The Importance of Being Seven (14 page)

That same Saturday morning, Elspeth Harmony was still in bed at 9.30 a.m. when Matthew left for the gallery. She was not feeling well, but had not told him so, as she did not want him to make a fuss. Pregnancy, she thought, should not be something that people made such a fuss about.

‘You don’t need to get up,’ he said brightly, when he came in to kiss her goodbye before going to the gallery. ‘Spend the day in bed if you want. I’m sure rest is good for you.’

She smiled wanly. Perhaps she should have told him that today was the day she was due to have her three-month scan at the hospital, but if she had done that, again he would have made such a song and dance about it. It was far better to get things like that over and done with, rather than to have anxious husbands getting in the way.

She knew, of course, that this was not the way most people thought. The current view was that men should be almost as involved in the pregnancy as women, going to classes with their wives or partners, discussing childbirth options, doing exercises together. She did not hold with this at all; she had no objection to the idea that Matthew would be with her at the delivery – that was perfectly reasonable – but she did not necessarily want him interfering in everything that went before that. Morning sickness was unpleasant, but did it really have to be shared with one’s husband? And as for medical examinations, those, it seemed to her, should be something between the doctor and the patient, and not to be participated in by others.

She had known for six weeks now that she was pregnant. Matthew
had known for almost as long, and had, as she had feared, moved rapidly from euphoria to neurosis over the whole thing. To begin with, he had tried to get her to stop drinking either tea or coffee in case the foetus was adversely affected by caffeine. Then he had removed all the shampoo from the flat after he had read somewhere that hair products contained chemicals that were dangerous for pregnant women.

‘Listen, Matthew,’ she had eventually said. ‘I know that you’re excited about this baby, but you really must let me go through this pregnancy on my terms. Obviously I’m going to be careful, but you can’t wrap me in cotton wool – not for the next six months!’

He looked hurt. ‘I wasn’t trying to wrap you in cotton wool. I was simply trying to …’

She reached out and took his hand. ‘Of course. Of course. You spoil me, my darling – you really do. But I’m quite robust, you know!’

‘I just want our baby to be … to be …’

‘Of course. And he will be. Or she. He’ll be strong and healthy, just like his daddy.’

Matthew grinned. He liked to be called Daddy; and it would almost definitely be the baby’s first word. Mummy would be the second one, following shortly after that. Of course Edinburgh babies were sometimes surprisingly sophisticated. He had read recently of an Edinburgh baby whose first word had been olive. That was very advanced. Glasgow babies were advanced too. He had heard of one whose first word was bevvy. Referring to milk, of course.

Matthew was already beginning to think of the baby’s future. ‘We must plan,’ he said. ‘We’ve got six months to get it right.’

She had laughed at this. ‘Oh, surely not, Matthew. You don’t need to have everything in place by the time the baby arrives. We’ve got years and years to sort things out.’

Matthew had become quite animated. ‘Not so! Not so! Babies creep up on you – or crawl perhaps. Then suddenly you discover that there are all sorts of decisions you should have made much earlier. Believe me, Elspeth, you have to plan these things.’

She had looked at him in astonishment. Was this the sort of
father that Matthew was about to become? ‘So what are you thinking of, then?’ she asked. ‘Give me an example.’

Matthew shrugged. ‘There’s so much. Disposable or non-disposable nappies. Feeding …’ He trailed off. ‘Well, I know you’re going to laugh at this, but I was thinking of putting his name down for Muirfield. If he’s a boy, that is.’

Elspeth gasped. ‘For that golf club? Oh really, Matthew! You must be joking.’

Matthew laughed. ‘Actually, I was. But there are some things we need to decide.’

‘All in good time,’ said Elspeth. ‘And anyway, we don’t know whether he’s a boy or a girl. There’s no point in doing anything until we know that.’

