Sail Upon the Land (33 page)

Damson had had to ask what NRI meant. Leeta gave her a look: ‘Non-resident Indian’, she spelt out. So different from boring old London and, Damson suspected, boring old Damson.

Perhaps if Leeta had had a different, more westernised attitude to sex, she could have accepted her baby as a fact of life, and rearranged her future to accommodate it. But Damson could see that her conditioning was wrapped around the baby like a tumour around an optic nerve, blinding her to the beauty of a child as an entity in itself and associating it only with shame, a drunken fumble in the dark and banishment from the heart of her family. Damson slid slowly into sleep as she puzzled once again over her daughter.

‘Damson, please wake up?’

She opened her eyes from a dream of baby elephants covered in red mud crashing through her garden wall, to see Leeta standing by the bed, leaning back slightly with her hand on the base of her spine. She was wearing a T-shirt with baggy cotton jersey trousers and her smooth bump showed between one and the other.

‘What is it?’ she said, stupid with sleep. ‘What time is it?’

‘It’s about five o’clock, and I think it’s starting.’

Damson sat up and rubbed her eyes, swinging her legs clad in men’s striped pyjamas off the bed and taking Leeta’s hand. For once her daughter let her.

‘Are you timing the contractions?’

‘It started as soon as we went to bed, but I didn’t want to bother you when they were ten minutes apart. I thought it might be Braxton Hicks still, as they weren’t painful just a bit surprising. But then they started being longer and more purposeful.

‘They’re about five minutes apart at the moment.’

The girl broke off, let go of Damson and reached gropingly for the edge of the chest of drawers with both hands. Her eyes closed, and she began to breathe through her nose, while executing what looked to Damson, from long-ago prep school dancing lessons, like a deep plié.

Damson began to count in her head, reaching sixty seconds as Leeta straightened up and let out a long breath.

‘Hmmm. Think you may be getting to the end of early labour. Would you like to go to hospital?’

Another contraction started to build, and Leeta was quiet for a while, doing her slow incongruous plié against the chest of drawers. Damson went to get the bag she’d packed for Leeta and the baby, as well as her own medical bag, and helped her daughter downstairs and into the car. The Royal Derby Hospital was nearly forty minutes away and Damson did not want to deliver the baby at the roadside.

The birth went smoothly, but the baby spent not a single moment with Leeta once he was free of her body. Even as the midwife guided him into the world, she rejected him utterly, flinging her arms over her eyes. Damson didn’t say anything. The pain was replaced by joy at her grandson’s appearance. He made little sound and she witnessed the healthy pink flush across his skin like a sunset as he emerged.

Even before the cord was cut, the new mother rolled abruptly on to her side, lifting her leg over her infant, leaving him behind her on the bed. She drew up her knees, foetal herself and covered her face with her hands. Damson, seeing what was happening, quickly moved round to the other side of the bed. The midwife dealt with the situation by clamping and cutting the cord. Damson found herself rapidly undoing her shirt buttons with one hand, before holding out her arms, and the midwife simply handed the naked baby to her. She took him in both hands and nestled him against the skin of her breasts, covering him with her shirt and cardigan, caring nothing for the vernix and amniotic fluid – there was very little blood – enfolding him close to her heart. The buttery coating of his just-born skin transferred itself to hers.

‘Now, Leeta,’ she heard the midwife say. ‘I need you to roll on to your back so we can deliver the placenta.’

Leeta groaned but complied, her hands still covering her face. The midwife deftly injected her thigh with syntocin and held on to the cord to guide the placenta from her body, reminding Leeta to push, which she did half-heartedly. Damson was only half aware of this in her wonder at what was inside her shirt. Once she had made sure the baby was warm and close, she tipped him away from her with her hand behind his head so she could look at his face.

‘Hello, little man,’ she said, detecting as she did so an impatient movement from the bed behind her. But she wasn’t going to be constrained by Leeta in this sublime moment.

‘How beautiful you are,’ she crooned, bending to kiss his sticky little head. Her breasts tingled as she snuffled his new-born scent.

