Born of Woman (84 page)

Jennifer shrugged. ‘OK.' She could see him on the plane, chatting up the air-hostesses, dulling Susie with gins, pawing her …

‘I doubt if it'll last.' Jo reached across for the biscuit tin. ‘Poor Susie. I tried to show her sense, but she wouldn't listen. Ah well—I suppose that's what she wanted, and if she sees a bit of Europe in the process, at least it'll help her education. You must be ready for some lunch, love—if you can call digestive biscuits and peanut butter lunch. I never cook midday.'

‘I'm … er … not very hungry, thanks. Anyway, I ought to see if … I mean, is everything all right, Jo?'

‘You mean, is
he
all right. Yes, fine. Don't look so worried. I may be anti-men, but babes-in-arms don't count. Actually, I've hardly heard a squeak from the little blighter. Did you sedate him or something before you brought him here?'

‘No. Just told him to mind his manners or you'd report him to the Sex Discrimination Board.'

Jo laughed. ‘Cup of tea—if you can't face peanut butter?'

‘Yes, please. I'm parched. The last one I had was at five o'clock this morning. D'you mind if I take it up there?'

‘Course not. You go on and I'll bring it up when it's brewed. I can see you're avid for another peek at your little bundle of joy, or do you just want to make certain he's still breathing? It's OK, I haven't castrated him or anything. Actually, I‘m surprised you ever trusted me with him at all.'

Jennifer said nothing. She couldn't admit to Jo that she'd had no alternative. There was no one else to leave a week-old baby with. She had to see Susie off. That was vital. Their last contact—perhaps for ever. And she had to see her off without the child. Susie couldn't relate to her baby, preferred to ignore him altogether, pretend he didn't exist.

She walked slowly up the steep and narrow staircase, paused on the landing, leaned against the bannisters. She still found it hard to believe the baby
did
exist, was real, breathing, perfect, there at all. She opened the spare-room door, felt the now familiar stab of excitement, wonder, awe, as she walked towards the cot.

She would never forget her first miraculous glimpse of him. She had stumbled towards the nursery behind a sturdy Irish nurse who had been ratting on about the weather. There wasn't any weather, just the stifling heat of the nursery and the thunder of her heart which was thumping so wildly she feared it would wake every baby there.

She bent forward, held her breath. All she could see was a fuzz of sparse black hair with a small cross sallow face beneath it. A Winterton baby—dark, male, bad-tempered, anxious-looking, screwing his eyes up against the light. She swallowed, bit her lip. Love hurt.

She had stood there, frozen, for a terrifying second. Once she touched this child, held him in her arms, she would be bonded to him indissolubly, tied to him for twenty years or more, through troubles, sickness, joy.

The nurse was squatting down, fixing a broken shoe-lace. ‘Go on—pick him up. He won't fall apart. He's tougher than he looks, that one. In fact, we were all surprised he turned out such a whopper.'

Jennifer opened her eyes. The sterile white-walled nursery was now papered with orange poppies, peeling off in places, the tidy row of cots replaced by Jo's overflow of furniture—a third-hand carry-cot perched on a battered card-table and guarded by a tallboy. Only the baby was the same—dark, solemn, frowning—Matthew's child, with nothing of Susie's pink and golden prettiness nor happy-go-lucky nature. Jennifer scooped him up, held him awkwardly. Susie was right. It wasn't easy to be an instant mother. Her arms felt clumsy, her breasts inadequate. He was nuzzling blindly against them, making little sucking motions with his mouth. She turned him over, frightened for his head. It seemed so vulnerable, not quite fixed or steady on its hinge. She crooked it against her arm, tried to make him more secure. He fixed his eyes directly on her own—strange eyes, huge and slatey-blue—Lyn's and Hester's eyes. Impossible. There was nothing of Hester in this child. All dark-haired babies' eyes were probably that peculiar shade of blue before they changed to brown.

The baby crumpled up his face, put tiny flailing fists up to his eyes as if he couldn't bear to face the world. His mouth trembled on the brink of tears or screams.

‘Don't cry,' she whispered. ‘You're all right now. We made it.'

