Stop the Clock

by Alison Mercer

A faint glimmer of something close to a smile crossed Tina’s face before it and her body contorted again.

  The midwife hung up and turned to Tina. ‘They want you in a delivery suite,’ she said. ‘The porters are coming to take you down.’

  And so Natalie found herself running alongside Lucy behind Tina screaming on a trolley, panting past the horrified face of a dressing-gowned mother-to-be on the stairwell, and so down in the lift into a windowless room with a muted frieze of peach and aqua flowers bordering the ceiling, a frieze at which Natalie found herself staring as Tina, screaming now like a reluctant sacrifice, was dumped on to another bed, examined, and instructed not to push until the baby’s heartbeat had been checked. A belt was strapped round Tina’s belly. It picked up nothing. A new, apparently senior midwife struggled and shoved between Tina’s legs like a removal man trying to get a particularly bulky sofa through a door.

  Natalie didn’t know what to do with herself, but didn’t want to get in the way, so stood back a little, feeling like a spare part, and worse than useless. They all seemed to be in a panic . . . where the hell was this going to end? Would Tina suddenly be wheeled off to theatre? Surely, if your body had done its job and sped through to the transition stage without so much as a prostaglandin pessary, you’d earned the right to escape being cut?

  But Lucy had somehow found a space by the head of the bed, between the various bits of alarming monitoring equipment, and was leaning forward, saying something over and over again, a little mantra, six words in the face of potential disaster: ‘It’s going to be all right.’

  ‘I’ve done it, I’ve clipped the monitor on to your baby’s head,’ the senior midwife said. She waited for a moment and watched a display.

  ‘OK, I’ve got the heartbeat.’ She pulled the stem of the monitor free. ‘You can push now. Don’t scream. Push.’

  A doctor bustled in and Tina cried out, ‘Help me! Help me!’ and the doctor said, ‘Yes, I think we will help you,’ and selected a pair of scissors and cut Tina open. Natalie didn’t look but she couldn’t help but hear the sound of metal snipping flesh, and then it was tuned out by a high electric buzzing gathering force, and she glimpsed Tina’s face purpling and heard Lucy scream, ‘Push!’ and the red ball of baby hurtled out into the doctor’s hands. Minutes later the great steak of the placenta was held up for inspection and that was it, the final straw, the buzzing was a swarm, an approaching whiteout, and in the end it was a relief to yield and go under.

  Coming to was much more painful than being out. Natalie was down on the floor, someone was leaning over her, and everything was bright and loud and brutal. She got to her feet and the midwife hustled her back down the corridor to the waiting room and told her to keep her head between her knees till she felt better.

  It was some time before she felt sure enough of herself to straighten up and make her way out. She had to explain herself to the woman at the reception desk, which was mortifying, though she could hardly make more of a chump of herself than she already had. The woman shook her head in amused contempt, told Natalie the delivery suite number and buzzed her through.

  She knocked gently at the door, heard nothing, knocked harder. Thought she heard ‘Come in.’ Pushed the door open, a little way at first, then wider.

  Tina was sitting propped up, pale and stunned, with Lucy perched on the end of the bed. It was dim and quiet, and Natalie couldn’t see anybody else.

  ‘Where’s the baby?’ she asked.

  Tina gestured towards the far side of the bed. ‘He’s asleep. Come and have a look.’

  Natalie shut the door behind her and went to see. The baby was lying in one of those awful hospital cots that Matilda had refused to settle in for the duration of Natalie’s three sleepless nights on the post-natal ward – a cabinet on wheels with a thin mattress on top and a clear plastic rim.

  But, just as Tina had said, he really was sound asleep. A red triangle of face – two lines for eyes, a small flat nose – was just about visible between his little white hat and the sheet he’d been swaddled in.

  ‘He’s gorgeous,’ Natalie said. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘He looks like his dad,’ Tina said.

  ‘I’m so sorry about what happened,’ Natalie told her.

  ‘What, that you passed out at the sight of my placenta? Honestly, I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t have minded being unconscious myself.’

