by Emily Gunnis
He had wanted to be happy for them but a depression had descended on him since Jessie and Adam told him about the baby. It was more than the intense sadness that Liz wasn’t there to share it, it was a sense of foreboding that seemed to increase in strength alongside Jessie’s growing belly.
Something didn’t feel right to him, and he suspected it was the fact that this was Rebecca’s granddaughter too, yet no one had dared to mention the elephant in the room.
Adam had never even met Jessie’s birth mother and, though Harvey had several times encouraged Jessie to introduce Adam to Rebecca, Jessie had been reluctant. Until five days ago Rebecca hadn’t even known about the baby, but last Friday Jessie had announced, to Harvey’s shock, that she had been to see her. The meeting had clearly been a disaster and only added to Harvey’s concerns about Jessie’s increasing anxiety.
‘I just don’t want her in our lives, Dad, it’s too hard. I don’t want her around when the baby is born.’ Jessie’s eyes had filled with tears and Harvey’s guts had twisted with worry.
Now, Harvey set down his coffee and pulled on his muck boots again. After dragging himself from the shower he had taken the dogs for a bracing run around in the freezing morning surf at Wittering Bay, the beach of his childhood, which he could now bear to visit only in the winter because of the gridlock that plagued it in the summer months. He could barely even cope with the two buses a day blocking the narrow lane in November, and in his sleep deprived state found it hard to bottle his rage at having to back up for a bus he met head on in the lane that morning.
The FOR SALE sign next to Seaview Cottage had caught the morning light as he reached the mouth of the footpath which led to its door. As far as he knew, Seaview was still owned by the family who had bought Seaview Farm from him nearly forty years before.
Over time, people had forgotten what happened there, but in the weeks and months afterwards it was all anyone had talked about. ‘So dreadful,’ they’d say, leaning into one another with glee. ‘Did you hear, the coroner said he had battle neurosis. Their little girl, Rebecca, was in the house at the time. Found them both. Horrific.’
Yet the trauma of that night for both him and Rebecca continued to this day, manifesting itself most visibly in the shattered relationship between Rebecca and Jessie, the daughter they shared.
As he fed the dogs, the mirror by the back door reflected his sorry state: with his grey, unkempt hair, the heavy bags under his eyes and washed-out skin, he looked every day of his sixty-eight years. But then the sun broke through the clouds and hit his face as he crossed the courtyard and it was so warm on his skin that for a moment he relaxed and a smile broke on the edges of his mouth.
He had a granddaughter. She was Adam in a babygro, with his long forehead and dark eyes, but she was beautiful. And he had been there for every moment of it, two days and nights.
Jessie had refused an epidural for too long. As Harvey rubbed her back and held her hand through every excruciating wave, she said that she had promised Adam they would have a natural birth, that she wanted to make him proud of her. Her father had tried desperately to persuade her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Then when her pain limit came and she couldn’t take any more they said it was too late. By the time she came to push she hadn’t slept or eaten for over forty-eight hours, and she couldn’t do it. The baby was stuck and Harvey had looked on in horror as the doctors used what seemed to him brute force to finally suck, cut and pull the limp baby girl out of her.
Jessie had called her Elizabeth Rose. He had expected – hoped – that her middle name would be Elizabeth, but it had been almost too much after months of Jessie barely uttering her stepmother’s name, and a stark reminder of what was bubbling below the surface.
Harvey unpadlocked the door of his workshop and tugged the frozen catch open. In an attempt to keep busy before he was allowed to return to the hospital, he sought out the tools he needed from his cobweb-covered work surface to mend the gate onto the driveway which Jessie always struggled with. A shard of light broke through the small windows and fell on Liz’s gardening gloves. Slowly, he picked them up, squeezed his long fingers into the stretchy fabric and put his hands up to his face the way she used to. He closed his eyes.
Pull yourself together, old man. He could hear her voice as clearly as the dogs barking outside. You’ve done well so far, but you need to keep it up. Jessie needs you. Your granddaughter needs you.
