So I said yes.
Janice took me to John Lewis in Edinburgh and bought me a maternity pillow. We went for lunch in a proper restaurant. She bought massage oil and iron supplements. She put me on the train to Leuchars at the end of the day and told me I was a bloody brave young woman and should be proud of myself.
‘Please come again?’ I begged, as I boarded the train.
She smiled and said of course, as if it were no bother to travel hundreds of miles. And she did, the very next week. And the week after.
I looked forward to her visits. She was becoming a friend.
I had made the right decision. I knew that, even in the middle of the night when I was faced with the reality of my body, with the miniature human beginning to kick and tumble. She would have a better life with the Rothschilds. Not only were they good, kind people, they were ready for her, and I was not.
Granny called often to try to make me change my mind, even though she knew it was pointless. She sounded defeated every time we ended a phone call, and my grandmother was not the sort of woman to sound defeated.
She gave up eventually. We agreed I’d go and stay with her for the summer when my second year finished, and I’d have the baby in London in early September. Then I’d stay at her house until I felt ready to rejoin my coursemates in St Andrews for our final year. She even had one of her toy boys paint the spare room for me.
Sometimes, I would wonder if Granny was actually right – that we could, somehow, do it together. Or I would think about what Jill was still saying, which was that we could muddle together to bring up a baby in our little student house. Vivi, our housemate, stayed up all night smoking pot and talking to her boyfriend in Korea – she’d be able to do the night feeds, no problem! But when I woke, and heard Jill entertaining some man in her bedroom, or spoke to Granny on the phone and heard her age in every word she spoke, I knew it was hopeless. Jill was twenty. Granny was eighty.
In the Easter holidays Janice invited me to stay at their place in Northumberland, so I could ‘relax’。
I had never forgotten how beautiful it was down there, with those enormous sandy beaches and endless rock pools and castles jutting out from the coast like dreams. I said yes.
I arrived in Alnmouth on a bright Wednesday morning in late April. Janice wasn’t due until later, so I let myself in with a key she’d hidden in the coaching arch. A coaching arch, I thought. A coaching arch! The house I had inherited from Dad in Plymouth was barely wide enough to accommodate a front door.
Inside it was beautiful. There were sheepskins and huge kilims and those thick creamy sofas you only ever saw in magazines. I showered in a sparkling cubicle that looked as if it had been installed that morning.
Later, I sat in the silence, looking out over the estuary at dripping farmland. This is going to be your holiday home, I told my baby. This is where you’ll learn the sea. The baby must have woken from a sleep just at that moment, because something shifted on the right-hand side of my pelvis.
Sudden tears burned my eyes. She would come here with a bucket and spade, just as I had. She would beg for ice creams and waffles and deckchairs she’d be far too busy to sit on. She would play on the swings down by the estuary, would be taken for tea at the pub up the road, would ask, all the way up the M1, Are we nearly there yet?
‘Hello?’ Janice’s voice called from downstairs. ‘Emily?’
I swallowed. ‘Hi! I’m here!’
‘Great!’ Janice shouted. ‘Lets go for a walk, it’s wild out there! Sunny and windy and glorious! I have food!’
We sheltered in an old sheep hut to eat the food Janice had brought. Outside, a storm raged back and forth across the beach.
We talked easily as rain pelted the old stone tiles. In my heart, hope grew.
We spotted the crab skeleton at the far end of the beach, soon after our picnic lunch. Medium-sized, dead, alone on the strandline amid deposits of driftwood and dried spiral wrack. There were razorshell fragments stuck to its abdomen, a bleached twist of trawler net hooked around a lifeless antenna, and peculiar, signal-red spots on its body and claws.