Weldon, Fay - Novel 07 (33 page)

 
          
Bells rang, red lights glowed,
people
ran.

           
Liffey had been in the operating
theatre for twenty minutes. She had gone in fully conscious, been given one
injection to reduce the secretions from her throat and mouth, another one that
part paralysed her and prevented her struggling, and an anaesthetic that was of
necessity light, in case the baby was anaesthetised too. Liffey sensed the
passage of time and of terrible, painful, momentous events.
Of
struggle and endeavour, and of the twists and turns of fate, and of life
taking form out of rock.

 
          
“Was
there breakthrough?” enquired the anaesthetist later. “Sorry. Sometimes it’s
hard to judge, not too much, not too little, and there wasn’t much time.”

 
          
The
foetal heart had showed no signs of distress. The baby’s supply of oxygen
remained adequate, in spite of the knot in the umbilical cord, in spite of the
haemorrhage behind the placenta, in spite of the frequency of the uterine
contractions —each one obstructing the blood and oxygen supply to the placenta
for, at their height, one minute in every three—in spite, in fact, of anything,
everything Mabs could do. The umbilical knot remained loose; the area of
haemorrhage was limited; the placenta remained able to provide enough oxygen
in two minutes to carry the baby through the next. The heart remained at a
steady 140 beats, falling to 120 at the height of a contraction.

 
          
“Lots
of time for baby,” said someone, surprised. “What a lucky baby. Not much for
mother, though.”

 
          
The
uterus had to be emptied before it could fully contract. Until it was fully
contracted it would continue to bleed.
Difficult to drip as
much into Liffey as she dripped out.
The surgeon made an inverse
incision from side to side across the abdomen just above Liffey’s pubic mound.
He then separated the muscles of the lower abdominal wall and opened the
abdominal cavity. The bladder was then dissected free from the lower part of
the anterior of the uterus. A transverse incision was then made in the lower
uterine segment, exposing the membranes within. The baby’s head slipped out of
the surgeon’s hand, membranes closed.

 
          
Mabs
seated herself, coincidentally, in the waiting room of the theatre block, and
took up a magazine and flicked through it. Poor woman, thought the voluntary
worker who organised the tea bar there.

 
          
The
baby, conscious of distress, moved violently, tumbled and turned and pulled the
umbilical knot tighter, and the surgeon reexposed the membranes and found the
baby’s buttocks, and Liffey, conscious of struggle within, tried to cry out and
could not.

 
          
The
surgeon found the head, used forceps. He sweated. “Little beggar,” he said.
“You seem to like it in there. If only you knew how unsafe it was.”

 
          
The
surgeon lifted out the baby.

 
          
“A
boy,” someone said. Someone always names the sex. Everyone wants to know. It
defines the event. Liffey heard.

 
          
“I’m
really sorry,” said the anaesthetist later. “Still, we do our best.”

           
“At least,” said Liffey, “I am left
with a sense of occasion, not just in one minute and out the next.”

 
          
The
baby was held upside down. The baby did nothing. Then the baby breathed,
spluttered, coughed and cried, and tried to turn itself the right way up,
slithering in restraining hands. His colour was pinkish blue, changing rapidly
to pink, first the lips, then the skin around the mouth, then the face. He was
covered, beneath the slippery vernix, with fine hair. His muscles were tense.

 
          
“Doesn’t seem premature.
Got her dates wrong, I expect.” The
umbilical cord was clamped in two places, and divided between the clamps.

 
          
“A
knot too. See that? Only eight lives left.”

 
          
“About
five, I’d say. How far did she walk?”

 
          
“A
mile, someone said.”

 
          
“Christ!”

 
          
More anaesthesia.
The placenta was removed.
Ergometrine, to contract the uterus.

 
          
“How
much has she lost?”

 
          
“Two,
three pints since she’s been in.
Can’t say, before.”

 
          
The
bleeding stopped. A morsel of puffball, undigested— for during labour the
digestive processes stop—rose up in Liffey’s gullet, propelled by retching
muscles as the anaesthetic deepened, and such was its light yet bulky texture,
might well have been inhaled had the nurse stopped bothering to exert pressure
on Liffey’s neck. But she was young and frightened and doing as she was told.
So much so that Liffey’s neck retained the bruises for some weeks. But she
lived.

