Sins

Emerald had to admit that Drogo’s appeal had been masterly.

Whilst she held her breath in desperate hope, Sister gave Drogo a look of cool irony, before saying, ‘I believe the premature baby unit is desperately in need of incubators, which will cost around a hundred thousand pounds. Do you suppose that Lady Emerald’s committee will be able to raise that amount, Your Grace?’

‘I can guarantee it,’ Drogo answered her promptly.

Sister looked at Emerald and then turned back to Drogo. ‘Well, well, then but I must stipulate that Lady Emerald can only stay provided she does not disrupt or add to the work of my nurses.’

‘I won’t,’ Emerald assured her fervently.

Sister had gone, leaving the room in a swish of starch that somehow or other she managed to make sound very disapproving. And Emerald and Drogo were alone in the room with Robbie.

She had to thank him, she couldn’t not do, but just like all those other times when she had desperately wanted to deny and defy the Emerald that so seemed to delight in being unpleasant and difficult, Emerald was for some reason afraid to do so.

‘I’ve got to go now,’ Drogo was saying to her. ‘You’ll want me to let your mother know—’

‘No. No, there’s no point in worrying her. She can’t do anything.’

‘She could be with you.’

Emerald shook her head. ‘No, I don’t want her here.’

It was a lie. She desperately wanted not to be alone with her fear that Robbie might die. But it wasn’t her mother she wanted with her, she realised with a small stab of surprise, it was Drogo.

Chapter Fifty-One

Unable to bear looking at it, Ella stuffed the doctor’s appointment card into her handbag, her fingers stiff and clumsy. The smell of anaesthetic and other darker things was still in her nostrils. Was it clinging betrayingly to her; to her skin and her hair and her clothes?

She felt as though, if she wasn’t careful, she was going to burst into tears and she mustn’t do that. Ella took a deep breath as she approached the entrance to Vogue’s offices.

She had hardly recognised herself these last seven weeks. She was normally so calm, and on those occasions when she wasn’t, she was extremely good at concealing it, but just lately, it had been as though her emotions had gone totally out of control and quite spectacularly so. She wasn’t sleeping properly, she had a breakout of spots on her face for the first time in her life, and most telling of all, she was being sick in the morning and she had missed her period–twice.

As she had wept in the office of the gynaecologist whose name she had managed to obtain only under the promise of shared secrecy from one of the other girls at work, it should have been impossible for her to get pregnant. She was on the pill, after all, and the pill stopped you getting pregnant, but the combination of the lack of her period and the all-too-evident morning sickness couldn’t be ignored.

The knowledge that she was pregnant had filled her with horror and fear.

She still felt that way now, even though this morning she had been to see the gynaecologist to get the results of the pregnancy test he had done for her a week ago, and which had confirmed that she was indeed carrying Oliver’s child.

She was relieved, of course, that the doctor had agreed to terminate her pregnancy for her, but she was still sick with shock and fear, still unable to understand why the pill had failed, and unable to allow herself to relax until it was all over.

The termination of a pregnancy was illegal, but there were doctors who performed such a procedure–if one was desperate enough, or rich enough. Ella felt that she had been lucky. One of the other girls at Vogue had guessed her condition and under pressure from Ella had given her the name of a doctor who she had ‘heard’ carried out safe terminations in properly sterile conditions–for a price and only on word-of-mouth recommendation from someone else in the know.

‘You are perfectly healthy,’ he had told her this morning after he had said that her test had indeed confirmed that she was pregnant. ‘There is no reason why you should not give birth to a healthy child.’

‘But I can’t have a baby,’ Ella had wept. White-faced, she had then told him about her mother, whilst he had listened, nodded and then told her to see his nurse to make an appointment to come

in in another week’s time for a D and C.

It might now be fall, with the leaves on the trees in Central Park turning the most glorious shades of crimson and gold, but the sun was still warm, too warm for her autumn coat over her new plaid autumn miniskirt and its toning deep plum cable-knit jumper, which she was wearing with a pair of suede boots from Biba, which Janey had sent to her, and which had been sighed enviously over by the whole of her office.

Fall. In less than a month now Brad would be back in New York. He had written to her the previous week to say that he was in the process of finishing his book, and making arrangements to return to the city and that he was very much looking forward ‘to seeing you again and taking up from where we left off to go somewhere very special’.

Once those words would have thrilled her and filled her heart with excitement and joy. Once. For a very brief window of time between going to bed with Oliver and realising the nature of the unwanted consequences of having done so.

Oliver himself was preparing to return to London. She had seen him briefly the previous day when he had come into the office to discuss with the fashion editor the photographs he had taken on the desert shoot. From what Ella had heard, Vogue’s legendary chief editor, Diana Vreeland, had declared them absolute masterpieces.

Ella knew that he had seen her because he had looked at her, but to her relief he hadn’t made any attempt to speak to her. That was exactly the way she wanted things. They had nothing to say to one another, after all. She would be relieved when he had gone back to London. Once, the fact that he was here would have been enough to have her worrying and anxious, but now the deeper and more pressing fear of her pregnancy had pushed all the other feelings she might ordinarily have experienced to one side. Dr Goldberg had warned her to buy herself some painkillers. He had written down what she must get. She had put the piece of paper away safely, hadn’t she? Anxiously Ella opened her handbag to check.

Oliver was just leaving the Vogue building when he saw Ella coming down the street towards it, a slender attractive figure in her plum and black coat and her suede boots, the sun shining on her hair. Something unfamiliar and unsought stirred unexpectedly inside him. A desire, a need to go up to her and…and what? Claim her? He might have had shagging rights with her for a handful of days, but that was over. She didn’t look particularly happy, he noticed. In fact she looked downright unhappy, her face paler and thinner than he remembered it. What was the cause of that? A fall-out with the boyfriend?