The Stationmaster’s Daughter. Kathleen McGurl
They’d have grown up together, gone to school together, played together.
With her first pregnancy, she and Ian had been ecstatic when the blue line showed up on the pregnancy testing kit. They’d only been trying for a couple of months, and Tilly had schooled herself not to be disappointed if they had no luck for ages. But it seemed they were both fertile, and a baby was on the way already. There’d been no sickness, and only a tenderness in her breasts to show that something was different.
And then, at around ten weeks, she began to feel a dull pain, low on the left side of her abdomen. There was a little bit of bleeding too. Tilly came home early from work, tucked herself up on the sofa with a rug and a soothing cup of tea.
‘I think I might be losing the baby,’ she said to Ian, when he arrived home.
He dropped his bag and sat down heavily opposite her, looking down at the floor. The pain in his eyes when he finally raised his eyes to hers broke her heart. ‘How come, Tils? How has it happened?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Should we go to hospital?’
‘Don’t think there’s any point, right now.’ She reached out a hand to him. ‘It might not be a miscarriage. Sometimes people bleed in pregnancy and it turns out to be OK. But not always. Jo lost her first one. She sighed. ‘If it’s going to happen, it’ll happen. I don’t think there is anything they can do, in hospital. I’d rather stay here.’
‘Can’t you do anything? Rest or something, try to keep it?’ His voice was hoarse with emotion. He really wanted this child, she realised. She hadn’t thought he felt so strongly about it.
‘I am resting,’ she replied. Why wasn’t he asking her how she felt; whether she was in any pain?
Later that night the pain increased severely. Tilly was doubled up in agony. This was more pain than Jo had described experiencing. This was far more pain. Tilly couldn’t function, couldn’t think straight. Ibuprofen made no difference. While Ian paced, muttering about how she must have done something wrong to cause this, she called the out-of-hours doctor’s number. Between spasms of pain she described her symptoms.
‘You need to go to hospital, right away,’ the doctor told her. ‘Call an ambulance if there’s no one who can drive you.’
Ian had drunk a couple of glasses of wine with his dinner, so she took the doctor’s advice and called an ambulance for herself. Thankfully it arrived very quickly. She was diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy; her fallopian tube had ruptured, and she was in surgery within thirty minutes of being admitted.
‘Can you still get pregnant?’ Ian had asked, sitting at her bedside after the operation.
‘Yes. Though I’ll only be firing on one cylinder, as it were, so might not be fertile every month.’ It’s what she’d been told when they’d prepped her for surgery.
Ian had grimaced. ‘Well, as long as we can still have children, I suppose that’s all right. How soon until we can try again?’
Tilly put a protective hand on the surgery dressing and winced. ‘Give me a chance. They say a couple of months, at least.’
‘OK. Well, get well soon, and all that.’ Ian had patted her shoulder. It was as much sympathy as she was going to get from him, she’d realised. At the time she’d just excused it as his way of expressing his sadness at their loss.
Six months later, she was pregnant again. Ian had wanted to wrap her up in cotton wool. ‘Don’t go to your Zumba class. Don’t go running. Make sure you get a seat on the bus. This baby is precious to me.’
‘And to me!’ she’d protested. It was so precious. She wanted children at least as much as Ian did.
But that pregnancy never felt quite right. She couldn’t explain why, but it was as though her body didn’t want this embryo. At just seven weeks the bleeding started, accompanied by what felt like bad period pains. She knew she was losing the baby, but this time had no chance to tell Ian until it was all over. He was away on a training course with work, and this wasn’t something to tell him over the phone. When he returned, and she told him, his first reaction was one of anger.
‘Not again! Bloody hell, woman. Having a baby’s a natural thing. Why can’t you do it?’
She’d been calm throughout the miscarriage, dealing with it with a resigned efficiency. But Ian’s outburst was the last straw. She crumpled, throwing herself down onto the sofa, wrapping her arms around her face. ‘It’s not my fault, Ian! It just … happens. This time it wasn’t ectopic. Maybe next time will work.’ God, she hoped so. She was 37. They’d left having children until they’d established their careers and bought a big family home. Now Tilly was regretting those decisions. Perhaps in her twenties her body might have made a better job of growing a baby?
It was another year before Tilly became pregnant again. She’d insisted on waiting six months before trying, and then it just took a long time. Ian had been getting more and more frustrated each month, when she told him that no, they’d had no luck this time.
When it finally happened, they were both thrilled, and the news gave a much-needed boost to their relationship. This time the pregnancy felt right. There was breast-tenderness, sickness, a small but definite bump low down on her abdomen.
‘This time it’ll work. This time we’ll end up with a baby,’ she told him, and they made plans to decorate a bedroom in readiness, and started looking at catalogues of prams and cots and car seats.
The twelve-week scan showed a tiny but recognisable foetus, waving its little arms around, its heart beating strongly, and they were ecstatic.
Then when the bleeding had started two weeks later, it was Tilly who reacted with anger and disbelief, while Ian was the resigned one.
‘How can it be happening again?’ she screamed at him. ‘Twice is enough. How much more bad luck are we due to have?’
‘Shh,’ he said, taking her into his arms and patting her back, as though she was a child crying over a broken toy. ‘It’ll be all right.’
But it wasn’t all right. The bleeding continued, the pain intensified and at three o’clock in the morning she had a miscarriage on the bathroom floor. She sobbed, unable to believe that the same happy little person she’d seen on the ultrasound scan a fortnight ago could now be lying here cradled in the palm of her hand, dead.
Ian hadn’t wanted to see it. She’d buried the poor thing, a boy she thought, in the garden, as though it was a dead pet. Better than a hospital incinerator. At least this way she could feel close to her child. She took herself to hospital as an afterthought, and was advised to come back only if the pain or bleeding continued longer than seven days. It didn’t.
‘We should get some tests done,’ she said to Ian, ‘to find out why I keep miscarrying. Perhaps there’s something that can be done.’ She was thinking of a friend of a friend, who apparently had a rare blood clotting disorder, that meant tiny blood clots formed. Harmless for the mother but fatal for tiny embryos.
‘Sure,’ Ian replied, but there was no conviction in his voice. It was as though he’d given up trying, she thought. And yet he’d been the one who most wanted a family.
They’d drifted apart after that. There’d been no discussion of when to start trying again. Tilly had withdrawn into her grief, for the babies that hadn’t had a chance, for the family she’d hoped and expected she’d have with Ian, for their relationship, which never recovered from this final disappointment.
*
Tilly had been so caught up in memories that she hadn’t realised how far she’d walked. The path had risen well above sea level then dipped down the other side, and she was now walking into a small village that nestled between two high cliffs. Beremouth, it was called, according to signs on the footpath. Tilly felt strung out again; remembering her miscarriages had drained her emotionally. She glanced