The Facts of Life (20 page)

She dozed for a while after lunch, finding the contractions barely woke her. The ripple would run through her lower body, like a wave turning in on itself. She would half open her eyes, hear a few minutes of Edward’s music coming from below, then slip back to sleep. She woke at last at dusk with an urgent need to pee. She had made him bring her a pot but he had left it coyly hidden beneath the bed so that it was out of her immediate reach. She threw back the sheet and slowly swung her legs off the mattress. She had assisted at births so often in the course of her work, that she felt she knew the best and worst of it, knew too the astonishing variety between one woman’s experience and another’s.

Reaching for the pot, she was just congratulating herself on being one of the lucky ones, when a fresh, savage contraction knocked her, gasping, on to all fours. Somehow she used the pot as soon as she could, unable to tell whether the hot liquid splashing below her came from bladder or womb or both. She was barely back on the bed before another contraction came. She scrabbled on the bedside table for the handbell Edward had left her and rang it hard.

‘Edward?’ she called out, feeling doubly vulnerable at the fear she heard in her thin voice. ‘Edward, my waters have broken.’

Another contraction gripped her before he had even made it upstairs.

She knew now that the agonies in store would be beyond anything she had experienced to date. Like everyone, she carried a scale of pain in her head, with notches carved by each new experience from the cradle on. Nappy rash, teething, stinging nettles, burns, the first splinter, the first grazed knee, the first scalding splash from a kettle, the first bee sting; any sensation more painful than its predecessors merited a new notch. She had suffered terribly from impacted wisdom teeth at medical school, had known the sudden, white-hot pain up the side of her face and, in the weeks before a dentist could operate, had learned to fear its unpredictable return. This new pain, which made her yelp, then almost laugh with surprise at its brain-clearing force, redefined her sense of suffering. Toothache was a mere itch by comparison; the only similarity was the pain’s spasmodic nature and her lack of faith that it would ever be over.

During the hours that followed, Sally not only lost all track of time but also all feelings of impending intimacy, all welling sense of mother-love. Instead, she was gripped by a single caustic desire to have the baby ripped from her by the swiftest means possible – anything to bring the pain to an end.

‘You’re not serious!’

Sally’s face shone with sweat as she stared incredulously up at him. One of her thighs had ridden clear of the sheet and it, too, glistened in the lamplight.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Her husband said he’d send one of the boys over to Digby’s Farm to see what was keeping her. Mrs Storey must be, er, having complications. But listen, I’ve called the ambulance and –’

He broke off as a fresh spasm seized her frame and she snatched instinctively at his wrist as though it could somehow ward off the pain. By a huge effort, she drew enough breath to gasp instructions to him.

‘It’s too late for that,’ she hissed between her teeth. ‘God! Listen. We’ll just have to manage. Get towels. All the towels you can, and string and scissors.’

‘Scissors!?’

‘Yes. And we’ll –’ Again she had to stop for a contraction. She tugged back the bottom of the sheet as she raised both knees and pressed down with her feet, grimacing. Her fingernails drove hard into his skin and she let out a yell. Edward had never been present at a birth. His mind raced with scenes from films; maids sprinting, white-faced, pursued by a mistress’s tortured screams and a house-keeper’s barked instructions.

‘What about hot water?’ he asked, remembering.

She managed a laugh.

‘That’s for later,’ she said. ‘When we need to wash the little bugger. You’ll need some now, though. Give your hands and forearms a good scrub with disinfectant and soap before you come back up. Oh and bring a pudding basin and the meths bottle.’

Cursing the midwife, Mrs Storey and the ambulance service, Edward raced off to do as she said. He lathered up his hands at the kitchen sink and scrubbed at them with the vegetable brush before rinsing them off in scalding water made milky with disinfectant. Humming under his breath, he found meths, pudding basin and scissors. He finally tracked down a ball of string in the cluttered drawer of the kitchen table, tugging it free of old knives, candle ends and seed catalogues. He swore, realising his hands were now dirty and would have to be washed afresh. Tugging an armful of towels from the airing cupboard, he found he was shaking.

When he got back to the bedroom, Sally was sitting up, clutching her knees, her head forward. He picked two fallen pillows from the floor and packed them behind her back and shoulders along with the ones from the other side of the bed. She sighed her thanks. Edward pulled up a chair beside her. As she lay back, she let him wipe the sweat from her face and arms with a towel.

