by Rosie Thomas
‘Where’s my husband?’ Julia croaked.
‘Oh, he’ll be along later. New fathers need their sleep too, you know.’ Somehow, the nurse had put her hands under Julia’s arms and helped her to sit up. She straightened the pillows behind her head, and Julia found that if she closed her eyes and held her body very still, the pain slackened off a little.
‘Feeling some discomfort from the wound, are we?’ the nurse asked her.
‘I am,’ Julia said.
‘Doctor will probably give you something later. Something mild, for baby’s sake. Now, here she is. A real beauty. Are you going to hold her?’
Julia looked to the side of the bed. A white crib had been wheeled there, and the nurse lifted a white bundle out of it. She turned down a corner of blanket and cooed, ‘There’s a girl. Here’s your mummy, waiting for you.’
Julia’s arms felt stiff and heavy, but she lifted them and stretched them out. The bundle was very light, surprisingly warm and soft. She looked down into the baby’s face. It was scarlet, and covered with fine, almost invisible down. The eyelashes were minute black spikes, and there was a lot of thick black hair. The tiny chin looked very firm.
So, after everything, there was a baby. It was hard to relate all the pain to this, the wrapped-up product.
‘Is it all right?’ Julia asked.
‘Of course she is. She’s perfect.’
Julia went on staring at her baby. She was waiting to feel something, wondering what it should be. The little creature was so tiny, but yet such a definite presence.
‘Thank you,’ Julia said politely.
The nurse chuckled. ‘You two get to know each other. I’ll pop back in a little while with a nice cup of tea for you.’
Julia felt almost panicky when the door closed behind her, but the baby slept on without stirring. A girl; My daughter, Julia thought experimentally. She was certain that Alexander had wanted a boy, although he had never quite said so. She leaned back against the pillows, holding the baby tight, wishing that he would come.
Her first visitor turned out to be Mattie. She erupted into the quiet room, her arms full of flowers and parcels. She dumped them at the end of the bed and wrapped her arms tenderly around Julia and her white bundle. ‘I came as soon as I’d spoken to Bliss. Let me look at her.’
Julia held out the baby.
The little thing fitted neatly into Mattie’s arms, and she laid a finger against her cheek. She whispered, ‘Oh God, she’s beautiful. Hello, my lovely.’ Mattie held the baby as if it belonged where it lay, and there were shiny tears in her eyes. Of course, Julia thought, Mattie understood about babies. She had brought up her own little brothers and sisters. Mattie saw Julia looking at her and sniffed hard, laughing at herself. ‘Why am I crying over her? Oh, my darling, you’re so clever. Was it bad?’
Julia made a face. ‘But all over now.’
‘Bliss said that you were shouting for me. And for Jessie.’ Julia remembered with shame that she had shouted for everyone, wanting them to come and rescue her from the astonishing grip of pain. ‘I think I even howled for Betty at one point. I didn’t perform very well. It bloody well hurt.’
‘Bliss says it was their fault. They let you go on and on until he wanted to kill them.’
‘I knew she was never going to come out. That made it bad.’
‘But they got her out in the end, and she’s wonderful,’ Mattie comforted her.
Julia rested her head against her shoulder, suddenly feeling that everything was all right. Better than all right; softened and burnished with happiness and relief. ‘Look, Mattie, her eyes are open.’
With their heads close together, they looked down into the baby’s black, unfathomable gaze.
After a long silence Mattie repeated, ‘You’re so clever. And lucky.’ And then, sounding more like herself, she announced, ‘I’ve got a bottle of champagne. Let’s drink a toast.’
She rummaged for glasses, and eased the cork out of the bottle with a resonant plop. She poured the silvery froth and then she looked at Julia and lifted her glass. ‘To you. Mother and daughter.’
Julia thought, as she drank, Is that me? It seemed a long time, very long, since she had thought of her own real mother, and she wondered what the unknown woman would feel if she knew she had a granddaughter.
The nurse came bustling in with a cup of tea. She clucked at the sight of the champagne and left the cup on the bedside locker. She looked very hard at Mattie before she went away again.
