The girl’s room smelt of sandalwood, her skin was soft, her ribs, her hipbones, her spine were hard and apparent, there was nothing redundant about her, no baggage. She had a mole on her left breast. It was a fight for something and yet she was accommodating and it was real, and then it was over, it was morning and Natalie was being nudged awake, ‘Didn’t you say you have to get your bus?’ and she was rushing dazed to the flimsy room she hadn’t slept in, half surprised to find her things were still there, gathering them up and running for the stop and the bus was still there, waiting, and she got on and the bus moved off and the town disappeared behind her, and there was no reason why she would ever return.
When she saw Richard six weeks later, the first night she got back, spacey and strung out with jetlag, she had been astonished by how much she coveted him. He was so gentle, so unsure of himself, so visibly trying to hide it. She wanted him to hug her and soothe her and assure
her it was all right, but of course he couldn’t, because she told him what had happened and he was shocked and he cried and she cried too and then it became possible to wish in earnest that it could all be undone.
They held each other and he left. She hurt him and they broke up and they didn’t tell anybody why. Everybody wanted them to get back together, and eventually they did . . . But slowly, slowly . . . and who could blame him?
Those doubts were over. There was nothing there for her; it wasn’t where she lived and it was nowhere she could stay. What was left behind was a sort of shadow, an unease, the ache of something that had been excised and refused the chance to grow.
How was it possible to be happy once you knew your future was restricted and you had made it that way, and your bed was well and truly made and now you had to lie on it?
It had happened a long time ago; nearly a decade. Wasn’t living in the past what old people did? Ignoring all the interim, returning to the clarity of youth?
But when you are trapped and waiting and afraid, what else is there to do?
At 4.00 a.m. she was examined by another midwife, a big, easy-going woman with an air of calm and expert authority. A youngish doctor came by afterwards and informed her that she would be allowed another four hours. He made it sound like a significant concession.
‘Patti’s been doing nights on the labour ward for twenty-two years,’ he explained, ‘and she says she thinks
you’re about to start dilating, so I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.’
Natalie had been reprieved by the Queen of the Night.
Richard went back to sleep and she waited, and she remembered that there had been a time when she had been free and had not known how free she was.
Walking on the beach by the Old Schoolhouse on the last day of the old century. She hadn’t realized that she was happy at the time. What she had felt was anticipation: as if the machinery of time was inexorably grinding towards a great transition, taking them all with it. It was an ominous sensation, and yet also a liberating one. It was not a day like any other, a day of mundane deeds, repetition and limitations; it was a day on which it was possible to believe in the imminence of unknown and unknowable change.
Richard stirred and, finally, she felt the ghost of an urge to push.
She rang the bell. Richard was at her side, willing but terrified. Another examination. She couldn’t feel it.
‘You can start to try to push if you like,’ the latest midwife said. And she tried, but it was like trying to read the very smallest row of letters during an eye test. She could hazard a guess, but she couldn’t read the signs.
A doctor examined her; blonde, female, doubtful. ‘How long has she been pushing? Twenty minutes? Well, nothing very much is happening at all. You’ve got forty minutes left,’ she told Natalie.
Her time was nearly up. And so Natalie, with the encouragement of the latest midwife, and slightly more
hesitant encouragement from Richard, began to push in earnest.
When Richard shifted down the foot end it crossed her mind to tell him that he shouldn’t, that it was a mistake, but then the next contraction was clearer and she shoved back against it as hard as she could and yes, she was making progress finally, she’d show the lot of them. The doctor quickly snipped her open and she felt a tugging as the ventouse was applied to the baby’s head, but no, no good, someone noticed the syntocinon was running out and started running round like a mad thing looking for another bag, oh shit, and the next contraction was slower and less sharp and the one after that weaker still. She really absolutely genuinely was running out of time, and then there was another spasm and she shoved and the doctor pulled with the forceps and she could feel the baby being lifted up and out of her. Richard stepped nervously forward to cut the cord, as per the birth plan, and then, also as per the birth plan, the baby was dumped on her chest and covered by a sheet, and she looked into her daughter’s cloudy blue eyes.
