"Almost" Part 23: Book 2, Part 13

Wendy Finds Out She Is Pregnant Again

The feeling hit Wendy with a dull, cavernous shock. She thought that, if a railway carriage were sentient, it would feel this way, when coupled with a locomotive.

She was on the toilet. Her period was late. She knew.

She felt nothing but that shock. A man gets a job, she thought, which will pay him well, but which he does not want… Or, more likely, a man gets conscripted for a war to defend another man’s homeland…

She shrugged, then laughed, rubbing her forehead. Time to pop out another one, breeder. Tom’s face rose in her mind, and she felt a strange starfish of pain deep within her.

She had been fantasizing about Tom for some time. It was quite gruesome, actually. Greek. Incestuous. She fought with Tom, overtly or covertly, every time they met. She found herself forever driven to test him.

It was very primitive. Wendy needed to be sure that the man she desired could never be broken. Never ever. So she had to test him. Forever. I mean – what if he has gotten weak overnight?

The ‘why’ of the testing was never really explored. She had, lost in the hedge-rows of her hidden heart, one of the deep secrets of femininity, which is a bottomless pool of acidic contempt for male weakness. In Wendy’s world, English men were like England itself – a sinking island surrounded by this rising sea...