Sail Upon the Land (26 page)

Easy way out. A little visit to the clinic, the rapid application of a vacuum to her cervix and all would be over. Damson lay back on her bed, squirming with discomfort. The rape would be compounded and she would be violated all over again, with a plastic tube this time. Sickened with herself and what she had done. Baby bird thing inside her didn’t have to suffer too, she was folded around it, layers of blood and water, fat and skin, padding it against the wicked world. If she went through with the abortion, there would be something like those smashed pink naked nestlings she used to find in the garden, but in a kidney dish.

Then there was adoption which meant her shame would be exposed, particularly to her shy, prudish father. As far as Munty was concerned, women married and had babies rather strictly in that order. Abortion, sex before marriage, the Pill and all the rest of Sixties sexual liberation seemed to have passed him by. Perhaps the Sixties was optional, you could stay in the Fifties if you didn't like it and hop straight on to the boring Seventies. By the time she was conscious, he was living a monkish life.

She shuddered at the idea of her father thinking poorly of her, but if she let it grow until it was big enough to be free of her body safely, then it could go to a family who could love it. You didn’t love a baby conceived like that, did you, so it wouldn’t hurt to give it up. And she would be free to defer, go back to Cambridge and grow into a doctor like Grandpa when it was all over.

Instinctively she knew that the last person on earth in whom she would confide might hold the answers. She grasped at Margaret’s efficiency and organisational skills. Damson didn’t know much about her background, except that her father had been a sailor and her mother a seamstress and that she came from somewhere very different from Castle Hey. Margaret didn’t love her so she wouldn’t be hurt. Her grandmother did not deserve the pain of this knowledge. She had suffered enough.

Then Damson would come back to Cambridge, rewind her life, crunch through another autumn’s worth of golden leaves on her way to the labs. There would be different Georges and Maries to make friends with, and it would all be as if it had never happened. And no one at Cambridge would be any the wiser.

Munty hadn’t had much time or space in his life for his small daughter. He was as good a father as he could manage to be and loved her in his own way. It would be frightening to expose her shameful pregnancy to him. He couldn’t love her any more after that, could he?

She knew Pauline would be fine whatever decision she made. Pauline was earthy and realistic, brought up on a farm. She let her mind rest on Pauline. She would be a refuge, she would not judge.

Coming home from Cambridge two weeks after going up was excruciating, but there was also relief when Margaret took charge. After a pause in the usual rush of words, her stepmother was briskly kind and made no attempt to ask probing questions or scold once she understood that Damson had turned down an abortion. Margaret would sort it all out.

In her usual way, Margaret had hired a proper old-fashioned trained nanny when the twins were born. Nanny had been a wise choice, sensible and kind. She was now retired to Balham, living in a little house belonging to Margaret which she shared with her sister. Damson was to go and stay there out of sight until the baby was born, after which it was to be handed over to a suitable adoption agency. She went along with this sensible plan without arguing. Her father never said a word. As soon as she had told them both, he’d quietly left the room.

Pauline, when Damson visited her in her house in the village, said simply, ‘Is this what you want?’

Damson nodded. If she said anything she knew she would start howling, so she kept quiet.

Damson did not visit her grandparents. They had written to her as usual, the letters forwarded from St Bennet’s or home, but between the cheerful words about ‘being so pleased that you are so independent now’ she could detect that they missed her. Trying to reassure them, hating to deceive them and wanting nothing more than a proper cuddle with her grandmother, she’d sent upbeat letters saying that she was so busy with her studies she couldn’t get away. That she’d taken an extension course (unspecified) which meant her studies went on for longer.

It was only a few months. Infinitely better for them never to know they had a great-grandchild.

Pregnancy in Balham was dull. Nanny and her sister were not sure how to treat her so they led very separate lives in the tall thin house. Damson had an attic bedroom to herself with a fridge, a gas ring and a microwave. There was a small bathroom on the landing. She had nothing to do but read her textbooks, go for lonely walks on Clapham Common and devour detective stories that she found in the library. Sherlock Holmes was perfect, as were early Dorothy Sayers and some of the drier Agatha Christies. Anything with a hint of romance was taken straight back. She cried much too easily over wars and disasters in the papers. The birth came as a relief.

