by Hilary Boyd
It felt very peaceful in the warm, clean room. The baby slept on and Eve dozed while Eric took Arthur – who was ecstatic about the Lego he’d been given – along to the parents’ room to find some juice. Stella felt like dozing herself. The tension of the past few days was over, the baby was safely born. She closed her eyes and must have dropped off for a moment, because the next thing she was aware of was Eve’s voice.
‘Mum … Mum …’
Stella opened her eyes to see her daughter lifting the sheet, her eyes widening in puzzlement, then horror. Stella was by her side in an instant. She gasped. The bed sheet was covered in blood, the intense, startling crimson spreading in a pool where she lay, seeping down the mattress, even infiltrating the beige compression socks Eve wore up to her knees.
A split-second later, her daughter’s face drained of colour and became chalk-white, beads of sweat bursting on her forehead. She was blinking rapidly, swooning against the pillow, and the hand Stella snatched up was clammy and limp.
‘Eve! Evie!’ she shouted, slamming her hand against the red emergency button on the wall behind the bed.
The next hour was the very worst nightmare Stella could imagine. She watched in horror as the medical staff grabbed the baby from Eve’s chest, pushed the mattress flat, surrounded her daughter with oxygen masks, tubes, syringes, monitors, gloves, aprons, the air thick with shouts, orders and controlled panic as they worked at frantic speed.
Stella was turned and gently expelled from the room, only to see, some moments later, the door fly open and Eve, still lying flat and surrounded by medics, being pushed at high speed along the corridor towards the heavy double doors of the theatre. Stella caught a glimpse of her daughter’s face as she shot past – ashen and unmoving – and thought she was going to throw up.
A tall, middle-aged woman in a navy uniform was touching her arm, drawing her back past the room where her daughter had been comfortably dozing only minutes earlier, to the end of the corridor, where a couple of low, faux-leather beige armchairs sat beneath the window alcove.
Blinking hard, trying to focus on what the woman was saying, Stella could only hear her own ragged breathing.
‘Is Eric still in the hospital?’ the midwife was asking. ‘We need to tell him what’s happening.’
Eric. ‘Yes … uh, he went to get Arthur some juice.’
There was a thin cry from somewhere close by and Stella remembered the baby. ‘Oh, please, dear God, please don’t let Evie die,’ she whispered silently. ‘Please, please, don’t let her die. She can’t die.’
‘In the parents’ room?’ the midwife asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. She was already on the move, hurrying off around the corner, shoes screeching on the shiny hospital linoleum, leaving Stella alone and suddenly waking up to all the questions she needed to ask.
She sank into one of the squashy armchairs and took out her phone, clicking on Eric’s number. There was no answer and she left a message: ‘Eric, ring me as soon as you get this. It’s very urgent.’
When she looked up, Jack was right in front of her, clutching a bunch of flowers to his chest, a big grin on his face.
‘Where are they?’ he demanded, before he’d even said hello.
She swallowed, struggling out of the low chair. ‘Eve’s haemorrhaged,’ she said, too shocked to soften the blow. ‘They’ve taken her back to theatre.’
The arm holding the flowers dropped to his side, leaving the bunch dangling.
‘How bad is it? Is she OK? What about the baby?’ Jack looked around. ‘Where’s Eric?’ The questions flew at her like knives.
She answered the only question she could. ‘The baby’s fine. She’s in here …’ Pushing past him, she walked back to Eve’s room. The door was open, the space eerily empty – no bed, no cot – just an orderly tidying up the mess left from the emergency earlier. ‘They must have taken her to the nursery,’ she said, as they both stood there, bewildered.
Jack slapped the flowers down on the bed table, looking round impatiently. ‘Where the hell’s Eric?’ Then he turned to her, pulling her roughly against him. ‘Christ, Stella.’ She took a wobbly breath, but she was too stunned for tears.
‘You should have seen her, Jack. There was so much blood. I genuinely thought she was dead.’
He said nothing, squeezing her harder. ‘Stop it, Stella. Just stop it. Eve is not going to die.’
She nodded against his chest, her mouth dry with shock. They had been here before. Different circumstances, of course, but the same dragging horror that sucked the life from her body.