This exchange had been followed by a discussion as to whether it was better to know or not to know. Elspeth, being practical, felt that it might be useful to be told whether it was a boy or a girl, but Matthew thought it would be better not to know. Elspeth understood; the point that he was making was about the mystery of the whole process. It seemed to her astonishing that new life could be created in this way – it was such an astonishing miracle: all those cells, millions and millions of them, falling into place after a moment of contact between two people. It was a miracle of the most profound nature. And yet, miracle or not, there were ordinary questions that needed to be resolved. The colour of the nursery was one.

Clothing was another. On that subject, Matthew had already commented.

‘If you look at portraits of children in Dutch seventeenth-century art,’ he said, ‘you’ll see that boys wore skirts until they were six or seven. That made things simpler.’

‘But our child, Matthew, is going to be a twenty-first-century Scottish child.’

‘Of course he is. I didn’t mean that we should dress him in skirts. Although that would put him in touch with his inner girl, I suppose.’

They both laughed. ‘What will we call him?’ Matthew went on. ‘If he’s a boy? I’ve always liked the name Dunstaffnage, you know. It’s a place near Oban. But it could also be a boy.’

‘No,’ said Elspeth. ‘It never helps to be named after a geographical feature.’ Some of the Steiner parents might be reminded of that, she thought. Waterfall’s mother, for example. Or Tarn’s father. ‘Let’s choose something simple. Children with simple names are never embarrassed about them. How about Jamie?’

Matthew looked doubtful. ‘Jamie’s fine,’ he said. ‘But if he’s called Jamie he’s going to end up being a particular sort, if you know what I mean. He’ll play rugby, he’ll go to New Town bars after the international matches. Being called Jamie signs you up to an awful lot of Scottish upper-middle-class stuff.’

Elspeth thought that their child, whatever and whoever he was, was signed up to that already, just by being their child. We’re all signed up, she thought. Matthew for what he is, for what his father signed him up for; me for … for motherhood. And that lasts forever. Forever. For the rest of your life, you’re a mother, whatever happens.

Matthew phoned Elspeth shortly after he arrived for work in the gallery. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’ he asked. ‘You mustn’t overdo things, you know. Not in your condition.’

She sighed, and looked at her watch. He had only been out of the house for twenty minutes; surely he must think her capable of looking after herself for that length of time. But then she thought how fortunate she was to have a husband who cared, even if he cared rather too much. Dear Matthew; solicitousness was a good quality, in general, particularly in a world where selfishness was so common.

She felt a bit too queasy to have much breakfast, but forced herself to eat a couple of oatcakes and drink a cup of black coffee. So far she had experienced no cravings of the sort that she knew might come in pregnancy, although when she had been in the supermarket a few days earlier she had found herself looking with sudden and unexpected longing at a tempting punnet of
straw berries. As pregnancy cravings went, strawberries were innocuous enough; she had read of people gnawing coal, of all things, or wanting to sprinkle powdered ginger on everything.

After the oatcakes and coffee she walked up India Street and along Heriot Row, to catch a taxi on the corner of Dundas Street. Her destination was the Infirmary, where her scan was due to take place at half past ten that morning. The thought of seeing her baby, whom she now imagined as a tiny flutter of life within her, was strangely exciting. She was not sure whether to look, given that they had decided not to know what sex the baby was, but surely a little glimpse would give nothing away – not at this stage of development.

That would be a very significant moment – the first sight of the child who would dominate her life day in day out for the next how many years – eighteen? What would she say? What could anyone say in such circumstances? She would cry, she suspected – she would cry from sheer joy.

At the hospital, a large complex of buildings on the outskirts of the city, she was directed to a waiting area. A sympathetic nurse took her details and gave her a form to sign, and she was then offered a seat. There were magazines and newspapers; she looked at the front page of a paper, but could not concentrate.

Her consultant appeared and called out her name. She had seen him once already, when she had first learned she was pregnant, and she had taken an immediate liking to him. He was a man in his late fifties, with a quiet, reassuring voice. He had heavy, black-rimmed glasses that seemed to add to the impression he gave of being in complete control of what was happening to her.

A nurse came to her side and watched as the consultant spread the gel on the probe. ‘It might feel a little bit cold,’ the nurse said. ‘But only for a moment.’

