‘Nothing,’ said Roz, who had turned very pale, her hands gripping the chaise longue. ‘I don’t want anything, I feel sick.’ Tears had formed in her green eyes, and she was looking at her mother with a mixture of panic and misery.
‘Roz, darling, what is it? Is it the baby? Shall I call Mr Partridge?’
‘No,’ said Roz, breathing heavily, the tears falling. ‘It isn’t the baby. Damn the baby. Oh, you wouldn’t understand. Oh, shit, I can’t stand it. Just go away, Mummy, and leave me alone. Actually I do want something. I want a drink. A big one.’
She was in labour by lunch time.
‘Roz, Roz, you’re forgetting everything you’ve learnt. Welcome your contractions, don’t fight them, let your body enjoy them.’
Cordelia Fowler, Roz’s childbirth teacher, had an earnest, pale plain face and long lank brown hair; she wore a long flowing cotton dress and Indian sandals. C. J., who was not given to aggressive feelings, was trying to resist a strong temptation to remove her physically from the room. Roz was less inhibited.
‘For God’s sake, Cordelia, shut up will you. This is plain, bloody agony, and you tell me to welcome it. I can’t, I can’t stand it. Just go away if you can’t do anything to help.’
Cordelia was undisturbed by this attack. She smiled serenely. ‘Roz, it’s you who can help. You can help yourself. Lean into the contractions. Smile, relax. Visualize your body opening. Let your baby go.’
‘Christ almighty, do you think I don’t want to let it go? Oh, God, here comes another one.’
‘Smile, Roz, smile.’
Roz leant forward, her face contorted with pain and rage, and slapped Cordelia sharply twice across the face. Then she lay back on her pillows and groaned.
‘I think,’ said Cordelia in a low voice to C. J., quite unmoved by this assault, ‘she must be nearing transition. It’s always an emotionally difficult time.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked C. J., his face white, sweat standing on his forehead.
‘Oh, dear, I’d forgotten you didn’t do the couples’ course. If only you had. She needs your understanding so badly. Well anyway, it means the point in labour in between first and second stage. Just before the mother wants to push. Emotional liability is always a sign. I’ll call the midwife.’
She rang the bell. ‘Roz, I think you are getting to transition. Would you like to squat? It could help such a lot.’
‘No,’ said Roz, ‘I would not like to squat. I would like a general anaesthetic and to wake up with my baby in a cot beside me.’
‘Then visualize that,’ said Cordelia earnestly, ‘visualize pain blanking out, visualize your baby out of your body. Oh, Sister, there you are. I think she may be in transition.’
Sister advanced on Roz with a stethoscope; she placed it on Roz’s stomach and listened to the baby’s heart, then pulled on a pair of examination gloves.
‘What are you going to do to me now?’ said Roz ferociously.
‘Just have a little look,’ said Sister. ‘Perhaps it would be better if your husband and your birthing companion stepped outside for a moment. Then if we’re right, I can call Mr Partridge.’
‘I don’t know why he isn’t here,’ said Roz, ‘we’re paying him enough.’
‘Mrs Emerson, you are having a straightforward labour, and down the corridor another lady is coping with a premature breech delivery. Mr Partridge has to stay with her until her own obstetrician arrives. He has examined you several times. He knows exactly where you are.’
‘Oh, God,’ wailed Roz, ‘here’s another!’
‘Welcome it, Roz,’ said Cordelia, gripping her hand, and then hurrying out of the door after C. J. ‘Not long now.’
Roz flung herself back on her pillows again, fixed the sister
with a baleful eye, snatched her stethoscope and flung it across the room. ‘Don’t you dare come near me. Don’t. I want an epidural. Now. Quickly. I can’t stand this any longer.’
Sister, who had spent ten years as an independent midwife, schooled in the most advanced methods of natural childbirth, had never come across a mother so totally out of control. She glared at Roz and picked up her stethoscope. ‘You are doing yourself and your baby a lot of harm,’ she said. ‘This is no way to conduct a labour.’
‘Have you ever had a baby?’ asked. Roz through clenched teeth.
‘I have not.’
‘Then I suggest you go and have one. And I hope you have some bloody silly woman beside you telling you to welcome it all. Go and get Mr Partridge. Now.’
Mr Partridge came in, a patient, sympathetic look on his face.
‘How are we doing?’
‘You may be all right,’ said Roz. ‘I am not. I want an epidural.’
