The Four of Us (27 page)

Horrified, Primmie lowered her ungainly weight on to the nearest chair. ‘But the baby is due in a couple of weeks, and once I begin looking after it myself … once I begin doing that, Artemis, I won't be able to part with it, I just know I won't!'

Artemis and Rupert had known it too and, at a financial cost she could only speculate about, had put the arrangements into the hands of one of the most high-powered lawyers they could find.

The results had justified their actions.

‘With the help of a sworn statement from you, we're going to be allowed to take the baby home the day you leave hospital,' Artemis told her, her voice weak with relief. ‘And you still want me there with you when you go into labour, don't you?'

‘Yes, Artemis,' she said, trying not to think how different things would be if only it were Simon who was going to be with her. ‘Yes. Of course I do.'

On her last day before taking maternity leave, her colleagues at BBDO presented her with a lace baby shawl from Harrods and two exquisite layettes, one in pink and one in blue.

‘So one of them will be the right colour,' her account director had said jocularly as he made the presentation to her, ‘and if you have twins, and they are a boy and a girl, they'll both come in handy!'

Her waters broke that evening on the train midway between Charing Cross and Catford. Damp and in great discomfort she walked from Catford Bridge Station to the flat and then phoned Artemis.

Artemis's immediate reaction was to panic.

‘But why aren't you at the hospital?' she shrieked. ‘Why didn't you get a cab? Who's with you now?'

‘No one,' she said placatingly, ‘and I'm fine. It will probably be hours yet before I need to go to the hospital.'

‘You can't take the risk, Primmie! Not when you have no one with you! I want you to phone for a cab and go there now, right this minute. If I set off immediately, I should be there in a little over three hours.'

Knowing that it was useless to argue, Primmie hung up, made herself a cup of tea and seated herself on the edge of her bed to time the pains she had begun having.

They were coming quite strongly, every twenty minutes, and she realized that Artemis had been quite right in demanding that she got herself to the hospital as soon as possible.

‘Blimey, love. Don't yer 'ave anyone wiv you?' the cab driver asked, eyeing her enormous bulk with nervous eyes. ‘Coming now, is it?'

‘Yes, but not
right
now,' she said, trying to sound reassuring.

By the time they reached the hospital, she wasn't sure whether she'd been speaking the truth or not.

‘Don't worry love,' a hospital porter said cheerily as she gasped in pain. ‘I'll have you in Gynae in three seconds flat.'

‘I didn't think the pains would get so bad so quickly,' she said as he seated her in a wheelchair and began pushing her towards a lift. ‘It's my first baby and first babies usually take ages to come, don't they?'

‘Well, some do and some don't,' he said, as he wheeled her into the lift. ‘Which means some people are lucky, and some aren't.' He was ginger-haired and freckled and looked to be all of eighteen. ‘And you're probably going to be one of the lucky ones, see?'

His opinion was backed by the more knowledgeable opinion of the midwife who examined her.

‘My goodness, dear. You're dilating nicely already,' she said, taking off her thin rubber surgical gloves and binning them. ‘Now let's get you shaved whilst you're still relatively comfortable.'

All Primmie had been able to think of was that if her present condition was relatively comfortable she wasn't remotely looking forward to what was to follow.

An hour later, as she was transferred into the delivery room, she knew she'd been right to be worried. The pains were so frequent, and so deep, that it was impossible to breathe normally through them – and impossible not to cry out.

‘Come along, dear,' a different midwife was now saying to her. ‘You're almost fully dilated. There's not long to go now. Just imagine there's an orange in your vagina and that with every pain you're pushing it a little further out.'

It wasn't an image she found helpful. The pain was so intense, so unlike anything she had ever previously experienced, that she knew she was fast losing control.

‘Here's a little gas and air,' another voice said, putting a mask over her nose and mouth. ‘Now when the next pain comes, try and work with it.'