He was a rich pink colour all over now, drying rapidly and giving off waves of balsamic new-born perfume, funky and strange, tropical in its intensity. As he was moved, his pink paws made a startled gesture, and he opened his eyes. If she had been drifting down the tide before, she was utterly lost now, sailing on an open sea of love. She seized him back against herself and held him with her own eyes closed. Then the midwife wanted him back, so she handed him over, rejoicing in his perfect APGAR score and his seven-pound heft.

He had had the consideration to be born at lunchtime with the paediatrician available for checks, so there was nothing to keep them. They went home just as soon as Leeta had showered in the adjoining bathroom, dressed and declared herself ready. Damson had brought maternity pads, which she handed to Leeta, and a bag of things to dress the baby in, which she did herself. Placing a tiny disposable nappy around his frog-like hips, she admired his splendid tripartite manhood, out of proportion as always in a new-born awash with hormones. Anxiously, she covered his chest with a crossover vest and eased his still folded arms along the sleeves of the old-fashioned soft cotton nightie she had bought for him, and then folded him into a cobweb shawl. It was only when she got to the car and realised she would have somehow to strap him into a car seat, with a strap between the legs, that she regretted her impulse to dress him like that.

Leeta climbed into the back seat, making no attempt to help Damson as she fumbled with buckles and belts. When Damson was satisfied that her charge was firmly strapped and comfortable, she got in and sat quietly for a minute. She needed to calm down before driving.

‘Well, are we going?’

‘Hang on, Leeta, I’m just getting my breath. Are you OK?’

‘I’m fine, don’t know what all the fuss is about.’

‘Well, I think you should rest. The more you rest now the sooner you’ll be back to normal.’ And she turned the key in the ignition and pulled slowly away from the parking space to set off home.

When they arrived at Swine Cottage, Leeta eased herself out and disappeared through the front door, again doing nothing to help. Damson had thought giving birth might switch on Leeta’s awareness of herself as a mother but clearly it hadn’t, at least not yet.

She undid the belt and removed the car seat, carrying it by its handle and putting it down in the hall. The little boy was asleep, lulled by the motion of the car. Upstairs, she heard Leeta’s door shut.

He was in the big bedroom with Damson from birth, bonding against her breasts and staring into her eyes while he sucked from the bottle of formula. When the extraordinary intimacy became too much, she would put him down in his basket and creep away to stand outside under the sky, riding waves of emotion such as she had never experienced before. Even more intense than anything she had allowed herself during her scrimped and scraped minutes with baby Mellita.

To be so completely involved with his physical presence that she might as well be his mother was overwhelming. But she must give Leeta every opportunity to be his mother herself. If she showed the slightest softening towards the baby, Damson would step aside willingly.

The baby was on the small side and Leeta very slim and young. Damson’s English, fair and fragile skin was seamed even now with silvery stretch marks like the Nile Delta, but Leeta’s belly had snapped back into shape with no lasting damage at all. Damson had to be quite bossy and insist she stayed in bed for a few days, as Leeta wanted to behave as if she had never had a baby from the moment she had come home from the hospital.

They went to the register office together, and Damson held the baby while Leeta filled out the forms. Leeta was surprisingly practical when it came to shedding responsibility. It was vital that there should be no immediate questions, so she suggested that she give him Damson’s surname as well as her own to avoid confusion. But Damson made sure that Leeta chose a first name for him. It was the one moment when the girl seemed to allow herself to think of the baby as a person rather than an inconvenience. She chose Hari, after her adoptive maternal grandfather who had died when she was five, and whom she remembered as being kind.

Hari Hayes Delapi, it was a good name. No father’s name went on the birth certificate of course, as there was no father present. They paid for the full version of the certificate, Damson insisted. And then she made sure they had the baby professionally photographed, and ordered a passport for him as well. Just in case, Damson said.

As soon as she was well enough, Leeta explained that she needed a new wardrobe in preparation for leaving Derbyshire. She’d gone into Bakewell on the bus and used her credit card to buy clothes at Franca. Damson had given in and prescribed her Parlodel to stop the milk, as she knew that Leeta would simply order it on the internet, and it could be fake and harmful. Although she knew with her mind, Damson’s heart had not realised she would lose Mellita again so soon.

