Shadow Baby by Margaret Forster Page A

duty. Her mother was impatient with her. ‘For the Lord’s sake, Catriona,’ said Ailsa McEndrick, exasperated, ‘what are you fussing about? The girl’s got eyes and ears, she’s smart, there’s nothing you can tell her she doesn’t already know, and I suppose you mean it’s sex that is worrying you, is it?’ It was. Even hearing her mother refer so openly to sex, as was her defiant habit, made Catriona despair. She had always been so embarrassed by Ailsa’s unusually frank attitude to sex. She had never been able to share it and now that there was Shona to instruct this worried her even more than it always had done.
    She had not enjoyed sex since she had known she would no longer be able to have children. While she had been fertile, even if her fertility ended in disaster, there had been a feverish excitement to sexual intercourse. All the time Archie was thrusting away she was visualising those little sperm poised ready to swim into her womb and at the moment of climax - Archie’s, not hers - she saw the egg pierced and conception happening in a shower of stars. She always lay very still afterwards, holding within herself the life-creating
     
    moisture, and as it began to seep out of her she would feel sad. Only the thought of that egg perhaps already fertilised stopped her from weeping. But after Shona arrived, when she was told her tubes were now so damaged that conception would be impossible and that her fertility, on the edge of forty years of age, would be low, she lost the only interest she had had. There was no longer any thrill. But she was a good wife and she loved Archie and so she said nothing. She never turned away from him, never repulsed his advances. It was not distasteful to be made love to, but nor was it pleasurable. It simply no longer had any meaning for her.
    Now that Shona was thirteen Catriona was almost fifty-three. She was post-menopausal and glad of it - all those night sweats, all those embarrassing hot flushes, all those symptoms she seemed to have so severely while other women had virtually none. She hadn’t spoken to Shona about any of them nor explained her listlessness and general poor health. She didn’t want to disgust or depress her with talk of the menopause. But she was obliged to tell Archie, who was equally obliged to notice her general debility and her sudden marked aversion to sex. He was understanding, as he always was. It occurred to Catriona that he might have another woman and though she recognised such a thought as unworthy, since she knew Archie, she found she did not care. It seemed fair enough to her. If she couldn’t bear any sexual congress during her menopause and Archie found the lack of it month after month intolerable - well, then. All that worried her was that she, a non-sexual being, was in charge of a nubile thirteen-year-old at exactly the wrong time.
    Catriona was not jealous of her daughter but she was afraid of what seemed to her to be Shona’s blatant sexuality. She was too young, surely, to give out these signals, to look so sultry and to be perfectly aware of the effect she had on boys and men. She was no longer slight and delicate in build. She had grown tall and developed large breasts and pronounced buttocks - her figure was unfashionably Edwardian, with its tiny waist and exaggerated curves. But there was no fat on her: her stomach was flat, her legs slim. She wore her hair, a deeper auburn now, pulled back from her face, but when she released the hair from the combs which held it, it fell forward in a great mass of waves and curls half obliterating the fine-boned face and lending her an allure Catriona found disturbing. ‘Why not have your hair shaped, Shona?’ she would say. ‘It’s so unruly, such a bother for you to wash and brush, why not have it cropped, it would
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    suit you.’ But Shona wouldn’t. She wouldn’t have her hair touched. She took great care of it, indulging in all kinds of shampoos and conditioners and