The Baby Verdict (17 page)

Read The Baby Verdict Online

Authors: Cathy Williams

BOOK: The Baby Verdict
7.72Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
‘What do you imagine life will be like once we're married? Once you've taken up residence here and there's no flat to run to?' His velvety voice seemed to reach her from a great distance and it was an effort to keep her eyes on his face with some semblance of normality.
‘I don't know.' A shrug. ‘Guess I'll have to wait and see. My mind will be on the pregnancy, anyway. And after that...well, babies require a lot of attention.'
‘Which still hasn't answered my question.'
‘What answer do you want?' she replied hotly. She resented his composure. She knew that he found all this much easier to deal with because the prospect of marriage didn't threaten him. He could quite happily cohabit with her because she meant nothing to him emotionally and so would never really disturb his lifestyle.
Quite honestly, she could have hurled something very big and very heavy at him.
‘The goddamn truth!'
‘No, you don't!' she snapped, close to tears now. ‘The truth is the last thing you want! What you want is my total agreement with everything you say! You want me to nod my head all the time and tell you what a clever person you are!'
‘You're talking absolute rubbish!'
She was leaning towards him, their faces almost touching, and through all her rage and misery she still felt a yearning to close her eyes and put her mouth against his. She still wanted his hands to slip beneath her shirt and caress her swollen breasts.
‘No, I'm not, Bruno! Let's look at things dispassionately, shall we? I was good enough for a weekend, but that was all you were interested in...'
‘If I recall, that was
your
point of view,' he grated.
‘Okay, then! A weekend, a week, maybe a month but then I got pregnant and, now that you've found out, you've decided to launch yourself into fatherhood and wrap the whole business up with a phoney marriage, which means nothing to you...'
‘And you want it to...?'
‘I never said that!'
‘Then what precisely
are
you saying?'
‘I'm saying...' She miserably tried to work out an answer to his question. The only thing revolving in her brain was the hideous revelation that she loved this man and that her love wasn't reciprocated. What kind of answer could she give him? ‘Oh, I don't know.' She buried her head in her hands, and was giving herself a strong lecture on self-control when she felt his hand against the nape of her neck, massaging it.
‘Turn around,' he said roughly, and she obeyed, flexing her muscles, then allowing her head to drop. She didn't want to think and his hands on her neck were so soothing. His thumbs pressed against her bones, rotating along her shoulders, and she sighed with pleasure.
‘Like it?' he murmured, and she nodded. His fingers found her shoulder blades, then her spine, pushing against the line of vertebrae, and she involuntarily gave a stifled moan of satisfaction.
His hands circled around to her ribcage, then back to her spine, then beneath her breasts and she gave a little gasp.
‘You're bloody tense,' he said softly, his breath tickling her ear. ‘I'm no masseur, and I can feel it Just relax.' He unclasped her bra and spanned his hands across her back, gently pressing and kneading her flesh.
‘I'm not tense.'
‘And stop arguing. You argue too much.' He circled her waist with his hands, then rolled them up higher until his fingers lay provocatively beneath her breasts, fuller and heavier with the pregnancy.
With eyes still closed, Jessica leaned back against him, tilting her head over his shoulder, and shuddered as she felt him cup her breasts, then slowly he began to massage them. She sank deeper into him, and when he shifted slightly she lay fully back, her body still arched up to him, her head inclined over the arm of the sofa.
She felt as though the past few weeks had been spent in a state of constant need, a craving that she had refused to acknowledge.
He leant over her and his tongue flicked against her nipples. The moan that escaped her lips seemed to come from someone else. It was a moan of the deepest contentment. His mouth covered her nipple, then he was suckling on it and she squirmed and smiled and curled her fingers into his hair.
Between her legs grew damp and she spread them apart, knowing that his hand would find the hungry moistness beneath her lacy briefs. Her skirt had hitched up to her thighs and he began to stroke the inside of them, while he continued to lick and play with her breasts with his mouth.
‘See. Don't be afraid. Marriage won't be nearly as bad as you anticipate.'
His words took a second to sink in, but as soon as they did her brain seemed to go into overdrive, analysing what he had said, dissecting every hidden nuance.
The thought of living with Bruno, married to him, having to conceal her love like a dirty secret, offered enough of a prospect of lifelong hurt. But to have him touch her, knowing that he didn't love her, knowing, in due course, that he probably touched other women as well, would be beyond endurance.
CHAPTER NINE
T
