by Adle Geras
‘We will go inside now. And I will do what you want, of course. But you must think, yes? About what is best. You are only nineteen years old, do not forget. To me you are still a child. But I will not force you. We will do what we have to do, after the birth, but you must have the baby in Scotland. Piers has already paid the rent for a cottage. Near the sea. Very healthy for you. It will be like a holiday. That is how we must think of it, yes? Everything will be good. We will not tell the world yet. You agree? It is a good place. Peace and quiet.’
‘It’s not exactly a metropolis here, is it?’ Hester said, sniffing and using the hankie Madame Olga had handed her. ‘I hear nothing but silence and no one ever comes to visit. Except Piers.’
‘Never mind. You will see, everything will be fine.’
*
At the beginning of November, Hester and Ruby moved to a cottage beside the sea in Gullane. This was a small house, with two bedrooms upstairs and a sitting room-cum-kitchen on the ground floor. It was a little way out of the town, set apart from other houses, and they had no immediate neighbours. Even here, Hester thought, where I know nobody, they’re making sure that no one comes near me. I don’t care. Soon, my baby will be here.
A bed had been booked in the hospital at Haddington and Dr Crawford (‘Such a gentleman! You will love him, I am quite sure,’ said Madame Olga) came to visit Hester a few days after her arrival. She hadn’t summoned him, but when he appeared at their door, she realised that Madame Olga must have told him that she and Ruby were in residence.
Hester was reassured when she met him. While he took her blood pressure, she tried to imagine what he must have been like as a young man. He was short and square and tweedy, with a rather mournful face and thick iron-grey hair. His white hands felt cool on her skin. He smiled kindly at her and she found herself relaxing.
‘You must rest, my dear,’ he said. ‘Your blood pressure tends towards the high, so we must keep an eye on that.’
‘Is anything wrong? Will the baby be all right?’
‘Nothing to concern yourself about at the moment, but don’t excite yourself unduly and take regular gentle exercise. I’ll come and visit you again in a few days.’
‘Will you take a cup of tea, Doctor?’ Ruby asked him, as he folded away his stethoscope.
‘No, thank you, Ruby,’ he said, going to the door. ‘It’s time I was off to see my other patients. Good day to you both.’
When he’d gone, Hester said, ‘He’s very nice but I can’t imagine him ever being in love with Madame Olga, can you?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said Ruby. ‘I think he might have been quite handsome as a young man. He’s a comforting sort of person.’
‘Anyway, I’m glad he’s going to take such good care of me. I’ll try to do what he says and avoid thinking of anything depressing. I’m going to rest and go for long walks and eat lovely food. And so are you, because you’re here to keep me company.’
Ruby made sure that Hester kept to her resolution. Every day, they wrapped up in warm clothes and went for walks among the sand dunes and Hester tried not to worry. They talked as they went, about everything, and Ruby was always comforting and calm. Whenever Hester gave way to despair, or anxiety, Ruby was there with a sensible word and a distraction of some kind. She seemed to know that Hester was avoiding thinking about what lay ahead for both her and her baby. Ruby was in charge until Madame Olga arrived. She was due in Gullane in good time for the birth, towards the middle of December.
For the first seven months of her pregnancy, Hester had hardly noticed that her body was changing. She was fit and young, and went on feeling almost exactly as she always had. It was possible sometimes for her to forget that Adam’s child was there, in the dark, growing and growing. Grief was the emotion she felt for the most part. She was grieving for her love and she gave little thought to what would become of her once the baby was born. She knew it would be hard to get back to dancing, but this was mostly because Madame Olga kept telling her so.
Then, towards the middle of October, Hester began to be aware of the changes. Suddenly, she was heavy and slow, and because of her distended stomach she was finding it difficult to walk or sit or even lie in bed normally. He (she always imagined her baby as a boy) was moving almost all the time, and Hester felt him turning and pushing and kicking in the silent dark, waving his tiny hands like fronds of seaweed in a kind of underwater dance. She dreamed of her baby at night. She saw his body enclosed in her body whenever she shut her eyes, and during the day she went slowly from place to place, feeling huge and swollen and totally unlike herself but like some strange, un-human creature.
