Like One of the Family (33 page)

Jane felt old and tired and unbearably vulnerable. If only she had someone to advise her, she thought, someone strong who would love and support her.

She leaned forward in her swivel chair and picked up the photograph she kept on her desk of her husband. She stared at his sombre, handsome face and wished desperately she could go back in time and somehow prevent what had happened. ‘Oh Eddie,' she whispered, ‘I've tried to bring them up well. I've tried my best but...'

She went to the window and stared out at the darkened driveway. The bulb in the porch had burned out and in the street too the lamp was dead. She shivered, thinking Terry must take responsibility for what he had done and at least offer his support to Grainne so that if she genuinely wanted it, she might have her child. But if she didn't ...

Jane's spirits sank lower as she remembered her promise to help the girl. She had all along supported women's right to freedom of choice, but the thought now of an abortion was utterly distasteful to her.

Terry lay motionless in his darkened bedroom, unhappily staring at the dim outlines of the football posters on his wall. Normally he loved being back in the comfort and privacy of his own room after sharing a billet with fifteen other flying cadets. But tonight bitterness lay like silt upon his soul. He had been at the threshold of a wonderful life and now it was spoiled before it was barely begun.

What wounded him most was the memory of Claire's soft farewell to him. ‘No more misunderstandings, Terry.'

Those gently whispered words had touched him deeply, filling him with hope for the future. And now it could never be! By his stupidity he had jeopardised his chances of happiness. He turned his head into the pillow to smother the groan of despair which rose in his throat.

Grainne's love for Terry was genuine. She would even go ahead and have the baby, she told Trish, if only she could have him too. Three years of an age difference was nothing. Some men were still juvenile at forty. Terry, at nineteen, was as masculine and mature as ever she wished to find.

‘You seem to have handled it well,' Trish said approvingly. ‘But stick out for marriage, Gra. There's a limit to the amount of terminations anyone can have.'

Grainne had been pregnant before, five years earlier when she was eighteen. She had solved her troubles by crossing the water.

‘He'll probably try and slither out of it.' Grainne said glumly, still smarting over the way Terry had ditched her the previous week. ‘What'll I do then?'

Trish shrugged. ‘Depends on how his mother feels. She might be just as glad for you to get rid of it. ‘You might even get some money out of it.'

‘I don't want money. I want Terry.' Grainne began to cry. She had felt awful all day. She knew in her heart that she didn't want to have a baby or an abortion. She just wanted to be happy again, without pressures of any kind. She clutched her stomach. The cramps were really bad. Maybe she was having a miscarriage.

‘Are you sure you're pregnant?' Trish asked suspiciously.

Grainne did not bother to reply. Of course she was pregnant. She had known just as soon as she realised that the guy hadn't used a condom. That was the trouble with one night stands, she thought resentfully. Men on the booze all night and no conscience about doing it to you unprotected. She had been too far gone herself to notice until it was too late. Yes, of course, she was pregnant.

Only she wasn't. She woke up the next morning to find her period had come. It was heavier than usual so it might have been an early miss. Her first feeling was relief, her second dismay. Now she would never get Terry to come back to her.

Grainne went into the clinic with a long face. How was going to face Dr McArdle? She grew hot just thinking of the things she had told her about all the times Terry had come to her flat and the things they had done.

Then Grainne remembered that Jane was not due into the clinic until the following week. She felt weak with relief. She went to the fridge and was about to take out her specimen and dump it when she heard the outer door of the clinic opening and went out to the reception desk.

Mary McCann stood there looking tired and flustered. ‘My little boy was sick all night or I would have got here earlier,' she explained. She took a tonic bottle filled with liquid out of her bag and thrust it down on the desk. ‘I lost the container the doctor gave me but I gave this one a good wash.'

‘Fine, fine,' Grainne said, hiding a smirk. Enough piss, she thought, to do fifty tests.

‘You'll ring me as soon as you get the result,' Mary asked anxiously.

‘Yes, of course, Mrs McCann. The very minute we hear,' Grainne said smoothly, and waited until she was gone before going back inside. So the woman was pregnant again, she thought.