She tried to work with it and heard someone groaning as if they were being racked. As she realized that the person was herself, she became dimly aware of Artemis's voice some distance away, saying frantically, ‘But I
am
the husband! Or, at least, I'm here
instead
of the husband, because there isn't one and I promised Primmie I'd be with her!'

Whether Artemis was with her or not, Primmie neither knew nor cared. She was being split apart. Split in a way she knew she couldn't possibly survive.

‘Pant,' someone was saying urgently to her. ‘Pant!
Pant!
‘

Seconds later she heard herself scream and then there was a rushing, slithering sensation and instead of screaming she was crying with relief and joy as one of the midwives helped her to raise her head and she was able to look between her blood-smeared, sweat-sheened legs and see her baby.

Covered in mucus, it was kicking and crying, its blond hair clinging wetly to its skull.

‘Oh! Is it all right? Is it all right?' she demanded in a frenzy of anxiety.

‘
She
is perfect,' the midwife attending to the baby said. ‘Now just let me check her air passages and then you can hold her for a minute or two while we wait for the placenta to come away.'

Wrapped in a towel, her still bawling daughter was placed in her arms, and as she felt the weight of her against her breast, and looked down at her little crinkled face, she was filled with such love it seemed impossible to contain it.

There came the sound of someone entering the delivery room and seconds later Artemis was saying to her in reverent awe, ‘Is it a boy or a girl, Primmie?'

‘It's a girl, Artemis.'

With tears of emotion streaming down her face, Artemis looked down at the baby and said, ‘Please, may I touch her, Primmie? Please?'

Primmie nodded and Artemis bent down to gently cradle the now quiet baby.

‘And now you'll have to leave the room,' one of the midwives said to her, briskly. ‘We don't usually allow husbands to hold the baby at this stage, let alone girl friends.'

As Artemis reluctantly stood upright again, Primmie said in a voice raw with emotion, ‘Her name is Destiny, Artemis.'

‘Destiny?'

Incredibly, naming the baby had been something they had never discussed.

Primmie nodded. ‘Naming her is the one thing I can do for her, Artemis. And I like the name Destiny. It's unusual and special'

‘It's a beautiful name, Primmie.' Tears continued to stream down Artemis's cheeks. ‘And she's beautiful, Primmie. She's perfect.'

‘And you now
have
to leave,' the midwife said, running out of patience. ‘This is a delivery room, not a private ward.'

As Artemis finally did as she was told, the other midwife said chattily, ‘It's most unusual for anyone to have their best friend in the delivery room with them. Have the two of you always been so close?'

‘The four of us were always close,' Primmie said, too exhausted to care that she wasn't making much sense. ‘But now things are different.'

The midwife, accustomed to the disorientating effects of gas and air on her patients, lifted Destiny from her arms without asking her to explain herself.

Primmie, watching as Destiny's umbilical cord was cut, thought of just how different things now were. She thought of Kiki, at Cedar Court with Francis. She thought of Geraldine, in Paris. And she thought of Artemis, with whom her relationship would never be the same now that Destiny would grow up calling her ‘Mummy'.

Things were not merely different now – they had changed beyond all recognition. An era had ended and another era – one she found impossible to imagine – was about to begin.

It was the first day of spring and Primmie was making a mug of tea for the carpenter/odd-job man who was fitting new kitchen units for her. The units were a present to herself and one she had wanted for a long time, for years, in fact. When she had first moved back into her childhood home in order to look after her mother, the upheaval of having new kitchen units fitted had been more than her mother could face, and after her death Primmie simply hadn't had the heart to begin the refurbishment the run-down terraced house so badly needed.

Another reason she hadn't done so had been lack of money. New kitchen units, even bottom-of-the-range ones, weren't cheap. She switched on the radio as she waited for the kettle to boil, reflecting that, if she'd stayed on at BBDO, she would have been earning a very healthy salary by now and would have been able to buy solid wood units, not merely the functional plywood ones now being installed. Staying on at BBDO, gaining promotion to account director level, hadn't been an option, though, not once her mum's health had deteriorated to the point where she needed full-time nursing.