‘Spread one of the others under my legs,’ she said. ‘Better make that two; we don’t want to ruin the mattress. What can you see down there? Besides the obvious.’

Edward looked.

‘There’s a bulge!’ he gasped.

‘Well of course there’s a bulge.’

‘No, I mean another one.’

Sally gave a glottal shout and threw her head forward, bracing herself once more against her knees. She forced herself to breathe as she did so, great deep breaths, dragged out raw through jagged edges. For a few seconds, as the contraction continued, he saw the lips of her vulva part and something round and dark and glistening briefly unveiled.

‘I think –’ he began. ‘I think –’

But her contraction stopped and it slid back inside.

‘What?’ she gasped. He looked up at her. From his position, crouched at the foot of the bed between her feet, her body seemed a magnificent, powerful thing. Panting, hair plastered in rats’ tails across her forehead, eyes and teeth brilliant against a complexion flushed with blood, taut with effort, she might have pronounced a curse and turned him to stone.

‘I think I saw its head,’ he admitted.

‘Thank Christ,’ she sighed.

‘What?’

‘Not breech,’ she muttered enigmatically before flinging herself forwards again to strain against her own body’s strength.

Labour and delivery; everyday use devalued the two words’ currency leaving them to sound neutrally euphemistic, but now that they were being enacted before him, Edward saw their rigorous precision. It was a warm evening and, even with a window open, the relentless cycle of Sally’s savage contractions and brief, panting moments of respite seemed to rob the room, the entire house, of air.’ Before long, Edward imagined he felt her every hoarse breath on his face and with her sharp, whooping sucks on the stale atmosphere, he felt suffocated. The sheer concentration of her being on this single act of expulsion made her the heaving centre of the house, queen of the anthill. He strained his ear for the sound of the midwife’s car or the ambulance bell but heard only Sally.

‘
Now!
’ she bellowed. ‘No. Don’t come up here. Stay down there and – Jesus! – I – I need you to take its head. You must be able to by now.’ She stopped talking to snatch a few quick pants then gabbled in her effort to communicate in the short time left her. ‘Just steady it. Don’t pull and don’t twist. Stop it coming too fast or it could burst a vessel.’

Startled into action, Edward wiped his hands on the towel and reached out for the smeary dome that was now recognisable as a wizened head. He saw, with a shock, that Sally had suddenly shat herself. Without stopping to think, he used a flannel to roll the big, firm turd clear of the baby’s face, then wrapped it in the cloth and tossed it quickly through the open window.

The baby’s head was hot, slithery with blood, mucus and God knows what else. Taking it gently in his hands he could hardly believe Sally could stretch so wide without tearing. And there were still the shoulders to come. Or had she torn? It was impossible to tell where the blood was coming from. He marvelled that she could do this and live. Perhaps it would kill her. He had made her pregnant and now she was going to die.

‘The cord!’ she yelled suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Umbilical cord.’

Edward looked back at the emerging form.

‘Oh God! I – I think it’s around its neck.’

‘Don’t panic. Ease it round over the head.’

‘But it looks so tight.’

‘Gently. It’ll give. Gently. Oh God.’

Wincing, Edward slipped his forefinger behind the pulsating cord. After two failed attempts, when it slid from his quivering grasp, he managed to move it around to the other side of the head. The tension in it relaxed.

‘It’s coming. Oh God, it’s coming!’ he murmured.

Suddenly Sally gave out a full-throated scream as though her very innards were being torn out.

‘It’s coming!’ he encouraged her. ‘Push, Sally. Push. Oh God in Heaven!’

Glistening like a pink frog, a whole new life was emerging from his wife’s insides and into his no less slithery arms. The sight was utterly surreal to him. Neither uplifting, nor abhorrent, it was so far removed from anything he had seen before that he watched in pure bewilderment. For a few seconds the child seemed lifeless, then a minute working of its mouth prompted Edward to wipe its face with a clean corner of a towel. Instructed by Sally, he cleared the tiny nostrils and prised his fingers between the lips to release a thick gobbet of mucus and was rewarded by a thin wail.

‘It’s a girl,’ he said. ‘A girl.’

