Old Sins (109 page)

Her heart thumping violently, she went in.

It had obviously been Miles’ shed; in it was his skate board, an old surf board, a bike, some roller skates. She looked at them, mildly amused and charmed by the personality that was emerging. But there were no clues as to his whereabouts.

Then she saw the satchel. An old school bag it was really, stuffed into a corner. Phaedria looked at it for a long time, then cautiously, as if she might be burnt, reached out and took it. It was dusty, covered in insects. She shook it, took it outside and sat down on the grass.

It was full of letters. Letters from girls at school, all with patently big crushes on Miles, letters from Granny Kelly written on his birthdays, all urging him to work hard and do better at school right in the same breath as wishing him happy birthday; heartbreaking letters from Lee, written in hospital, telling him how much she loved him, how she trusted him, how she wanted him to be good.

And then a last few, stuffed right to the bottom of the satchel, typewritten letters from Hugo Dashwood. One was very old and faded, dated 1971, saying how very very sorry and sad he was to hear of Miles’ mother’s death, asking him if there was anything he could do for him, and promising to come to the funeral; another dated two years later, saying how pleased he was to hear Miles had made the water polo team, but he hoped he would still go on working hard at school as well; and finally three more recent, undated, all rather admonitory in tone, telling him that he should stop fooling around on the beach, and get himself a job, that he was fortunate to have such a good education, that he owed it to his parents’ memory as well as to his grandmother and indeed to Hugo himself to show what he could do.

Phaedria read them in silence, wondering at them, at the heat of emotion so obviously contained in them, at the proprietary tone. Whoever Hugo Dashwood had been, he had felt very strongly about Miles. And moreover he could type. Odd, that. Not many men typed letters. Well, if the signature was anything to go by, it was just as well. It was virtually illegible, just a scrawled ‘Hugo’ – if she hadn’t known the name, been looking out for it, she would not have been able to make it out at all.

Phaedria sat looking at the letters for a long time, aware that they were engaging her attention on some quite different level. And then became aware that her brain was focusing very strongly on that signature. And that her heart was suddenly thundering in her and that the sun seemed suddenly almost unbearably bright. A darkness came over her briefly; a frightening, rushing hot darkness. She closed her eyes, swallowed, put out a hand to steady herself. The entire earth seemed to heave beneath her.

Then she opened her eyes, took a deep breath. ‘Don’t be absurd,’ she said to herself. ‘It isn’t, it couldn’t be.’

She stood up. She felt shaky, weak. She took the satchel and climbed very slowly back up to the car and sat in it for a while. The baby, still all day, suddenly woke up and started moving energetically inside her; it had less room now, the movements were different, stronger, but more forceful somehow, more controlled.

The normality of it made her feel better, hauled her back into the present, herself.

‘Let’s go home,’ she said to it, to her baby, to Julian’s child, ‘let’s go home and have a rest.’

She started the car and drove very very slowly down the hill. It took her a long time to summon sufficient courage to cross the teeming highway, but she finally managed it. Then she headed back into Los Angeles.

Tomorrow she would go and see Father Kennedy again. Ask him some more about Hugo Dashwood. But now she just had to get back and lie down. She had a strange taut pain ebbing and flowing at the base of her back, and her head throbbed. She was terribly frightened.

Afterwards all Phaedria could remember of that night was bright lights. Bright lights coming towards her from other cars: the bright welcome lights of the hotel, there at last to receive her after the nightmare drive of fear and pain; the bright brilliant light as the doctor summoned by the anxious hotel manager looked into her eyes and then as gently, as carefully as he could, said he had to move her to hospital, that her baby was being born; the fearfully bright lights of the hospital reception as she was rushed through on a stretcher, silent, stoical through
her terror; the piercing white light of the delivery room as she was taken in, moved on to the bed, her legs put in stirrups, her pulse, the baby’s heartbeat, taken feverishly, anxiously, her own pain set aside, taken no account of, not through disregard, nor callousness, but urgency, necessity; the light came and went then, sometimes it seemed dark, almost peaceful, but then again and again she was surfacing into the room, the pain, the brightness; you’re doing well, they kept saying, not long now, hang on, hang on, now rest, relax, breathe deeply, and she would start to sink, and then, there it was again, the awful wrenching tearing in the centre of herself, so fierce, so violent she could not see how her body could survive it.

