The Peacock Emporium(133)
“Things will get better, ’Thene. Really. I’ll make sure of it.”
She would be almost back at Dere Hampton by now, if he had taken the train. Douglas would have struggled with that pram in the same way she had. She could picture him now, demanding that the guard help him lift it in, wrestling with the hood, the oversize handle. Then, inside the carriage, leaning in to check that the baby was okay. Please don’t let her cry too much without me, she thought, and a large, solitary tear trickled down her cheek toward the pillow.
“She’ll be better off with him. You know that.” Tony was stroking her cold, white arm, as if that might comfort her. She heard his voice in her ear, urgent, persuasive, yet distant. “We could never cope with two, not in here. We can barely afford to feed ourselves . . . Athene?” he said, when the silence became too much for him.
She lay on the crumpled classified ads, her face cool against the stale cotton pillow, still staring at the door. “No,” she said.
* * *
—
Athene lay on the bed for four days and nights, not leaving the little bedsit, weeping helplessly, refusing to eat or speak, her eyes unnervingly open, until on the fifth day, fearful for her health, if not her state of mind, Tony took matters into his own hands and called the doctor. The landlady, who enjoyed a bit of drama, stood on the upper landing as the doctor arrived, and proclaimed noisily that she had a respectable house, clean and proper. “There’s no disease in this place,” she said. “Nothing unclean.” She was peering around the door, hoping to get some indication of what was wrong with the girl.
“I’m sure,” said the doctor, eyeing the sticky hall carpet with distaste.
“I’ve never had an unmarried before,” she said, “and this’ll be the last. I can’t be doing with the inconvenience of it.”
“She’s in here,” Tony said.
“I don’t want anything infectious in my establishment,” the woman called excitedly.
“Not unless a big gob is infectious,” the young man muttered, and shut the door.
The doctor eyed the little room with its damp walls and grimy windows, wrinkling his nose at the stale, tidemarked bucket of soaking laundry in the corner, wondering how many people in this district routinely lived in habitation more suited to animals. He listened to the young man’s hurried explanation, then addressed the woman on the bed.
“Any pain anywhere?” he said, peeling back the covers to knead the belly that was just beginning to swell. When she replied, he was a little surprised to hear her cut-glass accent after this bluff northerner’s. But that was the way things were going these days. The so-called classless society.
“Any problems with your waterworks? Sore throat? Stomachache?”
The examination didn’t take long: there was plainly no physical problem. He diagnosed depression, unsurprising when you considered the circumstances in which she was living. “A lot of women get a bit hysterical during pregnancy,” he said to the young man, as he closed his case. “Just try to keep her calm. Maybe take her for a walk in the park. Be good for her to get some fresh air. I’ll write you a prescription for some iron tablets. See if you can get some color in her cheeks.”
The young man saw him out, then stood at the door of the little room, his hands thrust uncomfortably into his pockets, patently out of his depth. “But what do I do?” he kept saying. “She doesn’t seem to be listening to me.”
The doctor followed the young man’s anxious gaze to the bed, where the girl had fallen asleep. Sympathetic as he was, he couldn’t waste any more time here. “Some women find motherhood a bit harder than others,” he said, placed his hat firmly on his head, and left.
* * *
—
“But I was told my mother died in childbirth,” Suzanna had said, when Vivi had told her what she knew of her mother’s last days.
“She did, dear.” Vivi had taken her hand, a gentle, maternal gesture. “Just not yours.”
29
My daughter was born on the night of the power cuts, the day that the whole hospital, and half the city, was plunged into darkness. I like to think it was portentous now: that her arrival in this world was so important it had to be marked by something. Outside, the lights had disappeared, room by room, building by building, dissolving their way across town like bubbles in champagne, as we sped by in our car until the night sky met us at the hospital gates.
I had laughed hysterically between the contractions, so that the thick-jawed midwife, who couldn’t understand what I was saying, thought there might be something wrong with me. I couldn’t explain. I was laughing because I had wanted to have her at home and he had said I couldn’t, that he couldn’t stand the risk of something happening. It was one of the few things we have ever disagreed about. So there we were, him apologizing and me laughing and gasping in the entrance, as nurses shrieked and swore, and the walking wounded collided in the dark.
I don’t know why I laughed so much. They said afterward that they had never known someone laugh like that in labor, not without the benefit of Entonox. Perhaps I was hysterical. Perhaps the whole thing was just so unbelievable that I couldn’t accept it was happening. Perhaps I was even a little afraid, but I find that hard to believe. I am not afraid of much, these days.