Barefoot Over Stones (25 page)

‘We moved Leda into room three to get her off the ward. You can pop your head around the door; if she is awake she might be glad of the company.’

‘I think I will let her sleep for the moment. In fairness, I’m tired too, and all I did was watch her giving birth.’

‘Well, his crib is here behind me,’ Polly said, motioning to the ad hoc nursery in the rear office of the nurses’ station. ‘He should need feeding in about two hours.’

‘How will I know?’ Colm’s panic started to rise again.

‘Oh, you’ll know! He might be the size of a stray kitten but his lungs will put a lion to shame when he wants grub.’

Colm relaxed again, confident that he could keep his baby alive and happy until the next feed. Polly watched his solid frame covering the length of the second floor in relaxed strides with his small bundle of a son tucked cosily against him. She saw all types of men in this job but she would be happier if more of them looked like Colm Lifford. He was tall and broad without being too brawny. He looked good in a shirt and tie but Polly thought he would look even better in casual clothes. His dark hair was cut short and his strong features were softened by a smile that lit his entire face. There was something definitely wrong with the girl in room three if she couldn’t appreciate the gorgeous man she had landed herself, Polly thought. She managed one more appreciative glance before the ward sister arrived back to the nurses’ station intending to stamp out any idle tendencies in her staff.

Colm noticed the other fathers coming and going as visiting hours proceeded, arriving to mothers sleeping alongside, watching or feeding their babies. Older children whooshed up and down the wards carrying balloons, ecstatic at the long-awaited arrival of a new sibling. He paused outside Leda’s room as if he was about to go in. The lights off within and the lack of any obvious sign of life gave him second thoughts and he continued his patrol down the overheated corridor.

Polly opened Leda Clancy’s file. Day two was ordinarily too early to start thinking about postnatal depression. The expected baby blues, experienced by the vast majority of first mothers as pregnancy hormones crashed out of the system, had yet to play out. Polly overcame her residual reticence and noted on the file that the young mother may well require special attention. She didn’t mention postnatal depression but any of the medical staff on the ward would know what she was alluding to. She had seen many mothers scouring the charts hanging from the foot of their beds to see what the doctors and midwives had said about them, their delivery and their babies. Better be safe than sorry, she thought as she closed the file and headed to the canteen for coffee and chips and a swift fag at the back door.

‘I was thinking of Thomas, Tom. Tommy even? What do you think, Leda?’

‘Haven’t really thought. You choose, Colm. He’s yours. You choose.’

‘For God’s sake, he’s yours too; you had him, remember? I just thought Tom is a good solid man’s man sort of a name. He’s not going to be Patrick anyway, that’s for sure. What about your Dad, Leda?’ Colm enquired, although he secretly wished that this little boy could start with a new name, nothing begged or stolen from the past.

If Leda heard his enquiry about her father’s name she made no attempt to answer. Instead she said: ‘Tom is grand. Yeah, Tom Lifford sounds about right.’ She might as well have been naming a stray dog, but Colm’s interest in little Tom was spilling out of him. Its abundance made up for
the want in Leda’s reaction. He was chuffed that the surname was not going to be an issue. It’s not as if they had had a chance to discuss the details since she’d dropped the time bomb of the pregnancy just weeks before.

Colm had brought their little boy to room three when he started to squall for his feed, just as Polly had said he would. He knocked first and then thought how ridiculous that was. The baby was hungry; Leda would have to wake up.

Listless. That was the word he used afterwards when anyone asked him how Leda had seemed. He knew what they were doing, of course, asking him to point out for them the clues that he had so blatantly missed. The truth was that Leda’s interest in her pregnancy had been minimal to begin with. Colm thought she was so relaxed with the idea because she had lived with the knowledge for seven months before she told him and so had done all the thinking, agonizing and deciding before she saw fit to let him in on the secret. The trip to visit her sister in Spain made sense in retrospect. He thought he had been given the brush-off and wasn’t particularly upset: even though he had found Leda attractive and had enjoyed their short relationship he’d never seen her as a permanent fixture in his life. She just hadn’t seemed interested in anything long term in all the months he had known her: reluctant even to commit to a concert or dinner date that was anything more than days away. So he was taken aback when his apartment intercom had sounded about six weeks before and he’d heard her voice; and even more shocked when her appearance at his front door revealed an unmistakeable roundness and fullness where before had been the slenderest of waists.