Grainne hunted in a drawer for a sterilised container. She labelled it with the woman's name and poured in a small amount of her urine. She was about to jettison the rest of it when an idea took hold. Why couldn't she still have Terry? She stared at the bottle thoughtfully. Right! So McCann was almost certainly pregnant again. What could be more convincing?

Grainne's emotions were still raw from Terry's rejection and her recent fright. She picked up her own container labelled in Jane's handwriting, and filled it with the overflow from Mary McCann's specimen, then put both containers back in the fridge. She was only just in time, for the messenger was at the door and took them away to the laboratory.

Claire thought of little else but Terry. He had said he would ring her before the end of the week, but she was sure he would not wait that long. She wished it was possible for her to ring him as Monday and Tuesday came and went without a word. She told herself that it wasn't easy for him to contact her. After all there must be hundreds of people in Baldonnel using the public payphone.

Terry did queue up for the phone a number of times that week but each time it was his turn to make his call, shrugged and let the guy behind him have it. He tortured himself with visions of Claire's growing impatience at his silence and, in retaliation, starting to date some other guy. When the strain became too much for him he rang her number merely to hear her voice, but as soon as she spoke, hastily replaced the phone.

‘What am I doing?' he asked himself in anguish. ‘Am I crazy?' He felt a little crazy. All week he had carried the burden of Grainne's pregnancy around with him. The only time he could shuck off his anxiety was when he was in the air.

Now the squadron was engaged in formation flying during the day and each evening, once darkness fell, he and Con were putting in a lot of practise at night flying. Both manoeuvres demanded precision and close concentration and kept him from brooding too much. Soon they would begin their gunnery course. All these exercises provided a distraction from his unhappy thoughts but as soon as he was back on the ground Terry felt swamped by his dilemma.

‘‘So what if she is pregnant?' he told himself. ‘I don't have to marry her.' But the thought of Claire's disgusted reaction sent him into the miseries again. She would never look at him once she knew. Terry groaned.

On Wednesday Claire was convinced that this was the night Terry would ring and she declined an invitation to go to a French film with some of the girls in her class. She sat in her room all evening, gazing absently at her books but with an ear cocked for the telephone.

It rang twice that evening. The first time she picked it up there was a pause and then she heard the engaged tone, the second time her mother answered it and laughingly replied. Disappointed, Claire went back along the landing to her own room. It was only Wednesday, she reminded herself. Still early yet.

She did not give up hope of hearing from Terry until the new week had started. When she could bear it no longer, she went across the street to talk to his twin. Claire couldn't believe that Terry would treat her so casually. She swallowed hard. There had to be another reason.

Sheena avoided her eyes. ‘I'm not allowed to say,' she whispered at last. Say what? Claire began to be worried. Had he crashed, was that it? Her thoughts leapt in alarm.

‘Oh Shee, he's all right, isn't he?' she cried. She had visions of him lying in a heap of smoking twisted metal, his back broken, his face disfigured. Her voice rose almost to a scream. ‘Please, Sheena, you've got to tell me.'

Sheena glanced at her in alarm. ‘Stop it, Claire. It's not Terry...' Now she was embarrassed. ‘It's Grainne.'

Claire stared. What had Grainne got to do with anything? She had seen for herself how Terry had ditched her at the party. Since then he had told her that the affair had been purely physical and he had never really loved her. So how could it be Grainne?

‘She's pregnant,' Sheena whispered, staring at Claire. ‘You must promise not to let on you know. Mum will have a fit if she finds out I've told.'

Pregnant? Claire felt her cheeks flush.

‘Mum's waiting for the result of the test,' Sheena said, looking at Claire pityingly. ‘She doesn't know about you and Terry.'

Claire nodded and turned away. She felt cold and sick and wanted more than anything in the world to bury herself somewhere so deep she would never come to surface again.

Two days into their gunnery course Terry and Con were top boys of their unit once more. Terry's dash and verve were matched by a similar lighting reaction in Con, and what had started out at the beginning of the cadet course as a kind of friendly rivalry between the two young men to attain first place, had deepened into strong friendship.

