Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (41 page)

‘There’s some medicine the doctor left this morning. She is to have it every four hours.’ He indicated a bottle standing by the bed. ‘Will you see that she takes it? She has a fever, she may not remember. I have to go now,’ he said more loudly, but she seemed not to hear him. He leaned down and kissed her, but with another lunging movement she threw herself away from him.

‘Might be better to get the baby away from her for a bit,’ he said quietly. ‘But you know best, of course.’

Then he was gone. She heard him shut the door and moments later, the car start up and leave. She experienced a moment of absolute panic, in which the baby already being dead and its mother insane with fever and grief assailed her. She looked at Myfanwy who was picking at her nightdress making small moaning sounds when her careless fingers knocked against her breasts. One thing about the poor girl that had been slowly dawning upon her was that she was not much older than herself. Please, God, let me do the right things, came to her. She edged round the bed and picked up the baby. It was far smaller than Sebastian had ever been, but it was not dead. Its swollen, almost transparent eyelids flickered and then were still again.

‘Owen,’ Myfanwy said. ‘He’s going to die. I know that,’ and she began to rock and cry in the bed.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m going to give you your medicine and you will have a good sleep.’

‘If I go to sleep he
will
die,’ she said in tones of such heartrending certainty that Louise, whose pity had been paralysing her, felt a sudden strength.

‘I will look after him for you while you sleep and then he won’t die,’ she said with all the assurance she could bring to such a wild promise.

But Myfanwy seemed to accept this; she nodded, her eyes fixed trustfully on Louise’s face.

‘Is there a spoon for your medicine?’

‘I have to take it in water. The bathroom’s next door.’

She retrieved the sticky, much-fingered glass beside the bottle and took it into the bathroom, rinsed it out and measured the dose. ‘Two teaspoonfuls,’ it said, ‘every four hours.’ When she returned, Myfanwy was trying to make the baby take her milk, but he turned his head away from the nipple and began making weary, thin, mewling little cries. Louise took him gently away and put him at the end of the bed. He was still crying, but she felt she must get the medicine into the mother before anything. She helped her to sit up, smoothed the long strands of hair off her face and burning forehead and gave her the glass. When the medicine was drunk, she turned the hot pillows and arranged the sheet over the blankets.

‘Owen’s room is next door to the bathroom,’ Myfanwy said. ‘His things are all there; my mam and I made all his clothes, and there’s a kettle there if you want to make yourself a cup of tea. You won’t sleep, though, will you? You’ll watch him for me?’

‘Yes, I will. I’ll stay awake if
you
promise to go to sleep.’

When she nearly smiled, Louise saw that she was beautiful.

‘I’ll put some water by your bed, in case you’re thirsty,’ she said. But when she came back with it, Myfanwy was asleep.

The night alone with him began. She boiled a kettle and put some water in a bottle with a teaspoonful of glucose. Then she put the rest of the water into an enamel bowl, and put the bottle in it covered with a nappy to keep it warm. The room was tiny, containing a camp bed, the baby’s basket and a table on which his talcum powder and safety pins were arranged. She felt to see if he was wet, and he was, so she laid him on the camp bed and knelt by it to change him. He was so pitifully small that she was frightened of hurting him, and he started his weary cries while she was doing this. She shut the door and prayed that Myfanwy would not hear him. She had been going to put him in his basket, but his face was so pale and his hands and feet so cold that she changed her mind. She took off her jersey and got into bed, propping herself up with the pillow and her overcoat. Then she unwrapped him from his shawl and laid him in her arms so that their flesh touched. But the room was so cold that she felt this would not be enough to warm him, so it was out of bed again and back to the bathroom where she remembered seeing a hot-water bottle. When she had filled it, she wrapped it in the baby’s shawl, and then, because she was terrified of burning him, in her jersey. In bed, she held him so that he was sandwiched between her and the hot-water bottle. Once she was still, the silence was broken only by the distant chiming every quarter of an hour of the grandfather clock below. She kept the light on so that she could watch him; the room was very cold, and she could see her own breath. So she sat, staring down into his tiny wizened face, trying to pour life into him, willing him to survive, and after a while, as he became warmer and his skin was suffused with a faint flush, he opened his eyes. For a second they wandered, unfocused, and then they came to rest and they were looking at each other. She spoke to him then: endearments, encouragement, admiration of his fortitude, and he watched her with a kind of grave attention. She felt his body move, his foot lurched uncertainly against her rib-cage, the fingers of his free hand unfurled and then closed again as tight as a bud. When he began experimenting with his mouth, smacking and mumbling his lips, she tried feeding him with the sugared water. He would not suck or even hold the teat, but if she squeezed it onto his mouth he seemed to accept the drops although the taste of them induced a flurry of little squallish frowns. He took very little – not even an ounce, but it was something. After it, when he opened his hand again, she gave him her finger and was rewarded by his instant grip which loosened only when he fell asleep.

