She backed away from the window in terror, and a sudden tightness in her chest and throat made it hard for her to breathe again. An instinctive need for protection made her run for the stairs, calling for Frank.
She didn’t stop to switch on the light, just flew down the stairs, forgetting in her panic that she was wearing only her nightdress. But as she reached the top of the last flight of stairs, her bare feet slipped on the worn carpet. She tried to stop herself falling by grabbing the banister but a sudden sharp pain in the arm she’d hurt earlier prevented her, and she toppled down the stairs.
Frank was sitting up in bed reading a book when he heard Fifi call his name. He threw back the covers immediately, sensing her panic, but even before he’d put his feet on the floor he heard the ominous sound, like a sack of coal falling down, thumping on each stair. He wrenched his door open just in time to see Fifi land at the bottom, her blonde hair bright against the floor in the dark hallway, arms and legs splayed out grotesquely.
The light came on just as he reached her, and Miss Diamond appeared at the top of the stairs in a long white nightgown. ‘Oh, my God!’ she exclaimed as she hurtled down the stairs towards them. ‘Why was she screaming?’ she asked. Then, bending down beside Frank, she pulled Fifi’s nightdress over her bare thighs. ‘She’s not dead, is she, Frank?’ she whispered.
Frank had enough knowledge of first aid to find Fifi’s pulse and tell his neighbour she was alive but had been knocked unconscious. ‘I’ll run and phone an ambulance,’ he said. ‘Stay with her, but don’t move her. If she comes round, talk to her and make her keep still. She’s having a baby, and that will probably be the first thing she asks about. I’ll bring a blanket for her after I’ve got my shoes and coat on.’
Nora Diamond sat on the stairs beside Fifi while she waited for Frank to come back from the phone, all her usual composure gone. To her, the awkward way the girl had landed suggested serious injuries, and with her husband in hospital too, things couldn’t look blacker for the young couple.
Nora rarely took to anyone young, but she had to these two. They were a warm couple, always smiling and joyful, yet not noisy or dirty in their habits like so many of the previous tenants. She wished Fifi had told her she was pregnant, then she wouldn’t have shouted at her this morning. She felt awful that she’d assumed the vomiting she’d heard was a result of drinking the night before.
What could have frightened Fifi tonight? Was it just being alone without Dan during the storm, or something more? Would she have been sympathetic if Fifi had come to her for comfort?
Deep down she doubted it. She had gone to bed early with a book and she always hated being disturbed. In fact, had she realized Fifi’s sickness this morning was due to pregnancy, she would almost certainly have been alarmed at the prospect of crying babies above her head, or wet nappies hanging in the bathroom. The chances were she’d already have been planning a letter to the landlord asking him to evict the couple well before the birth.
But now, as she looked down at the beautiful girl lying at her feet, seemingly lifeless, for the first time in many years she felt ashamed of her bitterness and intolerance.
At Fifi’s age she’d been just like her, vivacious, enthusiastic, warm and generous, despite having been orphaned at the age of eight and sent away by her guardians to boarding school. She had been popular with both teachers and pupils all through her schooldays, and though her guardians were distant and chilly, she was shown a great deal of affection by her schoolfriends’ parents who often invited her to their homes for the holidays.
If she had fallen in love with anyone but Reggie Soames she might have stayed that way. But she married him at twenty-two, refusing to listen to all who suggested he was only interested in her sizable inheritance. But it turned out that they were right. Reggie was not only a womanizing fortune hunter but a swindler, a thief and a liar. The war made it all too easy for him to fool her. While she was tucked away in Dorset, doing her bit for the war effort, growing vegetables and helping out at the local hospital, she really believed Reggie was doing top secret work for the War Office.
In fact he was using her inheritance to support his playboy life-style in London. While she was worrying that he could be in terrible danger in Germany, he was gambling and drinking away her money, sleeping with other women and laughing up his sleeve at her naivety.
