Hester's Story (39 page)

‘You really didn’t have to come here for the birth,’ Hester told her, after she had been in Scotland for some days. She could see that Madame Olga was out of her element, uncomfortable. She visited them in the cottage every day, and returned to her hotel only to sleep. She didn’t like the dark afternoons, the weather had turned cold, and something between a fog and a shower of rain seemed always to be sweeping across the windows.

‘I will be here with you,’ Madame Olga said. ‘It is my duty and my pleasure. This child, she will be like my granddaughter.’ She refused to consider the possibility of a male child. She took a sip from her teacup and put it down on the table. Ruby was sitting in an armchair beside the fire, working on her tapestry and Madame Olga and Hester were facing one another at the table. Hester’s body was so awkward now that she found a straight-backed wooden chair the most comfortable place to sit. Madame Olga went on, ‘We will not talk about babies now. I will give you the gossip from the Charleroi. I was with Piers in London before I came here. He is making a ballet from
The Snow Queen
of Hans Andersen for this Christmas. Most beautiful. It is Emily Harkness who will dance Gerda, the main role. Do you remember her?’

Hester nodded. Emily came into the company three years after she did. She was a fair-haired, rather
austere girl when Hester knew her, silent and withdrawn, but undoubtedly talented. She listened to Madame Olga talking about her; about the others in the company; about the music and the kind of choreography that Piers was experimenting with and the words came to her as though from very far away. They meant nothing. Ballet. Hester felt as though it was a country from which she’d been exiled for so long that she’d completely forgotten what language they spoke there; what they did there; how they felt about everything. She had left that strange and beautiful place and because she couldn’t imagine how she’d ever get back to it, hearing Madame Olga speaking about it filled her with such sorrow that she couldn’t help crying. Madame Olga saw her wiping tears away with the back of her hand and rose to her feet at once.

‘Please, please, do not cry, my darling,’ she said, crouching down beside Hester and putting an arm around her. ‘Please stop crying now, please. I am stupid, stupid. I am making you sad with talk of the dance when I came just to make you happy. I will not speak about it any more.’

‘No, I
do
want to know. I want to hear all the news. I know it’s my fault mostly, but I feel so cut off from everything. From my life, from my friends, from you. I’m tired. Tired of being fat and ugly and not being able to move and I’m scared. I’m scared of the pain and I don’t know what’s going to happen to me and how I’ll ever get back to being
me
. Hester Fielding. I feel … I feel lost.’

Her quiet tears then turned into a storm of weeping. She couldn’t stop herself. Ruby stood up and went to make tea. Madame Olga took Hester upstairs. She led her gently by the hand, and washed her face before helping her to undress, folding every garment carefully
on to the chair before tucking her into bed as though she was a child.

‘You sleep now,’ she said. ‘The taxi will come soon and I will go to my room in the hotel. In the morning, I will come again. It is nearly Christmas. Such a happy time to be born! Same birthday as the baby Jesus, maybe, if you are lucky. We must find a good tree and dress it with beautiful things. I will buy everything. We will light candles and sing the songs of Christmas and Ruby will cook us such food – food like you have never eaten before. There will be gifts and the angels will come down to visit us, you see. Dream of good things.’

Hester closed her eyes and shivered. This was the longest night of the year and also the coldest. The small electric fire in the bedroom, with its two horizontal scarlet bars gave out more light than heat but, in any case, it was always off at night, because Ruby said it was dangerous to have it on while you were asleep. The sheets on her bed felt like slicks of ice against her skin. She lay there in the dark after Madame Olga had gone downstairs to wait for her taxi, and listened to her own teeth chattering. The narrow cupboard against the opposite wall was painted white and Hester knew that inside it, her suitcase was ready. Ruby had packed it the week before, putting in a nightdress and a sponge bag and a bed jacket she’d knitted herself.

She could hear Madame Olga’s taxi driving away and Ruby moving about, putting the kettle on to boil for the last cup of tea of the day. A comforting sound, Hester thought, and then she fell asleep.

