The Christmas Surprise
Page 15

Moray poked his head round the door, having been in to see one of the other residents. He’d heard Rosie’s voice.
‘Hello!’ he said. ‘Give me some gin!’
Rosie looked up.
‘It’s a bit early for gin.’
‘Not when you’ve been doing what I’ve been doing,’ said Moray. ‘Are you joining me or shall I tell you in great detail? It involves use of the word “weeping”.’
Rosie fled to get the gin bottle and the tonic from Lilian’s mini fridge, and grabbed a lemon and some ice from the kitchen, and they sat round the fire, a convivial threesome.
‘So you’ve heard of her nutty plan,’ said Lilian.
Moray gave a half-smile.
‘Rather you than me,’ he said. But in fact, after the hard time Rosie had had so far this year, he absolutely approved. A change of scene, some sunshine, and other people to focus on rather than turning inwards. He was the only person aware of her fertility issues, and he hated her carrying the burden alone, even though he understood her reasons.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I think you’ll fall in love with it and go all Meryl Streep and come back saying “I hed a ferm in Efrika” and start talking about the moon over the savannah and the smell of the dust.’
‘I don’t see what’s wrong with Lipton,’ said Lilian.
‘I’m only going for a trip,’ said Rosie. ‘Don’t listen to Moray.’
‘Until Robert Redford turns up with a big gun and sweeps you off your feet,’ said Moray, and they both swooned a little, and Lilian said what on earth were they talking about, and Rosie was shocked when she realised Lilian had never seen the film, so she found it in the library and put it on, and they had more gin and tonics and watched it and all three of them swooned over Robert Redford, and Stephen was entirely confused when Rosie turned up at home late and slightly tipsy, talking about how much she couldn’t wait for their trip.
It had been a good, busy summer season and now it was late October, with fewer daytrippers and hikers coming through. Célestine’s baby was due in two weeks, so they probably wouldn’t be there to see it born, but they would visit the capital, spend a night in the village and make sure everything was all right there, then travel on to a backpackers’ hostel in a beach resort and have a little holiday too.
Rosie clutched Stephen’s hand very tightly as they shut up the little cottage, and turned the sweetshop sign to ‘Closed’. In the three years they’d known each other, they’d never had a holiday.
‘Well, it’s not really a holiday,’ said Stephen, smiling apologetically as he sat trying to apportion out their holiday money, while Rosie puzzled over the packing. ‘A new start. A healing process. Will you throw a humbug at me if I use the word “closure”?’
Rosie swallowed. He was so happy about this trip, so hyped up and enthusiastic. And she was too, of course. But she couldn’t forget that she hadn’t yet come clean with him; hadn’t shared everything about what had happened at the hospital.
‘Then we can come home,’ said Stephen, ‘and make a baby of our own, and then we can forget about ever having had a holiday or a second’s free time ever again.’ He came up behind her and kissed her.
Rosie stiffened.
‘What?’ said Stephen. ‘Sorry. Sorry, love, was that insensitive?’
‘No,’ said Rosie, shaking her head. ‘But there’s something I have to tell you …’
It wasn’t, she knew, the fact of it – or if it was, he didn’t touch on it. It was the months and months she had gone without mentioning it; it was such a huge part of their future, and she had selfishly kept it to herself, assumed he wouldn’t be able to cope, thought she could deal with it all herself.
And all she could say, numbly, was that she didn’t know why she hadn’t told him; that she’d thought it was already bad enough (and there was a tiny part of her that had wondered if, possibly, the immaculate Dr Chang might after all have been completely wrong; that maybe, in the intervening months, it might happen of its own accord, prove them all completely wrong and they would never have to face up to it and deal with it). And Stephen had accused her of wanting to control everything, to keep that knowledge for herself, and she could only agree.
‘Did you think I was going to jilt you?’ Stephen had said furiously. ‘Is that what you think of me? Hmm? Just dump you the second you stopped being breeding material?’
Rosie’s head had drooped.
‘You always bloody do this,’ he said. ‘Something goes wrong and you bottle it up and screw everything up. How can we work like this, Rosie? How? You think if you live in a pretend sweetie dreamland, bad things will go away. But they don’t, do they? They don’t. They get worse.’
Neither of them got much sleep that night.
Jake drove them the two hours to the airport in his old Peugeot, chatting amiably with Stephen about the price of cattle most of the way, seemingly not noticing that they weren’t speaking to one another. Rosie stared out of the window, but saw nothing. Autumn was bright across the country, brown and red and orange displays of leaves framing harvested fields with their great rolls of straw. Huge grey clouds loomed across the sky; rainfall was visible on distant, shaded hills.
Rosie rubbed her arm reflexively where she’d had her injections, and tried to remember where her malaria tablets were. All she could think about was how Moray had tried to make her laugh by pretending to give her the injections without looking, and then had had to ask if she was pregnant, and of course she’d had to say she wasn’t. And at this rate, she never would be.
They were carefully polite to one another. Stephen slept for most of the flight; Rosie, edgy and upset, failed to concentrate on the films she’d been so looking forward to seeing (the nearest cinema to Lipton was forty-five minutes away). Stephen’s hair had flopped over his forehead as he slept. She wanted to stroke it, but didn’t dare.
Our first holiday, she thought bleakly. You’re returning to the scene of the worst day of your life; I’m an infertile old cow you’re almost certainly going to have second thoughts about marrying. Happy holidays.
The airport was the first shock: a massive roof, no air conditioning, boiling hot, everybody shouting it seemed at once. People approached them from all angles, speaking loudly in French, asking if they needed taxis, hotels, bags carried … Rosie, who had only ever been to Spain before, on a package trip, looked around her in bewilderment. Stephen strode past it all, looking, Rosie thought, in his khakis and collarless cotton shirt, very much like he belonged here. She, on the other hand, was already regretting wearing jeans; they were hot and felt thick and uncomfortably creased against her skin.