It was such a lovely June day, thought Minnie, she would walk down and see Arthur. The baby had fallen quiet, and stopped its barrage of kicking, while giving her the occasional nudge just to show it was all right. The day was not too hot, not too cold, a gentle wind, the smell of honeysuckle in the air, and of new-cut grass where the gardeners had been scything. She would take the short cut to the workshops so no one would see her. Nanny Brown hated to let Minnie out of her sight, saying the baby would be here any day, but her physician Dr Hodson gave it another two weeks. She was very attached to her baby now, though she couldn’t quite see how it would ever get out. She’d said to Dr Hodson that she presumed it was the same way as it got in, from between her legs, but that had made him look rather shocked. But then many things made him look rather shocked. She persisted and said it needed a very small hole to get in but such a large one to get out, how did it happen? Dr Hodson was vague and said that Nature knew what it was doing, more or less letting her know that it wasn’t hers to enquire, but his to inform. She was a healthy young woman, that’s all he would say, she should call for him when the pains were two minutes apart; he would come straight away from Brighton. He had a reliable car – a brand-new Arnold Jehu with automatic ignition, he told her with pride – and before she knew it she would be sitting up in bed with a new baby in her arms receiving visitors. She’d got a look at his obstetrics bag once and it was terrifying. Strange metal instruments to claw, drag and crush and God knew what, and little bottles marked ‘poison’. Minnie told Dr Hodson that a midwife not a physician had attended her birth in Chicago, and he said that was barbaric: here the medical profession was doing what it could to keep midwives out: they were a dirty, slovenly, drunken lot who killed more babies than they ever saved.
Isobel wasn’t around to ask questions of: she was too caught up in the Coronation, only days away. Minnie still felt disappointed that she would miss this event of events, though the very idea of parading in a hot ermine-lined gown and wearing a tiara seemed oddly trying. The aim of all life was surely to sit down and be comfortable, though no doubt that was her body speaking; it was so very vocal, these days.
Rosina was no longer there to answer questions. Rosina was gone; Pappagallo was gone. Rosina would have looked up some medical books and given her some facts. She hoped Rosina would be all right. It was dreadful when people sailed away out of your life like that. Her mother had sailed away out of her life, or perhaps she had sailed away out of her mother’s?
There was no point in asking Nanny Brown anything: Nanny Brown seemed to think everyone she encountered was a child who had to be reminded that ‘those who asked no questions wouldn’t be told no lies’.
Arthur said he knew everything about the inside of engines but he would rather know as little as possible about women’s insides. Men had engines, women had babies. He would say anything for a smart phrase.
But such a lovely June. A blackbird singing a fresh melody on a branch, trying it out for size, clucking and chucking, and then trying it again. She walked slowly and happily down to the workshops. She could see them from a distance, smell the occasional waft of engine oil, hear the generalized clinking and clanging workshop noise, the occasional roar of an engine being tested for size, or vibration, or speed, or whatever his engines happened to be currently aspiring to. She was glad Arthur was the man he was: that he had something to strive for: he didn’t have a great deal of time for her but then he wouldn’t have any time or attention for anyone else. His father had a wandering eye; she could only hope Arthur had not inherited it. She had told no one, not even Arthur, that she’d seen his Lordship out with Consuelo Vanderbilt; such things were better not reported. Isobel would be devastated. And perhaps in any case Minnie had been mistaken. Though it was rather hard not to recognize her tall, impressive father-in-law, let alone the infinitely glamorous Duchess.
She couldn’t be bothered walking any more, she felt sleepy. The imperative was to sleep, not walk. She took off her cloak, it was getting hot anyway, and put it on a grassy bank for a rug and lay down on it. She would have trouble getting up again she was so top-heavy, but she would worry about that later. She watched a lark soaring into the sky. She fell asleep. When she woke her skirt was drenched. She was ashamed of herself. She must have wet her knickers as if she was a little girl. She hauled herself to her feet. She would get to the workshops and with any luck nobody would notice. These were men who loved engines: they didn’t notice much else. She felt a rather sharp slow pain as she walked up the ramp to the workshop where Arthur was usually to be found. The pain was rather like cramp, only a strange place to have it. Cramp usually came three times and then let you alone if you waited for it to do its worst and then it released you.
