He looked at her frightened face and spoke in the trademark calm tones he prided himself on. To everyone else he sounded bored stiff. “You are not dying, Maeve. Believe me. But I can’t get this baby out unless you help me. Let’s give another push, shall we?”
She didn’t argue. She hadn’t the breath in any case. Besides, he was the expert in the white coat. Nobody had argued with him in years.
“There’s a contraction coming now,” a trainee midwife said, watching the monitor.
“Right. Have the vacuum ready just in case.” But Mr Chapman thought he’d be able to manage without vacuum suction, which usually temporarily distorted the soft bones of the baby’s head. The parents always got a fright when their baby came out looking like an extra from Star Trek. “Okay, let’s give her some help.”
Everyone scurried around him. Maeve braced herself, holding on tight to her husband’s hand. He hadn’t said a word in ten minutes and his face was ashen. That was another thing that Mr Chapman had no truck with. Half the men didn’t want to be in the delivery room in the first place and, in his experience, half the women didn’t want them there either. They’d have been much more comfortable with another woman. But the men came because they had been told it was their rightful place, that their presence was necessary to make the event meaningful. Next thing, people would be encouraged to bring in any other children to witness the wonderful event, maybe even a couple of close relatives and the family dog.
It was all in danger of going too far, Mr Chapman sometimes thought. Not that he ever voiced these opinions. He would look like a dinosaur. Instead, he contented himself with banishing videocams from any of his deliveries, and only allowing photographs to be taken at the end. You wouldn’t believe what some people tried to photograph for the album.
“Oh, Christ,” Maeve moaned as the contraction swept over her.
“Let’s do it this time,” Mr Chapman said.
Helen, the chief midwife, went into action. She knew her stuff. She watched the monitor all the time as the contraction slowly peaked.
“Don’t push don’t push don’t push, Maeve, wait wait wait wait wait . . . okay, here we go, push push push, come on Maeve girl, PUSH PUSH PUSH!”
Everyone was screaming push, even the husband.
It was merely background noise to Mr Chapman, who had the baby’s head out. Now a shoulder, which popped out wetly. Mr Chapman eased the baby sideways and got the other shoulder free just as Maeve ran out of steam. But it was okay. A little gentle manoeuvring, a little pull, and the rest of the baby was in his hands. He held it up for Maeve to see. It started to cry – a thin, outraged wail at the brutality of it all, and Mr Chapman felt compassionate.
“A boy,” he said.
Maeve burst into tears. Her husband resisted, thank God.
Mr Chapman handed over the child to Helen, and quickly cut the cord. He never offered to let the father do this, as some doctors did. Ridiculous. They weren’t opening supermarkets. And what if something went wrong? What if the father mis-aimed and inadvertently stabbed his wife? You see! Those doctors never thought about that, did they?
Mr Chapman did. Most of his more sensible colleagues did. Some of them had been on the receiving end of solicitors’ letters for a lot less. Caution and accountability were the order of the day. It would strangle them all yet, Mr Chapman often thought sourly, this entire compensation culture. Oh, people expected them to work miracles, but they were not allowed to make a mistake. As if medicine were an exact science where nothing could ever go wrong.
Now he had the placenta out and had put two neat stitches into Maeve. She was oblivious to Mr Chapman, cradling her baby.
“Let’s have a look at the little fellow,” Mr Chapman said, preparing to leave. Maeve shyly held out the bundle, all gratitude now. The father was bursting with pride.
“He’s grand,” Mr Chapman said, looking at their shiny, smiling faces.
Little did they know what was ahead of them. Mr Chapman’s own three teenage sons should have been drowned at birth. Drinking and taking drugs and crashing cars, then coming to him looking for money. After all their fine education too, and all their mother’s hard work in trying to put manners on them. When they were twenty-one, he would buy each of them an apartment very far away and tell them to pack their bags.
It might have been different had they had girls, they often consoled themselves. But some said that girls were worse, far more devious than boys. They sucked up to you, smiled at you, gave you a hug before they went to bed. Next thing you know they’ve shinned down a drainpipe and are shagging the gardener. This had actually happened to a colleague of Mr Chapman’s.
And even if by some miracle your children turned out to be a credit to you, what kind of a world awaited them? One ruled by greed and jealousy, internal squabbling and political back-stabbing, Mr Chapman thought gloomily. Life was an endurance test until you amassed enough for a very comfortable retirement split between West Cork and a villa in Spain. And then you were too old and fat to enjoy it.
Mr Chapman had had plans when he was young. He was going to dedicate his career to groundbreaking research into birth defects, holed up in a laboratory paid for by meagre grants. Somehow the plan had changed. He couldn’t remember now how or when.
“Mr Chapman?”
