The Yuletide Child, Charlotte Lamb [best novels to read .TXT] 📗

unrevealing, intent eyes and said calmly, ‘I wondered if that might be it. I talked to my sister on the phone the other day and when I said you’d been sick a couple of times lately and were pale and listless she immediately said you must be pregnant. How do you feel about it, Dylan?’

‘I don’t know. How do you feel?’

‘I’m happy if you are,’ was all he said, giving her no real idea what he thought. ‘You’ll have to take care of yourself from now on; no heavy gardening. Put your feet up in the afternoon and make sure you get plenty of rest.’

He sounded omniscient, but spoilt the effect by adding, ‘That’s Ella’s advice, anyway. But she said you were so fit and had such well-developed muscles you’ll have an easy birth.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me you thought I might be having a baby?’ Dylan asked him a little resentfully. He confided in his sister, he confided in Suzy—why didn’t he ever confide in her? Looking back over the months since their marriage, she couldn’t remember him talking to her as easily as he seemed to talk to either of the othertwo women. It seemed to her that he kept her at arm’s length. Only in their bed were they ever intimate; was passion all he wanted to share with her?

‘I didn’t want to upset you if it hadn’t occurred to you.’

To Dylan’s disturbed mind that sounded as if Ross didn’t want a baby, at least not yet. If he thought the mere idea of having a baby might upset her he didn’t know her very well, for one thing, and, for another, it must have upset him, or why would he be reacting like this?

‘Also,’ he said, ‘Ella could have been wrong. You might not have been pregnant, and then you might have been disappointed—it seemed better not to say anything, and wait and see.’

That had been thoughtful, but Dylan wished he would talk to her, not his sister, and that he wouldn’t keep what he was thinking to himself. They were married, for heaven’s sake! It was time he started treating her as his wife, not some stranger he merely happened to be sleeping with!

The summer was beginning to wane by the time Dylan had got over the worst of her pregnancy, had stopped being sick and feeling queasy every time she tried to eat.

Ironically, as her health improved the weather worsened. Winds blew rain across the hills; it was damp and cold outside. By evening she often had to light a fire in the sitting room hearth or the house seemed grey and chilly. On the edge of the forest trees turned gold and brown, beech, birch and sycamore began to shed their rustling leaves, which blew across the lawns and lay in heaps, the rain soaking through them until they turned cobwebby, skeletal.

For a few weeks her garden borders were filled withautumn colours; orange and fire-red dahlias burnt against hedges, and then warm russet and gold chrysanthemums, competing with purple Michaelmas daisies, but at last even these last flickers of summer died away.

The green fern turned brown and withered, the outer barrier of trees grew bare, and the dark interior of the pine forest seemed to Dylan to intensify, come closer. The lower trunks of trees were brown and withered, shut out from the sun because they were so close set; only the upper branches were green. If you walked into the forest a deep layer of pine needles crunched underfoot and dry clouds of dust rose at every step, choking you, unless it had just rained.

She had begun to hate the forest and would never go in there with Ross any more. He didn’t argue. Not that she saw much of him, even less than she had during the first months of their marriage.

He was even busier. Autumn was the time of planting, and Ross was out at work from first light until dark most days. She saw very little of him during the week, but if he wasn’t working at weekends he came shopping with her, took her out to lunch at Carlisle or one of the little market towns within easy driving distance.

But as the autumn wore on into winter the sunshine grew rarer and the winds fiercer. Dylan discovered what a windy corner of England they lived in. In London she had always been able to ignore the weather, dive in and out of buses or the underground, find plenty to do indoors, go to cinemas, museums, galleries. Up here nature refused to be ignored.

She was kept awake at night by the wind tugging at their roof, roaring over the fields, whistling through the trees, pulling some of them down, damaging roofs and power lines.

She could have borne all that if Ross had been beside her in the bed, but as her body changed, swelling like ripe fruit, dark blue veins appearing on the full breasts which had once been so small and firm, Ross started sleeping in a spare bedroom. He said he didn’t want to wake her up in the early mornings when he had to get up to go to work. But he wasn’t making love to her any more, and Dylan knew why.

As she was driving home from the antenatal clinic one darkening November afternoon she passed the forest entrance and slowed, noticing Ross’s Land Rover parked there.

A second later she recognised the car parked right next to his. It was Suzy’s car, but Suzy was not in it. She and Ross were sitting in the back of his vehicle, very close together, their heads almost touching.

Dylan stared, dry-mouthed in shock, then instinctively put her foot on the accelerator and drove past.

When she got home she went indoors, moving like a robot, and made herself a cup of tea. She was shivering from head to foot. It was a chill, wet November day, but that wasn’t why she was so cold. She was in shock.

Sitting in