The midwives’ attitude had been peculiar and daunting as if they didn’t approve of her choice to have her baby adopted. She slowly paced the wards for hours and hours until she was exhausted and lay gasping at the Entonox.

The pain became so agonising that she requested an epidural. The sensation of pain disappearing out of her body was one she thought she would never forget but of course she did immediately.

Every now and then a midwife would come and examine her.

‘How’s it going?’ They knew she was a medical student by this time. One shift of midwives told the next. They didn’t bother even to speak quietly around her.

Just outside her cubicle: ‘She wants to go back to her medical studies. The baby’ll be adopted.’

‘Oh,’ accompanied by sideways glances. Her social worker Eva Williams had looked in to see how she was getting on. She wouldn’t normally have done this as Damson presented no challenges at all but she had a problem case in the maternity ward at the same time.

‘All right there, Damson? I’m just down the corridor this evening,’ she’d said in her cheerful Australian way, the ‘ning’ swinging upwards in an eternal Antipodean question that could never be answered. Damson nodded, too tired to speak and Eva went away to deal with the heroin-addicted mother of eight all in care who was having number nine tonight and sadly could not be allowed to keep it.

Her stepmother had dealt with the private adoption charity Elgin Robbins which specialised in baby adoptions. It had been quite difficult to find the right people to help as they didn’t advertise. There were so few babies up for adoption in England that if Elgin Robbins had put themselves in the Yellow Pages they would have been swamped by desperate prospective parents. In the end Margaret had confided in the priest at St Anthony’s about Damson’s predicament. He had been very kind and helpful about the whole thing and suggested a number of small private agencies that he knew about through his own counselling.

Damson had had a series of interviews and also some counselling herself. This didn’t make her feel any better as she never told anyone anything, just that the father was from India and they had had a brief affair. No she didn’t want to disclose his name. No he knew nothing about the baby and never would.

Margaret reminded Damson repeatedly that she must not damage her chance to be a doctor, as if she was afraid her stepdaughter might backslide. Damson didn’t have the space to be surprised by her stepmother’s sudden interest in her career prospects.

They chose Elgin Robbins because on enquiry it turned out that they had some Indian couples on their books which was unusual. This was because a childless Maharaja and his wife had adopted a son in England through their agency and this had become known in the Indian community. Elgin Robbins were sensitive to the cultural and spiritual status of children within traditional Hindu beliefs. In England babies born out of wedlock to Indian girls were rare so the options for Indian couples were few.

The social workers would abide as exactly as possible by strict rules about cultural matching. A mixed-race couple would be perfect but Indian parents would also ‘advantage’ the child enormously. Damson suspected she was a most unusual sort of person in the non-judgmental Eighties to be giving up her baby.

The midwife came in and looked at the readout from the monitor strapped to her belly, then she hit the red buzzer on the machine and it was all go.

The doctor came hurrying in, glanced at the readout and said to the midwife: ‘Prep her. We can get to her immediately.’

Damson was bewildered. ‘What’s happening?’ she asked.

‘Oh, sorry. Baby’s a bit tired so we’re going to have to perform a caesarean. Nothing to worry about. Lucky you chose to have an epidural, we can just get it topped up and whip baby out in no time.’

So she wasn’t going to give birth after all. First they were going to take the baby out of her, then they were going to take it away. She was overwhelmed by helplessness and began to cry. The midwife, coming back in, misunderstood. ‘Don’t worry, dear. There’s nothing to be frightened of. A caesarean is very straightforward these days. You’ll be fine.’

Damson wiped her eyes on her indecent hospital gown. She signed the consent form, then the porter came in and she was wheeled rapidly down to the operating theatre. There she was prepped and a green curtain erected between her and the scene of the action. She didn’t like this at all but the surgeon was adamant.

