Forget Me Not (10 page)

‘What is it now?’ I asked her as the armband deflated with a wheezy sigh.

‘Not so good,’ she replied. ‘It’s 150 over 120.’ She held up her hand. ‘Do you have any double vision, Anna?’

‘I’m not sure.’ I’d been crying and everything was blurred. ‘But my
head
,’ I whimpered. ‘It’s such … agony.’

‘Well, that’s going to get better very soon.’

‘How? Are you going to guillotine me?’

‘No.’ She gave me a lovely smile and pulled up a chair next to me. ‘We’re going to deliver the baby.’

I felt a wave of fear. ‘When?’

‘I’d say now’s as good a time as any.’

‘Oh,’ I said faintly. ‘I see.’

‘You have pre-eclampsia,’ she explained. I felt a flutter of panic. ‘And the cure for that is to give birth. But we need to get you gowned up in this fetching little green number ready for theatre, OK?’

I nodded bleakly. I had never felt more alone. Amity began to help me undress and as I was taking off my shirt I heard my phone ring. She passed me my bag and I fished out the mobile with my left hand.

‘Anna? Hi! I’m just ringing to ask how your exams went.’

‘Oh. Fine, thanks, Sue … I think. I can’t really remember to be honest … It’s all a blur you see, I …’ my voice trailed away.

‘Anna – are you feeling all right?’

‘Not really. In fact I’m at … birth’s door.’ I explained what was happening.

‘Have you got anyone with you?’

‘No.’ I felt my throat constrict. ‘I’m alone.’

‘Would you like me to come? I’ve had two kids after all – plus I feel partly responsible for your being pregnant in the first place – it’s the least I can do.’

I looked at the clock. It was a quarter past four. ‘Well … I’d love that,’ I replied. ‘Just to have a friend with me – but you’d never get here in time.’

I heard Sue’s footsteps tapping across a stone floor. ‘I’m not at home. I’m at Tate Britain …’ I heard her breathing speed up. ‘With my sister. But I’m going to leave … for the hospital right … now. Chelsea and Westminster, isn’t it? I’ll jump in … a cab. I’ll call you later, Lisa,’ I heard her add. ‘Anna’s having the baby.’ Then I heard her running down the steps. ‘Which ward … are you on?’ she asked, raising her voice above the roar of the traffic on the Embankment. ‘
TAXI!!!
Give me twenty minutes … tops. I’ll be there.’

The lights were so dazzling as I was wheeled into the theatre a short while later that I had to shield my eyes from the glare. As I sat on the operating table, the anaesthetist explained that he would give me an epidural, for which I had to sit stone still. As I watched him fill the syringe with the anaesthetic I suddenly heard Sue’s voice.

‘I’m here, Anna!’ I heard her call. ‘I’m just being gowned up but I’ll be with you in two seconds, OK?’ Then the door opened and there she was, in a green gown and hat and white overshoes. She stroked my shoulder. ‘You’re going to be fine. This is the happiest day of your life …’

I nodded, then a large tear plopped on to my lap, staining the pale green almost to black. In the background the doctor, in her surgical gown and mask, was conferring with the theatre nurses as they laid out the instruments.

Sue stroked my arm as the needle for the epidural was pushed into my lower spine.

‘Hold absolutely still,’ said the anaesthetist quietly. I focused on the large clock on the wall, watching the second hand click forward fifteen times. ‘Well done,’ I heard him say. ‘Now,’ he said after five minutes or so. ‘Let’s see if it’s working. Can you feel this cold spray?’ I saw him squirt something from a small aerosol on to my shins.

‘No,’ I replied ‘I can’t.’

‘What about this?’ He did the same to my thigh.

‘No.’

‘And this?’ He sprayed the top of my bump.

‘I might as well be a slab of sirloin.’

‘Then you’re ready to go. Let’s get you lying down.’

A nurse lifted my legs on to the bed, then a blue sheet was erected at mid level, shielding my lower half from view. Sue sat on a chair by my head while the scalpel went in. As she held my hand she told me all about the exhibition she’d just been to, as though she were having a nice cappuccino with me, rather than watching me being eviscerated.

‘Beautiful watercolours …’ I heard her say. ‘Still lifes and landscapes … and some gorgeous flower paintings …’ From time to time she’d glance nervously at the other side of the screen. ‘You’d have loved it, Anna.’

