Maura held out the little plastic tube to Evie. The small oval window in the middle contained two vertical red lines. They were clearly red. Maura’s hand was shaking.
‘Is that positive?’ Evie asked and Maura nodded. Evie had been sure of it: hadn’t she been there herself, four times? She bit her lip and led her to the armchair. Maura sank into the cushions and leaned back.
‘So – how many weeks? Can you work it out?’
‘Seven, maybe eight. Now I think about it, it makes sense. We were in Brittany. It was the end of June, beginning of July. Now it’s the end of August. I hadn’t realised, hadn’t given it a thought. Oh, I’m so stupid.’
Evie took her hand. ‘How are you feeling about it all?’
Maura stuck out her bottom lip and stared ahead. She was numbed, in shock. In contrast, Evie’s thoughts rushed: Brendan, the child, their futures. She shook Maura’s arm. ‘You’re going to tell Brendan?’
Maura did not blink. Her voice was empty and she looked drained. ‘I suppose so. I doubt he’ll be interested. I haven’t the first clue how he’ll react.’ She thought for a moment and her voice was quiet. ‘I’m worried. I don’t know if he’ll be pleased or angry. I shouldn’t imagine he’ll be happy. It’ll be my fault. To be honest, Evie, I hardly know him these days. I’m keeping the babby though, whatever happens.’
The next day, Evie and Jean-Luc went out in the morning. They spent the afternoon working in the fermentation rooms and in the evening they shared a meal with Brendan and Maura and then proclaimed they were tired and needed an early night. The following day, Maura was retching again in the bathroom and Evie surreptitiously popped her head around the corner and asked, ‘Have you told him yet?’ only to be greeted by a sad shake of the head.
In the morning, Evie and Jean-Luc went over to help Nige and Caroline with an unexpected problem in the house. Later that day, Evie and Jean-Luc were painting an outside wall together, refusing Brendan’s offer of help, and in the evening they went to O’Driscoll’s to chat to Ray, Evie telling Brendan he needed to spend some time alone with his wife. Evie was not being very subtle. She could tell from Maura’s pained expression, by the anxiety furrowing her brow, that she had not told Brendan about the pregnancy, but Evie did not care about being obvious about her intentions. She was taking desperate measures in a desperate time. When they came home in the evening, Brendan went to bed to read and Maura sat in front of the fire, flicking through a magazine and staring into the sparks. Jean-Luc filled the coffee pot and put it on the range.
Evie went over to Maura. ‘Does he know yet? Have you told him?’
‘No.’
‘Why the hell not?’
Maura’s head hung down.
Evie was not sure if tears were falling. ‘Shall I call him down? Shall I tell him for you?’
Maura sniffed. ‘It’s so difficult—’
‘It was never going to be a bloody picnic in the park.’ Evie’s teeth were gritted.
‘Evie, he’ll hardly speak to me. He sulks all the time. When I smile at him, he ignores me. When I say something, he tells me he has a headache.’
Evie put her hands on her hips. ‘Get yourself up there and talk to him, Maura. You need his help with this problem and the pair of you need a damn good shaking-up so you can sort it out. There’s a babby, for goodness sake.’
Maura looked around nervously. Jean-Luc came to sit by the fire and he breathed out deeply. Evie turned to Maura again and this time her tone was gentler. ‘It’s difficult, but he has to know what’s happening. Maybe then you can both talk about it, work things out.’
Maura smiled weakly and moved towards the stairs. Evie looked at Jean-Luc hopefully. By the time Maura opened the bedroom door, Brendan was on his back, his arms over his head like a child asleep, snoring.
‘Mammy, what’s going on?’ Brendan came downstairs in a T-shirt and shorts, his hair sticking up. Maura was at the table eating toast and Jean-Luc was packing flasks and sandwiches. Evie cut slabs of cake and put fruit in containers.
‘I’ve decided. We’re going out for a picnic, the four of us. We’re taking the day off and going into the mountains.’
Brendan reached for a coffee. ‘Lovely.’ His voice conveyed no enthusiasm.
‘We’ll go in the sports car and you two can follow in the Panda. Is that OK?’
Brendan wasn’t convinced. Maura passed the toast and he accepted it warily. She gave him a careful smile. ‘Your mother says they need a break. They have been working hard. Jean-Luc was chopping logs yesterday with Nige and then we did all that painting. I think a little break would probably be good for us all.’
Evie was concentrating hard on looking interested in cutting tomatoes. Jean-Luc did, in fact, look tired, the skin below his cheekbones seemed looser. Brendan shrugged his shoulders and bit into the toast.
