Least Said by Pamela Fudge

interrupted briskly, as we had both been expecting that she would, ‘the man couldn’t take his eyes off you, and she was smitten, too,’ Bette insisted, turning to me. ‘She couldn’t stop talking about him when we went upstairs. We were sharing a room – did I tell you that?’
    I shook my head, knowing from past experience that it was futile to try and interrupt the stream of memories that were as real to Bette today as they had been all those years ago.
    ‘The poor man had only invited her to call him Calum and do you know what she said as soon as we got upstairs?’ I shook my head again. ‘She mimicked him in the cruellest way, “Call me Calum, everybody does,” and I said, “Me thinks the lady doth protest too much,” buried my head under the covers and went straight off to sleep.’
    There was a dramatic pause in her narrative and I knew she was building herself up to the finale, which began with the inevitable, ‘Well,’ paused again to milk the moment for all it was worth and, when she was sure she had our full attention, she delivered the climax to the story, ‘I woke to the sound of the door being kicked open and Calum stepped into the room carrying Tina in his arms, both of them soaked to the skin.’
    ‘Just like a scene from Gone With The Wind ,’ Tina put in helpfully, knowing the way the dialogue always went off by heart.
    ‘A modern version of Gone With The Wind ,’ I added my own little embellishment.
    ‘Exactly,’ Bette beamed, ‘and I knew then that they were destined to be together forever.’
    Of course, we all three of us knew it hadn’t been anywhere near as straight-forward as that. A brief affair had resulted in the birth of a child, a fact Tina had chosen to keep secret from Calum for reasons of her own. In the end she had been forced into confessing, but not for many years. Tina and Calum were very happily married now, but it had been touch and go for a while whether they really would end up together.
    I shivered, as I realised that some aspects of their life mirrored mine and Jon’s, except we were already married when the affair took place and the child that was subsequently born almost certainly wasn’t my husband’s.
    Anyone looking at us would assume that, like Tina and Calum, Jon and I had the perfect marriage and, to all intents and purposes, we did. However, unlike Tina – who no longer had anything to hide – I was carrying the burden of a huge secret that could blow our happy family life sky high and destroy everything.

 
    Chapter 5
     
    Calum took all three of us to Annabelle’s for lunch. The restaurant had always been my favourite, especially because it was where Jon and I got engaged. Going there always brought back wonderful memories. The ring, not very originally, had been dropped into my champagne glass.
    Everyone in the restaurant seemed to have been privy to the imminent proposal of marriage that evening - everyone that is except for me - and there were party poppers going off and sparklers in a cake that was delivered even before I’d had a chance to say yes. It had been such a happy occasion and we were so very much in love.
    I jumped a little as Calum touched my arm and asked, ‘Is everything all right, Wendy? You’re very quiet.’
    It was only then I realised that, while I had been reminiscing and pushing my seafood cocktail starter round the plate, everyone else had eaten theirs and they were waiting for me.
    I had to tell them something, so I told them the part about getting engaged in this very restaurant, but obviously leaving out the fact that the ensuing marriage had run into trouble quite quickly when I’d failed to conceive the child we both wanted so much.
    I feel sure I could have accepted the fact that we might never have children, for whatever reason. Unfortunately, Jon couldn’t or wouldn’t accept that the fault almost definitely lay with his dodgy sperm – even going so far as to refuse further tests or even to talk about