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By the time her mother and father arrived she was tucked up in bed.
‘Oh, darling...how do you feel?’ her mother asked her anxiously as she hurried to her side.
‘I’m all right,’ Poppy assured her. ‘It’s the baby.’
She saw the look her parents exchanged and her anxiety increased.
‘They keep telling me not to worry... that it’s best to rest... but I haven’t felt her kick for ages and I had this awful pain. I want James,’ she told her mother bleakly.
‘Chris is doing his best to find him, darling,’ her mother tried to reassure her. ‘He’d left the people he was visiting before Chris could get in touch with him and we can’t get through to him on his mobile phone.’
‘He won’t use it in the car,’ Poppy told her fretfully. ‘He says it’s too dangerous.’
The afternoon passed in a haze of examinations and hushed conversations out of her earshot which left her feeling increasingly anxious. The baby still hadn’t moved and she was growing afraid that something might have happened to it. To her...to James’s child, James’s daughter.
Fresh tears rolled down her face. Her parents had volunteered to stay with her but she had sent them home. It was James she wanted. Only James.
She closed her eyes, whispering his name, her hands folded protectively across her belly. If only she had been holding their baby like that earlier, it might not have been hurt, she thought miserably.
She tensed as the door of her room opened, but it wasn’t James who came in.
‘Chris,’ she said weakly in disappointment, subsiding back against the pillows. ‘Where’s James? Have you been able to contact him?’
‘Not yet.’ He tried to smile, but Poppy could see how anxious he was. ‘Don’t worry.’
He tried to comfort her, taking hold of her hand and patting it, but, weak from shock and fear, Poppy snatched it back, telling him crossly, ‘Don’t... don’t; it isn’t you I want, it’s James.’ As she started to cry harder she was distantly aware of Chris ringing the bell for the nurse and of her suddenly appearing and the two of them talking in lowered voices. She strained to hear what they were saying.
‘She wants her husband,’ the nurse told Chris. ‘She’s in a very unstable condition, and we’re rather concerned about the foetal heartbeat...’
‘We’re doing our best to find him,’ she heard Chris respond. ‘He should have been back by now. God knows where the hell he is,’ he added feelingly.
Poppy closed her eyes. James had gone; he didn’t care about what happened to her. If anything should happen to their baby, he wouldn’t even know and she would have lost them both. Without them, what was the point in her going on? She could hardly swallow past the huge lump of misery blocking her throat.
‘They want me to go now,’ she heard Chris telling her awkwardly as he responded to the nurse’s brief nod and stood up.
Poppy didn’t care if he stayed or went. Without James she was alone anyway, would always be alone.
At some point she must have drifted off to sleep. She knew that the nurse had administered some kind of sedative—‘to rest the baby’, she had told Poppy firmly when she had tried to object.
Now, as she opened her eyes, she realised that the headache and sickness that she had felt earlier had gone but that her body felt stiff and sore and the graze on her temple throbbed painfully.
The room was in darkness, but as she turned her head she realised that Chris was there, standing just inside the door, and that his arrival was probably the reason why she had woken up.
‘Poppy...’ Chris began, but Poppy turned her head away from him.
‘Go away, Chris,’ she told him quietly.
As she heard the door close behind him she let out a small sob.
‘James...James, where are you? I love you so much,’ she whispered under her breath. ‘I love you both so much,’ she added as she touched the still bump of her stomach. ‘James...’
‘Yes, Poppy, I’m here.’
The shock of hearing his voice made her stiffen and then turn her head so quickly that she winced in sudden pain.
‘James!’ she repeated in disbelief, her eyes fastening hungrily on his shadowy outline in the darkness, as though she was afraid to believe that he was actually there. ‘When...? How...?’ she began, trembling as he sat down next to her.
‘Chris had left a message for me at home,’ he told her sombrely, then emotion broke through the controlled tautness of his voice as he exploded, ‘My God, Poppy, how—?’
‘It wasn’t Chris’s fault,’ she told him quickly. ‘It was an accident; he...’ She had started to shake violently, her finger picking anxiously at the coverlet until James reached out and took hold of her.
‘You’re cold,’ he said, but Poppy shook her head, dismissing her own injuries as she told him quickly, ‘James, it’s our baby... I can’t feel her kicking any more. They keep telling me not to worry and that she’s all right... but how can she be all right when she’s so still? Oh, James, I’m so afraid for her,’ she whispered helplessly. ‘She’s so small, so vulnerable and I love her so much.’
‘Chris said that you told him to go away, that you only wanted me. Is that true?’ James asked huskily.
‘Yes,’ Poppy admitted, and raised her head off the pillow to ask him uncertainly, ‘Where were you?’
‘On my way to Italy...to the villa.’
‘What...? Why?’
‘You are not the only one to indulge in pointless fantasies, you know,’ James told her obliquely. ‘The only difference between us is that I’ve had a hell of a lot more experience at doing it.’
‘Fantasies? What fantasies?’ Poppy demanded uncertainly.
‘Oh, the usual kind,’ James told her gravely. ‘That the woman I love loves me back, that she wants me, that in the darkness of the night, in the privacy of our shared bed, she turns to me and tells me that she aches for me to touch her, to love her and to go on. loving her for ever.’
As she listened to him, Poppy’s body started to stiffen in anguished shock.
‘Who is she... this woman?’ she asked shakily. James was in love with someone else. Why had she never guessed... realised...? ‘Do
I know her?’
‘Yes, you know her,’ James admitted, but he wasn’t looking at her any longer, Poppy recognised. He was looking at her body instead.
‘The baby!’ she suddenly gasped in delight. ‘She’s moving... Oh, James, she’s moving, she’s all right, she’s...’ Even now Poppy couldn’t bring herself to say the word ‘alive’ and to admit by saying it just what she had been dreading. ‘Oh, James.’ As she clutched his hand, happy tears poured down her face.
‘Why did you want me with you and not Chris, Poppy?’ James asked her as he reached out his hand and covered the small bulge.
‘You’re... you’re my husband,’ Poppy told him, unable to bring herself to look properly at him. ‘My baby’s—our baby‘s—father and...’
‘And?’ James prompted.
He wasn’t looking at her. He was still looking at her stomach, which was perhaps why she suddenly found the courage to tell him.
‘And because I love you,’ Poppy admitted quietly. ‘But I know that isn’t what you want,’ she added hastily. ‘I’m not an adolescent any more, James. I do know now what truly loving someone means. If you want me to... to set you free so that you can go to her... to the woman you love... then I’ll...’ she said bravely, then stopped to bite down hard on her bottom lip as her emotion threatened to overwhelm her.
‘Go to her? I’m already with her,’ James told her softly.
‘Already with her?’ Poppy’s heart started to thump heavily as she looked indignantly from the closed door to his face. ‘You’ve brought her here... now...?’
‘Oh, Poppy.’ Suddenly, unbearably, he was actually laughing at her—laughing as he stood up and then leaned over the bed, gathering her up in his arms to hold her close and touch her tenderly.
‘You’re the one I love, the one I’ve always loved. Are you really so blind that you never knew it?’
‘You love me...? But you can’t,’ she protested. ‘You’ve always been so angry with me, so I—’
‘Because that was the only way I had of defending myself, protecting myself from the pain of knowing that you only had eyes for Chris. I fell in love with you about the same time that you fell in love with him.’
