‘Get the oil, Rob,’ Nadine barks at Rob. ‘Come on, I thought you were going to
help
.’
They’re in a bleak little room with an iron-framed bed, walls the colour of rice pudding and her contractions are coming thick and fast. Rob extracts the white box of bottles from her enormous polka-dot kit bag – but which one out of the set of eighteen does she want? She’d told him the order in which they should be sniffed, to manage the pain and make everything lovely, while the baby slipped out effortlessly with a polite little peep. And he’d tried to mem-orise it all, in the way that he’d valiantly learnt his French irregular verbs and The Highway Code. But right at this moment, as Nadine lets out an enormous groan – far bigger than anything he’d have imagined could come out of such a tiny person – he can’t remember a thing. Even at thirty-nine weeks pregnant, Nadine doesn’t look remotely ready to give birth. Her bump is neat and compact, whereas Kerry’s were vast, almost heroic, forcing him to migrate to the very edge of their bed. The midwife is a slip of a girl too, with childlike freckles smattered across her little snub nose. Rob feels too big, too clumsy – too
male
– to be here.
‘My oil!’ Nadine commands again, causing him to grab at the first bottle his hand lands upon. As previously instructed, he shakes a few drops onto a cotton handkerchief and wafts it under her nose.
‘That’s the wrong one!’ she snaps.
‘No, honestly, it’s a clean hankie …’
‘I mean the
oil
. That’s rose, Rob, God.
Oooohhh
…’ Another contraction is coming; he sees the sweat beading on her forehead as if being squeezed out of a sponge.
‘Which one then?’
‘Clary sage …’ Her face contorts with pain.
‘Two minutes between contractions,’ says the midwife.
‘What does that mean?’ Nadine cries.
‘It means the baby’s coming, sweetheart,’ she says, smiling and patting her hand.
Nadine is up on all fours now in her organic cotton T-shirt, twisting her head to face Rob. ‘Clary sage, Rob, come
on
…’
‘Sorry, sorry,’ he mutters, feeling utterly redundant as the midwife utters soothing words, seemingly unfazed despite the fact that she looks, to Rob’s mind, as if she’s not old enough to drive a car, let alone deliver a baby. It’s amazing, he thinks wildly, what they teach them at school these days …
‘Clary sage!’ Nadine shrieks, but Rob’s mind has gone blank.
Who the hell is Clary Sage?
Oh, the oil, the oil … He grabs it from the box as she lets out another guttural moan, and the sound of her pain makes him flinch and drop the bottle. There’s a tinkle as it smashes and leaks out onto the shiny yellow floor, filling the room with a powerful bitter scent.
‘Have you broken it?’ Nadine exclaims.
‘Um, sorry …’ Hell, should he try to mop it up? An image forms in his mind of a drawing of a hospital delivery room with all the dangerous things highlighted. And now he sees a huge red arrow pointing to the floor, with the caption HAZARD – OILY SPILLAGE.
‘
Why
are you cleaning the floor?’ Nadine shouts, causing Rob to leap up, still clutching a green paper towel from the dispenser.
‘Don’t worry,’ the midwife says quickly as another woman arrives. ‘If you need gas and air you won’t be able to use your inhalations anyway.’
‘I don’t want gas and air. I wanted the water pool but you made me get out of it.’
‘Yes, because your contractions were slowing right down.’
‘And I wrote in my birth plan that I wanted Jade’s hypnotherapy CD on – where did you put it, Rob?’
‘I think we must have forgotten it …’
‘But the breathing techniques,’ she exclaims. ‘The positive affirmations—’
She is stopped short by what seems to Rob like unimaginable pain that no human should have to go through, and he hears the freckle-faced midwife murmur to the other woman, ‘It’s a bit late for that.’ They’re both telling her to push, and Rob feels as if he’s watching a terrible scene in a movie that he should walk away from, but feels compelled to see through to the end. The pushing isn’t working; she can’t get the baby out. Clary sage forgotten, Nadine sucks hard on gas and air, then it’s pethidine and more pushing, pushing, and still the baby won’t come. Rob feels helpless, as if he might cry. When he tries to mop her forehead with a cold compress, she bats him away. If he murmurs encouraging words, like the midwives are doing, she cries, ‘You don’t know what this is like! I can’t do it, I can’t get this baby out …’ And a terrifying thought fills Rob’s brain: it’s a freaky, massive super-baby and it’ll
never
come out of Nadine …
‘We’re taking you to theatre, sweetheart,’ the younger girl is saying as the room fills with people and urgent voices. And Nadine is no longer on all fours, barking and yelping in her sweat-soaked T-shirt, but on a stretcher, being taken away.
