Lingering Shadows

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And then he started to touch her, to kiss her, not hesitantly or half clumsily, as she had expected, but with a true lover’s sensitive awareness of every minute response she made, so that when she quivered as his mouth touched the sensitive cord in her neck he kissed it again slowly and lingeringly. And when her nipple swelled tautly in the moist heat of his mouth he knew that she wanted him to caress her there, without her having to say or do anything to tell him so.

His knowledge of how to please her was something that shocked her almost as much as her own quick, almost avid sexual response to him. She found that she was piqued, jealous almost of where he might have gained that knowledge, of the woman or women with whom he had learned such unexpected skills.

But, as Giles told her later, his sexual experience was far less than hers, and what had guided him, motivated him had been his need to please her, to love her.

The climax that shook her body long before he entered her caught them both off guard, Lucy doubly so because it was an alien sensation to her to have her body so completely out of her own control.

Giles was not a selfish lover, nor a demanding one, and nor, she discovered to her astonishment, would he allow her to even the score with the quick, deft manipulation of her hand.

When she drew back from him, startled to have her hand gently but very definitely removed from his body, he told her quietly, ‘When it happens I want it to be when I’m inside you.’

She made a brief, automatic inviting movement, but he shook his head.

‘No,’ he told her huskily. ‘I want you to want it as well.’

Later she did, laughing a little at him when it was over so quickly, recovering the control she felt she had lost when her body had responded to him so completely earlier.

She fell asleep in his arms, something so alien to her that to wake up and discover that she was in bed with him, and to know that he must have carried her upstairs while she slept, sent a frisson of apprehension along her spine.

To quell it she woke him up and made love to him passionately, almost angrily, her anger dissolving into tears of release when her body was overwhelmed by the intensity of her orgasm.

When she woke up in the morning she was alone. She turned her head, glancing at where Giles had slept, the pillow smelling faintly of him. She moved, turning her face into it, her emotions torn between a helpless awareness of how different he was from anyone else she had known and an instinctive fear of that difference and what it was doing to her.

He came back while she was lying there. He had, she realised when she saw the tray he was carrying, brought her her breakfast … her breakfast, she noticed, and not his: orange juice, which looked as though it had been freshly squeezed, warm croissants, honey and tea—proper tea, not the insipid tea-bag variety they normally had in the flat, and all served on a tray with a cloth and proper china, and, instead of the too perfectly tightly furled hot-house-grown rosebud which always seemed de rigueur in the hotels in which she had stayed with previous lovers, Giles had picked from the garden a jugful of fully open, softly petalled roses.

She buried her face in them, breathing in their scent, not wanting him to see the stupid tears burning her eyes.

‘Where’s your breakfast?’ she asked him when she judged that her voice was steady enough for her to do so.

The smile he gave her was rueful, boyish almost. ‘I had bacon and eggs,’ he told her. ‘I didn’t think you’d appreciate the smell. I thought I’d walk down to the village and get some papers—let you eat in peace.’

It shocked her that he should know her so well already, that he should know that after the intimacy they had shared she now needed some time to herself, to distance herself a little from the intensity of that intimacy, to recover the emotional isolation that was so necessary to her.

She was a sensual woman, but she was also one who had absorbed too many of the sexual insecurities suffered by her mother when she was abandoned by Lucy’s father.

Although when making love she had no inhibitions at all about her body, she preferred to perform the ritual of cleansing her skin, of preparing herself for the world, on her own.

While she could enjoy the love-play that went with sharing a shower or a bath with her lover, she did not like to share what was to her the greater intimacy of preparing herself to face the outside world. No man had ever realised that so immediately and instinctively as Giles had known it.

After he had gone she pictured him making her breakfast, squeezing the oranges, picking the roses. So much care … so much planning must have gone into every fine detail of this weekend with her. She liked that. She liked knowing that he had gone to so much trouble. Where another woman might have disliked his lack of spontaneity, Lucy did not. To her spontaneity equalled fecklessness, the same restlessness which had driven her father to leave her mother. Giles wasn’t like that. Giles was careful, thoughtful. He made plans.

It was a magical weekend, extended by an extra two days because neither of them could bear to break the spell.

Once Giles could add knowledge to his love for her, his lovemaking took on a special quality that took it worlds beyond anything Lucy had known before.

And it wasn’t just in bed that he surprised and delighted her. He took her out, sightseeing, shopping, entrancing her with his determination to spoil and indulge her.

It was only when they were driving back to London that he confessed to her that he hadn’t hired the house at all, but that it belonged to his godmother.

