The Little Prisoner_ A Memoir - Jane Elliott [45]
As always, I grabbed the chance to feel optimistic. If I did become pregnant, perhaps Richard would leave me alone at last. Surely even he wouldn’t want to do things to a woman who was pregnant by another man. I hoped this might finally be the end of it all, that he had finally grown tired of me and was willing to let me go and lead a life of my own.
Paul was just as keen on the idea if it meant that we would get a place of our own and be away from Richard’s tyrannical whims. Although he knew nothing about what Richard was getting up to with me in secret, he knew that he was an unpleasant, unpredictable and manipulative man to have in your life; he just put up with it in order to be with me and did his best to keep his head down.
For the next three months Paul and I kept trying for a baby, while Richard was careful to use a condom whenever he had sex with me. Each month I was disappointed and then in the third month my period was late. I did a test and it came up positive. I was so happy and so excited at the thought of having a baby of my own. Mum and Richard seemed to be as excited as I was, which was a bit of a puzzle, but I decided to make the most of their approval while it lasted. Maybe once I was a mother everything would change and they would start treating me as an equal.
Just because I’d succeeded in doing what he apparently wanted me to do, however, didn’t mean that I was let off my other duties to Richard. ‘Now you’re pregnant, we don’t need to use condoms any more,’ he informed me as soon as we were alone. My heart sank. How could I actually have believed that things were going to get better? He had managed to find a way of making them even worse.
In my confused state I became convinced that if I had sex with Richard while I was pregnant the baby might come out half his and half Paul’s. I think I knew that couldn’t happen, but that was what it felt like. I begged him to go on using condoms or to withdraw, but he wasn’t going to listen to anything I had to say. I felt that I was being subjected to the final humiliation. Just when I should have been at my happiest he had managed to make me feel the most suicidal I had ever felt.
I had always harboured ideas of killing myself, even as a child. Almost every day when I walked home from school with Hayley I used to pause on a bridge that went over the park, a place where all the junkies used to hang out, and talk about the attractions of jumping off rather than going home for one more night of hell. Now the idea of oblivion, with no more pain, heartache and humiliation, was becoming even more attractive.
All through the pregnancy, as I grew bigger and more ungainly, I kept believing that Richard would soon stop wanting sex, but it never happened. When my bump became too big for him to lie on top of me he would make me sit in an armchair with my bottom at the front of the cushions and he would kneel on the floor in front of me in order to get what he wanted.
Richard bullied Paul into moving into the house full time, even though he hated Richard as much as anyone else, and then set about making money out of him, charging him rent and then extra for his share of the food, gas and electric. Although he had been living at home with his mum, Paul was used to his freedom and to being treated like an adult. When Mum and Richard told him he could only bath once a day, he couldn’t believe it.
‘I have two showers a day,’ he told them, ‘one in the morning and one when I get back from work.’
‘You’ll have to pay if you want us to put the immersion on just for you,’ Richard informed him.
I was deeply grateful to Paul for loving me