‘It can’t happen again … It’s not fair … Not Evie too.’ She bit her lip, trying to breathe. ‘Not Evie, Jack. Please, please not Evie,’ she whispered into his shirt. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’
Jack was very quiet, but his arms still held her. She could feel the tension coming off his body in waves. Then his hands cupped her face and he turned it up to his. His blue eyes bored into hers, forcing her to hear him.
‘They are going to sort this out, Stella. Listen to me. Eve is not going to die. This isn’t Jonny …’
She took a gasping breath and stared back at him, willing him to be right.
‘This sort of thing must happen all the time,’ he was saying. His voice held a note of deadly calm that didn’t fool her. But his apparent conviction helped her get her breath. ‘She’s right where she needs to be. They know what they’re doing. Stella? Do you hear me?’ His large hands still pressed urgently into her cheeks. ‘Evie is going to be absolutely fine.’
She nodded, the knife-edge panic marginally receding, but leaving her faint and nauseous. Jack held her gaze, and her face, a moment longer, then his hands dropped and he let out a sigh.
‘Will you be OK for a minute? I’ll go and find out what’s happening … and look for Eric.’
Stella didn’t reply; she couldn’t speak. She almost fell into the blue plastic armchair that had been pushed against the wall in the emergency. ‘Evie,’ she silently spoke her daughter’s name as she buried her face in her hands.
50
Jack wanted to scream. During the next hour, every member of the medical staff – from midwife to ward sister to junior nurse, and various doctors whose rank or suitability to help was unclear – said virtually the same thing on his many trips to the nurses’ station. Which was basically nothing.
‘She’s still in theatre. We’ll let you know how she is as soon as there’s any news.’
Then they would try and placate him, their expressions creased with concern, their voices carefully modulated. ‘Try not to worry, Mr Holt,’ they said. ‘She’s in safe hands.’ But despite his assurances to Stella, right now Jack didn’t trust anyone, anyone at all. They didn’t get it. This wasn’t just any patient, this was Eve, his beloved daughter.
They waited in Eve’s room. Eric had fetched Mairi from the nursery, and she was sleeping in the bassinet beside him. Arthur was absorbed in his pile of Lego bricks, sitting quietly on the floor by the window. Jack had brought them tea and biscuits on the way back from his last, fruitless journey to the nurses’ station, but his tea was already cold in his cup.
The atmosphere in the room could be cut with a knife. As Jack perched on the padded stool over by the table – Stella huddled in the blue armchair – he felt slightly dizzy, his heartbeat lurching into the unnatural speed and irregularity of the atrial fibrillation. He ignored it and watched his son-in-law pacing up and down the space where the bed had been, hands thrust deep in his jeans’ pockets.
Eric’s face was pale and hard to read on a good day. But now it had a grey, putty tinge and was set like a mask. Jack didn’t need to look at his face, though. He could feel the suppressed terror coming off the man.
‘Please … can you take Arthur home?’ Eric said suddenly. He’d stopped pacing and was staring at Jack and Stella, his eyes blinking fast as if he were trying to focus on them.
Jack saw the panic in Stella’s eyes as she glanced at him.
‘He’s fine for the moment, Eric,’ he said. ‘Neither of us wants to leave when we don’t know how Eve is.’
‘He shouldn’t be here. It’s disturbing for him. Please, just take him,’ Eric almost snapped. ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I know anything.’
Jack’s eyes met Stella’s. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re Eve’s parents. We want to stay until she comes out of theatre. Then we’ll take him home.’
As he said it, he felt a jolt in his chest. They were her parents, he and Stella, despite the mess they had made of her childhood. Poor Eve. His heart contracted with love for his daughter as he stood there in the hot, thick silence.
Eric looked taken aback at his father-in-law’s intransigence and Jack thought he might kick off. The man was like a ticking time bomb. Then the mask slipped, Eric’s expression crumpled and he covered his face with both his hands and rushed out into the corridor. Jack heard one, controlled sob and hurried after his son-in-law, finding him just outside the door and putting his arm around his shoulders.
‘Hey, it’s going to be all right.’
