19

It was late on Friday night, but Eve wasn’t able to sleep. There had been a violent summer storm earlier, the thunder crashing overhead, flashes of blue light through the curtainless window illuminating the bedroom like a black-and-white movie. Eve didn’t mind the storm herself, but it had put her on alert, in case Arthur woke. Plus the baby had begun wriggling and fidgeting as soon as she lay down. Is this one a girl? she wondered, hoping it was. She’d asked not to be told the sex of her baby at the earlier scan, because Eric wasn’t with her. But this pregnancy felt so different. With Arthur there’d been terrible morning sickness, lasting for weeks, and she’d felt so tired she’d wanted to die. But this time she had barely noticed the child quietly growing in her womb – until she’d been forced to.

There was no sound, however, from her son’s room as she padded across the corridor to the bathroom for the second pee of the night – and found the blood. She had been checking for weeks now, worrying about it on and off every day. There had been no sign of trouble, though, since that first bit of spotting and the discovery that her placenta wasn’t in the right place. She’d begun to hope it had been a one-off. So now she was actually looking at the stain, she didn’t really believe it.

Her heart began to hammer. Stepping out of her knickers, she wondered what she should do. The doctor had been very specific. If there was any blood, she should go to the hospital immediately. Was this really blood? Was it enough? Enough to constitute dragging her mother out of bed in the middle of the night? She wasn’t getting pains or cramps.

After another moment’s hesitation, she went and knocked on her mother’s door. ‘Mum?’ No reply. Gently pushing it open, the old door creaked loudly and she heard her mother stir.

‘Eve?’

‘Mum, I’m bleeding.’

The bedside light snapped on and her mother was up and out of bed within seconds.

‘Sit down.’

Eve did as she was told, perching on the side of the bed on top of the soft duvet. ‘It’s not much. I don’t know if I should worry,’ she said.

Stella didn’t say anything for a moment. ‘Any pains?’

She shook her head.

‘Still … I think we should go and get you checked out, sweetheart. Just to be safe.’

‘Couldn’t we wait till the morning, see if there’s any more? It’s vicious out there.’ She didn’t want to go to the hospital; all that palaver in the middle of the night. But she could see from the set of her mother’s face that she didn’t agree.

‘I’ll go and get Arthur up,’ Stella said.

‘No, don’t! I can drive myself, Mum, if you stay with Arthur. It’s just spotting, I’m not crippled.’

Her mother sat down beside her, put her arm around her shoulder. Eve shivered. The storm had freshened the previously muggy summer night and now it was quite chilly.

‘Suppose you get terrible cramps on the way? Or more bleeding? Don’t be silly. Of course I’ll take you.’

Eve nodded, knowing her mother was right, but still reluctant. ‘Go and get dressed and I’ll do the same. Maybe Arthur will go back to sleep in the car.’

The roads to the hospital were shiny black with the earlier downpour. Spray from the passing cars on the A21 slicked the windscreen. The rhythmic draw of Arthur sucking his thumb was the only sound in the car, both women tense and discombobulated by the night-time drive.

‘It’ll be all right,’ her mum said, glancing sideways as she drove.

‘You keep saying that, Mum. What if it isn’t?’

‘Let’s wait and see what the doctor says.’

‘I’m not even thirty weeks. If the baby is born now …’

Her mother reached out and put a firm hand on her leg. ‘Try not to worry, Evie. You said it yourself, it’s not a lot of blood.’

Eve felt her breath catch in her throat. ‘Yes, but that may be only the start. I might have to stay in bed – stay in hospital – if it doesn’t stop, and then Arthur will be freaked out and you’ll have to cope …’ She dropped her voice, ‘He won’t understand, Mum, we’ve never been apart, not even for a night.’ She sighed. ‘God, I wish Eric was here,’ she added, then immediately felt bad for her mother, knowing how hard she was trying to help. But Eric was Arthur’s dad. It wouldn’t feel so strange for her son, being left with his father … or it wouldn’t have, before Eric went away.

The doctor was thin and pale, her dark hair scraped back in an untidy ponytail. Eve decided she was probably not much older than she was. The name tag hanging from the pocket of her blue scrubs said, ‘Dr Andrea Haas’, although she did not introduce herself, and barely looked at Eve as she pulled on some blue nitrile gloves.

‘This will feel cold,’ she muttered mechanically, before inserting the ultrasound wand into her vagina. The examination room in the modern, purpose-built unit was pristine-bright and chilly, like the wand. Eve, her legs wide, knees drawn up, could feel the baby kicking wildly at the intrusion. Craning her neck sideways, she only saw the edge of the screen and a mess of blurry black-and-white sonar images.

‘Is it OK?’

The doctor didn’t reply, her gaze intent on the VDU.

‘Baby’s fine,’ she said absent-mindedly, still gently probing, ‘but I’m afraid the placenta hasn’t moved.’ She raised her head to look at Eve, almost for the first time, her gaze – eyes ringed dark with tiredness behind her black-rimmed glasses – seemingly indifferent to the patient in front of her. ‘You’re what? Thirty weeks?’

‘Twenty-nine.’

‘OK …’

More probing, more silent screen gazing. Eve wanted to scream at her, Tell me! Just fucking tell me!

After what seemed like a lifetime, the doctor removed the wand and ripped off her gloves, throwing them in the metal bin by the door. She handed Eve a wad of paper towel to wipe away the excess gel, then stood looking at her, hands in her scrubs pockets, a slight frown on her pale face.

‘Well … Given the spotting, I think we should keep an eye on you overnight.’ She must have sensed Eve’s protest, because she hurried on, ‘Just to be safe. Then if there’s no more bleeding, you can go home tomorrow.’

Eve let out a sigh of relief. The images that had been spinning alarmingly around her brain, of Eric returning to a half-formed incubator baby – so strung around with tubes and wires, electrodes and catheters that he couldn’t see its tiny face – began to fade.

‘You can help Bibi get breakfast in the morning, then do some gardening. You love that,’ she told Arthur as she said goodbye to him. He adored pottering behind Stella as she tried to get the garden into shape.

Arthur put his thumb in his mouth and laid his head against his grandmother’s shoulder, stubbornly not responding to the carrot his mum was holding out to him.

‘He’s tired,’ her mother said. ‘I’ll get him home. He’ll be fine, Evie, don’t worry.’ She bent to kiss her. ‘Text me when I can pick you up, OK?’

She watched her mother carry her son away, the dark head and the pale-auburn one bobbing together. It was almost a month since her mother had arrived to stay and she was beginning to relax her old habit of being on guard all the time and checking her mother’s words for the criticism that had been such a regular feature of their earlier relationship. She was even beginning to loosen control on her house and her child, surrendering many of the chores to her mother.

It helped that the garden was taking up a great deal of Stella’s time. Most days, when the weather permitted, her mother and Arthur would be outside as soon as breakfast was cleared away, weeding and chopping and trimming, piling up the cuttings in a huge heap at the bottom of the garden near the small copse. Arthur had his own little green wheelbarrow and would follow his grandmother down the path to the heap with his small cache of weeds. Eve, blissfully alone in the house, could rest, read a bit – although her attention span negated anything more serious than a magazine most of the time – doze off, cook the lunch, surf the Net for baby-related clobber she would never buy and text her London friends, who she missed a lot. Her days felt like the lull before the storm.

But leaving Arthur alone with his grandmother overnight was a first.