Chapter 3
‘Lisa! Wake up!’
She saw Alec looming by the huge bay window, staring across the Levels. Following his gaze she looked through the old glass, watched it distort the scene like a fairground mirror. Moorland expanded outwards below them, interspersed with willows and ringed by the Mendips painted a deep slate blue. As she watched the glass twisted double-bent willows into witch shapes, black and menacing. She could distinguish them quite clearly; pointed hats, broomsticks, billowing skirts. A whole coven of them down by the Sheppey flowing its way sinuously towards Bridgwater Bay.
‘Lisa!’
Why was he shouting her name? Alec was, apparently, intent on peering at the grassland, his face away from hers. Lisa saw dark grey clouds gathering forces, obscuring the hills, marching across the vast expanse of sky brooding over the pastures. The wind scrolled shapes into wet grass, snaking the different greens into glittering damask spread out in front of her. It winked at her, sudden eddies of white-flecked highlights eyeing her. First one, then two, suddenly hundreds of eyes gleamed at her, held her tight. Not eyes; circles on wings, she saw. Hundreds of butterfly wings hovering over the Levels, hugging the turf. She tried to shut them out and found she could not do so.
The patter of rain turning to hail began to beat hard against the window panes. Lisa could almost feel the hailstones knocking into her. The wind, only a sigh to start with, began to loud shriek into her ears. Blowing so hard it’s rocking a house as solid as Sedgemoor Court, she thought uneasily. Twenty-two inches of solid brick walls: a square house! How could a mere hailstorm cause such movement?
‘That’s our lot, then,’ she heard Alec say, his voice distinct and clear above the hail splattering against the glass. ‘After this one our family’s complete.’
‘Supposing I want three?’ Alec’s assumption infuriated her. If he refused to father more –
‘Then you’ll have to make sure you’re carrying two,’ he grinned at her. That lopsided grin, the left side of his mouth higher than the right. His look unbalanced her, made her feel she was about to fall. She clutched at the shutters to steady herself and felt them opening. The vast spread of wood squeaked wide. She stepped away, shouting a warning to Alec, and then watched him turn his whole body towards her. Amazed, she saw he was holding Seb in his arms. But there was something odd about Alec’s face now. It seemed to be split in two - one side grinning at her, the other scowling.
Lisa braced back against the woodwork and tried to catch her breath. Something was wrong; something to do with her family. She rubbed her eyes and looked again, startled. Someone else was standing there. Who was that with Alec? The figure turned and she could see it was another man. A thickset bulky man, shorter than Alec, booted feet planted firm, astride.
Frank, Lisa recognised, astounded. A different Frank; the Frank of eighteen months ago, when they had first got to know the Graftleys well. Unfriendly, almost hostile. Keeping his distance, his eyes slits against outsiders, his shoulders hunched away. The dark curly head, without the grey, was lowered over something lying in a box. Small fingers waved unsteadily above the sides. A baby lying in a carrycot.
Frank had a pillow in his hands. He lowered it over the cot, pushed it down, pressed hard...
‘Stop!’ Lisa screamed. ‘You’ll smother it!’
He turned to her, small eyes spots of venom. ‘Baint human,’ he told her. A cold firm voice. ‘Baint nothing there but vermin. Old Don’ll be shooting the whole lot o’ they damn critters.’
She saw them, then; dozens of rabbits shot dead, their corpses lying in the meadow.
‘Darling: wake up! It’s me!’
And she saw Seb, apparently in Alec’s arms. He was also on the floor and on the chairs. He seemed to have split into little Sebs all over the place.
Lisa clutched her belly in sudden terror that she’d lose the new baby only just conceived. It seemed to quicken within her, grow from embryo to foetus within seconds, split into two…
As she felt the movement an image of one embryo appeared. A large oval, pulsating, and then slowly, inexorably expanding, its nucleus broadening. And then it divided into two, tearing apart like an amoeba, separating into two nuclei, apparently identical. She saw two distinct beings, pulsing with energy, beating their rhythm of life in unison. Two oval forms swimming in fluid, throbbing with vigour.
As she watched one form began to take shape, to grow, to swell, to bloat, then to dwarf the smaller one. The larger embryo opened up what looked like a giant maw. Lisa saw it slither towards the smaller one and engulf it in its jaws. She felt a pinching tearing pain within her, then saw the huge mouth close tight over the second embryo and swallow it. The larger embryo had absorbed the smaller one, had obliterated it from life.
‘Lisa!’
A grey mist swam across the image. The pinching turned to shaking - her shoulders were shaking in horror at what she’d seen. She held her hands over her abdomen, protecting it.
