The Pillow Friend (41 page)

The nurse came back with a large plastic jug of water and a small glass. “Here.”

“Oh, thank you, I am a bit thirsty.”

“Never mind that. You drink it all. It's to fill your bladder, so they can get a good picture. You must drink it all.”

It was something to do. When the nurse had gone away she set about drinking. She wondered what was growing inside her, and if she really wanted strangers to see it. She could get up now and walk out, keep her secret to herself—and keep it from herself.

It was better to find out what she carried now, while it was still possible to stop it being born. If it was so horrible they would surely recommend, probably even insist upon, a termination. She drank another glass of water and then another. She remembered a line from a poem by James Fenton—“Every fear is a desire”—and she drank another glass of water.

Thinking about the scan, she had imagined a room like a high-tech operating theater, full of people, most of them men, in white gowns. But there were only two women in a darkened room crowded with furniture and machines. One of them, the doctor, was about her own age and spoke with a soft Scottish accent. The other woman, an Asian, looked even younger and almost painfully sympathetic.

“Should I undress?”

“No, no, just lie down on the table and pull your trousers down to—that's fine. Now, we're going to spread some jelly—it's warm, Ayesha, isn't it?—on your tummy—terrible stuff when it's cold, a real shock, but I think it feels rather nice like this, no?”

“Mmmm.”

“Your bladder's nice and full?”

“Feels like it's about to burst.”

“Ach, well, I hope we'll be through before that can happen.”

“How good will the picture be? I mean, what will you be able to tell about the baby?”

“Oh, we should be able to tell what size it is, and if it's got all its bits and pieces—but you'll see for yourself, on that screen there—Ayesha?”

She turned her head and saw a television screen. “Never thought I'd be having a broadcast from my womb.”

“Oh, we've seen them all,” said the doctor. “It's not the womb so much as who's inside.” She was rolling the transducer over her greased belly now, pressing gradually harder than was comfortable. Agnes said nothing, gazing at the screen, looking for her baby. She felt neither fear nor excitement now, only acceptance and a sort of muffled curiosity. But she could see nothing. The screen, to her, appeared completely blank. She'd read, in her pregnancy book, that the video picture would be very blurry and would have to be interpreted for her by someone skilled. Yet she saw nothing which seemed to offer any scope for interpretation, and as neither the doctor nor the technician spoke and the silence, with the transducer being rolled back and forth and around her middle, over and over again, stretched on and on, she felt the faint prickings of alarm.

“I can't make anything out,” she said. “Where's the baby?”

“Just what I was wondering,” said the doctor in an odd voice. “That is, there doesn't seem to be a baby. There is no baby. You're not pregnant.”

It should have been a relief, although not untinged with sadness, but she couldn't believe there was no baby, despite the evidence. She still
felt
pregnant.

She went back to Gray's little house and packed a few things: only the most necessary clothes and books, her Walkman and a few tapes, her notebooks. Everything else she left behind, including tapes she knew he would never listen to and dresses he would certainly never wear.

She was free, whether she believed it or not; she could go anywhere. She had been thinking about the bothy during the past few weeks, and the yearning to be there, to see Knapdale again, had been growing stronger. She had resisted her desire, imagining Graham's anger at the thought of someone else living in his special place, but now she thought: So what? So what if he was angry? She couldn't disappear, cease to be, just to make his life easier, and she needed a place to live. He must be in Greece now, and the bothy would otherwise be empty at least until the spring. Why shouldn't she live there until they worked things out and got officially divorced?

Money would not be a problem. Besides his £500, she also had $7,000, inherited from her mother. She was sure she could live frugally enough in Scotland to eke that out for more than a year.

She arrived in Glasgow by train early the next morning, and caught the morning Campbeltown bus from Buchanan Street station. It took her as far as Lochgilphead, where she had an early lunch. She was asking in the hotel bar about the local taxi service when a woman's voice behind her said, “I can take you. It's on my way.”

She turned and saw a solidly built woman in her thirties, wearing a blue dress that looked like a uniform, and low-heeled shoes. She had curly light brown hair, lively dark eyes and an attractively friendly round face.

“Is it really? I didn't think Clachan was on the way to anywhere!”

“Depends on how you define ‘anywhere.' I have a patient to visit, beyond Clachan, at Kilrue, so you're right on my way. I'm Nancy Gates.”

“Agnes Grey. You said patient—are you a nurse or a doctor?”

“Midwife. Where is it in Clachan you're staying?”

“Not actually in Clachan. The house is a little farther along the road, about a mile, I guess. I've only been there once before. It's only small, a bothy, they call it. It belongs to my husband's family.”

“Which I suppose answers my question as to how an American comes to be in these parts. Your husband's a Scot?”

“English.”

“Well, we won't hold that against you. Are you ready to go now, or did you want a drink or something first?”

“No, I've had lunch. I'm ready whenever you are. These are my bags.”

“They'll fit in the boot with the messages.” She picked one up, ignoring her protests, and led the way outside. “You'll be here for a long stay, then?”

“I think so, I'm not really sure. I'd been thinking about staying until the spring, but I might change my mind. It just depends. . . .” She trailed off, unable to say what her plans might depend on, and the other woman did not press her.

