Eye of the Needle(16)
Then she said, “I have another present for you, but you can’t open it until May.”
He laughed. “What on earth are you talking about? How much of that brandy did you drink while I was out?”
“I’m having a baby.”
He stared at her, and all the laughter went out of his face. “Good God, that’s all we bloody well need.”
“David!”
“Well, for God’s sake…. When the hell did it happen?”
“That’s not too difficult to figure out, is it?” she said. “It must have been a week before the wedding. It’s a miracle it survived the crash.”
“Have you seen a doctor?”
“Huh—when?”
“So how do you know for sure?”
“Oh, David, don’t be so boring. I know for sure because my periods have stopped and my nipples hurt and I throw up in the mornings and my waist is four inches bigger than it used to be. If you ever looked at me you would know for sure.”
“All right.”
“What’s the matter with you? You’re supposed to be thrilled!”
“Oh, sure. Perhaps we’ll have a son, and then I can take him for walks and play football with him, and he’ll grow up wanting to be like his father the war hero, a legless f*cking joke!”
“Oh, David, David,” she whispered. She knelt in front of his wheelchair. “David, don’t think like that. He will respect you. He’ll look up to you because you put your life together again, and because you can do the work of two men from your wheelchair, and because you carried your disability with courage and cheerfulness and—”
“Don’t be so damned condescending,” he snapped. “You sound like a sanctimonious priest.”
She stood up. “Well, don’t act as if it’s my fault. Men can take precautions too, you know.”
“Not against invisible trucks in the blackout!”
It was a silly exchange and they both knew it, so Lucy said nothing. The whole idea of Christmas seemed utterly trite now: the bits of colored paper on the walls, and the tree in the corner, and the remains of a goose in the kitchen waiting to be thrown away—none of it had anything to do with her life. She began to wonder what she was doing on this bleak island with a man who seemed not to love her, having a baby he didn’t want. Why shouldn’t she—why not—well, she could…. Then she realized she had nowhere else to go, nothing else to do with her life, nobody else to be other than Mrs. David Rose.
Eventually David said, “Well, I’m going to bed.” He wheeled himself to the hall and dragged himself out of the chair and up the stairs backwards. She heard him scrape across the floor, heard the bed creak as he hauled himself on to it, heard his clothes hit the corner of the room as he undressed, then heard the final groaning of the springs as he lay down and pulled the blankets up over him.
And still she would not cry.
She looked at the brandy bottle and thought, If I drink all of this now, and have a bath, perhaps I won’t be pregnant in the morning.
She thought about it for a long time, until she came to the conclusion that life without David and the island and the baby would be even worse because it would be empty.
So she did not cry, and she did not drink the brandy, and she did not leave the island; but instead she went upstairs and got into bed, and lay awake beside her sleeping husband, listening to the wind and trying not to think, until the gulls began to call, and a grey rainy dawn crept over the North Sea and filled the little bedroom with a cold pale light, and at last she went to sleep.
A kind of peace settled over her in the spring, as if all threats were postponed until after the baby was born. When the February snow had thawed she planted flowers and vegetables in the patch of ground between the kitchen door and the barn, not really believing they would grow. She cleaned the house thoroughly and told David that if he wanted it done again before August he would have to do it himself. She wrote to her mother and did a lot of knitting and ordered diapers by mail. They suggested she go home to have the baby, but she knew, was afraid, that if she went she would never come back. She went for long walks over the moors, with a bird book under her arm, until her weight became too much for her to carry very far. She kept the bottle of brandy in a cupboard David never used, and whenever she felt depressed she went to look at it and remind herself of what she had almost lost.
Three weeks before the baby was due, she got the boat into Aberdeen. David and Tom waved from the jetty. The sea was so rough that both she and the skipper were terrified she might give birth before they reached the mainland. She went into the hospital in Aberdeen, and four weeks later brought the baby home on the same boat.
David knew none of it. He probably thought that women gave birth as easily as ewes, she decided. He was oblivious to the pain of contractions, and that awful, impossible stretching, and the soreness afterward, and the bossy, know-it-all nurses who didn’t want you to touch your baby because you weren’t brisk and efficient and trained and sterile like they were; he just saw you go away pregnant and come back with a beautiful, white-wrapped, healthy baby boy and said, “We’ll call him Jonathan.”
They added Alfred for David’s father, and Malcolm for Lucy’s, and Thomas for old Tom, but they called the boy Jo, because he was too tiny for Jonathan, let alone Jonathan Alfred Malcolm Thomas Rose. David learned to give him his bottle and burp him and change his diaper, and he even dangled him in his lap occasionally, but his interest seemed distant, uninvolved; he had a problem-solving approach, like the nurses; it was not for him as it was for Lucy. Tom was closer to the baby than David. Lucy would not let him smoke in the room where the baby was, and the old boy would put his great briar pipe with the lid in his pocket for hours and gurgle at little Jo, or watch him kick his feet, or help Lucy bathe him. Lucy suggested mildly that he might be neglecting the sheep. Tom said they did not need him to watch them feed—he would rather watch Jo feed. He carved a rattle out of driftwood and filled it with small round pebbles, and was overjoyed when Jo grabbed it and shook it, first time, without having to be shown how.