‘No!’ she called out. ‘No! Don’t do that!’
‘Darling,’ she heard. She recognised Alec’s voice, urgent and low. ‘Wake up! You’re having a nightmare! Lisa!’
The grey mist completely shrouded her, then turned to a cold measured festering sensation inside her. Cold; she felt so cold. And that sinking feeling, as though she were being sucked into a chasm, a cataclysmic series of events she could not control.
Her hands were interlocked, hard below the still-flat belly she clasped to herself. She could hear Alec talking to her, his voice caressing, could feel his hands against hers, stroking, trying to relax them. Her eyelids began to tremble. The gloomy grey turned into the soft orange glow of the bedroom lamps.
‘Are you all right, pet?’
‘I suppose so.’ Lisa struggled to open her eyes properly. Alec was sitting on her side of the bed, his hands now on her shoulders, sliding across her back, holding her to him, embracing her.
‘I couldn’t seem to wake you up. What was it?’
‘I dreamed you’d turned into someone else.’ She looked at him carefully, then round the room and down at herself. Only a crumpled nightdress to remind her of the scene in her dream. ‘It was so real – ’
‘All that rich clotted cream at Meg’s, I expect,’ he soothed her, stroking her blonde damp hair with his right hand, his left arm holding her to him. ‘And that idiotic business of sucking clover.’ He kissed her hair. ‘I’m just the way I always was.’
‘And Seb - Seb turned into several little Sebs.’
‘You’re dreaming of a baby brother for him.’
‘And the new baby split in two.’ She shuddered as she remembered the vividness of it. ‘Split right down the middle. Divided in half like an amoeba.’
‘It was a nightmare, sweet. All over now, nothing to worry about.’
‘Like a fertilised ovum dividing into identical twins,’ she continued stubbornly.
She felt his arms tighten around her, hard. ‘Determined to copy Meg, aren’t you?’
‘Completely, exactly the same as each other,’ she felt impelled to carry on. ‘Split into two equal foetuses; well, embryos maybe.’ She shuddered again, seeing the giant maw opening up, then devouring, the second embryo. ‘And then one of them swallowed the other one.’
She could not shake the image off; it was so real, so tangible.
‘That’s what you get for wishing for two for the price of one!’ Alec rumbled good-naturedly. She felt his chest against her own, the pyjama buttons pressing into her. ‘It’s all right now, it was just a dream. There’s no need to worry. You know what the obstetrician said.’
‘I know. He went on and on about the fertility drugs not affecting this pregnancy. But my dream was about identical twins, nothing to do with that.’
‘Twins are twins.’
Lisa bolted upright, pushing her husband away from her, eyes blazing. The placid disposition nurtured by their serene country lifestyle seemed suddenly transformed into her previous, rather more stormy, temperament.
‘No, they’re not. Fertility drug twins are formed by two ova released and fertilised at the same time: fraternal two-egg twins. Identical twins are formed in a quite different way. They’re produced by the splitting of a single fertilised ovum into two - usually within the first two weeks of pregnancy.’
‘Whatever, Lisa,’ Alec cut her off impatiently. ‘We really don’t have to worry about more than one baby for this pregnancy. It’s quite different from the first.’
‘I’m not an idiot, Alec. I know fertility drugs often lead to multiple births, and I didn’t need to take them again.’ She paused, and looked at Alec. ‘But twins can just happen, too, you know!’
He released her, stood up, and walked towards the bottom of the bed. He heaved the duvet on to it, pulling it over her.
‘I see you’ve done your homework.’
She had. The time when the Hammersmith Hospital in London had kept her waiting. That’s when she’d decided to do a little research of her own. She couldn’t stop herself from feeling annoyed, even now.
‘I can still read, Alec. Motherhood doesn’t deprive one of one’s wits.’
It rankled, the memory of the way the doctors had brushed off her first efforts at enlisting their help in becoming pregnant.
‘Come back in a year,’ they’d told her, brusquely and dismissively. ‘That’s the time we allow for infertility. If you’re still worried then we’ll run some tests.’
‘I’m worried now,’ she’d told them, keeping her voice steady and flat. ‘We’ve been trying to have a baby for two years.’
Obviously they hadn’t heard her. ‘You’ve taken the contraceptive pill for a long time,’ the specialist had told her judgmentally. ‘Twelve years altogether, I think you said.’
Practised birth control - of course, she only had herself to blame!
‘It would have been different if you’d had a baby right away, when you first married.’ A shrug. ‘You need to give your body time to adjust before assuming you’re infertile,’ the Hammersmith consultant had insisted.
Lisa was then thirty-six and worried that time for having babies was running out for her. Many agencies set a time limit as low as thirty-five.