It was a warm, clear day, much better weather than she'd had for her first visit, and she enjoyed the drive and the beauty of the scenery too much to do more than give brief, distracted answers to the various conversational openings which Nancy offered. When Jura first came into view, dark brown and purple against the blue sky and silvery sea, her heart lifted with a joyful sense of homecoming, and she cried out, “Oh, it's good to be back!”

But when they reached the bothy she discovered that both doors were locked, and, of course, she didn't have a key.

“Oh, this is so stupid, I should have thought . . .”

“Shall we try and force a window?”

Agnes looked at her in amazement. “You're very trusting!”

“How do you mean?”

“You don't know me or anything about me, I say I have a right to be here, but I don't have a key—”

“Ach, I'm always forgetting my own. Which is why I usually don't bother to lock anything, and leave the keys in the car.”

Then she remembered. “There's a woman in the village, Mrs. Mac-something, who has a spare key. She runs the village shop.”

“I'll run you back there.”

“I'm sorry, I'm taking up so much of your time.”

“It's no bother, honestly.”

“I should have thought of it before we came this far.” She worried that Mrs. Mac-something might be less trusting than Nancy, but the shopkeeper recognized her as soon as she spoke, remembering their single meeting of a year ago, and got the key for her without seeming to find it odd that she had come so far without her own.

“And will you not be wanting a few things, milk, bread, tea?”

“Oh! Yes, I'd better get some things—I wasn't thinking. There probably isn't very much in the kitchen.” She surveyed the shelves, trying to anticipate her needs for the next few days, and then broke off to say to Nancy, “It was very nice of you to drive me, but you don't have to stick around—I can walk back.”

“With all your bags? Honestly, I'm in no hurry, and I'm quite happy to drive you the last mile, whenever you're ready.”

She became a little suspicious of the existence of this supposed patient in Kilrue when the midwife accepted her rather perfunctory offer to come in for a cup of tea. As if reading her mind Nancy said, “There's always time for a cup of tea, and there's no rush to see Mairi, I only told her I'd look in sometime before five. One of my great sins is nosiness. I never could resist an invitation into a house I've never been in. All the times I've driven along this road, passing this wee house . . .”

“So you've never met my husband, or his brothers?”

“Not to my knowledge. The only thing I know about this place is that it's owned by some folks down in England, and it stays empty most of the year. There are plenty of other houses the same around here.”

She had expected the house to be cold, remembering her last arrival, but the sun had been streaming in the front windows for at least half the day, and of course it had been occupied only last week. It felt warm and cheerful. She put the kettle on to boil while she inspected the cupboards and put away her recent purchases. There were a certain amount of emergency supplies as she had expected: tins of soup, fruit, and baked beans, condensed milk, sealed jars of oats, rice and sugar.

“Is Nancy a nickname for Agnes?” she asked, handing her guest a cup of tea.

“I was christened Agnes Isobel Gates, but no one at any time has ever called me anything but Nancy—and my mother and her mother the same! You'd think that by the time I came along they'd have dropped the Agnes, which no one ever uses, and just christened me Nancy, wouldn't you? I can tell you, if I ever have a daughter, her name won't be Agnes or Nancy. Are you always called Agnes?”

“The only person who ever called me Nancy was my husband. But—Nancy never really felt like me.” She drew a deep breath, coming to a decision. “Actually, we've separated, my husband and I. That's why I'm here. I mean, I had to go somewhere, and London's so expensive, and I didn't want to go back to America—or not yet, anyway.”

Nancy nodded. “Well, I hope you'll feel it was the right decision. Of course, I think Argyll is the most wonderful place on God's earth, and it's been my choice to live here, but—aren't you going to miss your friends? You might feel cut off, and when a marriage has just ended, that can be a time when you need friends the most.”

“All my friends are far away, they were far away already. There's really nowhere else I could go.” She looked up and out the window, to the sea and the sight of mountainous Jura on the horizon and felt again that lifting of the heart, that sense of being at home, and said with deep conviction, “And there's nowhere else I'd rather be.”

She was happy in a way she had not expected, and had perhaps never been before; happy when she woke in the morning to the sight of the sea and the sky and the islands, or even to the clouds and rain. She went for long walks, regardless of the weather. She read in the devouring, eclectic fashion she'd had as a child, picking up whatever came to hand, whether it was a mystery, a Victorian novel, or a natural history guide, and reading until she felt like trying something different. She kept a journal, and for the first time in her life it was not about her feelings or her fears or her experiences with other people. Instead, she made notes about things she was reading and things she saw, listed plant names, kept track of the changing weather, described the scenery, again and again, struggling for accuracy. And she was writing poetry, for the first time since high school.

Most of the time the solitude she had chosen suited her, but at the beginning of her second week, just as she was starting to feel lonely and wondering if she'd done the right thing, Nancy turned up.

“I hope you don't mind unannounced visitors,” she said. “But as you don't have a telephone I didn't know how else to ask if you'd care for a lift into Lochgilphead for your shopping. ‘Getting the messages,' we call it here.”

It became a regular thing after that, the visits from Nancy and the shopping trips. She enjoyed the other woman's company, although she felt guilty that Nancy was doing all the giving and she the taking. Nancy, she suspected, was someone who adopted waifs and strays, and she didn't like to think of herself as fitting into that category. But the truth was she needed help and friendship and could not afford a standoffish pride.