An unexpected delivery

It had been almost six weeks since Millicent had been with Dante. Six weeks since that night of debauchery. The following day, she abruptly stopped attending the cookery classes – she was convinced if she saw Dante, she would end up sleeping with him again – and had settled back into her old routine.

It was better this way, she told herself, lying in bed next to Stewart at night, listening to the sound of his noisy breathing. She was lucky, she supposed.

How close she’d come to messing up her marriage! She’d had a slip, but, thank God, he hadn’t found her out. She’d known other women who’d found themselves in her position – indulging a base physical need, an unfortunate lack of discretion – who’d been kicked out of their homes by their husbands. Or, if they weren’t kicked out, made to live hellish existences in their homes, constantly repaying their guilt debt to their husbands.

And Millicent would think back on the events of that night when she’d crawled home at two in the morning, and she would become literally sick with guilt, waves of nausea making her stomach roil, at the thought of how close she came to destroying everything.

The affair was over before it had really begun; Dante had no way of getting in touch with her, and she would never see him again. With absolute discipline it gradually became easy for her to force herself to block the images of her encounter with Dante that would occasionally flash across her mind, images that would make a flush crawl over her skin and generate a slow, stirring warmth between her legs. That chapter is closed, she’d said to herself. Everything is going to be okay.

Her days passed in a veil of tedium. Now that she did not have the classes to look forward to, it seemed she lost her focus. A direct consequence of this was unfortunately that her plans to open a restaurant were shelved, for the time being. Somehow, she was unable to think about starting the restaurant without remembering the dalliance with Dante.

When Stewart asked, she gave her reason for giving up the class as being that it wasn’t challenging enough, which seemed to strangely satisfy him despite the fact that she’d initially expressed enthusiasm about the course when she’d just begun it.

Juanita, thankfully, did not press her, either. “Then you finish it already, Miss Mill?” was all she said in reference to Millicent’s announcement that she would not be going back to the classes.

Millicent’s guilty conscience, however, would offer her no ease. As the days passed, she found herself becoming sicker and sicker about her slip. So intense was her guilt, that it manifested itself physically, often sending her rushing to the bathroom and retching violently. This would happen at all hours – day and night. One minute she’d be fine, and then something, the smell of onions frying in oil in the kitchen, for example, would make her suddenly ill.

One morning, she found herself lying in bed, impatiently waiting for Stewart to leave for work, and fighting back the urge to vomit. He’d noticed the frequent stomach upsets and had commented on it. “It’s nothing,” she’d breezily assured him. “I think I ate something that disagreed with me a few days ago. You know my delicate stomach. I’ll be okay.”

But she was not okay. As soon as she heard Stewart’s footfalls on the stairs, she flew to the bathroom and buried her face in the bowl. When she was through, she lay sprawled on the floor in a weakened heap. No, she was not okay at all, she thought dazedly. Surely, this reaction was more than mere guilt. This was like when she was.

Suddenly, she sat up. No! It couldn’t be. She would not even allow herself to consider the possibility. But even as she was thinking this, she knew what was wrong with her. She got up and went back to bed, the blood throbbing in her veins. She would go to sleep, she thought. When she woke up, she would consider what to do.

***

The following day, Millicent sat for long moments in the doctor’s office, dazed and in shock, her doctor’s voice still ringing in her ears with the news: “Congratulations, Mrs Turner. You’re pregnant”.

She felt numb, glued to her position on the examining table as the doctor, a thin woman in her late sixties with greying hair and a slight limp who’d been her doctor for as long as she could remember, stood grinning at her. Millicent looked blankly at her, a cold sick feeling washing over her.

In some respects it was as though she hadn’t even heard her, as if the woman had spoken some kind of foreign tongue, Pig Latin, maybe, to her. Yet, for all that, she knew she had heard her. Quite clearly, too. It wasn’t as if it was a complete surprise, though. Subconsciously, she supposed she’d known all along that she was pregnant with Dante’s child.