Eric, surprisingly, allowed Jack’s arm to stay there. He seemed almost to welcome the contact.
‘I should have come home sooner. This is all my fault. If I’d been here, things would have been OK. I will never forgive myself if anything happens to Eve.’
Jack pulled him round. ‘Listen to me, Eric,’ he said. ‘Just listen, please. Eve is young and strong and perfectly fit. Something’s gone wrong – nothing whatsoever to do with you – but they’re fixing it. And any minute now a medic will walk into this room and tell us that she’s OK.’ He paused, keeping his gaze firmly on Eric’s frightened brown eyes, not letting him waver or look away. ‘You have to believe it.’ He heard the conviction in his voice for the second time that afternoon, and realized he genuinely did believe what he was saying. Eve was going to be OK. Anything else was inconceivable.
Jack glanced over Eric’s shoulder through the open door. Stella was sitting on the floor with Arthur, talking to him softly as she helped him with the bricks. She met Jack’s eye, her bottom lip clamped anxiously between her teeth. He smiled and watched as she took a deep breath, then turned back to Arthur.
Jack was not a superstitious man, but that evening in the hospital room, he felt for a moment as if the sheer willpower of the three of them to make Eve safe had swung things in his daughter’s favour. Because barely ten minutes later, a woman of about fifty, dressed in blue scrubs, was standing in front of them, pulling a patterned surgical scrub-hat from her short blonde hair. She smiled tiredly. And that was enough for Jack. He felt his whole body slump and wanted desperately to sit down, but he was rooted to the spot until he heard what she had to say.
‘Eve’s in Recovery. She’s doing really well,’ the doctor – whom Eric apparently knew as Eve’s obstetrician, Dr Marshall – spoke in the firm, educated voice of a woman who knew what she was doing. ‘She lost a lot of blood, but she’s going to be fine.’ When nobody said anything immediately, she went on, ‘I expect she’ll stay in Recovery for a while yet, so we can keep an eye on her.’
Jack found his voice first. ‘What happened? Why did she haemorrhage like that?’
The doctor didn’t reply for a moment, and Jack wondered if she would tell them the truth.
‘Unfortunately,’ Dr Marshall answered carefully, ‘a tiny fragment of the placenta was embedded in the wall of the womb and got left behind during surgery.’ She paused. ‘But we’ve got it now, the bleeding has stopped and there shouldn’t be any more problems.’ She waited, clutching the hat in her hands, impatient, Jack thought, to be gone now that she had delivered the good news.
‘Is that normal?’ Eric asked.
The doctor shrugged, her expression equivocal, suggesting she wasn’t going to commit herself on that one. She was probably aware, Jack thought, of the possibility of a negligence suit against the surgeon who’d performed the caesarean. ‘It’s more common when you have problems with the placenta.’
Eric looked at Jack, then turned back to the obstetrician, perhaps deciding this wasn’t the time for accusations. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you so much, Dr Marshall. Can I see her?’
Jack and Stella were left alone with Arthur.
He looked at her and shook his head, his breath coming out in a long sigh. ‘Oh … my … God.’
Stella smiled, but said nothing. She looked like he felt: totally empty, hollowed out.
Without speaking, they moved together and slowly put their arms around each other, leaning close, Stella’s head resting on his chest. Jack wanted to stay like this forever. He felt, in that moment, such an overwhelming love for his daughter, for his whole family, and especially for the woman in his arms. It made him almost faint. This wasn’t about attraction or sex, and it had nothing to do with their separate domestic politics. It was just about love. For Jack, it was a defining moment.
51
‘The woman’s a nightmare,’ Stella whispered into her phone as she answered Jack’s call. She was in her bedroom, the door firmly shut, but Morag McArdle seemed to be everywhere at once, pushing her nose into every conversation, lurking round every corner. It was as if the house had been invaded by a host of Morag clones, not just one grey-haired, bird-like, supposedly timid, middle-aged Scottish housewife.
Jack laughed. ‘Why, what’s she doing?’
‘I can’t tell you now, I’m sure she’s got the room bugged.’
‘Come over. We could have lunch somewhere, give you a break.’