She woke up suddenly with no idea of how long she had slept. She got out of bed to go to the lavatory and was suddenly seized with a pain in her head that was so dreadful that for a moment or two she thought she
was going blind. She stumbled to the bathroom and turned on the light, but it was too bright, much too bright, and as well as the terrible agony splitting her head, flashes of brilliance exploded in front of her eyes and she closed them to keep out the glare, but that didn’t seem to work. Here she was, ready to put up with the agonies of childbirth, and some malign fate had decided that this night, of all the nights of her life, was the time to show her what headaches really were. She started to cry, sitting on the edge of the bath.

Then she caught sight of her feet and didn’t recognise them. Her ankles were thick and swollen and all she could think was, how will I dance? How will these monstrous feet fit into my ballet slippers? She was crying so much that she could hardly breathe.

‘Ruby!’ she shouted.

Ruby came at once and put her arms around her. ‘There now, Hester,’ she said, calmly. ‘What’s the matter? Tell me what the matter is.’

‘I can’t see, Ruby. My head is bursting with pain and look at my legs, look how swollen my ankles are. And I keep seeing these bright lights in front of my eyes. Oh Ruby, I’m so frightened.’

‘I’ll speak to Dr Crawford immediately. You stay here for a moment. I’ll just get your dressing-gown. It’s freezing. I’ll be back at once.’

While she was gone, Hester stared down at her hands. She couldn’t move because every movement felt as though a knife was being driven into the space between her eyes. Her hands were disgusting. Every finger was like a sausage, thick and red and hideous. She extended her arm a little, trying to perform even a poor imitation of a movement she might have made onstage. She looked ridiculous. Someone’s hands, someone’s fat, old and ungraceful hands had been grafted on to Hester’s arms. Where was
she
in all of
this? She felt as though someone had stolen her away and left a snivelling, swollen wreck in her place; a wreck whose head felt as though it was about to burst open like a ripe pumpkin.

Ruby came hurrying back into the bathroom and draped a dressing-gown around Hester’s shoulders. ‘We have to be quick, Hester. The ambulance’ll be here soon. I’ll get your case. And you’d best put on this coat, it’s so cold. Dr Crawford says we have to get you into hospital at once.’

‘Why?’ A chill that had nothing to do with the weather had taken hold of her.

‘It sounded to him, he said, like possible eclampsia.’

‘Did you ask him what that was?’

Ruby shook her head. ‘No, there’s no time to lose. I didn’t want to waste whole minutes talking. You need to be in hospital. He said he’d ring Madame Olga’s hotel and arrange for her to meet us there. Are you nearly ready?’

*

The drive to the hospital was nothing but darkness and a kind of howling. Hester thought it was the wind but then wondered whether it could have been a siren. Or maybe even herself, making those ghastly sounds. Fuzzily, she thought, surely there’s no need for a siren on quiet country roads in the early hours of the morning, long before sunrise? She was almost fainting with pain and then there was Dr Crawford’s face, like a mask above her somewhere in a corridor.

She heard words … emergency … Caesarean … hurry … hurry. Was she lying down? On some kind of trolley? She didn’t know. What she knew was that the pain went on and on and the lights kept flashing until suddenly there was nothing but darkness like a black cloth coming down over her eyes and after that,
nothing. No pain, no feelings, no memories, no shame, no worries, no real world, only a deep well of unconsciousness into which she fell and in which she lay for hours.

Hester thought it was hours, but later she learned it was the best part of three days. Certain things came back to her in the way fragments of a bad dream return to your mind. You catch sight of them just as they slip away and vanish. If she thought hard, if she concentrated, she could remember seeing faces masked in white. There were a lot of green tiles, and then a baby’s face. She thought she could see her child’s tiny face, with the eyes closed but then wondered whether maybe she’d imagined it.

Hester lost that time. She lost the days that were the whole life of her child. She missed his entire existence. By the time she woke up, slowly, uncomfortably, like a creature coming up from the black mud of a swamp, Madame Olga was there beside her bed.

‘My darling girl,’ she said. ‘Such a terrible thing. Your poor little baby … he didn’t live. He was not strong. He has gone to God.’

Hester wanted to scream. Where is he? What happened? How long did he live? Where have they taken him? What do they do with such tiny corpses? I can’t do anything. Where are my tears?

