Born of Woman (63 page)

The red-haired woman who had driven them from Harrods had departed long since. It had been a nightmare journey. The first hospital they tried turned out to have no Casualty Department. They were directed to another one, just half a mile away, but a set of broken traffic-lights had jammed up the main road. Susie's screams competed with the honking of impatient horns. In the end, they did a U-turn and sped across the river to Susie's own hospital where she was booked to have the baby. At least it had a Casualty and Jennifer knew the way.

She eased her aching bottom on the uncomfortable wooden bench, inched away from the Millwall supporter's bulk. It was another world from Harrods' velvet chairs and whipped cream opulence. They should never have gone to Harrods in the first place. Susie had been pushed and shoved by crowds of Christmas shoppers, then sat and stuffed herself with an absurdly lavish tea. If anything happened,
she
would be to blame. She had become too lax with Susie, let her live her lazy, feckless way, even begun to follow it herself. She had even allowed Susie to miss her last appointment at the hospital. She hated the check-ups as much as Susie did—the hours and hours of waiting in a stifling basement room, the endless repeated questioning and form-filling, and—at last—the few rushed minutes with a doctor, a different one each time.

But now fate had paid them back, stranded them in the hospital for an even longer time and in far less happy circumstances than their normal routine check-up. At least the antenatal clinic had decent wallpaper—even a few pictures—a scrap of carpet, proper vinyI chairs, whereas here in Casualty, it was public lavatory walls, spartan wooden benches, windows with no curtains to conceal the bleak dark night outside. Antenatal promised new life, new hope; Casualty threatened pain and death. A sick old man with sores was slumped on the bench like a dirty sack, mumbling to himself; a small jaundiced infant whimpered in its mother's arms. At least it had its parents. Susie's baby had nothing—no home, no father, no heritage, no name.
She
was the baby's father. The special bond between them had grown stronger every week. Susie had conceived the child at almost the same date she had conceived her own, just a year before, so the baby was a successor and a substitute.

She jumped to her feet. She had to be with Susie, know what was happening to her, make sure the doctors understood how precious her child was. She strode towards the emergency room. The doors were creaking open, a body on a stretcher-bed being wheeled and jolted through them, trundled along the corridor past the sign which said HOSPITAL WARDS—ADMISSION. Jennifer was shoved aside, pushed into a corner. She glimpsed only a white blanket swaddling the body like a gigantic bandage, long blonde hair tousled on the pillow.

‘Susie!' she whispered. She tried to shout, stop the trolley, but fear made her voice as limp and pale as gauze. She rushed up to a nurse, begged her help.

‘Sorry, my dear, I know nothing at all about it. I've only just come on. We've had a call from Ambulance Control—an emergency admission. Wait a moment, please, and I'll try and get somebody to help you. It's chaos at the moment.'

Gone. A tannoy message was booming over the loudspeaker, doctors dashing in from other departments. The stretcher-bed had already disappeared. Jennifer tried to fight her way along the passage in the direction it had gone. Where were they taking Susie? Why had she lain so still against the pillow? Susie was never still. All the way in the car from Harrods to the hospital, she had been swearing and moaning, throwing herself about.

Perhaps there wasn't any baby. Just a bloody mess in a slop-bowl like her own unhappy foetus. No—Susie's baby was thirty-three weeks old. A child could live at less than that. It weighed three or four pounds by now, was sixteen inches long. She knew all the facts and figures, had pored over the baby books and handouts which Susie hardly glanced at. There would be hair on its scalp, tiny nails which didn't reach the fingertips, eyelashes and eyebrows.

A group of hospital porters was blocking her way, sweeping her back towards the double doors. The ambulance had just arrived. An overdressed woman in a crêpe de Chine two-piece stumbled out of it, tucking her ranch-mink coat round a small, fair child slumped half-unconscious in a wheelchair. His face was ashen-pale beside her own perfect mask of blusher, shiner, eye-gloss. Only her voice had cracked.

