Sheltering Rain (46 page)

So she became thinner and thinner, at a time when, the naval doctor remarked, she should really be putting on weight, and sadder, so that she knew Edward found it easier to go out than to stay in and look at her reproachful face.

And then, at about sixteen weeks, she had woken up one morning and found that it had almost disappeared; that she could contemplate the thought of food without groaning, that she quite fancied a walk outside, unencumbered by the fear of encountering foul, unexpected smells. Glancing in the mirror, she found that some color had returned to her cheeks, a little brightness to her eyes. “There you are,” said her mother, with only the slightest edge of disappointment in her voice. “You've started to bloom. Now you can smarten up yourself a bit. Look a bit more cheerful for everybody.”

But there was only one person Joy wanted to look cheerful for. That evening, when Edward came home, she was not just awake, but dressed in his favorite dress, and lightly sprinkled in the scent he had bought her for Christmas. A little afraid, but more afraid of what might happen to them if she didn't, she had moved swiftly toward him as he had opened the door, and silently placed her lips on his, her arms tight around his waist.

“Please don't go out tonight,” she had whispered. “Stay with me.” And he had looked down at her face, and his eyes had suddenly looked both terribly sad and terribly relieved, and he had held her tight to him, so that she thought briefly that the air might be crushed out of her, and they had stood there together, unspeaking, enfolded in each other, until the tension of the last weeks had finally eased away.

“Well, you both look chirpier this morning,” said Alice, when she arrived the next day to find them tucking into breakfast. And then her face closed off again, as she worked out why.

C
hristopher Graham Ballantyne was born at the naval hospital some five and a half months later, following a short, straightforward labor that, Edward joked afterward, had had less to do with the baby's determination to emerge, and more to do with his mother's determination to be up riding again as soon as possible. He was a large, placid baby, adored by both parents, who nonetheless were very pleased to have Joy's body to themselves again, and did not let the arrival of their son impinge too drastically upon their social life or riding habits. Not that this bothered Alice; not just because it was considered a bit strange for parents to spend too much time with their children, but because it allowed her to devote herself to him, fussing over him, dressing him in pale, beautifully made outfits with silk-covered buttons, and parading him in his huge, imported Silver Cross pram, keen to show off his evidently superior appearance and personality traits to the other pram-pushers of the colony. Joy would watch Alice's adoration of her son with a mixture of maternal satisfaction and some bemusement; her mother seemed far more able to express unconditional love to this child than she ever had to her. She didn't remember enduring the endless cuddling, the ceaseless baby talk, and attention that Christopher now received as a matter of course. “Don't worry about it,” said Edward, who was just glad to have the majority of his wife's attention. “They're both happy, aren't they?”

And for the next two years they all were; Edward in his role supervising the engineering works at the dockyard, Alice in her role as unofficial childminder, and Joy, although a doting mother, once again at her husband's side, determined never to let that kind of distance creep between them again. Edward was, if anything, more loving, more attentive, perhaps grateful that Joy hadn't metamorphosed into the kind of anxious, flapping child-obsessed mother he had feared. He didn't mind not going off to sea, like some officers, who got restless when posted too long in one place. He liked to be with his family. With his wife. He never spoke of the Wan Chai period, as Joy secretly called it, and she never pressed him to explain what he had been doing there; she now knew enough of what that part of town was like to have far too many unwelcome suspicions as it was. Let sleeping dogs lie, that was the expression she used. They were all happy; happier than she had expected to be, given the events leading up to Christopher's birth.

Which was why, when she woke one morning to the familiar, clawing sensation of nausea, her heart tightened with fear.

“Well, your suspicions are correct, Mrs. Ballantyne,” said the naval doctor, washing his hands in the little oval sink. “Just coming up to seven weeks, I would estimate. Your second, isn't it? Congratulations.”

He had seemed rather shocked when Joy burst into noisy, unchecked tears. She sat, her face pressed into her palms, unable to believe that the worst was happening.

“I'm sorry,” he said, resting a hand on her shoulder. “I had assumed it was planned. We did talk about . . . methods, after your son was born, after all.”