Lucy already knew that both his parents were dead. He had been born to them late in their lives, an only child maybe, but one who had still had the love of both his parents.

When he said he loved her he meant it, Lucy recognised, and she was beginning to suspect that she loved him as well.

Strangely, that did not terrify her as it might once have done, and when three months later he proposed, she accepted.

They were idyllically happy. Secure for the first time in her memory, gradually Lucy let her defences down.

Children, he must want children. She had tested him before they were married, but he had shaken his head and told her roughly that she was all that he wanted.

‘Maybe one day, if you want them,’ he had told her. ‘But girls, Lucy, not boys, otherwise I shall be jealous of them.’

She had laughed then. His words seemed to set the final seal on her happiness.

And they had been happy, Lucy remembered achingly. Too happy perhaps. Perhaps the very quality and intensity of her happiness ought to have warned her.

She had never intended to become pregnant. It had been an accident; a brief bout of food poisoning which had nullified the effect of the contraceptive pill she was taking. By the time she realised she was pregnant it was too late for her to opt for an early termination.

She had been frantic at first, angry and resentful, with Giles as well as with the child she was carrying. She was thirty-three years old and the last thing she wanted was a baby.

Although she tried to suppress them, all the fears she had had before she fell in love with Giles resurfaced. She was alternately anxious and emotional, angry and depressed, but stubbornly she refused to explain to Giles what was wrong. He thought it was because she was pregnant without wanting to be and that she blamed him for it, when in fact she was suddenly terrified of turning into her mother; of producing a child which Giles would reject along with her.

She couldn’t analyse her fears and she certainly could not discuss them with anyone. Her doctor was old-fashioned and disapproved of mothers-to-be being anything other than docilely pleased with their condition.

The more her pregnancy developed, the more afraid Lucy became, the more trapped and angry she felt. And as the weeks went by she could almost feel Giles withdrawing from her. Where once he had always slept as close to her as he could, now he turned away from her in bed.

Her body was changing. She was carrying a lot of water with the baby, which made her seem huge. It was no wonder Giles didn’t want her any more. He denied it, though, and claimed that it was for her sake, because he could see how tired she was, how great her discomfort.

She couldn’t sleep at night, twisting and turning. She woke up one night and Giles wasn’t there. She found him sleeping peacefully in the spare room. She woke him up, furious with him, blaming him for everything, telling him how much she hated him … how much she hated the baby.

She felt more afraid and alone than she had ever felt in her life. She was so used to having Giles to lean on, having Giles to love her, and now suddenly it seemed as though he didn’t any more.

She couldn’t bear people asking her about the baby, and when they did her whole body would tense with rejection, but some instinct she hadn’t known she possessed drove her.

She found she was instinctively adjusting her diet; exercising her body less vigorously, sleeping for longer; it was as though some part of her outside her control was ensuring that, despite her conscious resentment and misery, her baby was being well looked after.

The first time she felt the baby kick she was in the garden picking flowers for a dinner party. She dropped them in shock and stood there, her eyes suddenly brilliant with tears, but when Giles came home she didn’t say anything to him.

A gulf seemed to have opened between them. He couldn’t even seem to look at her these days without wincing, and when he kissed her it was a chaste, dry peck on the cheek.

The people they were entertaining that evening were a local solicitor and his wife. Giles was well established at Carey’s now, even though he detested Gregory James. He was not the kind of man who enjoyed pushing his way up the corporate ladder, and as long as he was happy Lucy had been happy as well. He was a good husband financially, generous, giving her her own allowance. His godmother had died just after their marriage and the money he had inherited from her he had invested to bring them in an extra income so that they lived very comfortably.

The solicitor’s wife was a couple of years younger than Lucy but looked older. She had three young children, around whom her entire life revolved.

‘Has the baby kicked yet?’ she asked Lucy over dinner. ‘I remember the first time John did … I couldn’t wait to tell Alistair. We spent all evening with me with my turn exposed and Alistair’s hand on it just so that he wouldn’t miss it if it happened again. And it was the middle of winter.’

Lucy’s hand shook as she tried to eat her food. Giles couldn’t bear to look at her now, never mind touch her, or at least that was how it seemed.

When Lucy was just over six months pregnant she went into premature labour. Giles was away on business for Carey’s and so there was no one to accompany her when the ambulance screamed to a halt outside the house, summoned by the alert doctor’s receptionist’s response to her frightened telephone call.

The baby, a boy, was born before Giles arrived. She wasn’t allowed to hold him. He was taken away to be placed in an incubator. He was very frail, the hospital told them when Giles arrived two hours later, white and strained, having received a message relayed from the hospital via his secretary.