That was the pattern of the night; she came to listen for the chimes below of the hours – two, three, four. Once, she got up to make sure that Myfanwy still slept, but she carried him with her, and once she boiled another kettle and refilled the hot-water bottle and warmed up his drink. Twice more he consented to take a few drops; awake he looked at her all the time, but mostly he slept.

As the night wore on, it became harder and harder not to fall asleep, but she was determined, and the knowledge that he became cold so quickly helped, and anyway she did not dare to lie down although her back ached from sitting up in the same position. But chiefly it was her growing conviction that his life was a painfully fragile business, that he needed not only her warmth and nursing, but her constant determination that he should live; by then she loved him.

Soon after seven she heard Myfanwy get up and go to the bathroom and then she was standing in the doorway asking after him. ‘Oh, he looks fine!’ she said. ‘I’ve had such a sleep thanks to you. I’m dying for a cup of tea. I’m going downstairs to make one.’

‘You go back to bed and take your medicine. Then I’ll bring you the baby and I’ll make the tea.’

‘I will.’

He slept while she wrapped him in his shawl; she half wanted him to wake so that they might gaze at one another again, but he did not. She carried him and settled him with his mother. ‘
She
is his mother,’ she said to herself as she went downstairs to make the tea. It was still dark and she could hear the rain against the small, pointed Gothic windows.

At eight o’clock the district nurse arrived on her bicycle. Louise went down at the knock on the door and found her divesting herself of her mackintosh cape and its hood.

‘Raining cats and dogs, it is,’ she said. She spoke as though English was not her first language. ‘Dr Jones told me to come as early as I could. Puerperal fever, he said it was. Upstairs, is she? Don’t worry, I’ll find my way.’

And that was it, really. She accepted the thanks, the offer of a bicycle to get back. When she bent over the baby to kiss him, the nurse advised her not to wake him, so she didn’t. ‘I’m so grateful to you,’ Myfanwy said, but she had become shy in the company of the nurse.

‘It was nothing,’ Louise assured her.

But battling home on the bicycle through the rain with her muffler, which was quickly soaked, over her head, although she felt light-headed with exhaustion, she was somehow exhilarated as well. The image of his gaze with its trust and dignity stayed with her all the five weary miles. I’ll see him again, she thought. I’ll have to take the bicycle back anyway. It occurred to her then that she had never felt like this about Sebastian, but the idea was painful and she was too tired to consider it.

She had thought she would go straight to bed, but the smell of breakfast stopped her and she realised that she was ravenous. No dinner the night before, she remembered.

In the dining room a captain of one of the MTBs in Michael’s flotilla was breakfasting with his wife. She always wore demure frocks with white Peter Pan collars – came up about once a month and Louise had never liked her.

‘Goodness!’ she called across the room. ‘You look as though you’ve been out on the tiles! I wondered why your poor husband was all on his own at breakfast.’

‘He said to tell you that he had to go to an early meeting,’ the husband said.

