Echoes (63 page)

It was just as she had dreamed it would be. Plenty of room, books all around the place, cups of coffee being made all day and all night, friends dropping in. Down to the National Library where people noticed her condition and smiled congratulations. In to UCD where people noticed her condition and were surprised. She had been a quiet student, and only the people in her own group knew her well.

She paid her examination fee, and got her number. It made it seem very close when she had the card with her own number.

She went to see Emer and Kevin and she noticed from their faces they were surprised to see how pregnant she now looked. Perhaps she had been holding herself in at home: everyone here seemed more aware of it.

 

Clare discussed the work she had done with her tutor.

“I didn't think we'd ever hear from you again,” he said.

“Why on
earth
did you think that?” Clare asked furiously.

“Well, married bliss, and a summer in Castlebay, a
summer
there, mind, not a week. I thought you wouldn't open a book again.”

“
My
only worry is the B.A.” Clare smiled at him. “I suppose I sound a bit intense, and off my rocker to a lot of people. But when it's so hard, you get a kind of Holy Grail thing about it.”

“I know, I wish they all found it as important as you do.”

“Wish me luck then.”

“You don't need luck, Clare O'Brien . . . or whatever your name is now. You're the grade. Everyone in the department knows it.”

 

They knew. Now all she had to do was prove it to them. She smiled as she went to sleep that night.

She had phoned David. He had just returned home after his second visit to Dublin. The Lodge was lonely without her, but in under ten days she would be back and they would wait. Together.

He wished her courage and energy and confidence. He couldn't say he loved her because he was standing in the hall, but he did say, “And everything,” which was their code word.

She turned over and went to sleep happily.

Mary Catherine woke up in alarm.

“Come quickly! She's groaning, and shouting!”

“What? Who?”

“Clare. She's doubled over. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I think she's having the baby. After all our joking about it.”

“Don't be ridiculous. It couldn't be. It's not for weeks yet.”

“Shut up. It could be a miscarriage. No, it couldn't. It's much too late. . . . I don't know. Get an ambulance.”

“She keeps saying no.”

Clare was white-faced, with sweat coming down her forehead. “It's all right,” she gasped. “I couldn't be having it. I couldn't. These aren't those pains you have. No downward pull or whatever they said.”

“We don't know any doctors here. We're not on anyone's list. We're calling an ambulance, Valerie's phoning it this minute.” Mary Catherine was trying to be calm.

“Please don't. I can't go to hospital. The exam . . . There's nothing wrong.”

“Please, Clare. Just go in and be a false alarm, will you? Just for us? Please. Then you can come out twenty minutes later, and we'll all laugh at it. Please.”

She kicked the door closed with her foot so that Clare couldn't hear Valerie explaining down the phone how bad the patient was. “Then we'll all go in and do the exams calmly.”

“I don't want you to be up half the night,” Clare cried.

Valerie came in, looking pale. “We'll get dressed. We'll go with her.”

“No!”
screamed Clare.

The ambulance was there in ten minutes. The girls had packed Clare's things quietly, and out of her line of vision.

The ambulance men were reassurance itself.

“It's all a false alarm,” Clare said with a tearstained face. “I'm so sorry and you see we're all starting our exams tomorrow. Our finals.”

She bent over with pain.

The ambulance men exchanged glances, and the driver leaped smartly into the driving seat and switched on the siren.

 

The pain was beyond anything she could possibly have imagined; nothing helped—not panting like a dog as they had taught her, nor reciting poetry very fast in an undertone, nor writhing and wriggling into different positions. A lugubrious student midwife kept telling her to relax. Clare wanted to kill her.

 

She was in labor for two hours before they told her that something was wrong. The midwife, listening for the third time to the fetal heartbeat, straightened up with more than usual gloom.

“The baby's in some distress.”

“Oh my God,” cried Clare wildly. “What's wrong? Can you tell what's wrong?”

“The heart's not standing up to the contractions.”

“But will it be all right? The baby, I mean.”

“I can't say,” said the midwife. “I shall have to report it.”

It seemed like hours. Clare felt pure terror and the most intense longing for David. It had never occurred to her that the birth would be anything but straightforward; now it appeared that the baby was being killed by something uncontrollable inside her own body. Before she had held it, kissed it or even looked upon its face, her baby would die; and there was nothing she could do about it.

She was holding her breath as though that might ease the baby's distress when the door swung open to admit Bar, the redheaded doctor whom David disliked so much. The examination took seconds.

