The Yuletide Child

moment. In every way her body was letting her down, after years of discipline and obedience. She looked up at Ross, biting her lower lip in frustration, wishing she could deny what he had just said.
He put a hand into his inside jacket pocket. ‘Look,I’ll leave my mobile with you—then if anything did happen to the phone lines you could still call for help.’ He put the mobile phone on the bedside table and bent towards her. ‘Feel better now?’
‘I’m not a child, Ross! Stop talking to me in that patronising voice. Being pregnant doesn’t make me stupid. ’
‘You could have fooled me!’ Ross pushed a hand impatiently through his thick black hair. ‘I can’t stand here arguing with you all morning. I’m sorry but I have to go. I must get to York in time for lunch with the others.’
He kissed her, his mouth warm against her cold, averted cheek. Her nostrils quivered, picking up his male scent, his skin freshly showered and shaved, his aftershave the fragrance of pines, arousing memories of those long-ago nights last summer, when they had made love in the forest, on a bed of green fern in the warm, breathing twilight.
It seemed so long ago. At the memory she was on the verge of tears again. They had been so happy in the beginning—where had it all gone, the laughter and passion, the closeness and need?
Ross didn’t love her any more. He hadn’t even tried to cuddle her for weeks; he always slept in the spare room.
He couldn’t bear to share the same bed and she couldn’t blame him; she took up so much of it and she wasn’t sleeping too well, moving restlessly all night, kicking out in spasm of cramp all the time.
‘Aren’t you going to say goodbye?’ he asked, half teasing now, trying to get a smile out of her. ‘What do you want me to bring you from York? You can have three wishes.’
Her head swirled with the muddle of emotions she feltso often lately—anger and resentment, fear and misery. She turned her head at last, her tangled mop of curly brown hair tossing on the pillow, and looked at him bitterly, blue eyes wide and wet in her flushed face.
‘Three wishes? That’s easy. I wish I’d never met you; I wish I’d never married you; I wish I wasn’t pregnant!’
Stiffening, Ross stared back at her, face hard, eyes leaping with rage, making her shrink away from him. Without another word he turned on his heel, picked up the case he had packed last night and walked out, banging the door of the bedroom shut behind him.
Sobbing, the pent-up tears now streaming down her face, Dylan heard him thudding down the stairs, two at a time. A moment later the front door opened and slammed shut.
Anguish burst out of her. ‘Ross!” she called. ‘Please, wait...Ross, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it!’ She slid her legs out of the bed and stood up shakily, her body clumsy in the crumpled white cotton nightdress. It was impossible for her to move quickly. By the time she managed to get to the window the engine of his four-wheel drive was starting up.
Dylan struggled to push down the catch but it was stiff; it seemed to take her an age to get the window open. She could see the dark green vehicle right outside, with Ross inside it, although all she could see of him was his profile: a tough outline, hard-edged cheekbones and jawline, framed in windblown black hair.
‘Look up, Ross! Look up!’ she pleaded as she finally flung the window wide open. Icy wind rushed into the room but she was unaware of it at that instant. She was intent on leaning out, waving. ‘I’m sorry, Ross!’
He didn’t hear or see her, he did not look up. She heard a roar of acceleration, then the sound of the tyresas he took off along the rough, unmade road. She clung on to the sill, listening to the fading note of his engine somewhere in the distance.
Seconds later he was gone, and she was alone, high on the roof of the world, it seemed to her, surrounded by hills and swirling sky.
The red-roofed, white-walled four-bedroomed house was strong enough to keep out the wind from the hills and distant sea which blew so fiercely much of the time. She rarely went out into the garden now, except to cut some of the vegetables Ross grew—mostly winter cabbage and potatoes at the moment, although in spring and summer she’d had an enormous choice to cook with. She had been amazed by how much better things tasted when you had just picked them in your own garden.
She was shivering violently now, her nightie blowing around her. Closing the window with another struggle, she shut the wind out, put her hot, tear-strained face on the cold glass and stared at the bitterly familiar view.
If only she could see another house, a roof, chimneys, a wisp of white smoke curling up somewhere—any sign of other human presence! She ached to see streets, shops and people, theatres and cafés, buses and noise, not this emptiness, however beautiful, where all she could see was trees.
Trees, trees, nothing but trees under the grey, sagging bolster of a sky.
‘I hate you!’ she yelled at the tall Norwegian spruce with its green needle-like leaves, the mountain ash planted at the forest edge which could be very pretty in spring, when it bore creamy white sprays of flowers, and still had some of those red berries the birds had mostly eaten, and a little belt of cypress whose silvery blue pyramid shape was pleasing to the eye. Ross said they’dplanted other trees at the edge of the pines to soften the impact of all those conifers, but nothing could disguise the darkness and lack of life beneath their towering presence.
This was not a natural wood of deciduous trees. No oak, no ash, no hazel. No, here you saw a commercially planted, regimented forest