The Apple of Discord
Her husband never once visited her in the maternity ward, not even a phone call. From the hospital, Blythe was taken home by her mother in a modest, unceremonial way. Blythe had mentally braced herself for this arrangement, yet it still stung not for herself, for she had learned to live with slights during pregnancy, but for the tiny son, so long awaited and cherished, who was greeted by the new world with such cold indifference.
She clung to the hope that, at the very last moment, her husband would look at the child, feel his pulse quicken, sense the blood that ran in his own veins, and see in the baby a continuation of himself. He, however, turned his gaze away.
For twelve years Blythe and Leonard had lived together, she would say, soultosoul, and she was certain of it. Their age gap was fifteen years, but that never seemed to matter. Blythe met Leonard in the planning and economics department where she started work straight after university. He came out of an unhappy marriage with no children. He swamped her with attention and care, courted her with a flourish, and they were married soon after. Blythe could hardly contain her delight at how lucky she felt clever, industrious, kind, handsome, and fairminded.
A single trait of his cast a shadow over her life: deepseated a sense of justice that, at times, made him more of a quarrelsome firebrand than a devoted partner. It was too late to reshape him. He could not stay in one job; one day he fell out with his boss, the next he would snap at anyone, regardless of rank, or refuse what he deemed unreasonable demands. He drifted from post to post, sometimes languishing without work while Blythe, unlike him, stayed put, rose to deputy head of her department, and earned a respectable salary in pounds that covered everything.
Blythe yearned for a child, but nothing happened. Doctors said both she and Leonard were healthy, yet no baby arrived. She had almost surrendered hope when, at last, the miracle unfolded. She glowed with joy as she told Leonard the news. His reaction crushed her.
With thinly veiled contempt he announced that he did not want the child, that at fifty he did not wish to become a young dad and be the butt of jokes, and that the burden should not be hung around his neck. I want a peaceful old age, he said. Do you realise what youre doing? Youre condemning this family to poverty. My earnings are insufficient to provide for you all. Running after extra work is no longer suitable for a man my age, he continued.
Leonard gave Blythe an ultimatum: if she kept the baby, he would walk out, for the flat was his. Blythe was shattered. After so many years, to hear such words was a blow she had not foreseen. She had sensed his dislike of children before, but his reaction to his own offspring was a complete surprise and a total collapse of her marriage.
She tried, for a while, to reach his mind, but failed. His constant jibes about oldwoman nonsense, his gloating over her ill health thats what you get, you brought it on yourself! wore her down. Her mother lived alone, so Blythe moved in with her. Leonard vanished from her life as if he had never existed, no calls, no visits, and just before the babys birth she received a summons to court: he had filed for divorce. The hearing was postponed, but a divorce loomed on the horizon.
Blythe never regretted defying Leonard and bringing her son into the world. He may have wanted a quiet old age; let him have it. She was still young enough to raise the boy. And so the child became the apple of discord. Conventional wisdom says children cement a marriage, yet sometimes, in the strange logic of a dream, they tear it apart.
