The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  “Oh, no, you needn’t. It was probably a bit of indigestion.”

  When her mother and the old man had left, she cleared up the lunch. Then she couldn’t think what to do: she wandered up, down and round the house. It was not large: two little attic rooms on the top floor where she had once slept when she had stayed with her grandparents. The wallpaper had been small white clouds in a blue sky, and Lady Rydal had paper seagulls of different sizes that you could cut out and stick wherever you chose on the wall, but you were only allowed one seagull per visit. Below the attics were three bedrooms and a bathroom. The sunniest and largest was to be the nursery with a bed for the nurse and a family cot for the baby, although to begin with it would sleep in a basket. The other large room was hers and Michael’s. It faced north and was bleak. It had been her grandfather’s study where he had composed. The third bedroom, very small with not much more room than would hold a bed and a chest of drawers, had been his bedroom where he had died. The ground floor had a large drawing room with a french window and steps down into the small, square garden, and double doors that led to the dining room, served by a lift that conveyed food up from the basement. The basement contained a large kitchen with an old range that heated the water and an ancient gas cooker. There were two cramped, damp, pitch-dark rooms with small, heavily barred windows where Lady Rydal’s unfortunate servants had slept. There were also a pantry, a larder and a lavatory. Louise hated the basement, and spent as little time there as possible.

  By the time she had finished a tour of the house, her back ached. The July summer’s day, which had begun with a pale blue sky and blazing sun, had now become overcast, grey, humid and oppressively hot. She decided to lie on the sofa for a bit and read, but the book she wanted was in the bedroom, and she couldn’t be bothered to climb the stairs to fetch it. The curious stirrings had started again; they did not seem to be regular and they did not hurt at all. In the end, she decided to do some sight reading; one of her grandmother’s pianos was still in the drawing room and there were shelves of music. But then she found that she had to sit so far away from the keyboard because of her now—to her mind—monstrous bulge that her back ached more than ever.

  She couldn’t remember much more about the rest of the day. She had made a kedgeree for herself and Michael, but the rice was overcooked and the fish stayed hard and salty: it hadn’t been nice, but Michael had said he didn’t mind, he was too fat anyway, which, she admitted, was true. She couldn’t remember what they did after dinner, what they talked about, or anything. She remembered saying that she was tired; it went on being hot and she had a headache, and Michael said there would be a storm later. She had managed to say that she really didn’t want to be made love to (she hadn’t told him about the stirrings all day), but she said she felt rotten and he accepted that. They went to sleep, and some unknown amount of time later she was woken because she had unmistakable pains coming about every ten minutes. She woke Michael who pulled on his clothes with incredible speed and rang the nursing home where she was to have the baby. They said that it was far too early for her to be in labour, but she’d better come in, just in case. While Michael went to get the car, she put on the skirt and smock she’d been wearing all day, and then tried to pack her suitcase. This was to have been packed ready to go, but her mother had said there was no point in doing it until nearer the time. She put in two nightdresses, her sponge bag and some slippers, but every time the pains came she found she had to stop. The whole thing felt unreal at that point: she was neither excited, nor frightened—nor anything.

  The nursing home was between the Cromwell Road and Kensington High Street. It was one of those immensely tall, grey buildings with a flight of steps up to the front door. They were received by a nurse, or sister, Louise didn’t know which, who made her feel that she was making an hysterical fuss about what would undoubtedly prove to be nothing. “She’d better spend the night here,” she had said to Michael, “and then Doctor can see her in the morning, after which I have no doubt but we’ll be sending her home.”

  “Right then. Here’s her case, sister.” He seemed very eager to be off. She suddenly desperately wanted him to stay, but he brushed her cheek with his mouth, said what good hands she was now in, and disappeared out of the front door before she could say anything.

  “We’ll have to go right to the top: we weren’t expecting you for another three weeks.”

  Louise followed her up the four flights of stairs. She got a pain half-way up, but she didn’t dare stop as she already felt a bit afraid of the nurse.

  She was told to undress and get into bed. “I’ll just have a look at you. How long have you been having pains?”

  “Since lunch-time today.”

  “Pity you didn’t telephone earlier.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t think it was the baby then.”

  The nurse did not answer this, but stood very patiently waiting for Louise to be in bed and ready to be examined; hostility leaked from her like a gas, and Louise dreaded being touched by her.

  When that seemed to be over, she made one more effort: “Do you think you could tell me what happens next? I mean, you must know so much about it, and I don’t know anything.”

  “What is going to happen next, young lady, is that as you’re here, I’ll shave you to be on the safe side, and then I shall give you something to make you sleep.”

  She went away and returned with a small basin of water, some soap and a razor that proved to have a very blunt blade, which hurt, and seemed to make her crosser than ever. Louise didn’t dare ask why she had to be shaved. When it was over she swallowed a large pill with a glass of water, and the nurse departed, switching off the light as she went.

  The best thing would be to go to sleep. Then she wouldn’t be being a nuisance, and tomorrow morning she would be able to go home. The discomforting thought came that eventually she would have to come back here, but then it occurred to her that not all the nurses could be like this one. Quite soon she fell heavily asleep.