  ‘I was worse than Richard,’ Natalie said. ‘At least he didn’t pass out.’

  ‘You did fine,’ Lucy said. ‘You got us here, which is more than I could have done. If I’d tried to drive I’d have probably got myself arrested, and I don’t think we’d have had much luck getting a taxi at two a.m. on New Year’s Day.’

  ‘So how are you feeling?’ Natalie asked Tina.

  ‘Compared to an hour ago, absolutely bloody fantastic,’ Tina said.

  Natalie noticed, on the stand that had been pushed down to the end of the bed, an empty cup of tea and a plate with some cold-looking toast.

  ‘You seem so calm,’ she said. ‘I can’t get over it. It’s like it was all in a day’s work, and now you’re sitting there having your tea break. I have to hand it to you. No gas and air. No epidural. No nothing.’

  But maybe an epidural wouldn’t have been such a bad thing. Had she been deluded in her disappointment over the way her own labour had turned out? Perhaps there wasn’t really any right way for a birth to go . . . or maybe any and every way was right, as long as nothing went permanently, unfixably wrong.

  There was a knock on the door and the midwife walked in.

  ‘They’re ready for you on the ward now,’ she said.

  Tina swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. Natalie saw that the white nightie was splashed with red at the hem.

  ‘You’d better put something on your feet,’ the midwife said.

  Natalie fished a pair of espadrilles and a dressing-gown out of Tina’s bag and Tina put them on. Then she shouldered the bag and Lucy picked up the car seat. The midwife led the way, pushing the baby, followed by Tina, who shuffled along with Natalie and Lucy behind her.

  Despite their slow progress, it struck Natalie as a triumphal procession. It was a victory over something – over what, she wasn’t quite sure; biology, perhaps, or birth, or death?? that Tina, bloodied but no longer bowed, was back on her feet.

  At the entrance to the dark ward the midwife said, ‘No visitors allowed at this time, I’m afraid, so it’s time to say goodbye.’

  Tina turned to Lucy and Natalie and said, ‘Thank you. I’m not planning on getting him christened, but if I did, you two would definitely be the godmothers.’

  ‘We’re honoured,’ Lucy said.

  Tina flashed them a smile of relief so intense it was not far off elation.

  ‘Happy New Year! I think this beats the millennium.’

  Then she allowed the midwife to usher her and the baby on to the ward.

  A moment later, a newborn – maybe Tina’s? – started crying.

  ‘When they stitched her up she couldn’t stop shaking,’ Lucy said. ‘I think she might have been in shock. If they’d sent her home, you and I would have ended up delivering that baby.’

  ‘You mean you would.’

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop putting yourself down,’ Lucy said. ‘It takes guts to face up to something you’re afraid of. It’s a hell of a business, isn’t it? And that’s what it’s like when it works. Anyway, I don’t know about you, but I’m just about ready to get out of here. It’s so stuffy! I’ve got the most appalling headache.’

  Natalie hesitated, and then decided to be brave. She had avoided inviting people round to her house for months. During the day it was all right, but not when Richard was there. But she had to at least make the offer, and Lucy could make of it what she wanted.

  ‘Do you want to stay over at mine?’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’ll have much luck getting a cab.’

  ‘Are you sure? I don’t want to intrude.’
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br />   ‘No, you’re very welcome,’ Natalie said, and realized this was true. ‘As long as you don’t mind the sofa. And a bit of a weird atmosphere. Richard’s been sleeping in the guest room.’

  ‘Natalie,’ Lucy said, ‘you look white as a sheet. Are you OK to drive?’

  Natalie nodded. She didn’t quite trust herself to speak; she thought she might cry.

  As they made their way to the lift she found herself humming: ‘Once in royal David’s city, Stood a lowly cattle shed, Where a mother laid her baby, In a manger for His bed . . .’ and she noticed for the first time that the hospital had Christmas decorations – shining paper streamers, purple, silver and gold, in the shape of Chinese lanterns, gleaming in the artificial light – and some of them were still up.

