by Josa Young
Miss Smith came down the stairs in dignified haste.
‘Don’t worry, your ladyship, it’s just your waters have broken, we’ll soon get you cleaned up and into bed. With any luck it won’t take too long, that’s a very good sign. Now don’t cry, it’ll soon be over.’
She took Melissa’s arm and helped her to step over the puddle, supporting her up the stairs. Melissa was vaguely comforted, but then was gripped by another pain coming much more quickly after the one before. She stopped, and grabbed the banister, squeezing her eyes and gasping for breath.
‘Just try to breathe steadily, dear. Come on, we’re nearly there. You can have some gas and air for the pain as soon as we’ve got you into bed.’
Melissa, with the idea of pain relief ahead, sped up a bit, but had to stop every time a pain started welling up. Quite soon Miss Smith had installed her in a clean, fresh bed, with a waterproof pad underneath her bottom. She was examined which was always a bit embarrassing but her mother had warned her, ‘You have to throw yourself open to the public when you have a baby.’
The reward was a red rubber mask through which she could suck blessed dizzying relief until she nearly blacked out. Miss Smith hurried out of the room to telephone the doctor and report progress. First she told Munty what was happening. While she was gone, he sidled into the room.
‘Are you all right, darling?’ His anxious face made her want to laugh, but it might have been the gas and air.
‘No.’ She turned her head away from him. ‘Go away.’ She heard him leave.
Dr Murphy called a couple of times to check her progress during the ten-hour labour, asking to be summoned for the birth itself as it only took him a few minutes to get there. He listened to the baby’s strong and steady heartbeat and said he was perfectly satisfied that all was as it should be, and he could leave the management of the labour to Miss Smith. The birth itself surprised Melissa very much by reminding her intensely of going to the lavatory. An overwhelming sensation that she could not deny, as her body took over from her anxious mind and everything else, determined as it was to expel the presence inside.
She bellowed like a bull, an animal noise that was as disconcerting as the sensation. Her baby emerged very quickly after that, Miss Smith gently steadying its progress into the world. As soon as the baby was out, Melissa lay still, deafened with the absence of her own sounds.
‘It’s a little girl,’ said Miss Smith, wrapping the baby quickly to keep her warm, and dealing efficiently with the cord. Melissa didn’t sit up to look. She just lay back flat on the pillowless bed. Then she noticed dimly that Miss Smith had moved to stand beside her, offering her something, and she craned round weakly to look. A ridiculously small face, roughly the same colour as the damson puree and clenched into folds, lay within a white cotton blanket.
Meanwhile, Dr Murphy, who’d come back for the birth, was delivering and checking the afterbirth. He examined her thoroughly before saying, ‘I’ll be off then, Lady Mount-Hey. Call me if you need anything else, Miss Smith, but I think she’ll do. Good, easy birth for a first timer, well done.’
Melissa nodded and tried to smile.
Within a few minutes, Munty was in there too and Melissa heard Miss Smith say, ‘A little girl. Eight pounds, my lord. You must be so proud.’
‘Eight pounds of what?’ she heard him answer. A flash of irritation made her shudder.
Miss Smith was clearly disconcerted. ‘The baby weighed eight pounds, sir.’
‘Oh, I see.’
Melissa focused on her husband and she could see he looked uncomfortable. He crept up to the crib and looked down at the tiny roseate face with mole-like paws up near its chin.
‘What do you want to call her?’ he asked his wife.
Melissa groped around in her mind. What do you call a baby? Did it matter? She remembered the satisfying garnet pots she had labelled in the kitchen. ‘Damson,’ she said, her eyes closed.
‘That’s fine,’ he answered. ‘We can give her my mother’s name Pearl as a second one. If it had been a boy we would have called him Baillie. Never mind, next time!’
The false cheerfulness of his voice grated across her mind. Next time? What did he think she was? A brood mare? She supposed he wanted a male heir and a baby girl wasn’t good enough for him. She hated him.