The prospect of a baby had changed everything. He didn’t have to think: of course he would do the right thing; Leda would have every kind of support that she needed. He thought they might even make the relationship work. A child was bound to bring them together, wasn’t it? He never doubted he was the father of the baby she was carrying. Even though it was a thunderbolt, totally unexpected, somehow the shape of the story seemed to fit something that was missing inside him. How long had she known? Why hadn’t she told him before now? The questions kept coming, but Leda soon realized they were not fuelled by any sort of recrimination but an appetite for detail that she sated with as many plausible answers as possible. Her older sister Ciara had lived in a small town close to Barcelona for a few years. She had gone to teach English the summer she finished her degree in Trinity and had never come home for long since then.

Colm listened as Leda described the lovely life Ciara had made for herself in Spain: the little seaside bar and restaurant she ran with José Sanchez with whom she had been living for nearly a year, the sunshine and the languid lifestyle. She seemed entirely more animated by her sister’s exotic life in Spain than her own incredible news. Her tone was envious and she was covetous of her sister’s carefree life. ‘Lucky cow, she got away from the lunatics at home. Never looked back.’

He made Leda promise that she would move into his apartment. She had been staying with her friend Siobhan in Glasnevin since she had returned from Spain, but she agreed with Colm that something more comfortable and suitable for when the baby was born was a good idea. Colm started to plan aloud all the things they needed to do to get sorted. Clear all the junk from the spare room for a start: his lecture notes from a decade before, barely looked at for summer exams, were now practically illegible and thoroughly disposable. Colm didn’t venture to talk about after the birth – nothing about Leda’s demeanour gave him any encouragement, and so he thought best to leave well alone. There would be plenty of time for plans and discussion when their baby was born. He hadn’t counted on Leda shutting down on the world, on Colm and on her son.

The next night in hospital Colm found Leda even more withdrawn than the previous evening. He thought that if she was at home in the apartment she might find things a little easier and so he had asked a very dubious Polly about an early discharge. ‘I will mark it as a request on her chart, Colm, but it’s up to her consultant in the morning to decide if she is well enough equipped to go
home.’ He knew by her tone that Polly thought that she was far from ready and Leda’s surly behaviour was doing nothing to convince him either.

‘I’m not going to feed him any more,’ Leda announced as casually as if she had asked him to pass the tissues or the water. Colm looked up from the foot of her bed, where he was making a thorough mess of changing his son’s nappy. The bed was covered in a mass of wipes, some soiled, some clean. The dirty nappy lay open, a taunt to the new father’s inefficiency. Colm thought he must have misheard her, so addled was he by the enormity of the task before him. ‘Sure you’ll have to feed him. Poor little devil is starving!’

‘They have loads of formula. He can have some of that.’

‘But I thought you wanted to feed him yourself. The book says—’

Before Colm could repeat what Miriam Stoppard or another of his recently consulted experts had said about the value of breastfeeding Leda caught up the box of breast pads on the bedside locker and flung them at the door, narrowly missing his head. ‘Nobody asked me before they shoved his mouth on to me. I am not a dairy cow and I am not going to feed him. They make formula and he can have that.’

‘Jesus, Leda, calm down. I thought you wanted to. You never said, so I presumed.’

‘Dead fucking right you presumed. Well, presume this from now on. I do not intend to be at your beck and call, or at his either.’ She threw a look at their baby that shocked Colm with its coldness. He finished the nappy change as quickly as he could and managed to re-dress the baby in much the same arrangement as he had found him. A few poppers were probably still undone but his son looked fairly content. All the saliva in Colm’s mouth had dried and it was an effort for him to find the words to address Leda.

‘Look, this little lad is depending on us. I don’t suppose it matters what he eats as long as he is not hungry.’

‘Exactly what I was saying.’

