Hester's Story (38 page)

‘
Adoption agency
?’ Hester turned round, not quite believing what she was hearing. ‘What are you saying? I told you! We discussed it right from the start. I’d never, never give up this baby for adoption. What makes you think I would? Did you think I’d changed my mind?’ Hester knew that she was scarlet in the face.

Madame Olga shrugged. ‘It’s what’s necessary.
When you first came here, you were very sad. I said whatever you wanted to hear. What could I do?’

‘I won’t do it. I can look after him. Or her. I can keep him and be his mother.’

‘Impossible! It would be cruel to leave him from the start when you go back to class. All his life, if he stays with you, he will be second-best. You are a dancer. You cannot also be mother. This I know. This I have seen, many times. You cannot be everything. And think of this: many women, millions of women can be good mothers. No one but you can be Hester Fielding,
prima ballerina
. I am right, am I not?’

Hester was so angry that she began shouting. ‘No, you’re
not
right. You’re wrong. I’m a mother. That’s what I want. I told you from the very first day I came to you. I want to be a mother to this baby. I know what it’s like not to have a mother and my baby will have me. Every day. Every night. I’m not going to go back to dancing unless I can keep my baby. Why can’t I have a nurse to help me, while I’m in class, or dancing? Someone to take care of the baby when I’m working?’

‘This is stupid. If you have a nurse to do these things, how are you the mother? Will your baby not miss you when you are not with him? He is better with a mother who is there all the time. The adoption agency will put him, or her, of course, with the very best family, I can promise you that.’

‘I’m not doing it!’ She was shrieking now. ‘I won’t. I’m keeping my baby. I don’t care what you and Piers have arranged. You can’t make me. And I’m going to be a dancer as well. Why can’t I? Why can’t I do both?’

‘You are a silly girl and you do not understand the feelings of the public! They will not love you if they see you are an unmarried mother. It is a disgrace. They like their ballerinas to be pure and good. They want to
admire them. To be in awe of them. If you had a baby, it would show them that you are—’

‘What? A slut? A slag? What?’

‘Not any of those. Do not say those words to me. You know I do not think that. No, they will see you are human. Like them, not better than they are. Not different. They will ask themselves who the father might be, and there will be gossip and the years will go by and you will not be young any longer and the child will grow up without knowing who his father is. That is cruel to your child, not kind.’

‘You can’t say that! It’s not true. I’ll love him so much. Quite enough for two parents. He’ll never, never be without love. I’ll surround him with it. Or her. My baby might be a girl. She might become a dancer too. Have you thought of that? How can you make me give my child away? It’s monstrous.’

‘I think of you. Only of you.
Your
career.
Your
life. I think of
your
future. Who will marry you when you have a baby by another man?’

‘I don’t care if no one does. And I’m going to keep my baby. I won’t let you bully me.’

‘I do not bully!’ Madame Olga was shouting now. ‘I am doing what is right for you,
glupysh
! You will regret it, you see, if you keep it.’

‘Then
let
me regret it. It’s none of your business. You’re not my mother. Or my grandmother. Go away and leave me alone.’

Madame Olga turned white. She stood up and Hester saw that her hands were trembling.

‘I didn’t … I
really
didn’t mean that, Madame Olga,’ she sobbed. The tears had come suddenly, and she wiped them away with her sleeve. ‘You know I didn’t. I love you. I can’t bear to fight with you.’ Hester sat down on the top step of the porch and put her head in her hands. Sounds came from her mouth
that she couldn’t seem to prevent – howls and moans, animal noises.

Madame Olga crouched down beside her and stroked her hair, gently, as though she were a wild creature that might turn on her and bite. Gradually, Hester’s sobbing died down and there was nothing but the sound of the wind that had sprung up suddenly to shake the leaves from the trees.

‘We will go inside now. And I will do what you want, of course. But you must think, yes? About what is best. You are only nineteen years old, do not forget. To me you are still a child. But I will not force you. We will do what we have to do, after the birth, but you must have the baby in Scotland. Piers has already paid the rent for a cottage. Near the sea. Very healthy for you. It will be like a holiday. That is how we must think of it, yes? Everything will be good. We will not tell the world yet. You agree? It is a good place. Peace and quiet.’

‘It’s not exactly a metropolis here, is it?’ Hester said, sniffing and using the hankie Madame Olga had handed her. ‘I hear nothing but silence and no one ever comes to visit. Except Piers.’

‘Never mind. You will see, everything will be fine.’

*

At the beginning of November, Hester and Ruby moved to a cottage beside the sea in Gullane. This was a small house, with two bedrooms upstairs and a sitting room-cum-kitchen on the ground floor. It was a little way out of the town, set apart from other houses, and they had no immediate neighbours. Even here, Hester thought, where I know nobody, they’re making sure that no one comes near me. I don’t care. Soon, my baby will be here.

A bed had been booked in the hospital at Haddington and Dr Crawford (‘Such a gentleman! You will love him, I am quite sure,’ said Madame Olga) came to visit Hester a few days after her arrival. She hadn’t summoned him, but when he appeared at their door, she realised that Madame Olga must have told him that she and Ruby were in residence.

Hester was reassured when she met him. While he took her blood pressure, she tried to imagine what he must have been like as a young man. He was short and square and tweedy, with a rather mournful face and thick iron-grey hair. His white hands felt cool on her skin. He smiled kindly at her and she found herself relaxing.

‘You must rest, my dear,’ he said. ‘Your blood pressure tends towards the high, so we must keep an eye on that.’

‘Is anything wrong? Will the baby be all right?’

‘Nothing to concern yourself about at the moment, but don’t excite yourself unduly and take regular gentle exercise. I’ll come and visit you again in a few days.’

‘Will you take a cup of tea, Doctor?’ Ruby asked him, as he folded away his stethoscope.

‘No, thank you, Ruby,’ he said, going to the door. ‘It’s time I was off to see my other patients. Good day to you both.’

When he’d gone, Hester said, ‘He’s very nice but I can’t imagine him ever being in love with Madame Olga, can you?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Ruby. ‘I think he might have been quite handsome as a young man. He’s a comforting sort of person.’

‘Anyway, I’m glad he’s going to take such good care of me. I’ll try to do what he says and avoid thinking of anything depressing. I’m going to rest and go for long
walks and eat lovely food. And so are you, because you’re here to keep me company.’

Ruby made sure that Hester kept to her resolution. Every day, they wrapped up in warm clothes and went for walks among the sand dunes and Hester tried not to worry. They talked as they went, about everything, and Ruby was always comforting and calm. Whenever Hester gave way to despair, or anxiety, Ruby was there with a sensible word and a distraction of some kind. She seemed to know that Hester was avoiding thinking about what lay ahead for both her and her baby. Ruby was in charge until Madame Olga arrived. She was due in Gullane in good time for the birth, towards the middle of December.

For the first seven months of her pregnancy, Hester had hardly noticed that her body was changing. She was fit and young, and went on feeling almost exactly as she always had. It was possible sometimes for her to forget that Adam’s child was there, in the dark, growing and growing. Grief was the emotion she felt for the most part. She was grieving for her love and she gave little thought to what would become of her once the baby was born. She knew it would be hard to get back to dancing, but this was mostly because Madame Olga kept telling her so.

Then, towards the middle of October, Hester began to be aware of the changes. Suddenly, she was heavy and slow, and because of her distended stomach she was finding it difficult to walk or sit or even lie in bed normally. He (she always imagined her baby as a boy) was moving almost all the time, and Hester felt him turning and pushing and kicking in the silent dark, waving his tiny hands like fronds of seaweed in a kind of underwater dance. She dreamed of her baby at night. She saw his body enclosed in her body whenever she shut her eyes, and during the day she went slowly
from place to place, feeling huge and swollen and totally unlike herself but like some strange, un-human creature.

In their little house, the days passed slowly. Late in the year, the nights seemed to come down almost after lunch, and they were very long. Hester didn’t mind that. She’d found a new talent for sleeping. Ruby was in charge of the cooking, but she always found something soothing for Hester to do such as scraping carrots, or laying the table, or chopping what seemed to Hester like a thousand vegetables for the nourishing soups that were Ruby’s speciality.