The invitation was casually put. Since their embrace in the hospital, Jack and Stella had not been alone together. The time since Eve’s near-death experience – and she had nearly died; her heart had stopped on the operating table – had been a whirlwind for Stella.
Eve came home a week after Mairi’s birth. But she was exhausted, weak from the blood loss and two operations, and traumatized by the whole experience. She needed a lot of help. Eric took over the basic mechanics of the household: cooking, clearing up, doing the washing and shopping. Stella was impressed by his quiet efficiency and his obvious desire to look after them all. But he was less good at coping with Eve’s volatile moods. He seemed to take it too personally – despite Stella’s assurances – when she cried and shouted that she couldn’t cope, that he was doing everything wrong, that he didn’t understand.
And then the out-laws – as Eve dubbed them – descended from the Hebrides. Ten days with Kenny’s tiresomely parochial conversation about wind farms and sub-sea cables, Cal Mac ferry cancellations and disease in the salmon farms; Morag’s quietly obsessive need for domestic control. Stella thought she might go insane and smother them in their beds if they didn’t go back to Scotland soon. She would have gone home, but Eve begged her not to leave her to Morag’s mercy.
‘Look, she’s a decent person. And I know she means well,’ Eve told Stella one morning when Morag and Kenny were safely out at the shops with their son and grandson. ‘And to look at her you wouldn’t think she’d hurt a fly. But I tell you, she’s properly scary, Mum. If she has her way, Mairi will be on strict four-hourly bottle feeds and sleeping in her own bedroom, and Arthur will be at boarding school.’ She paused and pulled a face. ‘And she keeps making porridge. I hate porridge. I need you to protect me, Mum.’
Stella had felt a fierce kick of love for her daughter at those words, even spoken in jest. She had not yet recovered from Eve’s close call. She could still almost taste the terror in her mouth at the thought of losing her child.
‘She even irons my knickers,’ Eve was saying, holding her stomach where the stitches were as she began to giggle. ‘And she wouldn’t read The Gruffalo to Arthur because she said it was “too frightening for a wee boy”.’
‘She’s trying her best,’ Stella said, also beginning to laugh.
‘She’s trying, that’s for sure,’ Eve spluttered.
And once started, neither of them could stop. It was like a valve had been released. All the tension
from the past weeks and months, the horror of the hospital, poured out of them both, with poor Morag the unwitting catalyst.
‘It’s surprising Eric turned out so normal,’ Stella said, when she finally caught her breath.
‘Hmm. He’s not that normal, Mum. But then, he got out when he was a teenager, and his aunt in Gloucester sounds like an entirely different kettle of fish.’
So today, Stella barely hesitated when Jack offered her an escape. Morag and Kenny had been persuaded to visit the local castle with their grandson and have lunch in the gastro-pub in the village. Eric had pressed money for the meal into his disapproving father’s hand – the McArdles would never have been so frivolous as to lunch out themselves. They took sliced white bread and cheese sandwiches in Tupperware containers everywhere they went. Eric and Eve would have the house to themselves for a couple of hours if she made herself scarce.
‘When are they leaving?’ Jack asked, when he and Stella were sitting in his cottage kitchen later, each with a strong cup of coffee.
‘Next Wednesday. Only four more days.’
Silence. Jack seemed tense and out of sorts. Stella began to regret her decision to go round.
The silence lengthened.
‘And how much longer will you stay?’ he asked eventually. The question seemed loaded.
‘I don’t know. I’m going to play it by ear, see how Evie gets on.’ She paused. ‘Oddly enough, I think Morag and Kenny’s visit has done her a lot of good. No thanks to them, of course, but it’s brought her out of herself a bit. I’ve seen flashes of her sense of humour returning.’
‘She’s had such a rough time,’ Jack said.
He started to say something else, then stopped. Stella waited, watching Jack’s mouth twist nervously. After another long silence, he began again.
‘So, Eve tells me you and Iain are selling up and getting a place down here.’
Stella nodded.
‘She’s thrilled. You know how she loves the family being together.’
‘Yes, we’re excited too. Iain’s got a buyer for his place already. A neighbour, lucky sod.’ She heard her voice pitched high and forced. The conversation felt like a tinder-box: one false move and they would both go up in flames.