She was completely numb as they’d topped up her epidural. There was a sensation of someone rummaging. Then there was a pulling and release, a pause while they cut the cord, and a mewling cry that receded away from her.

‘At least it’s alive,’ she thought.

No one popped a friendly face around her curtain to tell her the happy news. Clearly the staff didn’t think it was appropriate.

She lay like a chest of drawers that a burglar had tipped on its back and ransacked. Tears prickled her closed eyes. Then she was aware that someone was pulling her back together, stuffing things in any old how and locking her up tight. After a while, she ventured, ‘Is the baby all right?’

The theatre nurse bustled round to her side of the curtain and said briskly, ‘It’s perfectly all right, the midwife’s taken it into the recovery room. Now let’s get you cleaned up. Mr Wells is just finishing off your incision and then we can get you through as well. How do you feel?’

‘Sad.’

‘Now, now, none of that. Baby’s fine and so are you. You’ll soon be back to normal.’

Normal? How could anything ever be normal again? The tears slid down her temples and into her hair. She couldn’t find the energy to lift her hand and wipe them away.

‘What is it?’ she sobbed.

‘What’s what?’ said the nurse, whose name Damson did not want to know.

‘The baby. What is it?’

‘Oh. OK, it’s a little girl.’

‘What are they doing with her?’

‘Just warming her up a bit and sucking out some mucus and stuff from her little tummy. You were in labour for a very long time and she got a bit distressed. But she’s going to be fine.’

‘Can I see her?’

The nurse looked worried for a moment and went and consulted with the obstetric surgeon. She heard him say, ‘I don’t see why not. She’s the medical student, isn’t she? She’ll be sensible.’

He poked his head over the green curtain and said, ‘That’s you all stitched up, Miss Hayes. Nice clean scar. We can get you back into the ward and resting in a minute.’ The curtain was removed and Damson looked down at herself. Lying on her back, she wasn’t breathless or dizzy as she had been in the last couple of months with the immense weight of the baby pressing down on her vena cava and causing supine hypotensive syndrome – naturally she’d looked it up. Not caring that Mr Wells was still there, she hauled up her surgical gown and examined herself. All was flaccid flabby flatness now. A great pool of flesh veined with purple stretch marks, the scar neat and pink with staples shining in the light and her pubes shaved off. The life that had made beautiful the fidgeting mound was gone. She was heaved on to the trolley and wheeled away.

In the recovery room Damson shifted herself up on to her elbows to see the midwife standing in front of something that looked like an infrared grill, attending to whatever was under it. All she could see was one tiny pale arm.

‘Do I dare call her Melissa?’ she whispered to herself. ‘My own honey?’

After a few more minutes the midwife leant forward and lifted the baby with both hands, settling it into her left elbow and turning to Damson. She wasn’t smiling. It was probably quite difficult and embarrassing to know what to do with a baby that was to be adopted. Particularly when this was not at all like the usual care situations where social services hovered like so many ladies-in-waiting around a queen.

She couldn’t help smiling down at the baby and then turned the smile on Damson.

‘She’s a beautiful little girl. Aren’t you, precious?’

In an instant Damson was very angry. Why wasn’t she the first person to look at her baby and tell her she was beautiful?

‘Give her to me,’ she said.

‘I’m not sure that’s wise in the circumstances you might bond with her,’ said the midwife, holding her against her uniform. ‘Anyway, you need to lie flat for a bit. You can have a hold when we get back to the ward. We’ve arranged for you to have a side ward for a bit of peace,’ she added.

‘Give her to me, I need to see her now,’ Damson repeated, trying to keep her voice level. The midwife could see that she was about to lose control so she leant down towards Damson’s teary face holding the baby closer to her.

Damson saw a rumpled rosebud with a tuft of black hair peeping out of the hospital-issue cotton blanket. She reached out a finger and touched the petal cheek. The little creature’s eyes snapped open gazing with deep purple irises at her mother. Anguish shot through her from groin to heart. She opened her mouth and the wail tore through all her careful constraint.