She looks around her. This early, the square is empty and quiet, save for a cow’s distant lowing. There is no one to see her go in. She looks down at her feet, watching ants serpentine across the cobbles.
Taking a breath, Kate opens the door and is hit by the smell of disinfectant. The waiting room is cold and whitewashed, the plastic chairs and tired noticeboard a stark contrast to the building’s Tudor exterior. The space is dominated by a large desk, behind which a woman sits tapping away at a computer. The muffled sounds of conversation come from behind a heavy door: the consulting room, according to a gleaming brass plate.
‘Name?’ asks the receptionist, a thin woman with a vulpine face.
‘Kate,’ she says. ‘Kate Ayres.’
The receptionist’s eyebrows lift as she looks at Kate properly for the first time.
‘The niece,’ she says. It isn’t a question.
‘Um – yes. Did you know my great-aunt? Violet?’
But the woman is looking back at her computer screen.
‘If you could take a seat, please. The doctor will be with you in a minute.’
Kate sits heavily on one of the plastic chairs. She wishes she had some water; her stomach roils, and there is a strange taste in her mouth. Metallic, like blood, or even dirt. She’s been waking up with it. It reminds her of something, a childhood memory that she can’t quite hold on to.
The door of the consulting room opens.
‘Miss Ayres?’
The doctor is male – in his late sixties, perhaps; weathered cheeks shaded by white stubble. A stethoscope around his neck. Panic bubbles up in her.
She’d asked for a female doctor, hadn’t she? Yes – she’s sure of it. The receptionist – likely the same woman staring at her now – had assured her that there would be a female doctor. ‘Dr Collins is only available Tuesdays and Thursdays,’ she’d said on the phone. ‘So you’ll have to come in on one of those days if you want to see a woman, otherwise it’s Dr Radcliffe.’
‘Ah – sorry,’ she says now as she rises from the seat, wincing at the feel of her thighs unsticking from the plastic. ‘I think I was booked in to see Dr Collins?’
‘Couldn’t make it in,’ says the male doctor, gesturing for her to follow him into the consulting room. ‘Sick child. Always the way with that one, I’m afraid.’
She hesitates. Part of her wants to leave; to ask for an appointment with the female doctor another day. But she’s here now. And she’s not sure she trusts herself to come back.
She follows the doctor into the consulting room.
The gel is cold on her skin. Dr Radcliffe has already drawn volumes of blood from her arm, prodding and sticking her like a laboratory specimen.
‘Just relax,’ he says, running the ultrasound wand over her stomach. He moves closer and she smells his breath, stale with coffee. ‘Your husband couldn’t make it?’
She has an image of Simon’s face over hers, his hand resting on the base of her throat as he moves inside her. His cells travelling up into her body, ready to tether her to him forever.
‘I’m not married,’ she says, blinking the memory away.
‘Your boyfriend, then. He didn’t want to come?’ There is a strange whooshing sound in the room, almost like the beating of wings.
‘No, I don’t … what’s that noise?’
The doctor smiles, pressing the wand harder into her stomach.
‘That’， he says, ‘is the heartbeat. Your baby’s heartbeat.’
There is a plummeting sensation inside her.
‘Heartbeat? I thought it was … too early for that.’
‘Hmm, you’re between ten and twelve weeks along, I’d say. Here, take a look.’
He gestures to the blinking monitor, where her womb undulates in grey and white. For a moment she can’t make sense of the image, it’s like static. Then she sees it: a pearly glimmer, pupa-shaped, almost. The foetus.
Her mouth is so dry that it’s hard to get the words out.
‘Can you tell it … the baby’s sex?’
The doctor chuckles.
‘A bit too soon for that, I’m afraid. You’ll have to come back in a few weeks.’
There is something else she wanted – planned – to ask. But now, with the doctor’s liver-flecked hands on her stomach, the room filled with the sound of the baby’s heartbeat, it feels … impossible.
The question shrivels inside her.
The doctor looks at her strangely, as if he has read her thoughts.
‘All done,’ he says abruptly, handing her a piece of paper towel. ‘You can clean yourself up.’
He is silent as he enters information on a computer, carefully labels the ruby-red vials of her blood.
‘You look a bit like her,’ he says after a while. ‘Your great-aunt, I mean. Violet. Similar sort of eyes – just the hair that’s different. Hers was dark when she was younger.’
‘It’s dyed.’
‘You’ll have to stop doing that. Bad for the baby.’ He goes back to his labelling.
‘Did you treat her, then? My aunt.’
The doctor pauses, fiddles with the stethoscope around his neck.
‘Once or twice, when Dr Collins wasn’t in – she was her patient, really. Only in recent years, though. Before that I think she went to a surgery out of town – she only started coming here when my father died. The first Dr Radcliffe. He started the practice.’
Finished with his labelling, the doctor gets up to usher her out of the consulting room.
‘See Mrs Dinsdale on your way out, please, so you can book in for the next appointment. We’ll want you back in eight weeks.’
Back in the waiting room, Kate looks at the noticeboard again, at the pamphlets on display at the receptionist’s desk. But there’s none of the information she is looking for.
‘Will you book in for the next appointment today?’ asks the receptionist.
‘Um. Actually, I was wondering’， Kate lowers her voice, glancing over at an elderly woman in the waiting room, ‘if you have any information about … termination services.’
The receptionist slides a leaflet across the counter, her eyes narrowed.
‘Thank you,’ says Kate. She pauses. She wants to leave, to get away from the woman’s cold stare, but her bladder is tugging at her painfully. ‘Is there a toilet I can use?’
A nod at the corridor to the left.
She washes her hands, grimacing at the chemical smell of the soap. As she cups water from the tap and drinks, snatches of conversation from the waiting room float back to her.
‘Did she ask for what I think she did?’ An unfamiliar voice – the elderly female patient.
Kate freezes. She doesn’t want to hear this. Her cheeks sting with shame.
‘Can’t say I’m surprised,’ the receptionist is saying. ‘Being from that family.’
‘Who is she?’
‘That’s Violet’s great-niece.’
‘Really?’ says the old woman. ‘Didn’t know Violet had any family, save for himself up at the big house. Though not sure he counts for much.’
‘I wonder if she has it, too.’
‘They all do, don’t they? That Weyward lot. Ever since the first one.’