The Secrets Between Us by Louise Douglas Read Free Book Online Page A

office and not out with clients. Then I ran upstairs to check I had everything in my hospital bag: newborn nappies, cotton mittens, vests, talcum powder, sleep-suits, toothbrush, toothpaste, flannel. It was an unnecessary exercise. I knew everything was where it should be. I’d been checking for days.
    I put one hand in the small of my back – it was a pose I thought I should adopt – and with the other I stroked my hardening belly while I gazed out of the window in my best coat and shoes, waiting for Laurie to come home.
    I had never been so excited in my entire life. I had never looked forward to anything as much as I looked forward to the coming few hours.
    In the hospital delivery suite I threw myself into the rhythm of childbirth with enthusiasm. I had been warned how much labour hurts but nothing had prepared me for the physical violence of it or the way my body would take over. I was shocked but I knew it was what women had to endure if they were to be mothers. I was too busy breathing to listen when the medical staff explained they were changing the monitor strapped around me because it wasn’t picking up a heartbeat and they thought there might be a problem with the machine. A different midwife came in and then a doctor. The atmosphere in the room changed, but I ignored it. Laurie tried to talk to me, to prepare me, but I shook him away. I had a job to do. I carried on delivering. Laurie, the midwife, the doctors and the nurses were following the wrong script and I wouldn’t listen to them. I wouldn’t look at their faces, I wouldn’t believe what was happeningbecause if I didn’t believe it then it couldn’t be true.
    Bristol ended suddenly, just the other side of the river, and almost at once we were driving through countryside that was lush and green. Cattle grazed, heads down in fields; little villages went by. The hedgerows were drooping with the weight of an abundance of late summer flowers and leaves. Ahead I could see the looming silhouettes of the Mendip hills and they were glorious, purple in the light. We drove up a busy section of road and on past pubs and farm shops and fruit stalls. There were fewer and fewer villages, more farm tracks, the occasional all-night garage. As the sun began to set to our right, we turned off the main road and went uphill along a narrow, winding lane. Hills rose out of the gloaming green and shadowed landscape below us. Alexander pointed out Glastonbury Tor in the distance as a low Somerset mist settled over the valley. Scrubby blackberries weighed down the brambles that wove through the hedgerows, and the bracken was already dying. A huge flock of rooks, two hundred or more, cawed overhead, disturbing the calm of the wide, pale sky. For the first time that year I felt the promise of autumn in the air.
    ‘Here we are,’ said Alexander, turning sharply into a gap between the trees. We rattled over a cattle-grid and went up the track that led to Avalon. The Land Rover bounced and bumped over pot holes as we wove through a tunnel of trees, until the trees gave way to fields and up ahead I saw the house.
    The light was fading but was still strong enough to illuminate the front face of the building. It was larger, older and more substantial than I’d imagined. It had been there for so long that it seemed to be part of the landscape that surrounded it, an organic thing of stone, red-clay roofing tiles, wood and plaster. Alexander parked the car at the end of the track, next to a semi-derelict barn overrun with bramble and ivy, a couple of empty stables and a doublehorse-trailer, tilted forward to rest on its towing bar. Bales of hay were stacked at the back of a big old shed. Swallows darted in and out of the bucolic clutter of buildings and into the orchard beyond, swooping fast as arrows close to the top of the long grass. Black and white cows grazed beneath the tree. The orchard boundaries were defined by nettles, tall as my shoulder, that leaned over with their own