And then at last, quite quickly they told her afterwards, not more than an hour after she had arrived, the great primeval urge to push, to go into the pain, to let it carry her forward, onwards, to endure it somehow, anyhow, because through it, at the end of it, there now, yes, she heard it, was the cry, the triumph, the new life, the love. Love such as she had never imagined, never even begun to know, a great invasion of her every sense, love at first sight and sound and touch and smell. And they placed her in her arms, her daughter, a tiny, too tiny scrap of life, a great mass of dark hair and surprisingly wide dark eyes, just for a moment, just so that she would know that this was what for the rest of her life she would fight for and give to and be concerned about, over and above everything else she ever knew.

Then they took her away again; she was two months early, they said, she must go quickly to the special care unit, to an incubator, to be cared for, to stabilize. Phaedria wept, sobbed, tried to climb off her bed and follow them, but the doctor said no, she could not go, that the child would very probably be all right, that caring for prems these days was a most advanced science, that seven months was considered almost full term, that she must not worry, but have some rest. And then at last they moved her away from the brightness into a quiet, dim, peaceful room, and Phaedria, soothed by the assurances, exhausted, triumphant, fell asleep.

In the morning the news was good. The baby was lively, hungry, breathing well. Phaedria said she was to be called Julia,
and ate an enormous breakfast. Later they took her down in a wheelchair to the prem unit and she sat and gazed enraptured at the tiny scrap she had created, she and Julian, as she moved and stretched and curled up into her pre-natal shape again; sneezed, clenched and unclenched her hands, kicked her tiny legs. They let Phaedria put in her hand and touch her, feel her soft crumpled silky skin. She put her finger in the tiny fist; Julia took it, gripped it, clung on. Phaedria smiled triumphantly: the baby was strong.

Two days later she was not doing so well; she had developed, a respiratory infection. ‘Nearly all prem babies do this,’ said the doctor, trying to soothe her out of her wide-eyed terror, ‘she’s strong, you must try not to worry, she should pull through.’

Twenty-four hours later she was still holding her own, but plainly distressed; she was restless, feverish, she wouldn’t take the breast milk Phaedria was expressing for her, and the nurses were trying to give her.

Phaedria sat and watched her for almost thirty-six hours, scarcely moving, hardly sleeping; she was afraid to close her eyes lest she should open them and see the baby still, dead, gone. While she looked at her, she felt she could keep her safe. In the end, the doctor led her away, saying she would collapse if she stayed any longer, that she could do nothing for Julia, that she must rest. He put her to bed and sat with her, trying to reassure her; as soon as he had gone she climbed out of the bed again and dragged her poor sore, weary body down the corridor, back to Julia’s side.

‘Don’t leave me,’ she kept whispering urgently, fearfully, to the fragile, brave little piece of humanity: ‘Stay with me. I need you. I can’t lose you too.’

Towards the end of that night she fell asleep, and awoke suddenly to see the tiny body still, quite quite lifeless; she opened her mouth and screamed endlessly.

A nurse came running to her, took hold of her and shook her. ‘Stop it, stop it,’ she said, frightened herself. ‘You must be quiet.’

‘I can’t, I can’t,’ she said, tears of fright rolling down her face. ‘My baby’s dead.’

But no, they said, no she is not dead, she’s better, look, she’s peaceful, sleeping, she’s going to be all right.

And even then she would not leave, she stayed, exhausted, just watching and looking and loving the baby until another day had passed, and then finally, seeing her pink, kicking, healthy, however tiny, she trusted them and agreed to leave her for a while and go to bed.

The trauma and her vigil had weakened Phaedria; she did not recover as quickly as she should. She stayed in the hospital for another week, and then, because they said Julia could not leave for two weeks more, maybe three, she moved back into her bungalow at the Bel Air, driving in every morning to sit with the baby, feed her, hold her when she was allowed, and coming home in the evening to rest and recover herself once more.

It was a strangely happy, almost surreal time; she loved best (guiltily, because she was alone, not with her baby) the evenings, when she would sit on her patio, utterly peaceful, drinking in the scents of the flowers, watching the swans, hearing the conversation, the laughter, the music drifting quietly from the main body of the hotel; concerned briefly only for herself, and rediscovering the sensation of happiness.