‘My s … son. Swallowed my sl … sleeping pills. Found him on the floor. I thought I'd locked them up, but …'

The doors slammed shut behind her. Another child in danger. Once you had borne a child, you could never take life casually again. All the hazards were shouting from the walls: GERMS CAN KILL, FIRE COSTS LIVES, YOUR HOME CAN BE A DEATH-TRAP! No wonder Susie wanted the baby adopted. Nine months was worry enough, without the years and years which followed. The cord was never totally cut. Yet she herself craved the risks and troubles of that tie. She would gladly change places with Susie now, be fighting and suffering for a baby, joined and fused and one with it, rather than separate, unattached.

She marched up to the desk. The queue of new patients was even longer now. A punk boy with a cropped head and an earring was nursing a tattooed arm which had swollen and infected. Pus seeped between the scarlet hearts and flowers. His girlfriend was dragging on a joint, ignoring the ‘No Smoking' sign. The receptionist, besieged by forms and phones, shouted above the screeching of a toddler.

Jennifer trailed back to the bench. She couldn't waste the nurses' time by demanding special treatment, when six-year-olds had swallowed sleeping pills. She picked up a tabloid newspaper which had been discarded on the bench. She must distract herself, clamp down any panic. There was blood on the pages, like a real-life illustration to all the horror stories it contained—cars wrecked in smash-ups, girls raped in alleyways, Catholic bombing Orangeman, Arab fighting Jew. On an inside page, was a small excited paragraph on the Edward Ainsley affair. She flushed as she read the details. The entire Casualty Department seemed to be reading over her shoulder, pointing fingers at her. And yet, in reality, nobody had spared her so much as a glance. All were too intent on their private pain and problems. Anyway, even in a decent dress and make-up, no one would now connect her with the Mrs Jennifer Winter-ton of just six months ago. Fame had broken like a wave, flung her ten feet high, then crashed her down again, leaving a dirty tide-mark of flotsam round her life.

And yet the book itself was still Big News, Edward still floundering in a flurry of speculation and froth of adjectives. She glanced at his photograph—that portly, balding figure who was Lyn's own half-brother, yet, eyes apart, looked so little like him. Secretly, she longed to meet him, had even considered writing to him, trying to heal the breach. Yet she feared him, also—feared that injured pride and outraged sense of justice. He would see her as an adversary—someone who had stifled him as an infant, to cheat him of his rights, then sold his mother's secrets to the world, vulgarised and cheapened Hester, betrayed her love of privacy. Matthew, too, would use the word betrayal if she tried to contact Edward. The two were duellists. Yet, both men had been crippled from the start. Both had lost a mother, one by desertion, one by death; both grown up suspicious and reserved. Susie's offspring mustn't turn out like that, but be cherished and protected. Jennifer's hands were trembling on the newspaper. She tried to read the paragraph, couldn't concentrate. Susie herself kept tangling in the print, her pale scared face superimposed on Edward's scowling one.

Jennifer's head was throbbing, her bottom sore and aching from the bench. The room had been designed to add every additional discomfort to the patient' s pain—rigid wooden seating, glaring lights, stifling foetid air. The whole room reeked of Dettol, mingled with the still insistent smell of vomit where one of the Milwall crowd had thrown up his supper and his last six beers. There were no spare seats left now, and people were standing, or leaning against the walls. Some of the patients were simply skint or homeless, and had shambled into Casualty for free heat and light or company, the mother of the overdose whimpering there beside them.

‘My baby's dying—dying.'

Jennifer longed to help her, restore her son to her. Yet what could she do or say? Every patient was alone with his own grief, locked into it as if it were a soundless, airless glass cage where you could see other people, but nobody could hear you or stretch out a helping hand.

She groped to her feet, stumbled to the door, slipped across the foyer to the shabby street outside. She needed a breath of air, a moment's respite. The cold black night was like a compress on her face after the sweltering glare inside. She stared up at the sky. The moon was waning, its thin-lipped smile turned towards the west. A waning moon was unlucky—Hester had written that so many times—unlucky to sow crops, then, unlucky to marry, unlucky to be born. She shivered suddenly. Supposing Susie's baby was …

Ridiculous! How could she stand in the shadow of a modern hospital with its panoply of drugs and doctors, its high-powered science and wonder-brained machines, and hark back to superstition? Yet other cultures had. Ancient peoples, wise and civilised, had still prayed to the moon, looked to it for portents. Anyway, science hadn't put an end to suffering. Casualty was proof of that.