She vowed silently that no child of hers would be called an awful common name like Pearl and planned to summon up the strength to register the baby herself. Her mother-in-law was a distant figure to her, appearing at the wedding in a globular hat made of pale blue nylon and then vanishing off abroad. What did she matter to any of them? But then there did seem to be a lot of liquid still seeping out into the pad that Miss Smith had pressed to her bottom. Would she ever want to stand again let alone walk?
Miss Smith moved around the room and told Munty that he must leave Mummy and Baby to rest now. Melissa could see from his face that he was only too delighted to go back to his safe male world. She was so tired.
Fifteen
Melissa
November 1968
Melissa snapped awake. Instantly her heart began to hop in her chest. Voices in the passage. Miss Smith and Munty. She crept out of bed to lean against the door and listen.
‘I understand you must leave us soon, Miss Smith – month pretty much up, eh? Lady Mount-Hey doing well?’
More of that forced jollity in his voice. She despised him for it.
‘I’ve hired a girl from the village to help out and Lady Mount-Hey’s mother is due to be here any day too.’
Her husband’s voice made her feel panicky guilt, an agitation in a mind which was mostly just blank and woolly.
Oh God. Please don’t go. Please don’t go. Please don’t go. The words repeated over and over in her head making her dizzy again as she slumped to her knees by the door.
It was just under a month since Damson’s birth and the little girl was settled into a routine by Miss Smith’s firm but kindly management. This included four-hourly feeds, with the baby brought to Melissa in the daytime and bottles at night ‘so Mummy can get her beauty sleep’. There was nothing much for her to do apart from ‘Rest, your ladyship.’ Miss Smith did suggest from time to time that she tried dressing and going downstairs, but she always managed somehow to avoid it.
She lived in a hazy sad little dream when no one was near. Even reading was beyond her although she kept books by the bed and pretended to. She looked out of the window at the trees but spent a lot of time with her eyes shut trying to blot things out. Something gnawed inside her. She feared what was waiting for her out there. The only time she needed to do anything much was when anyone came to see her. Even then she could get away with a certain amount of wilting. Munty was the worst. He made her feel guilty. She was finding it hard to remember meeting him and what that had been like. There seemed to be a grey curtain between her and the recent past. A couple of days after the baby was born her parents had driven the thirty miles to visit their first grandchild. Melissa knew she must be cunning about this visit. The grey fog wasn’t quite so dense and persistent in those early days. It was possible to act as people expected her to for short periods. They would accept that she was very tired. Her parents mustn’t notice that she didn’t love or like Damson, didn’t care about her at all. That Munty was not someone she wanted anything to do with any more. Bitter, stomach-churning guilt and shame engulfed her once everyone had left the room, but it made no difference.
She rolled her head and bit the pillow, groaning and sighing. Her whole life was an appalling mistake. Letting everyone down was the worst of it. She glanced over at the delicate ogee arch at the top of her bedroom window. After Damson came she couldn’t get out into the miniature park, with its little reed-choked lake, so she couldn’t use the charms of the woods coming down to the water, from which deer would emerge to drink, to cheer herself. It was just bed and meals on trays, and hushed voices, then that demanding mouth wrapped round her nipple, sucking and sucking at her.
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bsp; Miss Smith knocked, and then came in with her lunch on a tray. Nice white napkin, dahlia in a glass, nasty-looking brown slop on a plate, carrots floating, floury potatoes with black marks on them. There was also a big glass of water.
‘Thank you, Miss Smith,’ she said, hauling herself up on the pillows and trying a smile.
Miss Smith seemed to be hovering, so Melissa put a carrot on the fork and carried it up towards her mouth. Miss Smith turned away to fold something – she was always irritating Melissa by folding things – and Melissa dropped the carrot back on the plate, but ostentatiously chewed and swallowed.
‘That’s fine, your ladyship. You make sure you eat it up, and drink all the water. I am a little worried about Baby’s weight, and we may need to use the bottle more, not just at night. I’ll make sure there’s plenty of Cow and Gate before I go, and we’ll have a little lesson about hygiene. It’s all very simple, but it’s very important that you use the Milton sterilising solution every single time.’
