Lucy Gordon - The Pregnancy Bond

As days passed the fog lifted a little but the world still reached him at a distance. He read his mail, only half taking it in, but stray words and phrases clung, worrying him. Somewhere out there were things he should be thinking about, taking seriously, but they were muffled, and what could he do about them anyway?

One night he managed to sleep for a few minutes, then awoke sharply. There was a light under the door. He forced himself up and went out, to find Kelly lying on the sofa, frowning as she read a book. Something about her struck him forcibly.

‘You’re going to have a baby,’ he whispered.

She jumped up, full of alarm. ‘Jake-’

‘It’s all right, I’m not crazy.’ He let her draw him down until he was sitting beside her. ‘I knew you were pregnant-I did, didn’t I?’

‘Yes,’ she said gently, ‘you knew.’

‘I remember now.’ He shook his head as though trying to free it of a swarm of bees. ‘There’s something I can’t quite-why are you sitting here alone?’

‘I’m fine-’

‘Why does nobody ever protect you?’ he asked wildly. ‘Why is it always you doing the caring? Your husband should have protected you, but we all know about him, don’t we?’

‘I don’t think anybody really knew about him,’ Kelly said gently.

‘A jerk. He let you down all the time. Now he’s letting you down again.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I’ll show you.’

He hauled himself up and made his way back to the bedroom, returning with a paper which he put into her hand. It was a bank statement showing that his money was fast vanishing.

‘Not just a jerk, but a stupid jerk,’ Jake said morosely. ‘He never bothered to save when times were good. He spent it all on enjoying life.’

‘He spent it on his wife too,’ Kelly remembered. ‘All those presents-’

‘Which weren’t what she wanted. When trouble came he didn’t have any savings. After I was shot the firm’s insurance company made a pay-out, although they used a technicality to make it as little as possible. That’s what we’ve been living on. I thought I’d be back at work long before now, because I was “Jake Lindley” who could cope with anything. But look at me. A mess.’

Kelly was staring at the bank statement and a resolution was forming in her head.

‘Say something, please,’ he begged.

‘All right.’ She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his face. She was about to take a huge risk, and she called all her love to help her judge the size of the gamble.

Vaguely she knew that she’d misjudged once before, driving him into Olympia’s arms, helping to bring this nightmare down on him. If she misread him again she might condemn him to disaster, but if her courage failed he might languish in his present misery forever.

‘I’ll say this,’ she told him. ‘I think it’s about time you started work again.’

He stared. ‘You think anyone’s going to give me work as I am?’

‘You’re not going to wait for people to give you work. You can make your own. It’s time you started on that book you always talked about. Heaven knows you’ve got the material. All your experiences in so many countries, and then getting shot. That book will sell, if you write it quickly. Leave it too long and the moment will pass. You’ve got all this time at home. Use it.’

In the silence she saw the dawning of interest in his eyes. ‘Do you-really think I could?’

‘I know you could. Jake Lindley can do anything.’

‘No-no,’ he shook his head in agitation. ‘This isn’t “Jake Lindley”. I’m not sure he’ll ever be around again. It’s just Jake.’

She understood.

‘It was always Jake for me,’ she said. ‘I never much cared for “Jake Lindley”.’

‘But a book-I haven’t done a long project in ages- I work in soundbites now-’

‘Then stop working in soundbites and start having long, joined-up, thought-out opinions again,’ she said urgently. ‘Jake, you still have all that. You haven’t lost it, just mislaid it a little.’

She was gripping his hands, looking eagerly into his eyes, and at that moment she looked closer to the seventeen-year-old who’d first adored him than he’d seen for a long time. It was the haunting echo of that memory that made him say, ‘I’ll do it-if you think I can-even though my head’s full of cotton wool, so that I can’t think how to put two words together.’

‘You don’t have to write it yet. Just do a bit of research and work out the outline. You can sell that to a publisher first.’

‘You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?’ he said with a touch of admiration. ‘You’ll be wanting commission as my agent next.’

‘You bet I will!’

He almost laughed, and for a moment she thought she’d revived the spark in him, but then his face became drained again.

‘Kelly, this is crazy. I can’t embark on the long haul when it’s as much as I can do to struggle up out of the pit every morning.’

‘Forget the long haul,’ she said firmly. ‘You’re looking at it the wrong way.’

‘Am I?’ He was watching her closely, as if waiting for her to produce the key that would open the vital door.

‘Just think about the first step. When you’ve done that we’ll worry about the second step, but never more than one at a time. So you must decide what the first step actually is.’

She was looking at him, waiting for a decision, and he fought to clear his mind, which had become cotton wool again. The first step…the first step…

‘My notes,’ he said at last. ‘I need to go back over them-and tapes-things from the last few years-to refresh my memory-’

‘Good. Where are they?’

‘In my flat. I’ll have to go there-’

‘First thing tomorrow.’

It was barely dawn when she called a cab and they went to his flat together. But when they reached the front door she hesitated.

‘Would you rather I waited out here?’

‘Why should I want that?’ he said, puzzled.

‘You wouldn’t let me come here before, to fetch your clothes. You sent Olympia.’

‘Olympia’s never been here. A social worker attached to the hospital did it for me. I guess I just didn’t want you to see it.’

She began to understand when he opened the door. This was no home, but a soulless cage. One room to live in, one to sleep in, and nothing that spoke of the man who lived there. It was as though his real self had gone somewhere else on the day he moved in. He’d kept her away before because this place revealed too much of what had happened to him without her.

She looked up to find him watching her closely, asking if she understood the things that were beyond words. She smiled and squeezed his hand. As he began going through his shelves she passed on into his bedroom.

Here there was more bleakness. A plain bed, a wardrobe, a bureau. No ornaments, photos, mementoes. Nothing to remind him of anyone he’d ever known. Not even herself, she realised with a pang of disappointment.

Suddenly she couldn’t stand it a moment longer. She began pulling open drawers, seeking something, anything, to reveal his inner life.

And she found it.

It was all there together in the bottom drawer, starting with their wedding pictures. They were excellent, a gift from a photographer friend. There was the absurdly young-looking eighteen-year-old girl and the scrawny young man. She frowned at the sight of Jake. Where was the confident young god of her memory? Had he really been this slightly loutish-looking individual with the unfinished air? And his expression, full of adoration for the girl beside him? Why hadn’t she noticed that at the time? Perhaps because her own adoration had filled her horizons.