They very nearly hadn't. From the moment she had slunk between Susie's blue-sprigged curtains and found her pale and weeping, without a cot, she had assumed the worst had happened. The child was dead, had perhaps been born a monster. Susie had seen some slimy stunted thing emerge between her legs and plop into a slop-bowl. There weren't words for horrors like that, so she sat in silence, smoothing Susie's hair, holding both her hands, keeping back her own tears. Gradually Susie quietened.

‘D'you want to try and … tell me about it', she had stuttered out at last.

Susie shook her head. Ten minutes passed without a word. The noises beyond the curtains seemed to come from another world—other people's babies crying, other women's husbands braying with laughter or talking about strange forgotten things like Christmas food and presents, relatives, the Queen's speech.

Susie sat up slowly, rubbed her eyes. ‘It was a b … boy,' she whispered. Her voice was so low, Jennifer could barely make the words out. She nodded, didn't trust herself to speak. Susie had said ‘was', not ‘is'.

Suddenly Susie began to pour out the saga of pain, shock and indignity which had been labelled Christmas Day. Christmas for her had been a collage of shrapnel-sharp contractions, glaring lights, loud confusing voices. Her body had become a broken-down machine, out of her control, man-handled by rough mechanics, wrenched, prodded, forced. Her voice became gradually shriller as she described the great bruiser of a midwife shouting ‘Push, mother,
push
,' while she heaved and panted, her feet stuck up in stirrups, tears and sweat streaming down her face.

‘And there was this great sort of squelching sound, a terrible wrenching pain and they pulled the baby out and everyone said, ‘‘It's a boy … it's a lovely little boy'' and I could hear it yelling and …'

‘Y … yelling?'

‘Yeah. They put it on my tummy all squirming and covered with sort of gunge stuff, and still bawling its head off as if it h … hated me already, and I said ‘‘Take it away, take it away'' and …'

‘You mean … it w … was all right—
alive
and …?' Jennifer was saying ‘it', like Susie, not daring a ‘he' until she was sure beyond all doubt.

‘Course it's bloody alive. It wouldn't stop screaming.'

‘Why? Was something wr … wrong with it?'

‘No. Just a damned good pair of lungs—or so the midwife said and …'

Jennifer gripped the end of the bed, forced herself to listen to the next instalment—the vomiting, the stitching up, the catheter, the shakes—but all she was really hearing was ‘It's a boy—a lovely little boy.' The baby wasn't dead, wasn‘t a monster or a cretin, offal in a bowl. He was yelling, bawling, triumphantly alive.

Susie stammered on. Every time she mentioned the baby, Jennifer pounced on the tiny jigsaw scrap of information, pieced all the scraps together until she had a whole and healthy child. Her relief and wonder doubled. The baby was not only alive, but normal, perfect, huge—well, five pounds three and three-quarter ounces, which was gigantic compared with those dregs of almost-life in the Special Baby Unit. He appeared completely unaffected by the antibodies, neither jaundiced nor at risk, so they had spared him intensive care. He hadn't needed so much as an incubator, let alone a life-support machine. For all its muddle and shambles, all her own carping and complaints, the hospital still styled itself progressive, and progressive hospitals believed that the bond with a baby's mother was more important than the latest technological hardware. The irony was that Susie had refused that vital bond.

As soon as he was born and weighed, they had laid him naked in her arms, but she had pushed him away, broken down in tears again. Even when they had washed and dressed him, presented him clean and fragrant in his shawl, she had still turned her back, hidden her face in the pillow, refused to have the cot beside her bed.

The next day, no change. Jennifer had tossed and turned throughout that endless night, reliving Susie's labour as if to make it her own, feeling the rude probe of the enema, the jab and gripe of contractions, and finally split apart at dawn by the baby's ramming head. She got up in the pitch dark, fretted through the pointless hours till visiting time, then rushed back to the hospital where she found Sister herself sitting on Susie's bed, trying to talk her round. Susie remained deaf to all persuasion, staring pale and listless at the wall when she wasn't actually weeping. Jennifer felt pity mixed with terror. Susie was meant to be pretending she wanted to keep her child. In fact, she had rejected him out of hand, and in her present state of shock and hostility, might well forget their vital agreement and hand him over for adoption.