Elspeth tried to smile, but she was nervous. So much more of this lay ahead, she thought; so many indignities; indignity and pain and surrender to the pokings and proddings of nurses and doctors. She looked up at the ceiling, at the harsh light shining down upon her. That is what her baby would see when it came into the world – harsh light and strange faces peering down at him or her. And
sounds too; how strange to be taken from a world of gurgles and thumping – the world of fluids and heartbeat – out into the cacophony of a hospital. No wonder there were people who wished it had never happened; perhaps they remembered, after all, those first few minutes and regretted them.

The consultant moved the probe. ‘I’m just going to take a wee look at baby now,’ he said. ‘We’ll get a picture in a moment, if you want to look at the screen.’

She felt the smooth surface of the instrument against her skin. She closed her eyes.

The consultant said something to the nurse, and an adjustment was made to the machine.

‘There we are,’ said the consultant. ‘And …’

He stopped. She waited for him to continue, but he did not. She felt the probe glide over her stomach. It had warmed up now from contact with the skin and all she felt was a very slight pressure. Within her, as if reacting to the intrusion upon his privacy, the baby moved.

‘I’m just going to move this a little bit,’ said the consultant. ‘Nothing to worry about – oh …’

‘Is everything all right?’ Elspeth asked. The conversation between the consultant and the nurse had unsettled her. What was there to see? An abnormality?

The consultant cleared his throat. ‘Well, I do have a bit of news for you. There’s more than one baby, Elspeth. There are … two, I do believe. Oh … Is that another? Three. You’re expecting triplets.’

Elspeth gave a little cry. ‘Twins?’

The nurse reached out to take her hand. ‘No, triplets. Three babies.’

Elspeth closed her eyes. She could not think of what to say, and so simply sighed.

‘It’s a bit of a shock, I should imagine,’ said the consultant. ‘But you’re young and healthy. Fortunately.’

‘Three,’ said Elspeth, her voice sounding small and distant.

‘A ready-made family,’ said the consultant. ‘So there we are.’

Elspeth began to cry. She was not sure why, but it was what she
felt she had to do. ‘I’m sorry,’ she sobbed. ‘I know I should be grateful, but it’s just that we were thinking of one baby, and now there are three, and I really don’t know how I’m going to cope …’

The consultant switched off the machine. ‘Well, I understand all that,’ he said. ‘But, you know, I suspect that you’ll rise to the occasion. People usually do, and are often very grateful for triplets at the end of the day.’

Elspeth took the tissue that the nurse offered her and blew her nose. ‘Maybe …’

‘That’s the spirit,’ said the consultant. He now became businesslike. ‘I’ll need to see you a bit more often than would otherwise have been the case. So we’ll set up an appointment for a month’s time and see how things are going.’

Elspeth got down off the couch. Suddenly she felt very heavy. Three babies. Not one; three. Three names to be chosen, or, if they had two names each, six names altogether.

‘I’ve changed my mind about not knowing,’ she said to the consultant. ‘I’d like to know now. Are they girls or …’

‘Boys,’ he said, smiling. ‘You’re having three boys.’

The nurse was hesitant to allow Elspeth Harmony to leave in a state of shock. ‘You can stay here for a couple of hours,’ she said. ‘Get your breath back, so to speak. Or get your hus … I mean, a friend …’ She stopped herself; years of official hectoring that staff should not make assumptions about marital status had had its effect. You should not mention husbands, the advice ran. Many women don’t have them.

In her emotionally charged state, Elspeth was in no mood for such scruples. ‘I’ve got a husband,’ she blurted out. ‘Some people still have them, you know.’

The nurse looked apologetic. ‘Of course.’

Having assured the nurse she was capable of getting home, Elspeth left the hospital and caught a taxi that had just discharged its passengers at the hospital door. She sat back in her seat and watched the city go past: the Dalkeith Road with its acres of flats; the Commonwealth Pool; Arthur’s Seat off to the east like a great crouching lion. Three, she thought. Three boys. Three boys.