It was only when the war ended, and he showed no sign of returning permanently to Dorset, that she began to be a little suspicious. She had got to know many other women with husbands involved in secret war work, but they were all coming home and settling down again. She tackled him about it when she found she was pregnant, and he promised that he would be back for good within the month.
He never returned.
She found out then that he had forged her signature on her trust fund and plundered it. The family jewellery was gone from the safe deposit box, and every penny had been cleared from the bank account. She lost her baby when angry creditors began calling on her.
A great deal more happened before she ended up here in Dale Street, but she knew it was the loss of her baby which started the fundamental change in her nature. The girls who worked under her, neighbours and even local shopkeepers were intimidated by her, and that was how she wanted it.
The funny thing was that Fifi and Dan were the only people who didn’t seem nervous of her. On many an occasion they had knocked on her door and asked if she needed anything when they were going to the shops, and they’d invited her up to their flat to see how they had decorated it. Dan had mended her coffee table when the leg broke off, and Fifi often invited her up for a cup of tea when he was working late. Nora told herself it was only good manners to accept these invitations from time to time, but it was more than that really. She had wanted the couple to stay at number 4 because she liked and trusted them.
Whatever the outcome at the hospital tonight, Nora had no doubt they would move on now, and that both saddened and frightened her. Since they moved in she had felt happier, less aware of all she had lost. And they had become the closest she could get to family.
‘Are we feeling better now, Mrs Reynolds?’
Fifi opened her eyes and looked at the nurse bending over her. She was West Indian, her plump face shiny like a conker.
‘Better than what?’ she asked with some difficulty as her mouth was as dry as a desert. She knew she was in a hospital, she remembered Frank telling her she was in an ambulance with him because she’d fallen down the stairs, and later being examined by a doctor.
Yet she was confused by seeing it was daylight now. It seemed as if there was a great deal of time unaccounted for.
‘Any pain?’ the nurse asked, and offered her a drink of water from a cup with a spout. ‘You had a little operation, you see, you’ve just come round from the anaesthetic.’
Fifi mentally checked herself. She seemed to be aching all over, but she supposed she would if she’d fallen down the stairs.
‘Not real pain, just aches,’ she said. ‘Did I break something?’
‘I’m afraid so, your right wrist,’ the nurse said. ‘Can’t you feel the plaster?’
Fifi looked down and saw the plaster cast lying across her chest, her fingers coming out of the end looking swollen and discoloured. She wiggled them and felt a stab of pain run up her arm, but she thought she’d got off lightly if that was the extent of her injuries. ‘What about the baby?’ she asked, almost as an afterthought.
When the nurse hesitated Fifi became wide awake immediately. ‘Have I lost it?’
‘I’m so very sorry, Mrs Reynolds,’ the nurse said in her curious sing-song voice. ‘I’m afraid you miscarried and we had to give you a D and C too. But your husband will be coming down to see you soon, he’ll tell you all about it.’
Fifi was too stunned to say anything. She closed her eyes and allowed the nurse to assume she was falling asleep again.
So she’d lost her baby, and what hadn’t come away naturally had been scraped away. A
nd who would mourn that little life? Her parents hadn’t welcomed it, she hadn’t even welcomed it herself, not at first. Dan was the only person who was one hundred per cent joyful about it.
So why was it that when she could barely feel the plaster on her arm, she could feel her heart breaking?
Dan was brought to her bedside later in a wheelchair. When she heard him say her name she opened her eyes to see his swimming in tears.
‘They didn’t tell me till this morning that you’d been brought in,’ he said brokenly. ‘They wouldn’t bring me to you then because they said you were having an operation. I thought it must be on your broken wrist. They only told me an hour ago that you’d lost the baby.’
Fifi wept then, and Dan moved his wheelchair closer so he could hold her and cry with her.
Later Fifi tried to tell him how it had all come about: falling down in the street, her fright at the storm, and finally seeing Alfie on the garden wall.
