Page 9 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
2
Pregnant Pause
Even aficionados of the horror genre will be shocked, stunned and revolted by Cass Leigh’s latest offering on the altar of bad taste…
The Times
Max did eventually send me a Christmas present (in January) of some expensive but noxious perfume. It smelled like it had been extruded from the nether regions of a musk rat, and probably had.
The musk rat was welcome to it, becauseIneverwore perfume. Why didn’t he know these things by then?
…from the unstoppered bottle rose a strange, evil, dark miasma that took form and shape and a greasy solidity before her eyes…
He was still calling me when the fancy took him, though his conversation was more and more about golf, the excellence of Californian wine, and their new personal fitness trainer, Kyra, than about how muchhe missed me.
Still, with no other man in the offing he remained in pole position.
Meanwhile in a fit of pique I bought my own late Christmas present of a Predictova fertility kit, although it took mea week or two to break open its pristine Cellophane wrappings, especially after reading that book Orla gave me for Christmas:Everything You Need to Know About Last-Minute Pregnancy.
Actually,Ididn’tneed to know most of that.
I was not sure how good an idea Predictova was either, because if I wasn’t ovulating at all I would be devastated, and if I was, I would be perfectly frantic in case each egg was the last one.
And it was all very well for Orla to tell me to get a young lover, but you couldn’t just pick one up in the supermarket with the weekly shopping. Buy one, get one free?I didn’t think so.
It was a pity my handbag couldn’t turn into a dark, handsome and comfortably worn lover. I contemplated kissing it, but I think that only works with frogs, besides seeming a little weird.
Orla was quite right about all available men having major defects, though, because when I actually came to look around, there were no possible baby-fatherers in the offing except Jason, whoseprogeny spoke for itself, mostly using the F-word.
We didn’t know how Jason could carry on being so nice to Tom, unless he’d got the drop on him. After all, therewasonly one witness who saw Tanya driving off in the middle of the night after that row she had with Jason (who had a fearsome temper), and it had been two years since then with no word.
Still, he did report her disappearance to thepolice and they looked into it, so they must have been satisfied.
Wonder where she went.
Had now paid several nocturnal visits to the church, especially on rainy nights. Dim lights burned all night, making it look pleasantly eerie, and I could settle in a little nest oftapestry cushions in my favourite pew next to the Templar’s Tomb.
The knight was wearing a pair of those knitted-looking chainmailtights with pointed wrinkly toes, which made him look rather endearing. His wife lay next to him, looking serene: she was probably glad of the rest, going by the number of named offspring on the sides of the tomb.
I found the atmosphere conducive to thinking about the current novel, and contemplating Max and motherhood, but not, so far, to repentance.
When I told Charles this he said God wasalways happy to welcome me to his house whatever I thought about. He had such a cosy view of God, so unlike Pa’s that I only wished I could share his comforting vision; but even if I should undergo some miraculous conversion, I feared I would never be the type to cover myself with little fish brooches and dance about singing ‘Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam’.
The evening being stormy, I settleddown (in the night, by the Knight) to do another of the pros and cons lists, although the first one hadn’t really helped: it showed me what I should and shouldn’t do, but then I ignored the information. Like horoscopes, really: you only take any notice of the bits you like the look of.
Having a baby in your forties:
For:
Against:
