The Peacock Emporium(2)
The air was rent by another wail from the woman on the bed. I was a little afraid to do this unsupervised, but I knew it was not fair to wait any longer. And now that the fetal heartbeat monitor no longer worked, I had no way of knowing if the baby was in distress.
“Keep her still, please,” I said to the husband, and, timing carefully between contractions, reached in with the hook and nicked a tiny hole in the extra set of waters that I’d realized were blocking the baby’s progress. Even above the woman’s moans, and the traffic outside, I heard the beautiful tiny popping sound as the soft membrane conceded to me. Suddenly there was a gush of fluid and the woman was sitting up and saying, with some surprise and not a little urgency, “I need to push.”
After that I don’t remember much clearly. I remember seeing the soft, shocking thatch of dark hair, then grabbing the woman’s hand and placing it there so that she could be encouraged by it too. I remember instructing her to push, and that when the baby began to emerge I was shouting as loudly as I had when I went to football matches with my father, with relief and shock and joy. And I remember the sight of that beautiful girl as she slithered into my hands, the marbled blue of her skin turning a rapid pink, like a chameleon’s, before she let out a welcome lusty cry of outrage at her delayed entry into the world.
And, to my shame, I remember that I had to turn my head because, as I clipped the cord and laid her on her mother’s chest, I realized that I had begun to cry, and I did not want Beatriz to give the other midwives something else to laugh about.
Beatriz appeared at my shoulder, mopping at her brow, and gestured behind her. “When you’re done,” she said quietly, “I’m going to nip upstairs and see if I can find Dr. Cardenas. She has lost a lot of blood, and I don’t want her to move until he’s taken a look.” I hardly heard her, and she knew it. She kicked my ankle. “Not bad, Ale,” she said, grinning. It was the first time she had called me by my real name. “Next time you might even remember to weigh the baby.”
I was about to respond in kind, but I became aware that the atmosphere in the room had changed. Beatriz did too, and halted in her tracks. Where normally there was the enraptured cooing of the new mother, the soft murmur of admiring relatives, there was only a quiet pleading: “Diego, no, no, Diego, please . . .”
The smartly dressed couple had moved beside the bed. The blond woman, I noticed, was trembling, a peculiar half-smile on her face, her hand reaching tentatively toward the baby.
The mother was clutching the child to her chest, her eyes closed, murmuring to her husband, “Diego, no, no, I cannot do this.”
Her husband was stroking her face. “Luisa, we agreed. You know we agreed. We cannot afford to feed our children, let alone another.”
She would not open her eyes, and her bony hands were wrapped around the overwashed hospital shawl. “Things will get better, Diego. You will get more work. Please, amor, please, no—”
Diego’s face crumpled. He reached over and began, slowly, to pry his wife’s fingers off the baby, one by one. She was wailing now: “No. No, Diego, please!”
The joy of the birth had evaporated, and I felt sick in the pit of my stomach as I realized what was happening. I made to intervene, but Beatriz, with an unusually grim expression on her face, stayed me with a tiny shake of her head. “Third one this year,” she muttered.
Diego had managed to take the baby. He held her tight to his chest without looking at her, and then, his own eyes closed, held her away from him. The blond woman had stepped forward. “We will love her so much,” she said, her reedy upper-class accent trembling with her own tears. “We have waited so long . . .”
The mother became wild now, tried to climb from the bed, and Beatriz leaped over and held her down. “She mustn’t move,” she said, her voice sharpened by her own unwilling complicity. “It’s very important that you don’t let her move until the consultant is here.”
Diego wrapped his arms around his wife. It was hard to tell whether he was comforting her or imprisoning her. “They will give her everything, Luisa, and the money will help us feed our children. You have to think of Paola, of Salvador . . . Think of how things have been—”
“My baby!” screamed the mother, unhearing, clawing at her husband’s face, impotent against Beatriz’s apologetic bulk. “You cannot take her.” Her fingernails left a bloodied welt, but I don’t think he noticed. I stood by the sink as the couple backed toward the door, my ears filled with the raw sound of a pain I have never forgotten.
And to this day I cannot remember any beauty in the first baby I brought into this world. I remember only the cries of that mother, the expression of grief etched on her face, a grief I knew, even with my lack of experience, that would never be relieved. And I remember that blond woman, traumatized, yet determined as she crept away, saying quietly: “She will be loved.”
A hundred times she must have said it, although no one was listening.
“She will be loved.”
2
Framlington Hall, Norfolk, 1963
The train had made six unscheduled stops between Norwich and Framlington, and the infinite glacial blue sky was darkening, although it wasn’t even teatime. Several times Vivi had watched the guards jump down with their shovels to scrape another snowdrift from the tracks, and her impatience at the delay was now offset by a perverse satisfaction.