In their little house, the days passed slowly. Late in the year, the nights seemed to come down almost after lunch, and they were very long. Hester didn’t mind that. She’d found a new talent for sleeping. Ruby was in charge of the cooking, but she always found something soothing for Hester to do such as scraping carrots, or laying the table, or chopping what seemed to Hester like a thousand vegetables for the nourishing soups that were Ruby’s speciality.
‘You always say you’re going to make shortbread, Ruby, but what we get is healthy soup! This is about the only time in my whole life when I could eat as much shortbread as I liked. No one cares if I’m fat at the moment.’
‘I’ll make some tomorrow. I’ll use my mother’s special recipe. It’s not difficult, Hester. You’ll learn how to make it yourself.’
‘I’ll need to, won’t I? I’d like to be the kind of mother who makes shortbread.’
‘When you come back from rehearsal, d’you mean? You’ll put away your pointe shoes and get out your pinny …’
‘Or maybe I could make shortbread en pointe? In a tutu?’
The two women burst out laughing and Ruby said, ‘You’re trying to avoid dealing with those turnips. This soup will never be ready at the rate we’re going.’
Hester sat down obediently and smiled. How lucky she was to have Ruby as a companion!
During the day, when they walked on the dunes, she wore a thick overcoat and a hat that Ruby had knitted for her. Her hands were hidden in a fur muff that Madame Olga had found, left over from the Russian winters of her youth.
On these excursions, she watched the clouds streak across the colourless sky, and followed the line between the sea and the sky, and trudged through the sand with the wind blowing in her face. Hester was grateful for the fact that Ruby came with her, even though sometimes, Hester knew, she would have preferred to stay by the fireside doing her tapestry. There were days when she persuaded Ruby she was happy to go out on her own, and it was true. Sometimes, she wanted to be absolutely alone with her baby and the sky and the iron-grey sea.
Hester couldn’t pretend that her sadness over Adam hadn’t lifted since the night they parted, but every movement of his baby reminded her that he was out there, in the world that existed beyond the dunes, and the small town with its neat houses and quiet streets that Madame Olga had chosen to be the birthplace for his child. There was also, somewhere, another universe: of footlights and greasepaint and ballet shoes, and flowers tossed on to the stage, and this seemed so distant that sometimes Hester had trouble believing in it. Here: this was where the truth was, in her sore ankles and huge stomach and the bone-wrenching tiredness that took hold of her whenever she sat down.
After supper, she and Ruby talked. Hester watched Ruby work on her tapestry and enjoyed seeing it grow and spread over the canvas. This had no picture printed on it, and Ruby chose her colours according to some private scheme that she couldn’t articulate when Hester asked her about it. Or perhaps (this sometimes occurred to Hester) she didn’t want to describe her thought process. Maybe she was superstitious about it. Hester knew that sometimes when you tried to explain how you did something, it vanished or evaporated, or a part of the magic that accompanied the creation seemed to disappear.
Ruby told Hester a little about childbirth. She was trying to be encouraging, doing her best to make Hester brave about the or
deal to come, but the mere fact that she clearly did think of it as an ordeal was the opposite of heartening.
‘The first baby’s always the hardest,’ she said one night. ‘That’s what my mam said, and of course I was the first. She was three days in labour with me. It’s a wonder, really, that she dared go on to have my brothers and sisters.’
‘I’m not going to have any more children, Ruby,’ Hester said. ‘You know I’m not.’
‘Well, I’m quite sure not everyone has a three-day labour. And in any case, this was thirty years ago, don’t forget. Things have moved on. I was born at home, in my parents’ bed. It’s all much more … more scientific now. Doctor Crawford is very clever and I’m sure you’re in excellent hands. Don’t forget that your body is much more flexible than my mother’s ever was.’
‘Tell me about the pains, Ruby. How bad are they?’
‘I can’t tell you properly, because I’ve never had them. But they can be bad, that’s true.’