‘It’s going very well,’ the doctor said. ‘Now you’ll feel a little pressure …’

I felt an odd sensation as she rummaged around in my insides as though she were doing the washing up. ‘And a little more pressure …’ I was dimly aware of a pulling feeling. Then there was an odd, sucking sound, like a retreating wave. I looked up to see the screen being lowered, and now I saw the doctor’s gloved hands raise up this …
alien
creature, its body the colour of raw liver, its head coated in a bluish white, its arms outflung, its tiny fingers splayed, its filmy eyes squinting into the glaring lights.

‘There’s your baby,’ Sue said, her voice catching.

‘Yes,’ I heard the doctor say. ‘She’s here.’

‘A girl … ?’ I felt a twinge of relief.

‘A
gorgeous
girl,’ Sue said. ‘She’s
lovely
, Anna.’ She squeezed my hand.

I felt tears trickle down the sides of my face. The baby opened her mouth and emitted a piercing cry; then she was whisked to one side, where I saw her being wiped, then weighed, then gently laid in a resuscitator.

I glanced at the clock. The time was five past six. But what was the date? Of course. It was the eighth of June.

I’ve got the peculiar feeling that I was
meant
to meet you
.

It was the first anniversary of my mother’s death.

FOUR

I spent three nights in hospital, the first one in the High Dependency Unit, attached to a hydra of drips and trailing wires, while Milly lay beside me in her Perspex cot, in her white hat and vest, her tiny limbs waving like windswept flowers. Round her left wrist was a little band saying ‘Baby Temple’.

‘Amelia Lucy Mary Temple,’ I whispered to her as she lay in my arms. ‘Amelia and Lucy after my two grandmothers, Mary after my mum and Temple after my family. So you’re Miss Milly Temple.’ I kissed the top of her head. ‘Welcome to the world.’

The nights in hospital were hard, the crying of twenty or so newborns making sleep impossible. Some of the babies sounded like kittens; others – including Milly – squawked like peacocks; there was one baby who made a trumpeting sound, like a tiny elephant, while the baby in the next bay emitted a constant shivery bleat, like a chilled lamb.

During the day it was depressing watching the other mothers being visited by their husbands, having congratulatory kisses bestowed on them, then being taken home with the respect shown to triumphant Olympians. My dad collected me but it felt all wrong. Xan should be doing this, I thought, as we walked through the revolving door with Milly in her car seat.

I e-mailed Xan three photos of her. Her features were already so identifiably his, in feminine miniature, that I thought he’d melt, but he didn’t reply. But then, as if to compensate me for his coldness, a flood of gifts and flowers arrived from family and friends. Each day a beribboned parcel would turn up, containing a teddy or a toy, or a tiny pink dress.

But the best gift of all was from Dad. ‘I want you to have a maternity nurse,’ he’d said at the beginning of May. He’d been in London and had dropped in to see how I was.

‘What’s made you think of that?’ I asked as I glanced up from my drawing board.

‘Cassie suggested it – it seems that one of her knitting circle runs an agency that specialises in maternity nurses; I think it’s a good idea.’

‘It is. But at
£
700 a week I can’t afford it.’

‘I’ll pay.’

I put down my pen. ‘No, Dad, honestly, that’s too much – and I’m sure I’ll manage …’

‘But you’ll need someone to look after
you
. Please let me do this for you, Anna. It’s not a luxury in your case, it’s a necessity, because you have no partner to help you and no mother.’

‘No, but …’

‘And if she’d been here she’d have stayed with you and helped you and shown you what to do, wouldn’t she?’

‘Yes,’ I agreed sadly, ‘she would.’

‘So I’d like to give you the next best thing. A maternity nurse – for six weeks.’

‘But that would cost nearly four and a half grand.’

‘But think of how often I’ve helped Cassie. I’ve always indulged her,’ he added, looking out of the window. ‘It must have seemed unfair.’ He returned his gaze to me. ‘But now I’d like to do something for you. Let this be my baby present, Anna. It would make me very happy.’

‘Well … OK, then,’ I said quietly. ‘Thanks.’

And so the day after I came out of hospital, Elaine arrived.

I’d already met her, two weeks before, when she’d come for her interview. She was Australian, late fifties, slim and neat, with her ash-blonde hair swept into a bun, a pair of little tortoiseshell specs strung round her neck. She radiated the kind of calm that makes you instinctively lower your voice. Within ten minutes of meeting her I knew she’d be fine.

And she was. She was friendly without being familiar. She took charge without being abrupt, swiftly establishing a sleeping and feeding routine for Milly. She moved about the house as unobtrusively as a cat.

