Blood Ties: Part 3 of 3: Family is not always a place of safety

Once in the surgery, Kathleen looked around and was struck once again by how it seemed as if there must be some evidence of her condition in her face. She was the youngest there by decades, bar a frazzled-looking mother with a toddler whose nose was streaming thick yellow mucus and who was fidgeting and grizzling at her constantly. Everyone else was elderly and gave the pair a wide berth.

And everyone – everyone – looked at her. Quite without any compunction or subtlety either, a couple of elderly ladies not even moving their legs out of the way as she passed them. She carefully stepped over them, conscious of all the eyes following her progress, all of them wondering, no doubt, why a young girl like her was here, taking up the precious time they might be allocated. She had always hated going to the doctor’s anyway, having a healthy fear of illness and death, and had not been inside the place since she was thirteen or fourteen when Irene had taken her because of a rash. It had turned out to be German measles and she remembered it well. Being stuck in the stuffy bedroom for days, banished in case of contagion, crying like a baby, wanting her mum.

The surgery looked exactly the same now; a tiny, too-hot room, with ragged posters on the wall that flapped in greeting as the outer door was opened, and a hole in the wall at the end that opened into a back office, at which the greeting was invariably more hostile. Between the two, the room was given over to high-backed bench seating – one row of it taking up the length of the remaining walls, and two benches, back to back, down the middle.

She gave her name and took the last remaining seat available, thankfully in the corner, and buried her nose in one of the magazines that was piled just beside it, reading an article about a man who made mosaics out of old plates, and hoping no one would try to engage her in conversation.

A good twenty minutes passed, and, in that time, the room emptied, and before long, with more leaving than were now shuffling in, there were just four patients left in the room. None looked ill, any more than she realised she must look pregnant, and she was just biding her time wondering what might be wrong with them when the receptionist in the office beyond called her name.

Kathleen took her notes from her – though woe betide you if you ever dared to look at them – and made her way into the corridor to Dr Jackson’s door. The name was familiar, though she couldn’t remember having ever seen him herself, and when she entered the room she was dismayed to find a grizzled man, swivelling in a swivel chair, with hairs sprouting from his nose. She flushed from head to foot. He looked about a hundred. Where on earth would she begin?

‘Take a seat, young lady,’ said the doctor, taking the envelope of notes she proffered, but, before so much as glancing at them, he sat back and considered her over a pair of tortoiseshell glasses that sat at the end of his nose. Then he sat forward suddenly, startling her, and said, ‘So, what seems to be the trouble?’

Now she was here there seemed little point in beating around the bush, so she told him she’d been feeling sick and thought that she might be pregnant, which unleashed a torrent of questions that came one after another, each more embarrassing than the last. When was her last period? Had she frequency? A desire to go for a wee more often than usual? Had she any breast tenderness? Giddiness? Any aversion to smells or food? And, almost as an afterthought, and which made her blush to her hair roots, a question about something that he seemed to have only just thought about: ‘I take it you are having regular sexual relations?’

Kathleen didn’t know where to look, let alone how to begin to answer, but her blush did the job for her instead. The doctor smiled then, and pulled her notes out, perhaps noticing her discomfort. Looking down at them and picking up a pen, he made a short note. ‘Well, yes, Kathleen,’ he said, glancing at the top of the envelope to get her name right. ‘Given what you’ve told me, and in the absence of other factors that might preclude it, I rather suspect that pregnant is precisely what you are.’

The doctor had made no comment nor asked a question about her marital status, for which Kathleen was extremely grateful. He must have known, though. No wedding ring. And he also knew her age, of course. So he knew. But he didn’t judge her. Or if he did, he didn’t seem to. She felt comforted by that, and felt a warmth for the kindly GP. A welcome warmth. The world at large would no doubt view it more coldly. The world at large and her father, no doubt. And her hated stepmother.

It was dark once again by the time Terry’s car pulled up outside, while Kathleen was pacing the little sitting room, at sixes and sevens about what to say and do. That she was pregnant was no longer in question. She’d gone back and worked out how long it had been since her last period and had also realised what she suspected might have been her downfall; that the light bleeding she’d experienced in December had not been a period. That was all so obvious now – how stupid had she been to think so? So she’d blithely reassured him of her dates … She cursed herself anew.

And now she’d been enlightened as to what the symptoms of pregnancy might be, it was all too obvious that she had the full set. Again and again, she’d considered running back to the phone box to speak to Sally, but again and again she decided against going out, as it was freezing, and there seemed little point. It would keep.

She knew what she knew – that she was almost certainly expecting a baby, that an appointment would be sent to her so she could attend the local hospital, and that once she had it, she should attend her first antenatal visit – that was, of course, assuming she didn’t have a period in the meantime (or any other worrying symptoms that might mean it was something else), in which case she should hurry back to the doctor’s, and the appointment at the hospital would be cancelled.

It all seemed so matter of fact, so calm and calculated, so clinical, that such excitement as she’d dared to feel (and now she could finally admit it to herself – she’d been excited above all things) had been swept away with all the efficiency of the family-planning lady who’d come to the school and whose lecture now came so readily to mind. Her with her dire pronouncements about the perils of ‘letting boys have their way with you’, and about the terrible, mortal shame of being an unmarried mother, which would see her shunned and reviled everywhere she went, and about the agonies of childbirth.

