Sheltering Rain (50 page)

“It's all right, darling. Honestly. Looks worse than it is. Why don't you go outside and wait for the ambulance to come?”

“I'll do that,” interjected Anthony Fleming, who was already making for the door. “I'll wait for the ambulance. I'll wait outside.”

Kate cast an irritated glance at his departing back. She kept looking at her watch, marking the distance between Annie's anguished noises.

“Okay. Okay . . .
erm
, Sabine—go and find me some towels, okay? And some scissors. And if you can, boil me a kettle and sterilize the scissors in some hot water. All right?”

“You're not going to cut her open, are you?” Sabine, still frozen at the kitchen door, felt her chest compress with fear. She didn't think she could cope with the sight of any more blood.

“No, darling. It's for the cord. Just in case the baby comes before the ambulance does. Go on, we don't have an awful lot of time.”

She turned back to Annie, stroking her hair, murmuring words of encouragement, heedless of the fact that she herself was now covered in the bloodied liquid, from where she had been supporting Annie on the floor.

“I need to push,” said Annie, her hair stuck in sweaty tendrils around her face. These were the first words Sabine had heard her say. “Oh, God, I need to push.”

“Sabine. Go
now
.”

Sabine turned to run from the room, unsure where she was going to find any scissors—Annie's house didn't look like anything would be where you would expect it, anymore—and bumped into Joy, who was holding a bundle of towels.

“The ambulance should be here any minute,” Joy said. “Thom's trying to get ahold of Mrs. H. Where are they?”

“Have you gotten scissors?”

“Yes, yes. . . .” Joy was following the long lowing sound, which, this time, raised up into something unearthly, nearer a scream. “We've got everything. In the kitchen, are they?”

The noise, when it came again, was too horrible. It made Sabine chill, like the sounds of the hounds howling in the night. It sounded like Annie was going to die.

Her face crumpled.

Joy turned to face her, her own expression suddenly softening, as she caught sight of her granddaughter's fear and reached out a hand to comfort her.

“It's all right, Sabine. Really. Birth is just a bit of a brutal business.”

“Is she going to die? I don't want Annie to die.”

Joy smiled and squeezed her, before turning toward the kitchen. “Of course she won't die. A minute after that baby is born, she won't remember a thing about it.”

Sabine watched from behind the door as Joy moved past her and crouched down next to her mother, handing over the towels, and helping arrange Annie's limbs on the floor, stroking her legs and murmuring something cheerful as she did so. Kate said something about “transition” and she and Joy looked at each other briefly, and their faces had an expression of not just mutual understanding and concern, but a faint hint of impending joy, as if they both knew something that they couldn't yet acknowledge. Sabine, watching it, found herself suddenly tearful again, but not because she felt excluded. She felt comforted.

“Okay, Annie,” said Kate, who was now at Annie's feet. “You get ready to push. You say when you feel the next one coming.”

Annie paused, stared wide-eyed at her feet, and then, with her chin to her chest, let out a lengthy roar, at first through clenched teeth, and then through a mouth so wide open that Sabine, peeping round the door frame, found her own mouth unconsciously mimicking its action.

Joy was wincing as she tried to hold Annie's upper half, her face flushed with effort. Kate pushed Annie's knees up, and wiped her face with a cold flannel. She was half crying now.

“You're nearly there, Annie. I can see the head. You're really nearly there.”

Annie's eyes opened, briefly, to look at Kate. They were exhausted, bewildered.

“Deep breaths, Annie. Just keep your chin down, and it will soon be over.”

“Where's Patrick?” said Annie, blearily.

Kate glanced at her mother.

“Patrick is coming,” said Joy firmly, her own face pressed up next to Annie's, her arms supporting her under her shoulders. “Patrick is coming, and your parents are coming, and the ambulance is coming. So you're not to worry. You just concentrate on that lovely baby.”

“I want Patrick,” said Annie, beginning to cry. And then her tears became strangled, as another contraction gripped her body, and her sob turned into another huge roar. And she gripped at Joy's arms so fiercely that Sabine could see her grandmother grimacing, and Kate was still down in front of her, her hands pushing Annie's ankles, so that her knees were up, her voice offering words of encouragement.