‘Welcome to the world, Matilda Rose,’ Natalie said, and burst into tears.
THE HEART OF
the courtroom was an empty space. It was a modern facility, square, windowless, airless, the colour of dull metal. Tina was sitting overhead in the press gallery, watching the proceedings as if in the stalls at a particularly uncomfortable piece of contemporary theatre. Below her, the witnesses and lawyers were seated around the four sides of the chamber, facing each other.
To the left were the parents of Alice March, whose death at just nine months of age was the subject of the inquest. On the right were the medical professionals who had tried and failed to save Alice’s life. And directly beneath Tina, opposite the coroner on the far side of the court, was Kelly-Ann Rose, the eighteen-year-old nursery nurse who had made the mistake of giving Alice food that she shouldn’t have eaten, after which Alice had suffered an allergic reaction, turned blue and stopped breathing.
The proximity of the grieving mother and the girl whose mistake might or might not have contributed to the baby’s death filled the courtroom with an electrical charge that had nowhere to go until the verdict was announced and the inquest was over. The atmosphere was intensely claustrophobic, exhausting, deadening. Kelly-Ann looked grey and stiff, and the bags under her eyes were the colour of weak tea. Mrs March was the dry, worn white of old stone, as still and composed as a carving of a good wife on top of a medieval tomb. One was the picture of remorse, the other the picture of grief.
Accidents happen, Tina told herself. Anyone can make a mistake.
Whatever they had taught her at St Birinus School for Girls, the bundle of cells currently multiplying inside her was not a life.
She had resisted the morbid temptation to look up the extent to which it, the invading cell-bundle, had adopted human form, although she imagined that it probably looked amphibious, like a newt, something from a previous stage of evolution, crawling towards land. They had told her over the phone that an ultrasound would be necessary to establish how many weeks pregnant she was, but she wouldn’t have to see the scan.
Surely nobody ever wants to look, she’d said.
You’d be surprised, the woman from the clinic had told her. We’re all different, and we all have different reasons for the choices we make, and different ways of coping.
Tina had seen Natalie’s birth plan, a mission statement
for Natalie’s desire not to be at the mercy of her body, but to direct what happened to it. The opportunities for Natalie to stamp her will on the natural process were limited, but still, she had set out what she wanted: gas and air, no interventions, water birth if possible.
And by now, more than a fortnight past Natalie’s due date, it must be over. Tina had texted to see if there was any news, and hadn’t yet heard back. She told herself that all was bound to be well, and found it was a guilty relief to put her concern about her friend to one side. The idea of Natalie as a new mother, settling her newborn at her breast, was a painful one, for reasons Tina didn’t particularly care to examine.
Tina, too, had had to select from a limited range of options. She had been guided primarily by the desire to have it over with as quickly as possible. So: a phone consultation, to be followed by a surgical procedure, in and out on the same day. No general anaesthetic, no sedation; that way she’d be able to leave as soon as she felt ready to walk. It would take all of five minutes, and then she’d be able to go home and crawl under her duvet and hide there until Saturday morning. When she would have to get up, put a brave face on it, and go to her father’s seventieth birthday party.
She was dreading what she had to do, but she was also resigned to it . . . though if the coroner didn’t reach his verdict soon, they’d all be back here again in the morning, and she’d miss her appointment. She’d almost forgotten what a time-consuming business reporting could be. She wouldn’t normally have been here at all, except they were short-staffed, and she was meant
to be using it as the basis for a long article about the increasing prevalence of allergies, as well as producing a news story for the next day’s paper. Anyway, it would be thoroughly unprofessional to regard it as a junior, demeaning assignment. She was a staff writer; she wasn’t just a columnist. Plus it never hurt to keep your hand in.