‘Oh. Thank you.’ She had hung her dripping coat on the back of the spare chair and was spreading a piece of toast that Michael had left with margarine. It was leathery toast, and the margarine tasted awful but she was so hungry she didn’t care.

‘Where
have
you been? Or can’t you tell us?’

Resisting the urge to invent some wild night of dancing and debauchery, she said that she had been staying with a friend who had had a baby. This silenced Barbara, who murmured something to the effect that she hadn’t thought that babies were much in Louise’s line.

When she had eaten as much breakfast as the menu afforded, she went upstairs planning to have a hot bath and then a sleep. But on the bed was a note from Michael: ‘Darling. I do hope everything went well. Arthur was so worried, but I’m sure you made all the difference. Shall be back for dinner. Love, Michael.’ His confidence that she would have been of some use warmed her as she got out of her damp clothes. Michael had the thickest dressing gown and she decided to put it on while her bath was running as she was beginning to feel shivery. Even her hands were cold. She thrust her hands into the pockets and felt a letter. Pulling it out, she recognised Zee’s writing. She knew that Michael wrote a good deal to her, but her letters went straight to the ship so she never saw them and now she felt curious.

After detailed comment on his naval activities and pieces of news of people barely known to her, the letter was signed ‘always with love as you know, my dearest one. Mummy.’ But there was another sheet of paper.

Just received yours of the 10th and thought you would like to know that Hugo has been sent to join his regiment in Germany, so he is safely out of the way. I do hope, my darling, that this relieves you, as in spite of Pete exacting a promise from him that he would not communicate with Louise
in any way
you must feel that neither of them are entirely to be trusted. Pete was
appalled
to hear that he had written in spite of the promise. How lucky that you were able to intercept it. Of
course
I think you were right to do so – the whole business must have been most distressing for you, as indeed, it has been for me, since any trouble of yours, my darling, becomes mine also. Again – love and blessings. Mummy.

She read this last sheet of paper twice, but the tumult of emotion it evoked was no less from a second reading. Anguish that he had left the country and she had not known it; fear that he would be killed; relief that he had
not
obeyed the family injunction, but had written to her none the less; an agony of impatience to find and read the letter he had sent; and through all this, rage at the horrible collusion. She began to search for the letter – through his chest of drawers, in the pockets of his clothes hanging in the wardrobe – but she did not find it. The thought occurred that he might have destroyed it, but she could not bear to consider that. She wanted the letter so much that it had to exist – somewhere. When she could think of nowhere else to search, she threw herself on the bed and wept until she had no tears left and her exhaustion overwhelmed her like a fog.

She woke to find Michael standing by her bed telling her that it was dinner-time. ‘You must have been asleep for hours,’ he said.

That was the beginning of the first, and most terrible row that they had ever had. She had read his mother’s letter, she said.

She should not have done that.

Why not?
She
read other people’s letters.

Silence.

She knew about Hugo. She wanted her letter from him.

That was not possible. He had destroyed it.

After reading it, she supposed.

No. That would be dishonourable. He had simply destroyed it. It was a promise, after all.

She
had been made to promise not to write; she had not promised not to receive a letter. It was only
one
letter, she had pleaded. (She had never had a letter from him; it would have been something to keep – some comfort when otherwise there was none.)

It was much better to make a complete break. She would get over it sooner that way.

How did
he
know that she
wanted
to get over it? She
loved
him. In all these weeks it did not seem to have occurred to him that she loved him.

And what did she think this made him feel? She had loved
him
– enough to marry him and have their child. Did she not take that seriously? These weeks had not been easy for him either. He had tried to make allowances – knew she was very young. Marriage was difficult when one partner had to be away so much of the time. She
would
get over Hugo – but it would happen far sooner if she would just make some effort and not give way to everything so easily.

Had he really destroyed her letter?

For God’s sake,
yes
! He was not a liar – surely she knew that?