Entry Island

CHAPTER THIRTY

The news of Marie-Ange’s pregnancy had changed the way he felt about everything. If he had spent his life searching for something, a reason for being, a point to his existence, then suddenly it seemed that he had found it.

But from the start Marie-Ange had been ambivalent. Sime had been unable to understand why she didn’t share his excitement. They had been going through a difficult time, and it seemed to him that a child could provide the glue that would keep them together. But looking back on it later, he realised that she had probably only seen it as an impediment to their breaking up. A responsibility to child and family that she didn’t want.

They’d had a debate about the scan. Sime had wanted to know the sex of their child. She had not. And, as usual, she prevailed.

Four months into the pregnancy, and having regular appointments with the gynaecologist, she still appeared to have little or no maternal instinct. And yet Sime’s sense of fatherhood had been powerful. He had found himself seeing children on their way home from school and imagining how it would feel to be a father. Bringing back memories of his own first day at school, insisting that he could find his way home himself, and then getting lost. He had even caught himself looking at prams and baby seats for the car.

It had stirred memories, too, of the story about his ancestor delivering the baby on the boat, and the moment of parting at Grosse Île when the child had gripped his thumb with tiny fingers. Sime had wanted that feeling. The unqualified and absolute love of a child. The sense that a part of him would live on when he had gone.

At about seventeen weeks Marie-Ange had taken a week’s leave to visit her parents in Sherbrooke. Sime was upcountry on a case the day she was due back. That afternoon he got a call to say she’d been rushed to hospital with severe bleeding, but it was twenty-four hours before he was able to get back to Montreal.

Without any idea of what had happened he went straight to the hospital, where he was left sitting in a waiting room for almost two hours. No one told him anything, and he was almost beside himself with worry.

People came and went. Sick people. Worried relatives. Sime was just about to read the riot act to the nurse at reception when Marie-Ange came through the swing door. She was deathly pale, and clutching a small bag of belongings. She seemed oddly hunched, and when he hurried across the room to her she put her arms around him and buried her face in his chest. Sobs ripped themselves from her throat, and when she tipped her face back to look up at him he saw that it was shiny and wet with tears. She didn’t need to tell him that they had lost the baby.

Strangely, they had been closer in those next few days than they had in years. Sime pampered her, cooking, doing the washing, taking her breakfast in bed. They sat together at night on the settee with a glass of wine, watching mindless TV.

It was the following week that she had broken the news to him. Her gynaecologist had told her she would no longer be able to have children.

Sime had been devastated. Taking it almost harder than the loss of the baby. He had been revisited by the same sense of bereavement experienced after the death of his parents. Of regret. Of being all alone in the world. Not just then, but for ever. And of somehow failing, not just his parents, but their parents, and their parents before them. It would all end with him. So what point had there been to any of it?