LITMIR.BIZ

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in her brown eyes, that amber shimmer of contentment; earth mother-to-be, with attitude and glamour.

      These days, she’s the first celebrity to be interviewed in the media whenever the subject of pregnancy is aired. She writes a column in Weekend Flair. ‘My Pregnancy Diary’ she calls it. How to retain one’s sexuality and sense of fashion during those long nine months. Promoting Anticipation all the time. One thing about her, she always was professional.

      The Anticipation maternity collection, Dee Ambrose told me when I called into the Stork Club boutique this afternoon, is the most popular label she’s ever carried. Lorraine Gardner is an excellent designer and she’s touched gold with Anticipation. I was so impressed, I bought a pair of fine wool trousers and a silk twist top.

      Perfect for the final trimester, said Dee, and wrapped them in tissue paper before placing them in a carrier bag. Anticipation was written in gold lettering against a black background. An elegant bag for an elegant collection. On the way out of the boutique, I almost collided with a lifesize cutout of Carla Kelly. Dee laughed, noticing how my mouth opened with an apology in the same instant that I realised it was part of the promotion.

      Only the big campaigns can afford her now. Her career took off after that lingerie promotion. It gave her an edge, a notoriety, all that sleek flesh and red lace flashing from the billboards. Drivers rang talk radio and complained that her image distracted them during rush-hour. Lorraine Gardner wouldn’t have had a chance of running her Anticipation campaign if Carla Kelly hadn’t been her sister-in-law.

      I carried my carrier bag like a banner to the Nutmeg Café where I’d arranged to meet my mother-in-law. The rain fell steadily as I crossed Market Square and I walked carefully on the slippery cobblestones. A wretched day for the Saturday market, what with the wind billowing the awnings and people scurrying past the stalls towards the nearest shelter.

      The Nutmeg was crowded. The smell of damp wool reminded me of crowded buses on muggy school mornings. Women stopped at my table to tell me I was blooming. Even the cashier, a frail, round-shouldered woman, smiled as if she’d known me all her life and said my bump had become enormous since the last time she saw me. I’ve no memory of us ever meeting but she knew that David had returned to the rig and that I’m planning an end-of-season discount sale at Miriam’s Glasshouse. I grew up in the solitude of crowds but here, where the population is sparse, everyone seems to know my business. Miriam arrived at the Nutmeg shortly afterwards and apologised for being late. Something to do with bumping into acquaintances on every corner she turned. She hugged me. Took me quite by surprise. No time to move before I was enveloped in her arms. My mother-in-law has a habit of nudging and hugging and tapping me when I least expect it. I’ve never grown used to her effusiveness. I expect it’s to do with my upbringing – nothing touchy-feely about my parents. I’ve told her about my childhood. The silence and the separation, two people living on either side of a glass wall of indifference, so steeped in their own unhappiness they were incapable of reaching out to me.

      ‘It explains a lot,’ Miriam said, and pitied me for the tenderness I’d never experienced.

      I’m willing to endure her pity but not her touch. ‘Don’t tempt fate,’ I warn her when she asks if my baby is moving. Now she no longer seeks permission to rest her hands on my stomach, but today in the Nutmeg she hugged me so tight I thought my heart would flip over.

      Phyllis Lyons entered and came straight to our table. No asking, just an assumption that, as Miriam’s school friend and my nearest neighbour, she had every right to join us. She picked up my Anticipation carrier bag and placed it on the table.

      ‘Go on, girl,’ she said. ‘Give us a look.’

      I lifted out my new purchases and held them up for inspection. Miriam thought the twist top was a wonderful colour. ‘Sapphire blue, a perfect match for your eyes,’ she said, and ran her hand over the silky fabric. ‘So glamorous,’ she added, ‘yet it looks so comfortable.’

      Phyllis checked the price tag. ‘Mother of God,’ she said. ‘Are you made of money or what? What’s the sense of glamour when you look like a whale? If I were you, I’d just keep letting out the waistband.’

      What does she know? She’s a middle-aged spinster and gone beyond all that now.

      Miriam looked apologetically at me and placed my clothes back in the carrier bag. She finds Phyllis as irritating as I do, but neighbours, she warned me when I first came to live in Maoltrán, have long memories. It’s wise to keep on their good side.

      ‘I feel sorry for her,’ she said, when Phyllis finally left to pick up a prescription for her mother. ‘It’s no joke looking after a creaking door and that mother of hers has been creaking for as long as I can remember.’

      She asked when I was due to see Professor Langley again. ‘Next week, I told her. I’ll take the afternoon off, if that’s okay with you?’

      ‘Of course…absolutely.’ She nodded vigorously. Her anxiety smothers me. The harder she tries not to show it, the more obvious it appears. She’s nervous about the long distances I drive. But I’m her marketing manager. It’s my responsibility to meet with customers. She keeps telling me to start my maternity leave and take it easy for the final months.

      ‘But what on earth would I do,’ I ask her, ‘sitting all by myself in an empty house? I’m fit and healthy. I intend working until the last minute.’

      ‘David warned me to keep a close eye on you and not let you overdo things,’ she said. ‘It worries me,’ she added, ‘him being on that oil rig. If anything…’ She paused, uncomfortable at having to remind me that I’ve a bad track record when it comes to bringing her grandchildren into the world. I try not to give her cause for concern.

      It has not been difficult to maintain the illusion of pregnancy. I’ve made a harness with bindings that fit snugly below my breasts and under my stomach. I pad it with firm fillings that outline my expanding curve. I’m so conscious of avoiding contact with anyone that my antennae remain on full alert, tremblingly cautious, always watchful. My face looks too gaunt for a woman in her last trimester but people see what they want to see and their eyes are always drawn to my stomach.

      Hopefully, Professor Langley has forgotten my existence. His secretary handled my decision to change gynaecologists with chilly politeness and sent me a bill for my last appointment and scans.

      At the start of the month, David arrived home on leave, his skin tanned and taut from the harsh North Sea gales. I hid the harness then, and drank so much water every day that my stomach felt as tight and swollen as a drum. My food was fat and starch, it sickened me, but my weight kept increasing. He transformed the spare bedroom into a nursery. He painted the walls a pale apple green and hung one of Miriam’s seahorse mobiles above the carry-cot. We travelled to Dublin and stayed for a weekend with my father and Tessa. We bought a pram and the carry-cot, a feeding chair, a changing station. The whispering grew more intense as we made our decisions. Each time I faltered they whispered…Remember us…remember us…no turning back…Whenever I felt the urge to run free from the shadow of that cottage and bring the dream to an end, they’d whisper stay…stay. Be silent, they urged, when the truth pressed against my teeth so hard it ached to be heard. Be brave, they whispered, when David laid his ear too late to my stomach and said, ‘I can’t feel anything…Well, maybe I do…it’s so hard to tell.’

      What he’d felt was my shudder of fear, my womb contracting with dread determination.

      That is how our baby grows, carried into being on a whisper.

      I met a horse whisperer once. He was small and stout and wore a wide-brimmed hat with a jaunty feather in the side. To be called a horse whisperer sounded mysterious and powerful, but he said he was simply a man who understood horses. He came to us soon after we purchased Augustus – the horse had too many bad habits for us to handle alone. I’d watched him stand before Augustus, face to face and then cheek to cheek, not threatening, just empathising, reaching deep into the horse’s psyche and connecting with the rage that lay at the heart of his flailing behaviour. By the time he’d finished, Augustus

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