A few moments later, Bliss arrived. Julia couldn’t see who he was, at first, because he was a moving pyramid of flowers. They were all white, white orchids and roses and lilies. They fell around Julia and over the bedcover, and he bent down and kissed her. ‘Thank you,’ Alexander whispered, ‘for my baby.’
Julia gathered up some of the flowers and held them to her face. She smelt the spice and honey scents of them. ‘I thought you wanted a boy.’
Alexander said, ‘I wanted exactly what you’ve given me.’ He bent over the crib to look at the baby. Julia had never seen him look so soft, so unmasked, even in the times at night, in bed, their own times at the beginning, before the fire had consumed everything. When Alexander reached to turn back the white covers of the crib, the stretched, glazed pink skin of the burn scars showed on the backs of his hands. Julia breathed harder, watching him, not letting her eyes slide away.
‘I sat and held her, you know, in the night,’ Alexander was saying. ‘After they had put you to bed. You were safe, and she was alive. Breathing. It was … the most precious moment I have ever known.’
Mattie stood up abruptly. The legs of her chair squawked on the polished floor. ‘I must go. Doing a full read-through of the new play this afternoon.’
Julia and Alexander nodded, barely hearing; Mattie understood that she just had to say something to ease her exit. She made herself fix her attention on the afternoon’s work as she gathered up her bag. Work was what she had, after all.
Mattie had spent a year in One More Day, at the Angel Theatre and then in the West End transfer. She had spent the last three months recreating the role of Mary for the film version. And now she was to read another part in Jimmy’s latest work. To directors and producers and backers they were a partnership like bread and butter.
‘How’s Jimmy?’ Alexander asked.
‘Oh, he’s fine.’ Only she didn’t sleep with Jimmy any more. He had coolly turned his attention elsewhere, leaving Mattie to feel hurt, and rejected, and then angry. She would have been lonely, now, if she ever had the time to think about it. She bent over and brushed Julia’s cheek with her mouth. It was amazing how Julia could still look beautiful even after eighteen hours’ labour followed by a Caesarean.
And Bliss, looking like a child who had just been given a present that was such an extravagance that he hadn’t even dared to wish for it.
They’ll be all right together, the two of them, Mattie thought, in spite of everything. She found herself praying wordlessly for it. She leaned over the crib once more and breathed in the strange, pungent, newborn smell. She remembered it from Rozzie’s babies. It tugged in her own stomach and breasts.
Mattie swirled round and drained her glass of champagne.
‘I really am going now. Bye-bye, my darlings.’
But she hadn’t reached the door before there was a flutter outside it and Julia’s nurse came in, followed by two others. They nudged each other.
‘D’you mind us asking? Are you Mattie Banner?’
‘Yes.’ Mattie had a practised smile for these occasions now.
‘Would you … could you sign these for us?’ They held out bits of paper.
‘For my brother, could you? His name’s Tony. He thinks you’re fabulous.’
Mattie scribbled her name, her tongue sticking out between her teeth, just as it used to do when she sat at the desk next to Julia’s at Blick Road Girls’ Grammar. Julia watched from the sea of her flowers, her hand in Alexander’s. The nurses thanked Matti
e profusely and rustled away again.
The women’s eyes met. They measured each other, for an instant, like strangers.
‘I’ll come again tomorrow,’ Mattie said. ‘If I’m allowed?’
‘You’d better,’ Julia answered.
They blew a kiss to each other. Then the door swung, and closed with a pneumatic hiss. Julia and Alexander were alone together.
‘How do you feel?’ he asked.
‘Sore. It could be worse.’
His fingers smoothed the cover over her belly. ‘You were very brave.’
Julia wrinkled her face, and then snorted with laughter. The laugh turned into a wince of pain. ‘I was awful. I was worse than a baby myself.’
Alexander was sombre. ‘I was afraid that you would die.’
He had thought of the fire when they wheeled her away, and he could do nothing but sit in a dingy little room and wait. He could hear the fire’s roar, and the stench of it filled his nostrils. Death again. He couldn’t surrender Julia to it. He would go back himself, into the greedy mouth of it, if it would save her …
And then the sister had come back. ‘You have a beautiful baby daughter. Your wife is fine.’