She had no strength left. She felt the words without being able to say them. She was dimly aware of Madame Olga holding her hand, and Ruby standing at the end of the bed. Hester couldn’t even see as far as the walls of the room. It was as though she was in a glass box of misery, all by herself.

The explanations came later, from Dr Crawford. Madame Olga and Ruby were there when he came to see Hester, but he sent them away. She could see that
Madame Olga wasn’t very happy about this, but even she obeyed the doctor.

‘My poor dear girl,’ he said once she’d gone. He seemed genuinely distressed as he tried to make her understand what had happened.

‘There’s little we can do in eclampsia cases like yours, dear Hester. When you came in four days ago, you had a seizure. A fit, you might call it. We had to consider your baby as well as you, of course, but the best way to deal with the raised blood pressure is to remove its cause. Which is the baby itself, of course. So we rushed you in for an emergency Caesarean, and I’m afraid … well, the baby doesn’t always survive the operation. My dear, I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’

‘Why,’ she whispered because it was hard for her to speak ‘couldn’t I see my baby? Why couldn’t I hold him? Even dead, I would have wanted …’

‘I know, I know. But the best treatment for the mother is sedation. For rather a long time, until the blood pressure is normal again. I couldn’t risk losing you, too.’

I wish you had, Hester thought. I wish I’d died with my baby. Why did you let me live? To Dr Crawford she said, ‘Thank you. Thank you for explaining to me.’

‘There’s something else,’ he said. He took Hester’s hand, which was lying outside the blankets. ‘I’m so sorry, Hester. I’m very much afraid that you won’t be able to have more children. The operation …’ His voice tailed off. Hester managed to make a noise that sounded a little like a laugh. All she said was, ‘I don’t want any more children.’

This child. I wanted this child, she told herself, not any other.

Dr Crawford left Hester’s bedside in the end, and she began to grieve. She developed a high fever, which made her delirious. She saw visions of monsters and
dancers and hideous landscapes. She saw her grandmother wrapped in a shroud. She thought she was speaking, but Ruby told her later that she didn’t say a word for more than a week. When she came to herself, she was no longer in the hospital but in a nursing home called The Laurels, run by Mrs McGreevey. She had her own room, and there was nothing wrong with it, but she was desperate to leave Scotland and go home to Wychwood.

The Laurels was a pleasant building of ivy-covered red-brick. Her window looked down on an uninteresting garden dotted with shrubs and she found herself longing for the moors in Yorkshire. Beyond the garden was a street, where the other houses resembled the Laurels in almost every particular. The corridors inside smelled of furniture polish and Mrs McGreevey’s shoes made a squeaky sound on the greenish linoleum. There was a lounge for those patients who were well enough to get up from their beds, but Hester wasn’t one of them. She had caught a brief glimpse of it from the corridor and that was enough. The walls were hung with paper chains, and there were sprigs of holly stuck to the frames of every picture. Christmas. Hester had forgotten about it, and thinking of the merriment and warmth and good cheer associated with the season roused such an ache of sorrow in her that she vowed she would never, ever keep the festival again.

*

She couldn’t move. She was weak and sick and still feverish. Her breasts were like two open wounds somewhere near where her heart was supposed to be, and they burned and throbbed and sent waves of pain shooting through her body every time she moved. And her baby. Her baby was dead. Ruby sat beside her for
hours, stitching and stitching and answering Hester’s questions as best she could.

‘Tell me. I can’t remember anything. Tell me about the last few days. When did I come here? Why did they bring me here? Couldn’t I go home? To Wychwood? Or at least to our cottage?’

‘You’ve been very ill, Hester. You need time to recover. We’ll go back presently. For the last few days, you’ve just lain here tossing and turning. We’ve had a nurse day and night, to sponge your forehead and try and keep the fever down. You didn’t eat. Dr Crawford has been to see you every day. You were fed through a tube and Madame Olga and I took turns to be with you. We spoke to you, but you didn’t hear us.’

‘I think I did hear you. But I couldn’t answer. I was down, down at the bottom of something. A pit, a deep pit. Perhaps I was at the bottom of his grave. My son’s grave.’

Then the tears came. More than a week after the birth, she started to cry and couldn’t stop. Then Ruby told her that Madame Olga had decided that the funeral would take place next day.