HE shock of opening her eyes and seeing Bruno staring down at her, white-faced, was almost enough to make Jessica want to slip back into unconsciousness.
Then, hard on the heels of that, she remembered the sequence of events that had brought her to a hospital, and she struggled to sit up.
‘The baby.' She knew that she was bleeding. She could feel it and a flood of sudden panic gripped her. She had lost the baby. She just knew it. She hadn't realised how desperately she had wanted this baby until now. ‘How long have I been here?' Her voice was unsteady and she glanced around her with an expression of fear. White walls had never seemed more intimidating. She was in a gown. One of those hideous hospital gowns that automatically brought on an attack of malaise the second they were put on.
‘Minutes. Do you remember what happened?' She hardly recognised his voice. Gone was the composure and authority. She looked more carefully at him and saw lines of anxiety and tension around his eyes.
‘I ran into the road.' She shook her head and made no effort to stop the trickle of tears that ran down her face. Very gently, he wiped them with his handkerchief.
He was already treating her like an invalid. Confirmation enough that the pregnancy was no more.
‘Don't talk about it if you feel you don't want to.'
‘Was I hit?'
‘The car braked just in time.' He managed a smile. ‘You'd know if you'd been hit, I assure you. Speaking, you understand, as someone with a limited medical background.'
He was humouring her, and she smiled weakly back at him, appreciating his efforts to sustain her spirits.
‘You came here by ambulance,' he continued. His voice was like a soothing balm. Just what she needed. She remembered his hands massaging her back. That had been just what she had needed as well. She squeezed her eyes shut for a few seconds to block out the image and then opened them and looked at him.
Now, of course, there would be no wedding. There would be no need to get married, and she felt a spreading void begin to wash over her. No wedding, no baby, no more Bruno Carr. She had been so terrified of marrying him and involving herself in a life of loving from the sidelines, but now the thought of never seeing him again filled her with a different type of terror. It was like staring into a black hole.
‘Actually, you more or less came to on the way here. You've only been in the room for a short while.' He took one of her hands between his, and was it her imagination or could she feel the pity oozing out of him? ‘The nurse will be back in a few minutes. You've already been examined by a doctor, and they'll be taking you to be scanned to see...' He didn't end the sentence, but there was no need for him to. She knew what he meant.
‘What did the doctor say?'
‘There's a heartbeat, but...'
‘That might not last, might it? I might be heading for a miscarriage. Well, after all that...' She tried to laugh but couldn't and he didn't say anything.
It threatened to become a silence filled with dangerously raw feelings of self-pity and despair, when the nurse bustled in, looking starched and cheerful. Jessica looked glumly at her and wondered how hospital employees always managed to maintain such relentless good humour.
‘Radiologist's all ready for you now, my love.' She was efficiently transferred from bed to wheelchair, which made her feel even more of an invalid, and she was immeasurably grateful when Bruno took her hand in his and held it.
This, she knew, was one of the many reasons why she loved him. He was a source of strength. However often she told herself that he was autocratic and over-forceful, she knew that those were just the desperate postulations of someone who recognised qualities she would rather not acknowledge.
The short spin passed in a blur. Fear had congealed itself like a ball in her head.
The room with the scanning machine was dark and she propped herself onto the narrow bed and lay down, watching as the radiologist swivelled the screen at an angle so that she could see what was happening on it. Or not, as the case might be.
Bruno was still clasping her hand, and now he squeezed it. The radiologist, a middle-aged woman with an expression of perpetual concentration, was talking in the background. Referring to the accident. Then she switched on the machine and began to roll the monitor across Jessica's well-greased stomach.
‘There,' she said, finding what she was looking for. ‘There's the foetus. And there, you see, is the heart. Beating away quite merrily.'
A blob. An indistinct grey blob with a merrily beating heart. The flood of relief was so intense that Jessica felt she might possibly pass out. She listened while Bruno began asking questions, and half absorbed what the radiologist was saying about measurements and stage of development.
A merrily beating heart. She stared, fixated, at the screen, just to make sure that she could still see the beating pinprick.
‘Of course,' the radiologist said, switching off the monitor, ‘you'll want to rest for a bit. Just until the bleeding settles, which should be quite soon. And then take it easy.'
‘Oh, she'll be doing just that,' Jessica heard Bruno say. ‘When I take her home.'
Home? Whose home?
 
