Having It and Eating It

by Sabine Durrant

  “I’m so glad,” I said. “Cup of tea later?”

  Pete didn’t turn around during this exchange. He said, “Aw, go on, let me in.”

  I didn’t have the heart to turn him away now. We went into the kitchen. Fergus had stopped being a snake and was hiding behind my knees, trying to pry them apart and peer through the middle. Pete, recovering himself, pretended to lunge at him, and Fergus giggled and clutched one of my thighs, twirled round my leg as if it were a maypole. “Steady on,” I said, almost losing my balance. “Come on, Fergus, let’s see if the Tweenies are on!!” I raised my voice to a high, infectious pitch of excitement. “Yes!”

  Fergus, infected, echoed, “Yes!” and ran through with me into the sitting room where he snuggled down happily into the sofa cushions, like a mouse nestling into hay. I left Dan on the floor chanting “balubalubalub,” next to a bucket of Duplo.

  Pete’s hands were waiting for me in the kitchen. “Come here,” he said, kneading me and kissing my neck. “I’ve missed this.”

  I pulled away. I was all angles. It wasn’t me he’d missed; it was the danger. “Pete, I can’t do this,” I said.

  “I can,” he said, his voice husky, his eyes glazed. “Come here,” and he pulled me toward him again and started kissing me. He had one hand on the back of my head. My knees weakened. I could hear the clatter, crash, clatter of Duplo being emptied onto the boards. Pete’s hands were everywhere. There were alarm bells ringing in my head. This was wrong. It wasn’t what I wanted. The alarm bells grew louder. More insistent. More ringing.

  “Mummmeeee. Phone!”

  “It’s the phone,” I said, pushing him away. “I’ve got to answer it.”

  Pete rolled his eyes and stood crossly, looking out the back door.

  I grabbed the phone from under a tea cloth.

  “Hello?” I said, breathlessly.

  “Can I speak to Maggie Owen, please?’

  “Speaking.”

  “It’s Dr. Pulbrooke here, from Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.” Even as she was talking, I could feel panic starting at my toes and working its way up. I moved on maternal autopilot to check the children in the front room. “I’m ringing on behalf of Fran Priton.”

  “What is it?” I said. “What is it? Is she all right? Is it the baby?”

  “I’m afraid there has been an accident,” said the voice. “Ms. Priton is in the operating room at the moment. She’s going to be all right. Please don’t panic. But she’s been asking for you. Would it be possible for you to come in?”

  “Yes, yes, I’ll come now. Yes.” I was gabbling. I’d forgotten all about Pete. “But the baby? What about the baby?”

  “We’re doing everything we can. We’ll be able to tell you more when you get here.”

  She gave me the details of where to go, and I put down the phone and started throwing things into a bag—cups, bottles, diapers, wipes. Pete said, his laid-back delivery 100 miles behind me, “Is everything okay?”

  “No,” I said, “it isn’t.” I grabbed my car keys, switched off the television, drowned Fergus’s cries of complaint with kisses, picked up both children for the sake of speed and started for the door. Pete trailed behind. Suddenly, I thought of something. “Your mobile!” I said. I’d felt it in his jeans pocket earlier. “I can ring Jake as I’m driving. Can I take it?”

  “Er . . . Actually . . .”

  “Thanks,” I said, before he could say anything more. I reached for it out of his pocket.“I’ll ring you later.”

  The children were muted in the car as if they sensed something was up. It had stopped raining, but the traffic was still heavy for mid-morning. Held up on the bridge, I fumbled with the phone until I got through to Jake’s office. He was in a meeting, but I told Judy, his secretary, it was urgent. When I said it was Fran, I registered a nanosecond of relief in his voice as he realized it was nothing about the children, and then he sounded sick. “I’ll come now,” he said, his voice heavy and tight. “I’ll meet you there.”