Lucy was too shocked and drugged to take in much of what was being said. It had all been so unexpected. There had been no warning signs, nothing she had felt or done.

It happened like that sometimes, the nurses soothed her, but Lucy couldn’t let it rest. She felt guilty that somehow she was the one responsible for the baby’s too early birth. She wanted desperately to see him, but had lost a lot of blood and they didn’t want her to move.

In the morning she could see her son, they told her, and Giles, who had been terrified when he walked into the ward and saw how pitifully small and frail she looked, tried awkwardly to describe their child to her.

His halting, terse description seemed to reinforce to Lucy that she had failed, and that he was angry with her because it was her fault that the baby had been born too soon, when in reality what Giles was trying to do was to blot out his mental image of the appalling fragility of the little figure he had seen through the screen that separated him from the premature-baby unit, and the wires and tubes that had been attached to his son’s minute body.

He hadn’t realised until he saw him just how much the sight of his own child would affect him. He had known that Lucy did not want children, and he loved her so much that he had been happy with that. He had seen how angry she was when she found out she was pregnant, and he had known that she blamed him.

All through her pregnancy his guilt had increased. He had seen the discomfort she was in. He had tried his best not to exacerbate things for her. He had even started sleeping in another room in case his need for her overwhelmed him. He ached so much to touch her, to explore and know the rounding contours of her body. He was amazed at how very sensual and arousing he found the visible signs of her pregnancy, at how much he wanted to make love to her, a reaffirmation of all that he felt for her and for the child they had made between them, and then he had been ashamed of his need, reminding himself that Lucy did not share the joy he was beginning to feel in the coming baby.

Now, in the hospital, trying to describe their son to her, he ached with the love the sight of him had stirred up inside him, and with the fear. He was so small … so fragile. He could feel the tears clogging his throat, burning his eyes, and he knew he mustn’t cry in front of Lucy. He turned away from her, unaware of the hand she had stretched out towards him as she tried to find the words to plead with him to tell her more about their child.

She ached inside with the loss of him. A feeling she had never known she could experience overwhelmed her. She wanted her child here with her, in her arms, at her breast, and that need was a physical pain that wrenched apart her whole body.

In the end, hours after Giles had gone home, they let her see him, afraid that if they didn’t she would work herself up into a fever anyway.

The nurse who wheeled her down to the prem unit warned her what to expect.

‘He’s very small,’ she told her quietly. ‘And very frail, I’m afraid.’

Lucy didn’t hear her. ‘My child … my son.’ Her body tensed, aching with love and fear.

The small room seemed so full of equipment that the five incubators were almost lost among the paraphernalia of monitors and tubes.

The nurse on duty stood up, frowning a little as Lucy was wheeled in, but Lucy was oblivious to her presence. All her attention was concentrated on the tiny baby in its incubator; the sole occupant of the small ward, her baby … her son. Without realising what she was doing she stood up, her body trembling as she left the wheelchair, ignoring the protests of the attendant nurse, the weakness of her own body forgotten as she stumbled across to the incubator.

The baby was lying on his back, his head turned towards her, his eyes open. She shuddered as she saw the mass of tubes attached to him and the way his tiny, fragile body fought to take in oxygen. His entire body from head to toe was only a little longer than a grown man’s hand, his limbs so delicate and fragile that his vulnerability made Lucy tremble with anguish and love.

Her impulse to reach into the incubator and pick him up was so strong that she could barely resist it. Her body ached with tenderness and despair. The intensity of the emotion that gripped her was like nothing she had ever experienced or imagined experiencing. Every other aspect of her life faded into oblivion as she looked at her baby and saw him look back at her. The pain of wanting to reach out and touch him, to hold him, and of knowing that for his sake she could not do so, that to even attempt to do so would be to endanger his life, filled her whole body.

As she watched him she prayed for his survival and knew that she would sacrifice anything, even her own life, for him, and the fact that she had once not wanted him or any other child was forgotten in the wave of love that swamped her. She stood motionlessly watching him, pleading silently.

Please God, let him live. Let him live. The sin, the guilt is mine. Please don’t punish him because I thought I didn’t want him.

But her prayers went unanswered. He was a strong baby, they told her compassionately later, but just not strong enough. He had been born too soon and his body was just not developed enough to sustain him outside the womb.

Lucy knew before they came to tell her that he had gone. She had spent every moment they allowed her in the unit, watching over him, afraid even to look away from him, silently, fiercely supporting him with her strength and her love, willing him to go on living, but finally the staff overruled her protests that she must stay with him, and she was wheeled back to her bed. She had lost a good deal of blood, they reminded her, and she was still far from fully recovered herself.

