Being silent is like saying ‘You no longer exist for me.’
I’d been hardwired to try to make it better.
I tried everything: cooked better meals, smiled, touched his arm, found shows on the TV he liked to see. Nothing worked.
He’d brush off my arm as if I was carrying poison.
He chose to punish me, and only he would decide when that was over.
My waters broke three Saturdays later. I’d been worried because the baby hadn’t been kicking for the past two days but I hadn’t wanted to make a fuss. I’ve never forgiven myself for that.
He was out when the contractions started. I didn’tknow where because he’d simply gone. I waited nearly three hours for him to return, feeling the contractions deepening.
I was terrified. I didn’t want to give birth on my kitchen floor but I knew that if I went for help with him gone, he’d never forgive me. It would be a great public rebuke: he had left his pregnant wife alone.
What mattered was not that I was alone, but that people wouldknowthis.
That was the crux of everything: how itlookedto other people.
Nothing else mattered, not me in pain or the fact that I needed an ambulance now.
The fear of giving birth, the knife-point of labour plunged into my lower back: all immaterial.
I rang Mrs Next Door then and said that he would be so upset, he’d feared going out even for a moment in case I went into labour.
This was the mantra. Not the pain or the dreadful fear over the baby not having moved. But how upset my beloved husband would be.
‘He’ll be so upset, you’ve no idea,’ I said again and again.
I almost believed it myself.
‘Where’s he gone?’ she asked. This was before mobile phones.
‘He’s gone to get groceries and buy me flowers,’ I lied.
I’m not a liar but I can be. Have been often.
‘You poor dear,’ she cooed, ‘we’ll find him. He’ll never forgive himself if he misses the birth of his baby.’
I knew that if he missed the birth of his baby, the person he’d never forgive would be me.
Chapter Nineteen
India and Keera inspect the kitchen. It’s smaller than they’d expected but it shines cleanly at them, a tiny palace of stainless steel.
‘What are all these gizmos?’ India says, gazing at a serried rack of hanging utensils of every shape and size. ‘And this? What is this?’
She stands beside a big square machine which sits beside several industrial-looking hand blenders.
‘Sous vide machine,’ says Keera, then sees India looking at her in astonishment. ‘I had to spend half an hour in a hotel kitchen once because I was the support act at a charity event and there was a delay. I couldn’t eat anything because I was about to perform – I was wearing a dress I’d been sewn into.’
She grins as India’s eyebrows lift.
‘Yeah, sounds extreme but at least if you’re sewn in, you’re less likely to have a costume malfunction. Although nipple covers help with that. So the chefs showed me around the kitchen. Sous vide cooks meat, fish, that kind of thing, in vacuum-packed bags, I think that’s it – not entirely surehowit works but that’s the idea.’
‘You’ve had such an interesting life!’
India feels such enormous pity for Keera and how much she cried on the terrace that afternoon that she wants to find the lightness in her new friend’s life.