It was Sparrow who saved all three of them. On the day after Boxing Day, family duties over, he turned up in the ward in skin-tight jeans and an oil-stained donkey-jacket, waving two airline tickets to Malaga.

‘Picked 'em up cheap,' he said to Susie. ‘It's time you got off yer arse. If we don't beat it soon, there won't
be
any cushy jobs in Spain. They're dated Thursday—New Year's Eve. I'll call for you here with …'

‘You can't,' Jennifer interrupted, from the other side of the bed. The baby was still in the nursery, but she was doing her daily stint of trying to calm and rally Susie. ‘Susie won't be better by then. She's still very sore and she certainly can‘t start jetting around on planes just six days after …'

‘You bet I can!' Susie was sitting up now, trying on the silver lurex boob-tube Sparrow had brought her with the tickets. She seemed to have miraculously rallied already. ‘I've had more than enough of this dump and the sooner I get out of it, the …'

They argued back and forth for half an hour, Jennifer warning of shock, infection, relapse, Susie pleading the health advantages of rest and convalescence in the sun. Both were dissembling. Susie wanted Sparrow and the quickest possible out, Jennifer wanted the baby. In the end, they compromised. Susie agreed to feign an instant maternal interest in her child, in return for Jennifer's promise to plead with Sister to let mother and baby out first thing Thursday morning.

She was surprised at the opposition, despite her carefully crafted story which avoided all reference to dangerous things like DC 10s and lovers. Sister remained cautious and uneasy, concerned not only about Susie's capabilities, but also about the weather and the risk of an infection.

‘If Susie insists on walking out, that's
her
affair,' she frowned. ‘We can't actually keep her here by force, but she'll have to sign her discharge. Baby's a different matter. He's still below his birthweight and we're most unhappy about him going home so soon.'

Jennifer sought out Staff-Nurse Stapleton, who had allowed her into Special Baby Care, begged her help again. Although she was on a different ward, she was friendly with the Sister on Postnatal and might be persuaded to use her influence. Kate not only agreed, but even suggested checking on the child herself once he was discharged, since she all but passed their door on her way to the hospital, and it might reassure Sister if she reported directly back to her.

Sister kept her distance, said nothing more at all. By Wednesday evening, the baby was gaining weight, but Jennifer losing hope. In twelve short hours, Sparrow would be marching down the ward again, with suitcases and passports. She had used every possible argument, even turned to Jo, to see if there were some basic law or freedom she could appeal to in the impasse. There wasn't. Jo informed her that the hospital had every right to keep the baby in, if its health or welfare gave reason for concern. She did, however, promise her assistance once it
was
discharged, offering bed, roof, cash and moral support, and pledging total secrecy.

Jennifer sat by Susie's bed in silence, watching another patient pack her case and leave, a conventional married woman with a nine-pound baby and a supportive husband who had brought a couple of bottles of sherry for the staff. When Jennifer left herself, deep in gloom and with nothing yet decided, she could hear the nurses clinking glasses in Sister's office. Sister called her in. Whether it was a sniffter or two of Tio Pepe which tipped the balance in their favour, or Kate Stapleton's assurances, Jennifer never knew, but she got her yes, at last.

It was a reluctant yes, admittedly, hedged about with every possible precaution and instruction, and with the full array of social services alerted and ready to pounce.

‘How are we going to dodge them?' Jennifer whispered to the baby, as she sat tense and frowing in Jo's sagging Oxfam chair. She had replaced him in his carry-cot, switched on the one-bar fire. She'd been so relieved to wangle him out at all, she had hardly spared a thought for the problems it had left behind—all those responsible professionals committed to an infant she had spirited away, rushing round to check on it, help and counsel its mother. How could she avoid them, how explain Susie's absence? Jo had offered her a refuge, but could she really cower at Putney while they knocked frantically at the heedless Southwark door? She would have to spin another web of lies. Her head was spinning with all the complications. She still felt weak and weepy from Susie's departure, confused by the whole fraught and hectic morning. She would shut the problems out, let them wait till morning. There were more important things. This was the first instant she had had her baby truly to herself, could claim him as her own. She pulled her chair up closer, gripped his tiny fingers in her own.