Precious Time by Erica James Page A

condition.
    Sometimes there was just no helping Gabriel Liberty.

Chapter Seven
    It was four days since Stella had left him, and while Archie wasn’t entirely surprised by her departure, he had been taken aback by the way she had gone about it. It was the coward’s way out and he had never thought of Stella in that light.
    The note had been blunt and to the point. It seemed that the affair he had thought was over had picked up again and Stella had decided, at last, where her future lay. And it was not with Archie, the man to whom she had been married for twenty-six years and who had failed to give her the children she had always wanted.
    Indicating right, he pulled off the main road and turned sharply into the hospital car park. He felt angry. It was always Stella who was supposed to feel the loss of not having children. What about him? Why hadn’t his feelings been taken into account? After all, it was he who had to live with the knowledge that he wasn’t man enough to become a father, he who had taken the jibes when Stella’s disappointment turned to bitterness. He had wanted children, too, but no one had thought he was bothered by his and Stella’s incompleteness as a couple and no one had thought to ask.
    Next to him, now that they were parked, his mother was
    struggling with her seat-belt. ‘Here, love,’ he said. ‘Let me.’ He pressed the red button and released the strap.
    She straightened her hat and smiled at him. ‘Ready now,’ she said.
    ‘Ready.’ He smiled back.
    She had dressed specially for the occasion - a trip to the speech therapist was a big day out for her. Archie had been roped in as chief style guru. ‘Pink or glue?’ she had asked, holding out two dresses as he sat on the edge of her bed eating his cornflakes.
    ‘Definitely the pink,’ he had said, trying to sound decisive. A hint of dithering on his part and they’d never get out of the house this side of sunset.
    It seemed to work, and she held the dress against her in front of the long mirror. Then, lowering it, she said, ‘Or maybe the … the…
    the …’ She squeezed her eyes shut, pursed her lips, and at the back of her mind, where some prankster was rewriting the English language for her, she located the word. She snapped her eyes open and said, proudly, ‘Or the cheese?’
    He proceeded carefully. If he gave the wrong answer, the limited supply of good words available to her this morning would shrivel to nothing. He gave the matter serious consideration before he tapped the air with his spoon. ‘No, I still think the pink would be best. Very Liz Taylor, when she was at her best. Shall I help you?’
    He helped her now to take her seat in the hospital waiting room, and could feel the heavy tiredness in her body: the short walk from the car park had sapped most of her strength. But it did nothing to dampen her desire to enjoy her big day out. She smiled at the woman opposite, who also looked as if she was dressed in her best party frock - she had overdone the makeup, though, and the red lipstick clashed with the frilly purple neckline. The man sitting next to her, presumably her husband, looked dog-tired, and Archie wondered what unearthly time the pair of them had got up to get ready for their appointment.
    But the woman didn’t respond to the warmth of his mother’s smile. Disappointed, Bessie turned to Archie and, in a voice that should have been a whisper but missed the mark by several decibels, she said, ‘Cobbly cow.’
    He tried not to laugh, and was still trying to contain himself when it was Bessie’s turn to see the young girl who was patiently teaching her to speak again. Though with a phrase as beautiful as ‘cobbly cow’ - so much better than ‘snobby cow’ - he wondered whether it wouldn’t be more fun to teach the rest of the world to speak as Bessie did now. He left them to their phonetics and flashcards and went in search of a polystyrene-flavoured cup of tea that would scald the top layer of skin