Every evening when she got home from school, Libby would go straight to bed and ask Hannah to bring her supper up. Then the girl would linger no matter how hard Libby would yawn and drop heavy hints about how exhausted she was.
‘Are you sickening for something?’ Hannah eventually asked, her eyes fixed on Libby’s belly, no matter that it was obscured by blankets, bedspread and a couple of library books. ‘You are looking quite peaky lately. Pale as anything.’
‘I always look pale, don’t I?’ Libby murmured vaguely, then she shut her eyes and stretched out her arms. ‘Gosh, I’m so sleepy. Be a love, Hannah, and switch out the main light for me.’
Libby still hadn’t got used to Willoughby Square being on the electric – light pouring into places that had been in the dark for so long. Millicent was never happier than when she was touring the house and snapping off any light that she found merrily burning away while moaning about how the bills would send her poor Freddy into penury. Libby could hear her mother-in-law’s tread on the stairs as she lay there and thought about how she should be lying in another room, in another house a mile or so away.
Except the life that Libby had imagined with Hugo in Highgate seemed like a fever dream. Since the scene with Pamela, more draining, more deadly than any tragedy that Libby had performed on stage, she’d had no word from him.
She’d called his office several times from the phone box on Hampstead High Street, always furtively looking over her shoulder for fear that Virena Edmonds was about to appear and demand to know who Libby was speaking to. Not Hugo, in any case, but his secretary who always sounded as if he were humouring Libby when he said that Mr Watkins was unavailable.
So Libby didn’t know if Hugo were in London, Manchester or Timbuk-bloody-tu. Didn’t know if Pamela were acting under his orders, though how could she be? Hugo had told Libby how happy he was countless times. Had bought a house for the two of them to share because he loved her and she was carrying his child, which was more than Pamela had ever given him.
Yet his silence was deafening and Libby’s thoughts, her fears, the creeping doubt chased around and around in her head like a series of bogeymen, each more terrifying than the last, and the most terrifying thing of all was the pain in her side, on both sides now, and her heart raced even when she was lying flat on her back and trying to take deep, calming breaths.
Her only recourse was to go back to the women’s health centre where she’d been pronounced pregnant. They’d written to her once requesting she attend an expectant mother’s clinic but Libby had decided it was best to leave well alone. All that poking and prodding couldn’t be good for the baby. Except now something was terribly wrong. Libby was sure of it, dreaded the confirmation, but still made an appointment for later that week.
On the Wednesday after school she caught the Tube to Goodge Street. On her own this time – no Beryl for moral support. Libby took her seat in the waiting room and, out of habit, rearranged her coat to hide her tummy.
There were two girls sitting opposite her, not much older than Hannah. The one with the belly as big as Libby’s caught her eye, and refused to look away, a challenging tilt to her babyish face, while her friend gazed at the floor, red staining her cheeks, lip caught between her bottom teeth.
It could be worse, Libby thought to herself. I could have got caught when I wasn’t very much more than a child myself. Now she was a grown woman and actually it didn’t help matters much. She might have a husband but the baby wasn’t his, her lover was gone and the whole affair was a bloody shambles, whichever way you looked at it.
She put one hand to her chest as her heart began to thump, the other to her left side as that niggling ache sawed into her. When her name was called she could barely stagger to her feet, much to the fascinated horror of the two girls on the other side of the room.
It was the doctor she’d seen the first time. She was as kindly but as young as Libby remembered, taking her arm to gently guide Libby to the consulting room.
‘We had hoped to see you at one of our clinics,’ the doctor chided her. ‘I’d say you were what, five months along now?’
‘Six months,’ Libby gasped and then she found that she couldn’t say much more than that because it had become so terribly hard to speak.
The doctor called in a nurse and between the two of them they helped Libby out of her coat and her dress and hoisted her on to the examination table. The doctor palpated her stomach then the pretty dark-haired nurse held what looked like an ear trumpet to the bulge. ‘Baby’s fine,’ she said with a smile and Libby managed to breathe out again. ‘Got a real live wire. Doubt he gives you a moment’s peace.’
‘Just growing pains,’ the doctor said, explaining how Libby’s body was stretching, expanding, to accommodate the new life inside it, but her expression became grave as the nurse took Libby’s blood pressure then measured her pulse. ‘Do you tend to suffer from your nerves, Mrs Morton?’
