The Birth of Love (25 page)

At the door he turns and surveys his flat, as if recording this ordinary scene: the coffee table strewn with newspapers, the sofa cushions flattened by his weight, the bed unmade in the adjoining room. At this moment Michael stands, in perfect ignorance of the future. He has no sense of foreboding. He puts the keys in his pocket and walks along the corridor to the lift. He presses the button and waits for the lift to ascend.

It is unfortunate, the midwife has told them, but they must wait a little longer. The doctors are on the ward, but they have a couple of other women to assess first. They are called women, not patients, Brigid notes, because of course they are not ill. Swollen and weary, mad with pain or shuddering as the epidural dulls their nerves, but they are not ill. This state is perfectly natural; its conclusion is the birth. Whatever happens, she thinks, it was meant to happen. She is wondering if this is true, as Patrick says to her, ‘Is there anything you need?'

‘I'm just so hungry,' she says. Patrick looks down at his empty plate. He has – before Brigid's eyes – consumed two pieces of toast, and drunk a cup of tea. Guiltily, he says, ‘Hopefully you'll be able to eat something soon.'

‘We'll have a better sense of what will happen when she's been assessed by the doctors,' says the midwife.

So Brigid waits. She waits, trembling on her regulation bed. Patrick washes his face in the sink. Cleans his teeth. He takes a book and tries to read. ‘Let me know if you want anything,' he says to Brigid. He is sitting on a low chair, trying to read a thriller. Even now, thinks Brigid, as Patrick reads, and as the midwife tidies the room, and as
she lies there, inert apart from the involuntary spasms, her labour is continuing, without her intervention or even awareness. Within her body, though she does not notice, everything is changing, the baby is preparing to leave.

She thinks of Calumn, waking in his little bed, wondering where she is. Crying, ‘Mamamam.' She has only spent a few nights apart from him since his birth. She wonders if he woke in the night, and if he cried for her and found she had gone. Her mother would have been sleeping in the spare room – she imagines Calumn shuffling along the corridor, opening the door of the main bedroom, finding it empty, not knowing where else to look. Bemused and lonely in the corridor, in his little pyjamas. She should have told her mother to sleep in the main bedroom instead. She hadn't been thinking, at the time.

She says to Patrick, ‘Can you call my mother?'

Patrick takes his phone and dials the house. There is a brief pause and then he is saying, ‘Hello, yes, it's Patrick here. How was your night? Oh no, no news here. We're just waiting for the doctors to come in and assess Brigid. But she's fine. Well, she can tell you everything herself. Here she is.'

‘Darling,' says her mother, as Brigid takes the phone. ‘What on earth is happening? You can't still be in labour?'

‘I had an epidural. So everything slowed down further but wasn't painful any more.'

‘Oh, I'm so glad. That was sensible of you. But what's happening now?'

‘The doctors are coming in a moment. Then they'll tell me what stage we're at.'

‘How frustrating for you, dear. What bad luck.'

‘Never mind. Anyway, how is Calumn?'

‘Oh, he's fine. A little bit up and down in the night; I think he just knew something was going on.'

‘Did he find you in your room?'

‘No, I heard him crying in the corridor.'

‘Was he upset we weren't there?'

‘Oh, perhaps a little, at first, but then we had a fine old time of it. I took him back to bed and sang him a few lullabies, and he fell asleep soon enough. And then I slept on the sofa bed in his room. So I was there the next time he woke, and – oh Lord – the next. Reminded me of all the sleepless nights I had with you.'

‘What's he doing now?'

‘He's just having some milk. And we're reading a story.'

‘So he's not too upset?'

‘No no, he's fine. He's just here. He's a resilient little fellow, aren't you darling? We'll be absolutely fine here until you get back.'

‘Can I speak to him?'

‘Of course.'

And Brigid imagines her mother holding the phone to Calumn's ear, the phone touching his shining hair, and she says, ‘Hello sweetie. How are you? It's Mummy here. I love you so much. And I'm coming back very soon, lovely little boy. I hope you're having a nice breakfast. Daddy is with me and he loves you very much too. We will be back very soon and then we will all sit down together and eat some food and read some books. Won't we sweetie? I love you very very much.'

