She keeps telling me to start my maternity leave and take it easy for the final months.
‘But what on earth would I do,’ I ask her, ‘sitting all by myself in an empty house? I’m fit and healthy. I intend working until the last minute.’
‘David warned me to keep a close eye on you and not let you overdo things,’ she said. ‘It worries me,’ she added, ‘him being on that oil rig. If anything…’ She paused, uncomfortable at having to remind me that I’ve a bad track record when it comes to bringing her grandchildren into the world. I try not to give her cause for concern.
It has not been difficult to maintain the illusion of pregnancy. I’ve made a harness with bindings that fit snugly below my breasts and under my stomach. I pad it with firm fillings that outline my expanding curve. I’m so conscious of avoiding contact with anyone that my antennae remain on full alert, tremblingly cautious, always watchful. My face looks too gaunt for a woman in her last trimester but people see what they want to see and their eyes are always drawn to my stomach.
Hopefully, Professor Langley has forgotten my existence. His secretary handled my decision to change gynaecologists with chilly politeness and sent me a bill for my last appointment and scans.
At the start of the month, David arrived home on leave, his skin tanned and taut from the harsh North Sea gales. I hid the harness then, and drank so much water every day that my stomach felt as tight and swollen as a drum. My food was fat and starch, it sickened me, but my weight kept increasing. He transformed the spare bedroom into a nursery. He painted the walls a pale apple green and hung one of Miriam’s seahorse mobiles above the carry-cot. We travelled to Dublin and stayed for a weekend with my father and Tessa. We bought a pram and the carry-cot, a feeding chair, a changing station. The whispering grew more intense as we made our decisions. Each time I faltered they whispered…Remember us…remember us…no turning back…Whenever I felt the urge to run free from the shadow of that cottage and bring the dream to an end, they’d whisper stay…stay. Be silent, they urged, when the truth pressed against my teeth so hard it ached to be heard. Be brave, they whispered, when David laid his ear too late to my stomach and said, ‘I can’t feel anything…Well, maybe I do…it’s so hard to tell.’
What he’d felt was my shudder of fear, my womb contracting with dread determination.
That is how our baby grows, carried into being on a whisper.
I met a horse whisperer once. He was small and stout and wore a wide-brimmed hat with a jaunty feather in the side. To be called a horse whisperer sounded mysterious and powerful, but he said he was simply a man who understood horses. He came to us soon after we purchased Augustus – the horse had too many bad habits for us to handle alone. I’d watched him stand before Augustus, face to face and then cheek to cheek, not threatening, just empathising, reaching deep into the horse’s psyche and connecting with the rage that lay at the heart of his flailing behaviour. By the time he’d finished, Augustus was still a spirited horse but he was biddable. He’s gone from the meadow now, sold to a horse dealer. I told David he broke loose and almost knocked me to the ground. Seeing him at the gate every time I passed was too much to bear. I want amnesia.
It will happen, my whisperers promise. Trust us…believe in us…we are the whispers of what should have been.
David was reluctant at first to move from my bed, but when I told him I’d suffered some spotting, he understood. Nothing must endanger this new life we’ve created. I reassured him of my love, explained how hormones go berserk during pregnancy and lovemaking is impossible. ‘Afterwards,’ I promised him, ‘afterwards when our baby is born, everything will be different.’
When I came home from the studio on the night before he left, he asked me to sit down and talk to him. He placed his hands on my arms and sank me into a chair.
‘Be still,’ he’d said, ‘and listen to me. All this rushing around and working such late hours. Apart from our trip to Dublin, I’ve hardly seen you since I came home.’
He kissed me, his mouth seeking some response. My body clenched in protest, and I accused him of being demanding, selfish, thinking only of his own needs. How was it possible that he could not hear the terrified whine behind my bluster?
‘Why,’ he’d asked, ‘do you spurn me? Do you think I’m a beast, incapable of lying by your side without wanting to invade your body?’
I almost told him. I could feel my knees weakening, the urge to kneel before him and confess. But the whisperers moved from gentle persuasion to implacable authority and straightened my spine. I faced him down, this man whose children I carried so briefly, all five of them, and who now urge me onwards…No more…no more…no more.
He drew away from me and wished me goodnight, chastely kissing my forehead. I understand his desire to be part of my experience but this is a journey I must take alone.
The rain had stopped by the time we left the Nutmeg and shoppers were drifting back to the market stalls. A traveller sat on a blanket outside the café. She was young, twenty at most, a baby in her arms, and a dull-eyed small boy hunkered beside her. I searched in my purse for coins but Miriam went back inside to buy coffee and sandwiches for the mother, milk for the boy.
‘It’s a boy child, missus,’ the traveller said. ‘A big boy child for his fine strappin’ mother.’
Her hard, experienced eyes seemed to sear through my secret. The pavement swayed, or perhaps I stumbled, and the coins fell from my hand, rolling across the uneven surface until they were clenched in the boy’s fist.
Phyllis Lyons arrived back from the pharmacy with her mother’s medication and asked if she could get a lift home with me. Her car was being serviced and she’d missed the twice-hourly bus that runs past her house. Miriam waved and left us together, glad, I suspect, to escape to her house on the other side of Market Square.
Throughout the journey home, Phyllis talked non-stop about her mother’s ailments and her efforts to alleviate them. I stopped outside her gate and waited for her to leave the car.
‘Come in and say hello to Mammy,’ she said. ‘She loves the bit of company.’
I stared at the grey lace curtains on the front window. Her mother would have been watching us, stooped on her Zimmer frame. Inside, the air would be stale and smoky.
‘I’m expecting a call from David,’ I said, and Phyllis nodded, as if my excuse echoed all the others she’d ever heard.
She stepped from the car and walked around the side of her house, squeezing her stocky figure past the tractor. Farming her few acres and looking after her mother…it can’t be an easy life but she accepts it without complaint.
I turned down the lane and drove into the grey arms of Rockrose. I locked the front door behind me. Such relief, being alone again, able to breathe, to open my waistband, to allow the silence to settle until only the whisperers were audible.
I speak to women all the time. They look at my bump and confide in me. One woman told me she’d never once, during the nine months of her pregnancy, felt her baby move. He’s eighteen years old now, on a track and field scholarship in the United States. Another woman was told by her gynaecologist that he could not detect her baby’s heartbeat. That night she felt the first fluttering of life in her womb. Put a group of women together and they’ll tell stories that mystify the medical profession.
Carla Kelly writes about them in her pregnancy diary. The happy, clappy