Suddenly she felt overcome by weariness. I am tired, she thought, and I’ve hardly even started. How shall I feel when the boys are back home and crying at night? What if they wake up at different times – which is perfectly possible, indeed inevitable? Or will their hours of wakefulness be co-ordinated by some strange synchronicity, that odd biological phenomenon that made people want to march in step, or feel hungry at the same time? There was certainly something in synchronicity, even if one declined to explore its more exotic edges – those unsettling instances where events happen in such a way as to suggest a causal link. Jung talked of that, of course, and wrote about discussing a scarab with a patient, turning round, and seeing a scarab at the window …

No, this was not the time to think about such matters. This was the time to think about what she would say to Matthew. Good news, Matthew, it’s triplets! Or something less Pollyanna-ish. Matthew, we have a tiny bit of a challenge ahead of us … Three of them, to be precise.

She wondered whether the shock might be mitigated by the news that the triplets were boys. She had suspected that Matthew had been secretly hoping for a boy – there had been those references to rugby and to the possibility of acquiring the baby a debenture seat at Murrayfield, strong clues by any standards, but there had also been the use of the male pronoun, another clue, perhaps. But even if Matthew was hoping for a son, one could not, by extension, assume that he was contemplating three. Three, as Oscar Wilde might have remarked, sounds rather like carelessness.

For her part, Elspeth had been hoping for a daughter. One daughter, to start with, and then perhaps another, with a son somewhere along the way as well. Girls were undoubtedly easier than boys … The conventional wisdom was certainly that girls were less physically
demanding than boys, as they played happily with their dolls and dolls’ houses, re-enacting domestic events in apparently complete contentment, for hours, whereas boys seemed to have an endless appetite for physical activity. Matthew, she remembered, had a friend with three boys, each an unremitting dynamo of activity. ‘Such nice boys,’ he said, ‘but when they were small I saw his moustache droop further and further from sheer exhaustion. It’s picked up again, though, now that the boys are older and less physically rumbustious.’

She stopped. It was so easy to be caught up with stereotypes. Were girls really easier, or was that just the way we thought of them? She did a mental roll-call of the children she had taught at the Steiner School – Bertie, Hiawatha, Pansy, Tofu, Olive … Olive gave her pause for thought. What a manipulative little piece of work she had been, with her constant playing off of one classmate against another. And poor Bertie, who only wanted to be left in peace, being ruthlessly hounded by Olive at every turn. It really was too much. Bertie, of course, being the boy that he was, tolerated it, but for Elspeth Harmony it had eventually proved insupportable and she had pinched Olive sharply on the ear, thereby bringing her career as a teacher to a premature end.

That, of course, was utterly unfair, and, as the taxi turned the corner at East Preston Street and began to trundle down South Clerk Street, she smarted at the memory. Teachers put up with constant, unremitting provocation and were expected to have the patience of saints. Well, they were human, and if every so often their human tempers showed then the self-same parents who had produced such ill-behaved offspring would launch a tirade of self-righteous complaints. What were teachers to do? Well, she had resigned – admittedly before she was pushed – and many others were thinking of doing exactly the same thing. Which meant the schools would become worse, with not very well-trained teachers taking over from those with more experience. Thus the culture spiralled downwards …

No, girls could be manipulative and every bit as trying as boys. Girls kept arguments going and loved using psychological warfare to achieve their aims; boys might be pugilistic at times, but they did not bear grudges to the same extent as girls. So three girls,
while not as physically demanding as three boys, could be even more psychologically exhausting. She sighed, and, as the taxi reached Surgeons’ Hall, began to cry.

The taxi driver looked in his mirror. He was a driver of the old school – part social worker, part psychologist, witness and confidant to a thousand secrets.

‘You all right?’

‘Yes.’

Having picked her up at the Infirmary, he knew.

‘Are you going to live?’ It was a risky question; the answer might well have been no.

‘Yes, I’m going to live.’

‘So it’s not that bad, is it, hen?’

He looked again in the mirror and winked. He was right. Of course it was not that bad.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s not. It’s just that … just that I’m going to have triplets.’

He was silent for a moment. ‘Oh, michty!’ he said. ‘I was wrong. It
is
bad!’