“Cord's dropped,” he said. “I'm very sorry. I know how disappointed you will be. We shall have to do a cesarean. We'll also have to ask you to sign a piece of paper giving your consent.”

“A cesarean,” said Clare, high-voiced with joy. “Oh, thank God. Thank God. I'd forgotten all about cesareans.”

Later she knew that a dropped cord was the worst emergency after a hemorrhage. Then she was only aware of Bar, now in a white mask and a green overall, giving clipped instructions. His face, which before had seemed rather heartless, now looked blessedly confident and know-it-all. Sister McClusky, summoned because she was an “expert at cords,” was an enormous, jovial woman who stuck her hand inside and gave Clare a running commentary on how well the baby was coping, all the way to the operating theater.

“I love you,” she said, then they put her under. She felt the first violent pain of the knife, heard someone say it was a beautiful baby girl, before the anesthetic took effect and she knew no more.

She woke up in the recovery room where the first person she saw was David holding their baby in his arms.

“She grinned,” he said. “I've been holding her for an hour, waiting for you to come round, and she gave me the biggest grin you've ever seen.”

“She's not normal, is she?” said Clare.

“Darling, she's
perfect.
”

“You're lying to me. She's a mongol.”

“Here, see for yourself. She's beautiful.”

“Babies don't grin until they're six weeks old.”

At this point the baby began to cry, steadily, angrily; and Clare, taking her in her arms for the first time, made two extraordinary discoveries. The first was that on contact with her mother the baby instantly stopped crying; and the second was that she was indeed utterly, perfectly beautiful. True, the nose was a bit squashed, but her eyes were big and clear, and she had masses of hair. Her fingers looked as if they'd been soaked too long in washing-up liquid, but they were slender and graceful with long, pointed nails—almost as if they'd been specially manicured for her debut. Round one minute wrist and one ankle were plastic bands stating that she was Girl Power, and the date and time of birth.

With a flash of insight, Clare suddenly wished that they could all stay here forever, the baby safely cradled in her arms, protected by the hospital staff. For with this new love came also a new and terrible vulnerability, from which there would never be an escape. How shall I endure chicken pox, and tree climbing, and reading about children dying in fires? she thought. Life stretched away in an infinity of dangers and she felt afraid.

THERE WERE All THE EXPLANATIONS : NOBODY GOT THEIR ARITHMETIC wrong, but it was the strain and the stress of the exam that brought the baby on; or she was genuinely a baby that was kicking and screaming to be born and would not wait the time; or Clare had been eating all the wrong food and not taking enough rest.

She had a very small face, but it wasn't nearly as red as the faces of other babies in the hospital; and her eyelashes were longer than any they had ever seen. She was so delicate and fine, that suddenly John Fitzgerald Byrne became a huge, hulking monster in comparison, and any other baby was crabbed and ugly.

Clare and David looked at each other and back at this magnificent person they had created. They kept saying over and over that they couldn't believe it. They said it so often in front of Father Flynn that he said he thought that's what they wanted her christened.

They decided they would give her a name that nobody else had, nobody else they knew. She wouldn't be Molly or Agnes; nor would she be Chrissie or Caroline or Angela or Emer or Valerie or Mary Catherine. She would not be a Fiona or a Josie or a Bernie. She would be a name that nobody had used before and put a shape into like wearing a jumper.

They didn't know any Victorias, and neither of them knew anyone called Martha; so those two were considered. Then David thought of Olivia, and the more he said it the more the tiny baby seemed to suit it; and the more they liked it. Olivia Power. It was a name that sounded made for her.

“You'll have to have a saint's name as well,” said the nurse who knew everything.

“I don't mind, any saint,” Clare said cheerfully.

“Mary's always nice,” said the nurse.

“What's your mother's name?” Clare asked David suddenly.

“It's Molly. You know that.”

“Yes, but what's it short for?”

“Margaret.”

“Right. We'll call her Olivia Mary. I just didn't want to let poor Saint Agnes feel left out. Da was put out enough about John Fitzgerald Byrne. I'll tell you that. . . .”

Olivia Mary Power was ten days old when she left the hospital. Her mother was still pale, and rather shaken-looking. Olivia would need more bottles than a baby which had gone the full nine months, but she was perfectly well and healthy. She had a small christening, with champagne, in the private room which had been found for Clare when they realized she was a doctor's wife and not the hysterical student they had taken her for when she was admitted. There were flowers and cards, and a great deal of admiration.

At no time did anyone say that it was a pity that this of all babies had to be premature since they were going to pretend in Castlebay anyway that it was a premature birth even if it were six weeks late.