The head of the Sussex Tourist Board couldn’t have organ
ised it better. Kerry and James have visited a nineteenth-century poet’s cottage, a perfectly-preserved art deco house which is open only six days a year (naturally, today was one of those days) and watched a chamber orchestra performing in the manicured grounds of a castle. He’d packed a lavish picnic to nibble at during the concert (naturally, it has been a perfect, sunny May day with just a few wispy clouds streaking a pale blue sky)
and
researched the nearby town
so they could skip the boring bits and head straight for the
more interesting shops. Kerry isn’t sure that a stop-off
at the bottle museum was strictly necessary. But she’s main
tained a perky exterior, praising James for choosing all the right things, and never once suggesting that they might go off-piste and have a cup of tea in, say, some nondescript but perfectly nice cafe.
And now they’re at The Lighthouse Hotel, which is also perfect, surpassing Kerry’s expectations as she’d glimpsed it from the main road. Having dropped off their bags late morning, they are now in their room – an airy circular space with a curved wall separating off the shower room, and light flooding in through two original windows. The rough stone walls are white, the enormous bath – which sits, alarmingly, in the centre of the room – has elaborate claw feet, and the enormous bed has been made up with the most luxurious cotton sheets Kerry has ever felt against her skin. Only her bare feet are making contact with the sheets at the moment, as she lies on her side, flicking through the pile of information leaflets which James collected from the various places of interest today. Later, though, after drinks and dinner, it will be her naked body. With James’s naked body next to hers, and followed at some point, she’d imagine, by sex. Sex in a lighthouse with James. Kerry would feel no more weird if someone had told her she must do it with the Archbishop of Canterbury.
She fans out the leaflets on the bed. ‘James, you’ve put so much thought into today. I’m so touched you organised all this for me.’
James is carefully unpacking his clothes and placing them in the chest of drawers. ‘I think we could probably have done without the bottle museum,’ he says with a small laugh.
‘Yes, well, the children will be impressed that I’ve seen every design of milk bottle ever made in Britain.’
He closes the drawer and comes over to the bed, lying down on his side to face her. ‘I wanted you to have a really nice birthday.’
‘Well, it has been already and we haven’t even eaten yet. And you know how I love my food.’
He leans closer, kissing her softly on the lips. ‘They do great gin and tonics here, I read in the reviews. Thirty-five gin varieties, the best one scented with wild flowers from the Orkneys …’
‘
That
sounds delicious.’ There’s a pause, and she wonders if he’s ever brought anyone here before. ‘What did Luke think about us coming away this weekend?’ she asks.
‘Oh, he approved. Glad to get me out of his hair for a couple of days, I suspect. He’s jacking in the shop, you know. Says he finds it repetitive, as if making sandwiches was ever going to be anything else …’
‘So he’s going to sell it?’
‘Nope, it’s staying open for the time being – run by me.’
‘Oh, so you’re buying him out?’
‘No,’ he says ruefully, ‘because he never put anything in in the first place. I mean, he didn’t finance it – that was me and his friends’ parents. He was the ideas person which, I have to admit, he is pretty good at. No, what I’m doing is allowing him to step away gracefully.’
‘Ah, I
knew
you liked the shop,’ she says, grinning. ‘And it might be better, running it your way …’
‘Yes, that’s what I thought.’
‘Would Amy get involved?’ she asks. ‘You mentioned she was looking for something local …’ His ex-wife has moved into a tiny flat in the centre of town and, as far as Kerry can gather, she and James maintain a cordial, if slightly chilly relationship.
James is laughing now, swivelling off the bed and stashing his empty case in the wardrobe. ‘We wouldn’t last a morning, working together. Listen, we should get ready for dinner …’
‘Yes, I could do with a quick freshen-up first, though, okay?’
‘Bath or shower?’ he asks with an entirely straight face.
Kerry blinks at the central bath which utterly dominates the room. ‘Oh, a shower I think. I need something to liven me up.’