‘I suppose I must have thought he was coming to hurt me,’ she finished up. ‘But I don’t really remember what I thought, or what happened after. Apart from Frank being in the ambulance with me.’
‘Frank came to see me this morning, just after they told me you’d been brought in last night,’ Dan said. ‘He looked rough, I think he’d been here all night, and they didn’t want to let him in as it wasn’t visiting hour, but he insisted. He said that the first thing you said when you came round in the ambulance was that Alfie was on the back wall.’
‘I suppose you both think I imagined that,’ she said tearfully. ‘But I didn’t, I saw him as clear as day in a flash of lightning. Why would he climb along that wall in a thunderstorm unless it was for something bad?’
‘Frank doesn’t think you imagined it. He was going home to check if the honeysuckle that grows up on the wall was trampled on. But Alfie was probably only doing a bit of peeping Tom. He couldn’t hope to get into the house that way, Frank keeps his back door locked and bolted. But Frank told me that you came back from Bristol on Friday night, not Saturday. Why didn’t you tell me that, Fifi?’
Fifi was sorry he had to learn it through Frank, but she supposed she’d have had to tell him eventually.
‘Because I had a row with my mum and I didn’t want you to worry about it.’
She saw in his face that he knew the row was about him. ‘I hope she’ll be proud of herself when I ring her to tell her what’s happened to you.’
‘She didn’t make it happen.’
‘She let you come home all upset and alone,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me that wasn’t the start of it all, because I know it was. You weren’t yourself yesterday, I knew something had upset you. And now we’ve lost our baby, and that’s going to take longer for you to get over than breaking your wrist.’
Dr Hendry came back the following morning to see Fifi and found her feeling very sorry for herself. He wasn’t surprised; she probably hadn’t slept well because of the pain in her wrist, and her body was bruised and battered. But it was clear to him that her aches and pains were secondary to losing her baby.
‘It wasn’t a planned baby,’ she blurted out to him, almost as if she felt she had miscarried as a kind of judgment. ‘I’d only just started to feel glad about it. What was wrong with me that I lost my grip in a thunderstorm? Aren’t pregnant women supposed to stay calm and protect their baby from harm?’
Hendry was over sixty, and in half a lifetime of medicine he’d seen many women blaming themselves this way after losing a child.
‘My experience is that miscarriages happen regardless of how well cared for the mother is,’ he said gently. ‘I’ve seen women deliver healthy babies after far worse accidents than yours, and, contrary-wise, lose them for no apparent reason at all. You mustn’t blame yourself, Mrs Reynolds, and there is absolutely no reason to suppose that in a few months’ time you can’t carry another baby to full term.’
He went on to say he wanted to keep her in under observation for a week.
‘I can’t stay here that long,’ Fifi exclaimed in horror. ‘Dan’s going home tomorrow and he needs someone to look after him.’
Hendry had already spoken to Dan Reynolds, and although he knew about the vicious attack, and that this attractive young couple didn’t live under the best of conditions, he had to smile at Mrs Reynolds’ belief her husband couldn’t cope without her. To him, Dan Reynolds looked the type to sail through any amount of disasters and still keep smiling and cracking jokes.
‘Your husband doesn’t strike me as the kind of man who needs looking after, but anyway, we’re going to keep him in for another day or two,’ he said. ‘You’ve both had too much to cope with all at once – you need rest before you start trying to get back to normal.’
On Monday afternoon Fifi lay in the hospital bed waiting for Dan to visit her. It had rained heavily all day on Sunday, but the sun was shining again now, showing up the rain-smeared windows. She’d grown used to the weight of the plaster on her arm, though not to washing her face or cleaning her teeth with her left hand. But the loss of her baby was just as raw; each time she put her hand on her stomach she was reminded that there was no little person growing in there any more.
She knew now that her ward was a gynaecology ward, all twelve women either waiting for an operation, hysterectomies in the main, or recovering from one. The youngest patient was eighteen; she had come over to talk to Fifi and said she had a cyst on one of her ovaries which they’d be operating on tomorrow. The oldest was in her sixties.
