy beard, the delicate skin pinkish and tender where the five-month growth had been. She reached up and laid her palm gently against his cheek and he pressed it to his face with his own.
‘Of course you’ll bond. As soon as she’s born it’ll be just the same as it was with Arthur.’
She shrugged. ‘No, it won’t, Eric. I won’t have gone through labour. I won’t be exhausted and exhilarated, I won’t have made the slightest effort. She’ll just be handed to me on a plate.’
Eric was silent, his arm around her shoulder. ‘But the baby will be safe and so will you—’
‘Yes,’ Eve almost shouted, sometimes hating her partner’s logical scientist’s brain. ‘I know all that. But you don’t understand. I’m not talking about being safe and doing the sensible thing – you know I’ll do anything it takes to make the baby safe – I’m just telling you how I feel.’
But Eve could see that Eric was baffled.
She tried again. ‘I wanted a birth like Arthur’s,’ she said, trying to keep her voice reasonable. ‘Just a normal delivery, with lots of pain and yelling and going red in the face, but feeling that glorious sense of triumph at the end. That’s all I’m saying. I know I have to do the caesarean, and I will. But I feel really upset about it.’ She just managed to get the words out before she burst into floods of tears.
‘They’re saying Monday, the twenty-eighth,’ Eve told her mother later.
‘Right, good. OK. Must be a relief to get a date. So what shall I do? I can come down on the Sunday? Or earlier. Just say the word, sweetheart, I’ll do whatever you want.’
Whoa, Eve thought as she listened to her mum’s gabbled response. ‘Everything OK, Mum?’
There was a pause. ‘Yes, fine.’
Her mother’s ‘fine’ usually meant the exact opposite, but Eve had long since ceased to query it. So she said, ‘It’d be great if you could come on the twenty-seventh. Or before, if you like. You know you’re always welcome.’
‘How long do you think you’ll be in hospital?’
‘Three or four days? Depends how it all goes, I suppose. Arthur’s not going to like it.’
‘Well, he managed last time. It’s not as if it’s new for him, you being in hospital. He’s got his dad this time, and I’ll be there. He’ll be fine.’
Eve was a bit taken aback at the peremptory tone in her mother’s voice. Usually, in matters concerning her beloved grandson, she was a total softy.
‘And his grandad, too. I just spoke to Dad and he says he’ll be staying at the cottage for the duration. Which is great.’
‘Right …’ her mother said, then stopped.
Frowning, Eve repeated her question, ‘Are you sure you’re OK, Mum? You sound a bit … odd.’
There was silence, then a forced laugh. ‘Do I?’
Eve waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. ‘Yes, you do.’
She heard a sigh. ‘I just seem to have a lot on at the moment,’ her mother said. ‘What with Iain selling his flat and this script they want me to do …’ She tailed off.
‘Right.’ Eve paused. ‘You know you don’t have to let Iain stay, if you don’t want to? I’m sure he’d understand if you—’
‘Oh, I know. He’s said as much,’ Stella interrupted, sounding almost impatient. ‘But I’m fine with him being here. It won’t be a problem.’
‘That’s good.’ Well, excuse me for caring, Eve th
ought. ‘And you’re positive you’re OK with coming to help out?’ she asked, wondering if this were at the crux of her mum’s mood. ‘I mean, if it’s difficult, you could just stay for the birth itself. I’m sure we can manage.’
‘God, no! I wouldn’t miss it for the world, sweetheart,’ Stella said without hesitation, her words genuine for the first time since the conversation started. ‘Me and Arthur will find lots of fun things to do while you’re in hospital.’
Eve laughed. ‘To distract him from realizing his life, as he knows it, is over?’
‘Ha! Yes. Poor child. It’ll be a while before he understands the benefits of a little sister.’
When she finally said goodbye to her mother, Eve was none the wiser as to the source of her mother’s strange mood.
