‘That sounds about right,’ the nurse replies and the reassurance in her voice makes me look up at Sascha who is, in turn staring at the monitor.
‘There’s your baby,’ the nurse says pointing at the screen.
All I can see is a small white blotch.
‘Oh my God,’ Sascha whispers.
At that moment we start to hear the baby’s heartbeat and it feels as though it’s the only sound in the universe. Relief washes over me and when I look over at Sascha she’s laughing and crying at the same time.
‘That’s a good strong heartbeat,’ the nurse says.
She goes to get the doctor who tells Sascha that as far as they can tell everything is fine and lists a few reasons why she could have been bleeding.
‘It was relatively light,’ he says. ‘You say there wasn’t any pain and baby seems fine so don’t worry, Mrs Jacobson. Is it possible you’ve been doing too much?’
Sascha shrugs and looks a bit guilty.
‘Very possible,’ I reply.
Dr Hargreaves checks his notes. ‘You’ve an appointment for another scan next week,’ he says. ‘So I suggest that you go home and we’ll reassess when we see you next week.’
Sascha starts to get up off the bed.
‘And please, Mrs Jacobson,’ he says, ‘get as much rest as possible.’
‘Who has time to rest?’ Sascha asks when he’s gone. ‘I bet he doesn’t rest.’
‘He’s not eleven weeks pregnant with a much-longed-for baby,’ I reply. ‘You’ll be resting from now on if I have to tie you to the bed.’
‘Oooh kinky,’ she replies, picking up her bag. Sascha is very clearly back to her old self. ‘Right let’s go and see what Marcus is up to,’ she says walking down the corridor ahead of me.
I groan inwardly. The last thing I need is Sascha asking Marcus a bunch of nosy questions. All I can hope is that Marcus will get us home as quickly as he got us here.
14
I wake up early again the next morning to the sound of rain battering the windows. I don’t seem to be able to sleep past 5.30am at all at the moment so I get up and I make myself a cup of hot lemon, listening out for sounds of life from the living room where Marcus is sleeping. I’m dreading him waking up and having to have the inevitable conversation with him, the conversation I put off last night because I was too tired and too wound up. All I’d wanted to do when we got back to the Bay was to make sure Sascha was OK, work out what to do about Marcus and go to bed. My desire to sleep overtook my desire to speak to Marcus so I gave him some blankets and directed him to the sofa. This flat has become a refuge for waifs and strays – it’s hard to believe that only a week ago I was feeling lonely.
But in an hour or two Marcus will wake up and I’ll have to face the conversation I hoped I’d never have to have.
When Marcus left I didn’t understand what had happened and I wanted him to explain it to me properly. But now I realise that perhaps he couldn’t explain it to me, that perhaps he just knew in his heart or in his gut that he had to take a break from his life and go to Thailand, just as I’d known – after he left and after Moby’s started pressuring James and Miranda – that I had to find a way to buy the café myself.
In the four years that Marcus and I were together I was able to pretend, by living vicariously through him, that my life was exactly as it should be. I was able to pretend that I was happy, that I was in the right career, that my PhD was going well. Marcus was so focused, his PhD from Columbia a huge success, his post-doctorate research going well – but I knew that at home he could be anxious about his work, worried that it wouldn’t be well received and constantly concerned that he didn’t fit into the department at York. He made me feel that my own anxieties were normal, that my own career must be going well because, after all, nobody had said it wasn’t.
I had thought, on the night that he told me he was leaving, that he was going to propose. All the signs were there, or so I believed – he had talked about our future a lot, where I saw myself in five years’ time, did I want children – and he’d become more affectionate; not that he wasn’t affectionate anyway but it was as though he wanted to spend every free moment with me. I had thought it was nerves, that when he did ask the question and I accepted (which I knew I would), everything would go back to normal.
But he didn’t ask. Instead, when he took me out to dinner on that cold November night and told me that he wasn’t happy, that his life wasn’t going in the direction he wanted it to go in and he needed to do something else, something that would help him work out his next steps. That night didn’t end with a diamond ring and falling into bed together wrapped up in our own happiness as I’d dreamed it would, it ended with a one-way ticket to Bangkok and Marcus moving into his friend’s flat until it was time for him to leave. He told me he was going ten days before his flight left for Thailand. He claimed he’d been too scared of hurting me to tell me before.
‘It sounds like a cliché I know,’ he said. ‘But honestly it isn’t you, it’s all me.’
I left the restaurant then and wandered through the cold, damp streets of York passing drunk students and early Christmas revellers and knowing, even then in my confused heartbroken state, that without Marcus there, I couldn’t pretend that I would finish my PhD anymore and that it wasn’t just him who needed to work out their next steps.
I’d run away from boarding school once, in the second year that I was there, just after the second Christmas spent at Sanderson Bay and not in Paris with my mother. I’d thought that nobody loved me, that nobody cared about what happened to me. When I’d run from the school while everyone else was eating dinner I’d realised, suddenly, that although my plans to escape were carefully hatched, I hadn’t actually planned anywhere to escape to. It was then that it had hit me, that Sanderson Bay was that place and that, actually, somebody – two people in fact – did care about me very much.
Which was why when I finally went back to my flat on the night Marcus told me about Thailand, the first people I phoned were James and Miranda and it was during that phone call, when they mentioned Moby’s had upped their offer again, that I knew what I had to do.
The last year in Sanderson Bay has changed me more than I ever thought possible and, although when I let my mind drift back to Marcus I still miss him and my heart still hurts, I know I can never go back to the life or the person I used to be.
I wonder if he found what he was looking for in Thailand.
I wonder why he’s back.
And I wonder what this terrible mistake he’s made is.
*
After an hour of scrolling through social media and replying to comments (and maybe a little bit of time rereading the texts that Ben has sent to me), there are still no signs of life from Marcus so I get up and bang on the living room door.
‘I have to open the café in an hour,’ I call. ‘I’m just having a quick shower and then I need you to get up.’
He grunts something at me. He never was a morning person.
The café is already open when he finally appears wearing a less colourful outfit than the night before. He leans against the doorframe and watches me as I make Lisa’s tea and I can tell by the look on Lisa’s face that she’s seen him.