‘Bad? How bad?’
‘My mam used to say, like the whole of your insides being cramped up by burning tongs.’
‘My God! And women go through this?’
‘Everyone does. It soon passes, and then you’ve a pretty bairn in your arms and you forget about the pain entirely.’
Hester doubted that she would, but said nothing. Ruby went on stitching, picking one colour after another from the basket of wool at her feet. Hester fell silent, trying to imagine what it would be like, this pain, this agony that was coming towards her as surely as the mist rolled over the sand dunes, blown inland by the sea wind.
*
Madame Olga arrived to be with them in mid-December. She installed herself in her modest hotel room with as much ceremony as though she were moving into the Ritz in Paris.
‘You really didn’t have to come here for the birth,’ Hester told her, after she had been in Scotland for some days. She could see that Madame Olga was out of her element, uncomfortable. She visited them in the cottage every day, and returned to her hotel only to sleep. She didn’t like the dark afternoons, the weather had turned cold, and something between a fog and a shower of rain seemed always to be sweeping across the windows.
‘I will be here with you,’ Madame Olga said. ‘It is my duty and my pleasure. This child, she will be like my granddaughter.’ She refused to consider the possibility of a male child. She took a sip from her teacup and put it down on the table. Ruby was sitting in an armchair beside the fire, working on her tapestry and Madame Olga and Hester were facing one another at the table. Hester’s body was so awkward now that she found a straight-backed wooden chair the most comfortable place to sit. Madame Olga went on, ‘We will not talk about babies now. I will give you the gossip from the Charleroi. I was with Piers in London before I came here. He is making a ballet from The Snow Queen of Hans Andersen for this Christmas. Most beautiful. It is Emily Harkness who will dance Gerda, the main role. Do you remember her?’
Hester nodded. Emily came into the company three years after she did. She was a fair-haired, rather austere girl when Hester knew her, silent and withdrawn, but undoubtedly talented. She listened to Madame Olga talking about her; about the others in the company; about the music and the kind of choreography that Piers was experimenting with and the words came to her as though from very far away. They meant nothing. Ballet. Hester felt as though it was a country from which she’d been exiled for so long that she’d completely forgotten what language they spoke there; what they did there; how they felt about everything. She had left that strange and beautiful place and because she couldn’t imagine how she’d ever get back to it, hearing Madame Olga speaking about it filled her with such sorrow that she couldn’t help crying. Madame Olga saw her wiping tears away with the back of her hand and rose to her feet at once.
‘Please, please, do not cry, my darling,’ she said, crouching down beside Hester and putting an arm around her. ‘Please stop crying now, please. I am stupid, stupid. I am making you sad with talk of the dance when I came just to make you happy. I will not speak about it any more.’
‘No, I do want to know. I want to hear all the news. I know it’s my fault mostly, but I feel so cut off from everything. From my life, from my friends, from you. I’m tired. Tired of being fat and ugly and not being able to move and I’m scared. I’m scared of the pain and I don’t know what’s going to happen to me and how I’ll ever get back to being me. Hester Fielding. I feel … I feel lost.’
Her quiet tears then turned into a storm of weeping. She couldn’t stop herself. Ruby stood up and went to make tea. Madame Olga took Hester upstairs. She led her gently by the hand, and washed her face before helping her to undress, folding every garment carefully on to the chair before tucking her into bed as though she was a child.
‘You sleep now,’ she said. ‘The taxi will come soon and I will go to my room in the hotel. In the morning, I will come again. It is nearly Christmas. Such a happy time to be born! Same birthday as the baby Jesus, maybe, if you are lucky. We must find a good tree and dress it with beautiful things. I will buy everything. We will light candles and sing the songs of Christmas and Ruby will cook us such food – food like you have never eaten before. There will be gifts and the angels will come down to visit us, you see. Dream of good things.’
