But it didn’t last. Beatrice felt the dream slipping away, the night encroaching, and the heavy realisation that her hands were clamped across her flat stomach.
She hadn’t dreamt like this before and cursed her brain for conjuring up such realistic feelings of fullness and contentment. She reached for Richard on his side of the bed and finding nobody there, curled reflexively onto her side, already crying, and slowly becoming aware of where she was.
The darkness in the room was cut through with silver moonlight below her.Belowher? Springing up in bed, her head met with the velvety material of the canopy that hung between her and the ceiling. Of course, it was all coming back to her, how she’d fought with the red-haired innkeeper so she could sleep here, just to spite his smiling eyes. Just to spite herself.
Swiping at her tears with her pyjama sleeve she cursed the new irate, awkward streak she’d been lumbered with lately; it was apparently not something she could do anything about. It seemed bound to her like a suit of armour, and yet it offered little in the way of protection and she seemed only to wound herself when she lashed out from under it.
She’d worn the armour ever since the night Rich had left her. Late coming home from work, he’d eventually called to say he’d checked into a hotel and that he was sorry, he couldn’t do this any longer and that she had to face her feelings and get help. He’d cried uncontrollably and sounded truly unhappy. Beatrice had found, after begging and bargaining until all her pride was gone, that he was resolute in spite of the tears.
She peered over the side of the bed only to be hit by the full realisation that she was up in the air, in the dead of night, in the middle of nowhere, curiously precarious.
She’d been so tired as she’d hauled herself up the creaking ladder into bed after dinner and all the effort of being cheerful and chatty that she had forgotten to draw the curtains in the low windows. Now the moonlight was spilling across the dark, polished floorboards.
What a ridiculous room. Why would anyone choose to sleep here? Unless they were trying to spite a smirking, eagle-eyed Scotsman who foundherridiculous. She wouldn’t admit to herself that the bed was comfortable and warm like a nest, or that the moonlight carried with it the rippling effect of the water in the bay beyond her window and spread a kind of shimmering, silver magic over everything it touched in the princess room. No, she wouldn’t let herself be charmed by the outlandish room she’d insisted on taking just to rile and punish haughty Atholl Fergusson.
Atholl must have some kind of sixth sense which meant he could see her armour. He had instinctively detected her prickliness and for some reason he wanted to tease and test it, to feel out its boundaries. Not fair, and not kind, thought Beatrice with a sniff. Well, she resolved, she’d made her towering bed and she’d just have to lie in it a bit longer. She’d be out of here soon.
Over by the door stood her suitcase. There were chocolate biscuits in there if she dared risk the perilous descent to get them.
‘As if I haven’t had enough of men interfering and cajoling. Face your feelings,’ she harrumphed as she made her way down the ladder slowly in the half light. ‘Face my bloody feelings. I’m going toeatmy feelings, thank you very much, Richard Halliday.’
Huffing a deep sigh as she padded across the floor and unzipped her carefully repacked case, her mind drifted back and forth between the ache of being forced to think about Richard’s sudden, uncharacteristic abandonment of their ten-year marriage and the wave of irritation that thinking about Atholl Fergusson’s antagonism brought on.
She pulled the biscuits from the suitcase, taking them over to the moonlit window before sitting cross-legged on the floor and tearing the packaging open. It was far easier to think of Atholl than Richard, so she did, and her annoyance grew. She absently snapped a biscuit in two and took an angry bite.
Seriously, who would think a Princess and the Pea themed room was a good idea? It was a stupid story anyway. The spoiled prince of a faraway kingdom had his pick of beautiful women, but his family were so worried none of them were suitably genteel enough for him, they devised a test to see just how much discomfort one woman could put up with. The queen (because there was always a meddling parent, wasn’t there?) put a pea under the prospective princess’s piled mattresses. Presumably it was one of those big, dry, wrinkly ones that English grannies used to keep in jars and never eat and not a fresh one or it would have been a flat green splat by morning. When the poor woman awoke she was stiff, bruised and unhappy, far from home, knowing something just wasn’t right, but unsure exactly what. The princess’s universe was thrown off kilter by something as tiny as a pea and that was all the proof the stupid prince needed that she was the woman for him.
