Hannah began to cry again, but the sound was distant, not anything Lucy could reasonably be expected to deal with. She was overwhelmingly aware of the movement of her own breath, her heartbeat, the skin on her hands, the raised blue lines of blood beneath the skin: everything accelerated, but still working as it was meant to, for now at least.
Then Hannah said, ‘I think she might be waking up.’
Lucy looked down at Ellen and saw that Hannah was right; Ellen was stirring.
She touched Ellen’s hand. ‘Mummy, it’s me, Lucy. Can you hear me?’
Ellen’s eyes opened wide. They were as clear and lovely as ever, but their expression was remote and unfamiliar. Was there recognition there, or acceptance, or indifference? Lucy felt that Ellen was looking through rather than at her, as if what Lucy might say or do was of symbolic interest, but was otherwise irrelevant.
And then the moment passed, and Ellen’s eyelids drooped, and she drifted back into unconsciousness.
The next day was a Saturday, and Lucy brought the girls to the hospital with her. They squabbled infuriatingly
all the way in the car, but when they reached the entrance to the ward they both fell quiet.
Lucy said to Clemmie, ‘Now, there are lots of poorly people here, and I don’t want you being noisy, or making any loud comments about what they look like, because it will hurt their feelings. OK?’
Clemmie pulled a face that was expressive of extreme displeasure and distaste, much as she did when presented with a meal she found particularly repulsive.
Lucy glanced at Lottie. She was staring into space with the flat resolve of a child waiting to enter the haunted house at a fairground, who has some idea of the dangling spiders, jiggling skeletons and strange mirrors that may lie ahead, and is summoning up the courage to cross the threshold.
‘Is this where people come when they die?’ Lottie asked.
‘No, it isn’t,’ Lucy said firmly. ‘I mean, it might be, sometimes, but Granny isn’t dying. She’s getting better, though she’s still very ill. You’ll see.’
They went in, and there was Ellen, and there, too, was Hannah.
Lottie hung back, but Clemmie rushed up to her aunt. Lucy could almost, but not quite, bear to watch: at the last moment, before Clemmie and Hannah embraced, she looked away.
Her mobile beeped, and she remembered that she ought to have turned it off. She got it out of her bag and saw that Natalie had just sent her a message.
Still nothing doing. Due to go into hospital to talk about induction on Wed. Not long now till I get to see Matilda
face to face. Richard and I are both really looking forward to hanging out with her!
‘Good luck with that,’ Lucy muttered.
The impulse behind her response was jaded and cynical:
Just you wait! Your marriage is never going to be the same again!
But once spoken, the words sounded like an innocent, impersonal plea, made on behalf of all of them; as if the stagnant hospital air had softened them and stripped them of bitterness, and transformed them into a genuine benediction.
NATALIE’S APPOINTMENT WAS
scheduled for 2.30 p.m. She arrived at the maternity ward clinic at two fifteen and found Richard already there, his briefcase at his feet, working his way through a stack of papers.
Two thirty passed, then two forty-five, then three, by which time she had finished with
Wow!
and, rummaging for something else to pass the time with, came across Wednesday’s copy of the
Post
. She rifled through in search of Tina’s column.
Whatever the compensations, I have to admit that there are times when being single is no fun at all. Other people’s weddings can be relied upon to provide at least a few highly uncomfortable moments. I’ve lost count of the times an older
woman has established quickly and pitilessly that I don’t have an other half tucked away somewhere out of sight, and then told me, ‘Never mind, dear, I’m sure your time will come. Don’t give up hope!’
Having a degree, a diploma and a career just doesn’t cut it with the senior lady. On the whole, my mother’s generation believes that women can’t be truly fulfilled without marriage and babies, and cannot conceive of being happy in old age if their daughters fail to reproduce.
Yet when I and my friends were in our twenties, we regarded the prospect of pregnancy as a disaster to be avoided at all costs. It was challenge enough to find a job and a place to live, and then hold down the job, and pay the rent, and work out what to do on Saturday night. We hoped that one day one of our frogs would turn out to be a prince, but we saw true love as a goal in itself, not as a passport to something else. We certainly weren’t in any rush to embrace family life? after all, we’d only just managed to leave our own families behind.