Arthur was running an engine and standing over it with a stop-watch in one hand. He looked at her with pleasure. She was glad of that. She was unexpected. Supposing his first reaction had been irritation? She couldn’t have borne that.
‘I think I am having the baby,’ she said. ‘If only they told me more I would know more.’
He took a rug from over the back of his office chair and she lay down on the oily floor. Her skirts were wet. Perhaps it would be better to get back to the house, only she couldn’t work out how to do it. Another of the cramps came and she asked him to time it. He did. Then he timed the next pain. He said there was a minute between them.
She said, ‘Dr Hodson said every two minutes, then to call him. But it’s still only one.’
‘We’ll wait then, until it calms down to two. I suppose it’s like an engine cooling down.’
‘I expect so,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if I stay here? I don’t want to get in your way.’
‘I’m always delighted to see you,’ he said.
He was relieved, though it seemed rather strange, lying down on the floor the way she was. There was another rather bad pain and a strange blocked feeling between her legs.
‘I don’t think this baby should wait any longer,’ she said. ‘Get someone to go and fetch Dr Hodson. Near the clock tower in Brighton, that’s where his surgery is.’ Someone roared off to Brighton. It was seventeen miles. She heard Arthur ask if anyone knew anything about babies, but nobody did. They were all quite young, apprentice mechanics.
It wasn’t exactly pain, anyway, just an extraordinary feeling that Nature knew best and there was nothing she could do about it. She was caught up, whirled up, in something amazing. She was lying down; legs bent, everything exposed. Arthur with his sleeves rolled up and something coming out of her, with a couple of pushes which she couldn’t have stopped even if she wanted to, which she didn’t. She looked down and saw that Arthur held a baby in his hands, it’s head covered with sticky stuff. It needed to be washed. The baby opened its mouth and made a noise, and then there was a kind of answer from inside her, another final surge and then there was something squishy and messy like liver lying on the rug. That would have to be washed too. Arthur looked very surprised.
‘That was quick,’ he said. ‘I thought it took days.’ The baby let out another cry. It sounded angry.
‘It’s a boy,’ he said, ‘unless girls look like that too when they’re born.’
She had a look.
‘I wouldn’t think so,’ she said. ‘But no one tells me anything.’
‘What do we do now?’ he said. He seemed to be crying. Sniffing away, at any rate. She felt quite energetic, as if there was a lot to be done.
She looked.
‘I expect you have to cut the cord thing in the middle,’ she volunteered. ‘People don’t go dragging something like that round with them all their lives.’
He studied the baby, the cord, and the lump of liver.
‘Navels,’ he said. ‘I see. How we all begin. Well, well. I see.’ He tied two knots in the cord with string and snipped the ends with some moderately clean wire cutters. He boiled up the tea kettle and poured the boiling water over the cutters before using them to cut the cord between the two knots. ‘I learnt the importance of boiling water in the Cadet Corps at Eton. In time of war and tumult.’
The baby was looking round and searching for something to put in its mouth. Her breasts seemed obvious so she pulled one out of various layers of clothing and put it in the baby’s mouth. It nuzzled around a bit and then began to suck.
‘You are clever,’ he said, admiringly.
‘You’re not bad yourself,’ she said.
Nanny Brown came bustling in, in a state of fine panic, looked, saw, tore off a piece of extra skirt and wrapped it round the baby without dislodging its mouth. Someone had sensibly gone to fetch her.
‘You are clever,’ she said to Minnie, and to Arthur, ‘You are a one, Master Arthur.’
Dr Hodson arrived an hour or so later, up at the house.
‘A lightning birth,’ he said, ‘I’ve heard of it but never seen one.’
‘You did not see much of this one,’ Minnie pointed out.
But he smiled at her in a quite friendly manner and said, ‘I told you, you could leave it to Nature.’
She smiled back. But then she would have smiled at anyone. She was in a state of adoration. It was different from anything she had known before. She and Arthur shared it.
They were safe.
They decided not to tell Isobel at once but to wait until the Coronation was over. It was only a few days away, after all.