  15

  The gift

  SOMETIME DURING WILLIAM’S first morning on earth, Tina checked her phone and saw a message from Dan: How are you? Would love to see you and William as soon as you’re ready. She replied, All well. Come soon – but not just yet. Will let you know.

  Despite the inevitable ambivalence he felt about becoming a father, Dan was desperate to see his son. She would have been touched by this, if she hadn’t already been feeling so overwhelmed.

  She wasn’t allowed to use her phone on the ward, but she also wasn’t allowed to take the baby anywhere else. One of the midwives had agreed to keep an eye on William as long as she was quick, and she had nipped into the corridor outside. But she had to wait for what felt like ages before someone responded to the buzzer and let her back in to the ward, and the midwife who was supposedly keeping tabs on William was nowhere to be found. He’d woken up and was crying – again.

  She’d had some idea of what to expect – the tiredness, the discomfort, the crying – but she hadn’t realized that William’s thin, keening wail would panic her like nothing else. Nor had she expected to find his face so endlessly fascinating that watching him would distract her from sleeping – not that there had been much opportunity for that so far.

  It had been about five in the morning by the time she said goodbye to Natalie and Lucy and was installed on the ward with William. Every time she’d drifted off, somebody else’s baby had started wailing, and then it had been seven o’clock, the ward lights had gone on, and a succession of people had felt entitled to fling aside the curtain and burst into her cubicle.

  The lady who filled up the water jugs, the one who brought round and collected the lunch menus, the pert little researcher who’d left her a questionnaire to fill in about pain . . . probably all very necessary and useful in their way, just not what she needed right then and there. If only they would all just leave her alone – but at the same time she was terrified of being left alone with this tiny baby’s life literally in her hands.

  She had been told she would be discharged that day, but just as the hospital had been reluctant to admit her, it was slow to let her go; and even though she was scared of going home with a child she had next to no idea how to care for, she didn’t want to linger any longer than was necessary in the Hades of the postnatal ward, and chafed at having to wait round for her paperwork to be signed off so she could escape.

  She toyed with the idea of getting a taxi home; her friends had done their bit, and she sure as hell didn’t want her parents to show up and collect her, as if she was a shamed child being released from a correctional facility. Dan would come like a shot if she called him, but he had drawn the short straw, the New Year’s Day Bank Holiday shift, and was working. She didn’t want him to have to come up with a pretext in order to leave the office and collect her; she didn’t want to oblige him to come to the rescue.

  But in the end, she decided she couldn’t face the prospect of lugging everything to the lifts, and down to the taxi rank, and she suspected she might get short shrift from the staff if she asked for someone to carry some of her stuff. It was quite a haul: her bag, William, the car seat, and the strange plastic bag of promotional gubbins that all new mothers apparently got, which it seemed rude to refuse. Probably she could manage it, but her stitches were going to pull with every step, and things she would normally not think twice about had become insurmountable challenges; even going to the toilet was a big deal.

  So she rang Natalie and did something that did not come naturally, but that she suspected she was going to have to learn to do more often; she asked for help. Natalie came quickly, did not object to sitting round waiting with her until she was finally given her discharge letter, and carried everything up the four flights of stairs at the other end without complaint. She offered to stay, but Tina said she should get back to Matilda; Tina’s parents were already on their way over.

  Tina couldn’t remember the last time her parents had been to the flat. Visitors of all kinds, whether intrusive or more usually confined to their own territory, were another feature of new motherhood that she had not anticipated.

  There was this to say for a stay in hospital, however short; it made you appreciate having a space to call your own. She’d come to see the flat as a bit of a tip, a dumping-ground for her eyes only, but now it struck her as bright and light and full of things she liked. The big wrought-iron bed, the piles of books and papers, the photo montage of her friends, the ormolu carriage clock . . . nothing was impersonal, everything was hers. She was no longer a numbered patient on a ward; she was Tina Fox, mother of William Fox, and she was home.

  When Cecily and Robert arrived it was immediately obvious how pleased and relieved they were – almost pleased and relieved enough to overlook the misfortune of her single status, but not quite.