‘Mum can be quite unpredictable these days,’ she told Eric when he wandered into the kitchen, his dark hair spattered with Dulux ‘Sorbet’. Arthur was watching catch-up of a children’s animation series about a chocolate-coloured bunny called Bing. Eve knew he spent way too much time in front of the television these days, but she didn’t have the energy and Eric didn’t have the time to find alternatives. He was painting the baby’s room, resurrecting the pieces of Arthur’s old cot, steeling himself for a confrontation with the Ikea flat-pack chest of drawers Eve had ordered online, and untangling the colourful felt mobile of trains, planes and boats that had hung over Arthur’s cot.
Eric sat down with her at the table. ‘Count yourself lucky,’ he said.
‘Lucky?’ She gave him a quizzical grin. ‘That my mum’s unpredictable?’
He raised his eyebrows, his expression amused. ‘My parents are so sodding normal, Evie. So … sewn-up and totally predictable. Like they’re painting-by-numbers people, not real.’ He sighed. ‘Even the cat wouldn’t stand out in a crowd.’
Eve laughed. She thought his parents were super-weird, their dour, self-righteous take on life precluding any sort of fun. But she wasn’t going to say that to him.
‘I’d like to bang their heads together,’ he said wearily. ‘Make them realize there’s a whole amazing world out there if they’d only relax a bit and open their eyes.’
‘I’d like to bang my parents’ heads together too,’ she replied. ‘I can’t tell from one day to the next whether they’ll be the best of friends or barely exchange two words.’ She laughed. ‘So stop complaining. Yours may be dull, but at least you know where you are with them.’
48
Stella felt like a bear with a sore head, stumbling around being grumpy and snappish with everyone – even Eve had sensed something was up. But she and Jack would be endlessly thrown together in the next few weeks. Eve had said as much: her father would be at the cottage ‘for the duration’. How would she cope, having to be friendly, but not allowing that spark – the one she refused to sanction – to ignite between them?
Sitting at the desk in the corner of her dim bedroom, her laptop open in front of her, she leaned back, closed her eyes and took some big deep breaths. Maybe this is for the best, she thought. The more we see each other, the more the gilt will rub off the gingerbread. She opened her eyes to the ping of a text. Please, she muttered, not Jack again. But it was Annette.
‘I’m heading your way. Fancy a cup of tea at that trendy deli on the green?’
‘So how’s it going with the hugging-your-ex thing?’ Annette asked, her eyes full of amusement.
‘Oh, that,’ Stella shrugged, picking up a slice of lemon and dropping it into her tea glass. She had told her friend about the memorial, but neither had mentioned the conversation they’d had when they last met. ‘I was just having a moment. Dealing with Jonny has been major, Annie. I’ve felt slightly mad all summer.’
‘But it was a good thing?’
She nodded. It was extraordinary, the difference in how she felt since that day. Now, when she thought of Jonny, she saw him more often as she and Jack had imagined him: a broad-shouldered, auburn-haired young man with huge violet eyes and the same cheeky, heart-rending smile he’d had as a boy.
‘Life-changing.’ She smiled as she told her friend.
Annette nodded her approval. ‘I’m really pleased it worked out for you.’ She paused, stirring her cappuccino. ‘So the feelings for Jack disappeared once you’d sorted the thing with your son’s ashes?’
Stella, her heart still fluttering with thoughts of Jonny, did not answer.
‘Or not?’ asked Annette, eyebrows raised.
And under her friend’s knowing gaze, Stella found herself blushing.
‘I kissed him,’ she blurted out. ‘That night, after the rose garden, we kissed … quite a lot.’
‘You’re kidding me! Jack?’ Her friend’s expression hovered somewhere between awe and consternation. ‘Wow.’
‘We got drunk and kissed.’
Annette frowned. ‘So I take it the kisses were nice, if you had “quite a lot” of them?’
Stella looked away to stem the blush. ‘That’s not the point.’ She knew she sounded indignant.
‘Well, it sort of is, Stell. I mean if it was a drunken snog, then it’s not worth worrying about – just a heat-of-the-moment thing – but if it meant something more …’
Stella let out a long, frustrated sigh. ‘I don’t know what it meant, Annie. Yes, OK, I’ll admit, I do seem to have feelings for Jack. But he’s married and I practically am. We aren’t free to find out if it was more than just a “drunken snog”.’ She paused. ‘Added to which, we’re too bloody old to mess about and disrupt our lives like this.’
