‘I’m not making any value judgements, darling. I know the sort of person you are. I’ve never doubted you for a moment, and anyone who does needs their head examining!’ she finished fiercely. ‘Who is this man—is he married?’
Catherine heard the slightly raw tone. Even now her mother still hurt. She had had her own cross to bear. Loving a married man had brought with it nothing but pain and heartache. And a baby, of course. Mustn’t forget the baby. For Catherine had been one of those fatherless children—a child who had never known her father. ‘No, he’s not married.’
‘Thank God for that!’
‘I shouldn’t have worried you by telling you about it, Mum.’
‘I’m more worried about the fact that you don’t have a job any more,’ her mother was saying. ‘Any luck on the freelance front?’
‘I haven’t really been looking—’
‘Well, better start, Catherine—you have to keep a roof over your head and food in your mouth and clothes on your back, remember?’
Oh, yes, she remembered all right. Independence had been another lesson drummed into her from an early age by a woman who had always had to fend for herself and bring up her child. Catherine’s mother had initially been wary of her daughter’s chosen career, seeing it as precarious—and for Catherine to now be freelance must be her idea of a nightmare.
‘Oh, I’ll find something—I’ve got plenty of contacts.’
‘Why don’t you come down this weekend? It’d be lovely to see you.’
Catherine hesitated, tempted. She couldn’t think of anything nicer than to escape to her mother’s tiny cottage, surrounded by fields and trees, with a distant peep of the sea. Under normal circumstances she would have been scooting straight out of the door to buy her ticket at the train station.
But these were not normal circumstances. No, indeed. Catherine cast a disgusted look down at her baggy tee shirt.
‘No, Mum,’ she replied. ‘I have a heap of things to do here. Maybe next weekend.’
‘All right, darling. You will take care of yourself, won’t you?’
‘Of course I will!’
Her mother’s words came back to haunt her during the next few weeks as Catherine scouted around many publications angling for assignments. She had a mixed bag of luck. Some people knew her work and respected it, and were keen to hire her. But the market was full of freelance journalists—some of them talented and hungry and straight out of college—and Catherine knew that she was going to have to work very hard to keep up with the competition. Suddenly the staff job she had had at Pizazz! seemed terribly comfortable, and she wondered why she had bothered throwing it in.
As a defiant gesture it had been rather wasted. She had lost Finn anyway—though she reminded herself that he had never been hers to have.
And what else had her mother said?
‘Take care of yourself.’
Had she known that the stress of everything that had happened would leave Catherine feeling distinctly peaky?
Stress had all kinds of insidious effects on the human body, she knew that as well as the next person. It played havoc with her appetite, for example. One minute she would be feeling so nauseous that just the thought of food would make her feel sick. The next she would be diving for the biscuit tin and thickly spreading yeast extract on a pile of digestive biscuits.
It wasn’t until one afternoon when Sally—her best friend on Pizazz! and the only person she had kept in touch with from there—commented that she was putting on weight that Catherine’s safe reality finally crumbled into dust.
She waited until Sally had gone and then shut the door behind her with a shaking hand. She went into the bathroom to stare at her white, haunted face with frightened eyes. Knowing deep down and yet denying it. Not wanting to know, nor daring to.
The thought that she might be pregnant simply hadn’t occurred to her. But as she allowed the facts to assemble logically in her head she wondered how she could have been so stupid.
The next day she went through the rituals of confirmation, knowing that they were unnecessary, but until concrete proof confirmed her worst fears she might really be able to put it down to stress.
The blue line on the indicator was a fact. Just as was the faint tingling in her breasts. The missed periods. The nausea. The compulsive and compensatory eating. It all added up—and you wouldn’t need to be Doctor of the Year to work out why.
Catherine sat back on her heels and took a deep breath, hugged her arms protectively around her heavy breasts.
Now what?
Her breathing short and shallow and low, she tried to flick her mind through her options. But nothing she thought of seemed to make any sense because it didn’t seem real. It couldn’t be real, could it?
She went into denial. Threw her energy into an article on pet cemeteries and spent days researching it. Managed to agree to an almighty fee for a piece on London’s newest wannabe club and spent a queasy evening in a smoke-filled room regretting it.