They all trudged back to the inn in the dark, dejected after a fretful first day of the year.
Nina was so damp and distracted she even scooped up the sleepy Bear in her arms and carried the sodden bundle all the way across the muddy meadow towards the lights of Port Willow Bay. Mutt walked a little further behind, making a show of calling for Echo who wanted to walk clamped to Ruth’s right leg, gazing up at her, nudging her hand, now ringless, with his soft wet muzzle.
Ruth took the comfort the collie was offering and patted his head often. She thought of the day in the registry office when Mark had put the ring on her finger and she’d been so thrilled at the words, ‘I pronounce you husband and wife’ that she’d closed her eyes and tipped her head back, elated and full of excitement.
Mark was matching her strides, but further than an arm’s reach away, head down, his brows knitted. Every now and then he’d say, ‘I really am sorry, Ruthy. What a pity.’ And each time she’d wonder if he was talking about her lost ring or their lost spark.
She kept her face turned from him and let Echo lead her away from the Coral Beach that had claimed the delicate, glistening band that had once bound her man to her. She’d never have her ring back and the tide would slowly erode it, but what of the promises the ring represented? Ruth feared they too had been worn down and washed away.
Chapter Nineteen
A Glimpse
‘Just a little jelly, it’s going to feel cold,’ the sonographer said, already squeezing clear gloop from a bottle onto Beatrice’s stomach and brandishing the scanner wand. He looked young and surprisingly nervy. Ever since they’d arrived he’d been trying to drum up some sense of excitement in the worried-looking prospective parents.
Maybe he hadn’t been doing this for long? Maybe he hadn’t met a bereaved parent before? Faced with Beatrice’s stony focus on just getting this over with, he’d soon given up and turned business-like, thank goodness.
‘Ready?’ he asked her.
Beatrice couldn’t answer, even with Atholl squeezing her hand and leaning close to her like she’d told him to, she couldn’t. Not even after the midwife’s visit to the inn to ‘book her in’ on the second of January and all her bloodwork coming back fine. Nothing could reassure Beatrice that this wasn’t all about to end the same way it had last time.
She definitely wasn’t ready. She’d tried to explain it all to Atholl, telling him she felt so battered about by life she was having trouble adjusting to whatever normal levels of optimism feel like. She hadn’t told him that she considered herself so incredibly lucky to have even met Atholl who was, it turns out, exactly the right person for her out of all the billions of people on the planet, and she was lucky to have found a welcoming new home and a job that she loved, all in one fell swoop. She really couldn’t expect even more good fortune from the universe. That would be greedy.
Her knees had been weak and shaking all morning and she’d found she couldn’t eat breakfast. Sipping on the water she’d been directed to drink ahead of the scan was hard enough.
The sonographer flipped a switch that dimmed the lights in the room, and the monitor glowed blue amongst all the clinical white. Beatrice shifted on the layer of paper laid out underneath her as though trying to get into the smallest, most protected shape possible while still letting this stranger have access to her exposed belly.
Atholl met her panicked stare. ‘Dinnae be afraid. I’m here. I told you, we’ll do this together. No matter what.’ He nodded, holding her gaze until she nodded back.
‘I can’t look.’ Her words were barely a whisper.
Atholl indicated to the sonographer to go ahead and Beatrice turned her face to Atholl’s chest, screwing up her eyes and trying not to conjure up the image of the black screen that had haunted her memory since the day she’d seen it back in the spring of last year. She tried to brace herself for the words there’s simply no preparing for or protecting yourself from: ‘no heartbeat’.
But the man wasn’t saying anything and she took this as a terrible sign. As he worked the wand over her stomach, she anticipated the things he was about to utter; the feeble apology, the calm, carefully picked words they’re trained to say to make sure there’s no equivocation, no confusion whatsoever, that you’re not taking this baby home.
Atholl’s shirt was tear-stained and her grip on his collar fearsomely tight when Beatrice heard the gasp and Atholl’s chest heaved, rolling her like a ship on a great wave. He was sobbing.
‘Beattie, look,’ he said, his voice vibrating with emotion.
She lifted her head just as the sonographer turned a dial and a great, swooshing, thumping heartbeat resounded inside the darkened room as though it were Beatrice and Atholl curled snug inside the womb, clinging together like twins hearing strange, muffled sounds of blood rushing and a new world to come.
‘There’s your baby,’ the sonographer said.
Beatrice didn’t smile, even though she was aware she was expected to. All her concentration was fixed upon the shadowy image, a skinny thing with a big rounded head and spindly limbs, bucking and moving in tiny jolts she could not feel.
‘Baby’s measuring just under fourteen weeks. Does that match your calculations?’
Beatrice didn’t answer. The midwife had estimated much the same thing. It meant she’d fallen pregnant only a few weeks after she’d met Atholl. She’d asked her midwife about the bleeding she’d had over the autumn, having simply assumed they were unusually light periods and she’d put it down to turning forty and the first signs of perimenopause. The midwife had noted it all down with unworried composure. Fourteen weeks meant she’d passed the awful milestone of her last baby’s loss and this realisation afforded her the slimmest degree of relief.
Atholl pressed his face against hers and the pair watched their child in silent wonder, before the sonographer lifted the wand from her stomach and their direct line to the tiny person’s world was cut off. Beatrice felt it keenly, like night-warmed covers being suddenly yanked from her sleeping body on a cold winter morning. She awoke from the screen’s spell, blinking at Atholl.
The sonographer bustled out the room saying he’d taken some images and would get them from the printer next door.
Alone by the monitor the parents held their heads together, eyes wide and lips parted. Beatrice was still shaking.
‘Dinnae be afraid,’ Atholl said again, but this time there was an assured tone in his voice that told her he already believed this miraculous thing was actually going to happen, that the tiny shadow they’d just seen was going to perform its magic and bring itself into full being.
Beatrice gripped his shirt again, feeling suddenly tired and limp.