All week the sorties had kept Terry fully occupied but when not engaged in artillery practise, he was haunted by visions of being tied in a loveless marriage to Grainne. Con never pried or took offence at his moodiness, just supported him tactfully with an infectious grin and an encouraging word.

Not that Con was having an easy time of it himself, Terry thought, as he successfully fired his quota of SNEB rockets and went into a tight climbing left hand turn, his participation in the sortie finished for the day. Con's gunnery captain had read his friend's impressive dossier and, ever since, had been intent on reducing him to size. Fireballs Brennan hadn't got his nickname for nothing. All week the man had been harassing Con, never letting up on his views on ‘today's brash young pilots'. Even more disturbing to Terry was the gunnery captain's fixation with holding Con off from firing his machine gun, or releasing his rockets, until the very last minute on the firing run. Scary, Terry thought, remembering how early in the course they had all been warned of the danger of pulling up at too low an altitude, not to mention the risk of richochets and bombs so near the ground. Only Con was such a damn good pilot, Terry reckoned, he would have been in trouble. He knew from his own experience just how much skill it took, heart pounding and muscles aching, to pull up the nose of the Marchetti and climb back into the sky. Terry did not think he would ever forget the shock he had experienced earlier in the week, when finding himself almost below 800 feet, the outer limit for safe recovery.

Now Terry flew in a holding pattern with the other Air Corps' aircraft and doubtfully watched Con's plane go zooming down for the last time on the target. Con was disturbingly low. Terry heard his own gunnery captain voicing this same observation on the radio to Con's captain, but Brennan had replied curtly that they were no lower than usual.

As Terry watched the exploding shells glint and sparkle against the circles traced on the sand, he was uneasily aware that the blast was dangerously close to the underbelly of the aircraft. He turned his head and saw that Captain O'Driscoll was watching the Marchetti with a preoccupied frown.

Their earphones crackled suddenly and Captain Brennan's irascible voice erupted in their ears. ‘The bloody fool! I warned him he was past interception point.' And seconds later a frenzied, ‘Pull up, man. Pull up!'

Terry froze in his seat and stared through the rain-spattered windscreen as Con's aircraft fell sheerly away, with its power spent, like a child's discarded toy tumbling out of the sky.

‘Good Christ!' Liam O'Driscoll's gasp startled Terry and he sucked in his own breath in dismay, as the aircraft continued its slow dive earthwards. Next on the radio transmitter was a confused babble of voices and, seconds later, the sound of impact.

Watched by the appalled eyes of the airborne unit, the aircraft hit the ground and exploded in a bright, blossoming flash.

Terry felt the impact of his own shock and his throat was dry with horror and grief. His friend who had been closer to him than his brother was dead. Terry wanted to cry out at unfairness of it and in his mind kept soundlessly repeating the same protest, until it broke from his lips in an anguished groan. ‘No! Oh God no, not Con.'

Below, moving fast along a track between postage stamp fields, an ambulance and two fire engines screamed towards the pall of smoke ballooning out over the crashed aircraft.

‘Nothing anyone can do now,' Captain O'Driscoll said heavily.

Terry hardly heard the terse command to regroup and return in formation to the base. After a look at his face, Captain O'Driscoll took over the controls, still stunned himself by the disastrous end to the sortie.

Jane had waited anxiously all week for the results of the pregnancy tests, but due to a go-slow at the hospital it was not until the following week that they were posted. They arrived at the clinic on the day after the funeral of the two crashed airmen. By this time Mary McCann was throwing up each morning, and Grainne had fully regained her spirits and was out again with Trish every night, enjoying herself.

Jane read the result of Grainne's test with dread. So she was pregnant. Her slight hope that it might have been a false alarm withered and died. She sat with her head bowed, swept by waves of hopelessness. Terry's life was spoiled. If only he had loved the girl, but she knew he did not. She found she was weeping and brushed aside her tears. A child was the sign of life, of hope, Jane reminded herself. Her first grandchild should be an occasion for rejoicing.