  She woke suddenly because of a pain. The bed seemed wet and sticky. She reached out for the bedside light to see what was happening. The bed seemed full of blood, and immediately she thought that the baby must have died inside her. There was a bell on the table with the lamp by her bed and she rang it. Perhaps it is dead, and I am dying, she thought as another pain seized her. Nobody came. She rang twice more, for longer, but there was complete silence. By now she was very frightened. She heaved herself out of bed and opened the door of her room. “Please! Somebody come!” she called. In the end she screamed it, and heard footsteps and passage lights being turned on. The nurse appeared, and before she could say anything, Louise pointed to the blood.

  “Ssh. Don’t wake the other patients. Now you sit on that chair and I’ll remake the bed.” She went out onto the landing to a cupboard and came back with a fresh sheet.

  “What’s happening?”

  “You just had a little show. It means the baby’s on its way.” The pains seemed to be coming about every four minutes and there was no doubt at all about them being pains. Her mother had told her that one did not make a noise during labour and this came back to her now.

  “I’ll send someone to sit with you. Don’t worry. It’ll be hours yet.”

  She heaved herself back into the bed. She had never felt so isolated in her life. Why had Michael abandoned her to this?

  During the rest of that awful night she managed not to cry or scream. The nurse came back with another one who, elderly and woken from her sleep, looked sour and unfriendly as well. She asked when the doctor would come, and they said not until morning, at least, and possibly not then. They gave her a contraption that had a small rubber mask that she could put over her face and breathe from when the pains got too bad, but when she did this, it didn’t seem to make any difference.

  “I don’t think it’s working.”

  The midwife, who had positioned herself on a chair as far away from the bed as possible, came over and looked
at it.

  “It’s broken,” she said, and removed it.

  Outside, the storm rumbled with enormous peals of thunder. In between the pains, she struggled with the agonizing desire to sleep that the pill had induced. Each time she felt herself sinking into oblivion, another pain seized her and she was tortured awake. If only she would talk to me! she thought, but the nurse went on reading a newspaper. When she could see that the sky was becoming pale from a chink in the blackout, and the thunder seemed more distant, she asked how long it would go on for.

  The nurse, who did not even look up from her paper, replied that she was sick of people asking her that question. After that, there did not seem to be much point in asking anything else.

  Eventually, things did happen; another nurse arrived and looked at her and then the doctor came and told her to push and then there seemed to be at least three people round the bed. Her mouth was so dry that she managed to say she was thirsty whereupon the doctor held a glass of water to her mouth but whipped it away before she had had more than a sip. “One more push,” he said, “and then I’m going to give you something and you won’t know a thing.” And that was what happened. The last push was so agonizing that she thought she began to scream and the scream got cut off because he put a mask over her face and she disappeared or at least that was what it felt like—she simply ceased to exist. When she came to the nurse was bustling round her and the doctor smiled and said, a splendid little boy, but she couldn’t see anything. “He’s being bathed,” they said. They were all smiling now. She asked what the time was and they said a quarter to twelve and somebody gave her a cup of tea. Then Michael arrived carrying the baby and gave it to her as though it was a present from him and she knew from the expression on his face that she should be overcome with delight. She looked at the tightly wrapped white bundle with its small, wrinkled, tomato-coloured face—remote and stern and fast asleep—and felt nothing at all.

  “Six pounds twelve ounces,” Michael was saying proudly. “You are a clever girl!”

  They had brought her another cup of tea, but she said she didn’t want it, she just wanted to go to sleep. “You must drink it first,” they said; “you need to drink to bring the milk in.” So she had drunk the tea; Michael said that he was going to ring up their parents, and the baby was taken away.

  When she woke up she was crying. Michael came back in the evening, and said that he was popping down to Hatton as Zee wanted him to spend the rest of his leave with her. They poured liquids down her until her breasts were painfully swollen with milk, but the baby, being premature, did not want to suck, kept falling asleep—those early days she only saw him when he was asleep or crying. In the end they procured a breast pump, but by then she could not bear them to touch her. They told her how fortunate she was to have enough milk; there were mothers in the Home, they said, who did not have any to speak of. Couldn’t she feed one of their babies, then? Louise had asked, but they looked shocked at the notion and said that it would not do. She cried for three days—from exhaustion, from pain—apart from her breasts she had had to have stitches—from thirst—one of the ways in which they reduced her milk was refusing to allow her anything to drink at all—from a kind of homesickness—although she did not know for what home—from the feeling that Michael had abandoned her—twice, once when he had left her at the nursing home, with the hostile strangers, and again when he had chosen to spend the rest of his leave with his mother rather than with her—and, worst of all, from the growing conviction that there was something wrong with her since she clearly did not love her baby as she was expected to, or indeed feel anything about him except a vague fear. They called it post-natal depression and said she would soon be over it, and after a few days told her that she must pull herself together and get over it.