And now, sitting on his wife’s bed in the June sunshine, he tried to slide his hands under the mounds of flowers. Beside them, in her crib, the baby opened her eyes and gave a thin cry.
‘She must be hungry.’
‘What do I do?’
Alexander moved the flowers, heaping them on the chairs and on the floor, and lifted the baby up. With her fingers awkwardly fumbling, Julia opened the front of her nightdress. Alexander held the baby to the breast and she turned her head, nuzzling, but Julia’s fingers couldn’t connect the tiny mouth to the nipple. She felt huge, and clumsy, as if the weight of her hands alone would crush the fragile skull. The baby’s face contorted and her bare gums showed as her lips drew back and she cried louder.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ Julia whispered.
The nurse swished back into the room. ‘Dear, dear. Time to try a little feed, is it? Good girl. Look, it’s like this.’ She grasped Julia’s breast and inserted the nipple neatly into the baby’s gaping mouth. The gums clamped down at once and the baby began sucking furiously. ‘She knows what she wants, all right,’ the nurse said cheerfully.
Julia looked down at the expression that had changed in an instant from fury to satisfaction. She did know what she wanted, and she was how many hours and minutes old? The bony gums were hard, and the sucking seemed to draw from deep inside Julia. Her innards contracted and she shivered a little.
‘That’s a picture,’ said the nurse. Alexander extricated his camera from amongst the flowers and asked her, ‘Will you take it?’
‘Smile, then, please.’
With Alexander’s arm around her and her baby at her breast, Julia looked into the lens and smiled obediently. The shutter clicked.
‘The happy family,’ the nurse said brightly, and left them alone again.
‘What shall we call her?’ Alexander asked, touching his finger to the back of the dark head. Julia was looking at the flowers. The lilies had curving pure white petals, and golden stamens thickly powdered with pollen. They were cool and sappy, and perfectly beautiful.
‘Let’s call her Lily,’ Julia said.
‘Lily? I like that. Lily Bliss.’
The baby had stopped feeding, and had fallen asleep again with her mouth drooping. Julia and Alexander watched her, and then smiled tentatively at each other.
‘I wish I could take you both home, now,’ Alexander said. ‘I want my family at Ladyhill where it belongs.’
‘Ladyhill,’ Julia repeated.
She turned her face away, not looking at his hands now. She wondered how she could have been so stupid, in the last hazy days of her pregnancy, as to have believed they could go on in the safe suspension of waiting.
‘I don’t want to go back yet.’ Her voice sounded shrill and she softened it with an effort. ‘Can’t we stay on at the flat for a while?’
Alexander’s hand tightened on hers. ‘We must go home,’ he said. ‘It’s where we belong.’
Julia looked down again. Their hands were joined, like they were themselves, even more forcibly now by the scrap of life that was half of each of them. But she felt the distance between them all over again, as if they had been sitting on opposite sides of the room.
More softly, Alexander said, ‘There’s work to be done at home. Waiting for us.’
Julia nodded, mute. With the unimaginable rite of birth behind her at last, she realised that nothing had changed.
‘Are you hurting?’ Alexander asked. The corners of his eyes folded into creases of concern.
‘A bit.’
He put his, hand to her cheek, stroking it. Julia wanted to pitch forward into his arms, wanted him to pick her up and hold her, but neither of them moved.
‘You should try to go to sleep,’ he murmured. He did lean forward then, to kiss the corner of her mouth. ‘I’ll come in again this evening. Rest now.’ He stood looking down into the cradle for a long moment, and then he went away.
After he had gone, Julia lay with her arms resting stiffly over the folded sheet. The room’s pale blue walls, hung with innocuous pictures, couldn’t contain her imagination, although she longed for its confinement.
The high outline of the house reared over her again. There was a black hole burned through the heart of it, and although there was silence except for the rooks in the elm trees, Julia could always hear the roar of the fire.
