The Dutiful Wife (12 page)

‘Saul wants me to see this professor,’ she told her great-aunt. ‘He is an expert on the subject of postnatal depression. Saul feels that the professor should be the one to advise us about…about what decision we should make, but I’ve already made up my mind. I love my baby so much already.’

Was that sympathy or sadness she could see in her great-aunt’s eyes? Was her great-aunt going to let her down after all and side with Saul? Tension gripped Giselle’s muscles.

‘Giselle my dear, there is something I must say to you,’ her great-aunt announced firmly. “And that is that whilst I understand how you feel with regard to your mother’s mental illness, it does not necessarily follow that you will be the same. I tried to tell you this whilst you were growing up, but the effects of the trauma you experienced were such that I never felt you were able to hear what I was saying. The truth is,’ she told Giselle bracingly, ‘I have always felt that you are very much more like the Freeman side of the family—like my mother and your great-grandmother on your father’s side. I see so much of my own mother in you, Giselle. I always have done. You have her looks, her colouring, and her courage.’

Relief and gratitude flooded through Giselle. Her great-aunt was trying to make her feel better, but it was true that in looks Giselle was nothing like her own
mother, who had been dark-haired and brown-eyed. Even the shape of Giselle’s face and the features on it very different from her mother’s. Her mannerisms and tone of voice were much more in line with those of her great-aunt, Giselle knew, but then it was her great-aunt who had brought her up and nurtured her.

Much as she wanted to believe what her great-aunt said, Giselle still shook her head and told her, ‘It doesn’t matter what I say. Saul is determined that I have to see this professor. I don’t want to, though.’

‘Giselle, my dear, I do understand how you feel. But don’t you think that you might be being unfair to Saul?’

‘Because I don’t want to see the professor? But I’m so frightened of what he might tell me.’ Giselle spread her hands in a gesture of defeat and a plea for understanding.

It was gone nine o’clock so, knowing that the residents of the retirement home tended to go to bed early, Giselle told her great-aunt that she would ask the warden to ring for a taxi for her.

‘You can’t go yet,’ her great-aunt protested, looking unusually agitated as she glanced towards the entrance door of her small bedsit. ‘Why don’t you stay a bit longer and have supper with me? You must be hungry.’

Hungry? Was she? Food was the last thing she had thought about today, but her great-aunt was insisting, and becoming even more agitated at the thought of Giselle leaving without having something to eat, so Giselle felt obliged to give in and agree that, yes, some supper would be lovely.

Although the retirement home provided round-the-clock, twenty-four-hour service for those who lived there, Giselle was struggling to stifle her yawns by the time a young girl arrived, pushing a trolley on which was a pot of tea and some sandwiches. The sight of them unexpectedly set her tummy rumbling.

Half an hour later, encouraged by her great-aunt to eat the last of the sandwiches and have a second cup of tea, she was protesting that she couldn’t possibly keep her elderly relative up any longer when the sound of a helicopter close at hand reverberated through the late evening silence.

‘What on earth—?’ Giselle began, but her great-aunt interrupted her immediately.

‘Oh, that will be Sir John Haycroft. It’s his new toy, and he’s forever flying all over the place in it.’

Giselle nodded her head, stifling another yawn, oblivious to her great-aunt’s anxious glances towards the door of her small apartment. The sudden ring on the bell made Giselle jump a little, and then tell her aunt ruefully, ‘That will be the warden, coming to say that I’ve outstayed my welcome. I’ll go and tell her that I’m leaving.’

Only when Giselle opened the door it wasn’t the warden standing there, it was Saul—and Saul as she had never seen him before. Saul looked as though he had aged a decade. He was in need of a shave and, ridiculously, looked not only as though he had aged during the twenty four hours since she had last see him but also as though he had grown thinner.

As she stepped back into the room Giselle cast a look
at her great-aunt, who was looking flushed but determined as she told Saul triumphantly, ‘I did what you asked, Saul, and kept her here. Although it was touch and go.’

Watching her husband hug her great-aunt, and seeing the genuine affection between them, Giselle felt her heart ache anew. When a relationship ended it wasn’t just the two people most intimately concerned who were affected. The ripples from the break-up spread and affected others as well.