And she did. As they sat together soon after Elizabeth’s birth, the midwife seemed to be sucking Jessie into a vortex of stress that the baby wasn’t latching on. It was four in the afternoon and starting to get dark and Jessie was approaching her third night straight without sleep when a midwife thought it sensible to tell Jessie she had ‘awkward nipples’.
‘You need to try and feed her, Jessica.’ A midwife with cropped black hair and onion breath had appeared next to Jessie, holding the baby while they were still stitching her up after the birth.
She had turned to him, wide-eyed. ‘When is Adam getting here, Dad? It’s getting dark, you aren’t allowed to stay here with me tonight, only the babies’ fathers are. I need him to help look after her. I’m scared someone will take her in the night.’ Jessie had the same haunted look in her eyes as Rebecca did, the same conviction that someone was out to hurt her baby.
‘He’s booked on a flight tomorrow morning. He’ll be here tomorrow evening, sweetheart,’ he said gently, hiding the fact that he had just called Adam’s editor for the fourth time, demanding to know where the hell Adam was. ‘Don’t upset yourself about tonight, honey,’ he said. ‘Hopefully they’ll let you go home soon. I’ll stay with you as much as I can until Adam gets here.’
‘Why doesn’t she like me? Why isn’t she feeding?’ Jessie said, looking deathly pale.
‘Jessica, I know it’s hard, but it’s important you keep trying. We need to feed her within the first hour or it could be bad for the baby. If you move her round a bit closer to you, that’s it, support her head, so you’re both more comfortable. Does that feel better?’ the midwife had said as the baby screamed blue murder and tears poured down Jessie’s cheeks.
‘Could we not give the baby a bottle to keep her going?’ Harvey had suggested, trying to bury his rage, but the midwife pressed on.
She shot him a steely look. ‘The baby needs Mum’s colostrum,’ she snapped when Harvey eased her out into the corridor. ‘It could be there’s a reason she’s not feeding properly.’
‘What about what Jessie needs? Do you know she suffers with depression, that she’s come off her Citalopram because of this obsession with breastfeeding?’
‘I appreciate your concern, Mr Roberts. We are aware of the situation with Jessica’s medication and we are keeping a close eye, but there is a small window for her baby to get her colostrum. There will be plenty of time for Jessie to rest after that.’
‘She’s going to die, Dad.’ Jessie’s eyes were wide when he went back to her after popping outside for some much needed air in an attempt to calm down. She seemed highly agitated and she hadn’t touched her lunch. His daughter was acting just as Rebecca had – the same panic in her eyes, the same sleeplessness. It was like reliving a waking nightmare over and over again.
‘She’s not going to die, darling,’ he said, lifting Elizabeth out of Jessie’s arms, whereupon she immediately stopped crying now that she wasn’t being forced to Jessie’s breast. A breastfeeding poster glared down at them both: BREAST IS BEST. A mother shown contentedly kissing her baby’s foot while it breastfed happily. Breast milk lowers baby’s risk of ear infections. Breast milk lowers baby’s risk of diarrhoea. Breast milk lowers baby’s risk of pneumonia.
He walked over to the window with his granddaughter in his arms and looked out over Chichester as a group of noisy relatives armed with balloons arrived at the next bed.
‘It’s so noisy here, I really want to go home.’ Jessie started to cry and he tried to hold her hand, the baby lying awkwardly in the crutch of his arm.
‘Promise me you won’t take your eyes off her so you know if she stops breathing. Promise me, Dad.’ Jessie’s knuckles were white as her nails dug into his arm.
‘I promise, darling.’ But while Jessie tried to sleep a young female consultant came to tell him that because the baby wasn’t latching on and feeding they had taken a heel prick blood test, and it was showing that Elizabeth had a raised white blood cell count.
‘What does that mean?’ he had snapped.
‘It means the baby is showing signs of an infection. We’re starting a broad-spectrum antibiotic until we have time to grow a blood culture, which takes twenty-four hours. When we have the results of that we’ll know if she’s on the right antibiotic and whether she needs to continue it.’