Nadine is shouting for Rob; he can hear her through the doors.
‘I need to go in,’ he barks at the brick of a man with a pink, shiny head who’s preventing him from being with her.
‘There’s too much going on in there, mate,’ the man grunts. ‘You can go in when they’re ready.’
Ready for what? He’s not about to miss the birth of his child. When Nadine yells, ‘I want Rob!’, he shoves his way past, surprised at the burst of determination that seems to come from nowhere and blunders into the room where his girlfriend is lying on a bed, her short dark hair plastered to her forehead with sweat. She manages a weak smile.
‘Oh, you’re
here
.’ Like he’d been dawdling and only just made it in time.
‘Yes, I’m here. Don’t worry.’ He grabs her hand and grasps it tightly.
‘She’s refusing to have a caesarean,’ says a woman with an unyielding helmet of black hair.
‘It’s not in the plan,’ Nadine wails.
‘Who cares about the plan?’ Rob touches her hot, damp cheek. ‘It doesn’t matter now. You’ve tried and done your best but it’s not important. They have to get the baby out safely.’ He pauses, expecting Nadine to say something cutting, but she murmurs a weak, ‘Okay.’
Then something in helmet-hair’s mood changes. ‘You can try one last time,’ she says firmly. She urges her to push, and a man Rob hadn’t even registered before takes what looks like a pair of tongs off a trolley – he’s reminded of his parents’ special-occasion salad tongs – then there’s so much shouting that Rob has to turn away. He can’t watch the tongs bit, it seems too wild and chaotic, not the way he likes things at all. It wasn’t like this when Mia and Freddie were born …
With his back teeth jammed together, he tries to spirit himself away to a place where babies are delivered in a orderly fashion. Then he hears the man saying, ‘Well done, well done, Nadine, it’s a boy …’
Rob turns to see his tiny baby being held up and being placed, all wet, silky skin and dark hair, on Nadine’s chest.
She looks at Rob and smiles. ‘Look, it’s our son.’
He nods, unable to find words while he studies the face, which is definitely
his
face – or rather, his father’s brow and nose. For a moment, he wonders if there’s something of Eddy too, around the mouth – although, actually, this perfect child really only looks like one person: Nadine.
The baby is whisked away, then returned all clean and alert, his dark eyes taking in his surroundings. The nurse hands him to Rob. ‘Here you are,’ she says kindly.
‘Er … okay.’ It’s silly to feel nervous, but Rob hasn’t held a newborn baby for so long that he’s fearful of somehow breaking him. He is sweating a little, but after a few moments something in him adjusts and he remembers what to do, and it feels utterly natural to be cradling this tiny human being. Sod paternity tests and quizzing Nadine and night after night spent worrying. As Rob looks down at the baby in his arms, there is no doubt in his mind that this child is his, in the only way that matters.
It’s like that feature in
Mr Jones
– ‘Your A–Z of foreplay’ – which Kerry’s eyes had lit upon in the dentist’s waiting room. She’d almost convulsed with laughter when she’d spotted that it was written by ‘Miss Jones’ – Rob’s alter ego – and had been unable to resist sneakily tearing it out of the magazine and slipping it into her bag. How she and Brigid had laughed at the way he’d written it. It was the way he’d suggested working through the proceedings in
alphabetical order
: ‘a for areola’, ‘b for bottom’, ‘c for clitoris’ … oh dear, oh dear …
Only now, it appears that this is happening to Kerry in real life. She’s not averse to some things being alphabetised – her CDs have been a jumble since Rob left and his ultra-strict filing system broke down – but not this. Plenty of women would appreciate James’s efforts and award an A-star for effort. But the more James gamely continues, and the more she tries in vain to participate – to feel
something
,
in this perfect lighthouse room – the more she is conscious of a terrible rising hysteria in her, until everything he does is unbearably tickly and it takes every ounce of concentration not to cry with laughter. Was she always this tickly, or is it because she hasn’t been touched in so long, and her nerve endings are over-responding?
‘Sorry,’ he murmurs as she flinches again.
‘No, it’s not you. It’s fine – I’ve just gone horribly tickly. I don’t know why. I’ll be all right in a minute …’ James pulls back, observing her with a quizzical smile. He’s so handsome, she reminds herself.
Don’t mess up this opportunity when you haven’t had sex in …
well, she can’t actually remember.