Lucy Gordon - The Pregnancy Bond

And then, when her torment was at its height, he’d called her, imploring her help.

Now she sat beside him on the sofa, feeling his trembling abate, wondering what terrors had invaded him, and why suddenly at this moment? She didn’t press him to talk; he wasn’t ready. It was enough that he was in her arms, needing her as never before.

He had said she was his wife, as though their marriage was an unbroken continuum. And he had claimed her child as his, as though in his heart he had always guessed. But he had not said these things to her, only to others, and perhaps they’d been only the desperate words of a desperate man. She would know nothing until he repeated them to her.

She, in her turn, had called him her darling, and she knew that it had always been true. Her love had never died. She’d merely buried it, hoping to forget how to find it again. Now she knew that had been a vain hope. While Jake retained even a shadow of his old cocky self she could fence with him, bicker with him, defend herself from him. But his vulnerability broke her heart. As long as he needed her, she was his.

‘You’re cold,’ she said at last. ‘You should be in bed.’

He seemed unable to move, as though he was drained of will, but he let her urge him to his feet and into the bedroom. She was shocked at the sight of him. His face had the muddy pallor of an old man’s and there were black smudges beneath his eyes.

‘Stay with me,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t want to be alone. Please, Kelly. ’

‘Of course I will, my dear. I’ll do whatever you want. Just let me get my things.’

She slipped away. She was gone just a couple of minutes, but when she returned, dressed for bed, Jake was standing at his door, watching for her with something in his eyes that it hurt her to see.

‘I’m coming,’ she said quickly, taking his hand.

As they lay together in bed he told her about the evening, keeping back nothing.

‘I was going to take her to bed,’ he said bluntly, ‘but I couldn’t. There was nothing there for her. Nothing. Just like last time.’

‘Last time?’

‘In Paris. I always told you the truth about that. I backed off at the last minute. You seemed to be there, and you wouldn’t let me do anything that would destroy our love. So I made excuses and got drunk. And then the joke was that you wouldn’t believe me. But it was true all the time.’

‘I believe you now,’ she whispered. ‘I wish I’d believed you then, but I didn’t know you in those days as I do now.’

He fell silent and she just held him, knowing that he must take his own time. Inwardly she was weeping for him.

‘It was like sliding down into the pit of hell,’ he said at last. ‘As though my mind has been holding all the bad things behind bars and now they’ve got out. I don’t know what to do.’ He tried to force himself to speak sensibly. ‘Of course it’s only temporary. I’m all right now.’

But his voice shook even as he said it, and she tightened her arms.

‘It will be all right,’ she promised. ‘I’ll call the doctor tomorrow-’

Some old reflex action made him bristle at the word. ‘I don’t need a doctor-’

‘Yes, you do,’ she said firmly. ‘No argument. I’ve decided.’

At that he even managed a shaky laugh. ‘Yes, dear.’

She picked up the echo, as he’d intended, and smiled into the darkness. But her heart was heavy because she knew they’d just embarked on the dreadful road that Dr Ainsley had warned her about. It was sharp and thorny, and the end of it was hidden from her.

When she called the doctor next morning she was half afraid Jake would protest again, but he was too deep in his own private agony to say anything.

The local doctor was a brisk, well-meaning man with little imagination. To him, clinical depression was something to be treated with drugs, and time would do the rest. The medication he prescribed was strong and usually effective. Kelly learned that much from a talk with a fellow student who was doing medical research. But she felt the doctor had looked at only one side of the problem. Jake needed more. From the way he’d reached out to her she guessed it was something only she could give, but as yet she wasn’t certain what it was. She could only watch and wait, and hope that the moment would find her ready.

Jake had never before suffered clinical depression. He’d thought he had, when he was first in the hospital. Now he knew that experience had been nothing, just a bout of being down in the dumps-bad enough, but not to be compared with this bleak hell.

The medication was only partly effective. It dulled the edge of his consciousness, so that instead of the darkness being full of sharp weapons to taunt him it was a place of diffuse misery.

By day he slumped into coma-like sleep, by night he lay awake tormented by demons. They came from inside him, and had names like futility, guilt, hopelessness. From this perspective his entire past life seemed empty, his future non-existent.

His body seemed to be made of lead so that dragging one foot in front of another was an almighty effort. He understood nothing that was happening to him. Faces came and went. Voices echoed in his head. There was Kelly telling him that all would soon be well because Dr Ainsley had predicted this.

‘He thought it would happen sooner…and then you recovered…you were so strong, it was like you’d got away with it…’

You were so strong…

He tried to remember when he’d ever really been strong. What had his strength ever been but an illusion, depending on one crucial prop? Then the prop had been removed and he’d seen himself with awful clarity. While Kelly was there, Jack the lad, a bouncing fire-cracker who could enthral the world. Without her, nothing.

Day after day his misery blotted out almost everything else and the world reached him through a fog. The only reality was Kelly, who had quietly moved her things back into his room, and spent each night with him in the double bed. When the fog was heaviest her face was still there, tense with anxiety, watching him with fearful eyes. She took several days off, making various unconvincing excuses, and gradually it dawned on him that she was afraid to leave him alone.

That brought the darkness down again. Her chance was slipping away because of him. History was repeating itself, and it mustn’t be allowed to happen.

‘It’s all right,’ he told her, concentrating hard on the words. ‘I’ll still be here when you get back. I’m not-going anywhere.’

At last he persuaded her to leave, and endured several hellish hours when the walls seemed to be closing in on him. But when she returned at the end of the day he managed a smile.

‘The kettle’s on,’ he said with a fair pretence of cheerfulness. ‘Sit down while I make you some tea.’

‘How have you been?’ she asked, looking anxiously into his face.

‘It’s getting easier,’ he lied.

He knew she doubted him, and he managed to keep smiling until he was in the kitchen. There his control slipped and he stood clinging onto a shelf, heaving with distress while sweat poured down his face. But a movement behind him made him pull himself together and hoist the bright mask into place before she saw his face again.

He had his reward next morning, when she left the apartment with an easier mind. He gave her a cheery wave through the window before turning away as the waves of blackness engulfed him again.

Once he called Dr Ainsley. ‘Kelly said you knew this was going to happen.’

‘You took two bullets, and that’s enough to traumatise any man,’ Ainsley said cheerfully. ‘Inside, you never did recover quite as well as you made out, and pretending just makes things worse. What medication are you taking?’ When he heard he grunted. ‘That’s all right. It’s good stuff. Give it time to do its work and leave the rest to Kelly.’