Sister: A Novel (17 page)

‘I thought you weren’t allowed a cremation if you’re Catholic? Mum said the church thought it was pagan.’

‘They did. Once upon a time. But not any more. As long as you still believe in the resurrection of the body.’

‘I wish.’ I said, hoping to sound light too, but instead I sounded desperate.

‘Why don’t you think about it further? Ring me when you’ve decided, or even if you haven’t and just want to talk about it.’

‘Yes. Thank you.’

As I parked the hire car in the hospital’s underground car park I thought about taking your ashes to Scotland, to a mountain with purple heather and yellow gorse, climbing up into the grey skies above the first level of cloud and in the cold clean air scattering you to the winds. But I knew Mum would never allow a cremation.

I’d been to St Anne’s before but it had been refurbished beyond recognition with a shiny new foyer and vast art installations and a coffee bar. Unlike any hospital I’d been in, it felt like it was a part of the world outside it. Through the large glass doors I could see shoppers strolling past and the foyer was flooded with natural light. It smelled of roasting coffee beans and brand-new dolls just opened from their boxes on Christmas day (maybe the café’s new shiny chairs were made of the same plastic).

I took the lift up to the fourth floor, as instructed, and walked to the maternity wing. The shininess didn’t extend up that far and the smell of coffee mixed with brand-new dolls was smothered by the usual hospital smell of disinfectant and fear. (Or is it only we who smell that because of Leo?) There were no windows, just strip lights glaring onto the linoleum beneath; no clocks, even the nurses’ watches were upside down; and I was back in a hospital world with its own no-weather and no-time in which the aberrant crises of pain, illness and death were Kafka-like turned ordinary. There was a sign up demanding that I wash my hands using the gel provided and now the hospital smell was on my skin, dulling the diamond on my engagement ring. The buzzer on the locked ward door was answered by a woman in her forties, her frizzy red hair tied back with a bulldog clip, looking competent and exhausted.

‘I phoned earlier. Beatrice Hemming?’

‘Of course. I’m Cressida, the senior midwife. Dr Saunders, one of the obstetricians, is expecting you.’

She escorted me into the post-natal ward. From side wards came the sound of babies crying. I’d never heard hours-old babies cry before and one sounded desperate, as if he or she had been abandoned. The Senior Midwife led me into a relatives’ room, her voice was professionally caring. ‘I’m so sorry about your nephew.’

For a moment I didn’t know who she was referring to. I’d never thought about our own relationship with one another. ‘I always call him Tess’s baby, not my nephew.’

‘When is his funeral?’

‘Next Thursday. It’s my sister’s too.’

The Senior Midwife’s voice was no longer professionally caring, but shocked. ‘I’m so sorry. I was just told that the baby had died.’ I was thankful to the kind doctor I’d spoken to earlier that morning for not turning your death into pass-the-day-away gossip. Though I suppose the subject of death in a hospital is more talking shop than gossip.

‘I want her baby to be with her.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘And I’d like to talk to whoever was with Tess when she gave birth. I was meant to be with her, you see, but I wasn’t. I didn’t even take her call.’ I started to cry, but tears were completely normal here, even the room with its washable sofa covers was probably designed with weeping relatives in mind. The Senior Midwife put her hand on my shoulder. ‘I’ll find out who was with her and ask them to come and talk to you. Excuse me a moment.’

She went into the corridor. Through the open doorway I saw a woman on a trolley with a just-born baby in her arms. Next to them a doctor put his arm around a man. ‘It’s customary for the baby to cry, not the dad.’ The man laughed and the doctor smiled at him. ‘When you arrived this morning you were a couple and now you’re a family. Amazing, isn’t it?’

The Senior Midwife shook her head at him. ‘As an obstetrician, Dr Saunders, it shouldn’t really amaze you any more.’

Dr Saunders wheeled the mother and baby into a side ward and I watched him. Even from a distance I could see that his face was fine-featured with eyes that were lit from the inside, making him beautiful rather than harshly handsome.

He came out with the Senior Midwife. ‘Dr Saunders, this is Beatrice Hemming.’

Dr Saunders smiled at me, totally unselfconscious, and reminded me of you in the way he wore his beauty carelessly, as if unacknowledged by the owner.

‘Of course, my colleague who spoke to you earlier this morning told me you were coming. Our hospital chaplain has made all the necessary arrangements with the undertakers and they are going to come and get her baby this afternoon.’

His voice was noticeably unhurried in the bustle of the ward; someone who trusted people to listen to him.

‘The chaplain had his body brought to the room of rest,’ he continued. ‘We thought that a morgue is no place for him. I’m only sorry that he had to be there as long as he did.’

I should have thought about this earlier. About him. I shouldn’t have left him in the morgue.

‘Would you like me to take you there?’ he asked.

‘Are you sure you have time?’

‘Of course.’