“It's coming, Annie. Go on, push now. It's really coming. I can see the head.” Her mother's voice was now shrill with excitement, her face lifting to Annie's with a broad smile.

Annie fell back against Joy, exhausted.

“I can't do it,” she said.

“You can, you're nearly there,” said the two women in unison.

“Just pant, Annie,” said Kate. “Keep panting for a minute.” She looked at her mother, adding quietly, “That's right, isn't it Mum?”

Joy shrugged imperceptibly and nodded. They half smiled at each other again.

“Okay, now one more push,” she said. Sabine couldn't see past the counter to see what Kate was doing. She was secretly grateful. And then Annie began to yell, a long, wavering, strangulated note, and Kate began to yell, and Joy, who was still wincing because of the hold Annie had on her arms began to yell, and Sabine found she was crying now, without realizing it, because just when she thought she couldn't bear it, suddenly there was a brief, wet slithering and a shout of blood and joy and her mother was holding this thing, this thing with its two purple arms thrust high in the air, like a football fan, and Joy was kissing Annie, and laughing, and Kate was wrapping it tenderly in a towel and placing it on Annie's chest, and the three of them had their arms around each other, and through it all Sabine kept watching Annie's face, with its raw expression of joy and pain and relief, oblivious to the blood and gore, oblivious to the noise, oblivious to Anthony Fleming, who was standing at the door
ah-hemming
into his hand and asking everybody to excuse him but the ambulance was here.

And then her mother, as if suddenly remembering her, looked up and reached out to her, and Sabine walked over and kneeled down with them and gazed at this thing, which was covered in blood and wrapped up in a beach towel, smelling of sweat and iron. And as she looked down she couldn't see the pools of blood, the sodden towels, the knickers, the mess it had made of her own trousers. She just saw two tiny milky-dark eyes, gazing steadily back at her in that ancient way that suggested knowledge of all the secrets of the world. A tiny, downy mouth shaped small, silent words, telling her everything she had never known about what life meant. She realized with a brief burst of clarity that she had never seen anything more beautiful in her whole life.

“A little girl,” said Kate, her eyes wet with tears, squeezing her daughter's shoulders.

“She's so perfect,” Sabine said, reaching out a tentative hand.

“My baby,” said Annie, gazing at her disbelieving. “My baby.” And then suddenly, without warning, she began to sob, great, wrenching sobs that ravaged her whole body, shaking her head forward, pummeling her under the weight of their withheld grief that went on and on and on, so that Kate had had to briefly take the baby back, to protect her from Annie's anguish. And Joy had leaned forward, clutching Annie's head, crying: “I know, I know,” and then, as Annie's tears eventually began to subside, had told her, so quietly that Sabine could only just make it out above the exclamations of the people coming in. “It's all right, now, Annie. It's all right. It's all over.”

And then Kate, her own hands shaking, had helped pull Sabine up from the floor, and with their arms tightly around each other, they had both walked silent and blinking out into the night, where the ambulance men, under the spinning siren of blue light, officious in their neon uniforms and monitored by hissing radios, had started to unload the stretcher.

T
here were very few real surprises left in life, said Mrs. H, but the birth of her grandchild had been one, for sure. She said this many times, to many people, but it didn't stop her eyes filling with grateful tears every time she said it, and the fact that she often said it to the same people was not minded by anyone who knew her. Little Roisin Connolly was good news, and news that good could happily bear the burden of repetition.

Patrick had returned to Annie the night of the birth, deeply shocked but overjoyed at the arrival of the new baby, overwhelmed with relief at finally having an explanation of his wife's increasingly strange behavior over the past months. Annie, who had never come to terms with her daughter's death, had become temporarily unbalanced by the shock of her new pregnancy, the doctors said, and had coped only by ignoring it, and distancing herself from those around her. It was not an uncommon response, apparently. Despite this, Mrs. H had seemed rather embarrassed not to have realized that her own daughter had been pregnant, and had blamed herself for the trauma of Roisin's birth, but Mack and Thom and everyone else told her not to be so daft—and Annie herself later pointed out that if she had been able to keep it from her own husband, what little chance did her mother have of guessing? Mrs. H was vaguely appeased, but could often be seen studying the waistlines of various local women, keen to be the first to guess any future pregnancies, and several times causing mild offense by asking.

