‘If you change your mind, the offer is there until the end of the week. Until I go back.’
‘I won’t be telling Rebecca about our conversation,’ Julius told him. ‘I don’t want her upset. I’ll just tell her you wished us the very best.’
Thomas Quinn didn’t look shamefaced in the slightest as he shook Julius’s hand.
In the end, he did tell her, because she pestered him to reveal what they had discussed.
‘Did he offer you money?’ she asked. ‘I bet he did.’
‘He wanted me to persuade you to give the baby up. For adoption.’
Rebecca was furious. ‘He is so manipulative.’
‘I think it’s because he cares. I tried to put myself in his situation.’
Julius wasn’t sure why he was trying to protect Thomas Quinn, but it was mostly because he didn’t want Rebecca upset. He was feeling more and more protective of her, especially now the baby was showing. And so he suggested they get married. After a certain amount of laborious paperwork, they left the registry office one sunny spring afternoon.
‘You know what we should do? We should open our own book shop,’ Rebecca said as they walked home, hand in hand.
Julius stopped in the middle of the pavement. ‘That,’ he said, ‘is the best idea I’ve heard for a long time.’
‘Nightingale Books,’ said Rebecca. ‘We could call it Nightingale Books.’
Julius felt a burst of joy. He could see it now, the two of them with their own little shop.
In the meantime, he got a managerial position at the book shop, which gave him a slightly higher wage, and found them a house of their own to rent: the tiniest two-bedroomed terrace in Jericho. The second bedroom was only a box room, but at least they had their own space. He spent all his spare time painting it out, until it was bandbox fresh. He put up shelves and hooks so they had plenty of storage. He took Rebecca to Habitat to choose them a sofa.
‘Can we afford it?’ she asked.
‘We’ll use it every day, for the next ten years at least, so it’s worth spending money on it.’
He didn’t tell her Debra had given him five hundred pounds to make their lives more comfortable. He didn’t want to get into comparing parents. He didn’t consider taking her money to be sponging, either: Debra had offered it happily. Debra was infuriating in her own way, but she had a generous streak, and she hadn’t said ‘I told you so’. Just knowing she was there made him feel secure, so he understood that Rebecca must find it difficult, being semi-estranged. He wondered how her parents would react once the baby was born. He suspected they were just playing a waiting game, hoping she would crack. Hoping, no doubt, that perhaps he would abandon her when the going got tough.
Which it did.
By her third trimester, Rebecca changed in front of his eyes. She swelled up. Not just her tummy, but everything: her fingers, her ankles, her face. She was miserable. Fretful. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t get comfortable. She stopped working at the shop and lay in bed all day.
‘You have to keep active,’ Julius told her, worried sick. She no longer seemed enchanted by the idea of a baby, as she had been at first. She was frightened, and fearful.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t feel like I’m me any more. I guess I’ll be better when the baby gets here,’ she told him one night, and he rubbed her back until she fell asleep.
She woke one night, three weeks before the baby was due, writhing in pain. The bed sheets were soaked.
‘My waters broke,’ she sobbed.
Julius phoned for an ambulance, telling himself that women went into labour early all the time and that it would be fine. Giving birth was the most natural thing in the world. The staff at the hospital reassured him of the same thing. Rebecca was put in a delivery room and examined.
‘You’ve got an impatient baby there,’ said the midwife, smiling, not looking in the least perturbed. ‘It’ll be a little preemie, but don’t worry. We have a great track record.’
‘Preemie?’
‘Premature.’ She put a hand on his arm. ‘You’re in safe hands.’
For eighteen agonising hours, Rebecca rode the waves of her pain. Julius was privately horrified that anyone should have to go through this, but if the noises coming from adjoining suites were anything to go by, it was the norm. None of the staff seemed disconcerted by Rebecca’s howls as the contractions peaked. Julius did his best to keep her distress at bay.
‘Does she really have to go through this?’ he asked the midwife at one point, who looked at him, slightly pitying, as if he knew nothing. Which was true – until now, he had never been in close contact with anyone pregnant, let alone watched them give birth.