And as the minutes ticked by, she found she could only concentrate on such negatives. They’d been together less than half a year, they’d been living together barely a month, and she realised she didn’t know if Terry even wanted children. Surely if he had, he and Iris would have already had some? She just couldn’t imagine he’d be happy about it, not becoming a first-time father at his age. Now he really would have to support her, despite her claims to independence – at least when the baby was little. And not just her either. A baby he probably didn’t want as well.

She heard Terry’s key in the front door, and the sound of it swinging open and then shutting, before getting up to go into the hall and welcome him home. And as she passed Iris’s picture she gazed into the other woman’s eyes, feeling a sudden connection to the girl who’d once loved the man she loved – and an unspoken question formed on her lips. Will it be alright? Do you think so?

She went into the hallway and watched as he hung his coat up on the row of hooks, the cold air from outside eddying around as he did so. He turned to greet her.

‘Hello, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘How you doing now? Any better?’

‘Sort of …’ she began, but then, overcome with emotion, turned back towards the sitting room. He followed her in there.

‘Love, what’s up?’ he said, placing a hand on her shoulder. ‘What’s the matter?’

She turned to face him and he immediately put his arms around her. ‘I knew I shouldn’t have gone to work today! Look at you! You’re shivering! Come on. Sit down. Take the weight off. Damn. I shouldn’t have left you. You didn’t go into work, did you?’ he wanted to know, urging her towards the settee.

Kathleen sat down, even though sitting down was that last thing she wanted to do. She felt like a coiled spring in a jack-in-the-box, ready to explode at any moment. Just tell him, she ordered herself. Just get it over with!

‘Terry, I’m not ill any more. Well, sort of not. No, no. That’s wrong. I’m not ill. I’m fine. But I’m …’

‘What?’ His eyes bored into hers, his hands gripped her own.

She dropped her gaze. ‘Oh God, I don’t even know how to tell you …’

Terry’s frown deepened, the concern written all over his face. ‘Don’t scare me, love,’ he said, letting go of her hands to hold her face up to look at him. ‘What is it, Kathy? You can tell me anything. Have you been to the doctor’s? I knew it …’

‘Terry, I told you. I’m fine. It’s just …’

He gripped her hands again. ‘Now you’re really scaring me … What’s happened? Is it something I’ve done? Is that it?’

Kathleen shook her head. He was getting all the wrong ideas and she needed to toughen up and just tell him. ‘God, no! Terry, no. Nothing like that! There’s nothing wrong with us. Or me …’ She dredged a shy smile from somewhere. ‘Well, unless you count being pregnant as an illness.’

Terry’s mouth gaped open, and he let go of her hands once again. Then, finally, he spoke. ‘You’re pregnant?’

She nodded.

‘You mean we’re going to have a young ’un? But you said …’

‘I did my sums wrong.’

He cupped her face in his hands again. ‘Oh my God, Kathy! Oh, my God! We are, aren’t we? We’re going to have a kid! You’re actually pregnant!’

She placed her hands over his. They were still cold. She would warm them up for him. ‘You’re not cross, then?’

‘Cross? Why ever would I be cross?’

‘Because I’m seventeen … because it’s so soon … because we’re not …’ No. She couldn’t even think of saying the other thing. And didn’t need to say any more anyway, because, whooping with joy, he had hauled her back up onto her feet, and was spinning her around and around the centre of the sitting room, like her dad used to do when she was little. Which made her giddy. Almost faint. But she no longer cared.

Chapter 20 (#udc4ae593-7bdf-5ac5-84c0-9fd6222baa85)

It was a night like no other; as if she’d been whisked to a parallel universe, where the cares of the world no longer existed for either of them. They’d talked long into the night about the past, present and future, about getting married – Terry aghast – ‘I can’t believe you thought I wouldn’t want to marry you!’ – and much later, with Tiddles banished from the bedroom – a rare sanction, about which she was most indignant – they made love, keeping the world further at bay.

But with the morning – another alarm-shrill in the blackness of the bedroom – came the inevitable reality that the world wouldn’t go away. Was very much present, in fact, in the shape of the fact that Kathleen must now go and tell her father.

‘Well, you’re not doing that on your own,’ Terry said as he sat and ate his porridge. Once again, she was poleaxed by the intensity of her nausea, but now she knew the cause she felt better able to deal with it. It would be gone in a bit and, in the meantime, she’d ride it … well, as best she could. Smelling his breakfast was already making her retch.

‘I wasn’t planning on it,’ she told him. ‘I want you there right beside me.’

‘As I should be. As I aim to be. Let’s go round there tonight.’

Kathleen nodded. ‘I was thinking the same. I want to catch him on his own. I don’t think I can face her …’

‘I’ll bloody well face her.’

‘I know, love, but I think it’s best if we leave Dad to tell her, don’t you?’

He frowned. ‘Much as it’s even her business, love.’

‘It is, Terry. I’m still her stepdaughter.’

‘And doesn’t she let you know it! But, no, if that’s the way you want to play it, then that’s fine by me. More than happy to knock the witch off her bloody broomstick!’

It was a Thursday. Which was good, because it was games night at the pub, and she knew her dad would be down half an hour before opening to brush the billiard table and polish the balls before the match.