Annie had spent several weeks in hospital—to keep Roisin company, as she had arrived a little over a month prematurely and had to spend some time in an incubator, but also to give Annie time to adapt to her renewed role of motherhood under the watchful eye of the health authorities. She had, after an initial period of delayed grieving for Niamh (the two babies, it was agreed, were heartbreakingly similar in appearance) recovered astonishingly quickly, suffering none of the postnatal depression that the doctors had warned could be a feature in a case like this. And she got her counseling, although Mrs. H said to see her with her little baby, and her husband's arm around her, was all the counseling anyone needed. Annie even talked about Niamh now, pointing out how similar Roisin was in feeding, or winding habits, and how dissimilar in the shape of her tiny seashell fingernails, or the color of her hair, and sometimes she even told off visiting relatives for crying when she did so, saying that while she wanted to remember that she had had two daughters, “she wouldn't have Roisin growing up in Niamh's shadow.”

Sabine visited her several times, holding the tiny child carefully in her arms, marveling at how quickly she had lost her squashed and bloodied appearance and become something alert and pink and sweet-smelling. She didn't want to have her own baby, though, she told Annie. Not until they could make boys have them. Annie (who, as Joy predicted, seemed astonishingly to have forgotten all the pain and blood) had laughed at that. She laughed quite often these days; her eyes glinting with mischief when she teased Sabine about Bobby McAndrew, and with delight when her little daughter did something apparently remarkable, like wave a starfish hand in the air, or sneeze. Sabine secretly thought Roisin was still a bit of a blob. But she didn't say anything. Annie had asked her to be a godmother, and even she knew that wasn't a particularly godmotherish thing to say.

Patrick, who was almost always at the hospital “making a nuisance of himself,” the smiling nurses said, just sat and gazed at his daughter, his big, dark face radiating a soft beam of satisfaction, his hands no longer anxiously reaching to stroke or comfort his wife, but most often comfortably entwined in hers. He hadn't done any work for weeks, said Mrs. H, but then you couldn't have everything.

He had wept tears of gratitude at Sabine, Joy, and Kate when he had finally arrived at the house, holding on to them, and shaking his head disbelievingly, so that Sabine had been a little embarrassed for him, but Kate had hugged him, herself tearful, and kept saying that she was “so, so happy,” as if it had been she who had given birth. A child, Joy had told Sabine, still a little emotional herself, was the greatest gift anyone could possibly have. One day she would understand. Sabine thought privately that she probably did understand. She had never witnessed anything like Annie's expression when she had first laid eyes on her new daughter—that explosive mixture of joy and pain and relief. Thinking about it now made her want to get emotional, not that she ever let anyone know. There was quite enough sentimental stuff going on these days as it was.

T
hom never told Kate about Sabine's failed attempt to seduce him. Or perhaps he did, and her mother had decided not to say anything to her about it. Either way, Sabine was grateful, and a little wrong-footed by not knowing who it was she should be feeling grateful toward.

She had first seen him again on the night of Roisin's birth; he had come running down the road shortly after Sabine and Kate had emerged from the house and were standing by the ambulance, not really knowing what they should do next. He had skidded to a halt in front of them, his eyes darting from one to the other, a hand on each. “Is everything okay?” he had said, looking terribly serious. “Is Annie okay? Are you okay?” He had looked very hard at Sabine when he said the last bit, and she had nodded, too full of the drama of the baby's arrival to still feel humiliated. It had all suddenly seemed such a long time ago, an almost dreamlike scenario, as if it had happened to someone else. She had waited, suddenly tense, for him to kiss her mother, or wrap his arms around her or something, but he hadn't. They had just sort of looked at each other, and then Kate had told him quietly to go on inside, to go and see Annie. And after he had gone in she had paused, and then steered Sabine toward home, saying: “I don't know about you, sweetheart. But I could certainly do with a drink.”