‘Is that everything?' says her mother.

‘Did he smile?'

‘Oh yes, he knows his mummy, don't you Calumn?'

‘Patrick will call you and let you know what's happening, if I can't,' says Brigid.

‘Of course, I understand. I've been through it myself. Don't worry about us at all.'

‘Thanks Mum.'

‘You look after yourself.'

Brigid hands the phone back to Patrick. Her mother, always good in a crisis. A coper, self-determinedly. And Brigid yearns for her son, and wants to hold him and kiss him and hear him babbling lovingly at her, and she worries – once again, once more after all the times she has worried about it already – that he will never recover from the arrival of the other child. But this other child – and she turns to the midwife and says, ‘Will it be soon?'

‘Oh yes, very soon.'

Michael is on the platform, and the train is delayed. Sally had offered to order him a taxi, of course she had offered, and almost insisted, but he said he wanted to take the Tube. ‘Madness,' she said to him, the night before. ‘You don't want to be jostled around and probably end up late, do you, really? Arrive puffed out and sweaty, hardly in the right frame of mind? When you could come along in an air-conditioned cab?'

‘No no, it's quite all right,' he said to her. She was obliged to accept his whim. ‘Whatever you prefer,' she said in the end. ‘You're the one who'll be in the studio.'

So he is waiting for the Northern Line, and then he will have to change at Tottenham Court Road.
All around him, thousands of humans, passing through time. Moving at their own pace through the hours and days. Michael looks around at them – at the man with a bulging briefcase, and the woman with a grim fixed expression, as if she hoped for something better, and all those with grey hair and balding heads and potbellies and a few more of their infirmities revealed to the world. A few more hidden away. He knows nothing of their experience of time, though each one has woken to the sunshine and eaten breakfast and conducted their morning rituals, and each one, thinks Michael, lives – though perhaps they do not know it – governed by ancient impulses – a desire for human company, love, intimacy, family, a fear of darkness and the unknown, an aversion to pain, a curious sense of hope, despite everything. Perhaps some of them believe that this series of days – their series of days – will be infinite. Perhaps the repetition has deluded them, so they do not notice the years passing, or perhaps they look up from time to time and see that things have subtly changed, that something in their cycle of days has changed. But maybe they dismiss the thought. Ultimately, he thinks, we must all dismiss this thought, because otherwise how do we live? How do we live through our series of days?

The train is swinging towards the platform, and now it whirrs to a halt, and its doors open. In a swathe of people, a directed surge, Michael gains the entrance, and is deposited into a bright carriage. The train is crammed with bodies, and so he stands and holds onto a rail. All around him people are doing the same. The carriage is full of overheated humans, dressed in work clothes, shoulder to shoulder. But never, thinks Michael, face to face. Some
of them are holding newspapers and struggling to read them. These people are hoping to differentiate themselves. But they are buffeted and jostled all the same.

‘This is a Northern Line train for Mill Hill East. Stand clear of the closing doors.' It is foolish, thinks Michael, as he is buffeted and jostled in turn, to be too concerned about your own destiny, about the way the Fates toy with you, if they are toying indeed and not concerned with something else entirely. It is foolish to be too concerned, because in the end it is impossible to change things. Small elements might be rearranged, but the grand sweep, well, that is impossible to change. How could I have foreseen anything that has happened, all the events that have accumulated? All the mistakes I have made, the destruction even I have wrought? I was blind, as everyone is who lives within time.

To blame yourself for lacking foresight is perhaps like blaming yourself for being mortal, thinks Michael. You know nothing of the future. The past is unfathomable, stretching into darkness. The present is where you live. And the future – the future is simply the locale of your hope, the place where you deposit your expectations. And your fears too. But for some reason, today Michael feels more hope than fear. He thinks he may be redeemed. If he can go to her and say – something – what it is, he is not sure. When he is there, perhaps he will know.

It must or might be, thinks Michael, that – but now the train is pulling into Charing Cross and the carriage empties and fills again, and Michael is knocked on the back
and turns his head round, though he is not angry at all. He just wants to see the person who has collided with him, and it is a woman wearing red, looking urgent and troubled as she leaves the train. She is hurrying down the platform, and now the train moves out of the station, and he can no longer see her.