  The traffic was fine until the Fulham Road and then we inched along, stuck in single file behind a parked truck. “Come on,” I urged gutturally, like a businessman in a hurry or a Morton Park mother on a school run. “Come arnnnnn.” I put my foot down when I turned into the side road leading to the parking lot, a quick spurt of relief—and then I braked hard. There was a line of cars in front. A Peugeot 205 with a fat man in the driver’s seat was trying to turn around, but a bus had come up on the other side of the road and was jamming his path. Everybody else was just sitting, patiently, some with their engines off, as the line of cars idled its way, or rather didn’t idle its way, down the lane to the parking area below. “Shit,” I said, when I realized what was happening. “Shit, shit. Bugger, bugger.” There were four cars ahead of us to the first bend. I looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was 12:40 p.m.—forty minutes since the doctor had called. A sign on the wall next to us said “NO stopping: offenders will be clamped.” Why wasn’t the road littered with clamped vehicles? This was a hospital after all: a place for screeching brakes and crashing doors, for relatives and doctors hitting the decks running. The man in front was eating a sandwich. But of course, outside of ER, hospitals are not places of rush and urgency and panic. They are about boredom and repetition and interminable waiting . . . But not now, not for me NOW.

  “Oh no,” I said through my teeth, as we entered the tunnel and I counted six cars in the flickering yellow light in front. I remembered the phone then, on the passenger seat beside me, and I picked it up to try to ring the ward, but the screen dimmed. No signal. “Oh no,” I said again, chucking it into my bag.

  It was 1:00 p.m. by the time the barrier had coughed us in, and ten past by the time we reached the elevator. A heavily pregnant woman and her husband got in with us. She had her bag with her; he was carrying a bottle of Perrier. There were no obvious contractions between floors. I wanted to say, in that irritating manner that women who’ve been there do, “Go home. You’ll only have to sit around and wait,” but the doors opened and I was out of there, rushing to the desk and identifying the floor and the “Lift Bank,” scooting past the stall selling pastel knitted rabbits, and the visitors with their plastic-wrapped bunches of flowers, the sculptures hanging like shop window decorations in the atrium, past the cappuccino machine, and the “café-style” cafeteria, up in the Pompidoustyle elevator to the ward.

  Fergus said, “Are we going swimming?”

  “No, darling,” I said, pushing open the double doors. “We’re going to see Fran.”

  The sister, a petite brunette who looked about twelve, frowned at us when she saw us. “Mother’s own?” she said.

  “Sorry?”

  “We don’t allow any other children!” she said sternly, but she melted when I told her who I’d come to see. She said, “Well, in that case, one minute.”

  I said, moving Fergus out of the path of a woman in a nightgown who was inching her way along the hall, “I’m sorry. I was just in a hurry. I didn’t really have time to make arrangements.” A small, hiccuping kitten cry started up at one end of the corridor. “How is she? How’s the baby?”

  “She’s in here,” she said, leading us through a series of swinging doors to a room at the side. “In recovery.” She paused before letting me in. “She’s fine. She’s a bit upset and shaken up obviously. It’s been a big mental and physical shock. She’s very sore. We’re giving her morphine and voltral for the pain. And she’s had to have quite a lot of blood.”

  “What about the baby?” I almost shouted. “Where’s the baby?”

  “Sssh,” she said, too kindly. “The baby is in the Special Care Baby Unit. She’s very little. Thirty-two weeks is quite early . . .”

  “So she’s had the baby?” I said, one part of my brain saying “It’s a girl!” and the other dampening the hope down. “Is she going to be all right? They say thirty weeks is okay, isn’t it? I mean, it’s fine isn’t it?”

  She frowned. “The doctors gave her
a Caesarean,” she said, speaking slowly, as if this was something I was already aware of. “The placenta as you know was damaged in the accident and so delivery had to take place as quickly as possible. As I said, the doctors are doing everything they can.” I must have looked stricken. She said more gently, “They’re very good, the doctors. She’s in very good hands. Now . . .” And then she opened the door, and there was Fran lying on a high hospital bed with tubes coming out of her and drips hanging next to her and a strange oblong-shaped ridge under the sheet where her pregnant swelling had been. She looked very pale and very small. There was a nurse, fiddling with a clipboard in the corner of the room. And next to her, looking very solid and calm and comforting, was Jake. He was cradling her head in his arm and stroking her hair and talking to her in a low voice, and before he looked up and saw us, he had just put his finger on her cheek and said something that made her smile.