Damson was careful to put Hari down before she went to Leeta in the tiny room, offering to help her pack and sort out her possessions. Hari’s presence appeared almost unbearably irritating to Leeta and Damson did not dare to guess at her daughter’s feelings. Leeta stuffed anything that might remind her of being pregnant into a black sack for the charity shop.

‘Can you take it into Derby for me? No one must ever know about this.’

Damson’s unaccustomed mother’s heart bled for her daughter.

‘See how you are. I’m always here if you need me,’ she said timidly, while knowing that her utility for Leeta was now over.

‘I think it would be much better if we didn’t see each other for some time. I don’t want anyone to know anything about this or connect me with you. If my parents or a prospective husband found out, it would be the end of everything. And please don’t say you’re my mother and you’ll look after me. I can’t bear it if you do. I’m Indian, and my family is Indian, and that is how I’ll live my life. I’m not like you at all. When I look at you, I don’t see a mother.’

‘What do you see?’ said Damson.

‘I see a person.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I see a person wearing corduroy trousers and an old jumper with holes in the elbows. A shapeless person in dull-coloured clothes with no hair.’

Damson glanced down at herself and could only agree. She knew that Leeta was building up a head of negativity to power her exit from the cottage.

‘I don’t want a link between us at all. So I’m looking at you and seeing something that isn’t feminine enough to be a mother.

‘I love my parents and I can’t let that love go. So I can’t love you. Do you understand? There isn’t any room for you.’

Damson had never had a mother so she wasn’t at all sure what loving one might be like. She had no expectations in her heart. But there was a little boy asleep in the other bedroom. It was a reminder of her love for her own tiny Mellita. Attaching that love to this bold defiant girl was strange but it was there.

She knew she was on dodgy ground accepting this private fostering arrangement in the twenty-first century, but she couldn’t make Leeta understand her point of view. Any mention of social services sent Leeta into point-blank refusal to discuss it. There was a niggling worry about her professional status, but she thought she could explain things to any authority that bothered to ask. Hari was her grandchild. She had some experience of a certain laissez-faire attitude when it came to middle-class cases.

Damson was also old enough to know that you can never rely on other people to act as you would in almost any circumstance. It would’ve required Leeta to override her lifelong conditioning as a dutiful Indian daughter. The whole regrettable business, from pregnancy to leaving the baby behind, appeared to be a violent sustained reaction to discovering not just that she was adopted, but that she was half-English too.

‘So there’s nothing I can say? And you will take care of your health? You should take it very easy for at least six weeks – get yourself checked by a doctor.’

‘What would I say? I’ve had a baby and abandoned it?’

‘Well, no. I don’t know. It’s up to you. What time’s your train? Would you like me to drive you to the station?’

‘I’ve ordered a taxi. The train’s just after seven.’

‘Where are you going?’ she ventured, thinking it was unlikely she would be told the truth.

‘I’m taking Eurostar, going to San Tropez to stay with a friend. I’ve told her I’ve had glandular fever and need to rest somewhere warmer than England. You’ve got my email address, but don’t use it unless you have to.’

After all, Leeta was an adult. She could do what she liked. Even Indian parents didn’t need to know where their adult children were every day.

‘Do you need money?’

Leeta glanced up at her.

‘No, I don’t. But thanks.’

The doorbell rang.

‘That’ll be my taxi.’

Damson’s arms lifted, reaching towards her daughter.

‘No. Don’t touch me. We can’t risk stimulating the milk.’

Damson’s hands dropped to her sides. ‘Have you got all the medication you need?’

‘Yup. There doesn’t seem to be much going on in there now, those pills work.’

Leeta pulled up the handle of her smart new wheelie suitcase, packed with fresh clothes. She was wearing high-cut jeans that looked like they had a little blue corset to hold in her tummy, and a sky blue jersey. She carried a soft black leather jacket over her arm. She looked young, free, slender, fresh and beautiful. No one would ever think she’d recently had a baby.