  A fortnight later, she was sent home to St. John’s Wood with a middle-aged and garrulous monthly nurse, who taught her how to use Tampax and saw to it that she continued never to be with the baby unless he was feeding or crying. “He’s as good as gold with me!” she would exclaim. She spent hours telling Louise about her last place that had been with a titled lady in a large house in the country where there had been a proper staff and she had not had to carry trays up and down stairs. Louise’s staff consisted of a very old lady whom Zee had bullied out of retirement to come and cook for a month. She came up after breakfast for Louise to order the meals, but they never had what she ordered, either because it turned out not to be in the shops, or, Louise suspected, because Mrs. Corcoran did not want to cook it. Apart from being a snob, Nurse Sanders was also a bully: she insisted that Louise stay in bed for two of the four weeks that she was there, and made her have boring rests in the afternoons after that. She also had the terrifying habit of bringing the baby in when he was hungry and crying and dumping him in his basket on the other side of the room to cry for a good fifteen minutes before his feed. “Let him tire himself out, he’ll sleep all the better after it,” she would say as she left them so unhappily together. Louise could not bear it, but when she got out of bed to pick him up he would not stop crying (she was too frightened of Nurse Sanders to dare to start feeding him before she was allowed to). He did not seem to like her much, she thought: even when he was feeding, he seldom met her eye, and squirmed away from her when she attempted (when Nurse Sanders was out of the room) to kiss him. Half-way through each feed, Nurse Sanders seized him and banged him on the back until his head shook and eventually he belched.

  “Doesn’t that hurt his back?” she had ventured the first time.

  “Hurt his back? Bless me, who do you think I am? Hurt his back? We have to get his wind up. Mummy doesn’t understand you, does she? Poor little mite.” And on and on, Louise counted the days until Nurse Sanders was to go. The nanny who was arriving to replace her could not possibly be so awful; she was young, for a start, and she had been trained in Aunt Rach’s Babies’ Hotel. Perhaps she would even be some company. But Mary, when she came, intimidated her with her quiet assurance and, because they were roughly the same age, both of them found it quite difficult to know how to deal with their relative positions. Mary adored the baby at once, and he seemed to like her, which was something. And Mary did not snub her. “He smiled at me!” she said to Nurse Sanders, on the morning that she was to leave. “Wind,” said Nurse Sanders briskly. “It’s nothing but wind.” She left after lunch, and Louise felt her spirits rise for the first time in months. Stella was coming for the weekend, Mary would be able to look after the baby and they would be able to go out in between feeds. Meanwhile, she had the two o’clock feed, by herself, for the first time.

  She remembered, sadly now, how she had run upstairs full of good resolutions: she would feed him and talk to him and cuddle him and without the malign presence of Nurse Sanders, he would respond. He was asleep, so she folded the Harrington square and the towelling nappy ready before she woke him. She had had very little practice at changing him. Then she lifted him carefully out of his basket. He was sopping wet, and started crying before she had got him onto her lap. Taking the wet nappies off was easy, but putting on the clean ones was another matter. By now he was screaming, arching his back and throwing himself about. She laid him on the floor in the end on top of the laid-out nappies, but it took her ages to fold and pin them as she was so afraid of pricking him. At the end of it he was scarlet in the face and, she felt, furious with her—so cross, in fact, that to begin with he refused to take milk, simply banged his head against her breast and went on roaring. Just as she was beginning to wonder insanely whether Nurse Sanders, as a parting shot, had somehow managed to feed him from the Cow and Gate tin she had insisted upon buying, he suddenly seized her nipple in a painful grip and started sucking, his slaty eyes fixed reproachfully on her face. Half-way through the feed, the telephone rang and, putting him over her shoulder, she went downstairs to answer it. It was Michael. He was able to get home for a couple of nights, and would be back in time for dinner.

  “Stella’s coming,” she said
.

  “Oh, good,” he said heartily. “It will be jolly to see her again. How’s Sebastian?”

  “Sebastian? Oh! He’s just been sick on my shoulder.”

  “Poor chap! Well, see you later, darling. Has the dragon left?”

  “Yes, just. The new nanny is due at tea-time.”

  “Splendid. I’ll take you both out, if you like.”

  She went back to the nursery and gave him the rest of his feed. It seemed ridiculous to call someone that size Sebastian, she thought. She wasn’t awfully keen on the name anyway, but Michael said it was a family name.

  Mary had arrived soon afterwards, and in no time was sitting in her lilac and white striped cotton dress bathing the baby. But the weekend, somehow, wasn’t fun at all. It was then that she discovered she was two different people, one with Stella and another with Michael, and with them both there, she didn’t know which to be. Also, she had been hoping that she might bring herself to talk to Stella about her horrible lack of maternal feeling: she was the only person with whom, she felt, she could take such a risk. But she got no further than telling her how awful the nursing home had been and Stella had been sympathetic and said that her father had said all the good nurses were in major hospitals or overseas, and that private nursing homes were having to make do with the dregs. This made her feel better: it was a kind of acknowledgement that it had been a bad time, which she had not had from anybody else.