The Love of My Life(54)

Eventually, I put him out of my mind and told myself I’d never be so stupid again. I got on with my course. There were essays, there was fieldwork, there was reading; endless reading, and of course there were parties. I was a second-year undergrad; I sat in the inside lane of normal, my strange childhood moving further away with every passing day.

I was happy.

Until one cold morning in early March, when I was sitting in the library reading about marine hermaphrodites, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t had a period in a long time.





Chapter Thirty-Three


It’ll be OK, I thought, sitting on the lip of our mildewed shower. It’ll somehow be OK.

I was nineteen years old, a blue line was forming on a screen but still I felt there must be a solution. I might be broke and orphaned, but I was an educated, middle-class woman: I had choices. This was the privilege into which I was lucky enough to have been born.

Wasn’t it?

Jill knocked on the door. ‘Are you doing what I think you’re doing?’ We’d been into town to buy the test that morning.

I nodded, taking in our tiny bathroom; the cracked floor tiles, the over-mirror light that had never worked. A can of hair removal cream with gruesome pink foam around the rusting collar, an empty bottle of shampoo covered in long black hairs.

My precious, hard-won student life.

‘Emily?’

‘Sorry,’ I called. ‘Yes. And yes.’

A pause.

‘You’re pregnant?’

‘I’m pregnant.’

Another pause.

‘Right. Well, we need to . . . Let’s – oh Em, let me in.’

Jill came and sat on the floor next to me.

‘We used a condom,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Who was in charge of condoms? Him or you?’

‘Him.’

‘Well. He was very drunk.’

We stayed there as the winter day darkened, then Jill got up to make toasted cheese sandwiches.

‘It’ll be OK,’ she said, as she went. ‘We’re in this together.’

It was not OK. By the time I’d thought to take a pregnancy test, I was fifteen weeks and a day: termination was still possible, but when I read about what would be involved this far into the pregnancy, I couldn’t face it.

Yet the idea of having a child felt no more real than a moon landing. Where would I go? Who would help; where would I live? How would I afford it? (I couldn’t possibly afford it.) How could I finish my degree? (I couldn’t possibly finish my degree.) And my friends. My cherished new friends. Dad and I had never lived anywhere for more than a few years, and even then I’d had to stay at Granny’s when he was away with the Marines. My student friends were the first solid group I’d had. Whether they knew it or not, they were front and centre of the life I’d always dreamed of; the life that began when I arrived here as a fresher.

The wind blew and the North Sea hulked around the land, indifferent and vast. I took to walking along the shore every morning before lectures, singing loudly to keep my thoughts at bay, watching the sea change minute by minute. It could be sleek as steel when I arrived but furious and rolling by the time I left, and I found some comfort in that: no state was permanent. But for all its changes and its rising and flattening and booming and sparkling, it never gave me any answers.

Can I do this? I asked it, each morning, and each morning it said nothing.

There was an expanding layer of fat around my middle, and my face was bloated with hormones and worry. I didn’t feel sick, but the exhaustion was like being trapped underwater, my thoughts oily and slow. In desperation, I finally visited a clinic to discuss termination, but left before my name was called.

My short time in the world of average was over: I would be a mother by the age of twenty.

‘If you’re going to keep this baby, you’re going to need help,’ Jill said. ‘Financial help, logistical help, the works. You need to get in touch with him.’

‘How?’

She frowned. ‘Well, unless you have his phone number, which you don’t, I think there’s only one way of doing it.’

We looked him up. Jeremy Rothschild. He was actually quite well known – I wasn’t wrong when I thought he’d looked familiar. He was a radio presenter, listened to by millions every morning – I’d heard his voice in Dad’s house for years.

His wife was an actress. I recognised her face, too.

We composed a letter. On the envelope I wrote the BBC correspondence address I’d heard a hundred times on children’s BBC: Television Centre, Wood Lane, London W12 7RJ.

There was no way he’d get back to me.

Three days later, Jill burst into my bedroom and hissed, ‘Fuck, Jeremy Rothschild’s on the phone.’

‘What? What did he say?’

‘He’s on the line now! Downstairs! Fucking get out of bed!’

‘Emily,’ he said, in a pleasant, untroubled voice, but I don’t think either of us believed he was having a relaxing afternoon.

‘Hello,’ I said. And – a self-betrayal – ‘Um, sorry.’

‘Don’t be. The last few weeks must have been hellish for you.’

I wasn’t expecting that. For a moment, my eyes filled with tears, but Jill poked me until I agreed, carefully, that it had not been an easy time.