The Girl by the River

by Sheila Jeffries

  A late red rose was hanging over the wall. He sniffed its fragrance, and immediately sensed the presence of a bright spirit. A blaze of light. A smile. A scent of honeysuckle. A pair of wise, familiar eyes. Granny Barcussy! His beloved Gran who had died when he was a child. Freddie looked at Lucy, wondering if she had seen her too, but he was pretty sure she hadn’t.

  ‘Let the flowers do the talking,’ said Granny Barcussy, and he felt her touch his arm. Then she vanished into the light, leaving him a feeling of warm acceptance. Had she led him towards that red rose?

  He put Lucy down and looked into her eyes. ‘You pick Mummy some flowers.’ He took a penknife from his pocket, opened it and neatly cut the red rose. ‘No – wait a minute,’ he said, as Lucy held out her hand for it. ‘Let Daddy trim the prickles off.’

  Smiling now, Lucy waited while he neatly shaved the prickles from the stem, and gave her the rose. Freddie watched her staring at it and he sensed that the vibrant life in the flower was radiating love and warmth. Lucy darted all over the garden, picking Michaelmas daisies, sprigs of mint and rosemary. She arranged them round the red rose and brought him the posy. ‘Some string, Daddy?’

  ‘Ah – string.’ Freddie rummaged in the depths of his jacket pocket and found a grubby curl of white string. ‘That do?’

  Lucy nodded, beaming. ‘You tie it, Daddy,’ and she put the posy down on the broad back of the lion he had carved from Bath stone.

  ‘This is a reef knot,’ he told her as he tied the stems together. ‘Left over right and right over left. It’s strong, see?’

  ‘You are clever, Daddy,’ Lucy looked at him adoringly, her eyes shining now. Freddie felt energised by her joy. He fished in his pockets again, wanting to see Lucy’s eyes shine even brighter.

  ‘There you are – a silver sixpence for the baby, and a silver shilling for you. Don’t lose it now.’

  Lucy gasped. ‘Thank you, Daddy!’ She flashed him a smile and ran into the house, clutching the flowers and the coins. Freddie strode after her, pleased to see her white-blonde curls bouncing as she ran. He couldn’t describe the magic of making Lucy happy. It was a blessing in his life.

  He followed her upstairs, smiling as he listened to Kate’s cheerful voice. Lucy was on the bed, curled against her mother, and she had dumped the posy on Kate’s heart. Sally was walking around with the new baby in her arms.

  ‘We’ve got to choose a name,’ she said, looking down at the baby with her eyes full of tears. Old tears, thought Freddie. Tears for Ethie!

  ‘Who is she like?’ he asked.

  Sally didn’t hesitate. ‘Ethie,’ she said. ‘I saw it straight away. It’s like – like she IS Ethie, reborn. Ethie was exactly like this, and a difficult birth. So why not call her Ethie? It’s short for Etheldra.’

  ‘No,’ said Freddie and Kate together, and Freddie bit back the comment that burned on his tongue. He felt the name Ethie would be a curse on the new little baby.

  ‘What do you think, dear?’ Kate asked him, and he noticed that her face was suddenly pale, her eyes half closed.

  ‘Something plain and simple,’ Freddie said. He watched the tiny baby who was staring at him over Sally’s shoulder, her pale blue eyes burning with intensity. ‘Tessa,’ he said. ‘How about that?’

  ‘Hmm. Tessa. We haven’t got a Tessa in the family,’ Sally said. ‘We could call her Tessie for short.’

  ‘What do you think, Kate? – KATE!’ Freddie turned to look at Kate, shocked to see her eyes closed, her face drained of colour, her eyelids blue, her sweet lips unmoving. He took her hand. It was limp. ‘KATE! Something’s wrong. Call Dykie up.’

  ‘Mummy’s asleep,’ said Lucy firmly.

  Everything happened quickly. Dykie came running up the stairs. ‘You take Lucy downstairs, Sally – and the baby – for now. And you, Freddie – best leave the room,’ she said, but Freddie stayed close, holding Kate’s limp hand, his thumb fondling the plain gold wedding ring and the diamond engagement ring she wore so proudly.

  ‘Don’t look,’ said Dykie, and she rolled the quilt back over Kate’s body. Freddie caught a glimpse of blood-stained sheets.