‘I’ve come to take you home,’ was all Saul said to her, but he was looking at her in a way that made her heart turn over in a mixture of intense love and raw agony. ‘We need to talk—about everything.’

Her aunt broke in unexpectedly to ask Giselle directly, ‘You want this baby, don’t you, Giselle?’

The directness of the question undermined Giselle’s defences.

‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I do. The creation of a new life is such a special thing.’ Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘A gift, a privilege. My baby—our baby—has the right to live.’ She took a deep breath and lifted her head to look at them both, but especially Saul. ‘I
will
see the professor, but I’ve decided that…that I want our child to be born—even if it means that for its own safety and happiness another woman has to bring it up. I’d rather that than risk hurting it.’

Giselle wasn’t sure how she had come to this painful decision, she only knew that having come to it she now felt an overwhelming sense of peace, a sense of having
given her baby safety and security by the best means she could.

‘Giselle!’ Saul protested, stunned by the stark reality of what her words had revealed to him.

But she simply shook her head. ‘It’s the right thing to do,’ she told him tiredly. ‘I love you, Saul, but I love our baby too. I am going to have our baby, and nothing you can say will make me change my mind.’

‘I don’t want you to change your mind.’

Giselle stared at him, convinced she must have misheard.

‘Go with him, Giselle,’ her great-aunt was begging.

The energy to resist them was seeping relentlessly from her, and as though she was being propelled by a force greater than she was herself she found that she was walking towards Saul. Because she wanted to be with him, Giselle admitted to herself weakly. She ached and longed to be with him. She wanted the strength of his arms around her, the comfort of his shoulder to lean on, the love she knew he had for her to support her.

Tiredly she gave in to her own weak longings and nodded her head, kissing her great-aunt on the cheek before going to Saul’s side.

‘I’ll have to cancel my room at the hotel,’ she murmured.

‘Already done,’ Saul told her, making it plain that he hadn’t intended to return to London without her. ‘Come on, the chopper pilot’s waiting. I’d have hired a helicopter and flown it myself for you, but I didn’t dare trust myself to concentrate on flying and not worrying about you.’

As she listened to Saul guilt filled Giselle, but she
didn’t say anything. How could she? Whichever decision she had made someone would have suffered, and she knew she would always feel guilty about the decision she had chosen to make. How could she not?

Once they were inside the helicopter, with Saul sitting up-front with the pilot and acting as co-pilot, there was no real opportunity for them to talk privately. And Giselle felt so exhausted and drained by the events of the day that she was practically asleep by the time they landed at City Airport.

From there it was only a short taxi ride to their Chelsea house. The hallway was filled with the scent of the morning’s new delivery of lilies and the brilliant light from the chandeliers—so carefully chosen by Giselle because they’d been made at a start-up factory in Poland, which trained and employed young apprentices who had previously been out of work. The light illuminated the just off-white paint she had spent such a long time choosing, to make sure that its grey-blue undertone added just a hint of colour to the hallway that she felt chimed with the colour of Chelsea’s sky and river backdrop. But tonight the atmosphere of lived-in elegance and comfort reflected by her interior design choices failed to have its normal restorative effect on Giselle’s senses.

‘You look dead on your feet.’ Saul told her. ‘Go and get ready for bed, and I’ll make us both a drink and bring it up.’

Much as she longed for a warm bath, Giselle had to make do with a shower, half afraid that she was so tired she might actually fall asleep in the bath. She was
exhausted really, but she desperately needed to understand if Saul had actually meant what he had said at her great-aunt’s about wanting their baby.

Saul came into the bedroom just as she emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a thick towelling robe.

‘Cocoa?’ she exclaimed in astonishment, as she saw the milky drinks he had made.

‘They always used to make it for us at my boarding school if we were feeling low,’ Saul told her simply.

‘I didn’t know we had any in the house.’

‘We didn’t. I bought it this afternoon.’ He placed the mugs on his bedside table and turned to face her. ‘Giselle, you can’t mean what you said about giving up our baby for someone else to raise.’

