Seven Dials (39 page)

And then her hand slid across her belly as it so often seemed to these days and she bit her lip. Brin might mean nothing to her any more - or so she might try to convince herself - but what about he-or-she waiting there so quietly to be born? Wouldn’t he-she want to know about who his-her father was? Would he-she ask questions, demand reasons for his absence? What could she say to him-her, if she had never told Brin?

This was a question she had asked herself many times in the past few days, ever since Sir Lewis had died and she had made up her mind to hold on to her baby, no matter what happened. Did Brin have a right to know he was to be a father? Shouldn’t he be given the option of being involved? To keep silence was surely to rob him of his just due, of the chance to behave as a man should and -

No, she had told herself fiercely over and over again. No. I’m using no blackmail of any kind. If he couldn’t work out for himself that this was a possibility then he isn’t worth worrying about. He’s forfeited any right he might have had to share in this baby. It isn’t his at all. It’s mine, all mine - and she had warmed to that thought, found a great deal of pleasure in it. It wasn’t going to be easy to get through these next months, to
make her plans, to protect both her own reputation and through that the welfare of her child, but she was going to do it. To be Charlotte Hankin Lucas alone and independent and waiting for her child was a good and special thing to be. No worrying about Brin Lackland and his rights in the child was to be allowed to spoil that; and as she reached Endell Street and the main entrance to Nellie’s, she lifted her chin in sheer exultation and ran up the steps. She had an evening’s work to do on her wards, and plans to make for the future. Let Brin go off to his career in Hollywood tomorrow. She didn’t need him and she never really had.

And for that evening at any rate, she really believed herself.

But as the days became weeks and they in turn pleated into months, her certainty wavered many times. At the end of long days on the wards, when her back ached abominably and her head spun with nausea - a problem which hit her rather badly when she was in the third month of her pregnancy, and just didn’t go away as it should have done - self-pity would rise in her like a thick greasy tide and make her want Brin so badly it was like a physical thing. Then, she would lie on her bed in the doctors’ quarters, trying not to retch and would hate herself for being so obsessed. The man was bad, bad, why let him hurt her so much?

But another part of her mind would tell her to stop being so silly and hysterical; he hadn’t been bad, he’d just been himself; shallow and casual, perhaps, uncaring of others’ needs and feelings, but without any real malice. Just a stupid but rather beautiful man with whom she had allowed herself to become infatuated. To hate him now because of her own foolishness was hardly fair, she would tell herself, and turn over in her hot bed and try to sleep, knowing that alone could relieve the nausea and the self-absorption that so plagued her.

Surprisingly, Max Lackland became a great help to her. He stopped her one afternoon in the corridor as she hurried from Spruce to Elm wards, a bundle of patients’ records under her arm and said, ‘Charlie - you look, if you will forgive my saying so, quite dreadful! You’re overworking, and I rather think not eating enough.’

She had stopped and stared at him and then rubbed her hair off her damp forehead. ‘I’m all right. It’s the heat - I’m too worn out by it to eat -’

‘I know.’ His sympathy had been genuine and immediate. ‘Hell, isn’t it? And to think we all complained in the winter when it was so bitterly cold for so long - but all the same,
you’ve got to take care of yourself. You’ve certainly got to eat. I know a rather nice little place you can get something that’ll tempt you, however hot you are. When are you off tonight?’

So it had started, their occasional quiet little dinners in a small restaurant in Greek Street, where they offered her Italian dishes that even when made of meagre English rations, which had dwindled steadily all through the year, still somehow managed to taste of the south and which made it possible for her to overcome her queasiness and eat. And he would sit across the table and watch her, slowly turning a glass of wine between his hands and smiling slightly.

They would talk as well as eat. That was a great comfort for her, for there was no one else, apart from Dr Forester - who politely and carefully avoided indicating in any way when they met around Nellie’s that he knew anything at all about her - who knew what her situation was. To have someone to talk to without reservations, to tell of her hopes and her fears and her plans and her doubts made her feel much better.