‘Is she going to be okay?’ Harvey stood up, still holding baby Elizabeth in his arms.
The doctor nodded. ‘I suspect it’s Group B streptococcus, which is a common infection. She’ll need seven days of antibiotics.’
‘Do they have to stay here? I mean, could the baby be given the antibiotics at home? My daughter desperately needs to get some peace and quiet so she can rest.’
The doctor shook her head. ‘We’re going to take the baby and put a cannula in her hand now so she can have the antibiotics by IV. She needs to complete the treatment, I’m afraid, or she could become seriously unwell within a very short time.’
He had tried to stop them, said that he’d promised Jessie he wouldn’t let the baby out of his sight. But they had insisted. So, with Jessie finally in a rather fitful sleep, he had reluctantly put Elizabeth back in her cot and watched them wheel her off. He had hoped Jessie would carry on sleeping, perhaps even until they brought Elizabeth back, but the ward was so noisy she was awake again within minutes. She had looked at him, seen he was not holding Elizabeth and then looked over at the space where her baby’s cot should be.
‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ she had gasped in panic, sitting up and trying to haul her broken body out of bed.
‘Darling, she’s fine, they needed to give her some antibiotics. Please, Jessie, don’t upset yourself.’
‘Antibiotics? What for? Where is she?’ Jessie was hysterical within seconds and stayed that way until he fetched someone and they took her, in a wheelchair, to Elizabeth. And then they both stood and watched two paediatricians try for half an hour to find a vein in Elizabeth’s tiny hands while she relentlessly screamed blue murder.
After that Jessie seemed to Harvey to disappear into herself entirely. She wasn’t eating, she couldn’t sleep and she wouldn’t let anyone else touch her baby.
‘They’re trying to poison her, Dad. It’s not medicine, they’re hurting her.’
‘Sweetheart, they wouldn’t do that.’
‘I want to take her home, I don’t want to be here. I don’t want them putting that stuff in her little veins. We don’t know what it is. Please, Dad, I want to get out of here.’
‘I can’t let you do that, honey, you haven’t been discharged. I’ll stay as much as I’m allowed and in a day or so Adam will be here. Before you know it you will be able to go home.’
‘Please, Dad, they’re killing her. You need to take me home before they come to take her away again. She’s poorly – can’t you see what they’re doing to her? She’s my baby. Why can’t you take us home if that’s what I want? I hate it here.’
‘Darling, we’d get into a lot of trouble if we left now. We need to let them give Elizabeth these antibiotics and then you can go. Just a couple more days.’
And they had talked like this, on a loop, as the night descended on the first day of little Elizabeth’s life. He had sat there trying to calm her, until 8 p.m., when they told him visiting hours were over. Then, he left, having made the distracted, overworked midwives promise to keep a close eye on Jessie. They said a private room would soon be available so she’d be able to move there and get some rest, but it had done nothing to alleviate the sense of doom engulfing him as he walked away.
Now, crossing the yard back to the house, he saw a police car pulling up outside.
He stood rooted to the spot, wishing he could stop time. A hundred scenarios of what had happened to Jessie spun through his mind but he knew for certain they were there about her. A man and a woman climbed out, let themselves through the broken gate then walked towards him.
‘Harvey Roberts?’ Harvey nodded at the tall man with the long, narrow face who had addressed him. ‘I’m DC Paterson and this is DC Galt from Brighton CID.’
‘What’s wrong?’ Harvey’s throat felt dry. The words were stuck; he didn’t want to let them go.
‘We wanted to talk to you about your daughter Jessica Roberts.’
‘What about her? What’s happened?’
‘I take it that means she’s not here.’
‘Of course she’s not bloody here, she’s in hospital.’
‘I’m afraid Jessica left the hospital with her baby just after eight o’clock this morning. I take it from your reaction you’ve not heard from her?’
Harvey stood staring at him, unable to respond.
‘Could we possibly go inside and talk?’
