After the War is Over (18 page)

Two weeks before this plan was to be put into operation, Tom came down on one of his regular Sunday visits and proposed they all go for a drive. ‘It’s a lovely day. We can have lunch somewhere. You two must be fed up stuck in Caerdovey all this time. It’s so dead here.’

Nell refused. She felt just a little bit sick, though she didn’t tell Tom that; until now, the pregnancy had been trouble-free. Nor did she say that she quite fancied being alone for a few hours and not subjected to endless questions about her health.

Tom and Iris went off. He was right; it was a beautiful, sunny day, the sky almost cloudless. Nell strolled as far as the sands. She was feeling bulky by now, very conscious of the huge stomach that preceded her everywhere she went, as well as her enlarged breasts. She stood and studied the crystal-clear water cluttered at its edge with clumps of seaweed and little smooth stones. One stone was as big as a bird’s egg and a remarkable blue colour. She bent to pick it up, her hand breaking through the surface of the water, when she felt a searing pain in her gut. She jerked upwards, much too quickly, as she immediately felt dizzy. She swayed and nearly fell.

Please, dear Jesus, help me, she prayed. But there wasn’t a soul in sight to help. She eased herself down until she was actually sitting in a few inches of water, and wondered if it would be of any use to call for help. She was, very slowly, beginning to panic as the pain got worse.

Then she heard a shout, a series of shouts. She couldn’t make them out at first, but the voice became clearer as it got louder. ‘Mrs Desmond, Nell, I’m coming. I saw you from me window, luvvie.’

Nerys Jones was running towards her, waving her arms. ‘I’m coming. Don’t be frightened.’

‘I think it might be the baby,’ Nell cried. It was the only thing that could have been responsible for such a terrible pain, and the ones that had followed shortly afterwards.

‘Well, I’ve delivered more babies than you’ve had hot dinners, so you’ll be all right with me.’

Nerys was hardly out of breath. With the woman’s strong arms supporting her, Nell was led slowly back to the house and upstairs to the bedroom, where she fell thankfully on to the bed.

‘I’ll go next-door-but-two in a tick and tell Mrs Evans to start boiling water,’ Nerys said, rolling up her sleeves before removing Nell’s wet clothes. ‘You lie back and take things easy. I’ll be as quick as I can. I’ve been delivering babies in Caerdovey for the last thirty years, so you’ve got nothing to worry about.’

Nell did her best to relax. She was breathing slowly in and slowly out when Nerys returned with a pile of towels and the woman from next-door-but-two, who was called Pauline. She had long untidy grey hair like a witch. ‘Let’s put a couple of these underneath you, luvvie,’ Nerys said.

Before Nell could comply, another pain, as sharp as a knife, sliced through her stomach and she screamed.

From that moment on, everything became a blur of pain and screams and struggle. Someone behind the bed held her hands against the headboard. She heard a man’s voice. A woman shouted, ‘Push.’ Her body felt as if it was falling apart. There was a delighted cry, ‘Here it comes!’ then, ‘It’s a boy!’

‘Lord almighty, Nerys, he’s a giant. No wonder he came early. Another two weeks and he’d’ve killed the poor girl. What’s she going to call him?’

‘I don’t know, Pauline.’

The baby began to cry, great howls of misery and despair.

Nell’s face was stroked, her chin chucked. Very slowly, she opened her eyes. The witch-like Pauline was bending over her, and Nerys Jones was standing behind her nursing a baby wrapped in an old, frayed towel.

‘This is your son, luvvie. Would you like to hold him?’

‘Please,’ Nell whispered. The plan agreed with Iris and Tom was that she wouldn’t touch her baby. It would go straight to Iris, so Nell didn’t have the chance to get attached to it – to him; ‘bond’ was the word Tom had used. But how could she refuse? In Tom’s plan, Nerys wouldn’t have been present, and would have been kept at bay for the next few days.

Her baby was laid in her arms. Oh my God, he
was
big! Big and tough and strong. But he was still only a tiny human being. He moved his arms and his elbow dug into her breast. Nell touched his nose with her finger and he gave a desperate sigh and stopped crying.

‘Aaah!’ Nerys and Pauline said delightedly together. ‘What are you going to call him?’ Nerys asked.

‘William.’ It came from nowhere, but it was a name she had always liked, a warm name with soft letters. ‘Hello, William.’ She laid her finger in his palm and he wrapped his own little fat ones around it.