‘What a pity.’
‘For whom?’
‘For everybody. You. Your baby. Us. It would be so much better if you could do it all by yourself.’
‘Mr Partridge,’ said Roz, gripping her bedhead, ‘I am in dreadful pain.’
‘Ah, but it is constructive pain. Good pain. Think of it like that.’
‘Constructive pain my ass. I want an epidural.’
‘Well, let’s have a little look and then we can decide. It might be too late.’
He bent to examine her, then stood up beaming happily, pulling off his glove.
‘It is.’
‘It is what?’
‘Too late. You’re fully dilated. Any minute now you’ll be pushing. Then its just wonderful fun. You won’t mind at all.’
Roz lifted one of her long legs and aimed it very hard at Mr Partridge’s plump chest. He staggered and nearly fell; he looked at her with deep distaste.
‘Now, Mrs Emerson, you must conserve your strength. You’re going to need a lot for the next hour or so. It’s a very big baby.’ There was just a suggestion of menace in his eyes.
‘Mr Partridge, I am going to start screaming now and I am not going to stop until you give me an epidural.’
‘I can’t.’
Roz began to scream. She screamed from rage as much as pain and fear and, somewhere within her tumult, a passion of misery at the news she had heard that morning. Why should she be going through all this, when in a year she might have a brother to take everything away from her? Another contraction gripped her; she couldn’t take much more. Dear God, she thought as she sank into a morass of pain, let this baby at least be a boy. Please, please, a boy.
Miranda Emerson was born an hour later, a ten-pound, noisy, healthy baby. Roz had, as promised, continued to scream, kicked the midwife as well as Mr Partridge, sent Cordelia packing, bitten her husband’s hand so hard she drew blood, and then suddenly at the end of it delivered her baby with extraordinary ease and swiftness and a beatific smile on her face.
‘Isn’t she lovely, C. J., isn’t she absolutely lovely?’ she said, sitting up in bed half an hour after the delivery, the picture of rosy health, Miranda in her arms. ‘What on earth have you done to your hand, why is it all bandaged up?’
‘You bit me,’ said C. J., not a note of reproach in his voice. ‘Hard. It bled.’
‘Oh, God, I’m sorry. I really didn’t know what I was doing. Did I bite that silly bitch Cordelia as well?’
‘No.’
‘Pity. I will if ever I see her again. What a load of balls. Pain management indeed. Never mind, it’s over now. Don’t you think she’s beautiful?’
‘She’s lovely,’ said C. J., looking slightly nervously at the small wrinkled face, the mop of black hair, the tiny waving hands. ‘Lovely.’
‘Did you ring Mummy?’
‘Yes. She’s very excited, she’s coming over later.’
‘Tonight? How lovely. I want everyone to see this baby. What about Daddy?’
‘Yes, I spoke to him.’
‘Where was he? At home?’
‘Not at first. Some girl answered the phone. Said he would soon be back. She seemed to know about the baby. I don’t know who she was. Then he rang here, and he’s coming over in the morning. Sent lots of love.’
Roz scowled. In her euphoria she had temporarily forgotten the new mistress. A cloud of fear and rage was cast briefly over her happiness; she remembered with a rush how passionately she had needed the baby to be a boy; for a second she looked at her daughter with regret, then shook herself. Who needed boys? Women could fight as well as men. Miranda was hers, her own creation; she would train her from this moment.
‘What did she sound like, this girl? How do you know she was a girl? She might have been fifty.’
‘Didn’t sound it,’ said C. J. cheerfully. ‘She sounded really young. She had a very pretty voice,’ he added.
‘Oh, great,’ said Roz, tugging ferociously at the ribbons on her nightdress. ‘I’m delighted.’ Then she looked down at her daughter and her face lightened again. ‘Look, C. J., she’s woken up. Look at her lovely lovely blue eyes.’
She wasn’t going to have tonight spoilt by Phaedria Blenheim. Of all the ridiculous names. There would be plenty of time to deal with her.
‘I do think,’ said Letitia to Eliza, ‘that Julian has treated Camilla dreadfully badly. Moving this girl he hardly knows into his house.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Eliza, who found it hard to feel charitable towards Camilla. ‘I can’t see it’s that hard on her. It’s not as if she’s actually been living with Julian, she’s kept that perfectly appalling little house going all this time.’