 
          
Mabs,
sitting outside in the waiting room, was conscious of defeat, and sighed and
was brought a cup of tea by the voluntary worker.

 
          
The incision in Liffey’s
now firmly
contracted uterus was repaired with catgut. The bruised bladder was stitched
back over the lower uterine segment. Liffey’s Fallopian tubes and ovaries were
inspected. They looked young, healthy, and capable of function in the future.
The anterior abdominal wall was sutured. The incision in the skin was then
closed with individual stitches.

 
          
“I
wouldn’t want to do that again,” said the surgeon. “Next?”

 
          
The
baby lay in an incubator in the special-care unit. His temperature was 98
degrees. His heartbeat, 120 at the moment of delivery, had fallen to 115, and
would slow gradually over the next three days to between 80 and 100, where it
would stay for the rest of his life. He breathed at 45 breaths a minute, with
an occasional deep sighing breath. The breathing came mostly from the
abdomen—the chest itself moved very little. He grunted a little, but that would
soon stop. He was immune for the time being to measles, mumps and chicken pox,
thanks to antibodies present in Liffey’s system which had crossed the placenta.

 
          
With
his first breath he had inhaled some 50 cubic centimetres of air, opening up
the respiratory passages in his lungs, forcing blood through the pulmonary
arteries, establishing an adult type of circulation. He weighed six pounds and
six
ounces,
he was nineteen and a half inches long.
Grasp, sucking, swallowing, rooting and walking reflexes were present. That is,
his palm would clench when pressure was applied to his palm, pressure on his
palate would start him sucking, a handclap would make him throw out his legs
and arms, he would swallow what was in his mouth, he would root for food,
following touch on his jaw: when he was held under the arms and his feet
touched a firm surface, he would seem to walk.

 
          
His nails reached the ends of his fingers, which were blue, but
already, unusually, changing to brown.
He could not see in adult terms
but could differentiate light from dark. His tear ducts worked so well he could
not cry. He sneezed from time to time. He could hear. He had already passed a
quantity of meconium, the sticky dark-green substance present in his intestine
at birth. Liver and spleen were slightly enlarged at birth, which was normal.
His testicles had descended, and his urinary passage was normal.

 
          
Everything
was well with the baby.
Very well.

 
          
In
the operating theatre next door Debbie hovered between life and death and
finally came down on the living side. The nurse who went to tell the mother
found her eventually in a phone booth, where she was having a long, wrangling
conversation with her sister Carol as to whose fault it was.

 
          
Mabs
seemed annoyed at having to bring the call to an end, rather than gratified
with the message brought. “What a fuss,” she said, “about nothing!”

 
          
Mabs
did not enquire too closely into the nature of Debbie’s illness, its cause, or
its prognosis.

 
          
“I
expect you’ll want to stay with your little girl till she’s out of the
anaesthetic,” said the nurse.

 
          
“Well,
I can’t get back till Tucker comes with the car,” said Mabs. “How’s Mrs.
Lee-Fox doing?”

 
          
Liffey
had been wheeled past her on the trolley, ashen white,
head
lolling.

 
          
“She’ll
be all right,” said the nurse. “We only lose one mother a year and we’ve
already lost her!” It was their little joke.

 
          
Mabs heard
Liffey’s baby cry. A pain
struck through to Mabs’s heart, not just at this final, overwhelming evidence
of her impotence to prevent this birth but at the injustice it presented.
Tucker’s baby emerging from the wrong body, so that she, Mabs, was left ignored
in a waiting room while the gentle, powerful concern of authority and the
dramatic indications of its existence—masks and lights and drugs and
ministering hands—focused down on the wrong person. Mabs sat beside Debbie’s
bed and waited for her to wake up and scarcely saw her.

 
          
Liffey
woke up to ask how the baby was and was told it was fine, which she didn’t
believe, and sank back into sedated sleep. When she woke next she cried with
pain, exhaustion and lack of a baby to put in her arms.