She opened her eyes wide, staring at the blue walls and the pictures. She hated herself for her weakness but the tears came anyway. Alexander wanted to take her and the baby back to Ladyhill, where the nightmares and the guilt followed her like shadows. She shrank under the bedclothes, and she heard Lily snuffle and stir in her crib. The door clicked open again and the nurse materialised. ‘Tears? Oh, dear now, there’s no need. All new mums feel that they can’t cope, you know. And you did have a difficult time, poor love.’ Her sympathy made Julia feel her inadequacy more sharply, and the tears dripped down her face and ran on to the sheets. The nurse bustled around, finding a handkerchief and pouring a tumbler of water, clearing away the champagne bottle and glasses. Julia sniffed and scoured her face with the handkerchief, ‘You’ll see. You’ll be as good as new in a few days, and you’ll be able to go home with your husband and the baby …’
Julia looked wildly around. The little blue room was square and safe. ‘I’m all right here, really,’ she gabbled. ‘I don’t want to go yet.’
The nurse looked at her. ‘I often think it’s better,’ she mused, ‘for the mums to be all together, on the ward. They keep each other company and cheer each other up when they get weepy. I suppose you’re in here because of who you are …’
Who am I? Julia thought desperately. I’m not Julia Smith and I’m not Lady Bliss. Alexander’s wife. The baby’s – Lily’s – mother. Who am I?
The nurse patted her hand. ‘Doctor will be along now to have a little look at you.’ A woman in a white coat with metal-grey permed hair came in. Julia lay back exhaustedly against the pillows and submitted to her examination.
Julia stayed in the maternity clinic for almost two weeks. It was longer than was strictly necessary, but she told the doctor that she didn’t feel quite strong enough to go home after only ten days.
Streams of visitors came to see her, and to exclaim over Lily who rapidly lost her redness and became almost as beautiful as everyone declared. Amongst the visitors was Betty. She brought a pink-ribboned dress for the baby, and a box of chocolates for Julia. Julia put her arm awkwardly around her mother’s shoulder and kissed her cheek. ‘Thank you,’ Julia said.
‘Well, it’s not much, I know. But I didn’t know what to bring, what with everything …’
Betty gestured nervously at the flower-filled room.
‘Thank you for coming.’
Betty sat down on the edge of her chair. Since
Julia’s marriage and the death of Bliss’s father it was as if Betty had become the daughter and Julia the mother. Betty deferred to Julia’s opinions, deprecating herself and her circumstances. No one had a better appreciation of social status and its various degrees than Betty, and she made it clear that Julia had moved far beyond her own orbit. It was her evident pride in the fact that disturbed Julia. She had been happier with Betty’s approval of her job at Tressider’s. That, at least, had been her own doing. Now she was only identifiable as Alexander’s wife, and, when she thought about it, she realised that she had come uncomfortably close to being what she herself had despised Betty for.
Julia wondered, a little wearily, how everything had happened so quickly.
She wanted to talk to Betty about it, to ask her if she felt that her sacrifices had been worthwhile, but their relationship was too remote for that. Betty had turned herself into a distant acquaintance, an acquaintance who wouldn’t dream of presuming.
They talked rather stiffly about the baby, instead.
‘Aren’t you proud of her?’ Betty asked.
Julia still felt more bewilderment at being asked to accept total responsibility for another human being, than pride. But she nodded, and Betty seemed satisfied.
‘She looks like you, when you were a baby. But you were bigger. We never saw you, until six weeks,’
It was the first time, since the long-ago day in the square, that either of them had mentioned Julia’s adoption.
Carefully, Julia said, ‘It must have been … strange. Like taking delivery of a package.’
Suddenly, Betty’s face cleared. Her eyes met Julia’s, all the stiffness gone.
‘It wasn’t strange. It was wonderful.’
Julia was silenced. She understood that it must have been wonderful, and the sadness that had followed it seemed suddenly almost too much to bear. She looked from Betty’s glowing face to the crib beside the bed, and she thought, Lily …
She should have left Betty to the comfort of her memories of babyhood, but the moment of intimacy seemed too valuable. She asked, ‘Do you know anything about my real mother?’
She had thought more about her, since she had been given her own daughter to hold, than she had ever done before. Does she think of me? On my birthday. At New Year. What would she feel, if she knew she had a granddaughter? She looked at Lily, sleeping. Are those her features?