“What?” he hurled over his shoulder as he briskly left the delivery ward. Nurses, doctors and interns reverentially stepped out of his way, like the Red Sea parting. Dr Doolan, a junior doctor, eventually caught up with him, a commendable feat given that he hadn’t slept since Monday.
“Two of yours have been admitted,” he panted. “One’s just started; the other looks like a false alarm.”
“Right. Don’t discharge the false alarm till I look at her.”
He hurried on. He had a lunch appointment with a member of the hospital board. He had issues about the closure of Martha’s to discuss with her. Like, how to pile more people into an already overloaded public healthcare system; how to manufacture extra beds where there was no staff to administer them. His sinus headache began to throb nicely behind his eyes.
Dr Doolan caught up with Mr Chapman again, like a terrier on its last legs.
“What about Emily Collins?”
“Emily Collins Emily Collins . . .”
“In Martha’s.”
“Oh. Yes. Emily Collins.” The threatened pre-eclampsia. He had meant to ring Martha’s this morning but had been caught in delivery for the past three hours.
“How’s she doing?”
“BP is still up.”
Mr Chapman sighed again. He had hoped to be able to tell them to discharge her.
“Haven’t we any bed here for her?” he said impatiently.
“We did an hour ago, but now . . .”
“God Almighty!” This didn’t bode well. Everybody had assured each other for the past two years that Martha’s could be seamlessly devoured by Cork. He would have to bring this up with the board. Again.
And he would have to drive up and see Emily Collins. He wouldn’t be satisfied otherwise. This meant that everything this afternoon would be pushed back. Another late night. Hannah would go mad. There was a golf do on at the club. She would just have to go on her own.
“Tell them I’ll be up around four.”
Dr Doolan looked very far away. He was in fact asleep.
“Dr Doolan,” Mr Chapman said sharply. “Go home.”
“Did you put a birthing chair down on your birth plan?” Maggie wanted to know.
“Not yet,” Emily conceded. She didn’t want to tell Maggie that she had yet to draw up a birth plan. Maggie’s seemed very elaborate, running to five pages of dense handwriting with two diagrams thrown in lest anything be open to confusion or question. She was making a change now with Tipp-ex and a red pen.
“I’m going to put down that if there’s no birthing chair available, I want extra pillows,” she confided. “Oh, hello, Auntie Paula!”
Auntie Paula was followed b
y several more relatives. Apparently the influx of Maggie’s relatives happened all day every day, according to Trish, who now took out a pack of cards and started playing by herself, very concentrated. Siobhan packed to go home. Emily put on her dressinggown and took to the corridors again.
There was a visitors’ room at the end of the floor; a dark, cheerless room with shabby chairs and a big poster on the wall that warned, Don’t Wait! Vaccinate! Someone had added a moustache to the pink-faced baby on the poster, and two rotten teeth.
Emily wondered why people felt the need to destroy things, to ruin them on an impulse.
She closed the door behind her and sat down. It was the first time she had been truly alone since she’d arrived here.
“Hello, baby,” she said, patting her belly. She liked to have conversations with the baby every now and then but not in front of other people. “It’s all a bit mad in here, isn’t it?”
The baby lay quietly, listening.
“Mr Chapman’s on his way,” she said. “He might let us out soon. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
She heard her own voice, false and forced, and wondered how she had become such a sham.
There must have been some definable point at which she had made a decision not to notice what was going on in her marriage. But these things were subconscious, weren’t they? Surely she didn’t consciously ignore the signs that Conor was having an affair? What did that say about her, after all?
Either way she was not coming to this fresh. There wasn’t the sharp, horrifying shock of a first discovery, no wordless trauma as though she had unexpectedly been hit a stunning blow. Hers was a feeling of dull realisation as the full impact of something coming for a while now hit her at last.
It was more painful in a way. She had colluded with it by her silence and her stark refusal to notice. In some ways she had gone along with her own betrayal, and in typical Emily fashion, had hoped that if she left well enough alone, it would all go away.
Not that Conor gave much away, in fairness to her. He was too careful, too considerate to leave any tawdry clues around that might hurt her. To come home with lipstick on his collar would be so ludicrous and crass. No credit-card receipts for Ann Summers in his pocket either. The mere notion!
No, what Emily had ignored was much subtler in some ways and more obvious in others. His increased preoccupation, for example, hard to spot in one so preoccupied anyway. His reluctance to just bloody talk about things that mattered. And her own vague unhappiness and loneliness, feelings that she assumed most married people took for granted once the first flush was over.
They had joked about these things in the beginning, those silly jokes that people make in their newly married smugness, and that lie there like time bombs to explode years later. “Don’t go kissing any boys now,” Conor would say when she left for a night on the tiles with Neasa. “And don’t you go filling Mrs Conlon’s sugar cup while I’m gone,” she would deliver as a riposte. Mrs Conlon-next-door was always coming around to borrow something. She was sixty if she was a day, and they had both thought this great gas. It wasn’t funny at all now.
