chuckle, briefly. I’m still lying, though. I’m not telling him why I’m shopping, not yet. Not until I know.
‘What’s the weather like down there?’
I gaze through my windscreen as the car rolls along the coastal road. The stunted church tower of St Just is a grey silhouette on a grey horizon. ‘Looks like it’s going to rain. Bit chilly, too.’
He sighs. ‘Yes, the summer’s pretty much over. But it was good, wasn’t it?’ His pause is earnest. Hopeful. ‘Everything is OK now, everything is getting better, with Jamie, you’re feeling better.’
‘Yes,’ I say, and again I lie, and this lie is probably more important. I am certainly not feeling better: I am still thinking of the hare I killed. I haven’t mentioned it, to anyone. As soon as the accident happened, I cleaned the car and quickly disposed of the body,I wiped the blood from my hands, and then I tried to wipe the event from my mind. My first reaction had been to call David, tell him, share the story. But a minute’s thought told me that, no matter how trivially disturbing, it was probably better to stay silent. The moment I broached the subject, even as a passing and frivolous remark – oh your son said this and then it really happened, how funny, it could appear, to David, that I actually believe his son can foresee events, is clairvoyant, is a Kerthen from the legend. My remarks could make me sound mad. And I must not sound mad. Because I am not mad.
I don’t believe that Jamie has any power. The accident was an uncanny coincidence: animals die on the narrow, rural, zigzagging Penwith roads all the time – badgers, foxes, pheasants, and hares. I’ve seen dead hares before, they always make me sad; hares somehow seem much more precious than rabbits. Wilder, more poetic, I love the fact they live in Penwith. But they do get killed with regularity, as people speed round those granite-walled corners. My encounter on that rainy lane through Ladies Wood was, consequently, Jamie’s anxieties conflating with a simple accident. Yet it still faintly haunts me. Perhaps it was the way the body lolled in my hands. Like a dead baby.
‘Rachel?’
‘Yes, sorry. Driving.’
‘Are you OK, darling?’
‘I’m fine. Gotta find a parking space. I’d better go.’
He says goodbye and says let’s Skype later and then he drops the call. I scan the streets for a place to slot my car. It doesn’t take long. It’s never that hard to park here. Remote, regularly battered by the weather, the ‘last town in England’, one of the last places in Cornwall to speak Cornish, St Just-in-Penwith on the best of days has an empty and melancholy feel: bereft of its mines and miners but not their memories. But it is also the nearest town with the shop I need, the nearest to Carnhallow, and I need this shop right now.
Pushing the car door open I sense the inevitable dampness in the air. It is threatening to mizzle: that specific form of fine Cornish rain which is half-mist, half-drizzle. Like a spa treatment, but cold.
The pharmacy is down the fore street, at the corner of which is the medieval church; the central square is eighteenth-century shopfronts and big Victorian pubs – which retain hints of that wealthier mining past, the days of count-house dinners and hot rum punch, the days when adventurers and stockholders would celebrate the boom days of another copper lode, when giddy mine-captains would bring their sweethearts into the saloon to drink their gin-and-treacle.
Crossing the road, feeling the odd sensation that I am being watched, I press the door. It opens with an old-fashioned chime.
The girl at the counter gives me a look. She’s young. Very pale.
Slowly I make my way around the scented pharmacy. The girl is still looking at me, but hers is a warm, friendly glance. I realize with a sense of surprise that she’s almost my age: I spend so much time alone, or with David, I sometimes forget that I am also young. Only thirty.
The beautiful tattoo of a mandala on her neck implies she might be arty, or musical, the kind of friend I would usually make, without a worry, in Shoreditch. Maybe she’s working here to support a creative career; either way she looks fun and alternative. I’d like to go up to her and crack a joke and have a laugh – make a friend. It’s what I would have done in London.
But I’m still struggling to make real friends here, and I’m not sure why. Over the last weeks and months Cornwall, or Carnhallow, or the Kerthens, have somehow muted me. Or maybe it’s Jamie; the boy absorbs my emotions, even if we barely communicate.
The shelves do not have what I want. I am going to have to brave a conversation. With a glitch of anxiety in my throat, I approach the counter.
‘Do you have any um, um, pregnancy testing kits?’
The girl gazes at me. Perhaps she can tell how important this is from the crack in my voice. Pregnancy is my escape from worry and the growing sense of pointlessness: I will become a new mother, meet other new mothers. I will have a proper role and a real job and something extraordinary to give to David and Jamie. I will forget my anxieties. And I will make my husband happy: I know David is very keen for me to fall pregnant.
I am five days late, as I realized this morning, staring in confusion and tingling hopefulness at the calendar.
The girl is frowning.
‘There aren’t any kits on the shelves?’
‘Not that I can see.’
‘Well, uhm. Not sure we have any left. I’ll go check.’
She disappears. Gazing around, I see a poster for some kiddie medicine on the wall. The poster shows a mother with an angelic little baby, superhumanly cute and flawless. The mother has a smile as radiant as the faithful on Judgement Day. For unto us a child is born.
‘Here,’ says the shop girl. ‘Had a bunch at the back, must have forgot to put them out on the shelves. Sorry!’
I snap from my daydream. ‘Thank you. Brilliant. Can I take two?’
The girl smiles. Two to make sure you are definitely pregnant. Grabbing my kits, I scoot out into the drizzle and wind. Shoppers in drab hoodies turn my way, as if they have all been there a while, waiting for me. Look at her. Skulking around.
Am I pregnant? It is what I’ve wanted, needed, desired, for so long, to make things whole. My heart sings at the idea. A daughter, a son, I don’t mind. And a sibling for Jamie. This will repair the world. I bring you glad tidings.
The tension is too much. I can’t even wait to drive home. I’m going to find out this very second. Climbing out of the car again I head for one of those rather handsome old pubs, the Commercial Hotel.
The pub is, inevitably, almost empty. Just one young guy at the end of the varnished wooden bar, staring at a pint of Guinness. He briefly leers at me, then stares at his beer again.
Into the Ladies. I take out the kit, squat on the loo. I pee.
And then comes the wait. I am actually trying not to pray. I mustn’t get my hopes up. But oh, my hopes. My brilliant hopes.
Count the time, count the time, I must number the moments until I can call my husband and sing out the wonderful news, the news that changes everything, the news that will make us truly happy, properly a family.
I