A driver hooted and slowed down, trying to chat her up, a motorcycle roared by on the other side, a tom-cat screeched and lusted in an alley. She hardly heard them. She was still numbed by the vastness and the grandeur of the sky, even in this-squalid part of London. She could feel again that strange, brooding presence, as if Hester were alive and watching her, reliving her own child's birth in Susie's crisis.

She turned back to the hospital, felt the fug engulf her as she pushed open the door. Fear screamed back like the siren of an ambulance. The queue at the desk was longer still. Jennifer took her place in it, standing behind a small ill-smelling woman who wore a coat above a torn and grubby nightgown. This time, she would take a firmer line, insist on joining Susie wherever they had taken her.

While she waited, she skimmed the newspaper, trying to distract herself with foreign affairs and sporting triumphs. All seemed puny and unreal. Her eye kept shifting to the Edward Ainsley story, which she somehow feared to read in case it beset her with new guilts. Yet it was only about the Frasers and their younger cousin, Wanda, who was still alive in Hamilton and had been dug out by reporters.

‘Over home-made apple wine, Wanda, 78, but looking younger, revealed that the infant Edward had been simply handed over to his foster-parents without any legal papers or formal adoption procedure. Edward left the country—and his mother—without even a birth certificate—so Wanda claimed. Her cousin Alice also told her that …'

Jennifer stopped. Her heart was pounding, her hands clammy on the newspaper. Here was her own solution, and one so obvious and so easy, she was astonished that it had never occurred to her before. All she had to do was to follow the Frasers' example—not adopt the child, but simply take it over—cut out snooping social workers, or fussing forms in triplicate, side-step all those footling rules and checks. Susie would have the baby, but
she
would take it home with her, and no one need even know what they were doing. It would be Susie's child in theory and in law, hers in simple fact.

She shut her eyes, slumped against the wall. She had to think this out. Was it wrong, perhaps, to wriggle through the red tape, unfair to the child itself? She had been insisting just the other day that the baby's interests must come first and last. Yet didn't love count more than anything—love and total commitment? No one could love this child as much as she did, identify with it so strongly and so totally, and before it was even born. It was Hester's child, Susannah's child, her own lost, renascent baby.

All she had to do was to dodge the busybodies, evade the bureaucrats and get Susie's co-operation. Susie would play along. She must simply pretend she had changed her mind and now planned to keep the child herself. There was still a host of problems—where to live, what to live on, how to break the news to Lyn while keeping it from Matthew. But she would overcome them. Hester had helped her, pointed out the way.

She wiped the perspiration from her forehead. People were pushing past her in the queue, bumping into her. Her body was on fire, burning with a birth, a genesis, which had not yet reached the bare black world outside. The child might still be at risk, but it was
her
child now, her risk. She was no longer just the father, the provider, but the womb, the source, the home.

‘Jennifer Winterton.'

She jumped. She had lost her place in the queue, but the tannoy was crackling out her name. She rushed back to reception.

‘Are you the one who brought Susan Grant in?'

‘Yes. Yes. I am. How is she?' Jennifer tried to steady herself against the desk. Was the baby all right? Born, thriving, sickly? ‘Where is my friend? Can I see her'

‘Well, not tonight, I'm afraid. She's been sedated.'

‘Sedated?' Jennifer's voice was wilting and fainting itself. ‘Wh … what happened? What's wr … wrong with her?' They wouldn't give a pregnant woman sedatives. Susie must have lost the baby.
She
had been sedated after her own miscarriage. Drugs to drown a death.

‘I'm afraid I haven't got the details.' The receptionist was checking someone else's card. ‘They just phoned down to tell you not to wait.'

‘But I've been waiting hours and hours. And what d'you mean, ‘‘phoned down''? Where
is
she?'

‘She's been taken to Maternity. You should have gone there in the first place, in fact, instead of coming here. But don't you worry—its all been sorted out now. She's in very good hands up there.'

Maternity? That surely meant Susie was in labour. Maybe even a Caesarian or a stillbirth.