‘Or too bloody old not to,’ Annette said.
Stella sighed. ‘He’s driving me mad. He keeps texting, and we had lunch yesterday …’
‘You had lunch? OK, so you are seeing each other.’
‘No! Well, yes … he’s very persistent.’
Annette held her hands up in a gesture of surrender. ‘You’re not making any sense, darlin’. Are you saying you and Jack are having an affair or something?’
‘No. NO, Annie, we are so not having an affair. I told you, it was just a kiss. Kisses,’ she corrected herself. Talking about it reminded her, took her back to the delicious feel of his mouth on hers.
‘OK, OK, calm down. But I’m having a bit of trouble working out what the hell you’re doing.’ Annette began counting off on her fingers. ‘You like him/he’s driving you mad. You kiss him a lot/you aren’t having an affair. You had lunch with him/you’re not seeing him.’ Her face was a picture of amused bewilderment. ‘Where does Iain fit into all this? Does he know about the kisses?’
‘No,’ Stella repeated more softly. ‘I think he senses something isn’t right, you know how he is. But I haven’t told him because I thought it was a crazy one-off and it would only hurt him.’
‘Wasn’t it a one-off? Have you and Jack kissed again?’
‘No. Well … no.’ The aborted kiss in the dark garden didn’t count.
Annette sat back, looking as exhausted by the saga as Stella felt by the reality.
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Well, for starters, me and Jack have to grandparent little Arthur for the next few weeks, while Eve has her baby … It’s a girl, by the way. They’re thrilled.’
The friends sat in silence, allowing the noises of the café to surround them and buffer their thoughts.
‘You’re not in love with him, are you?’ Annette finally asked.
There was only a slight hesitation before Stella answered quietly, ‘I can’t be, can I? Not after all this time.’
49
Stella held Arthur’s hand as she pushed open the door to the hospital room. It was very hot and quiet and she could feel the boy’s bemusement as he looked around for his little sister. He’d been hyper all morning, whining to go and see the baby, but she sensed his impatience was tinged with confusion.
Little Mairi – named after Eric’s grandmother on his mother’s side – looked so tiny, so fragile, almost invisible, swaddled skin-to-skin against her m
um’s chest. All Stella could see was the top of her head. Unlike with a normal birth, the baby’s head hadn’t been squashed during delivery, but was round and perfect, capped with a surprising quantity of dark hair. Arthur, Stella remembered, had only a golden down when he was born.
The transparent plastic bassinet stood ready beside the bed, but Mairi had not been in it yet, according to Eric, who hovered beside mother and baby, looking relieved, proud, but also a bit shell-shocked. Eve beckoned Arthur over, and the boy clutched at his mother’s hand and tried to climb up on the bed.
‘Want a cuddle,’ he said uncertainly as Eve reached down, stroking her hand lovingly over his curls.
Eric lifted him up and sat him next to Eve. ‘Snug in, Arthur, but don’t wriggle too much,’ he said. ‘Mummy’s got a very sore tummy.’
‘So it all went well?’ Stella asked Eve when her grandson was safely out of earshot, having been taken by Eric over to the table against the wall, upon which sat an oblong box, wrapped in blue paper and tied with a red ribbon: Arthur’s present from Mairi.
‘Yeah, fine, I think. But the whole thing was surreal, Mum … Lying there with all these people around and then suddenly being handed a baby.’ She shook her head. ‘I really don’t want to think about it.’ Then she smiled as she looked down on her sleeping baby. ‘But it was all worth it. She’s so perfect, isn’t she?’
‘She is, sweetheart. Completely perfect.’ Stella stroked the baby’s forehead very gently, feeling the warm, silky softness beneath her fingers.
‘I’m so glad it’s over, Mum. And that Mairi’s all right. My fears were totally unfounded.’
‘They were quite understandable, given the circumstances. I think you’ve been amazing.’ Stella bent to give her daughter a kiss.
‘Nurse Ratched says I’ve got to get up and move around later.’ Eve pulled a face. ‘Proper hard core.’ She grimaced, obviously in pain, shifting cautiously on the slippery hospital mattress, her hand protectively against the baby’s back. ‘Can you move the pillow up a bit, please?’