Three miscarriages preceded this pregnancy, one of which was at eighteen weeks and therefore the worst; she had dared then to hope that she might gain her prize.
The only prize that she has ever really wanted.
When did I realize that a child was all I ever desired?
How odd it feels, to have longed for something for so long, yet not to have known it, not until recently. When I was young, I played with my dolls and teddies, yet I did not consciously appreciate that this was all that I wanted; when I was a teenager, I had boyfriends but not, I am sure, because I saw them as a means to motherhood. Yet now I know that that was precisely my reasoning.
It frightens me, this recognition that I am driven, that I always have been driven, that perhaps all my decisions in life were guided by an imperative over which I have had no control, that was wired into me, whether by fate, or blind chance.
Or God.
After forty-five minutes, when they have just stopped to admire two ponies in a field, he asks her, “Are you all right?”
She looks up at him and smiles. “Oh, yes.”
This starts off fine but ends with a catch in her throat. She looks quickly away, back to the ponies.
“Hey,” he says gently, tapping her on the shoulder.
A nod. Shoulders hunched and a nod that is tensely sprung. She does not look at him.
“Gilly.”
He puts his arm around her shoulders, grasps the soft blue cashmere, squeezes them gently, lowers his face to be level with hers. Another quick nod but this time with a sniff; still no words.
The ponies are skittish, kicking and suddenly galloping in short spurts. Perhaps they sense the coming rain.
Greg says quietly, in her ear, “You did the right thing.”
For a moment, she continues to stare fixedly at the ponies but the sniffs come more and more quickly until she suddenly begins to cry continuously. Another squeeze of her shoulders and she turns to him and buries her face in his thick, woollen jumper; she smells his eau de cologne, the one that she gave him for their first Christmas and that he still says that he likes.
“We couldn’t have coped.” He is so calm, so reassuring, so certain.
“But...”
“We both agreed, didn’t we? Do you remember, Gilly? How we agreed?”
Face still buried in his sweater, still trying to burrow into him, to hide from her grief, she nods slowly and only after hesitation. He is holding her tightly but she likes this, draws comfort from it. He says, “You’re not strong enough on your own. You would have needed me, and at this moment, with things so difficult, I couldn’t have given you the support and got the business going again.”
There is no nod this time. She withdraws slightly, looks up into his face where she has always found so much security. “I didn’t realize that it would be so horrible.”
He holds her face in his hands, smears tears with his thumbs. “I know, I know,” he whispers although she wonders just how he can know. “In a few years, when we can more easily afford it, when we’re more established.”
“But I’m getting old. What if I can’t have any more?”
A laugh, one that tells her she is being silly, that of course she will have more.
“You will,” he says. There is something of a command about this but it is couched in the softest, most gentle of tones. “These days, no one is too old.”
It is flippant, almost insulting. The easy response to the unimportant fears of a subordinate.
“I knew that it wouldn’t be easy, but I didn’t think it would be this hard...”
For a moment he does not speak, then, “You’re too close to it, Gilly. It was only a month and a half ago. By the time Christmas comes, you’ll be able to think logically. You’ll see then that it was all for the best.”
And this makes her realize that he does not understand at all, that he had thought it was easy, that he still thinks it is. A light anaesthetic, a short sleep and — hey presto! — no more problem.
Yet six weeks on, she still feels dirty, filled with sin, tainted by guilt.
She says, “I hope so.” But she is thinking through his words, his tone, the thoughts that must lie behind them.
A smile and what he presumably believes is a warm laugh as he replies, “You’ll get over it, Gilly. This will help. You’ll see.”
And then he kisses her and holds her again for a long, long time.
“Okay?” he asks.
She says that, yes, she is, because she can see that this is what he wants her to say.
They continue on their walk.
Greg rescued me.
That sounds like an overstatement — hyperbole, I believe they call it — but that is what I always believed.
My mother had died after a long illness and I thought that I was coping by being busy and by helping Dad come to terms with the situation, and by jumping into charity. Except that I wasn’t. I was fading, day by day, good deed by good deed, and I was completely ignorant of it all.
Greg gave me back a skyline, something to aim for, a concept that there was an outside world as well as the place where I lived.
I just wish that I thought that he knew what he was doing.
I’m afraid, you see, that he did not perform any of his chivalrous acts consciously, that he had always been blithely unaware — if not uncaring — of what he did.
Which is fine, I thought at first.
After all, most good in this world is done unconsciously, as an unintended byproduct of acts performed for different, perhaps selfish, reasons.
Oh, dear.
I wish I hadn’t said that.
They are staying in an old coaching inn. The bed is fairly comfortable although Greg complains that the mattress is too soft and giving him backache.
They have not made love for six months.
The meals are hearty, with far too much on the plate; the puddings are straight out of Gilly’s childhood, gorgeous, fat-filled sweetnesses that steam and beckon the diner with siren sighs.
Gilly is not really hungry.
It is a friendly pub, with a husky, deep-voiced landlady and low beams and the scents of scenes still remembered.
Gilly suspects that Greg is having an affair.
The first drops come after two hours. They are large drops, cold but not startlingly so. Greg looks up into the sky, his prominent nose and Adam’s apple silhouetted against the sky in which the clouds are now grey but still bright. He looks at Gilly. She has fully recovered, is back to a young, professional woman on a short break.
“I think it’s going to be heavy,” he says. There have been occasional, mild flurries of rain, but this is different; the wind has got up and there is a slight chilled dampness around them.
They are in the middle of a small hump-backed bridge that crosses a fast-running stream that cuts deeply into a gully. Greg is leading because Greg always leads and Gilly is happy with that. She loves him, after all.
She looks around, points. “There’s an old cottage over there. Why don’t we shelter there?” It is some distance away, through some overgrown woods; it looks deserted, almost a ruin, but the roof appears to be intact.
He nods, holds out his hand for her, then they run together over the bridge and to their right, off the single-track road and into the woods. The rain becomes harder, the noise of its attack louder. By the time they reach the cottage, it is surprisingly torrential and they are very, very wet.