Sally let out a sob and held out her hands. Still hunched in her tangle of sheets, with raised knees, she clutched the minute creature to her heaving chest and released a low moan that turned into a sigh. She looked up at him, weeping with happiness, pain, and relief.

‘The house,’ she said. ‘A girl for the house!’

‘Shall I get that hot water now?’ he asked over the noise of the baby’s crying. She nodded. He left them, fetched another towel and filled the biggest saucepan he could find with hot water. When he carried it carefully back into the room she told him to set it on the bedside table, then made him snip two lengths of string into the pudding basin and pour the meths over them, dropping the scissors in to soak as well.

‘Here. Hold her for me,’ she said and he held the baby while she dipped a towel in the water and gently washed the baby’s wrinkled limbs with languorous, careful gestures. ‘Now,’ she said, when the baby was dried and furled in another towel, ‘The cord.’

The umbilical cord had stopped pulsating now. Under Sally’s supervision he tied string tightly around it in two places but he hesitated with the scissors.

‘Won’t it hurt?’ he asked.

‘Here.’

Sally took them from him and snipped cleanly through the meaty vessel between the two knots of string, tucking the short length still attached to the baby away inside the towel, and muttering something about a dressing.

‘What about, er …?’ Edward held up the other length, the root of which was still hidden inside his wife. The cut end was seeping slightly onto his fingers. She smiled at his ignorance.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t pull. All that’ll come out on its own in a while. Oh, Edward. Darling.’ She began to cry again. ‘Sit by me a little. Sit by
us
!’

Edward wiped his hands on the towel and walked around to the other side of the bed, where he clambered up. For what seemed like the first time in months, he put his arm about her shoulders and she leant back against him. His nostrils caught the strong mineral scent of her drying sweat and blood.

‘Hello,’ she said to the bundle in the towel. ‘Hello. Oh look, darling. Look! She’s here. Miriam’s arrived! Miriam. Miriam. Miriam. It suits her. Don’t you think. Miriam.
Miriam
.’

Their reverie was interrupted by the arrival of the midwife, who congratulated him on his handiwork then shepherded him from the room while she fussed back and forth with blood-soaked towels and set about tidying Sally. She was followed shortly afterwards by ambulancemen, who carried sedated mother and sleeping child from the house on a stretcher.

Left alone with the hot night and his wife’s deserted house, Edward poured himself a large whisky, took out the address book and twice began to dial her parents’ number to give them the news. Twice, however, he set the receiver back in its cradle, unable to rid his mind of Sally’s tone as she repeated, in a dreamy incantation, the name of his dead sister.

After the brisk spring evening outside, the theatre’s air felt uncomfortably warm and it was rendered heavier still with expensive scent and alcohol. Not counting a grim Christmas spent at her parents’ house, it was Edward and Sally’s second proper excursion since Miriam’s birth the previous summer. People yawned, coughed, burrowed in handbags and jacket pockets for pastilles and handkerchiefs, some even fanned their programmes slowly against glowing cheeks yet nothing could detract from the power of the sounds welling up from stage and pit.

Following a blood-chilling orchestral evocation of a sea storm, the scene had just changed to an East Anglian tavern interior. Fishwives huddled around a fire, their menfolk sulked over pints and argued over women, the storm howled at intervals whenever someone new crashed in from outside. Suddenly the villagers’ worries found a focus in loathing and mistrust for a drunken fisherman who did not belong among them. Just when Edward was expecting a straightforward choral expression of dislike, composer and librettist surprised him by having someone start an old-fashioned round in a well-meaning effort to dispel a dangerous atmosphere. Character after character joined in the vigorous, catchy tune with a kind of desperation until chorus and orchestra caused the sound to surge up to meet another burst of storm music as the door once more flew fatefully open. The handling of the material was almost cornily melodramatic – the musical equivalent of the broad, wide-eyed gestures of an old silent film – and yet it succeeded brilliantly. The aggressive rhythms, the huge crescendi and piling of texture on texture were utterly seductive. Edward glanced at Sally and found that even she, who he had long since guessed found modern music difficult to enjoy, was sitting forward in her seat, mouth slightly agape in her excitement. Irritated, he stared at her openly, only to irritate himself further as the music held her so raptly attentive that she did not notice his gaze.