‘I’ll find Polly or one of the other nurses and say you’ve changed your mind.’

‘I was never fucking asked in the first place.’

‘Jesus, Leda, will you forget about yourself for a minute and concentrate on this little baby? He needs us to think about him.’

Leda resettled the covers around her, straightening out her legs the length of the bed where her baby had just been lying. He chose not to look at her again before he left the room with his son in the crook of his arm. Colm knew his son was too young to look like anybody but he was overwhelmed by the sense of recognition that filled him as he gazed down at the little boy’s blue, unfocused eyes. Polly set him up with countless bottles of formula and did the first feed with him until he saw how easy it was and how little there was to be terrified of. She didn’t seem too surprised that Leda had forgone her attempts at breastfeeding. ‘Maybe it’s for the best, especially if she is that tired.’

‘Oh, I know he won’t be hungry, it’s just that she doesn’t seem to be responding to him at all. I’m not sure what’s normal but her reaction to him feels so wrong. I just want him to be OK, you know.’ He paused. He had never felt comfortable communicating his feelings and he felt plain stupid now for opening up to a stranger. He was tired. Tiredness makes you do stupid things, he reasoned. He hadn’t counted on Polly’s kindness or the fact that her heart went out to him and his little baby.

‘Listen, babies want to thrive. It’s their nature. You keep doing what you are doing and he will be grand. Leda will come round, you’ll see.’

Colm nodded gratefully, afraid his voice would betray him if he attempted to respond.

‘Have you thought of a name yet?’ Polly asked breezily, changing the topic.

‘We’ve decided on Tom,’ Colm said, trading the first secret of his little boy’s life with
someone he hadn’t even met three days ago. The thought made him guilty. It really was time he told his mother that she was a grandmother. Polly was saying how much she liked the name, what a grand solid little name it was. Colm was nodding, pleased that she liked his choice, but really he was thinking of and dreading the phone call to Iris Lifford. Where to begin? How would he field the litany of questions that would roll like unrelenting gunfire down the phone, each one designed to annihilate its target? The mere thought exhausted him. He looked down at Tom dozing after a mammoth feed and decided it was much too late to ring tonight. He would rather spend the next few hours here with his son before he handed him back to Polly. The light in room three remained off and Polly noticed that Colm did not even look in its direction as he gathered his brief bag and coat and wandered out from beneath the harsh lights of the hospital into the open anonymous space of a Dublin night.

The onset of winter irritated every ounce of Iris Lifford’s being. All that darkness, cold and rain, not to mention the glare of orange street lamps from early evening, made serious inroads in her otherwise relentlessly optimistic nature. It was impossible to keep the hallway dry and even the simplest trip to the shed for timber to light the living-room fire meant changing into boots and donning a scarf and coat. Her garden, so neatly manicured in spring and summer, and even rather glorious in autumn, lost all its power to please her as leaves shed for the winter descended into damp sludge on her paths and lawn. Colm usually rang from the offices of Reilly & Maitland to check on his mother in between meetings with clients. He was a good and attentive son who made sure that his mother never wanted for anything, financial or practical. If a drain was blocked or a gutter overflowing Colm would make sure that someone came to fix it and Iris never received a bill for any of the work. She was proud that she had raised a kind and gentle son. He was the best thing that she had done in her life. She was grateful that the horrible business with her husband’s financial dealings had not sunk them. With the help of a handful of loyal friends and relatives they had picked up the broken pieces and turned their backs on the disgrace of Patrick Lifford’s memory. Colm seemed to be doing well at his legal career and though Iris hoped he would make partner at Reilly & Maitland she had stopped mentioning the prospect to Colm. Her ambition on his behalf irritated him so she kept quiet, but she couldn’t stop herself willing it to happen.

She was polishing the brass fittings on her hall door when the early-morning phone call came. A grandson? Did Colm just say a grandson? Maybe it was time to take the hearing aid that nice doctor had given her out of the cupboard. There was only so long that she could deny that she was only hearing the odd word here and there and imagining the rest. Colm raised his voice and delivered the message more vehemently.