 
          
“Baby’s
perfectly all right,” said the nurse. “Don’t fuss. All Caesar babies go into
special care for a couple of days, that’s all.”

 
          
The
staff treated Liffey with automatic kindness—moving her up in the bed when she
slipped down, changing pillows, sponging her face. The desire to empty her
bruised bladder was enormous; the ability to do so lacking: the pain and
humiliation of being lifted to use a bedpan overwhelming. She had more drugs.

 
          
She
remembered the baby.

 
          
“Don’t
let Mabs get the baby,” she said. Of course this was hospital, and Mabs was at
the farm, but Liffey kept saying the same thing: “Bring the baby here. Please
bring the baby
here,”
and they promised her they would
to keep her quiet, knowing her sense of time was confused.

 
          
The
Almoners’ Department tried to trace her husband, but he could not be found at
his office and had a new secretary who was not helpful. They did rather better
with the Personnel Department, which proffered the information that Mr. Lee-
Fox might well be having a minor breakdown, that this sometimes happened to
executives under stress at the time of a major life event, of which having a
first baby was certainly one. They were concerned but not anxious, and thanked
the hospital for its help.

 
          
Liffey
lapsed back into slumber and pain and woke to find Mabs in the room. Liffey
tried to sit up but could not. She had no strength in her abdomen, thighs, arms
or shoulders.

 
          
“Well,
well,” said Mabs. “Feeling better, are we? Congratulations!”

 
          
Liffey
said nothing.

 
          
“I
never had to have a Caesar,” said Mabs. “Perhaps you have narrow hips? You
should have taken some of my rosemary tea. I always drink it when Pm pregnant
and never have any trouble. Is Richard pleased?”

 
          
Liffey
said nothing.

 
          
“I
do think a girl’s easier for a man to accept,” said Mabs, “but there’s not much
we can do about that. Do you mind me just chatting on? Don’t talk if it tires
you. I know what it’s like by now. The doctor told me you lost a lot of blood
too. Why didn’t you come down to me instead of setting off like that all by
yourself? Mind you, the phone was out of order. Eddie broke it, the naughty
boy; I didn’t half wallop him. Debbie was taken ill with appendix, and of
course the one time l really needed the phone, it wasn’t working.”

 
          
“Is
it visiting hours?” asked Liffey. Perhaps she was dreaming Mabs?

 
          
“No,”
said Mabs, “it isn’t. I’m living in, with Debbie. She’s been quite poorly.
Isn’t it a coincidence, the two of us here together? So I can pop in any time I
please. Where’s baby?”

 
          
Dreamt
or not, Liffey wasn’t replying to that.

 
          
“In
the special-care unit, I suppose?” went on Mabs. “I’ll just nip down and see
him. Poor little mite, all wired up. No baby of mine ever went into special
care.”

 
          
Mabs
saw the bruises on Liffey’s neck. “Who ever tried to strangle you?” she asked
as she left. “Now who would want to do a thing like that?”

           
And Mabs was gone.

 
          
I
dreamed it, thought Liffey. There was a great hollow under her ribs where the
baby used to live, and a hole in that part of her mind that the baby had used.
She had endured some kind of fearful loss. Liffey sat up and cried for help.

 
          
No
one came.

 
          
No.
She had not dreamed Mabs. Mabs had been real.

 
          
Liffey
remembered Richard’s going, the pain, the broken telephone, the slammed door,
the blood, Eddie, the walk.
Mabs.
Witch.
Murderess.

 
          
Liffey
got out of bed. She took her legs with her hands and dropped them over the side
of the bed and let the rest of her fall after them. Once she was out of bed and
on the floor, progress was possible.
Surprisingly, movement
begat movement.
Liffey began to crawl. She still wore a white surgical
gown, tied with tapes across her back.

 
          
Mabs
was already at the special-care unit, at the far end of a wedge of post-natal
wards. The walls of a corridor turned to glass, and there, behind the glass,
under bright yet muted lights, were ranks of plastic incubators, and in them
babies, wired up to monitors by nostril and umbilicus, or linked to drips of
life-support machinery—tiny mewling scraggy things.

