What was she going to do? How was she going to cope with it? Who could she tell? She felt totally trapped, her mind and emotions twisting and turning this way and that, the terror as responsible for the sickness as her hormones and the tiny, life-engulfing creature growing inside her.
Alice was also pregnant: joyfully, radiantly, nervously pregnant. She was also surprised at the speed of their accomplishment. It would probably have been wiser to wait a little longer, to complete the purchase of the small house they had chosen in Acton. But Tom was so keen to start their family, and she had deliberately left her Dutch cap behind for their honeymoon. She’d hated it from the beginning, it was the opposite of romantic. She’d just assumed she should go back to it once they were home again. Which indeed she did. And when Alice, too busy to notice, passed the date of one period and when, two weeks later, she threw up horribly when she woke, she blamed the chicken she had eaten the night before. Then, finding nothing to blame the second morning, she looked a little nervously at her diary as she sat on the bus (still feeling fairly queasy) on her way to St Thomas’ and realised that, yes, the dates at least fitted perfectly.
She told Tom that night and he was overwhelmed with a beaming, almost exultant pleasure; entirely untinged – as she had feared it might be – by anxiety, or even, far worse, by thoughts and memories of Laura and Hope.
‘Now look,’ said Alice, after absorbing this joy and finding it increased her own a hundredfold, ‘we can do a test. This frog thing, you know –’
The frog thing, the Aschheim–Zondek test whereby her urine would be injected into a frog and two weeks later, if indeed she was pregnant, it would start laying eggs, was revolutionising anxiously pregnant women’s lives, reducing the two-month or so wait for certainty to as many weeks.
‘What you must do is tell Sister immediately – you need to establish your leaving date.’ Alice, who was dreading this, knew what must be done. ‘And Alice, I do want you to look after yourself, very carefully. I don’t want you working and getting overtired, which you know you do.’
‘All right,’ said Alice, recognising the first signs of anxiety in him, the legacy of the three miscarriages for poor Laura. ‘I promise.’
And the third morning of horrid noises in the loo left them both in no doubt; there was a small new Knelston on its way.
Diana felt very much in need of the frog’s services. Too afraid to go to her GP or even the local hospital, she went to an expensive private clinic in York where the smooth, rather smug gynaecologist there rang her two weeks later to confirm her pregnancy. Johnathan still had no idea; he was usually out long before she woke, and conveniently, she was usually sick mid-morning, rather than first thing.
Because she had to talk to someone, she went to London for two days, on the pretext that her mother was unwell, and stayed with Wendelien; unwise for many reasons, not least that Archie, Wendelien’s baby, was at an enchanting age. Diana loved babies anyway; she had enjoyed Jamie’s babyhood hugely, once the birth was over. Wendelien, of course, counselled termination: ‘It’s the only thing, darling, you can have it done really well in a nursing home. Only one night there, and then you can go home again, feeling fine, all over.’
‘Yes, but it might not be Freddie’s. In fact, it’s quite unlikely – it’s probably Johnathan’s. He’s been very ardent, desperate for another baby.’
‘Diana,’ said Wendelien, ‘you really can’t know that.’
‘I know I can’t know. But—’
‘And what does Freddie look like?’
‘He’s – oh, well, he’s blonde and—’
‘Diana,’ said Wendelien severely. ‘Johnathan is dark. You are dark, Jamie is dark. Eyes?’
‘Freddie’s? Green.’
‘Yours – dark. Johnathan’s dark.’
‘Yes, all right,’ said Diana irritably. ‘I get the message.’
‘And – time in your cycle?’
‘Oh, right in the middle. But then, I practically seduced Johnathan the night I got home, I felt so guilty and bad. So—’
‘I still think you can’t risk it. How on earth are you going to explain a green-eyed blonde to Johnathan? Well, look, I can help with places. It’s not a problem. So go away and think about it. But please, darling, be sensible. There can always be other babies.’
‘I know,’ said Diana. ‘But Wendelien, I just don’t know if I could do that. Just get rid of it. As if it was a bit of rubbish. It’s so brutal.’
‘And telling Johnathan you’re having another man’s baby isn’t?’
All the way back to Yorkshire, Diana sat motionless, staring out of the window. Of course Wendelien was right; a termination was the only safe, sensible thing to do. Johnathan would never know, would never have to cope with the pain of what she had done. Her marriage would be safe – he would quite likely divorce her if she told him. They could start again, immediately; probably in two months she’d be safely pregnant again. By him.
It wasn’t as if she was in love with Freddie Bateman, nor he with her. He was gloriously, wonderfully sexy and exciting and it was so flattering that he fancied her. They’d had a heavenly time, but God, how could she have been so stupid.
But she knew. It had just been too much for her; irresistibly too much. Years of boredom in Yorkshire, a dull husband she wasn’t in love with, who made the sex act about as thrilling as a bowl of unseasoned porridge. To be suddenly with someone who made her feel alive and hungry in every tiny unexplored corner of her body, someone funny and appreciative, someone who lived the dream of the new world she had just found herself in, this glorious world, all glamour and style and wit and charm, someone moreover with whom she could bring something to that world, who raised her beauty and her own sexiness to new, dizzy heights, who made people exclaim over her and adore her, and desire her. How could she have said no to him, as he plied her with cocktails and racy gossip and then flattery and dirty talk, and finally, first suggestions, then pleas, then increasingly open insistence that she go up to his room and thus his bed? Where, for the first time in her life, she discovered what sex could be for her, how she could climb and reach, and fly and soar, how she could laugh as she rode the pleasure, and cry as she came, how all her thoughts and emotions, her past and her present, could fuse into this one amazing thing. How at last she knew what she could do and be.