She must have sensed my panic. ‘Shall I bring you a cup of tea, Mrs Savage?’
Around midnight, Will arrived. He was unshaven and looked awful. I refused to look at him as I spelled out the details. ‘They say the antibiotics will start working within twenty-four hours.’
He bent over the cot and touched Chloe’s cheek. ‘Little one,’ he said. ‘You’ll be better now’ He straightened up. ‘I’ll stay here with you.’
I fetched another chair and we sat, side by side, for the rest of the night only speaking to each other when it was necessary.
In the morning, it was clear Chloe was on the mend, and I told Will to go back to London.
Three days later, Meg and I regarded each other lifelessly over the kitchen table. Neither of us had slept much since we had brought Chloe home after that night in hospital.
Meg twisted a strand of hair around her fingers. ‘We can relax now.’
No, we can’t, I thought. I can’t take anything for granted again.
I looked down at my hands, which appeared so white and thin that I hardly recognized them.
‘Babies do this,’ Meg offered. ‘It’s to test us.’
I managed a weak smile. ‘I am grateful, Meg, for the support.’
She seemed pleased. ‘For the moment.’
We sat in a non-threatening silence and drank coffee. Upstairs, for the first time in days, Chloe slept a tranquil sleep – which, at that moment, I considered the height of my ambitions.
‘Will rang,’ Meg said. ‘Earlier. He’s on his way.’
To the surprise of both of us, I dropped my head into my hands and cried. There was a touch on my shoulder. ‘Leave Will to me. You concentrate on Chloe.’
This was too much. I peeled my damp face away from my hands. ‘Meg. Thank you for everything you have done, but you must leave Will and me alone.’
‘Fanny…’ Meg assumed her caring expression and I was never quite sure how to trust it. ‘I’ve looked after him in the past. I know how to handle him.’
‘No. It’s fine.’
She shrugged. ‘As you wish. But I suggest you have a sleep before he gets here.’
I was deeply asleep when Will shook me awake. ‘It’s six o’clock, Fanny.’ I managed to drag open my eyes. ‘Good girl.’ He placed a cup of tea beside me and sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘Meg has seen to everything downstairs, so we thought it best to leave you as long as possible.’
I lay quite still.
‘Can I talk to you?’
‘What is there to say?’
He looked marginally more kempt than in the hospital. At any rate, he had shaved. He looked down at the floor as he spoke. ‘I have been a terrible fool. Liz is nothing to me. I am nothing to her. You are the person I love and with whom I wish to spend my life. I can’t explain it further, without sounding beyond contempt.’
I tried to explain what I felt, and did it badly. ‘Will, what we had was private and not to be shared. God knows, you share everything else with the world. Don’t you see? That was the one thing that belonged only to us.’
He hunched over his clasped hands. ‘Isn’t it the other way round? It does not excuse me, I know, but – ’
‘I can hear Chloe, Will.’
‘I’ll get her.’
He reappeared with a pale, sleepy baby. ‘Here.’ He put her down in the middle of the bed and lay in his accustomed place.
Chloe gave a pallid chuckle. Will propped himself up and offered her a finger. ‘Poor sweetie. Better now.’ Chloe kidnapped his finger, pressed it into her mouth and bit. ‘Ouch…’
He extracted his finger. ‘Fanny, I know how bad it is, how bad it looks but, I beg you, don’t make it more complicated than it was.’
‘Will, what am I supposed to make of it?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, in a hopeless way. ‘It was a terrible mistake. I will regret it to my dying day. I didn’t stop to think, I didn’t make comparisons. It was just for the moment, and I took it. I am sorry. I am so sorry.’
Deprived of the attention, Chloe shrieked, sounding much more like her old self. Will hauled her into his arms and pressed his cheek against hers. ‘Precious.’
Chloe now bit his nose and Will yelped. ‘When did she start doing that?’
‘She’s probably teething.’
I took a deep breath. ‘I don’t know if we can be married any more.’
Will reached out for me but I flinched. ‘Don’t touch me.’
‘What can I say, Fanny? What can I do?’
I glanced at the clock. Six-thirty. I swung my leg out of the bed. ‘Get moving, Will, it’s the Rotary Club supper. We won’t stay late.’
His mouth dropped open. ‘We’re going?’
‘Do we have a choice?’ I opened the wardrobe door and dragged out the dress which I had earmarked. ‘Can’t let the Rotary Club down.’
‘But what are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know, Will. Go to the Rotary Club supper.’
I pulled off my jumper and T-shirt and transcribed a slow, provocative circle in front of my husband. He swallowed and went pale. My body was still a little slack, breasts not quite settled back to their normal size; it was the body of a girl… no, not a girl, a woman, who had given birth, and I wanted him to see it.
That night, I glittered, or so Will reported. But perhaps he was filtering a new, rather terrible me through a guilty prism.
Oddly, along with my outrage and the still partly submerged pulse of grief, a peculiar kind of confidence had arrived, with the desire not to be beaten. I wanted to face this challenge, to be fierce and determined, to seize the competing strands of this situation and arrange them as I wished.
Will watched my every move surreptitiously as I donned the pink dress with the full skirt and a pair of high heels, for which I would pay later. I brushed my hair until it crackled and let it hang down over my shoulders. I made him wait until I was ready and Meg was summoned to take charge of Chloe.
I got into the driving seat, kicked off my shoes and drove into the town in silence. I parked in the hotel car park and ran through a briefing. ‘Pearl will be there. There will be an auction of books and things. A raffle. The usual. It’s fund-raising to provide machinery for the new neonatal baby unit in the hospital. Got it?’
‘Fanny. Stop this.’
‘No,’ I said. I gathered up my bag and shoved my feet into the high heels.
‘If you want me to leave,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Tell me.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I will think about it. Let’s go in.’
Attired in a faded green dress shot through with silver, Pearl exuded a certain magnificence. ‘Your father’s here,’ she observed. I glanced round. He was talking to a Knights-bridge blonde in black and pearls. He raised a hand and I waved back.
Pearl pressed a glass of indifferent champagne into my hand – I could tell by the colour and the general look of it. ‘We must have a chat,’ she said, and I could have sworn her eyes flicked over my legs to check that the tights were there.
By now I knew the form. We drank champagne in a reception room with tasselled brocade curtains and lots of gilt decoration. From there we progressed to dinner and were served chicken in a cream and mushroom sauce, followed by rubbery lemon mousse. Afterwards there was coffee with chocolate mints. I ate as much of it as I could and I answered the questions of the two men who sat on my left and right but, if I had been asked, I could not have remembered what we talked about.
I smiled politely as I lifted the cup to my lips, but I was struggling to make sense of it all. In a former life – so long ago – I had come and gone as I pleased, drunk coffee in the cafe on Saturday mornings, and read my wine books.
I looked up to encounter Pearl’s unequivocal gaze. ‘Are you feeling all right, Fanny? You’ve been very quiet.’ The implication was that, by not chattering like a parrot, I was letting the side down.
‘Chloe has been ill and I’ve been up several nights running.’