‘In a minute,’ Nerys said, ‘I’ll give him a wash, and Pauline’ll clean you up a bit, then you can give William his first feed. Well, won’t this be a surprise for Mr and Mrs Grant when they get back,’ she cried jubilantly.

‘Sorry we took so long,’ Iris shouted as she ran upstairs. ‘You’ll never believe, but we had a puncture and Tom had simply no idea how to fix it. Fortunately, we were quite close to a garage. Are you having a little lie—’ She burst into the room where William was fast asleep against Nell’s naked breast and Nerys was sitting at the foot of the bed, watching. ‘Oh my God!’ Iris cried. Her face went as white as a sheet.

‘What’s the matter?’ Tom shouted. He followed his wife upstairs and into Nell’s bedroom. ‘It came early,’ he said in a dull voice. ‘We shouldn’t have gone out.’

‘It’s a boy!’ Nerys said joyfully. ‘William. He suits William. I reckon he weighs a good nine and a half pounds, possibly ten. He’s a beautiful baby.’

‘So I see,’ Iris said faintly. ‘May I hold him?’

‘Why not wait until he wakes up? He had quite a struggle getting out. Best not disturb him.’ Nerys yawned. ‘Seeing as how you’re both home, I’ll get back and make our Idris his tea. By the way, he had to give a hand holding this young lady against the headboard while she was giving birth, like. It wasn’t easy, was it, luvvie?’ She patted Nell’s hand and left the room.

‘It was worse than I ever thought it’d be,’ Nell said when Nerys had gone.

‘Was it, darling?’ Iris fell to her knees beside the bed and put her arms around both Nell and William. She was crying. ‘How do you feel now?’

‘Tired,’ Nell sighed.

‘Shall I take William?’

‘Not just yet.’

‘Let Iris have the baby now, Nell, if you don’t mind,’ Tom said in a hard voice.

‘Don’t take any notice of him, darling.’ Iris looked at her husband with burning eyes. ‘Go downstairs, Tom, and do something useful. And don’t dare come back unless I ask you to.’ Tom left the room without a word. ‘Would you like me to fetch the cradle, Nell, and put it beside your bed?’ It was a wicker basket on springs suspended from a metal base, easier to transport in the car than a wooden cot.

Nell smiled. ‘In a minute,’ she said. ‘I’d like to hold William for a bit longer.’

Three hours later, with the sun beginning to sink low in the sky, Iris and Tom left the cottage in Caerdovey. Iris resolved she would never go there again. She had baby William in her arms. He wore one of the embroidered gowns and a soft white shawl knitted by Tom’s mother. The shawl kept the baby warm and absorbed the tears that Iris couldn’t stop shedding.

‘Will you for Christ’s sake stop crying,’ Tom snapped. He’d become a completely different person since they’d returned from the drive. ‘You’ve got the baby you wanted; why can’t you be pleased about it?’

‘What do you mean, the baby
I
wanted?’ Iris said tearfully. ‘Are you saying now that you didn’t want him too?’

‘Of course I wanted him.’ Tom shook his head angrily. ‘But I don’t see the need for a scene.’

‘I’m crying for Nell. We’ve stolen her baby from her, Tom, while she was asleep. How will she feel when she wakes up?’

‘It’s
our
baby, damn you.’ Tom sounded as if he could easily cry himself. ‘It’s always been our baby. It’s never been Nell’s; she knows that full well. And I wanted him more than anything I’ve ever wanted before, mainly for you, Iris. When Nell wakes up and finds him gone, she won’t feel anything.’

‘What a stupid, insensitive man you are.’ They’d never had a row like this before. She felt almost numb with rage. ‘You were stupid for suggesting we go out for a meal, knowing that the baby might arrive while we were gone. And insensitive for talking about Nell as if she was an animal, a cat or something that’s just had her kittens taken away from her and will have got used to it by now.’

Tom turned a corner dangerously fast. Iris clasped the baby closer to her chest. He made a little snuffling sound. She looked closely at his face to see if there was anything familiar about it; the shape of his lips, his nose, his ears, anything to indicate who his father might be. She still suspected it was Frank who’d taken advantage of Nell, barely conscious in bed. Right now, because he was being so unpleasant, she wondered, not for the first time, if Tom was the father, though it was a really outrageous thought. Normally Tom was the nicest of men. It could have been any man at the party. It was something she might never know.