They had lunch in the mountains, the picnic cloth spread on the ground between the two cars. Evie was talking about Benji’s mum, who had been a widow for ten years and was now unwell, and she said she thought a cake might cheer her up. The sun was overhead and Brendan stretched out on a rug with his book; Maura was trying to rub sun-cream on his face and the back of his neck and he felt irritable. A thin string of clouds hung between the peaks and clung to the sides of the mountains like snow. Some hikers passed, rucksacks bouncing on their backs, boots kicking pebbles into the dust, and Brendan followed them with his eyes. More distant mountains hung beyond them, huge and hazy in the heat, and he could hear the tinkle of goats’ bells on the air. Maura bit into her second ham roll and Jean-Luc pulled Evie to her feet.
‘Where are you going, Mammy?’ Brendan asked.
‘Jean-Luc and I are going to take a little walk. We might take a few pictures on my smartphone. We don’t have any photos of the two of us.’
‘Shall I come?’ Brendan instinctively felt Maura turn towards him sharply.
Evie was already on her way, her hand in Jean-Luc’s. ‘Don’t worry, Brendan. We won’t be long. I am sure you and Maura have plenty to talk about.’
He watched them go, and then went back to his book. He muttered, ‘Like a couple of teenagers,’ and straight away regretted it. His voice sounded whining and petty, even to his own ears.
Maura thought for a few moments. ‘I think they’re sweet.’
‘You would.’ It was out of his mouth before he’d thought what to say. He stared at the page, his eyes stuck on the same sentence.
Maura rolled over onto her back and began to speak to the clouds. ‘We need to talk—’
Brendan had nothing to say. He reread the sentence again twice.
Maura breathed out and started again: ‘I need to talk to you about something.’
His mouth twisted in a miserable line. ‘Not sure I want to hear it.’
‘I’m pregnant, Brendan.’
He read the line again. The words began to move on the page, letters merging and separating, black against white.
‘Eight weeks, I think. It was when we first arrived in Brittany. I’ve done a test.’
Brendan closed his eyes. There was a rushing sound in his ears. He put a hand to his head and felt sweat against his palm. He eased himself to a sitting position and looked around him. The scenery was still the same but something inside him had moved uncomfortably.
‘Well, Brendan?’
He was trying to focus his eyes on something – the rolling hills, the grass, the sky; his mouth was full of glue or sand or wood chips and he could not open it. Maura’s eyes were glued to his face but she made no sound. She waited, examining his expression, and he felt anger surge in his lungs, making him breathe heavily.
He searched for the hikers: there was a little path, a scar in the mountain face, and they were crawling along it, ant-lines in the distance. He wished he was there with them, away from the picnic rug, away from Maura and away from the news that she was pregnant.
She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. ‘So you have nothing to say to me about our baby?’
Baby. The word rattled in his brain, staccato, machine-gun shots. Baby. Rat-a tat-tat. He shook his head. Above the clear blue of the skies, the clouds, swathed mist-like over the mountaintops. He sought out valleys, sweeping green fields, then looked down at the picnic mat: crumbs of bread, a few tomato pips, a liquid ring from a lemonade glass. There was a little blue flower growing by his thigh. His fingers pulled at the leaves, touching the petals. Baby.
‘So you’ve nothing to say at all?’
‘I’ve made such a mess of things …’ He eased himself to his feet, unsteady, shaking, and glanced all around him, looking for an escape. In the distance there was a tall man holding a small blonde woman by the hand. They were walking towards him. He started to move with urgency, collecting plates, wiping away crumbs, folding the picnic rug. Maura watched him. He scanned her face briefly and looked down at his fingers.
‘I’m not sure. Not sure what to say. And here’s Mammy. Shall we talk about it later, Maura? Later?’
He drove the Panda back to Cave Bonheur in silence, following the red sports car, changing gears deliberately and with studied concentration. Maura looked out of the window. His chest hurt as he thought about his child. He imagined buying cradles and cots and clothes and nappies and then he wondered if he’d become a weekend dad. He imagined Maura meeting someone else, chatting to a new man in the warm, flirtatious, easy way she had talked to Jean-Luc, and the new man being a proper father to his child. He would be out in the cold again, alone. He imagined someone else holding Maura in his arms and Maura looking at the new man as his mother gazed at Jean-Luc. Jealousy and self-loathing became perspiration in his hair, which slid down his forehead, onto his lip. The sun’s heat perforated the windscreen and his head ached; each thought that throbbed behind his eyes was rubble and it was piling up and stifling him, stopping his breath.