Melissa wasn’t listening. She couldn’t fit the information into her mind. She tried a little bit. Yes, Milton (what was Milton? The poet? Paradise Lost? A level English?). She tuned back into Miss Smith, who was saying, ‘And you must be very careful indeed about how much Cow and Gate you put in each bottle. If you put too much powder in, Baby will be very thirsty. Won’t you, poppet?’ She had walked into the other room and picked up Damson, cuddling the misbegotten scrap in her cobweb shawl.
When the midwife had gone, Melissa slipped out of bed and fetched one of the brown paper bags from the maternity pack sent down from John, Bell & Croyden, the smart London chemist, to put her disgusting pads in, and quickly scooped all the food off the plate. She slid it under the chintz valance of the bed, with the others, awaiting a moment when everyone was asleep or out and she could get down to the dustbins. Some of it went out when the sanitary bin was emptied but she didn’t dare put all of it in there, in case someone noticed.
Then she went to run herself another bath. No wonder she wasn’t hungry with that ghastly whiff in her pants. She took baths to try and get rid of it. She called it the birthy smell and it made her sick.
Dirty, dirty, dirty, she sang in her head.
If the sun shone through the window in the afternoons, it seemed so ridiculous to be sad and crushed and trapped and ill when there was nothing wrong at all, and she had a lovely baby, as people kept calling that ridiculous sucking purple thing. Melissa knew she had nothing to complain about, but she also felt nothing. Not for the baby, or for herself. She just wanted to sleep. So far, asking Miss Smith to look after Damson while she had a little doze was working very well for her. What would she do when there was no one to take Damson away?
There had been plenty of signs the safety couldn’t last. Munty made her feel guilty, he looked confused and unhappy. But she couldn’t help him. She couldn’t remember why she was here in the big cold house in the country. The voices outside the door continued to sound a knell.
‘I was booked for the month, my lord,’ Miss Smith was saying quietly. ‘To attend the birth with the GP, and then supervise the lying in and settle little Damson into her routine. I need to move on to my next mummy now.’
‘Yes, of course,’ she heard Munty saying slowly.
‘My lord.’ Miss Smith was hesitating. ‘A month is the usual lying-in period. It was just that Baby was late. And anyway, I think we need to have a little word about her ladyship.’
Behind the door, Melissa tensed.
‘What is it?’
‘She doesn’t seem very well, tired and sad, unenthusiastic about Baby. I’d like to call Dr Murphy in to see her.’
‘Really? The doctor said it was an easy birth and she should recover very quickly. She is young after all. There’s nothing wrong with her that getting up and about won’t cure. It’s all this lying in bed that’s the problem. She was always so active before the birth.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ said Miss Smith. ‘I think her ladyship may have a very rare illness that happens to a handful of mothers after birth.’
‘What do you mean?’ Melissa could hear the anxiety in his voice.
‘It’s when the new mother is sad and confused for no reason. It can be quite serious.’
Then she heard her husband say, quite distinctly, ‘Some trick cyclist nonsense, I suppose? Read about this kind of thing. They invent diseases, so you have to spend a fortune lying on a couch and talking about yourself. She’s just feeling sorry for herself. As I say, if she got up and out into the fresh air, she’d be fine. She’s probably missing her walks in the park. Don’t worry, Miss Smith. If there’s nothing physically wrong with Lady Mount-Hey, there’s no reason to make a fuss. She’s probably looking forward to having the baby to herself.’
‘Oh, is there no nanny booked?’
‘No. But Melissa’s mother will make sure she gets used to it all when she comes.’
Melissa had known for months that there would be no nanny, and she’d been relieved then. She knew Munty was looking for more ways to earn a bit of cash. It wasn’t his fault, but Munty clearly felt that Castle Hey wasn’t his, that he didn’t deserve it. That the house punished him for his undeserved occupation by sucking up every penny and refusing to be done up. Every time some part of the roof was repaired, another would spring a leak. Dry rot had broken out in disgusting brown pancakes all over the attic. There had been a time when she had tried to help him come to terms with his accidental inheritance, spinning dreams of opening the house up to the public, making it pay its way. That just seemed too much trouble now.