“He didn't really like them,” said Joy, wiping at her face. “He said it spoiled things for him.”

She began to cry again. “We thought we were being careful.”

After several minutes had passed like this, the doctor had become a little less consoling, reseating himself behind his desk, and informing his receptionist pointedly by telephone that he would be ready for the next patient “very shortly.”

“I'm sorry,” said Joy, rummaging for nonexistent handkerchiefs in her handbag. “I'll be fine in a minute. Really.”

“A baby is a blessing, you know, Mrs. Ballantyne,” he had said, his eyes sharp under his half-moon spectacles. “There are plenty of wives who would be very grateful for a healthy addition to the family. And sickness is a reliable sign of a healthy baby, as you know.”

Joy, silenced by the subtle admonition in his words, rose to go. I know that, she thought silently. But we didn't want another baby. We weren't even sure we wanted the first one.

“You might not be so sick this time,” said Alice, who had been greatly pleased at the prospect of another grandchild. She appeared to equate her daughter's fertility with an increase in her own status. It had, at least, given her a role; something she had not had since Joy had grown. “Lots of women aren't.”

But Joy, already conscious of the hidden smells of the colony, already arrested by the sight of the carcass-filled dust cart, the pungent offerings of the street hawkers, the visible fumes of traffic, knew what was coming. And felt the helpless paralysis of a small animal caught in headlights, waiting for the worst to hit.

This time, if anything, it was worse. Joy, swiftly placed on bed rest, was unable to eat anything except boiled rice, fed to her in spoonfuls every two hours, to try to stem the vomiting. She vomited if she was hungry; she vomited if she ate. She vomited if she moved, and vomited, often, if she did nothing but lay under the whirring fan, wishing, as she frequently did, that a large truck would come and roll over her and put her out of her misery. She could do little but murmur words of comfort to the toddling Christopher, when he clung to her supine body (how could she explain that the smell of his hair made her sick?) and soon felt so ill that she forgot to care about what Edward thought. She simply wanted to die. It couldn't feel any worse than this.

This time, even Alice was worried; she frequently called out the doctor, who prescribed drugs that Joy refused to take, and became alarmed at the rapidity of her weight loss. “If she gets any more dehydrated, we'll have to put her on a drip,” he said. But his manner suggested that while it was all undoubtedly unpleasant, Joy was simply going to have to put up with it. It was all part of being a woman after all. “Why not put on some makeup,” he said as he left, patting his sweating forehead with a folded handkerchief. “Brighten yourself up a bit.”

Edward, while initially sympathetic (he would sit and stroke her hair, and remind her unconvincingly that any time now she would be “up and about again”) grew swiftly tired of his role as unofficial nursemaid, and, while evidently trying to be patient and understanding, could not hide his apparent suspicions that she was rather making a meal of things this time.

“She's usually pretty hardy,” Joy heard him say to one of his colleagues, as they sat out on the balcony, swatting at passing mosquitoes. “I can't understand why she keeps crying about it.”

He didn't try to make love to her at all this time; simply moved his stuff without fuss into the guest room. It had made her cry all the more.

It didn't help when various other young wives and mothers stopped by to tell Joy of their own experiences. Some, inevitably, had sailed through it and remarked cheerfully that they “hadn't been the slightest bit ill,” as if that should be of some comfort to her. Others, the worst kind, said they knew how she was feeling, when she knew they patently didn't, and suggested various remedies that, they assured her, were bound to have her up out of bed in no time; weak tea, crushed ginger, mashed banana—all of which Joy tried dutifully and threw up equally enthusiastically.

Days gradually blurred into each other, dissolving into the wet season; still, humid days following interminable, sweat-drenched nights, and Joy found it harder to pretend to her son that Mummy was fine, or to her husband that she would soon be better (she had repeated this like a mantra, hoping it might prevent him from disappearing to Wan Chai). Physically weakened and sunk deep in depression, she ceased to note the days, counting them off as a coming return to normality, but lay in the half light, listening dully to her own breathing and trying not to throw up the water that Wai-Yip brought her, freshened every hour.

