Darren and Monica’s father hit her hard. What if Terry was furious? What if he threw her out?
The little bubble of unreality suddenly popped.
Kathleen returned home after finishing at the pub, thankfully having seen no one. Not even Monica, who she’d heard leave while on her hands and knees behind the bar. And once home, she’d stayed home, for a long, thoughtful hour, drinking tea and dithering about going to the doctor’s on Park Avenue where she’d be bound to see someone she knew. The morning surgery finished at eleven, and she knew she’d probably have a wait; they did a first-come-first-served thing and if you weren’t there when the surgery doors opened, you could have a dozen or more patients in the queue in front of you, especially at this time of year, with everyone suffering from coughs and colds.
Which was what decided her. She might feel shameful and silly turning up with her questions about possible pregnancy, but she could legitimately go because she’d been ill with an infection, too. She poured the last of her tea down the sink and berated herself for being so daft anyway; no one would know anything – consultations with doctors were confidential. So, having given Tiddles the milk she’d promised earlier, she set off down Louis Avenue and across to Park Avenue. Impossible to deal with something when you didn’t even know what it was you were dealing with, after all.
Once in the surgery, Kathleen looked around and was struck once again by how it seemed as if there must be some evidence of her condition in her face. She was the youngest there by decades, bar a frazzled-looking mother with a toddler whose nose was streaming thick yellow mucus and who was fidgeting and grizzling at her constantly. Everyone else was elderly and gave the pair a wide berth.
And everyone – everyone – looked at her. Quite without any compunction or subtlety either, a couple of elderly ladies not even moving their legs out of the way as she passed them. She carefully stepped over them, conscious of all the eyes following her progress, all of them wondering, no doubt, why a young girl like her was here, taking up the precious time they might be allocated. She had always hated going to the doctor’s anyway, having a healthy fear of illness and death, and had not been inside the place since she was thirteen or fourteen when Irene had taken her because of a rash. It had turned out to be German measles and she remembered it well. Being stuck in the stuffy bedroom for days, banished in case of contagion, crying like a baby, wanting her mum.
The surgery looked exactly the same now; a tiny, too-hot room, with ragged posters on the wall that flapped in greeting as the outer door was opened, and a hole in the wall at the end that opened into a back office, at which the greeting was invariably more hostile. Between the two, the room was given over to high-backed bench seating – one row of it taking up the length of the remaining walls, and two benches, back to back, down the middle.
She gave her name and took the last remaining seat available, thankfully in the corner, and buried her nose in one of the magazines that was piled just beside it, reading an article about a man who made mosaics out of old plates, and hoping no one would try to engage her in conversation.
A good twenty minutes passed, and, in that time, the room emptied, and before long, with more leaving than were now shuffling in, there were just four patients left in the room. None looked ill, any more than she realised she must look pregnant, and she was just biding her time wondering what might be wrong with them when the receptionist in the office beyond called her name.
Kathleen took her notes from her – though woe betide you if you ever dared to look at them – and made her way into the corridor to Dr Jackson’s door. The name was familiar, though she couldn’t remember having ever seen him herself, and when she entered the room she was dismayed to find a grizzled man, swivelling in a swivel chair, with hairs sprouting from his nose. She flushed from head to foot. He looked about a hundred. Where on earth would she begin?
‘Take a seat, young lady,’ said the doctor, taking the envelope of notes she proffered, but, before so much as glancing at them, he sat back and considered her over a pair of tortoiseshell glasses that sat at the end of his nose. Then he sat forward suddenly, startling her, and said, ‘So, what seems to be the trouble?’
Now she was here there seemed little point in beating around the bush, so she told him she’d been feeling sick and thought that she might be pregnant, which unleashed a torrent of questions that came one after another, each more embarrassing than the last. When was her last period? Had she frequency? A desire to go for a wee more often than usual? Had she any breast tenderness? Giddiness? Any aversion to smells or food? And, almost as an afterthought, and which made her blush to her hair roots, a question about something that he seemed to have only just thought about: ‘I take it you are having regular sexual relations?’
Kathleen didn’t know where to look, let alone how to begin to answer, but her blush did the job for her instead. The doctor smiled then, and pulled her notes out, perhaps noticing her discomfort. Looking down at them and picking up a pen, he made a short note. ‘Well, yes, Kathleen,’ he said, glancing at the top of the envelope to get her name right. ‘Given what you’ve told me, and in the absence of other factors that might preclude it, I rather suspect that pregnant is precisely what you are.’
The doctor had made no comment nor asked a question about her marital status, for which Kathleen was extremely grateful. He must have known, though. No wedding ring. And he also knew her age, of course. So he knew. But he didn’t judge her. Or if he did, he didn’t seem to. She felt comforted by that, and felt a warmth for the kindly GP. A welcome warmth. The world at large would no doubt view it more coldly. The world at large and her father, no doubt. And her hated stepmother.
It was dark once again by the time Terry’s car pulled up outside, while Kathleen was pacing the little sitting room, at sixes and sevens about what to say and do. That she was pregnant was no longer in question. She’d gone back and worked out how long it had been since her last period and had also realised what she suspected might have been her downfall; that the light bleeding she’d experienced in December had not been a period. That was all so obvious now – how stupid had she been to think so? So she’d blithely reassured him of her dates … She cursed herself anew.
And now she’d been enlightened as to what the symptoms of pregnancy might be, it was all too obvious that she had the full set. Again and again, she’d considered running back to the phone box to speak to Sally, but again and again she decided against going out, as it was freezing, and there seemed little point. It would keep.
She knew what she knew – that she was almost certainly expecting a baby, that an appointment would be sent to her so she could attend the local hospital, and that once she had it, she should attend her first antenatal visit – that was, of course, assuming she didn’t have a period in the meantime (or any other worrying symptoms that might mean it was something else), in which case she should hurry back to the doctor’s, and the appointment at the hospital would be cancelled.
It all seemed so matter of fact, so calm and calculated, so clinical, that such excitement as she’d dared to feel (and now she could finally admit it to herself – she’d been excited above all things) had been swept away with all the efficiency of the family-planning lady who’d come to the school and whose lecture now came so readily to mind. Her with her dire pronouncements about the perils of ‘letting boys have their way with you’, and about the terrible, mortal shame of being an unmarried mother, which would see her shunned and reviled everywhere she went, and about the agonies of childbirth.
And as the minutes ticked by, she found she could only concentrate on such negatives. They’d been together less than half a year, they’d been living together barely a month, and she realised she didn’t know if Terry even wanted children. Surely if he had, he and Iris would have already had some? She just couldn’t imagine he’d be happy about it, not becoming a first-time father