‘I do mean it,’ she assured him. ‘At least that way it will have life, and…and safety.’

‘And its mother’s love?’ Saul demanded fiercely.

Giselle’s whole body shook. She knew how Saul felt about a child’s need for its mother’s love, because he had been denied that. ‘I shall always love our child. But for its sake…’

‘We are going to see the professor, Giselle, and I won’t take no for an answer. You will be a wonderful mother, and I can’t allow you to even think of depriving our child of its mother’s love and presence in its life.’

‘It will have you—if you meant what you said at my great-aunt’s?’ Giselle trembled as she phrased her words as a question.

‘I did.’ Saul’s voice was firm. ‘I shall be there for our child, Giselle, and I promise so will you.’

‘I’d love to believe that, but I dare not let myself. I want our baby so much, Saul.’

‘That makes two of us.’ Saul’s smile was slightly slanted and wry. ‘I don’t know how it happened myself, Giselle, but all I’ve been able to think of since you told me was you saying how much you’d have wanted our children, my children, had things been different. Gradually, almost without me knowing it, as the baby has grown inside you, so a protective love for it has grown inside
me.
I felt such a tug of fiercely paternal love inside me that it stunned me, robbing me of the ability to say or do anything. I was shocked, I admit it. That was why I didn’t say anything to you there and then. How I felt was so totally contrary to everything I’d always thought I would feel if I allowed myself to imagine our child. The resentment, the jealousy, the fear of losing you I’d suspected I’d see in myself just weren’t there. I was in a daze.

‘I should have told you. I wanted to. But I was afraid that if I did it would put even more pressure on you, and that you’d be even more afraid of being like your mother. That’s why I want you to see the professor—so that he can reassure you and tell you what I already know. You will be a wonderful mother.’

Hope, belief, joy, life. Like stars glimmering in a dark night sky, the words lit up in Giselle’s mind until the light from them and from her own relief dazzled her.

‘You’ve changed your mind? You want our baby?’ Giselle’s words were soft with all that she felt for this most wonderful of men—a man strong enough to show his weakness to her, strong enough, too, to allow the
course he had chosen for his life to be diverted for the sake of the tiny spark of life they had ignited together.

Saul nodded his head.

‘Don’t ask me how it happened, because I don’t have an answer. I only know that inside my head I have an image of the two of you together that does things to me I thought impossible.’

‘Oh, Saul, you don’t know how much this means to me—knowing that you will be there for our baby even if I can’t be. Knowing that he or she will grow up with you to love them and protect them.’

‘Don’t speak like that, Giselle—as though you aren’t going to be part of that. Because you are.’

‘You can’t say that. We don’t know that. No matter how much I want it to be so. But I feel so much better now, Saul, so much stronger. Knowing that our baby will have your love gives me that strength. I
will
see the professor now, and we can tell him that no matter what happens to…to me, you will always be there for our child. That’s if he will see me after I didn’t keep the appointment you made.’

‘He will see you. I’ve already spoken to him, and he said to tell you that he perfectly understands how you feel. We will
both
be there for our child, Giselle. I know it.’ Saul’s voice was raw with emotion.

He reached for her hand and held it whilst they looked at one another.

‘We’ll find a way through this, Giselle. We’ll find a way to make it work—and there
will
be a way. What happened with your mother was appalling and tragic, and I can’t begin to imagine the trauma you must have
gone through—a six-year-old having to cope with something like that without help.’

‘I had my great-aunt,’ Giselle reminded him gently. ‘She was wonderful. She explained everything to me as I got old enough to understand.’

‘But her explanations didn’t stop your fears, or the grief you felt inside yourself, did they?’ Saul challenged her, equally gently. ‘They didn’t stop you feeling guilty even though you should have been the last one in the whole situation to feel that.’ His hand tightened over hers. ‘You have no need to be anything other than what you are,’ he assured her fiercely. ‘You are everything you should and could be already. You are the wheel on which my life turns, Giselle, the heart of everything I do. I promise you that somehow we will find a way to set you free from your fear. Medical science has improved dramatically since your mother gave birth.’