‘I have been anxious,’ Libby confessed as she struggled to sit up, though anxiety hardly described the long sleepless nights she’d suffered. ‘Worrying about the baby and things.’
‘Thirty-two is really quite old to be starting a family,’ the doctor said with a frown. ‘Now I could write out a prescription for something to calm you down but the best medicine I could prescribe is strict bed rest for the duration of your pregnancy.’
‘But I can’t. I’m a teacher. I agreed I’d finish the term.’ On top of everything else, now Libby would have to have another unpleasant conversation with Beryl, who’d barely said two words to her these last few weeks.
The doctor shook her head. ‘Bed rest,’ she reiterated, scribbling notes on a sheet of paper. ‘Straight home and under the covers. You’re only to get up when nature calls. That’s an order.’
The nurse helped Libby get dressed again and the doctor talked about asking a colleague who had a surgery in Belsize Park to visit Libby weekly; that if her blood pressure and pulse still remained high she’d have to deliver the baby in hospital. The doctor’s words floated around the room. Libby pressed her hands against the constant fluttering above her breastbone.
‘But the baby’s really all right?’
‘Yes, but baby will only continue to thrive if you take my advice, and if I find out from my colleague you’ve been disobeying my instructions, I’ll be having words with your husband, Mrs Morton.’
Freddy would find that an absolute scream, Libby thought, but she promised that she’d take a taxi back to Hampstead and go straight to bed and stay there for the next three months.
She found a cab soon enough and after she settled herself on the seat, the cabbie turned around and asked, ‘Where to, my ducks?’
There was one thing that she simply had to do before she took to her bed.
‘Park Lane. Near the Dorchester. It’s a car showroom.’
It was close to six now. People leaving offices and shops, pouring into Tube stations, queuing for buses.
They had a slow run down Oxford Street and around Hyde Park Corner. Libby peered out of the window as white mansion blocks and hotels, the Marriott, the Park Lane Hotel and finally the Dorchester, loomed up like art deco monoliths in the dusk.
‘Just here, please,’ she said hurriedly as she spotted the illuminated sign, Watkins Motors, before she saw the sleek, gleaming cars raised up on plinths and displayed under spotlights in the windows.
Libby hesitated at the door. She saw a flurry of movement at the back of the showroom, a group of men gathered round one of the cars. It was easy enough to step inside then. Heels clicking on the marble floor, her course set, her path clear.
Hugo in shirtsleeves, his jacket discarded, was leaning over the open bonnet of a long black car next to two men in overalls, a younger man hovering on the sidelines. He caught Libby’s eye as she tottered towards them.
‘I’m afraid we’re closed, madam,’ he said, moving away from the group. He had a bandbox, wet-behind-the-ears look to him as if his mother dressed him every morning and warned him in no uncertain terms not to let his clothes get spoiled. ‘Would it be possible to come back tomorrow?’
But Libby only had eyes for Hugo as he peered into the car’s innards and murmured something she couldn’t catch.
‘Hugo! I don’t bloody call this Manchester!’ Her voice was perilously high, the men all looking at her now, curious but wary because Libby realised that she must look an utter fright in the baggy crumpled clothes she’d been wearing all day, her hair flat and frizzy. As she’d got out of the taxi, the driver had even felt moved to say: ‘If I were you, love, I’d have a tot of something as soon as you get home. You look like you’re about to keel over.’
‘Where have you been, you bastard?’ Libby demanded in the same shrill tone. ‘Have you any idea what you’ve put me through?’
Hugo was at her side in an instant, eyes flashing a warning, his face a hard, rigid thing. ‘Elizabeth,’ but his voice was as soft as feathers, ‘I was expecting you ages ago. Did I give you the wrong directions? Did you get turned around?’
‘What? What on earth…?’
‘This is Elizabeth, a friend of Pammie’s,’ Hugo threw at the men, who were staring at Libby as if they’d never seen anyone heartsick and half dead with it before. They didn’t stare for long as Hugo was already tugging Libby past them and through the door at the back of the showroom, his fingers a vice around her wrist. ‘Said I’d give you a lift home, didn’t I?’