There had been endless excitement, of course, when they had heard in England what had happened, phone calls and letters and great banks and baskets and bowls of flowers, arrived, and boxes extravagantly gift wrapped in Beverly Hills, containing presents for Julia, tiny dresses, shawls, bonnets, coats, and enormous, ridiculous soft toys, golden teddies and great pink bunnies, three, four, five times as large as their small owner; Eliza flew over to see her, and her small stepdaughter, wearing a minute white silk dress and matching coat from the White House, and a cobweb-fine hand-crocheted shawl from Letitia, and a tiny gold locket set with sapphires that Letitia’s grandmother, the Dowager Lady Farnsworth, had worn in her own cradle, and bequeathed her in her will. David Sassoon came with a Hockney print of Los Angeles for her: ‘Clever girl, what better place could you possibly have chosen to have a baby?’

Susan came, greatly to Phaedria’s surprise and pleasure, a little reserved but friendly just the same, bringing boxes of cookies and chocolates and strawberries. ‘I do remember how marvellous it is to be hungry again, and you must need little doggy bags to take to the hospital.’

Augustus Blenheim came, jerked into reality by concern and love.

C. J. came, with an exquisite engraving by Frith of a baby, looking anxious and concerned, but with a ring of ‘I told you’ in his eyes and his voice. ‘And I’m sure it could all have waited, there was no point tearing down here, Roz has made no progress at all, as far as I know.’

Phaedria, still nursing her quiet fear, unable to confront it, to recognize it as real, had allowed the night of pain and the days of terror that had followed in its wake to blank it out, did not even tell C. J. she had seen Father Kennedy, merely sat and nodded and said how right he had been.

And then one day, towards the end of the time, when Julia was nearly strong enough to leave and she was sitting peaceful and happy in the evening sun, reading
The Water Babies
, which someone had sent to Julia and which she had rediscovered with immense pleasure, she heard footsteps and looked up and there in front of her was Michael Browning.

‘Now you are not to faint and you are not to be sick,’ he said, placing a bottle of Cristalle champagne on the table and producing two glasses from his pockets, ‘and you are certainly not to run away. And before you ask, Roz has no idea I’m here.’

He looked at her as she sat, frozen with shock, silent, her eyes huge brilliant smudges in her pale still face. ‘Aren’t you going to greet me? I’ve travelled three thousand miles to bring you this. I hope you like it.’

And he produced from yet another pocket a book, a tiny leather-bound volume, a first edition of Christina Rossetti’s poems. ‘I bought this because of the “Birthday” poem. I thought it was appropriate. I guess your heart must feel pretty much like a singing bird just now.’

‘Michael!’ said Phaedria, reaching up and kissing him gently on the cheek. ‘I didn’t know you were a literary person. What a lovely present. Thank you.’

‘This is a man,’ he said, taking off his jacket and sinking into the chair beside her, ‘who got the Eng Lit runner’s-up prize at Sethlow Junior High two years running. Champagne?’

‘Do you know I haven’t had any yet? Eliza offered me some but I refused. I wasn’t ready for it. But today, yes, I really would like some.’

‘Well, it’s time you did, and it’s just as well,’ he said. ‘Otherwise I would have drunk it all.’

She looked at him, smiling with the absolute pleasure of his company, untroubled for the moment by thoughts of what might lie before or behind them. He looked, as always, slightly rumpled; it was not just his clothes, it was his hair which looked perpetually in need of a comb, his rather shaggy eyebrows, his disturbed (and disturbing) brown eyes. She thought (not for the first time) how extraordinary it was that a man so devoid of most of the obligatory qualities of conventional male desirability (height, looks, stylishness) could have such an ability to project sexuality with so acute a force. She wrenched her mind away from her deliberations with an effort, and smiled at him. ‘It’s so nice to see you. But why are you here?’

‘I’m here,’ he said simply, ‘because I wanted to see you. I was in Los Angeles anyway, I have two companies here, I knew where you were, and I suddenly decided to come rather than go racing back to New York for a lonely weekend. I am family – or nearly. I felt I should greet the new member.’