‘You can't stay in your flat on your own,' he repeated the following day as they were in the car and heading away from the hospital. ‘Before you start launching into a debate on the subject. You're bloody lucky...' His voice stumbled a bit, but he carried on almost immediately in his usual tone of command. ‘You heard what the woman said. You need to rest.'
‘I can rest at my own place.' But it was a token protest. The fact was that she wanted to put her feet up, at least for a little while.
‘Absolutely not. No way, no how, no debate,' he told her warningly, and she glanced across at him, trying to read his mind and unearth how he felt.
Relieved that everything was all right? Or disturbed that he had been given a glimpse of possible liberation from an unwanted marriage and was now forced back to square one? She daredn't ask him. The thought of what he might say by way of reply was enough to make her cringe inwardly.
‘How are you feeling?' He glanced across at her. This was the third time he had asked that question.
‘Still shaken, but all right. Why do you keep asking?'
‘Why do you think?' He let the rhetorical question hang in the air and then evidently gave up on her saying anything. ‘You could say that I was responsible for everything that happened, couldn't you?' he said conversationally. His face was impassive, but there were thoughts running through his head. She could tell from the tense set of his jaw.
‘How do you work that one out?'
‘Don't be obtuse, Jessica,' he ground out. He shot her a brief glance, then reverted his attention to the road. ‘I touched you, and you obviously didn't want to be touched, so you fled. Without thinking.'
‘Well, it's very good of you to take the blame, and I wish I could let you get away with it, but...'
‘But...?'
‘My reaction had nothing to do with you,' she told him bluntly. ‘Yes, you touched me, but I allowed myself to be touched. I just felt, when it happened, that I needed to get away. To escape.'
‘Which pretty much seems to sum up your feelings ever since we reached the decision to get married for the sake of the baby. Or maybe even before. You're terrified of commitment, even the sort of commitment that doesn't have the burden of love and romance to live up to. Am I right?'
‘I suppose I am,' Jessica said carefully and he expelled a long, frustrated sigh.
‘In which case, you're free.'
‘What?'
‘You heard me,' he said flatly, not looking at her. ‘You're free. I'm not going to force you to live a life of terror and abhorrence simply because of my principles.'
‘Are you being serious?' Her ears had taken in what he had just said, and her mind was slowly registering the fact that, far from feeling heady with a sense of release, she felt as though she were being sucked down a plug hole.
‘I've never been more serious in my entire life,' he told her grimly. ‘I mistakenly imagined that we might have rubbed along harmoniously as a married couple for the sake of the baby, but what happened has proved that that's complete nonsense. Your aversion to me is so intense that it almost ending up endangering our child's life.'
So she had got what she had clamoured so loudly for after all. Didn't they say that you should be very careful what you wished for because wishes had a nasty habit of coming true?
‘Naturally, we will have to have something drawn up by lawyers.'
‘I really don't feel up to discussing this just at the moment, Bruno,' she said feebly. She rested her head against the window-pane and shut her eyes. Her ears were pounding and the trauma of her near miss was catching up on her. Or so it felt. She was very tired. All she wanted to do was get into a bed and drift off to sleep.
‘You'll still be coming to stay with me for a while,' he continued, ignoring her lack of response. ‘At least for a week. There's no way that your stubbornness is going to come before health.'
Jessica didn't answer. After a while, she was aware of the car slowing down, pulling up in front of the house, then she heard him open his door, and eventually she lugged herself out of the car and followed him inside.
‘I'll need the key to your place,' he told her. ‘I'll have to bring some of your clothes over.'
‘I can always go and fetch them myself tomorrow,' she said.
‘Still fighting for your independence up to the last, aren't you, Jessica?' She heard the cynicism in his voice and flinched. ‘Still totally incapable of accepting even the smallest of favours just in case you might find a corner of your precious self-control eroded.'
‘Please, Bruno. Not now. I'm feeling very fragile at the moment.'
She knew that he would respect that, but for how long? He was furious with her and she wondered whether that wasn't in part due to the fact that, just this once, he had found himself incapable of ordering events precisely how he wanted to.
He had wanted to marry her, had wanted to adopt the mantle of fatherhood, and now he must be seeing it slipping away from him.
How do you think
I
feel? she wanted to shout at him. She would be financially secure, she knew that, but the emptiness stretching out in front of her was almost beyond endurance.
Weekly visits. Just often enough to ensure that she never recovered from the havoc he had wreaked on her heart. And then watching from the sidelines as over time he found someone. In fact, probably not that much time before the inevitable happened. He was an intensely sexual man. Celibacy, she guessed, was not a word he was overly familiar with.
He walked her up the stairs, keeping pace with her, and then led her into one of the guest bedrooms.
‘Your keys?' he reminded her, standing by the door and watching as she sank onto the bed.
‘Yes, my keys.' She rustled around in her bag and unearthed them from underneath a half-empty packet of mints and an assortment of pens and stray items of make-up. Funny, with all her passion for control, she had never been able to control her bag. Was there a name for someone whose life resembled the state of their bag? ‘I don't feel happy about you rummaging around in my flat—' she began.
‘Tough. You've got zero choice in the matter.' He took the keys from her and vanished. She waited a few minutes, then slowly changed into more comfortable clothes, drew the curtains and lay down on the bed.
She must have dozed off, because when she next opened her eyes evening had arrived, and Bruno was standing by the bed. On the chair by the bay window, she saw her suitcase, and she sat up, momentarily disoriented.
‘How long have I been asleep?' she asked.
‘Hours. I got back here and didn't want to disturb you, and I've been popping in every so often to check and make sure you were all right.'
The overhead light hadn't been switched on, so she couldn't properly make out the expression on his face, but at least his voice had no undertones of anger.
‘Tea.' He nodded in the direction of the bedside table, and Jessica gratefully took the mug and drank. Warm but fortifying.
‘How are you feeling?'
‘Much better. Thank you.'
He pulled a chair across to the bed and sat down next to her, so that he was more on her level and she didn't have to crane her neck upwards to see him. She knew they would have to talk. They had worked out details of the marriage that wasn't to be, and now they would have to work out arrangements for her and the baby after it was born. And claiming exhaustion was an excuse that wouldn't hold water for ever.

Other books

The Cairo Code by Glenn Meade
Lunar Lovers by Emma Abbiss
Clothing Optional by Virginia Nelsom
The Haunting of Josephine by Kathleen Whelpley
The Eden Effect by David Finchley
Setting by Jack M Bickham
Midsummer Night's Mayhem by Lauren Quick