 
          
Baby
Lee-Fox, there only for observation, unwired, unlinked, lay in a far corner,
breathing, sighing, snuffling,
doing
well. Masked
nurses sat and watched or moved about the rows on quiet, urgent missions. An
orderly at the door handed out masks and gowns for parents and close relatives.

 
          
“Baby
Lee-Fox?” asked Mabs. She looked like many women in these parts, large and
strong, yet soft.

 
          
The
name Lee-Fox, with its pallid hyphenated ring, its overtones of refined home
counties, sat strangely on her tongue, but not strangely enough for the orderly
to doubt Mabs’s right to be where she was so clearly at home, amongst these
small babies hovering between dark and light, at that moment of existence at
which the ability, the desire, to go forward peaks again towards reluctance.

 
          
At
Honeycomb Cottage, doors and windows stood wide. Rain had fallen in the night
and splashed unheeded on to papers and books. A column of ants now filed
through the sunny front door and into the sugar bowl on the kitchen table. The
rain had washed out most but not all of the marks where Richard, in his anxiety
to be away, had scored the lane with his tyres.

 
          
Up
at Cadbury Farm, Tucker was in charge. He liked being alone with the children.
They sat round the kitchen table eating large plates of cornflakes liberally
sprinkled with sugar and swimming in milk. Audrey made a cake. Eddie sat on his
father’s knee and poked his fingers up Tucker’s nostrils. They missed Debbie.
The radio was on. All remembered a time when Mabs had been kind, and Tucker
felt at fault for not having earned them, of late, a remission. Each remission
of course meant another mouth to feed for the next fifteen years. Now, it
seemed, he had earned one by proxy.

 
          
Mabs
leaned over Baby Lee-Fox. Mabs laughed. The tone of the laugh disturbed a
nurse, who came over and looked as well.

 
          
Baby
Lee-Fox clenched and unclenched fists, struggled to open eyes.

 
          
“Lovely
little baby,” said the nurse. “Of course Caesar babies usually are. They don’t
get so squashed.”

 
          
Mabs
laughed again: it was a strange deflating sound, as if all the air and spirit
were draining swiftly out of a balloon, so that it tore and raced and hurled
itself about a room before lying damp and still.

 
          
“Is
it that funny?” asked the nurse, puzzled.

 
          
“He’s
the image of his father,” said Mabs.

 
          
“Just
like Richard,” said Mabs to Liffey, laughing again. Liffey had been picked up
from the floor outside the special-care unit and put back to bed, and the drips
set up again, and Baby Lee-Fox brought into her room, since she was apparently
earnest in her desire to see her baby.

 
          
“Why
shouldn’t he be?” asked Liffey wearily.

 
          
Mabs
smiled,
a really happy, generous smile.

 
          
“All’s
well that ends well,” said Mabs, “and Debbie’s fever has broken. If they’d let
me give her feverfew in the first place, we’d have had none of this trouble.
What a fuss they make in here about every little thing.”

 
          
Mabs
leant over and picked Liffey’s baby out of its crib. She did it tenderly and
reverently. Liffey was not afraid. Mabs had dwindled to her proper scale. The
world no longer shook at her footfall. Mabs handed Liffey the baby.

 
          
“But
where’s Richard?” asked Mabs, all innocence.

 
          
Liffey’s
memory of the Sunday lunch was vague, overshadowed by the events that had
followed it. She remembered, as one remembers on waking from sleep, the feeling
tone of the preceding day rather than its actual events—that Richard had left
angry and that this had been a practical inconvenience rather than an emotional
blow. As to the details of the rest, they seemed irrelevant.

 
          
The
baby lay in Liffey’s arms, snuffling and rooting for food. She sensed its
triumph. None of that was important, the baby reproved her,
they
were peripheral events leading towards the main end of your life, which was to
produce me. You were always the bit-part player: that you played the lead was
your delusion, your folly. Only by giving away your life do you save it.

 
          
“The
little darling,” said Mabs. “How could anyone hurt a baby?”

 
          
The
baby smiled.

 
          
“Only
wind,” said Mabs, startled.

 
          
“It
was a smile,” said Liffey.

 
          
“Babies
don’t smile for six weeks,” said Mabs uneasily.

 
          
The
baby smiled again.