Her plans were good ones - he told her that approvingly when she had explained how she had at last claimed back her Lancaster Gate house, which had been requisitioned by the Government to be used as a branch of the Ministry of Information during the War but which was now once more all hers, and how she had made an elegant little flat out of the ground floor which had access to the garden.

‘It’s too big for just two of us, me and a baby - the whole house I mean. And it’s not like the old days when there were hordes of servants to take care of it. There’ll just be me, though I hope I can get someone to be a sort of nanny and general help. And I’m going to have the rest of the house made into flats and let them. There’s such a shortage of places to live these days it’ll be a good thing to do, and it’s better than living on my own in a mausoleum.’

‘It’ll help with income too, I imagine.’

She shook her head at that. ‘I’m rather well off, actually,’ she said almost apologetically. ‘Cousin Mary left me far more than I need -’ She had brightened then. ‘But that means the baby has a future, doesn’t it? He-she’ll be secure -’

‘He-she will have you,’ he had said gravely. ‘And I rather think that in the long run that will be of more importance than any amount of money. Not that it isn’t useful. Mind you, the
way this Government’s going, they’ll have every penny out of your pockets and into theirs in no time.’

And they would talk then of politics, of what was going to happen to medicine under the great new National Health Act, which both she and Max approved of in essence, unlike a great many of their colleagues at Nellie’s who regarded socialized medicine with appalled horror, and about the shortages and strikes that were making England so uncomfortable in this long hot summer of 1947.

She left Nellie’s at the end of November. She had been feeling less and less well, and the consultant gynaecologist who was looking after her, and who had agreed to deliver her baby in her own flat with the aid of a midwife from St Mary’s hospital in Paddington, told her firmly that she must stop, and she didn’t argue with him. She had become thinner than she should be and the baby was beginning to show rather more than was comfortable. She wore a girdle at work, and an oversized white coat but was uneasy at the way some of the senior nurses looked at her so quizzically, and also, she was far from happy.

A period of self-assurance that had carried her through the late autumn seemed to be succeeded by a period of great depression and she even wondered for a while if some of it was due to the country’s wedding fever. It seemed that no one around Nellie’s talked of anything but young love and honeymoons, as the Royal Wedding filled the papers day after day until Charlie felt that if anyone else mentioned Princess Elizabeth and her romantic sailor groom she would scream at them.

So she left Nellie’s and settled into her flat, and for a couple of weeks the novelty of arranging furniture and hanging curtains and sorting out where in her small kitchen her dishes should go sustained her, but that was succeeded by the worst time of all.

She had not realized how much she had relied on her work to keep her on an even keel and without it she floundered through the days, tearful and irritable by turns and far from her usual cool and sensible self.

It was Max who helped her through that. He had telephoned her one evening quite unexpectedly, early in January, and asked her to come out to dinner and at the sound of his
voice on the phone she had burst into tears and he had made soothing noises and hung up and then, twenty minutes later, had appeared on her doorstep with a package under his arm.

‘I imagine you have a kitchen here,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’ve brought my own dinner, and a little something for you too. Can’t drain your rations, can we? I have friends in illegal places, fortunately. Where’s the stove?’

She had tried to protest at first and then given up, for he had been cheerfully firm, and had moved purposefully about her shiny new kitchen, which truth to tell she had hardly bothered to use for more than the making of tea and toast, and then set in front of her a piece of grilled fish and mashed potatoes which, she realized, were exactly what she wanted. She had wolfed it and he had said nothing all through their meal and then, pushing aside the dishes, had told her firmly that she was to tell him of all that was worrying her.

And though she had resisted at first, had felt he was treating her as though she were one of his neurotic patients, he had persevered and at last she had let it all out; her rage at both Brin and herself, he for being so selfish and shallow, she for being such a fool as to believe him, and he had listened and said little.