  ‘Oh my goodness!’ Dykie’s eyes flashed up at him, dark and afraid. ‘She must go to hospital. Immediately. No time to telephone—’

  ‘I’ll take her in the lorry. You hold the doors open – and find some towels, will you please?’ Freddie wrapped an old tartan rug around Kate’s shoulders, flung the sheets back and lifted her. ‘Never mind the blood,’ he said, and, unexpectedly, tears ran down his cheeks and dripped from his chin. In a daze, he carried her down the stairs with Dykie running ahead, and Sally white-faced in the kitchen doorway, the baby screaming in her arms. ‘Get some cushions for her – and you get in the back with her.’

  Sally came running with two brown cushions from the sofa. Between them they bundled Kate into the back of the lorry which was half full of stones from the quarry. A trail of blood was left along the garden path and into the road.

  ‘You look after the children – please,’ Freddie said to the distraught Sally who was close to panic, ‘and keep calm.’

  ‘My girl. Please, please God, don’t take my girl.’ Sally was openly weeping and staring at the sky. ‘Don’t take our Kate – she’s all we’ve got – please God.’

  Dykie climbed into the back of the lorry with Kate, her navy blue skirt getting covered in stone dust. ‘The baby will have to go with her,’ she called to Sally. ‘See if you can get someone to help – then bring her up in the pram.’

  Freddie didn’t usually swear at his lorry, but he did now. ‘Start, you bugger. Bloody well start.’ The engine spluttered into life and he put his foot down and roared up the hill to Monterose Hospital where Kate had worked as a nurse in the years before Lucy was born. ‘All that love she gave,’ he muttered as he drove furiously. ‘Now it’s gotta come back to her – oh God – if I lost her . . .’ His whole body was shaking uncontrollably as he turned into the hospital drive. He braked carefully, not wanting to jolt his precious cargo, and Dykie leapt down and ran into the hospital.

  Shaking and terrified, Freddie managed to lift Kate down from the lorry. She opened her eyes and looked up at him. ‘My baby?’ she said. ‘Where’s my baby girl?’

  ‘Your mother’s got her. Don’t try to talk, Kate – my love. You lie quiet.’

  The doors of the hospital burst open and two nurses in starched hats, and a burly porter rushed towards them with a trolley. Freddie stood, mesmerised, with Kate in his arms, and he didn’t want to let her go. He pulled the tartan rug tightly round her. ‘That was Ethie’s blanket,’ she said, in a voice like a dry leaf. Freddie felt her trembling in his arms, and the morning sun lit her pale cheeks. Her skin looked grey, like the face of the stone angel.

  ‘Put her on here.’ The porter helped Freddie to gently lie Kate on the high trolley. He smiled confidently. ‘Don’t you worry, sir – we’ll take good care of her.’

  Freddie nodded. Miserably, with his heart thumping, he followed the trolley inside, and Dykie took his hand as if he was a child. ‘There’s nothing we can do now, Freddie. Except pray.’

  They stood watching the doors close on Kate’s dark head as she was wheeled away. NO ADMITTANCE was stamped in red letters on the doors. It looked very final.

  ‘You’re shaking, Freddie,’ said Dyke looking up at him like an enquiring robin. ‘You should sit down.’

  ‘Ah. Sit here and wait, I suppose.’ Freddie sat obediently on one of the hard metal chairs against a wall. A bleak and cheerless place. He found hospitals intimidating.

  ‘I’ll wait with you,’ said Dyke.

  ‘Thanks.’ Freddie stared around at the peeling paint on the walls, the exposed pipes and brown linoleum floor. He looked at the stains of Kate’s blood on his shirt; he could smell it and it terrified him. Kate’s life draining away. Wrong. It was wrong. It shouldn’t be happening. And was it his fault? Their love-making had been beautiful, a warm and blessed secret that meant the world to Freddie.
‘Kate was my only love,’ he said to Dykie. ‘I never looked at another woman. I loved Kate since I were nine years old. Loved her. And she wanted this baby so much – we wanted a boy, but she’d love anything, Kate would. If she gave birth to a blimin’ frog, she’d love it – that’s the way she is. Heart of gold.’

  ‘Don’t torment yourself, Freddie,’ said Dykie kindly, but Freddie needed to talk. He felt nauseous and giddy with shock, and the talking distracted him from the question of whether he was going to pass out, fall on the floor and disgrace himself as he’d done many times in his childhood. He didn’t tell Dykie that. He was the man. Had to be strong.

