Stop the Clock (10 page)

‘Wonder how long it’ll take them to send someone to clear up,’ said the woman who’d made the phone call.
Nobody replied. The room fell restlessly quiet, and the tired woman shut her eyes again, and Natalie wished that Richard would hurry up.

If only she could have her things, she might feel a little more ready for whatever was going to happen next. What on earth was he doing, anyway? He was certainly taking his time.

Someone came with a mop and gave the floor a desultory once-over to get rid of the traces of the girl. The woman who’d made the phone call was called away to a delivery suite. Her partner still hadn’t showed up.

But Richard did reappear, finally, looking panicky and overwrought. He’d changed into jeans, and was dragging Natalie’s pull-along suitcase.

‘I’m so sorry it took so long. There’d been an accident; the traffic was horrendous,’ he said.

‘Did you bring the CD player?’ Natalie demanded.

‘Oh no. I’m sorry. I forgot.’

‘Oh well. No whale music,’ Natalie said.

‘I’m really sorry it took so long,’ Richard said, settling next to her and squeezing her hand. ‘Are you all right? I can’t believe you’re still here. I thought I’d find you surrounded by beeping lights and flashing monitors and staff in surgical masks. Are you sure they haven’t forgotten about you again?’

‘They didn’t forget about me last time,’ Natalie said. ‘They’re just really busy.’

She went to check anyway. No, they didn’t know how much longer it would be, but if she started seeing shooting stars she should definitely let them know.

Back in the waiting room Richard opened the suitcase,
took out a document folder and tried to read. After a few minutes he said, ‘I can’t do this. I can’t concentrate.’ He sounded genuinely shocked that his ability to work had deserted him.

As Richard stared into space Natalie rummaged through the tiny nappies and babygros and cotton wool in the suitcase and found the small cushion stuffed with lavender that Lucy had sent her. She pressed it to her nose and sniffed. Her heart continued to batter away. Still, the scent was comforting; it was redolent of the kind of vintage femininity Lucy’s home and lifestyle paid homage to. Natalie was beginning to see how the prettiness and sweetness of well-ordered domesticity might come to serve as an antidote to the brutal impotence of biological womanhood – and was even, as practised by Lucy anyway, assertive, a triumph of the will over muddle, helplessness and mess.

Shortly afterwards her name was called (‘I think they did forget you, till you went and reminded them,’ Richard muttered) and she was taken off by a friendly-seeming but very young midwife wheeling a machine on a trolley. The midwife seemed to be looking for something, or somewhere, and after they’d been traipsing around for a while it occurred to Natalie that it was proving difficult to find a space to put her in. Eventually the midwife gave her a pair of blue plastic shields to put over her shoes and took her past a door marked
SLUICE
to a little curtained lobby with a hospital bed and a couple of cupboards. She had a furtive expression, as if she was doing something that was common practice, but might not be officially approved of.

She fixed a grubby strap round Natalie’s belly, flicked a couple of switches and studied the display. ‘OK, we need to see whether anything is happening yet,’ she said. ‘I’ll be back in twenty minutes. Don’t go anywhere. Theatre is just down the corridor; that’s why you have to have the covers on your shoes.’

Then she took off, and Natalie lay back and tried to relax, and stared at the display and willed it to kick into life.

The midwife returned thirty-five minutes later and studied the printout from the machine. She didn’t look particularly impressed, but she didn’t look wholly dismissive either. ‘There’s something going on,’ she said, ‘nothing regular, but some kind of activity,’ and Natalie padded after her down the corridor again, until she said, ‘Oh, you can get rid of those now,’ whereupon Natalie took the blue plastic shields off her shoes and was delivered back to the waiting room.

As she went in Richard shot her a look of mute male suffering that said, loud and clear,
I’m out of my depth.

Not so very long ago he could have cleared off to the pub across the road and nobody would have thought any the worse of him. She could picture it quite clearly, him sipping half a lager to quell his nerves, watching sport on a large TV screen even though no sport interested him and he would much have preferred the news. Maybe, for him, that would have been better – but then she would have been completely alone.

