It was in bed on a Sunday morning in June that Christopher first felt the baby moving inside Angela. He was lying half awake with one hand on her belly. At first he felt no more than a fluttering, as though a fledgling were practising bird-flight from the safety of the nest. Then there was a movement, a slight shifting of position. Christopher was fully awake now and he tried to wake Angela, but she turned her belly away from him. He got out of bed and came around to Angela’s side. He peeled back the sheets and blankets and watched her belly. He loved the swelling of it, the recent definition of her womb. He held her belly with both hands and felt the child kick at the point where his thumbs were connected. He looked at the clock and noted the time: 8.13 AM He would remember that, he thought. Angela half woke and felt for the bed coverings, and Christopher pulled them over her and tucked them around her neck. He then went back to his side of the bed and lay down and wondered what it must be like to have a living thing inside you.
He called the child Catherine in his mind. He said it out loud. “Catherine,” then he said, again out loud, “Catherine Moore.” He wanted her to have his surname. Angela stirred.
“What?” She opened her eyes.
“How about Catherine?” he said.
“Catherine?” She didn’t understand, she didn’t know a Catherine.
“For our baby. Catherine. I felt her move, Angie.”
She turned over and buried her head in the pillow. He shouldn’t have named it, or felt it. It had been stirring inside her now for over a week. She hadn’t told him because these new stirrings were disgusting to her. She felt as though she was being consumed by an alien force. One that was swallowing her up and making her invisible.
“How about William, if it’s a boy?”
It was all he talked about lately. The baby.
She felt his hand sliding under her, then his left hand move over her back to link up with the right, and girdle her belly. She knew he was waiting for the baby to move again. He was as still as an angler waiting for a fish to bite. She got out of bed abruptly, breaking the circle of his arms, and went into the bathroom and stood under the shower. She washed her hair and shoulders and arms. She could not bring herself to touch her taut belly, or her blue-veined breasts, which had swollen so much that she no longer recognised them as her own. Under the noise of the rushing warm water she spoke to the baby. “I don’t want you, I don’t want you, I don’t want to be your mother.” Then she thumped the place on her belly where she had last felt movement. She thumped again and again until her fists ached and she was sure that the baby must be battered inside her. When she was towelling herself dry she avoided her belly and breasts, and let them dry naturally in the fresh warm air. She took her dressing gown off the hook on the bathroom door and put it on, and went downstairs to make the coffee.
While she waited for the percolator she listened to the floorboards creaking as Christopher moved around upstairs. She pictured his big sad face as he shaved and how very much sadder it would be when she told him that she no longer had his baby inside her. She laid four strips of raw bacon inside the grill pan, and put it under the grill. She watched the fat pour out and then frizzle and contract and harden, until each piece of bacon had changed its shape and texture and colour, and become something else.
When Christopher came into the kitchen, he was fully dressed; his hair was wet from the shower. He knew from the way Angela kept her back to him that something was wrong. The pregnancy book he had read had warned him that it was a time of ‘hormonal changes’ for Angela and he was to expect some ‘mood swings’. The book asked him to be patient and loving. He went to the stove where she was spooning hot fat over uncooked egg yolks and put his arms around her belly. He was astonished when she spun around and pushed him away. He had never seen an expression of hatred on her face before. It made her ugly and it frightened him into silence.
He set the breakfast table carefully, with the blue and white striped crockery and the sleek cutlery they had bought for the new house in the Habitat shop that had recently opened in their town. He took a loaf out of the pine bread box and cut some slices of bread with the new Sabatier bread knife on the new ash bread board. The kitchen was full of sunlight, and he felt like a man in the Habitat catalogue until he noticed that the keen blade of the knife had sliced into the top of his thumb on his left hand and that crimson blood was bubbling out and dripping on to the last slice of bread in the small stack he’d cut.
He took his injury to show Angela, then to the sink where he watched his diluted blood sliding down the plughole. When she’d seen the blood flowing Angela had said, “Lucky you.” Christopher was surprised. But of course, she must have meant to say, “Unlucky you.” It was a slip of the tongue. He blamed the hormones. She would be perfectly all right when the baby was born. He wished Habitat was open on Sundays. It was time they sorted the spare room out and made a place for the baby, for Catherine or William. But preferably Catherine.
A week later she told him that she was going on a training course to learn about the computers that were going to revolutionise the travel industry. He believed her. But he said, “Is it worth it for you, Angie? I mean, you’ll be leaving your work soon, won’t you, when the baby’s here?”
Three days later he had helped her to pack a small overnight bag. She had removed two hundred pounds from her building society account and caught a train to Leamington Spa.
A mini-bus had picked her and six other women up from the station. They had not spoken to each other on the journey to the Elms. There was nothing to be said.