I’m sure the near-constant headlines about egg-freezing and IVF play their part in whipping thirtysomething women into a frenzy of broodiness, but I have a theory that the so-called biological clock is really powered by a force that is much more personal and universally effective than the media. It’s a ruthlessly efficient mechanism for ensuring the survival of the species, a failsafe that comes into its own now that the dominance of men has been undermined:
Most women do not want to disappoint their mothers
.
‘What’s she on about this time, then?’ said Richard, peering across at the paper.
‘Complaining about the pressure to produce grandchildren,’ Natalie said. ‘I don’t think her mother’s going to be very happy about this.’
‘Has her mother been dropping hints?’ Richard asked.
‘Probably not, but she wouldn’t have to say anything for Tina to know that’s what she’d like,’ Natalie said. ‘I think Tina’s got a point. Nothing else I’ve ever done made Mum quite as happy as the news that I was having a baby. That we are, I mean.’
‘That’s because it’s the first,’ said Richard, whose older sister already had three children. ‘Sounds to me as if Tina’s protesting a bit too much. She’s probably secretly insanely broody.’
‘Oh no, I don’t think she is at all.’
‘Why shouldn’t she be? Remember how you got when Lucy had Lottie? You were champing at the bit. It seems to be contagious.’
‘It just makes you think when your friends do these things, that’s all,’ Natalie said. ‘I mean, come on, you’re exactly the same. I know that when your sister had hers it got you wondering about what it would be like to have your own one day. At least a little bit.’
‘Yes, but they’re my family,’ Richard pointed out. ‘There’s no real reason for what Lucy does or what Tina does to have any kind of effect on you. And yet you’ve all got this stake in each other’s lives, even though you’re all quite different and you’ve gone about things in very different ways. It’s like you’re all looking over your shoulders to check what each other’s up to.’
‘It’s no different to you keeping tabs on all your
contemporaries from law school, to see how far up the greasy pole they’ve got.’
‘Yes, but I don’t care if they’ve got married or had children,’ Richard said. He pushed his glasses up to the bridge of his nose and went back to reading through his paperwork.
As time passed the waiting room seemed to fill up rather than empty out. Eventually, at three ten, Richard said, ‘Shouldn’t you go and check they haven’t forgotten you or something?’
She checked. They hadn’t. She sat back down again.
At three twenty her name was finally called and a midwife led her to a small office where she was asked a few routine questions and told to strip off for yet another awful examination. Natalie thought of herself as a good sport and not particularly prissy or coy, but having her recalcitrant cervix prodded was, she thought, pretty much a zero on the fun scale. She was relieved to get back into her clothes and pull up her sleeve for a blood pressure reading.
The midwife pumped the blood pressure cuff till it was tight, and then studied the gauge. She said, ‘It’s a little on the high side.’
‘My blood pressure’s been fine all the way through,’ Natalie said.
The midwife tried it again. ‘It’s still high,’ she said. ‘Do you have your specimen?’
Natalie handed it over. The midwife took off the lid and stuck a stick into the pot. The stick turned black.
‘You have protein in your urine,’ the midwife said.
‘I’ve had just a trace before,’ Natalie said.
‘This isn’t just a trace.’
The midwife took the blood pressure reading again. ‘It is definitely too high,’ she said, and sent Natalie back to the waiting room.
By now Natalie’s heart was pounding, as if she’d just screwed something up in front of an audience.
If I can just calm down it will be all right and they will let me go. Please God just let me get out of here.
‘What’s going on?’ Richard asked.
‘My blood pressure’s high.’
‘I’m not surprised. Mine probably is too. Anybody’s would be after waiting in here for an hour and a half. So what does that mean?’
‘It means we have to wait.’
‘Well, that’ll help,’ Richard said.
Natalie tried to focus on drawing air slowly into her lungs and then gradually expelling it. Her heart continued to race.
Richard went to get them both a cup of tea from the machine. He came back with two cans of Fanta.