Soon afterwards they were admitted to a delivery suite. Natalie was given to understand that this was a special privilege – if anyone came along who was in
more urgent need, they would be turfed out. Richard, who had not accompanied Natalie on the tour of the labour ward, looked round in confusion.

‘Where am I meant to sleep?’ he asked.

The midwife indicated a green armchair. ‘It reclines.’

This, too, it seemed, was a privilege.

Richard went off to the hospital canteen to buy some sandwiches, and the midwife poked a prostaglandin pessary as close as possible to Natalie’s unripe cervix.

‘Try to sleep,’ she said brightly, ‘you’re going to need it. Have a good rest, and then you’ll be ready to wake up tomorrow and have a baby!’

Then she went off, leaving Natalie to her own devices. What to do? She was alone in a windowless delivery suite, not in labour, with a television and telephone unit that didn’t work.

Richard came in with some sandwiches. ‘I got some for you as well, just in case what they bring you isn’t very nice, or isn’t enough,’ he said, putting the food down on the wheeled table that could be used for someone in the bed to eat from.

God, am I really that greedy? Natalie thought. Yes, I am.

‘Thanks,’ she said.

Richard perched at the end of the bed and opened up one of the packets of sandwiches.

The room fell silent. Natalie picked up the other sandwich and tore it open.

After a sleepless night spent listening to Richard’s snoring the morning examination revealed that Natalie
was still not much further along than she’d been the evening before. The new midwife on duty didn’t believe on stinting on the pessaries and went for a double dose. ‘That’ll get you going, you wait and see,’ she said. ‘It’s a lovely day. Why don’t you go out for a walk?’

It was strange to be allowed out into the sunshine when the previous day she’d been forbidden to leave the hospital. When you were powerless the whims of those in charge had an inordinate effect. And indeed, strolling along the walkway besides the Thames, for all the world like an ordinary couple, did seem to speed things up. Periodically she fell quiet and Richard waited discreetly for the pain to pass before carrying on.

When they got back to the ward the midwife who’d sent them off examined her.

‘Well done,’ the midwife said, ‘you’re on your way,’ and Natalie felt she was beginning to redeem herself.

As the afternoon wore on the pain became more vicious and Natalie was allowed to try out the gas and air. God, it was good . . . Within minutes the whole scene was transformed. She was riding queen-like on the bed, clasping a mask to her face, she and the bed were high and enormous, what was the French for it, oh yes,
s’accoucher
,
je m’accouche
, Bella had told them, it was Louis the Wotsit started the vogue for women giving birth in bed flat on their backs,
elles s’accouchent
, Louis liked to perve on his mistresses in labour through the spy hole, watch coming out of them what he had put in . . .

But Richard wasn’t really watching. He could hardly bear to look at her. Miserably uncomfortable – well,
perhaps that was preferable to being titillated? And anyway he was distant and very small, poor Richard, terrified, hating every minute of it, doing his best, it was hopeless really, not fair on him . . . His nerves, his fears, a dark bubble of tension on the far side of the room, and there was nothing she could do to reassure him or make it up to him, to make it right, he had done what he came for, he was superfluous now, but still required to be here.

All that effort, all that senseless worry, should they, shouldn’t they, moving in together, getting engaged, the wedding, starting a family, each fresh stage eliciting a fresh bout of doubt from Richard, while she cajoled and reassured and waited, hanging on to him for dear life, trying to convince him that it was the right thing, that she was right for him, that he was right for her . . . She had believed that Richard made her safe, but now it was apparent this was not so, he was a bit player, and she was undergoing this extraordinary, this astonishing torture . . . as Lucy had done, twice – good God – and Natalie’s own mother, who was so modest: Natalie had never seen her undressed . . . Lucy’s mother, the difficult one, the drunk . . . Tina’s mother, Madam Chairman, fundraiser for good causes, the lady of the house. All those other mothers: clinging to branches during hurricane and flood, on planes, tube trains, Underground platforms during the Blitz, medieval bedsteads, the floors of caves . . .

The price of pleasing Mother.
But no, that wasn’t it . . . it was the secret price of life. So this was it, this was what it cost, this was the charge every single person walking
on every single street had exacted before they had even been born.

