The Love of My Life(61)

My baby.

I’d never allowed myself to use those words. But all the normal rules were out, and I stroked my belly all the way.

The bleeding didn’t restart, but I must have checked nearly twenty times between Alnwick and Edinburgh.

‘Please be OK,’ I whispered to her, as we sped north. ‘Please be OK.’

‘Try not to worry, Emily,’ the midwife on the delivery suite said. Her tone was neutral, but I knew it wasn’t good when she took me straight off to a private room.

A few minutes later my community midwife, Dee, came in. ‘I saw your name on the board,’ she said. ‘Are you OK, sweetheart?’

That’s when I started crying. I cried all the way through my examination, and when she attached me to a machine that monitored the baby’s heart (‘Looks good!’ she smiled, examining the printout) I sobbed. It was only when Dee took me for an ultrasound and I saw her there, asleep with her tiny head against my navel, a miniature hand tucked under her cheek, that I believed she might survive.

‘Everything looks fine,’ Dee said. ‘I’ll need to get one of the doctors to take a wee look, but the baby looks happy and everything else is as it should be.’ She zoomed the ultrasound into my baby’s chest. ‘Sometimes these things just happen.’

I watched the chambers of my girl’s heart moving quietly, and I couldn’t do it for another moment.

I grabbed her hand, just as she went to leave, and said, ‘Please, Dee. Help me.’

After Dee had got the whole story out of me she went to call Granny.

‘Let’s just say, your grandmother’s going to take care of this,’ she smiled, upon her return. ‘She’s calling the agency now. You don’t have to hand over your baby to anyone, sweetheart. I just wish you’d told me what you were planning. I can’t believe you’ve been going through all of this on your own.’

Granny called an hour later.

‘All sorted,’ she said, as if she’d just cancelled the plumber.

I breathed out.

‘I also took the liberty of calling the Rothschilds,’ Granny said. ‘I’m sure the agency will, but I wanted to nip this in the bud.’

‘And?’

‘I was nice, but I told them not to contact you again. I don’t want them putting any more pressure on you.’

‘They haven’t put any pressure on me,’ I said. ‘Not once.’

‘Hmm.’

‘How did Janice take it?’

‘Bugger Janice.’

‘Granny. Come on.’

She sighed. ‘Devastated,’ she admitted. ‘But that’s not your concern, Emily.’

There was a pause. ‘We’ll do this together,’ said my eighty-year-old grandmother. ‘We’ll do it together, Emily, and if you think I’m too old, you’ve forgotten who you’re dealing with.’

In spite of my misgivings about her age, I moved to Granny’s house in London two weeks later, too exhausted to sit my second-year exams. It might be years before I went back to university, I realised, and I didn’t much care.

Granny had done hours of research on benefits and tax breaks, and worked out complex budgets involving her own pension and the modest rent I received from Dad’s house. Our situation wasn’t excellent, but it was a lot better than terrible, and she was full of rambunctious excitement.

I loved my growing baby. The love crept through my veins like an infusion. I dreamed of days on the Heath with my girl. Walking with Granny, or maybe Jill, once she’d graduated, because Jill’s parents also lived in London. I even allowed myself to imagine befriending other mothers at an antenatal class. I tried to imagine sleep deprivation and I wasn’t afraid. I’d be able to offset it with the cake and coffee I’d be having with all these new friends.

But then one day in September my baby came, and it wasn’t like that.

It wasn’t like that at all.





Chapter Thirty-Nine


Four days postnatal


It was a Tuesday afternoon, and I hadn’t slept in days. I stood at the window of Granny’s bathroom, looking out at the sky, recording what I could see on a sheet of toilet paper.

The sun was burning at midday height, but around it, the sky was iron-black. The front of Granny’s house looked over a walled garden, inside which magnolia trees and lilac bushes slid with the breeze. But the sky itself was still as a portrait: no wind; just hammered-in sheets of black where there should have been clouds and light.

I slid up the sash for a better view, or perhaps a clearer understanding. It must be an eclipse, but there was an energy to it – something occult, that didn’t feel right for an astronomical phenomenon. Besides, the sun was not obscured. It was fat and fiery, a disco ball on the black ceiling of Hampstead.

I wanted to dance under it. I’d loved dancing, once. I’d been good at it.

I rode a wave of love, of euphoria, of deep and absolute clarity as I walked back downstairs to my grandmother and my baby girl. We’d got back from the hospital an hour ago, and my caesarean incision burned at the bottom of my empty belly. Something nasty snagged when I tried to lift my left arm, and my breasts were like unexploded bombs.

But it was all manageable. I was a woman who’d just had a baby, and we were purebred fighters, made of steel, forged in fire. We could overcome anything.