It had been a sultry day, and his own temper had been on a short fuse. He had been dreading leaving her, and the thought had even begun to cross his mind that he might have to break his contract with the Sultan and look for work closer to home. But where? One of the oil companies operating in the North Sea?
In the Gulf he would be in charge of a team of divers and biologists hired by the Sultan to check on the effect of pollution on the area’s seabed and life-forms. It was a golden, once-in-a-lifetime, opportunity to be part of the kind of research anyone in his position would have dreamed about. It was his intention to publish a paper on his discoveries once his work for the Sultan was completed, and he knew that if he turned his back on this opportunity he would never get another one like it.
But he still hated the thought of leaving Annie. For the past three days she had been crying in her sleep at night, and there was a tension between them that both of them seemed powerless to defuse.
Annie had been due to start her first term at university the week after he’d left, and on that particular day, in an attempt to give them both something else to think about other than his imminent departure, he had spent the evening discussing with her the career options that would be open to her once she had obtained her degree.
‘I’m not sure I want to take up my university place any more,’ she told him quietly. ‘After all, we’re married now, and…well…once we have children—’
‘Children!’ Dominic interrupted her blankly. The issue of whether or not they would have a family was not one they had as yet discussed. The experience of his own upbringing—his childhood belief that he wasn’t important to his parents versus his now adult recognition of the demands their work had placed on them both—had forced him to acknowledge that not every adult was up to the huge responsibilities that being a parent meant, and to question whether or not he was himself.
Now he saw that Annie had a completely different viewpoint from his own, and he knew that he had to make her understand that they both needed time to adjust to their relationship to one another before they even began to discuss whether or not they would make good parents.
Certainly there was no question of them having a child whilst he was committed to his current contract. No way did he want a child to suffer through him in the way he had done as a boy—oh, no, no way!
‘You don’t want children?’ she exclaimed in shock. ‘But…but why not?’
‘No. No, I don’t,’ he confirmed sharply.
‘But why not?’ Annie demanded, and Dominic cursed himself for the pain and disbelief he could hear in her voice, setting out as gently as he could to explain his feelings to her.
‘Parenthood isn’t just about having a baby, Annie. It’s…’ Desperately he struggled to find the right words. ‘It’s a very big responsibility. When we create a child we aren’t just giving it life, we’re giving it…burdening it, if you like, with ourselves…with our own personal history. And at the moment I feel that just isn’t something I would want to burden a child with. We’ve got one another…isn’t that enough?’ he beseeched her, adding almost desperately as he saw the look in her eyes, ‘I married you for you, Annie, and not for…for children.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she agreed, her voice becoming almost pleading as she added huskily, ‘But sometimes things happen…a baby is conceived without being planned and…’
‘No way…not for us,’ Dominic denied immediately. ‘I don’t…’ He stopped, then asked her gently, ‘What are we arguing for? After all, there’s no way you could be pregnant.’
One of the first things he had done, the very first time they had made love, was to assure her that she need have no fear of him being careless about contraception, and he had been touched and amused when, just before their marriage, Annie had hesitantly confided to him that she had read that sex could be more pleasurable for both of them if he did not have to…to ‘use anything’, and that because of that she had taken the responsibility for contraception into her own hands.
He had let her do it, partly because, if he was honest, he was just as eager to be inside her, skin to skin, flesh to flesh, as she was to have him there without a protective barrier between them.
‘We can’t have any accidents, Annie,’ he reinforced firmly.
‘But if we did?’ she persisted with unusual stubbornness.
He frowned as he looked at her. Her face was flushed and her eyes unexpectedly determined as well as anxious. It was unlike her to argue with him, and the last thing he felt like doing when they had so little time left together was to argue about a hypothetical pregnancy. He rubbed his temple, where a pounding headache had been irritating him all day.
‘If we did,’ he told her tersely, ‘then of course we would do the sensible thing, take the only reasonable option, and have the pregnancy terminated.’
‘An abortion!’ She gasped and went white. ‘You mean you would want me to destroy our baby…to kill it…?’
‘Annie, for God’s sake stop being so emotional,’ he demanded short-temperedly. ‘When the time comes we can sit down together and discuss starting a family rationally and sensibly. Until that time does come, though, it would be crazy…impossible for us to have a child. Look at you,’ he taunted her. ‘You’re still practically one yourself…’
‘I wasn’t a child when you wanted to take me to bed—or to marry me,’ Annie immediately pointed out stiffly. ‘And this is my body we’re talking about. Mine, not yours. And I can tell you, Dominic, there’s no way I could ever, ever destroy our child. And if you tried to make me then…then…’
‘Then what?’ Dominic demanded in exasperation. The ache in his head had gone from a single angry pounding to a pain that was jangling his already overstretched nerves to a rising crescendo so intense that he was having to grit his teeth to prevent himself from complaining about it.
‘Then I’d leave you,’ Annie told him flatly.
‘Leave me? For God’s sake, don’t be so ridiculous, so childish,’ he fumed. ‘We’ve been married less than a month, Annie. You aren’t pregnant, and…’
‘But if I were? If I were you’d make me have a termination? Right?’ she persisted emotionally.
Dominic sighed. ‘It would be impossible for us to have a child right now.’
‘Impossible? Why? Because you don’t want one? Because—?’
‘You know the position I’m in,’ Dominic interrupted her shortly. ‘I’ve got my career to think of, Annie, and…’
‘Oh, yes, your career…I mustn’t forget that must I?’ she demanded, her eyes filling with tears. ‘Nothing, no one must interfere with your precious career, must they Dominic?’
He guessed then—or at least he thought he had guessed—what was really wrong. Like him, she was dreading their imminent parting, and immediately his heart softened.
‘Come here,’ he commanded huskily, reaching for her. But to his chagrin, instead of responding, instead of running to him and flinging herself into his arms, as he had expected, she deliberately took a step back from him, her face and her body freezing with disdain.
‘Sex…is that all you can think about, Dominic? Well, I’m sorry, but I’m just not in the mood.’
And with that she stalked off, leaving him open-mouthed, torn between anger and amusement.
He hadn’t seen her display such haughtiness before, nor such obstinacy, he reflected later, when she refused all the tentative attempts he made to coax her back into a more loving frame of mind, and in the end, irritated both by what he considered to be her childishness and his own headache, he shrugged his shoulders, telling her pithily, ‘If I were you, Annie, before I thought about having a child I would check on my own maturity…or lack of it!’
That night for the first time since their marriage they slept without touching. Several times Dominic was tempted to reach out and take hold of her, to end their discord by telling her how much he loved her and how much he was dreading being apart from her. But he had a stubborn streak of his own, a
nd an even more well-hidden vulnerability as well, and a part of him needed to have her to be the one to turn to him, to tell him, show him, that he was wanted, that he meant more to her than the as yet unconceived child they had argued so hotly and painfully about.
But she didn’t, and in the end, because of the pain in his head, he resorted to taking some of the strong painkillers he had been prescribed for such attacks, with the result that he overslept the following morning.
When he was finally able to drag himself out of his drug-induced sleep Annie had gone.
Gone never to return…
At first he simply assumed that she had gone into the city to do some shopping, but then lunchtime came and went, and then teatime, and it finally began to dawn on him that she might not be coming back.