Fern Woolbright’s pregnancy

Fern Woolbright’s pregnancy transforms a private secret into a family crisis: at nineteen, she discovers she is expecting a child, while the people around her take for granted that James Frobisher is the father. The pregnancy brings a hurried marriage and the physical strain of a twin pregnancy, but its deepest tension lies in what Fern cannot say: Charlie Treadaway may be the father, and no one else knows that possibility is real.

Recognition and concealment

Fern Woolbright visits Dr Leonard at her mother’s urging because of exhaustion, nausea, new food aversions, and an unusually sensitive sense of smell. He has known her since she had chicken pox as a toddler, and his careful suggestion that she might be pregnant initially leaves her baffled. The possibility takes time to register; when it does, Fern Woolbright laughs and dismisses it, insisting that she cannot be pregnant.

Dr Leonard asks about contraception. Fern Woolbright says she has a Dutch cap for use if the occasion arises. Her pause when he asks whether she is conscientious gives him reason to explain that a barrier method must be in place to work. The embarrassment is physical: she feels a blush rise from her throat to her hairline. Dr Leonard offers a blood test to be safe, but Fern Woolbright understands the likely answer before it is confirmed. At nineteen, she experiences the pregnancy not as welcome news but as the ruin of her life.

Family decisions and uncertain paternity

Rosemarie Woolbright has suspected the pregnancy even before Dr Leonard raises it. Her response is brisk and practical. She distinguishes Fern Woolbright’s situation from what has happened to Minty and Paul, which she regards as a genuine catastrophe, and insists that this is something the family will have to manage. Though Fern Woolbright briefly hopes her mother might suggest an abortion, Rosemarie Woolbright does not intend to offer that option. Fern Woolbright is, in one sense, relieved not to have to make the choice herself.

Rosemarie Woolbright’s plan depends on James Frobisher accepting responsibility. She tells Fern Woolbright she is surprised by him but confident he will do so. She informs Fern Woolbright’s father while Fern Woolbright is out of the house, giving him time to recover from his anger before she returns. He tells her he is disappointed, but grateful that James Frobisher is the father. Fern Woolbright cannot correct him. The father could instead be Charlie Treadaway, whose possible connection to Fern Woolbright is bound up with the death of her cousin Elise Landreth and the heroin case reported in the papers. The pregnancy therefore makes an assumption that comforts her parents into a secret that isolates her.

Marriage and the twin pregnancy

Telling James Frobisher is painful. He arrives expecting Sunday lunch, is shocked by the news, and then proposes. Fern Woolbright sees Rosemarie Woolbright cutting tulips for the table and thinks of the damage she might do to everyone’s lives. She says she is only nineteen; James Frobisher invokes Lady Diana as a comparison. Amid the tulips and the yellow wobble of the trifle, Fern Woolbright agrees to marry him. The family immediately discusses a June wedding, planned as a registry-office ceremony because there is little time. Fern Woolbright raises the question of college, but the available account does not say how it is resolved.

During a flight home, Fern Woolbright begins bleeding. At first there is only spotting; by the time the plane lands at Heathrow, the blood has soaked her underwear and stained her skirt. Wearing navy has concealed the stain, but she feels faint at passport control and tells James Frobisher that something is wrong. She wakes in a private room at St Thomas’ Hospital, looking out at the grey sky over the River Thames. The consultant explains that one baby has been lost, but a heartbeat remains. The evidence suggests that Fern Woolbright had been carrying fraternal twins: in some cases, one fetus is miscarried while the other continues to develop, and the surviving embryo may absorb the non-viable one.

The explanation gives a medical name to the loss—vanishing twin syndrome—but does not settle the private uncertainty of paternity. As the doctor describes two separately fertilised eggs, Fern Woolbright imagines one baby resembling James Frobisher and the other resembling Charlie Treadaway. James Frobisher tells her to listen to the doctor. Fern Woolbright wants to protest that she is not a child, yet recognizes that the explanation matters. The account leaves the imagined resemblance, and the question it carries, unresolved.

Waiting for Sophie

For the rest of the summer, Rosemarie Woolbright protects Fern Woolbright with what the narration describes as metaphorical cotton wool. The pregnancy feels much like Fern Woolbright’s recovery from glandular fever at sixteen, apart from the bulge at her front. She is not allowed to ride, and Rosemarie Woolbright objects even to her cycling the few miles into town. Check-ups and maternity clothes mark the passing weeks; Fern Woolbright also manages to see her husband occasionally and catch up with boarding-school friends.

Those friends respond to Fern Woolbright’s experiences with morbid fascination. They ask to touch her stomach and want to hear about Elise Landreth’s death, the miscarriage, and the surviving baby. Lydia Metcalf admits that she would like to be married and have children, regarding her long, narrow nose as the obstacle to the happiness she imagines. Her envy contrasts sharply with Fern Woolbright’s earlier conviction that pregnancy has ruined her life: the same condition that Fern Woolbright experiences as crisis becomes, to another young woman, a coveted future.

The onset of labour follows a broadcast report that Charlie Treadaway has been found guilty of supplying Elise Landreth with a lethal amount of heroin and sentenced to four years in prison. Fern Woolbright has expected the verdict, but is still shocked. Rosemarie Woolbright calls her to lunch, with soup warming in the kitchen. When Fern Woolbright stands from the sofa, she wets her trousers and finds herself in a pool of fluid before realizing that the baby is coming.

A letter later establishes that Fern Woolbright gave birth to a girl, Sophie, two weeks before its writer records the news. Fern Woolbright and Sophie are living with Rosemarie Woolbright at Three Paddocks while James Frobisher is on duty in Northern Ireland. Rosemarie Woolbright is besotted with her daughter and granddaughter. The birth brings the pregnancy to its immediate outcome, but does not erase the circumstances that preceded it: the lost twin, the concealed possibility of Charlie Treadaway’s paternity, and the family’s confidence in a different account of Sophie’s conception.