  ‘Last time I came in here was four years ago, before Lucy was born,’ he said. ‘And my mother came. We came here to a presentation ceremony, and Kate had the “Nurse of the Year” award. We were so proud of her. But she laughed it off. Fancy me getting that, she said, I haven’t done anything special. Always laughing, she is. Always laughing. The house rings with it.’

  ‘And she will be again,’ Dykie assured him. ‘We got her here just in time, thanks to your wonderful lorry.’

  Freddie wasn’t convinced. He found himself once more on the descent into gloomy thinking. He looked into Dykie’s birdlike eyes. ‘Tell me honestly, will you – could she die?’ he asked.

  Dykie wagged a skinny finger at him. ‘Now what would Kate say if she heard you saying that?’

  The corners of Freddie’s mouth twitched as the possibility of a smile drifted through his being. ‘She’d call me a – a prophet of doom. Don’t be a prophet of doom, dear, she’d say.’ A negative thought rushed in, wiping the smile before it happened. That’s what I’ve become, he thought gloomily, a prophet of doom.

  And hard upon that thought came another one. That baby, he thought, she’s brought bad luck.

  Chapter Two

  MADAME ELTURA

  Sally’s cheeks were crimson with worry and frustration as she marched into the hospital with baby Tessa screaming in her arms.

  ‘Any news?’ she asked breathlessly.

  ‘No. Nothing. They took her through there,’ said Freddie, raising his voice above the screaming baby.

  Sally handed Tessa to Dykie. ‘She’s never stopped crying all the way up here,’ she said, ‘and I found the pram but I couldn’t drag it out from under all that wood. I did try. But in the end I put her in my bicycle basket, tied her in with string and rode up here, pedalled up that hill with her bawling. Turned a few heads, it did. It’s a cold day but I’m hot as ten fires.’

  ‘Poor little mite’s hungry,’ said Dykie. ‘She ought to be with her mother.’

  Sally struggled out of her heavy bottle-green serge coat and hung it over a chair.

  ‘You’re breathless,’ Freddie observed. ‘Come on, you sit quiet and get your breath back.’

  Sally looked at him gratefully. Sensing she was on the edge of tears, Freddie looked into her worried eyes, and thought about what he was going to say. Words came through to him in a bright stream, words that didn’t come from him but from a shining spirit person who had befriended him long ago when he was a child. ‘Kate’s going to be all right. She’s a strong woman, full of life, and she won’t let go. She loves being a mother. It’s important to her. She’ll be all right, you’ll see.’

  Watching the calming effect of his words settling around Sally like a soft cloak, Freddie felt empowered. ‘Let me hold the baby,’ he said to Dykie. ‘You go and find someone – tell them we’ve got her and she should be with her mother.’

  ‘I should think the whole hospital knows she’s here.’ Dykie eased the howling infant into Freddie’s arms, and something magical happened. He looked down at the baby’s tiny scrunched-up face and saw it smooth itself out like a flower in the sun. In wondrous silence, baby Tessa gazed up at him, her clear inquisitive gaze piercing his heart. Freddie talked to her in the language of silence, and he listened to the flow of her thoughts.

  ‘She’s going to be a daddy’s girl!’ said Sally.

  ‘You just got yourself a job, Freddie,’ Dykie said.

  Freddie hardly heard them. Tessa’s stare completely absorbed and unnerved him. She WAS like Ethie, but he could also see Kate in her, and his mother, and – a startling thought – She’s like me.

  Freddie walked to the window and showed Tessa the sky over Monterose. Silver and ivory clouds bubbled over the distant hills, and thousands of elm trees dotted the landscape like splashes of chromium yellow, and along the hedges the hawthorns hung heavy with scarlet berries. Far out across the Levels, the starlings made immense towers of black specks, swerving and shifting. ‘A million birds with one mind,’ Freddie told Tessa and saw a spark of recognition in her pale blue eyes as if she knew everything about the world she had entered. Her unwavering gaze stripped away the layers of knowledge he’d worked so hard to accumulate, stripped his soul bare. In an instant, the clever hardworking mechanic had fallen away like a black shell, and the creative artist with the gift of prophecy stood there in the sun, hand in hand with this new little being who had burst through the gates of pain and arrived, with nothing.

  The squeak of shoes and a whoosh of Dettol-scented air brought him back to reality. The door marked NO ADMITTANCE was open, and two white-coated doctors stood there with grim expressions.

  ‘Mr Barcussy?’