I stayed in bed for the first three days, recovering from the surgery. But as I became more mobile Elaine showed me how to use the steriliser, how to breastfeed more effectively, how to burp Milly and bathe her tiny body – a proposition which terrified me – how to swaddle her to make her feel secure. She revealed to me the Byzantine mysteries of the baby sling and showed me how to collapse the pram. She’d cook for us both and clear up; she’d make me rest; she’d go to the local food store while Milly slept.

‘How’s it going with the maternity nurse?’ Dad asked me over the phone a week after Elaine arrived.

‘Wonderful.’ I sighed. ‘She’s like the Angel Gabriel and Florence Nightingale rolled into one.’

As we became used to each other we talked. Elaine was from Melbourne, where she’d been a nurse. She’d been separated from her husband for just over a year.

‘Last April I found a note from Don on the kitchen table,’ she said quietly, as we sat under the parasol in my small courtyard garden one sunny morning in late June. Milly lay peacefully in her arms, swathed in a soft pink blanket, her eyes flickering with sleep. ‘The note said that he wouldn’t be back for dinner because he was leaving me for Julie – a close friend of mine.’ At least Xan had only abandoned me for a job, I reflected. It seemed less humiliating. ‘At first I didn’t believe it,’ Elaine said, ‘because by cruel coincidence it was April the first. Then I phoned him and realised it was true. I learned afterwards that they’d been having an affair for six months. I’d had no idea.’

‘How terrible.’

‘For two months I hardly ate or slept. I wouldn’t leave the house because I couldn’t face people. I’d adored Don – we’d been married thirty-one years. But then I suddenly woke up one day and said, “To hell with this misery.” I was fifty-six. I still had a lot of life left to live – God willing’ – she knocked on the table – ‘and I resolved to
live
it. My two boys were grown up so I arranged to come here.’

‘Did you know anyone?’

‘An old school friend who lives in Bath and my nephew, Jamie. He’s been here for three years.’

I glanced at the bees buzzing about in the lavender. ‘You were brave to come.’

‘Maybe – though you might say that I was running away. But I knew that only a complete change of environment would save me.’ She stroked Milly’s outstretched hand. ‘But maternity nursing suits me. I love tiny babies – I don’t mind the nights because I’m a light sleeper – and it means I get to travel and meet some wonderful people. I miss Don, of course, but at least the life I’ve made for myself now isn’t a bad one.’

‘You’re such a positive person,’ I said. ‘I should try to be more like you and stop feeling sorry for myself.’

‘So … what about your fella?’ she asked. All I’d told Elaine was that I wasn’t with Milly’s father. ‘Not that it’s any of my business,’ she added, ‘so excuse my Aussie directness and you don’t have to answer.’

I smiled. ‘I don’t mind. In fact, I’d like to tell you …’

‘How do you feel about him now?’ she asked quietly, when I’d finished.

‘Well … I feel sorry for him in many ways. The truth is he
hadn’t
known me that long. It’s also true that I could have taken more care not to get pregnant – I knew I was taking a huge risk that night. But something … strange had come over me and I just wasn’t … myself.’

‘Bereaved people never are,’ Elaine said.

‘So … I don’t blame Xan for feeling angry. But at the same time he’s thirty-seven, not twenty-two, and he’s far from poor, so I feel he could have been bigger and better about it all. Milly’s been in the world for three weeks now and he has yet to acknowledge her existence. It seems heartless,’ I added bleakly.

‘He’s probably terrified,’ Elaine said.

‘How could anyone be terrified of Milly?’ I murmured, stroking her head. It was as soft as swansdown.

‘He’s terrified of what it means. Because the minute he does acknowledge that she exists, he also has to acknowledge that he’s a father and that his long “boyhood” is over. Plus he wants to punish you.’

‘That’s certainly true. He said he’d never forgive me.’

‘But he won’t always feel as he feels now. Everything will change. Because it always does.’

It wasn’t that what Elaine said was ever startlingly original, but her insights were always comfortingly spot-on. And she had a gift for sympathy – an ability to relate in a thoughtful, imaginative way to other people’s feelings.

She worked six days a week and had Sundays off. On these she caught an early train to Bath to stay with her friend, returning twenty-four hours later. Dad spent the first two Sundays with me, then, on the third, Cassie visited me with a number of knitted garments. ‘Sorry they’re a bit wonky,’ she explained. There were visible mistakes on every one. ‘But because we all gossip so much at Stitch ’n’ Bitch – or Knit ’n’ Natter as I prefer to call it – I didn’t notice until it was too late and I hate undoing knitting.’