She’d had no option but to play along with the doctors. No other fertility clinic would look at her if her notes told them she’d already been to the Hammersmith.
Lisa settled back on to her pillows. They had eventually given her the fertility drugs, but she still hadn’t conceived - until they’d moved to Somerset. In the end that’s all it took. Not their stupid pills, but good country air and wholesome food. That’s what had done the trick. The doctors could keep their dangerous chemicals. Lisa intended to live a purely natural life.
‘Let’s not worry about all that history now. Just leads to nightmares,’ Alec insisted. He put his arms back around her shoulders, drawing her to him, nuzzling her neck. ‘You’re pregnant again, and everything is fine. I’ll soon relax you!’
An almost irresistible feeling of aversion came over Lisa. She held her breath, at first allowing her husband to fondle her without withdrawing, just holding herself back, unresponsive, but forcing her body out of rigidity. In some way she could not quite understand she felt Alec would be threatening her unborn child - children - if she allowed him to go inside her. She’d discussed this point at length with the medical profession at the time she’d finally conceived Seb. According to them intercourse caused no danger to a foetus.
According to them. For this second pregnancy Lisa preferred not to take any chances. She’d decided to sound Meg out as well, as delicately as she could. ‘Any special problems about carrying more than the one?’ she’d asked her, diffident, insisting on carting the tea things out to the scullery after Seb’s party.
‘Problems? Before the birth? Not then. Didn’t even know I be carrying twins until the seventh month!’ Meg had said, her voice unusually high.
‘You mean there were problems later?’
Meg’s eyes had slid away. ‘Susan did notice I be bigger than afore. Her be the midwife in charge, so her organised a scan. That did show they, right enough.’
‘That’s when it became harder? In the last few weeks?’
‘Not as yer’d notice.’ Meg’s dishes had been clattered into her cupboards, the doors shut tight.
‘And what about - well, you know. Frank.’
Meg had looked at her shrewdly, face to face. ‘Frank be just like any other man,’ she’d said, shrugging. ‘But him never did cause me no trouble.’
That hadn’t been what had worried Meg, then. Presumably she focused her worries on Phyllis’s foot. She did seem oddly anxious about that.
Alec’s lips were on Lisa’s, eager and pressing. ‘You’re choking me,’ she spluttered, gasps of coughing successfully wrenching her out of his arms. ‘I think I must be getting a cold.’
Startled, annoyed, he lifted his head away from his wife’s explosive hacking without, however, releasing her.
‘It’s all that ridiculous composting you’ve decided to go in for,’ his voice hissed in her ear. ‘You overdo it, and then you complain you’re tired or not feeling well.’
The coughing eased and he reached towards his groin, his lips flirting now, caressing her ears, her hair, her eyelids. She struggled, heaved against him, began to cough in earnest.
He let her go, climbed over her to his side of the bed, reached his hand out to turn off the light, and pulled the duvet away from her to spread over himself. Lisa lay back, recovering her breath.
‘You really are becoming tricky, Lisa. I never know where I am with you.’
‘It’s just a cold,’ she murmured, putting out her hand. ‘It’s brought on by a virus. Nothing to do with making compost.’
Her husband turned away from her. The silence from the other side of the bed made her uncomfortable. It stirred her imagination yet again. Alec, she knew, could have lived quite happily without any children. Now that he had a son she sensed he felt that was all he needed. He was prepared to tolerate one sibling for Seb. She was clear he wouldn’t put up with more than that.
‘’Night,’ she purred. ‘I expect it was just the nightmare. I’ll be fine tomorrow.’
‘I’ll get Saunders in to stack the compost for you, if you insist on making it,’ Alec announced. ‘You’d think Doubler would be good enough for you. You can even have a go at Multiplier, if you want.’ He heaved the duvet up and down. ‘You’re not Meg Graftley, you know. She’s got the muscles for all that. You haven’t. I wish you’d bear that in mind.’
Listening to her husband’s deep breaths of sleep Lisa felt isolated, unsure. What was wrong with her? Why was she causing trouble? She now had everything she’d always dreamed of. A healthy son, a comfortable country house set in idyllic surroundings, another baby on the way, a perfectly good husband doing well in his profession. What else could she possibly want?
A large family. Lisa wanted a family like Meg’s - half a dozen children, company for each other, tumbling over the house. She wanted nothing more than to be an earth mother.
The four-leaf clover appeared in her mind again. Four leaves erupting from a single stem. One for hope, one for faith, one for love - and the last one for luck, as the saying went.
‘It’ll bring me luck,’ she whispered to herself. ‘I know it will bring me luck.’