As Fifi had never been in hospital before she had no way of knowing whether this ward was better or worse than other kinds, but one of the nurses had said it was her favourite as the patients were usually cheerful and rarely desperately ill.
Fifi had wondered whether that was a gentle way of telling her to buck up and be jolly because she wasn’t ill, but she couldn’t summon the will to chat or laugh as most of the other women were doing. Frank had visited her the previous evening with Yvette, bringing the nightdress, dressing-gown and toiletries Fifi had asked Miss Diamond to get for her. Frank had brought some flowers from his garden and a box of Roses chocolates, Yvette some glossy magazines and a little bottle of flowery-smelling French cologne. They had brought get-well cards from various people in the street, and Stan had put together a little basket of fruit. Miss Diamond had written on her card that she would be happy to help Fifi with dressing and anything else she couldn’t do one-handed when she got home, and that if she wanted any shopping she had only to give Frank a list.
It was very touching to see so many people cared about her and Dan, yet all the fussing, questions and attention just made Fifi feel worse. She thought she would give anything to be tucked away in a room by herself, where the only visitor was Dan.
The ward door opened and visitors came surging through, smiling and waving as they spotted their mother, wife, sister or friend.
All at once Fifi saw her mother and father among them. She could hardly believe her eyes, for they were the last people she’d expected to visit.
Her father normally wore an old tweed jacket with his pipe tucked into the breast pocket, corduroy trousers and brown leather brogues, and he looked right in them. But today he was wearing what he considered to be his best suit, a dark grey pinstripe. Fifi and Patty had always sniggered about it behind his back for it was a wartime style with wide lapels and very baggy trousers.
That he’d chosen to wear it to visit her was an indication of his state of mind, for he only ever dressed up when he was anxious about something.
Her mother was dressed up too, in a pale blue costume with high heels, gloves and a boater-style straw hat. But this was quite normal for her when she went out for the day.
Fifi didn’t know how she felt about them coming. She’d told Dan not to ring them, but clearly he’d done so anyway.
‘You poor darling,’ Clara exclaimed, swooping over to the bed in a flamboyant display of maternal affection. ‘What a terrible ordeal you’ve been through. We are s
o sorry.’
‘Why are you?’ Fifi asked sharply. She thought her mother had to be the most insincere woman on the planet. ‘You should be glad there is no baby any more.’
‘Don’t be like that,’ her father said testily. ‘Your mother’s been distraught ever since Dan phoned.’
‘I’m surprised she could even bring herself to speak to him,’ Fifi said sullenly.
‘It was me who spoke to him,’ her father said reprovingly. ‘And I’m sure Dan will assure you that I was very upset to hear about your fall and the subsequent miscarriage. If we’d got the call earlier yesterday we would have come right away.’
‘If only you hadn’t run off in a huff on Friday,’ Clara butted in, ‘this might not have happened.’
‘What you should be saying is, “If only I hadn’t been so nasty to you”,’ Fifi corrected her. ‘I’m a married woman now. If you can’t accept Dan and try to like him, then I don’t want anything to do with you.’
‘I understand how you feel,’ her father said quickly, glancing at his wife as if warning her not to retaliate. ‘But you must try and understand what you put us through by getting married in secret. We couldn’t help but think badly of Dan, it was all so furtive. However, when I spoke to him on the telephone yesterday I was pleasantly surprised by how sensitive he is, and it was obvious to me that he loves you. So I’m very sorry I misjudged him and in future I shall try to get to know him better.’
Fifi was very glad to hear that, but she could see by her mother’s tight expression that this wasn’t a joint change of heart. ‘Well, perhaps you could start by going to see him while you are here?’ she said.
‘Of course we will,’ her father said. ‘I was going to suggest to him that you both come home to recuperate when you leave the hospital. You are going to find it quite hard going without the use of your right hand, and Patty and the boys will be delighted to see you and help you.’
A Lesser Evil Page 17