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‘Thank you for taking the trouble to come and see me,’ she told him quietly, going to open the sitting-room door and standing determinedly beside it. ‘I’ll make sure that Jessica knows…everything.’ Somehow she managed to keep her head high and her face expressionless as she added curtly, ‘And now if you wouldn’t mind leaving…’
As he got to his feet he half stumbled, and instantly pain flashed through her. She ached to go to him, to hold him…to tell him that it didn’t matter…that nothing mattered…that she loved him; but she already knew that he didn’t want her love, just as he had never wanted it or her. Just as he had never wanted their child.
‘Lacey, please; you don’t understand. I—’
‘You’re wrong, Lewis; I do understand,’ she corrected him sadly. ‘You hate me for conceiving your child, and I expect you hate Jessica too for being that child and for not being perfect. Is that how you feel, Lewis, that only perfect children have a right to be born?’
‘Lacey, please.’
‘No. I don’t want to hear any more. Morally and ethically you’ve done all you need to do. I’ll make sure that Jessica knows what’s happened.’
‘If you’d like me to be with you when you tell her…’
She gave him a bitter look. ‘Why, so that you can take advantage of her and persuade her to be sterilised? No, thank you, Lewis. I’ve brought her up on my own and I think I’m capable of dealing with this without your help as well.’
She noticed that as he walked down the hall he favoured his right leg and she felt her anger drain away, anguish taking its place. Why hadn’t he been honest with her from the first? Why had he married her when…?
He had reached the front door. He paused and then turned round, saying quietly to her, ‘I didn’t know any of this when we married. It was later, after—’
‘After you met her…the woman you loved more than me…more than our marriage,’ Lacey concluded bitterly. ‘Well, I’m glad you didn’t know, Lewis, because if you had known you’d never have allowed me to conceive Jessica and, no matter what pain you caused me…what misery…what anguish, I’d go through it all ten times over to hold Jessica in my arms the way I did the night she was born. That one moment made everything else that had happened seem totally unimportant. She was worth every second of misery you caused me.’
She opened the front door and watched as he walked slowly through it, his head bowed, his face slightly averted from her, but not before she had seen how strained he looked, and that something metallic or moist glistened in his eyes.
Tears from a man like Lewis. She smiled bitterly to herself as she closed and then locked the door after him.
HALF AN HOUR LATER Lacey was standing in the garden, without having any real idea of how she had got there. It was the shock, of course, she acknowledged while she frowned over the tightly closed bud of a pink peony with a concentration that really had nothing to do with the flower’s unreadiness to open.
They had had an early spring without much
rain, and the garden was bearing testimony to the unexpected bonus of early warmth and sunshine.
Later these same plants which stretched so eagerly towards the sun now would be wilting, scorched by that sun they had embraced so eagerly, longing for rain.
She gave a tiny shiver. So, too, did the human race reach out to embrace that which gave it the illusion of being loved…cared for…wanted…and suffered the same bitter effects once it realised that what it had thought was love was merely a fiction, a cruel deception.
The scene in front of her started to blur and shimmer. She was, she realised, on the verge of tears. Shock again. She was aware of a frantic pulse of anxiety beating fiercely inside her, giving birth to an urgency that demanded that she do something…that she cease to stand staring uselessly into space and instead…
And instead what? It was too late to protect Jessica now. To keep her in ignorance of what Lacey herself had just learned was something she simply did not have the moral right to do.
Jessica was a very strong and courageous young woman, but to learn totally out of the blue that she could be the carrier of such an ultimately destructive gene…
Fear, love, anxiety, the need to protect…the need to soften the blow…to ease the pain her daughter would have to experience—these and a hundred other maternal emotions welled up inside her, and with them was another emotion: guilt. If she had known…
What would she have done—opted not to have children? Perhaps. Chosen not to marry Lewis in the first place?
It surprised her how instantly her heart rejected that latter thought. Lewis, the man, her husband…her lover. He had been more important to her than her becoming a mother. She had loved him too deeply to have turned her back on him and found another man…a man who could give her healthy children.
And yet she had wanted a family; they both had—or so it had seemed. She remembered how passionately she had talked about it. How often she had told him that in forming a family unit of her own, in having children, she felt that she might finally wipe away the unhappiness and loneliness of her own childhood.
Those had been the daydreams of someone who was still very much a child herself, she recognised now, her reasons for wanting the family she had declared so passionately was necessary to her happiness dangerously emotional ones.
And yet what would she have done if Lewis had told her about his medical history once she was pregnant with Jessica? Would she have chosen to go through with the pregnancy, to take the risk of giving birth to a boy with all that that entailed, not just for herself, but more importantly for that child as well? Or would she…?
She moved restlessly, knowing with the wisdom that had come to her over the years that it was a question to which there was no clear-cut answer.
Knowing the anguish the Sullivans had suffered, she wondered if she would have had the courage to live through the terrible mental and emotional anguish they had suffered. She had been lucky: her child had been a girl.
And for Jessica it would be a little easier. She would have the choice of taking advantage of modern medical science, and of opting to conceive only female children. Of not having sons…
