from her last period, fearing the sudden rush of his desire, terrified of pregnancy.
He rolled on top of her, moving steadily and deliciously, Ruth opened her legs and felt her desire rise and rise to match his, but then her caution chilled her. ‘Patrick, we shouldn’t…’ she started to say.
With a sudden delighted groan he came inside her.
Ruth’s routine changed little after her week’s notice expired and she became freelance. She left home at the usual time and she came home, if anything, later than usual. It was as if she were afraid that any slackening would prompt Patrick to exploit her unemployment.
‘You could take it easy,’ he said on the first Monday.
‘Better not,’ Ruth said. ‘I want to show them I’m serious about getting work.’
Patrick had not pursued his theme—that Ruth could rest, or could tidy the flat, or could visit his mother and see the cottage. He had kissed her and left for work. He was in less of a hurry now in the mornings. He strolled to his car and let the engine warm and the light frost melt from the windscreen before he drove away. He no longer had to be in at the television newsroom first; he now had status. He had a parking slot of his own outside the building and a secretary who had to be in before him to open his post. Patrick’s stock had risen dramatically, and his timekeeping could decline. Some mornings in November it was Ruth who was up first and Patrick who lured her back to bed. On at least two mornings they made love without contraception. Patrick had been urgent and seductive and Ruth could not refuse him. She was flattered by his desire and enchanted by its sudden urgency. One morning she was half asleep as he slid inside her and she woke too slowly to resist. One morning she acquiesced with a sleepy smile. Escaping pregnancy the first time, she was becoming reckless.
In mid-December she felt sick in the mornings and felt tired at work. She was trying to persuade the afternoon show producer to commission a series on local Bristol history.
‘Something about industry,’ she suggested. ‘From shipbuilding to building Concorde at Filton. We could call it Bristol Fashion.’
‘Sounds a bit earnest,’ he criticized.
‘It could be fun,’ she said. ‘Some old historical journals. I could read them. And some old people talking about working on the docks and in the aircraft industry before the war. There’s loads of stuff at the museum.’
He cocked an eyebrow at her. ‘Are you sure? Oh, well, maybe. See what you can dig up. But nothing too dreary, Ruth. Nothing too historical. Bright and snappy. You know the kind of thing.’
She closed his office door quietly behind her and went to the ladies’ room. She ran the cold-water tap and splashed cold water on her face and rinsed her mouth.
One of the newsroom copy takers, combing her hair before the mirror, glanced around. ‘Are you all right, Ruth? You look as white as a sheet.’
‘I feel funny,’ Ruth said.
The woman looked at her a little closer. ‘How funny?’
‘I feel really sick, and dreadfully tired.’
The woman gave her a smiling look, full of meaning. ‘Not up the spout, are you?’
Ruth shot her a sudden wide-eyed look. ‘No! I can’t possibly be.’
‘Not overdue?’
‘I don’t know…I’d have to look…I’m a bit scatty about it…’
The woman, with two children of her own at school, shrugged her shoulders. ‘Maybe it’s just something you ate,’ she said.
‘Probably,’ Ruth said hastily. ‘Probably that’s all.’
The woman went out, leaving Ruth alone. She looked at herself in the mirror. Her dark, smooth bobbed hair framed her pale face, her large dark eyes. She looked scared, she looked sickly. Ruth shook her head. She could not see herself as a woman who might be pregnant. She had an image of herself as a girl too young, too unready for a woman’s task of pregnancy.
‘It’s something I ate,’ Ruth said to her reflection. ‘It’s bound to be.’
She bought a pregnancy test kit on the way home from work and locked herself in the bathroom with it. There were two little test tubes and a collecting jar for urine and immensely complicated instructions. Ruth sat on the edge of the bathtub and read them with a sense of growing panic. It seemed to her that since she could not understand the instructions for a pregnancy test then she must, therefore, be totally unfit to be pregnant. She hid the test, tucking it behind the toilet cleaner, secure in the knowledge that Patrick would never have anything to do with cleaning the toilet, and brushed her teeth, splashed water on her face, and pinned on a bright smile for Patrick’s arrival home from work.
She woke in the night, in the shadowy bedroom, and found that she was holding her breath, as if she were waiting for something. When she saw the grey-orange of the sky through the crack in the curtains she knew it was morning, and she could do the test. She slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Patrick, and went to the bathroom. She locked the door behind her and took the pregnancy test from its hiding place. She lifted her nightgown and peed in the toilet, clumsily thrusting the collecting jar into the stream of urine for a sample. Then she poured urine and test powder into the little test tube, corked it, shook it, wrapped herself in a bath towel for warmth, and waited.
She had to wait ten minutes before the test was completed. Ruth made herself look away from the tube, fearful that the strength of her wishing would make the results go wrong. She was longing with all her heart for the liquid to stay its innocent pale, pale blue. She did not want to be pregnant, she did not want to have conceived a child. She turned her mind away from Patrick’s new insistent lovemaking. She had thought their marriage had taken a sudden turn for the better; she had seen it as a renewal of desire. She had explained his new demanding sexiness as being a relief from the stress of his job as a reporter, a celebration of his new status as a manager. She did not want to think that he had been aiming for this very dawn, for Ruth sitting on the cold floor of the bathroom waiting for the result of a pregnancy test to tell her that she was no longer a free woman with a multitude of choices before her.
She glanced at her watch: eleven minutes had gone by. She looked at the test tube. In the bottom of the tube it had formed a sediment: a bright, strong dark blue. It was unmistakably a positive test. She screwed up her eyes – it made no difference. She took it closer to the light over the mirror. It was the bright blue that meant pregnancy. Ruth folded up the instructions and put the test pack away behind the toilet cleaner again. She was supposed to retest within a week, but she knew she would not bother to do it. She had known this yesterday morning, when the woman in the ladies’ room had asked her if she was up the spout. She had recognized the information as soon as it was spoken. She was pregnant. Patrick and his parents had got what they wanted.
She did not tell Patrick of her pregnancy until Boxing Day morning, when he was hungover from his father’s best Armagnac, which they had drunk on Christmas afternoon, and liverish with the richness of his mother’s Christmas cooking. Some resilient piece of spite made her withhold the information from the assembled family on Christmas Day. She knew that they would have fallen on her with delight; she knew they would have said it was the best Christmas present they had ever had. Ruth did not want them unwrapping her