‘You always say you’re going to make shortbread, Ruby, but what we get is healthy soup! This is about the only time in my whole life when I could eat as much shortbread as I liked. No one cares if I’m fat at the moment.’

‘I’ll make some tomorrow. I’ll use my mother’s special recipe. It’s not difficult, Hester. You’ll learn how to make it yourself.’

‘I’ll need to, won’t I? I’d like to be the kind of mother who makes shortbread.’

‘When you come back from rehearsal, d’you mean? You’ll put away your
pointe
shoes and get out your pinny …’

‘Or maybe I could make shortbread
en pointe
? In a tutu?’

The two women burst out laughing and Ruby said, ‘You’re trying to avoid dealing with those turnips. This soup will never be ready at the rate we’re going.’

Hester sat down obediently and smiled. How lucky she was to have Ruby as a companion!

During the day, when they walked on the dunes, she wore a thick overcoat and a hat that Ruby had knitted for her. Her hands were hidden in a fur muff that
Madame Olga had found, left over from the Russian winters of her youth.

On these excursions, she watched the clouds streak across the colourless sky, and followed the line between the sea and the sky, and trudged through the sand with the wind blowing in her face. Hester was grateful for the fact that Ruby came with her, even though sometimes, Hester knew, she would have preferred to stay by the fireside doing her tapestry. There were days when she persuaded Ruby she was happy to go out on her own, and it was true. Sometimes, she wanted to be absolutely alone with her baby and the sky and the iron-grey sea.

Hester couldn’t pretend that her sadness over Adam hadn’t lifted since the night they parted, but every movement of his baby reminded her that he was out there, in the world that existed beyond the dunes, and the small town with its neat houses and quiet streets that Madame Olga had chosen to be the birthplace for his child. There was also, somewhere, another universe: of footlights and greasepaint and ballet shoes, and flowers tossed on to the stage, and this seemed so distant that sometimes Hester had trouble believing in it. Here: this was where the truth was, in her sore ankles and huge stomach and the bone-wrenching tiredness that took hold of her whenever she sat down.

After supper, she and Ruby talked. Hester watched Ruby work on her tapestry and enjoyed seeing it grow and spread over the canvas. This had no picture printed on it, and Ruby chose her colours according to some private scheme that she couldn’t articulate when Hester asked her about it. Or perhaps (this sometimes occurred to Hester) she didn’t want to describe her thought process. Maybe she was superstitious about it. Hester knew that sometimes when you tried to explain how you did something, it vanished or evaporated, or
a part of the magic that accompanied the creation seemed to disappear.

Ruby told Hester a little about childbirth. She was trying to be encouraging, doing her best to make Hester brave about the ordeal to come, but the mere fact that she clearly
did
think of it as an ordeal was the opposite of heartening.

‘The first baby’s always the hardest,’ she said one night. ‘That’s what my mam said, and of course I was the first. She was three days in labour with me. It’s a wonder, really, that she dared go on to have my brothers and sisters.’

‘I’m not going to have any more children, Ruby,’ Hester said. ‘You know I’m not.’

‘Well, I’m quite sure not everyone has a three-day labour. And in any case, this was thirty years ago, don’t forget. Things have moved on. I was born at home, in my parents’ bed. It’s all much more … more scientific now. Doctor Crawford is very clever and I’m sure you’re in excellent hands. Don’t forget that your body is much more flexible than my mother’s ever was.’

‘Tell me about the pains, Ruby. How bad are they?’

‘I can’t tell you properly, because I’ve never had them. But they can be bad, that’s true.’

‘Bad? How bad?’

‘My mam used to say, like the whole of your insides being cramped up by burning tongs.’

‘My God! And women go through this?’

‘Everyone does. It soon passes, and then you’ve a pretty bairn in your arms and you forget about the pain entirely.’

Hester doubted that she would, but said nothing. Ruby went on stitching, picking one colour after another from the basket of wool at her feet. Hester fell silent, trying to imagine what it would be like, this
pain, this agony that was coming towards her as surely as the mist rolled over the sand dunes, blown inland by the sea wind.

*

Madame Olga arrived to be with them in mid-December. She installed herself in her modest hotel room with as much ceremony as though she were moving into the Ritz in Paris.