Beatrice sighed, watching the waves from her window which were now right up against the sea wall, thinking how her own world had been turned on its head by a thing as tiny as a pea, only her Happy Ever After wouldn’t be waiting for her when the morning came.
In fact, nothing happy remained in her life, apart from Angela, Vic and her little niece, and thank goodness for them. She’d have been lost without them when it happened back in March. Her eyes drifted out to the dark horizon as the memories dragged her back to the spring.
Everything had been fine that morning. Rich had gone to work and Beatrice got on with her usual morning routine, only slower because she had been so sleepy lately. She had searched the arts jobs pages, even though she knew that at twelve weeks pregnant her chances of being offered a job at any point that year – maybe even for a year and a half – were practically non-existent.
In the afternoon Rich had picked her up and they’d gone to the hospital. Already this felt like a familiar routine, since they’d visited for an unscheduled ultrasound weeks before when Beatrice had seen a spot of red when she went to the loo and her heart had sunk. But all had been well. The sonographer had showed them a jump-jiving heart and they’d heard a thin beat over the hospital noises and collapsed into each other’s arms in relief. The sonographer printed out the scan image for them to keep, a little white peanut wriggling in the dark, and Rich had handed over his mobile and asked the sonographer to take a picture of them, Beatrice’s gelled-up belly on show and all.
Beatrice loved the picture, loved how it captured Rich’s toothy smile and bright, wide eyes, his arm clasped around her shoulder as she lay on crinkly paper on the big trolley, and there by her side the sonogram monitor with their peanut frozen in that moment, Beatrice’s eyes fixed upon it.
The nurse had told her to take it easy and let them know if there was any more blood, which there hadn’t been, and so the routine twelve-week scan had rolled around; the day they’d find out if they were having a boy or a girl. Richard whistled all the while he was driving.
They had been disappointed to find it was a different sonographer this time, less smiling and, they suspected, less likely to help them pose for a picture with Beatrice’s small bump on show. Rich had chattered and joked and said something about a daughter wrapping him around her little finger, but Beatrice couldn’t quite hear over a sudden cacophony of panic and dizziness that she didn’t like to mention to anyone.
Looking back, Beatrice realised she had known what was coming, but the blankness on the screen and the silence where there should have been a heartbeat still hit her like a bomb blast. The sonographer had cried too.
The next day after the horror of the anaesthetic and the awful, empty awakening with the cannula in her hand and her heart cut open, she cried into the hospital pillow, gripping it until the joints in her fingers ached. She heard the doctor tell her in cool tones that ‘it’ hadn’t grown for a week or so and there was no way she could have known, and that he was very sorry, and Beatrice had curled up on her side again while the other women in the ward watched her from their beds and she screamed out for her mum. One of the nurses pulled a blanket over her and rubbed her back and offered in a kind voice to phone her mum for her, and Beatrice couldn’t even breathe through the heaving sobs to let her know that her mum was gone too.
Staring out at the rain hitting the motorway tarmac on the way home she told Rich she thought maybe she could remember the moment, a week or two before when she’d been lying on the sofa napping and felt the strangest sensation of movement and a sudden, gentle falling away, but then there had been nothing and she had put it down to her imagination or the possibility that she had felt the first kick.
Rich held the wheel tightly as she told him that the whole horrible hospital procedure now felt somehow like a theft, and that if she could, she would have parcelled up all their hopes and dreams and love in crisp brown paper like the precious bundle it was and kept it close forever. But they had left the hospital with nothing.
After that she had stopped talking about it, and Rich, his face grave and set like a white mask that Beatrice couldn’t bear to look at, had let her, and she hadn’t uttered a word about their little lost son ever since. In fact, she had found there was very little else to say about anything. Their little sticking plaster was torn away leaving them untethered, slowly drifting apart again.
Now Beatrice made her way back up the ladder in the dawning light, drawing the bed curtains closed around her and letting herself sink into the pile of mattresses where she wept silently until sleep came again.
Outside in the bay and on the hazy horizon, the fishermen cast nets and pots over the sides of bobbing boats. The sea had settled into its gentle summer flux once more and Port Willow awakened to a calm morning after the storms.
Chapter Six
Directions to the Coral Beach