Tom said, ‘Nell showed no sign that the baby would arrive today. And babies don’t usually come so quickly. What happened was totally unexpected. Anyway, if you had any concerns about it, all you had to do was refuse to leave Nell on her own.’ There was a long silence before he reached out and squeezed his wife’s knee. ‘I’m sorry, darling. I’m being a pig. I’m angry with myself more than anyone. It’s just that I find all this terribly upsetting, and I know you must do too. I’d expected everything to go quite smoothly. I’d never imagined for a minute it happening the way it did.’

‘I’m sorry too.’ Iris hadn’t the energy to argue any more. She didn’t say that the person who would find it the most upsetting of all would be Nell. She wondered if that somewhere in the further recesses of the baby’s mind Nell’s face had been stored, and one day the memory would return and he would realise that another woman, not Iris, was his mother.

Nell knew, before she opened her eyes, that William had gone. When she did open them, she saw the cradle was no longer in the room and the house was completely silent. Next door, Nerys was singing a wartime song she couldn’t remember the name of.

She sat up in bed and put her hands over her breasts; the nipples felt hard and pointed. Her son had sucked on them only a few hours ago. She would never forget the feeling, a delicious sort of churning in her stomach. But he was no longer her son; William had a different mother now.

In a way, she was almost glad he’d been taken while she was asleep. To see him go, carried away in another woman’s arms, would have broken her heart. And there was always a chance, just a chance, that she might have refused to give him up, and there would have been ructions. Yes, she was glad things had gone the way they had.

Yet she felt hurt, deeply hurt, that Iris and Tom had left without a word, taking with them the most precious thing she had ever owned. Iris had said right from the start that it was important that she didn’t bond with the baby, not hold him, not even touch him. Over the few days they’d been planning to stay in the cottage after the birth, it would be best for her not to go near her baby.

Such wise advice; Nell had been all prepared to go along with it. She couldn’t see any reason not to co-operate fully. But now she had touched her baby, held him, fed him and nursed him, having been given no other choice. He had held her finger in his little hand and she had felt the love flow between them.

Any minute, Nerys would come in and expect to see him. How on earth was Nell supposed to explain why he’d been taken away from her, his mother? She felt upset again that Iris and Tom had left her having to make up lies to satisfy Nerys’s understandable curiosity, answer her shocked questions.

She got out of bed and tested her ability to stand, walk a few steps. Her breasts were hurting and she could feel blood running down her legs. There was nothing she could do about the first, but there were a few old but clean towels thrown on the chair that she could use to deal with the second. She found she was able to walk quite steadily – after all, she was young, and had always been fit. According to the bedside clock, it was only twenty to five – she’d thought it much later. She found a note by the clock in Tom’s handwriting saying he would arrange for her to be taken back to Liverpool early on Wednesday.

It took less than half an hour to get washed, dressed and pack some of her things in the shabby cardboard suitcase she’d used when she was in the army, leaving behind the maternity clothes. Iris had left a lot of her things too. She tiptoed quietly around the house so Nerys wouldn’t hear, and crept out of the back door. There was a road behind the cottages that led to the village centre, where she hoped it would be possible to catch a bus.

She hadn’t been walking long when she heard the sound of a car, and a male voice singing ‘Ol’ Man River’. Seconds later, the car drew up beside her.

The singer, a man with a huge black beard and laughing eyes, rolled down the window. ‘Want a lift somewhere, pet?’ he asked in a strong Yorkshire accent.

‘The nearest bus stop, please.’

‘Get in then, pet. It’s only half a mile away. Give us your suitcase and I’ll put it in the back.

‘And where is it you’re heading on the bus?’ he enquired when he set off again, Nell in the passenger seat. She felt grateful to be off her feet, already feeling worn out after walking merely a fraction of a mile.

‘Liverpool,’ she replied. ‘I mean, I know a bus from Caerdovey won’t get me as far as Liverpool, but I thought it’d take me to a place where I could catch one.’

‘Not at this time on a Sunday afternoon, pet, but I can take you to a place where a bus leaves for Liverpool in another two hours, at eight o’clock. In fact it’s where I’m heading right now. I’m night manager at Butlins holiday camp in Pwllheli, about twenty miles away. Being so early in the season, we have guests who come just for the weekend, and an awful lot of them are from Liverpool.’

Nell told him it was the closest to a miracle that she had ever come and she would be eternally grateful. He told her his name was George Hurley and that he would eventually live in the camp when it got busier, but for now he was staying with an old army mate who’d lost a leg during the D-Day landings.