Emily sat there in the dark visitors’ room in her long-buried knowledge, frozen and numb. She was denied those initial hot feelings of disbelief and anger. It would be very false of her to shout and scream hysterically, and throw things across the room. There wasn’t anything to throw anyway, except for the ancient television and she’d probably be billed for breaking that. She remembered now all those crappy late-night movies on the telly where the blissfully ignorant wife suddenly discovered a used condom in the back seat of the family saloon and had predictably gone ballistic, setting fire to the car before going after the wayward husband with a shotgun. Emily felt very jealous of these women now. But she suspected there were many more like her who, for a billion reasons, had known all along but had ruthlessly convinced themselves that there was nothing wrong.
Part of her wished fiercely that she hadn’t seen that concert programme. She might even have got away with it. They both would have. And that was the honest-to-God truth.
But it was the first and last piece of stark evidence – how she hated that word – that she simply couldn’t ignore. Not even her.
She thought about herself and her baby and her marriage, the safe existence she had painstakingly built for herself, the energy and commitment she had invested in everything, like a hard-working squirrel hoarding nuts for a comfortable winter. She even included the dogs in this scenario, and the house and the cappuccino-maker in the kitchen. She thought about all her hopes and dreams and expectations, and she felt the first stab of real rage at Conor for making her entire life seem so fake and contrived now, so worthless. As if he were God or something, free to dabble as he pleased. He had no consideration! That to Emily was a terrible sin.
She took a deep breath, looking at the grey walls of the visitors’ room. She supposed that this was where it would all happen later – the confrontation, the angst, the anger. It was, she thought, a wearying prospect. And it wasn’t as though there would be something nice at the end of it all, a little reward for putting them through the mill. No well done, let’s move on now even better than before. She didn’t know what was going to happen but none of it would be nice.
She supposed she should at least wait until Neasa rang with confirmation, and that’s all it would be. Perhaps she shouldn’t have involved Neasa in her sleuthing. Perhaps she should just have asked him straight out. But Emily was too precise, too hungry for order in her facts to do that. There was still that slim chance she was wrong and she would not accuse him in the wrong.
Also, she was terribly afraid that he would lie to her face. And that would somehow be worse. That would be unforgivable.
No, she wouldn’t play any cat-and-mouse games. They weren’t that kind of people. She didn’t even feel bad about snooping around behind his back, checking up on him. Honesty had already been a casualty in their marriage, long before any affair had reared its head.
He was at home on his own now, probably worrying and waiting for her to phone. She didn’t want to talk to him. But neither did she want to worry him. After all, this baby was fifty percent his.
Cold dread crept over her at this thought of ‘percentages’, like she was already mentally dividing things up. He had become separate from her already.
The baby had hiccups. Emily crossed her arms over her belly as far as they would go and knew that she had to be very careful about everything. She could not afford to be self-indulgent, neither of them could. It wasn’t just about them.
It was strange, she thought, how events had a way of outdoing each other. The loss of the partnership had paled into insignificance when the pre-eclampsia had reared its head. Now the affair had overridden that in a different way. What would it take to outdo the affair? Maybe if Conor dropped dead.
“Look at you! Sitting up grinning! I thought you were sick.” Liz had found her.
“Hello, Liz.” Emily tried to look welcoming. “You shouldn’t have come in – I told Conor to tell everyone that there was no panic.”
Her voice sounded perfectly normal. And she hadn’t even paused before she’d said Conor’s name.
“Of course I had to come in! Mammy’s very worried.” Oh, it was for their mother then.
“Tell her I’m fine.”
“Obviously.” Liz looked her up and down. “I thought it was pre-eclampsia?”
“They’re not really sure yet.” Emily felt like she had been repeating this piece of information all her life.
“Oh.” Liz looked even more like it was all a storm in a teacup.
“Where’s the gang then?”
“I left them with Eamon except for Willy here,” Liz said stoutly. “It’ll serve him right. And I gave them all a can of Coke before I left so they’ll be climbing the walls with caffeine.”
“And how’s Mammy?” Emily said, when it became obvious that her own health wasn’t going to be enquired after any time soon.
“I think it’s that new postman.”
“You can be so facetious sometimes about really serious things, Emily. Poor Mammy might be on the way out for all we know.”
“We’re all on the way out, Liz. Even little Willy there.”
Liz hugged Willy to her. “That’s a horrible thing to say!”
Emily didn’t see why. “He’ll have seventy good years first.”
“Maybe ninety,” Liz declared. “If he takes after Eamon’s father.”
“Let’s hope he doesn’t take after ours.”
Their father had died of a sudden heart attack ten years ago at the age of fifty-two. “It could have been worse,” their mother had said bravely.
Liz looked at Emily suspiciously. “Have they you on drugs?”
Expecting Emily Page 10