Chapter Two
Harriet
VE Day, Tuesday, 8 May 1945
Harriet Waterhouse sat at her pine dressing table next to the small draughty window on the top floor of her employer’s townhouse and pulled the diary she had bought that day from her shopping bag. It was still wrapped in brown paper, which crackled like newly lit kindling as she unwrapped it, the scent of the post office wafting out from the parcel and making its mark on her musty room.
The smart leatherbound book had the words ‘Five Year Diary’ embossed on the front in gold letters and a small brass lock fastening its cover tight. Harriet realized that she was holding her breath.
She didn’t know what had made her spend a month’s salary on something she had never coveted before. She had only gone into the post office to escape the crowds. Every man, woman and child was ecstatic at the news that the war was finally over. They were desperate to be together, united in their euphoria, singing and shouting from every doorway, window, rooftop, lamp post. She had stood in the queue for an hour in Wilson’s grocery store to get Miss Clara’s and Miss Ethel’s weekly rations, surrounded by people she had known all her life looking at her expectantly, demanding an ecstatic reaction from her.
‘I can’t believe it,’ she had said after being asked how she felt about Jacob coming home, forcing a smile as they frowned at her, waiting for more, until, to her great relief, someone came along and swept them back up into the celebrations.
It had been a day like any other Tuesday. She had taken Miss Clara and Miss Ethel a cup of tea at seven then laid the fire in the sitting room. After breakfast, she had made the beds, tidied the bedrooms, dusted and polished the silver before serving lunch. It was around three o’clock when she was starting on the laundry that they had called to her and she’d found them sitting in a highly unusual state of stunned silence by the wireless as Winston Churchill made his broadcast to the nation.
The sounds of cheering and singing began to echo through the streets outside and Harriet stood, her legs shaking, her heart hammering, unable to take her eyes from Miss Clara and Miss Ethel as they clutched one another and sobbed.
‘Isn’t it wonderful, Harriet!’ said Miss Ethel, beaming at her, her ruddy cheeks shiny with tears. ‘Our boys are coming home.’
In the safety of the kitchen, she had locked the door and sat down on the cold stone floor, closing her eyes and trying to feel some emotion that Jacob was coming back to her. The same image kept playing on repeat in her mind’s eye, the last day she saw him, saying goodbye at the station, his canvas bag slung over his shoulder, his Chestnut eyes warily darting around, his beautiful smile absent.
&n
bsp; They had watched the other couples kissing goodbye and, tears in his eyes, he’d turned to her and said, ‘I can’t do this, Hattie, I’m not strong enough.’ He had been home for just one week’s leave and she had been shocked by the change in him: his sunny nature was gone, replaced by a short temper and a lack of appetite. He had recoiled if she touched him and had barely slept, sitting up all night drinking, too afraid to fall asleep for fear of the nightmares that lay in wait for him. ‘Please help me,’ he had said on their last night, crying himself to sleep in her arms then minutes later kicking her violently out of her bed because she had turned over in her sleep and startled him.
As she wiped away her tears and dragged herself up to make Miss Clara and Miss Ethel’s afternoon tea she thought of Jacob’s letters, folded neatly in her dressing table. Bundles of writing paper sent over the years which she’d ironed painstakingly and brought back to life. Jumbled snapshots of hell written in his childish handwriting on borrowed or stolen paper and pushed into envelopes of different shapes and sizes. Letters which when she read them she could picture him writing, by candlelight, in makeshift camps; cold, scared, alone, pausing over the words, not wanting to worry her but desperate to get the memory out.
D-Day landings were rough. Having found ourselves finally on land, there was no time to gather ourselves as we set off to the scene of the battle. I shall not tell you about that for fear of planting the pictures that haunt me into your head, but I will say that I had no time to eat or drink for an entire day. We broke through the beachhead and we are now advancing rapidly. No sleep. Lost all my kit and money. The clay and the rain were our greatest enemies. Some of the toughest fighting of this war is taking place now as the Allies battle to gain a foothold in France. Feel very far away from you and as if I have left a part of me behind on that beach.