Libby’s reply, her renunciation of the glib excuses that had fallen so smoothly from his lips, was drowned out by the door slamming shut behind them. ‘You’ve got better at telling lies,’ she said furiously, her thoughts turning as they so often did to that first weekend in Brighton. ‘Oh, I don’t even know who you are any more! You go to Manchester and I don’t hear a word from you and then Pamela, precious, bloody Pamela, comes visiting. Did you put her up to it? Did you hatch the plan together to steal my baby? Did you? Did you? Answer me!’
Hugo was silent and still pulling Libby along, down a corridor, the smell of petrol and grease growing stronger. Then he shouldered open another door and they were outside in a courtyard, which must have originally been part of a stable but now there were cars waiting patiently on the cobbles instead of horses.
‘You’re hysterical,’ Hugo said evenly and Libby supposed she was because she was crying without even knowing how long she’d been crying. ‘Get in.’
He held open a car door. Libby climbed in, still sobbing. She scrabbled in her bag for her handkerchief as Hugo walked round the car, got in the other side. Libby glanced at his clean, pure profile as if her tears, her words, her despair had simply bounced off him like stones skimming the surface of a still lake. Then she saw that throbbing tic at his temple, which even Hugo couldn’t control, and the stones she’d made from her sorrow sank below the surface.
He turned the key in the ignition and the car roared into life. Hugo manoeuvred out of the yard and nudged into Park Lane and the evening traffic. They drove in silence for a while punctuated only by Libby’s shuddering, hiccupping sobs. Every time that she thought she must be done with crying, more tears burst forth. It was exhausting.
‘You said… you promised we’d be together,’ Libby finally managed to say. ‘When did you stop loving me, Hugo?’
‘Of course I still love you,’ he said, so perfunctorily that even the most inept director would have shouted, ‘Once more with feeling.’ Hugo glanced over at Libby, she was limp and quiet now, and his face lost a little of its rigidity. ‘Though I wish I didn’t love you because it’s all shot to hell. I can’t get a divorce, Pamela won’t agree to it.’
It had been hard to hate Pamela when she’d been sitting across from Libby with her tears for all the babies that weren’t to be, so that Libby couldn’t help but feel a kinship with her. Now she could hate Pamela without impunity for being fickle and faithless. For taking a lover then running to Hugo when the affair soured, knowing he’d have no choice but to take her back.
‘Freddy says that they’ll change the law soon,’ Libby remembered. ‘There’s some MP, a Mr Herbert, with a bee in his bonnet who’s going to propose a bill or whatever it is one does to change the law.’
‘Fat lot of good it will do. The baby will still be illegitimate. Even if I give him my name, in the eyes of the world, he’ll be a bastard.’
It was such an ugly word to describe the little being that they’d made from their love. ‘Leave her. “Come live with me and be my love,”’ Libby quoted and she was calm now, so deadly calm. ‘Let’s live in sin in Highgate. Not even Highgate. There’s a whole world out there that doesn’t care one jot about our business.’ She warmed to the idea. ‘We could find a little island and live on coconuts and pineapples. You have the legs for a grass skirt.’
‘Now you’re being silly,’ Hugo said, but he seemed relieved Libby wasn’t crying or shrieking any more. He rested his hand on her knee and she relished the warmth of his touch. Then remembered that Pamela had ruined that too.
‘You told her about us,’ Libby said quietly. ‘About the things we’ve done. She said —’
‘It doesn’t matter what she said,’ Hugo insisted. ‘There was one night when we were in Suffolk… she was upset, contrite… I said I wouldn’t have her back, but she’s been my wife for so long. She noticed that I was changed… the things I did… were not the things we, Pamela and I, used to do. She accused me of going with… well, never mind about that. I told her about you. That I’d fallen in love.’ He was stammering and stuttering, and drove straight down the Finchley Road instead of turning right when they reached Swiss Cottage.
Despite his stuttering and stammering, it was perfectly clear what Hugo was saying: he’d made love to Pamela. If he’d done even half the things to Pamela that Libby had taught him then no wonder Pamela was so desperate to have him back. Hugo was quite the demon lover these days.
When Libby thought about it, Hugo had been withdrawing, distancing himself by degrees, ever since he’d returned from Aldeburgh. She’d hardly noticed – there had been all that business with Freddy and having to go to Paris – but now she felt the loss of him even as she sat next to him. Libby knew she could live without Hugo if she had to. She’d got used to losing men before, had managed to survive the heartache, the grinding pain of a lover departed, but why should the baby be deprived of its father?
