For Better for Worse

‘Are all you women the same, so blindly prejudiced that you can’t see what having a baby really means?’

She had tried hard to stand her ground, inviting him shakily, ‘What does it mean, Ben? Tell me.’

He had given her a bitter, cynical look.

‘It means an extra mouth to feed, and less money coming in; it means endless nights without any sleep, and the stink of sour milk and worse pervading everything. It means the total destruction of the relationship you thought you had with one another; that’s if you’re still together when the child arrives.

‘It means… Oh, God, what the hell is the point in trying to explain to you, Zoe? Children, pregnancy… to you they mean giving birth in some fashionable private ward of a hospital and then going home with a clean cooing bundle wrapped in something expensive and impractical bought by Mummy. It means agonising endlessly over finding a nanny, and then agonising even more over finding the right school. You don’t have any real idea.’

She had wanted to tell him that he was wrong, totally and utterly wrong, but instead she had asked him quietly, ‘And what does parenthood, fatherhood mean to you, Ben?’ But as she waited for his answer, she suspected she already knew.

Even so, his reply had shocked her.

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ he had told her harshly. ‘Because I don’t intend to ever be a father.’

And with that he had got into bed, put out the light and pointedly turned away from her.

Later, lying silently in bed beside him, she had waited for him to relent and turn to her; to take her in his arms and hold her.

Only he hadn’t done, and now this morning she was alone in their flat with anger as well as misery, a cold, hard lump of indigestible solidity wedged firmly inside her.

She got out of bed reluctantly and headed for the bathroom.

She pushed open the door and then stopped, staring at the paper images pinned, taped to almost every surface.

Eyes widening, she went into the living-room. It was full of them as well, huge hearts cut from newspapers and magazines, with the words ‘I love you’ scrawled across them in red felt-tip pen, tiny smaller ones cut from silver kitchen foil and strung together like the tail of a kite, and hung from the doorframes so that they danced in the draught, big fat pigs with drawn-in tiny mean little eyes and droopy would-be-curly tails made from wrapping ribbons that made her laugh as the tears filled her eyes.

He must have spent hours doing this, hours when he should have been asleep. Hours when she had been asleep.

Across the largest pig of all, propped up against the kitchen taps, he had written the words, ‘I’m sorry’.

Oh, Ben!

As she carefully collected every single heart, and every single pig, smoothing out the paper before gently folding it and then searching for a large envelope to put them in, she was still crying, her heart aching, not for herself but for him.

She knew how much his family meant to him, how fiercely protective of them he was. And she knew as well how much Sharon?

?s pregnancy and all that it would mean to her life must hurt him. She had been a clever girl, he had told her, and in those words she had heard all his frustration and disappointment.

‘It will be another mouth to feed,’ he had told her and no doubt he had been thinking that he would be the one who would have to help to feed it.

Neither of them ever discussed the financial help he gave his mother. They didn’t need to. Zoe felt no resentment of his loyalty towards his family.

‘That’s because you’ve never needed to worry about money,’ he had told her cynically, and then she had smiled sunnily, refusing to allow him to aggravate her.

It wasn’t until she had finished tidying away all the scraps of paper that she noticed the envelope on the table.

She had forgotten to mention it to Ben last night, and he obviously had not noticed it when he got up.

She picked it up, scanning it uncertainly. When she had seen it yesterday she had been so excited; now, like an opened forgotten bottle of champagne, her excitement had gone flat, superseded by other emotions.

For the first time she felt, if not resentment, then certainly a sudden awareness of irritation with Ben’s family. She wriggled uncomfortably, frowning as she refocused on the envelope.

This was their future here in front of her. Hers and Ben’s… The exciting, enticing, challenging future they had worked so hard together for. It belonged to them. They had worked for it… planned for it, and Ben… Ben deserved it; and yet now, because of his family, because of last night, somehow its promise was shadowed, her excitement doused, their right to share and anticipate the pleasure of taking their first major step into the future and success dulled by the sharp contrast between their future and that of Ben’s sister and her child.

And if she was so aware of the discrepancies in those futures, then how much more so must Ben be?

She gave a small shiver of distress and guilt. Was she really so selfish, so shallow that she resented Sharon for inadvertently casting a shadow over their lives? By rights what she ought to be feeling was sympathy and concern, not wishing that Ben’s sister had not spoiled this special moment in their lives by inflicting her problems on her brother.