Robert von Lucius walks through the streets of Vienna, his head bowed. The streets are crowded with people, and he hears the clatter of horses' hooves on the cobbles. Carriages pass him, in a continuous line. He steps aside to avoid a man, and the man nods his thanks. The shops are opening, and the market sellers are setting up their stalls in the square. Von Lucius is hurrying, and the crowds merely irritate him. They are an obstruction, so many people standing between him and the asylum on Lazarettgasse. Between anticipation and action. Though what he will do when he arrives, he is not sure. Much depends on the mood of Professor Semmelweis, on whether he is lucid or raging. Now the cathedral clock chimes above him – he checks his own clock against it – and it is 8.30 a.m.

‘Brigid, I am Dr Gupta,' says one doctor, holding out his hand.

‘I am Dr Witoszeck,' says the other, younger and less self-assured.

‘We are going to examine you, if that is all right?' says Dr Gupta, though Brigid can hardly refuse. She says it is all right. They say, ‘We are now beginning the examination,' and they push their hands inside her, one after the other, and then they jot down notes together.

They say things she cannot understand. They speak quickly, using medical terms. Then Dr Gupta addresses her. He sits down – on the chair Patrick has vacated for him – and says, ‘The labour has progressed quite some way. You have done very well. However, the baby's head is stuck. It is the wrong way round and so this is making things very difficult for you. I think this is quite a large baby, larger than your first baby. This is why your contractions have been so unproductive, I suspect, because of the size and now the awkward position of the baby.'

‘What can I do?' she says.

‘We will see if some pushing turns the head. If that doesn't work then we will consider the other options. I'll leave you with the midwife.'

So her baby is stubbornly fixed. They are sending stronger waves of chemicals into her body, making the contractions more forceful even than before. Brigid is positioned; her numbed legs are moved. Upturned, stranded on her back, Brigid sees that her legs have been opened wide, and she becomes aware that she is naked below the waist. She observes this fact, though she no longer cares. Deprived of feeling, her body does not seem to be her own. The midwife says, ‘An hour to push. Then the doctor will come back again.'

Outside, the hum of traffic. There are boats moving on the shining river. And the midwife says, ‘Now! Push!'

With deadened nerves, Brigid aims to push. Her muscles are asleep, she thinks. The epidural has numbed her body and somehow it also seems to have detached her altogether
from her surroundings. From what is really happening to her. She is obeying the midwife, but automatically, as if it doesn't matter any more. And the midwife says, ‘That's it! Keep pushing!' and Patrick is there too, saying, ‘Push! Brigid, keep going!'

She grits her teeth, only an hour she thinks, from some reserve she must produce a final burst of energy – and she thinks she is pushing though her body has been silenced and cannot tell her what it is doing at all. She hears a deep guttural growl, like an animal, and she knows, though it seems improbable enough, that this sound is coming from her. In her desperation, she is growling like a beast.

And Patrick says, ‘Go on Brigid – that's great. Well done! Keep pushing!'

‘You should rest for a moment,' says the midwife, and the growl stops. Brigid breathes, tries to understand her body; she listens but all the shrillness has been muffled. Patrick kisses her and says, ‘You're doing really well.'

She is given a drink of water, tended to briskly, her brow is wiped, and then the midwife holds up the watch again and says, ‘Now! Push again!'

Within her, Brigid feels the suppressed force of a contraction, still tearing her apart, but surreptitiously, so what she registers is something like an aftershock, not the real force and fury at all. She has her eyes on the ceiling, a great lamp is shining down on her, she is the illuminated centre of the room, and so she grimaces and makes grunting noises, as if that will help. She grunts to compensate for the mute
ness of her body, these silenced muscles she has been dutifully honing throughout the months of her pregnancy, with special yoga exercises. She has been training for the marathon of the birth, and now she is lying on her back, with Patrick and the midwife peering doubtfully inside her. And because there is nothing else she can do, Brigid growls like a beast and bares her teeth, and she hears Patrick saying, ‘Come on Brigid, come on.'