‘We must go away,’ Libby said. ‘We can start again. Be new people. Have a new life. You, me and the pickle.’
‘I’d like that,’ Hugo said wistfully then he tensed again, swore under his breath as he missed another opportunity to turn right. ‘It’s impossible. Robin and Susan…’
‘They’re not yours.’ It was a mistake; Libby knew that as soon as she said those three words. ‘The baby is your flesh and blood. Our child, Hugo.’
She took his hand that was still on her knee and lifted it to her belly. The baby had been restless all day, shifting inside her, but now it was still. Hugo snatched his hand back.
‘I can’t go away. It’s impossible,’ he said again. He sucked in a breath. ‘Would you even consider letting us, Pamela and I, raise the baby?’
‘Oh! You really are a bastard! How could you even ask me that?’
‘Just think about it. If you love the baby, love me, then you’ll want what’s best…’
‘What’s best? How could you possibly think that I’d agree to that?’ She was crying again and Hugo tried to reach for her but Libby batted him away, flailing her arms and she thought she might have scratched him for he cursed, then had to wrench the steering wheel to keep the car straight. ‘I would die before I’d let you take my baby.’
‘You’re hysterical again. Nobody’s taking the baby,’ Hugo said quickly as if he hated the words. ‘But it’s something to consider when you’re feeling… calmer. I know it sounds cruel, unreasonable, but please, if you’d just think about it, you’d see that it makes sense if —’
‘Stop the car!’ Libby gasped. There was no air and she was choking from it. Tried to open the door but Hugo reached across and yanked her hand back.
‘Are you trying to kill us?’ he roared and for the most fleeting of all moments, Libby thought it might be the answer.
‘I wish I were dead. No! I wish you were dead. That I’d never met you!’ But even that was a lie because the baby was moving again. She couldn’t even hate Hugo because without him, she wouldn’t have this miracle.
Then it all stopped. Hugo pulled the car into the kerb on the corner of Willoughby Square. ‘We can’t leave things like this, Libby,’ he said, this time stilling her shaking hand so he could open the door for her. ‘Think about what’s best for the baby.’
‘I’m best for the baby.’ Libby got out on wobbly legs as Hugo leaned across the seat to say something. Some other ludicrous reason why Libby should let him and his precious Pamela steal her child, but she slammed the car door so she wouldn’t have to hear it.
‘Clear off! I never want to see you again!’ Libby doubted he could hear her so she banged on the roof of the car so he’d get the message.
‘Libby! Why are you standing in the middle of the road shouting at stationary motorists? What will the neighbours think?’
Libby turned round as Hugo drove off to see Freddy on the corner by the postbox. She stood there, tears streaming down her face though she would have thought that they’d have stopped by now. Surely it wasn’t possible for one person to have so many tears?
Freddy took a couple of steps towards her and his amused expression changed to one of concern. ‘What’s the matter, old girl?’ He looked down the road, but Hugo was long gone. ‘Come and tell Freddy all about it.’
He held out his arms and Libby stumbled into them. ‘It’s as if all I am to him is an unwanted parcel,’ she sobbed and Freddy stroked her hair until she calmed down enough to let him lead her across the road to number 17.
‘Bed,’ Freddy said firmly but quietly so that the ladies chattering away at the dinner table wouldn’t hear them as he helped Libby up the stairs. ‘You’re to go to bed and stay there. I was a dab hand at knots when I was in the Scouts, I’ll cuff you to the bedpost if need be with some of Father’s old ties.’
Even once Libby was in her nightgown and in bed, Freddy stayed to listen to her incoherent, tear-soaked woes and stroke her hair.
Finally, when Libby settled down, covers tucked up to her chin, Hannah sent up with toast and sweet tea, then sharply dismissed, Freddy sat on the edge of the bed and took Libby’s ice-cold hand in his. ‘Libby, why do you always fall in love with the most awful people? And yes, I count myself among that number.’
‘Why do I always end up making such a hash of it?’ Libby asked but she could feel sleep licking at the edges, pulling her down and she drifted off before Freddy could reply.