When it got to sixteen weeks and there was no discernible improvement in her condition, the doctor had decided that it would be best for all concerned if she were admitted to hospital. She was properly dehydrated now, he said, and it posed something of a risk to Baby. They were all terribly concerned about Baby, who was always referred to as such. By now, Joy could cheerfully not have cared if Baby lived or died, but then neither did she care if she herself lived nor died, and accepted her mother's instructions that she be moved without argument.

“I'll look after Christopher,” Alice had said, her brow furrowed with concern. “You just concentrate on getting better.” Joy, for whom most things passed by in a nauseous fug of irrelevance, noted her mother's anxious face, and tried to squeeze her hand in return.

“You mustn't worry about anything,” Alice said again. “Wai-Yip and I will take care of everything.” Joy had simply closed her eyes as she was gently loaded into the ambulance, grateful that she didn't have to think anymore.

J
oy stayed in the hospital for almost a month, until there had been a sufficient easing in her nausea to allow her to eat at least the blandest foods by mouth, and she could walk, unaided, the entire length of the women's ward. She had spent almost two weeks on the drip, which, she was forced to admit, had made her feel almost immediately better, but the prospect of food was still a risky one, tied up with the possibility of unheralded and explosive sickness. Some days it could be something as innocuous as dry bread that prompted it; other days, the better days, she might even be able to force down a piece of boiled fish without concern. White foods, that's what the doctors said, and the blander the better. So Alice, who visited every day (although to both women's dismay she wasn't allowed to bring Christopher, who was considered “too wearing for Mother”) brought fresh-baked scones, pale bananas, and even meringues, anything that she and Wai-Yip could devise between them.

“She's been awfully good, I have to say,” she told Joy, as she sat beside her bed, dressed in a smart blue suit with a pussycat bow, and nibbling on a scone. “Doesn't talk much, but works ever so hard, even when, frankly, she looks exhausted. I think these mainland girls don't have the attitude of the Hong Kong ones, you know? Much less full of themselves. That Bei-Lin, I've told her. I'll replace her with a Guangdong girl now, you see if I don't.”

It was, Joy thought afterward, the closest the two women had ever been; Alice laden with responsibility for both her child and grandchild, took her duties seriously, and didn't make Joy feel guilty for doing so. Joy being ill through some kind of “women's troubles” was somehow a validation for her, it showed both that Alice was needed, but also that her awkward, unconventional daughter had turned out right in the end. She was suffering to bring her husband another child, wasn't she?

Joy, meanwhile, had lost her fight. In her stay at the hospital, beaten down by her illness, and the relentless, gently domineering ministrations of the medical staff, she had slowly become passive; accepting of the various treatments and invalid rules laid upon her, grateful for her mother's help, a slave to the hospital routine. She just wanted someone else to deal with it all. Here, she could lay on crisp white sheets, under the whirring fan, listening to the soft shuffle of the nurses' feet on linoleum, the starched swish of their skirts, and the low murmur of voices from the other end of the ward, away from the noise and sweat and smells of real life. Although she felt a dull ache of longing for her child, it was tempered by relief that she no longer had to cope with his constant requests, his physical neediness.

Ditto her husband.

But after another month had gone by, and she began to feel a little more like her old self, Joy felt a growing need to return home, a desire to be with her family again. Her mother brought Christopher twice, on the days that they were allowed to sit outside in the lush gardens, and her heart broke when Alice had to peel him from her, screaming and pleading, at the end of visiting time. More important, she began to feel concerned about how seldom Edward came.

He had been awkward with her, had not even attempted to kiss her cheek the last two times he arrived, and had paced around her bed, glancing out of the window, as if expecting some disaster to befall, so that Joy eventually had to ask him simply to sit down. He didn't like hospitals, he had muttered. It all made him uncomfortable. He had meant the women's ward, she was sure, and she understood, because all-women environments usually made her uncomfortable, too. But he had snapped at her when she had asked him whether he really was all right, and told her irritably that he wished she would stop fussing, so that when he left, Joy had wept copious tears into her pillow.