Hester closed her eyes and shivered. This was the longest night of the year and also the coldest. The small electric fire in the bedroom, with its two horizontal scarlet bars gave out more light than heat but, in any case, it was always off at night, because Ruby said it was dangerous to have it on while you were asleep. The sheets on her bed felt like slicks of ice against her skin. She lay there in the dark after Madame Olga had gone downstairs to wait for her taxi, and listened to her own teeth chattering. The narrow cupboard against the opposite wall was painted white and Hester knew that inside it, her suitcase was ready. Ruby had packed it the week before, putting in a nightdress and a sponge bag and a bed jacket she’d knitted herself.
She could hear Madame Olga’s taxi driving away and Ruby moving about, putting the kettle on to boil for the last cup of tea of the day. A comforting sound, Hester thought, and then she fell asleep.
She woke up suddenly with no idea of how long she had slept. She got out of bed to go to the lavatory and was suddenly seized with a pain in her head that was so dreadful that for a moment or two she thought she was going blind. She stumbled to the bathroom and turned on the light, but it was too bright, much too bright, and as well as the terrible agony splitting her head, flashes of brilliance exploded in front of her eyes and she closed them to keep out the glare, but that didn’t seem to work. Here she was, ready to put up with the agonies of childbirth, and some malign fate had decided that this night, of all the nights of her life, was the time to show her what headaches really were. She started to cry, sitting on the edge of the bath.
Then she caught sight of her feet and didn’t recognise them. Her ankles were thick and swollen and all she could think was, how will I dance? How will these monstrous feet fit into my ballet slippers? She was crying so much that she could hardly breathe.
‘Ruby!’ she shouted.
Ruby came at once and put her arms around her. ‘There now, Hester,’ she said, calmly. ‘What’s the matter? Tell me what the matter is.’
‘I can’t see, Ruby. My head is bursting with pain and look at my legs, look how swollen my ankles are. And I keep seeing these bright lights in front of my eyes. Oh Ruby, I’m so frightened.’
‘I’ll speak to Dr Crawford immediately. You stay here for a moment. I’ll just get your dressing-gown. It’s freezing. I’ll be back at once.’
While she was gone, Hester stared down at her hands. She couldn’t move because every movement felt as though a knife was being driven into the space between her eyes. Her hands were disgusting. Every finger was like a sausage, thick and red and hideous. She extended her arm a little, trying to perform even a poor imitation of a movement she might have made onstage. She looked ridiculous. S
omeone’s hands, someone’s fat, old and ungraceful hands had been grafted on to Hester’s arms. Where was she in all of this? She felt as though someone had stolen her away and left a snivelling, swollen wreck in her place; a wreck whose head felt as though it was about to burst open like a ripe pumpkin.
Ruby came hurrying back into the bathroom and draped a dressing-gown around Hester’s shoulders. ‘We have to be quick, Hester. The ambulance’ll be here soon. I’ll get your case. And you’d best put on this coat, it’s so cold. Dr Crawford says we have to get you into hospital at once.’
‘Why?’ A chill that had nothing to do with the weather had taken hold of her.
‘It sounded to him, he said, like possible eclampsia.’
‘Did you ask him what that was?’
Ruby shook her head. ‘No, there’s no time to lose. I didn’t want to waste whole minutes talking. You need to be in hospital. He said he’d ring Madame Olga’s hotel and arrange for her to meet us there. Are you nearly ready?’
*
The drive to the hospital was nothing but darkness and a kind of howling. Hester thought it was the wind but then wondered whether it could have been a siren. Or maybe even herself, making those ghastly sounds. Fuzzily, she thought, surely there’s no need for a siren on quiet country roads in the early hours of the morning, long before sunrise? She was almost fainting with pain and then there was Dr Crawford’s face, like a mask above her somewhere in a corridor.
She heard words … emergency … Caesarean … hurry … hurry. Was she lying down? On some kind of trolley? She didn’t know. What she knew was that the pain went on and on and the lights kept flashing until suddenly there was nothing but darkness like a black cloth coming down over her eyes and after that, nothing. No pain, no feelings, no memories, no shame, no worries, no real world, only a deep well of unconsciousness into which she fell and in which she lay for hours.