When Giles arrived she wept and begged him to make them let her stay with Nicholas, and when Giles told her that he agreed with the staff that she must recoup some of her own strength she turned away from him and refused to speak to him.

The rift that had developed between them while she was pregnant seemed to have deepened with Nicholas’s premature birth.

Although she did not know it, Giles blamed himself for not being there with her when she went into labour. At the back of his mind lay the feeling that somehow, if he had been, things might have been different.

It had shocked him when he arrived at the hospital to see how ill Lucy looked. He had been so desperately afraid then that he might lose her that for a moment he had actually forgotten their child.

Their child. His heart ached with the weight of his love for Nicholas. A love he couldn’t find the words to express, especially not to Lucy.

Nicholas’s birth had changed her completely. The girl who had so fiercely resented her pregnancy had become a sad-eyed, haunted woman who seemed barely aware that anyone other than her child existed. She seemed to have distanced herself from him completely. When he touched her she winced away from him. He could see in her eyes now her anger and bitterness.

‘Giles, please. I must be with him … I must.’

Her voice had started to rise, panic flooding her as the need inside her fought against her physical weakness, her inability to get up and go to her child.

Tears filled her eyes. She didn’t want to cry, she wanted to scream, to rage, to vent her anger and her fear, to somehow make them understand that she must be with her child, but already a nurse was hurrying towards her bed, holding her wrist, telling her firmly that she must not upset herself.

She tried to fight off the drug they gave her, forcing her weighted eyelids not to drop, focusing bitterly on Giles’s blurring face as she lost her battle.

She woke up abruptly hours later, her heart pounding, her mouth dry. It was just gone two o’clock, and she knew immediately why she was awake.

She heard the door to the ward open quietly and saw the nurse coming in, heading for the small curtained area at the end of the ward. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t; the pain was too great for that.

Giles. Where was Giles? Why wasn’t he here with her? Didn’t he care?

Outside the premature-baby unit, Giles leaned back in his chair, blinking his eyes rapidly. He couldn’t believe it was over. They had told him to go home after they had given Lucy the sleeping drug but he hadn’t been able to do so. He could still see the way she had pleaded with them to let her be with Nicholas.

Had she known? He shuddered, weighed down by his sense of guilt and failure, and the ache of loss. Their child, their son … his son. Born and now dead.

He stayed until a doctor gently insisted that he must leave; that he must go home and rest because Lucy would need him when she woke up and was told the news.

Giles wanted to tell her how much he wanted to hold his child … how much he wanted to lift him from his cradle of plastic and metal—after all, they could not save him now—and hold him against his body, flesh to flesh, father to child. That he wanted to pour out to him all the love he felt for him, but he just could not find the words, and so instead he nodded and stumbled out of the hospital into the cold of the pre-dawn summer morning.

They would not wake Lucy until nine, they told him kindly. That would give him time to have a brief rest and get back to be with her.

It was not his fault, nor the hospital’s, that Lucy did not need to be wakened.

She waited until the nurses changed shift. There was a new nurse, a trainee, the ward was busy, and it was easy for Lucy to convince the girl that she could manage to get to the bathroom unaided.

It took her a long time to make her way to the prem unit. She was still very weak. They hadn’t told her just how much blood she had lost or just how much danger she had actually been in, and Lucy assumed that it was the drug they had given her that made her feel so unsteady.

The nurse in charge of the unit didn’t see her until it was too late. The tubes had been removed from the incubator and Nicholas had been dressed in a set of minute doll’s clothes, a white knitted romper suit embroidered with teddy bears in pale blue and yellow.

The mother of another premature baby had given the clothes to the hospital, and the nurse, who knew that she should have the strength to detach herself from her emotions, had cried a little as she dressed him in them.

She saw Lucy and knew immediately that there was no need to tell her anything, and she marvelled, not for the first time, at the power of maternal love. Silently she settled Lucy with Nicholas in her arms and then went to her office to ring Lucy’s ward.

His body felt soft and warm so that it was almost possible for Lucy to believe that he was simply asleep. She touched his face. His skin felt so soft. He looked like Giles. She was sure of it. It was only when she kissed him that her control broke, her body racked by the shudders of pain that ached through her.

By the time Giles arrived they had sedated her, and, what with his concern over her and the arrangements for the funeral she insisted on holding, it never occurred to Giles to tell her how he had watched over Nicholas for her, or that he had been with him when he died.