‘I understand,’ Munty was saying. ‘I’m grateful for all your help with Lady Mount-Hay and the baby. I’ll run you to the station this afternoon. Is that OK?’
‘My lord?’
‘Yes?’ Melissa could hear him beginning to walk away, then hesitating.
‘My lord, I would be easier in my mind if you would call Dr Murphy in before I go.’
‘I’ll talk to him, I promise.’
‘Thank you, my lord.’
Melissa pulled herself up using the doorknob, and ran shakily back to bed on her bare feet, just pulling the covers over herself as she heard a knock on the door. What could Dr Murphy do? There was nothing wrong with her, was there? Just this sickening feeling of failure. And doctors couldn’t cure that.
‘Your ladyship? May I come in?’
‘Yes, do.’
‘I’ll need to bring Damson in for her feed in a minute. How are you feeling?’
‘A bit weak, but I’m on the mend.’ Melissa managed a bright smile. ‘Ready to get up and dressed.’
Miss Smith stood hesitating and Melissa tried smiling at her again.
‘As you know, I need to move on to my next family. The baby is due in a couple of weeks, and I’ve had a letter from the Duchess today. It’s her fourth. I do like to have a week’s rest between each confinement.’
‘Of course you must. I’ve taken up far too much of your time. Those nights in the first week can’t have been easy.’
‘Oh no, not at all. Damson’s such a good little girl, aren’t you, darling?’
It never ceased to amaze Melissa that Miss Smith could summon up so much affection and enthusiasm for all the babies she delivered and then nursed in the first weeks of life. Didn’t they all blur into one? She told endless stories about little Viscount Storrington, who’d been so early that they’d despaired of him, ‘The size of a bag of sugar!’
And Lady Amelia Wilcox, who’d had to be rushed to hospital in the middle of a ball in her father’s Rolls. Miss Smith had arrived at the Manor the next morning to get things ready for when she came back, disappointed not to have attended Lady Amelia’s delivery. Melissa had giggled at all the titles trotted out like show ponies – but that was before she forgot how to laugh or why she had ever wanted to.
‘How she adored her little boy,’ she went on as she offered Damson up to Melissa’s breast. ‘Couldn’t keep her eyes or hands off him. I always bel
ieved she’d be one of those mummies who left it to the nannies while she got on with parties and fun, but no. I heard they’d never had a nanny, but she had them all mounted in little basket saddles by two, and following her out hunting. I even heard she took them to Glyndebourne, and left them in the keeper’s cottage so she could feed them in the interval.’
Melissa’s womb contracted sharply with a pang of guilt and grief that she could not understand such mothering at all. Couldn’t imagine taking the baby anywhere, even downstairs. Tomorrow was entirely a darkness to her. She stared down at the baby’s little sucking cheek and longed for it to stop.
She had frightened herself one day, when Miss Smith had left the room, by yanking the baby off the nipple and rolling her over and over in her shawl right down to the end of the bed, kicking at her with her feet.
The baby had shrieked her indignation, which had brought Miss Smith running. Melissa had hastily snatched her back into her arms before the midwife entered the room. She held the baby’s face into her shoulder to try to stop the cries.
‘What happened?’
‘Oh, I wasn’t concentrating and she fell off the breast.’
She’d been aware that Miss Smith was eyeing her, but she made no response and merely took the baby, saying, ‘I’ll just go and change her.’
While the midwife was taking her afternoon rest, Melissa crept through into the nursery to look at the baby. The room had not been redecorated in any way, and was just a little dressing room off her bedroom. A pile of snowy nappies was geometrically arranged on top of an old-fashioned mahogany chest of drawers which contained the baby’s little clothes. There was a wide, large basin in one corner, with chrome legs, and a glass shelf which had been removed so Damson could be bathed while she was still so small.
The bassinet had wheels, and Miss Smith was always pushing it through and placing it beside the bed in the daytime. Melissa wished she wouldn’t.