Afterwards, when her mother had died, she hadn't approached BBDO to see if they would re-employ her – and she hadn't approached any other advertising agencies either. Instead, she had taken a job as general office manager in a small import/ export company five minutes walk from her Rotherhithe home. It was a far cry from the glamour of advertising, but it suited her. Though not ill, her father was growing increasingly infirm and she preferred to go straight home after work, to make him a meal and to keep him company, rather than frequent glitzy wine bars with colleagues as she had done in her BBDO days – or as she had done if she hadn't been meeting Simon.

‘I like this song.' Ted Dove, who had been measuring a unit and the space it was to fit into, leaned back on his heels and stuck the pencil he had been using, behind his ear. ‘It's very gentle and somehow folksy.'

The interruption was both unexpected and deeply welcome. Over long, painful years she had schooled herself not to dwell on thoughts of Simon, and she refused to allow herself to do so now. Instead, she zeroed in on what was being played on the radio. It was ‘Mull of Kintyre'by Wings.

‘Yes,' she said, aware that the kettle was boiling and had probably been doing so for several minutes. ‘I've always liked Paul McCartney. I was a real Beatles fan when I was a teenager.'

‘Were you?' he began rifling through his battered tool-bag. ‘I was more of a Frankie Laine fan, myself. But then, I was a teenager in the early fifties, when teenagers weren't yet called teenagers – if you follow what I'm saying.'

She smiled to acknowledge that she did know what he was saying and poured boiling water into an already warmed teapot.

He withdrew an electric drill from his tool bag. ‘My late wife was the last person I saw do that,' he said, watching her. ‘Most ladies now use tea bags.'

The flare of shock she felt at his being a widower tempered her amusement at his use of the word ‘ladies'. He didn't look like a widower – his shirt was far too crisply ironed – and she wondered if he was living with a girlfriend. One thing she did know was that though he was engagingly friendly there was also something reassuringly respectful about him. As she'd contacted him via a card he'd placed in a sweetshop window, the latter realization had come as something of a relief.

‘Yer want ter be careful who you're getting, gel,' her dad had said to her, when she'd told him of how she'd found the carpenter who was going to put their kitchen in for them. ‘What if'e's one of these'ere cowboys?'

She'd had doubts herself, but his hourly rates had been so reasonable that she'd overcome them. Then, after she'd telephoned him and he'd come to the house to have a look at the size of the kitchen and to estimate how long the job would take him, she'd felt reasonably sure that she was safe in employing him.

He'd
looked
trustworthy, for one thing. And he'd had a nice manner.

He hadn't gone round her kitchen tut-tutting and shaking his head, saying that for a job such as hers he'd have to put his hourly rates up, and nor had he made her uncomfortable by trying to flirt with her. He'd simply told her how many days he thought the job would take and asked her when she would like him to start. Even more breathtakingly, he hadn't let her down. Two days ago he'd been there on the agreed morning and, as chunkily built as a boxer, his hair a thatch of thick curls, dressed in a short-sleeved chequered shirt and faded corduroy trousers, he had also looked remarkably neat and tidy.

Now, after the remark about her pleasantly old-fashioned way of making tea, he got on with his work without further chat, obviously happy at having the radio on for company.

As she got on with some ironing, doing it in the living room whilst her dad watched snooker on the television, it occurred to her that though she'd taken three days of her holiday time to be at home whilst he was putting the units in for her she really hadn't needed to do so.

‘Penny fer 'em,' her dad said, as Cliff Thorburn potted a blue into the centre pocket.

‘I was just thinking that I needn't have taken three days'holiday to be at home whilst the kitchen's being done – and that set me to thinking that we haven't made any arrangements for a holiday this year. What would you like to do, Dad? Would you like to go to Whitstable again, for a week?'

‘I'm'appy anywhere, gel, you know that. But what about you?

Don't yer want to go off somewhere exotic, with a couple of friends from work or somefink?'

‘My friends at work are all married, with families.'