The door opened and a man in a white coat walked in at the head of a short retinue. She recognized the curly-headed woman behind him from the maternity clinic.
Sometimes it is hard to be a woman
.

White Coat addressed a few words to the latest midwife, who passed him Natalie’s notes to survey.

‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘the pre-eclampsia case.’

He studied Natalie’s notes and addressed a few questions to her. Somehow she answered. As she did, she felt the pace of the pain slacken and die away.

A belt was run round her belly and White Coat examined the display on the machine.

‘Not much going on there,’ he observed.

He told her what would happen next. The anaesthetist would give her an epidural; she would be induced on a syntocinon drip. The belt monitoring her contractions would need to remain in place from now on. A blood pressure cuff, too.

And with that he swept out, followed by his attendants.

The latest midwife muttered, ‘Well, that was a waste of time, wasn’t it?’ and Natalie realized that this was how her attempt at labour could be seen: pain for no purpose.

She began to say something to Richard, but was silenced by a final desultory pang. Like a last crack of heartbreak from a love affair that never had the chance to progress.

The anaesthetist was glassy and calm, and set about working his magic with the benign assurance of one whose ministrations are always welcome. Afterwards she found herself small again, shrunk back down to size, hooked up to the epidural, the blood pressure monitor, the contraption that kept track of her contractions and a catheter bag; paralysed from the waist down, and watching the jagged peaks and troughs that represented her contractions, spewed out on a printout. She supposed she ought to be grateful.

Richard settled in the green chair next to her and ate another hospital sandwich. He looked pale but relieved.
At least this way you’ll be safe.
‘We’ll check on you in four hours and see how you’re doing. Try to sleep. You’re going to need all the strength you’ve got,’ this latest midwife said and disappeared.

But of course Natalie couldn’t sleep, and once again the dark hours ticked by to the soundtrack of Richard’s snoring, broken, once, by screaming from the next room. There goes another one, Natalie thought. Lucky thing; at least for her it’s over. She tried to think of happier times but it was a struggle, and she found she had to go back – a long way back – to find a memory that was bright and strong enough to face down her fear.

No, not the honeymoon in Florence, nor the dinner at Pierre Victoire when Richard had finally proposed. Not even the ring shopping, or the pure gratification of finally being able to tell her mother she was getting married. No, not the takeaway pizza they’d ordered on their first night in the house they’d bought together,
nor the exchanging of contracts or signing of the mortgage . . .

Her home life had been comfortable, convenient, steady, reassuring . . . There had been consolidation, but not much adventure. Not since she’d jacked in her job and gone off travelling just after the millennium, spurred on by Tina’s insistence that she should take control of her life and do something for herself. And look how that had turned out!

Oh God, what had she been thinking, she’d been such a fool – leaving Heathrow for Auckland after the goodbye kiss with Richard, feeling so pleased with herself, setting off to visit her brother and spend a couple of months sightseeing on her own. And what had she gone and done? On the other side of the world, she had allowed herself to be someone else. To be with someone else.

One night only, in a cheap white room over a red pub in an old gold rush town in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t a place she had chosen to be. She was only there because she couldn’t get a bus out till the next day. She was just waiting for her connection . . .

It was outside of backpacker season and the hostel had been virtually empty, a little creepy it was so deserted. Jerry-built too: the door handle to her room felt as if it might come off if she turned it too fast; one tap dripped and the other gave nothing away; the walls seemed thin, insubstantial; a breeze whipped round the window frame as if hinting that anybody who wanted to could get in. The pub next door at least seemed solid and enclosing, even if it was ersatz? a traditional
British boozer, dim and high-ceilinged with brassy mirrors and crimson walls and ornate mouldings, in an un-English, flat, dusty, remote no man’s land of a place. But the job of any pub is to allow you to forget that sometime soon you’ll have to leave and go home, and it fulfilled that . . .

She’d played a couple of games of pool. She only knew how because Lucy and Tina had taught her. Her opponent was a girl with bright blonde hair that was dark at the roots and a pack of Gauloises in her back pocket. Nobody had noticed when Natalie left with her; nobody had turned a hair.