‘There is a little word which my son, I fear, has not ever quite managed to get his tongue around,’ said Letitia. ‘It’s “no”. I’m afraid I find much of his behaviour very hard to excuse. Maybe he doesn’t actually live with Camilla any more, but she was virtually driven out of the house by his behaviour. He has continued to use her when it suited him. And she has remained very loyal to him, never publicly complained about him. I don’t like her either, but I think she has a code of honour. Which is
more than I can say for Julian. I’m afraid I don’t often feel very proud of him these days.’ She sighed, and looked suddenly very sad; Eliza took her hand.
‘Oh, Letitia, darling, don’t start getting morbid. I really can’t subscribe to this view that our children’s faults are down to us. Julian is not a raw adolescent. He’s been outrageously spoilt, not by you, but by life. It’s hardly surprising he behaves badly.’
‘Well, you may be right,’ said Letitia with another sigh, ‘but sometimes I wonder if –’
‘If what, Letitia?’
Letitia looked at her, as if she might be about to say something; then visibly silenced herself. ‘Oh, nothing. Just a silly thought.’
‘Very silly, I would imagine. Anyway, I’m afraid I can’t feel sorry for Camilla. I’m just terribly pleased she’s left London. Now listen, you’ve met Phaedria, what’s she like?’
‘She’s charming. Intelligent, quite self-contained, certainly not swept off her feet by him. And really most beautiful. Tall, very slim, with the most amazing hair, dark brown, all kind of pre-Raphaelite curls.’
‘She sounds vile. And he really wants to marry her?’
‘He tells me so. I do find the whole thing very hard to believe.’
Camilla, sitting on her plane, drinking distilled water and nibbling at raw vegetables – the only food she ever allowed herself on flights – found the whole thing equally hard to believe. She was hurt, she was angry, she was humiliated, but most of all she was, she discovered, slightly amused. It really was a trifle pathetic that a man of sixty-two should be swept off his feet by a girl young enough to be his daughter. Or his granddaughter.
Camilla knew exactly what had happened to Julian; she had spent a great deal of time discussing the syndrome with her analyst over the past eighteen months. It was the mid-life crisis. The male menopause. He was perhaps a little old for it, it usually struck in the mid forties or early fifties, but its manifestations – a panic rush into a new relationship, a desperate grab at youth – were classic and unmistakable. It usually coincided with the waning of the sexual powers and the
new relationship was seen as a remedy, a revitalization. Camilla allowed herself a short and pleasant contemplation on Julian’s sexual powers and their vulnerability and her own singular position with regard to them – and to wonder how he would manage without her in the future. Once or twice over the past years, when things had been rather less than one hundred per cent for him, he had turned to her again for help and she had given it generously, grateful, she had to admit to herself, for his unique need of her; there then would follow a period of great affection, and many promises of faithfulness. The promises were always broken, and Camilla always managed to persuade herself that the relationships were trivial, short term, and that she should not allow herself to over-react, to throw away so much that was good about her life with Julian Morell along with the little that was bad.
And usually she was right; the affairs did not last, and particularly not with the younger women he became involved with, who swiftly tired of being forced into a middle-aged lifestyle, however glamorous, and moved on. And there was absolutely no doubt in Camilla’s mind that this would happen now. Phaedria Blenheim – very young indeed, even by Julian’s standards – was clearly not going to spend the rest of her youth tied to someone so much older than herself, however rich he might be. No doubt she had found his wealth irresistible, she was from all accounts very hard up, but it was a commodity that very soon palled. In a year’s time, her wardrobe full of couture clothes, her wrists and neck hung with jewels, her body expensively exercised and massaged and tanned, already bored with her old husband’s old friends, Miss Blenheim would be looking, idly desperate, for a young lover, a friend, a soulmate, someone who spoke her language, shared her tastes, saw the world from her own viewpoint. And she would no doubt find him. Well, good for her.
She bit savagely on a stick of celery, remembering with fierce misery the session with Julian yesterday morning. He had been very frank, totally out of character; he had rung her quite early, about eight o’clock, apologized for not taking her to dinner the night before and asked her to join him for breakfast at the Connaught. She had gone along just mildly revengeful, but serene and in control nonetheless; he had stood up as she
entered the dining room and looked at her very seriously. He was clearly tired; his eyes had the shadows of a sleepless night in them; and his mouth was tense, unsmiling.
‘Camilla, good morning. Come and sit down. Breakfast?’
‘Some honey in yogurt, please, and some decaffeinated coffee.’