Holding hands, they waited together. It felt like a very long time since he had felt this emotionally close to Martha, as though finally she had lowered the barriers that each month of disappointment had erected between them.
‘Do you suppose it’s all that running you’ve been doing,’ he said, ‘it’s relaxed your body?’
She shook her head. ‘No, silly. We must have conceived well before I started running again.’
He smiled and checked his watch. ‘Another fifty seconds,’ he said. ‘Oh, and I forgot to say, in all the excitement, your mother tried ringing you.’ He pulled out Martha’s mobile from his pocket and gave it to her.
‘I’ll call her later,’ she said, barely looking at it. ‘How long now?’
‘Thirty-five seconds.’
‘Will you tell her our news?’ he asked, when a few more second had passed. ‘Or should we wait?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I think we should wait.’
‘For what? To be sure?’
‘No,’ he said, already feeling protective of the life they had created together, ‘until we’re beyond the risk of—’
‘Don’t say it,’ she interrupted him. ‘Please don’t say anything to spoil this moment.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he apologised, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut. Then: ‘Time’s up,’ he said.
Together, his arm around her shoulders now, they looked at the slender white stick and just as the first one had given a positive result, so did this one.
‘We did it, Tom,’ Martha said, her face wreathed in the brightest of happy smiles. ‘We did it.’
‘I knew we would,’ he lied.
Chapter Twenty-Six
‘You did what?’
‘I just said. I went for a drink with a group from work after my shift; it was Stefan’s birthday today.’
Rick slammed a drawer shut. They were in the kitchen and he was emptying the dishwasher, a job she should have done before setting off for work, but which she had forgotten all about. ‘I don’t care whose birthday it is,’ he said, ‘what did you drink?’
‘I had just the one glass of wine,’ she lied. ‘One won’t hurt the baby.’Would two?
‘One might be all it takes,’ he snapped. ‘Is that what you want? For our child to be damaged? To be mentally impaired or deformed because you,’ he swung round and jabbed the air with an accusatory finger just inches from her face, ‘hadjust the one glass of wine?’
‘There’s no real evidence that it does any of that,’ she said, doing her best to suppress a nervous giggle at the silliness of him mimicking the pitch of her voice. She could never understand why, but she often felt like laughing when Rick was in one of his moods. He seemed so childishly petulant at times; it reminded her of Martha. And her father.
Something else she didn’t know with any real certainty was if it was true what she’d just said,that there wasn’t any evidence to prove that one glass of wine was harmful to the baby. But at the end of the day, it wasn’t as if she was out every night getting off her head on tequila shots like she used to. Well, that was such a distant memory, she could scarcely recall it. It was as though that had been a different person. But shehadbeen a different person back then; she wasn’t the responsible grown-up she was now trying to be, and who was expecting a child.
The thought of that instantly sobered her up. Not that she was drunk; it would take more than two glasses of Pinot to do that. But standing here with Rick quietly fuming at her – actually, not so quietly; he was slamming cupboard doors now as he continued to empty the dishwasher – she couldn’t help but feel like a slightly tiddly teenager all over again and being reprimanded by her father.
‘Let me do that,’ she said, wanting to please Rick, to stop him being in a bad mood. Especially when she knew she was the cause of it.
‘No, you’ll only put things in the wrong place like you always do.’
‘You wanted me to do it before,’ she said. ‘So let me do the rest now.’
He whipped round. ‘I saidno!Are you deaf as well as stupid?’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, stepping away from him in alarm. Then: ‘I keep annoying you, don’t I? Perhaps,’ she added faintly, ‘this wasn’t such a good idea.’