  “Daddeeeee!” Fergus had leaped into the room. Jake looked up and nodded his head at me, telling me with his eyes how things stood, reassuring me and cautioning me, as he cushioned the blow of his careering son away from Fran.

  “Sweetie,” I said. I abandoned the stroller in the doorway and went over to the bed. I bent down to put my arms round her. She flinched. There was a bruise on her forehead, a small cut above her mouth. Her eyes looked slightly odd, the pupils small. “Maggie,” she said. “Oh, Maggie.” And she started to cry and I was crying too and kissing her hair and saying I was sorry, so sorry, meaning sorry for all this and sorry for not having been there, for not having rung, for not having gone to Babyworld with her, to have driven her there, for not having stopped this from happening. And over and over I was saying, “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.”

  Fran was saying, “It’s so early. Is she going to be all right? Please tell me she’s going to be all right. I really wasn’t driving that fast. The van just sort of came . . .”

  “Sssh.” Jake had put Fergus down and was stroking her hair again. He gave me another look, a serious look.

  “I want to see her,” Fran said. “Please.” She turned to me. “Please, Maggie, ask them if I can see her now.”

  Jake put his hand on her forehead. “You’ll see her very soon,” he said. “As soon as you can be moved, you’ll see her, I promise. And she’s got Rain with her. She’s not on her own.”

  The nurse came over then and flicked at the tube of blood. “They’re taking very good care of her,” she said. “They’re doing everything they can.”

  Fergus was being very quiet. He was sitting on Jake’s knee, staring at Fran and the tubes coming out of her. He seemed very interested in the nurse’s flicking. But Dan was beginning to protest, unimpressed by the lack of attention coming his way, arching his back against the stroller straps, kicking his legs and crying in a cross way.

  Fran said, “Hello, Dan,” without moving her head and then closed her eyes. “Hello, Fergus,” she said, opening them again. Fergus was pressing himself back against Jake’s knees.

  I said, “I’d better . . .”

  But Jake said, “Don’t worry. You stay here. I’ll take them downstairs to look at the fish.”

  After he’d gone, Fran started telling me what had happened, going over and over it, as if she couldn’t stop herself. “It just came from nowhere, the van. It was a red van. I remember that.” She closed her eyes. “One minute it wasn’t there, the next . . . I was so excited to be getting all the nursery stuff, muslins, you know. I was so excited about getting there and I was taking that shortcut, Maggie, you know, behind the Fulham Road, and we’d been stuck in traffic so I was sort of whizzing and then suddenly it was there, in the middle of the road. And I tried to brake . . . but I went right into him. There was this horrible crunch. And I knew something was wrong, you know? I knew. At first I just thought, oh, and then I realized . . . it was really hurting in my back and here, this terrible pain, and Rain had put his arm out . . . and there was blood everywhere and I thought it was me . . . And then the ambulance came and . . .”

  She was crying again. I was wiping the tears away with my fingers, kissing her wet face. Two accidents in one summer, two red vans. “Sssh,” I was saying. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  “I’m so cold,” she said. “I’m so cold.”

  I asked the nurse if she could have a blanket, and she went off to see what she could do.

  “The doctor said we were lucky we were so close,” Fran said, tugging at the skin on her hand. “But they don’t know. Please, God, I wish . . . Oh God, if only I hadn’t . . .”

  The nurse came back in with a sheet and a towel, which we draped over Fran as well as we could. “I’m sorry I can’t find a blanket,” she said. “There’s a shortage of blankets.” I said something about selling some of the art downstairs to buy some and she raised her eyes to the ceiling. “But apparently it cheers people up,” she said doubtfully.

  The door opened and Rain came in, his face calico-white against his rook-black hair. He looked lost and drawn. “Hello, Maggie,” he said. I asked him if he was all right. His arm was in a bandage. There was blood in his fingernails. He shook his head and said he was fine as if he hadn’t even noticed. I stood up so he could have my chair. He sat down and put his head on the pillow next to Fran and started telling her things about the baby. “The doctor says her lungs aren’t as mature as they could be at thirty weeks, so she can’t quite yet breathe on her own, but she’s a good weight. She looks tiny but she could have been much smaller . . .”