‘Nothing seems to be working out today,’ he said as he handed hers over.
At four thirty Natalie’s name was called again. She was taken to another office where a curly-haired woman sitting on the other side of a desk introduced herself as the registrar on duty and took her blood pressure again, and then pronounced sentence. She was to be induced straight away. No, she could not go home. It was too dangerous. She had pre-eclampsia. Somebody else would have to pick up her things and bring them.
Once things had progressed sufficiently, she would be given an epidural and the labour would be augmented with syntocinon.
Bella Madden had encouraged them to question medical professionals, to ask why certain steps were necessary, or what might happen if you didn’t take them. But it was quickly apparent to Natalie that there was no way out.
She stood to leave; the registrar also got to her feet and followed her. At the door to the office the registrar touched her lightly on the back and said, ‘Sometimes it is hard to be a woman,’ and walked quickly away along the corridor.
Natalie went back to Richard and told him the news. He said, ‘They’d better know what they’re doing,’ and she knew he was trying to sound bullish, but he looked too terrified for the comment to come across as anything other than fearful.
Richard hurried home to fetch Natalie’s things and Natalie was taken into a lift and along a corridor and left in the labour ward waiting room.
It was full of women, with not a single father-to-be in sight. Where were all the partners? Was this how it was, outside Bella Madden’s conservatory? Natalie found a spare seat between someone who was sitting with her eyes closed, as if trying to nap, and a pale teenager who was leafing through a magazine.
The teenager put her magazine aside, stood up and shuffled out. Her bump looked all the more enormous for being the only part of her body that curved. She was dressed in a filmy top over knee-length leggings, and a
pair of sloppy ballet shoes that came off her feet with every step.
And then yet another woman came in. She got her mobile out of her handbag and started making a call. It quickly became apparent that she was in exactly the same situation as Natalie, and had been told she couldn’t leave the hospital and go home, and was asking the father of her child to bring in the things she needed. It was also obvious that he wasn’t at all keen on the idea.
‘No, they’re not going to let me out,’ she said. ‘Yes, I know it’s bloody annoying. Nappies, babygros, wipes. OK, then ring your mother. Get her to sort it.’
The teenage girl reappeared in the doorway and shouted: ‘What’s happening? What the fuck is happening to me?’
She had brought with her a stink that was as strong as shit or sex: a rank, sharp, insistent smell that did not belong in a public place, in front of strangers. A clear, viscous fluid was oozing down her legs, soaking the shabby fabric of her shoes and puddling on the floor.
The woman sitting next to Natalie opened her eyes. She had the subdued, exhausted look of someone who makes her living on her feet – a shop assistant or waitress, someone resigned to crap pay, tedium, rude customers and bunions.
‘Your waters just broke, that’s all,’ she told the girl. ‘It’s a good sign. It means it’s all happening.’
She got up and guided the girl to a seat, then went off to fetch help.
The girl’s head and arms dropped towards her belly,
as if she were imploding, and she rocked forwards and backwards in her seat and groaned.
‘If you want to see this baby being born, you’d better get it together and get over here,’ said the woman who was on the phone.
The girl was sitting upright again. Droplets of sweat had sprung out on her forehead.
The other woman put her phone away. She looked at the girl with resigned sympathy.
‘It’ll be over soon, and you’ll forget all about it,’ she said. ‘You’re young, and that’s all to the good. It’ll be quick.’
The woman who had gone for help reappeared with a midwife, who led the girl out. As the door was about to shut behind them Natalie saw a plastic carrier bag under the chair where the girl had been sitting. It was full of baby stuff, and a tiny all-in-one with Tigger on the front had fallen out.
Natalie leaned down and made a grab for the bag, shoved the contents back in and went after them.
She caught up with them a little way down the corridor and held the bag out to the girl.
‘You left this,’ she said.
The girl turned to look at her. Her eyes were big and dark and shocked and fearful. She didn’t say a word. She took the bag, and the midwife swept her away.
Natalie went back to the waiting room, where all that remained of the girl was the puddle of amniotic gloop by the door.