The Complete Short Stories

‘Everything all right?’ she asked, eyeing him shrewdly. She moved her matronly bulk towards him and began to straighten the bed. Freeman fidgeted irritably, pushing her away when she tried to lift him off the pillow on which he was sitting.

‘For heaven’s sake, Elizabeth, I’m not a child!’ he remonstrated, controlling his sing-song voice with difficulty.

‘What’s happened to Hanson? He was supposed to be here half an hour ago.’

His wife shook her large handsome head and went over to the window. The loose cotton dress disguised her figure, but as she reached up to the bolt Freeman could see the incipient swell of her pregnancy.

‘He must have missed his train.’ With a single twist of her forearm she securely fastened the upper bolt, which had taken Freeman ten minutes to unlatch.

‘I thought I could hear it banging,’ she said pointedly. ‘We don’t want you to catch a cold, do we?’

Freeman waited impatiently for her to leave, glancing at his watch. When his wife paused at the foot of the bed, surveying him carefully, he could barely restrain himself from shouting at her.

‘I’m getting the baby’s clothes together,’ she said, adding aloud to herself, ‘which reminds me, you need a new dressing gown. That old one of yours is losing its shape.’

Freeman pulled the lapels of the dressing gown across each other, as much to hide his bare chest as to fill out the gown.

‘Elizabeth, I’ve had this for years and it’s perfectly good. You’re getting an obsession about renewing everything.’ He hesitated, realizing the tactlessness of this remark — he should be flattered that she was identifying him with the expected baby. If the strength of the identification was sometimes alarming, this was probably because she was 255 having her first child at a comparatively late age, in her early forties. Besides, he had been ill and bed-ridden during the past month (and what were his unconscious motives?) which only served to reinforce the confusion.

‘Elizabeth. I’m sorry. It’s been good of you to look after me. Perhaps we should call a doctor.’

No! something screamed inside him.

As if hearing this, his wife shook her head in agreement.

‘You’ll be all right soon. Let nature take its proper course. I don’t think you need to see the doctor yet.’

Yet?

Freeman listened to her feet disappearing down the carpeted staircase. A few minutes later the sound of the washing machine drummed out from the kitchen.

Yet!

Freeman slipped quickly out of bed and went into the bathroom.

The cupboard beside the wash-basin was crammed with drying baby clothes, which Elizabeth had either bought or knitted, then carefully washed and sterilized. On each of the five shelves a large square of gauze covered the neat piles, but he could see that most of the clothes were blue, a few white and none pink.

I hope Elizabeth is right, he thought. If she is it’s certainly going to be the world’s best-dressed baby. We’re supporting an industry single-handed.

He bent down to the bottom compartment, and from below the tank pulled out a small set of scales. On the shelf immediately above he noticed a large brown garment, a six-year-old’s one-piece romper suit. Next to it was a set of vests, outsize, almost big enough to fit Freeman himself. He stripped off his dressing gown and stepped on to the platform. In the mirror behind the door he examined his small hairless body, with its thin shoulders and narrow hips, long coltish legs.

Six stone nine pounds yesterday. Averting his eyes from the dial, he listened to the washing machine below, then waited for the pointer to steady.

‘Six stone two pounds!’

Fumbling with his dressing gown, Freeman pushed the scales under the tank.

Six stone two pounds! A drop of seven pounds in twenty-four hours!

He hurried back into bed, and sat there trembling nervously, fingering for his vanished moustache.

Yet only two months ago he had weighed over eleven stone. Seven pounds in a single day, at this rate — His mind baulked at the conclusion. Trying to steady his knees, he reached for one of the magazines, turned the pages blindly.

And baby makes two.

* * *

He had first become aware of the transformation six weeks earlier, almost immediately after Elizabeth’s pregnancy had been confirmed.

Shaving the next morning in the bathroom before going to the office, he discovered that his moustache was thinning. The usually stiff black bristles were soft and flexible, taking on their former ruddy-brown colouring.

His beard, too, was lighter; normally dark and heavy after only a few hours, it yielded before the first few strokes of the razor, leaving his face pink and soft.