But at the end of it all she had felt amazingly better. They had reached her sitting-room by then, for he had made coffee and brought it to her and when she had said all she could she had fallen asleep, there in the corner of the sofa, and woken stiff and startled in the small hours to find he had covered her with a rug and was himself sleeping in an armchair on the other side of the room.

They had both laughed when she woke him, and she had given him another blanket and settled him on the sofa while she went to her bed, and in the morning she had made breakfast for them both and he had gone away, shaking her hand and telling her that she’d be fine now; and so she had been, to her enormous relief and gratitude.

For the remaining weeks of her pregnancy she became tranquil. She slipped into a pattern of daily living that was comforting in its regularity; a morning walk in the park on the other side of the Bayswater Road among the naked trees and shivering birds and the spikes of early crocus and daffodils pushing their way through the cold dark earth, a light breakfast in her cosy kitchen and then the morning spent over
her knitting and sewing, for she had decided to make the baby’s clothes from the things she had found in Counsin Mary’s trunks in the attics. Old silk dresses and cotton chemises were cut up to make rompers and pilches and old cobwebs of knitted woollens were unravelled to be reknitted into matinée coats and shawls and bootees, and slowly she became adept at her making over and as the pile of small garments mounted she was filled with a deep contentment.

Her afternoons were peaceful too, for she dozed them away, her wireless on softly beside her bed as she listened to ‘Music While You Work’ and talks about ornithology and cathedrals and cookery and even ‘Children’s Hour’, and in the evenings there were books to read and more radio - she became an addict of ‘Dick Barton, Special Agent’, and ‘itma’ - and sometimes, quiet outings with Max. They would go to theatres and cinemas and more of their little Soho dinners and, as Max said, she began to bloom as a pregnant woman should.

But in the last two weeks of the pregnancy she became restless again. The sewing and knitting were finished, the small room she had prepared for the baby lay waiting with its old cot repainted and its cupboards filled with the results of her handiwork and all she could do was prowl uneasily around the flat, waiting impatiently and yet fearfully for the time to come; and then her fears were sharpened by two separate events, both of which alarmed her a great deal.

Her midwife called her in the first week in April and told her that she had fallen and broken her ankle.

‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Lucas,’ she said. ‘I thought I’d be in plaster and able at least to look after some of my special patients, but it’s no use. I’ve got to go into the hospital, they’ve just told me, and have an op on it - it’s too silly - I’m so sorry -’

And then the next day, before she’d even had the chance to think about finding another midwife to take care of her at such short notice, the second blow fell.

The secretary of the consultant obstetrician who had been looking after her telephoned to tell her that she was very sorry, Mr Mills-Topham would not after all be able to deal with her confinement, since his wife had to have her appendix out and he had cancelled all his work for the next three weeks in order to take her on a convalescent holiday.

‘And since your baby is due before he comes back, he feels it would be better to transfer your care to his colleague, Mr Harris,’ the woman said smoothly. ‘Mr Mills-Topham regrets any inconvenience but he’s sure you’ll understand -’

‘But I don’t
know
Mr Harris,’ Charlie had said blankly, standing with the phone held so tightly in her hand that her knuckles shone white, and the baby leapt in her belly in seeming sympathy with her anxiety. ‘I can’t be looked after by someone I don’t even know!’

‘Well, I’m afraid that is how it has to be,’ the secretary said sharply. ‘I’ll give you Mr Harris’s telephone number and if you call him as soon as you go into labour he’ll come and see you. And of course you have your midwife, haven’t you?’

She did the first thing that came into her head, which was to phone Max. He listened to her account of her dilemma and said at once that it was absurd to try to find new people to come to her confinement in Lancaster Gate, that she would be much better off coming into Nellie’s to have her baby.

‘I wasn’t best pleased with your plan to stay in the flat anyway,’ he said. ‘I know most women do have their babies at home, but you - it’s different for you -’

‘No husband?’ she said bitterly.

‘It’s nothing to do with that. It’s everything to do with your health and your age -’

‘My age? What do you mean?’

‘How old are you?’

‘Thirty - last month -’