The voice coach sits me down on a stool at the corner of the rehearsal room and presses my head towards my knees to stop me from fainting.
‘It can happen,’ she explains. ‘In pregnancy the hormonal changes can cause the vocal cords to swell. It can affect your range. You’ve been straining to reach the notes and that can cause a bleed. You should see a specialist, get it checked out. And definitely rest your voice for a while.’
Piers’s fury erupts with the force of an Atlantic storm. ‘What a complete disaster,’ he says when I tell him that evening, having seen a doctor who has confirmed both that I am pregnant and that I have what looks like a lesion on one of my vocal cords. I reach out to put my arms around him, desperately needing the reassurance of a hug, but he shakes me off.
‘You’ll have to get rid of it,’ he says, the heat of his rage turning to a cold, hard anger as he turns away to pour himself a large Scotch.
For a moment I’m confused and think he’s talking about the lesion. But then I’m dumbstruck with horror as I realise he means the baby. Abortion’s been legal for ten years now, but I haven’t even considered it as an option. I feel a connection to this child already, at once fiercely protective and lovingly tender.
He takes a gulp of whisky and goes on, ‘Get rid of it and then if you need an operation on your throat they can sort that out. You don’t want to lose this role.’
My head fills with white noise and I can’t think straight. And then, through the confusion and the fear, I hear a thread of my mother’s voice, singing the words of songs of love and loss in the kitchen at Keeper’s Cottage:
‘Will ye gang love and leave me noo?
Will ye forsake your ain love true?’
I know the answer to that question: there’s no doubt what Piers is going to do. He has already left this relationship.
And then the noise in my head clears and there is no doubt in my mind, either. I’m going to have this baby and I’m going to raise it on my own. Perhaps my voice will mend in time. The voice coach said there was a chance it would, as long as the damage I’ve done to it isn’t too bad. I’ll need to see a specialist to know. But now that will have to wait a few months. I have some savings set aside which, at a pinch, I can live off until the baby is born and then I can get my career going again. It isn’t over, just on hold. After all, other singers have combined children and a career. Why shouldn’t I?
The Scotch has loosened Piers’s tongue by now and when I tell him to leave he lets fly a stream of invective so bitter it makes me frightened for what he might do to our baby. He tells me he wants nothing to do with me ever again, that I am selfish to make this decision, that I’m just as self-centred as every other actress he’s ever met. ‘It’s probably not even my child.’ He pulls on his jacket and as he wrenches open the door, he flings back at me, ‘It’s not surprising they gave you that role – they clearly know a whore when they see one.’
I shut the door on his hateful words with a thud. The finality of the sound echoes off the walls. And then I collapse to the ground and lie curled on the grimy tiles of the hall floor, my knees drawn up to protect the flicker of new life in my belly as I sob into my hands. I feel completely alone.
But one thing’s for sure, my life is in London now. There’s no way I’m going back to Scotland.
Lexie, 1978
Thankfully Daisy’s slept, strapped into her car seat, ever since we passed Inverness. I know that means it won’t be easy getting her off to bed tonight, but I’d rather have the peace for the final miles. I turn off the cassette player, having grown heartily sick of our combined collection of nursery rhymes and West End show tunes over the two days that we’ve been in the car. The radio reception up here is non-existent, so I’m left with the humming of the engine and my own thoughts as the twisting road draws us north-westwards.
A sense of dread lodges itself in the pit of my stomach as we begin to approach the coast. I haven’t been back once since I left Keeper’s Cottage more than a dozen years ago. Of course, Mum came to see me several times during my career and from the way she went on about it, you’d have thought the journey down on the sleeper was the big event rather than watching her only child perform in Oklahoma! and Carousel. I suppose I always took it for granted that she’d be here, in the little stone croft house on the shores of Loch Ewe, if I ever wanted to come back. But coming back was something I definitely never wanted to do. I didn’t even have the strength to arrange a funeral service in the kirk when Mum died in the hospital in Inverness. It was easier – and far more practical – to have a simple service at the crematorium in the city. I could sense the disappointment and disapproval among the small band of villagers who made the journey to say their final farewells to Flora Gordon even as they shook my hand and muttered their condolences on that awful, empty day.