Dr Saunders escorted me down the corridor towards the lifts. I heard a woman screaming. The sound came from above, which I guessed to be the labour ward. Like the newborn baby’s cries her screams were unlike anything I had ever heard, scraped raw with pain. There were nurses and another doctor in the lift but they didn’t appear to notice the screams. I reasoned that they were used to it, working day in, day out in this Kafkaesque hospital world.

The lift doors closed. Dr Saunders and I were pressed lightly against each other. I noticed a thin gold wedding ring hanging on a chain just visible round the neck of his scrubs top. On the second floor everyone else got out and we were alone. He looked at me directly, giving me his full attention. ‘I’m so sorry about Tess.’

‘You knew her?’

‘I may have done, I’m not sure. I’m sorry, that must sound callous but . . .’

I filled in, ‘You see hundreds of patients?’

‘Yes. Actually we have over five thousand babies delivered here a year. When was her baby born?’

‘January the twenty-first.’

He paused for a moment. ‘In that case I wouldn’t have been here. Sorry. I was at a training course in Manchester that week.’

I wondered if he was lying. Should I ask him for proof that he wasn’t around for the birth of your baby and for your murder? I couldn’t hear your voice answering me, not even to tease me. Instead I heard Todd telling me not to be so ridiculous. And he’d have a point. Was every male in the land guilty until one by one they could prove their innocence? And who said it had to be a man? Maybe I should be suspicious of women as well, the kind midwife, the doctor I’d spoken to earlier that morning. And they thought
you
were paranoid. But doctors and nurses do have power over life and death and some of them have become addicted to it. Though with a hospital full of vulnerable people what on earth would make a healthcare professional choose a derelict toilets building in Hyde Park to release their psychopathic urge? At this point in my thoughts Dr Saunders smiled at me, making me feel both embarrassed and a little ashamed.

‘Our stop next.’

Still not able to hear your voice, I told myself, sternly, that being beautiful does not mean a man is a killer - just someone who would have rejected me in his single days without even being aware that he was doing it. Coming clean, I knew that this was why I was suspicious of him. I was just pegging my customary suspicion onto a different - and far more extreme - hook.

We reached the hospital mortuary, me still thinking about finding your killer rather than about Xavier. Dr Saunders took me to the room they have for relatives to ‘view the deceased’. He asked me if I’d like him to come with me but, not really thinking first, I said I’d be fine on my own.

I went in. The room was done out thoughtfully and tastefully like someone’s sitting room with printed curtains and a pile carpet and flowers (fake, but the expensive silk kind). I’m trying to make it sound OK, nice even, but I don’t want to lie to you and this living room for the dead was ghastly. Part of the carpet, the part nearest to the door, had almost worn through from all the other people who had stood where I was standing, feeling the weight of grief pressing down on them, not wanting to go to the person that they loved, knowing that when they got there they would know for sure that the person they loved was no longer there.

I went towards him.

I picked him up and wrapped him in the blue cashmere blanket you had bought for him.

I held him.

There are no more words.

Mr Wright listened with focused compassion when I told him about Xavier, not interrupting or prompting, allowing me my silences. At one point he must have handed me a Kleenex because I now have it, sodden, in my hand.

‘And you decided at this point against a cremation?’ he asks.

‘Yes.’

A journalist in one of yesterday’s papers suggested that we didn’t ‘allow a cremation’ because I was ‘making sure evidence wasn’t destroyed’. But that wasn’t the reason.

I must have been with Xavier for about three hours. And as I held him I knew that the cold air above a grey mountain was no place for a baby, and therefore, as his mother, it was no place for you either. When I finally left, I phoned Father Peter.

‘Can he buried in Tess’s arms?’ I asked, expecting to be told that it was impossible.

‘Of course. I think that’s the right place for him,’ replied Father Peter.

Mr Wright doesn’t press me on the reason I chose a burial and I’m grateful for his tact. I try to carry on, not letting emotion slip out, my words stilted.

‘Then I went back to see the Senior Midwife, thinking I’d meet the person who’d been with Tess when she gave birth. But she hadn’t been able to find Tess’s notes so didn’t know who it was. She suggested I come back the following Tuesday when she’d have had time to hunt for them.’

‘Beatrice?’

I am running out of the office.

I make it to the Ladies’ just in time. I am violently sick. The nausea is uncontrollable. My body is shaking. I see a young secretary look in then dart out again. I lie on the cold tiled floor, willing my body back into my control again.

Mr Wright comes in and puts his arms around me, and gently helps me up. As he holds me, I realise that I like being taken care of, not in a patriarchal kind of way, but simply being treated with kindness. I don’t understand why I never realised this before, brushing away kindness before it was even offered.

My limbs finally stop shaking.

‘Time to go home, Beatrice.’

‘But my statement . . .’

‘How about we both come in tomorrow morning, if you’re up to it?’

‘OK.’

He wants to call a taxi for me or at least walk me to the tube, but I politely turn down his offer. I tell him that I just need fresh air and he seems to understand.

I want to be alone with my thoughts and my thoughts are about Xavier. From the moment I picked him up, I loved him for him and not only as your baby.