The Rachel Incident(54)

“Okay.”

“It’s a silly thing. They sang ‘Just the Two of Us’ together. It’s a bit of a lame private joke.”

My heart thudded and my armpits began to sweat. Fred Byrne’s stricken face came back to me, his soft voice telling me that he was always disappointing his wife. The psychological heaviness of sex with her that followed their many pregnancy attempts.

I became extremely nauseous, a symptom of both my nerves and the fact that I was—unbeknownst to myself—eight weeks pregnant. I sat down on her kitchen chair.

“Can I have a glass of water, please?”

“Sure.” She looked worried, and fetched a jug of filtered water from the fridge. She put a heavy-bottomed glass in front of me. It felt expensive. “Is something else wrong, Rachel?”

I took a long glug of water. “I’m just not feeling so well lately. Ever since the new job.”

“Is it that bad?”

“It’s a call centre,” I said. “I need to find a way out.”

“I really wish there was something I could do for you, but absolutely nowhere is hiring. I heard my company is taking on unpaid interns who actually have master’s degrees. It’s a terrible time to start a career.”

Deenie said this like I had chosen 2010 to start looking for a job, against all better business advice from my accountants.

“What about…other editors like you? Slush pile reading?”

“I don’t know. No one likes to admit they need help, and it’s not…it’s not a very well-paid industry as it is. I don’t think people can afford to employ someone in the way I did for you.”

I smarted at this, this note of charity in her voice. The way I did for you. Deenie had underpaid me hugely. Exploited me, really.

“Maybe at the dinner next week you could make a few contacts. Get your face seen. It will be a lot of publishing people.”

“How’s Fred?” I asked, feeling vomity already, and even more so at the thought of pecking away at Deenie’s contacts like a crow over a dead body.

“Oh, fine.” She furrowed her brow briefly. “I don’t know. He’s a bit international man of mystery sometimes. I think he’s a bit disappointed about Kensington. There was a piece in the paper about Dad’s book and…Oh, I don’t know.”

“What did it say?”

“Oh”—she waved her hand—“about how I’m the daughter of a poet and I married an author.”

“Okay?”

“And, well”—she rolled her eyes, to let me know that the article was definitely full of shit—“the kind of author Fred is. It was some nothingy aside about him being…ah. Middlebrow, I think was the word.”

She looked at me, slightly desperate, hoping for a contradiction.

“That’s bollocks,” I said dutifully.

Even through my nausea, it was curious that James had never brought this up. Maybe he didn’t even know. Was Dr. Byrne really so in love with James, or was he just a balm for his ego? Did having a young lover and the hatred of the press make him feel like Oscar Wilde, or something?

“The sales have been a bit…well, book sales overall have been down. As you know.”

Another wave of sickness passed over me. I felt like I had been riding in a too-hot car for too long, over bumpy concrete and twisting roads. “Can you open the window or something?” I said, putting my hands over my eyes. “Sorry, this is embarrassing. I just feel…”

Deenie opened the sliding door of the kitchen. The air was dead and didn’t offer much relief.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” I said at last, and the words were a surprise to me. I was not a vomiting person. I was a headaches and diarrhoea sort of person. The last time I had vomited was the night before Carey left, and the time before that was at a birthday party when I was twelve.

I went into the bathroom and kneeled in front of the toilet. But I got terrible stage fright. I couldn’t stop thinking about Deenie in the kitchen, listening to me abuse her lovely bathroom. I stayed on the floor for ten minutes then heard Deenie go out into the garden, obviously trying to give me privacy.

At this point, it was habit to go through Deenie’s bathroom cabinet. It was as instinctive as washing my hands. Sudocrem, more ovulation strips, a box of hair dye for covering greys. That was quite exciting. I had seen it before, but never inspected it properly. I was quite fair, so hadn’t ever considered the drawbacks of Deenie’s dramatic dark brown locks. I took it down and revealed another rectangular box hiding behind it.

There, with a thin film of dust coating the cardboard, was a Clearblue pregnancy test.

It had obviously been there a long time. When I took it down, the dust around it left a fine imprint, like the chalk outline of a body.

Digital results—five days early!

It was the first pregnancy test I had ever seen outside of a pharmacy shelf. I had never taken one, never had a friend who asked me to buy one for her, never held a hand while she waited for the results. I knew you pissed on them, and that was all I knew. You always rush past these things in Boots, never wanting to appear too interested in the sexual health section.

I don’t know when the realisation dawned on me, except that I felt a cold trickle of sweat slide from the hair underneath my ponytail and down my neck. My heart started to beat, hard and heavy in my ears. It was like my body knew before I did. I started counting weeks. The sickly wave came over me again.