Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [31]
Later at lunch, however, the temptation became too great.
‘I’m hoping the fact you’ve gained weight means you aren’t exercising too much. We’ll never know for sure that wasn’t the problem last time.’
Andrew and Douglas protested in perfect harmony:
‘Mum!’
‘Pamela!’
My husband, on the other hand, was the unenthusiastic backing singer who missed his cue.
‘Yes, Mum,’ he added, too belatedly for me to feel reassured.
‘Now Pamela, no-one feels worse about what happened than Ellie,’ said Douglas. ‘Comments like that are very unhelpful.’
‘Mmm,’ said Tony. Again I would have preferred more conviction.
On the way home in the car, I brought this conversation up again. ‘Thanks for all your support this afternoon when your mother tried to sheet home to me the blame for William.’
‘I did support you…Anyway, you should know by now what Mum’s like. She says these things just to get a reaction.’
‘Some things are off limits.’
‘I suppose so. The thing is I don’t believe this bullshit the doctors spout about our baby dying for “no reason”. There must have been a reason and I guess we can’t exclude anything you did…or I did for that matter.’
A cold fear settled in my stomach. Was Pamela’s poison finally hitting its mark? Or was it possible that in those long silences after we’d lost William he’d been thinking these treacherous thoughts all along?
‘The doctors aren’t saying it happened for no reason. Obviously there was a reason. They’re saying that there is no way of determining the reason and that it’s nobody’s fault. Why can’t you get that? Anyway, I’m not exercising this time, so you’ll just have to put up with me getting fat.’
‘I didn’t necessarily say it was the exercise but you could try eating a bit less.’
‘I can’t help it. I’m trying to eat healthily but I’m hungry all the time.’
‘I can see that. I think you ate more than me at lunchtime.’
‘I’m carrying your child, Tony. I think you could be a bit kinder about all this.’
***
Exercising was not the only thing off the agenda. During the last pregnancy, once we’d been given the green light by our obstetrician, we’d resumed love making. This time Tony declared that, as the doctors knew ‘crap all about anything’, he was not going to touch me.
At first I was in complete agreement. I was terrified something would happen to the baby and my libido disappeared just as it had when I’d been pregnant with William. However, as the pregnancy continued without complication I began to think this might be a mistake.
‘It doesn’t have to be intercourse. I could give you pleasure in other ways. You always said I was good at that.’
‘No, I don’t want to bother you. You’re always so tired these days,’ he’d say.
But by then I had begun to fear another reason.
Once the sex was out of the picture I was startled to realise how little we now touched in a non-sexual way. Was this an inevitable consequence of marriage and familiarity? I wasn’t sure about that. There were times I found him looking at me with an expression I didn’t understand and something he’d said to me years earlier kept coming to my mind: Judge me by my actions not my words.
Then it seemed, under his mother’s expert tutelage, Tony learnt the art of making comments. He had barely glanced at a pregnant woman before this time, but now began to observe how ‘so and so’s’ wife looked ‘great’ during pregnancy. (Great compared to whom was never explained.) In fact he felt it necessary to point out every woman he found attractive during this time. My name never made it on to the list.
I was never sure if this was deliberately designed to hurt me or just a consequence of his self-imposed sexual frustration. I never asked. My confidence eroded, I felt like a grub being poked at with a stick by a curious boy. All I could do was curl myself up in a ball and hope this barely comprehended threat went away.
Like Meggs the cat, I took my solace in food. In a gob-smacking act of perversity I chose to console myself the absolutely