  ‘That’s me.’ Freddie’s heart began to thump again, he could feel it pulsing against the layers of thick crocheted shawl wrapped around baby Tessa.

  ‘And I’m Kate’s mother,’ Sally stood up, her eyes on fire with anxiety, ‘and Miss Dykes – Dykie – is the midwife.’

  ‘Come this way.’

  Again, the nausea and the fear whirled through Freddie’s head as his feet followed the two doctors into a small room with dark oak chairs and a desk topped in olive green leather. On the walls were yellowing charts of people’s insides, horribly fascinating but not exactly calming. A skeleton dangled in the corner, chillingly cheerful, with a tobacco-factory grin. Freddie turned his back on it, not wanting the baby to see it.

  ‘Your wife has lost a lot of blood, Mr Barcussy. We’ve managed to stop the haemorrhage. But she’s very weak. We need your permission to give her a blood transfusion.’

  ‘And what’s that?’ asked Freddie. His skin felt cold and sweaty. He wished he hadn’t asked. He didn’t want to know about Kate having someone else’s blood in her veins. ‘Anything,’ he said, interrupting, ‘I’ll sign anything to get her better.’

  ‘It will help her recover very quickly – otherwise it’s touch and go, and six weeks of complete rest. I imagine that’s not an option?’

  ‘I want – what’s best for Kate,’ Freddie said, and he signed the papers with a cold, sweaty hand. ‘And where is she? I’d like to see her please.’

  ‘And the baby,’ said Sally. ‘She’s newly born – and hungry.’

  The corridor was long and squeaky, full of ominous doors. They walked in silence and above his heavy footsteps Freddie heard the sudden roar of rain on the roof and the harsh cry of a heron as it passed overhead on its way to the river.

  ‘Wait here while we set up the blood transfusion. It’s ready to go. Then you can come in, and we’ll see if the baby will feed.’

  Again, the three of them waited, this time standing up, in a corridor where nurses bustled to and fro with trays and trolleys. Beyond the double doors marked MATERNITY there were babies crying. It set Tessa off, crying again.

  ‘Give her to me,’ said Freddie and, with tender pride, he scooped Tessa into his arms. He could calm her down, and show Kate he had bonded with their new daughter. Freddie wanted to be the one to put Tessa back where she belonged, in her mother’s arms.

  The ward sister had an intimidating starched hat and an even more starchy expression. She eyed Freddie up and down, her eyes pausing on his boots which were covered in oil and stone dust. ‘We don’t usually allow MEN in the maternity ward,’ she said. ‘Shall I take the baby?’

  ‘I’m coming in.’ The
steel in Freddie’s blue eyes made her step aside.

  ‘Just ten minutes then. And strictly with the curtains round.’

  Still carrying his daughter, Freddie followed the starched hat into a long ward full of women. The knitting needles stopped and twenty pairs of eyes stared at him. He ducked through the cream curtains, and there was Kate, not lying half dead as he’d expected, but sitting up, dazzling them all with the love that shone from her bright brown eyes.

  ‘That’s the best thing I’ve seen today!’ she declared. ‘My wonderful Freddie.’

  Speechless, he leaned over and kissed her tenderly, his eyes searching hers. Then he tucked baby Tessa into her arm. ‘My baby,’ she breathed. She unbuttoned her nightie and exposed a breast that was full and throbbing.

  ‘We don’t usually let men . . .’ began the starched hat but one quiet power stare from Freddie silenced her.

  Tessa began to suck noisily, her eyes gazing steadily at Kate. ‘Bless ’er little heart,’ said Sally. ‘Thank goodness!’

  Freddie propped himself on the bed, his arm round Kate, his mind already creating a stone carving. A mother and child. In alabaster. He’d use the beautiful pink alabaster boulder he’d found in the quarry, and he saw himself carving it out in the sunshine, with chisels and sandpaper, and running water to make it smooth as marble. It would express his gratitude and awe at the way Kate looked so ripe and peaceful, and the baby utterly contented. Beyond the wonder of it was the statement his carving would make about priorities and wordless love.

  Freddie bristled when he saw the vicar’s long black robe and pristine shoes coming through the hospital entrance just as he was leaving with Sally and Dykie. So far, he’d managed to keep his mouth shut and not get into confrontational arguments with vicars. He found this one, the Reverend Reminsy, particularly patronising, and right now he felt vulnerable and nervous after the stressful morning. He wanted his family together under one roof, private and safe.