The couple had smiled with crumpled, closed tight lips, a little shadow of defeat and resignation in their eyes.
‘I don’t want to upset you, but… you’re a bit… jumpy today, a bit… hyper,’ Angela said, looking down at her food, trying to sound unthreatening.
‘I’m fine, honestly. Totally fine,’ Beatrice said with a wave of her hand. ‘Anyway,’ she continued, determined to make them relax again. ‘Tomorrow I’m bulk buying milk chocolate-covered Brazils because the plain ones are awful. Who cares if Rich raises an eyebrow or two at them? Obsessed, indeed! I’morganised, that’s what.’
Lying on the towering mattresses, Beatrice finally accepted that Angela, Vic and Rich – especially Rich – might well have had a point. But at the time, the action-planning really had given her something to feel hopeful about.
She recalled the days following the miscarriage which she’d spent wandering round town in trainers and sweats, or on long walks along the canal, out to the supermarket and the big Boots, anything but sitting still and alone with her thoughts.
She had felt better when moving. It was a salve for the restlessness that wouldn’t leave her in peace.
Then she had struck upon the idea of asking Angela if she could push Clara in her buggy one day so that she had some company and looked less weird ranging about town on her own.
Walking with Clara had been a revelation. She just slept in her buggy or sucked on rice cakes, looking about her, and they’d gone miles together – all the way to the castle on one occasion. She remembered the grave look on Angela’s face when she’d taken Clara back home that afternoon, turning her over to Vic for a feed, when she’d said, ‘It was nice. People stop and talk to Clara and to me. They think I’m her mummy.’
And the walking had helped when the letter arrived from the hospital letting her know the date of her six-month scan, still weeks away, and she’d torn it into pieces wondering how the system could have let that happen and telling the empty house that she had thought she couldn’t feel any worse, but it turned out she could. Rich was at work and missed the whole thing and when he came home that evening the scraps of paper were in the bin outside and they went unmentioned forevermore.
She’d gone in secret to the GP too and heard there was no explanation for the miscarriage, none that they could ever know of. The GP told her he wouldn’t be prepared to investigate further unless she’d had a few. Beatrice had experienced a dizzying wave of nausea at that.
‘A few?’ she’d replied. ‘How are you meant to endure this more than once? God, those poor women. I hadn’t really thought that this could happen again. And all those poor daddies.’
In those first few desperate weeks she had felt sadder when she thought of Rich than when she thought about what she herself had lost. She had truly felt sorry for him. And she couldn’t fix it.
Normally, if there was a problem, she could swing into action and come up with some solutions. Like when Vic and Angela had needed help finding a donor service and paying for a few rounds of their assisted inseminations. Her talent for organising stuff – as well as half her savings – had come in really handy then. But her efficiency and organisation hadn’t been enough to help her in her own time of crisis.
All the temperature charting and ovulation prediction kits and the mad bicycling of her legs above her head after sex, and all those bitter, chewy pineapple cores and Brazil nuts – none of it had helped her. Rich had taken his broken heart and left.
She had scared him away and proved his vicious, boozy old dad right. No baby ever fixed a struggling marriage. And no myopic striving to conceive when she and Rich should have been grieving had fixed it either.
Beatrice felt the sleepiness come over her. The inn was silent and warm and she became aware of the waves shushing against the sea wall over the road. A small sense of peacefulness reached her. Was this it? Had she had a breakthrough? All by herself?Hah!
Yes, she had been right after all, hadn’t she? You didn’t have to spill your heart out to get some clarity on your feelings. Vic, Angela, Rich – and Atholl Fergusson – had all been wrong!
Atholl Fergusson may well have thought he could see through all of her silence and withholding and he may well have wanted to encourage her to talk, and so fix her, but that wasn’t going to happen. She would never tell him or anyone else the humiliating story of how she drove her husband away by turning a cooling marriage, which may even have been salvageable at one point, into an uncomfortably fraught place that Rich couldn’t bear any longer.
It’s better to leave Port Willow now, she told herself. Let Atholl think of her as cold and sad and then forget about her altogether, even at the risk that her sadness might be compounded by leaving this lovely, eccentric place before she’d had the chance to get to know it properly and just when she was beginning to connect with new people and enjoy herself.
Yes, she’d get out of here in the morning, taking her scraps of fresh insight with her, along with the heavy lump of words within her chest.
Chapter Fourteen
An Invitation
Beatrice had been standing over her open suitcase for at least five minutes, frozen to the spot. She knew that if she was going to make the morning train she’d have to leave now.
Could she sneak out and along the front without being seen? Everyone would be up and about by now. The aroma of bacon and toast was wafting in through the open window and the calm music of receding waves gently churning pebbles accompanied her thoughts. Could she really leave without saying goodbye, especially to Kitty, and more especially, to Atholl?
The gentle tap at her door that turned to insistent knocking sent her shoulders flying up to her ears as she looked accusingly at its source.
‘Beatrice? Are you in there? Beatrice?’
She held her breath, registering the concern in Atholl’s voice, before exhaling with a sharp blow. She opened the door only to witness his eyes crease as he spotted the gaping suitcase on the floor behind her.
‘I came to apologise for prying…’ he began.
‘No, don’t.I’msorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. It’s just I came here to get away from… everything, and I’m not ready to talk about it. I can’t see how I ever will be. OK?’
Atholl’s gaze passed over the suitcase again before scanning over her body and flicking back up to her eyes. Could he tell she’d dressed comfortably for the train journey back down south, in her jeans and white trainers and a thin navy jumper? If hecouldtell, he wasn’t going to let that stop him talking.