  Cecily put pink roses in a vase and filled the freezer compartment in the top of Tina’s fridge, plus two of the shelves beneath it, with portions of home-made lasagne and Bolognese sauce and shepherd’s pie. She’d brought a cake, too – chocolate – and Tina, still baggy-bellied but too ravenous to care, asked for an indelicately large slice and wolfed it. Meanwhile Cecily settled on the sofa and ceremonially held her new grandson, and Robert submitted to Cecily’s gentle admonishments and held him too.

  Robert didn’t look very sure of himself. He looked as if he feared being unmanned, but was moved in spite of himself by cradling this tiny scrap of his own flesh and blood, his unforeseen and probably only descendant. Perhaps it was this that prompted Tina to say, ‘There you are, Dad, a male heir to carry on the Fox name. It’s funny how things turn out, isn’t it? You see, there are some advantages to me not being married.’

  The fond look on Robert’s face gave way to irritation. ‘I don’t think it’s something to be flippant about, Tina.’

  ‘Robert,’ Cecily murmured, ‘remember what we talked about.’

  ‘Well, has his father even seen him yet?’

  ‘Dad, I only just got out of hospital.’

  ‘Plenty of time for all that,’ Cecily said, and Tina was grateful that her mother was defending her, but would have preferred it if Cecily had looked a little less pained.

  She had told her parents a little about Dan: his name, his profession, where he lived, his West Country roots. She wanted Robert and Cecily to think well of Dan, so she had assured them that he wanted to be part of William’s life and was keen to contribute financially, money that she had reluctantly decided to accept. However, she also didn’t want to get their hopes up, and so she had told them that she wasn’t in love with him and never had been.

  ‘Boys need their fathers,’ Robert grumbled.

  ‘And daughters don’t, I suppose,’ Tina muttered.

  That did it. Robert was not inclined to engage with her, or William, any further, and occupied himself with the newspaper and the crossword.

  Cecily, saddened, as on many previous occasions, by her husband’s penchant for stubborn, sulky moods and her daughter’s willingness to provoke them, busied herself with housework. She found an apron and some rubber gloves to put on, and these accessories contrasted oddly with her silk blouse, well-cut slacks and trim, elegant frame, as if she’d pulled them on to
rehearse a part in a play. It was an unfamiliar sight, because for many years Tina’s family home had been kept spick and span by the help, but it quickly became apparent that lack of practice had not diminished Cecily’s cleaning skills.

  While Tina bathed, Cecily moved the sofa and vacuumed, unasked, the curdled dust that had collected underneath it; and when Tina awoke from a deep sleep, more a bout of unconsciousness than a nap, to find that it was pitch black outside, the whole flat smelt of lemon bleach.

  She was half relieved when her parents left, but felt, too, a strange tug of sadness, as if she had just been abandoned. This was it, this was really it; she was on her own.

  But, damn it, there was a whole world out there, and she was still connected to it. She was not just a woman home alone with a newborn baby on a cold, dark winter’s night; she was not confined to these four walls.

  She got William off to sleep and settled him into the cot, then checked the Post website. They hadn’t yet put anything online to say she’d had the baby, though she’d sent Jeremy a message about it. But everything was probably out of sync because of New Year. It didn’t mean that her column was no longer regarded as of interest.

  As sometimes happens when you go looking for confirmation of your well-earned place in the scheme of things, she stumbled across something that made her feel even more at sea.

  It was a photo. The Rt. Hon. Justin Dandridge QC, MP enjoying the New Year’s Day brass band parade in Shepstowe’s market square, at the heart of his north Devon constituency, accompanied by the fragrant Mrs Virginia Dandridge.

  Justin and Ginny were pictured standing close together, wrapped up warm against the cold. Presenting a unified front to the world? Or genuinely united against possible affront – including the threat that Tina might once have presented?

  The fragrant Mrs Virginia Dandridge! But Ginny did look as if she probably smelt rather good? fresh and floral – and was not, like Tina at that particular moment, emanating a bitter, iron-heavy undertone of dried blood.