She was half listening for facts or quotes that she might need, but most of what was emerging was clarification rather than wholly new information, and her note-taking had ground almost to a halt. They’d all been shut in together for the best part of two days, but still the coroner was taking his time, going back over some of the evidence from the previous day, asking for further details from the GP, the paediatrician, the paramedic, the A & E consultant.
Only Mr March, the baby’s father, had not been called upon to speak. His features were boyish, but shock and loss had robbed him of youthfulness, and he looked tired beyond either anger or despair. He was sitting very close to his wife; sometimes they held hands.
Tina had never seriously entertained the idea of telling Dan, or Justin, about the fix that one or other of them had got her in. She knew perfectly well how they would react if she did: there would be dismay, a desire to disbelieve, followed by concern – concern that she should get rid of it as quickly as possible, and terror that she might not. There was no point in lying, in telling either one that he was the only candidate for paternity – neither would want her to bear their child.
And why should they? If you wanted to have a child
with someone, you went out with them, you lived with them, you got married. You didn’t hook up with them just the once after having a few too many down the pub and then move on to someone younger. And you didn’t keep them at your beck and call – but at a safe distance – for the best part of a decade, playing an occasional part in a long performance that had all the props of a love affair – the letters, the lingerie, the secret rendezvous, the intense reunions, the reluctant separations – and yet, at its heart, was all about what wasn’t there.
She had to face facts, she just wasn’t the mothering kind. Mothers were either staunch and dedicated like Lucy, or mild, gentle souls like Natalie. They were not bony-kneed, bitchy bigmouths like herself.
Finally! The verdict.
Time to concentrate. She might need to include something from the summing-up. She sat with her pen poised on her notebook, ready to start scribbling.
Accidental death.
Accidents happened. Even the law made allowances for that.
So why did she have this feeling that after she’d gone through with what she had to do tomorrow, she would never forgive herself?
Getting back to her flat was a relief, but a qualified one. Lately she’d become uncomfortably conscious of how badly she’d neglected the place, and as soon as she walked in through the front door it struck her as tatty and uncared-for.
How wonderful it would be, like the heroine in
A
Little Princess
, to return to her garret one evening to find it warm, cosy, magically transformed. The fading paintwork, the heaps of books and papers, the dust: these were things that a month ago she would have been oblivious to. Now it was as if she’d lost her immunity, and there was nothing to protect her from seeing that her home was unloved.
The flat occupied the top two floors of a big Victorian house, with the living space and kitchen area upstairs in the converted attic, and a downstairs bathroom and bedroom. After she’d let herself in, the first thing she did was head to the bedroom and take off her work clothes: blouse, skirt and tights, which were de rigueur at the
Post –
opaques in winter, 10 denier in summer. Women in trousers, or with bare legs, were frowned on, whatever the weather, as were men with rolled-up shirtsleeves, or no tie. These were irksome restrictions, but Tina had spent seven years in the pea-green and dung-brown uniform of St Birinus, and the
Post
’s unofficial dress code was zany freedom in comparison.
Having stripped down to her underwear, she went over to the full-length mirror she had bought soon after starting at the
Post
, not for vanity, but as an act of professional self-protection. She used it to check for drooping hems, see-through shirts, fresh ladders and VPL – anything that might remind male colleagues to speculate about her body parts, or elicit a raised eyebrow from one of the artfully groomed lovelies on the fashion desk.
She turned sideways and examined her belly. A bit bloated, yes, but not too obvious. What would it be like to
do this – to check for evidence that you were beginning to soften and swell – if it was a transformation you actually wanted? What if you had a man beside you, who wanted it too, who might even be proud of you? How blessed you would feel! But no . . . she couldn’t afford to think like that; it was much too close to self-pity. She’d brought this on herself, and now she had to square up to it like a . . . well, like a woman.
She turned again, and looked at herself head-on. Was her face beginning to look fractionally fuller? She was almost spilling out of her bra, and her breasts looked eerily creamy, as if milk was already blooming beneath the skin . . .