  “What do you mean she can’t breathe?” said Fran.

  “She’s on a machine to help her breathe,” he said. “So there’s a tube going into her mouth, and there’s something for her temperature, and something going into her stomach, and there’s a drip in her scalp, um and that’s for . . .” He looked anxiously at the nurse, who was doing something with the line in Fran’s hand.

  She said, “That’s to keep a vein open so they can keep testing her blood and oxygen levels. It looks awful, but it’s all very necessary.”

  “And she’s sedated so she doesn’t pull the line out,” Rain said. “And she’s under a light because she’s a bit jaundiced . . .” His voice began to break up.

  The nurse said, “That’s very common.”

  But Rain’s head was bowed. Fran was clutching onto him, and they were sort of rocking a little bit together. I felt in the way then and suddenly, with a pang, I wanted to see Jake again, and my children, so I said, “I’ll be back in a minute”—for the nurse’s sake, because I knew they weren’t going to hear me—and I left the room. First I went downstairs to the aquarium tank, but there was no sign of them. Then I went to the café place, but they weren’t there either. So I went through the big revolving doors at the front, which move so slowly you want to punch through the glass, and looked up and down the road outside. I thought perhaps he’d taken them to Starbucks, but they weren’t there. And they weren’t under the “town square”-style trees. I felt a little murmur of anxiety as I went back inside. I was on my way back to “lift bank D,” when I saw a familiar caravan coming toward me—not with Jake, but with my mother.

  “Mum!”

  “Oh, hello darling,” she said, as if I’d just bumped into her in Woolworth’s. “Jake rang and asked me to pick up the children. We just went to say good-bye to you, but as you weren’t there, we left a message with that lovely nurse. Now we’re going to go back to Granny’s house, aren’t we Fergus, and we’ll have a lovely lunch and maybe a lovely walk and then mummy will pick you up later.”

  I was momentarily stunned by her tone of efficiency. “What about . . .” I began to say.

  “Aqua aerobics can wait!” she said. “All that matters now is Fran.”

  Then she turned the children around before they could complain and marched them briskly off in the direction of the front doors.

  “Where are you parked?” I yelled after her.

  “On a yellow line,” she called, without turning around. “This is
, after all, an emergency.”

  I went back up to the ward when my mouth had fully closed but turned around just before I got there. I asked the nurse for directions and took another elevator up to the next floor. I couldn’t work out where to go at first. The first room I peered into had a Beatrix Potter frieze along the walls and mobiles hanging from the ceiling—it looked cozy and jolly, even the couple of small babies who were crying seemed to be doing so in a healthily demanding sort of way. But there was a nurse coming out, and she said I was in the wrong place; she directed me farther along the corridor, and there were no babies crying down here. There was a man at the door, when I got to the right room, with his back to me, his face against the glass. He was wearing a suit, a familiar dark gray linen suit from Paul Smith, which was all baggy at the knees and crumpled across the bottom of the jacket. It needed a dry cleaning. Someone who cared about him should have taken it to be dry cleaned. He moved so that his elbows were up against the door, his hands cupping his head.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He turned around, and on his face was a gentleness I hadn’t seen for a while. There was tenderness in his eyes and hope and desperation too.

  “Hello,” he said. There was a catch in his voice. He moved aside. “Look,” he said.

  I stood next to him with my head next to his and looked into the room through the glass. There were a lot of people inside, banks of high-tech equipment, and seven or eight tiny incubators. The lights were on full. There was no crying here, just bleeping.

  “She’s over there,” he said. He pointed to the farthest incubator, over by the window. You couldn’t see much, what with the wires and the plastic. You could just make out a shape really, an unimaginably small, bony shape in its artificial womb, a tiny smidgen of life.

  We stood there, with our heads resting together, for a long time.

  Chapter 23

  When we got back down to the room where Fran was, she was sleeping, her head to one side against the pillow, her mouth open. Rain was standing by the window looking out across the roofs to the hotel towers around the Chelsea football ground. He said he’d been waiting for us to come back so that he could go home and get some things, but Jake told him that we’d go, that he should stay in case Fran woke up.