50

Jack wanted to scream. During the next hour, every member of the medical staff – from midwife to ward sister to junior nurse, and various doctors whose rank or suitability to help was unclear – said virtually the same thing on his many trips to the nurses’ station. Which was basically nothing.

‘She’s still in theatre. We’ll let you know how she is as soon as there’s any news.’

Then they would try and placate him, their expressions creased with concern, their voices carefully modulated. ‘Try not to worry, Mr Holt,’ they said. ‘She’s in safe hands.’ But despite his assurances to Stella, right now Jack didn’t trust anyone, anyone at all. They didn’t get it. This wasn’t just any patient, this was Eve, his beloved daughter.

They waited in Eve’s room. Eric had fetched Mairi from the nursery, and she was sleeping in the bassinet beside him. Arthur was absorbed in his pile of Lego bricks, sitting quietly on the floor by the window. Jack had brought them tea and biscuits on the way back from his last, fruitless journey to the nurses’ station, but his tea was already cold in his cup.

The atmosphere in the room could be cut with a knife. As Jack perched on the padded stool over by the table – Stella huddled in the blue armchair – he felt slightly dizzy, his heartbeat lurching into the unnatural speed and irregularity of the atrial fibrillation. He ignored it and watched his son-in-law pacing up and down the space where the bed had been, hands thrust deep in his jeans’ pockets.

Eric’s face was pale and hard to read on a good day. But now it had a grey, putty tinge and was set like a mask. Jack didn’t need to look at his face, though. He could feel the suppressed terror coming off the man.

‘Please … can you take Arthur home?’ Eric said suddenly. He’d stopped pacing and was staring at Jack and Stella, his eyes blinking fast as if he were trying to focus on them.

Jack saw the panic in Stella’s eyes as she glanced at him.

‘He’s fine for the moment, Eric,’ he said. ‘Neither of us wants to leave when we don’t know how Eve is.’

‘He shouldn’t be here. It’s disturbing for him. Please, just take him,’ Eric almost snapped. ‘I’ll ring you as soon as I know anything.’

Jack’s eyes met Stella’s. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re Eve’s parents. We want to stay until she comes out of theatre. Then we’ll take him home.’

As he said it, he felt a jolt in his chest. They were her parents, he and Stella, despite the mess they had made of her childhood. Poor Eve. His heart contracted with love for his daughter as he stood there in the hot, thick silence.

Eric looked taken aback at his father-in-law’s intransigence and Jack thought he might kick off. The man was like a ticking time bomb. Then the mask slipped, Eric’s expression crumpled and he covered his face with both his hands and rushed out into the corridor. Jack heard one, controlled sob and hurried after his son-in-law, finding him just outside the door and putting his arm around his shoulders.

‘Hey, it’s going to be all right.’

Eric, surprisingly, allowed Jack’s arm to stay there. He seemed almost to welcome the contact.

‘I should have come home sooner. This is all my fault. If I’d been here, things would have been OK. I will never forgive myself if anything happens to Eve.’

Jack pulled him round. ‘Listen to me, Eric,’ he said. ‘Just listen, please. Eve is young and strong and perfectly fit. Something’s gone wrong – nothing whatsoever to do with you – but they’re fixing it. And any minute now a medic will walk into this room and tell us that she’s OK.’ He paused, keeping his gaze firmly on Eric’s frightened brown eyes, not letting him waver or look away. ‘You have to believe it.’ He heard the conviction in his voice for the second time that afternoon, and realized he genuinely did believe what he was saying. Eve was going to be OK. Anything else was inconceivable.

Jack glanced over Eric’s shoulder through the open door. Stella was sitting on the floor with Arthur, talking to him softly as she helped him with the bricks. She met Jack’s eye, her bottom lip clamped anxiously between her teeth. He smiled and watched as she took a deep breath, then turned back to Arthur.

Jack was not a superstitious man, but that evening in the hospital room, he felt for a moment as if the sheer willpower of the three of them to make Eve safe had swung things in his daughter’s favour. Because barely ten minutes later, a woman of about fifty, dressed in blue scrubs, was standing in front of them, pulling a patterned surgical scrub-hat from her short blonde hair. She smiled tiredly. And that was enough for Jack. He felt his whole body slump and wanted desperately to sit down, but he was rooted to the spot until he heard what she had to say.

‘Eve’s in Recovery. She’s doing really well,’ the doctor – whom Eric apparently knew as Eve’s obstetrician, Dr Marshall – spoke in the firm, educated voice of a woman who knew what she was doing. ‘She lost a lot of blood, but she’s going to be fine.’ When nobody said anything immediately, she went on, ‘I expect she’ll stay in Recovery for a while yet, so we can keep an eye on her.’

Jack found his voice first. ‘What happened? Why did she haemorrhage like that?’

The doctor didn’t reply for a moment, and Jack wondered if she would tell them the truth.

‘Unfortunately,’ Dr Marshall answered carefully, ‘a tiny fragment of the placenta was embedded in the wall of the womb and got left behind during surgery.’ She paused. ‘But we’ve got it now, the bleeding has stopped and there shouldn’t be any more problems.’ She waited, clutching the hat in her hands, impatient, Jack thought, to be gone now that she had delivered the good news.

‘Is that normal?’ Eric asked.

The doctor shrugged, her expression equivocal, suggesting she wasn’t going to commit herself on that one. She was probably aware, Jack thought, of the possibility of a negligence suit against the surgeon who’d performed the caesarean. ‘It’s more common when you have problems with the placenta.’

Eric looked at Jack, then turned back to the obstetrician, perhaps deciding this wasn’t the time for accusations. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you so much, Dr Marshall. Can I see her?’

Jack and Stella were left alone with Arthur.

He looked at her and shook his head, his breath coming out in a long sigh. ‘Oh … my … God.’

Stella smiled, but said nothing. She looked like he felt: totally empty, hollowed out.

Without speaking, they moved together and slowly put their arms around each other, leaning close, Stella’s head resting on his chest. Jack wanted to stay like this forever. He felt, in that moment, such an overwhelming love for his daughter, for his whole family, and especially for the woman in his arms. It made him almost faint. This wasn’t about attraction or sex, and it had nothing to do with their separate domestic politics. It was just about love. For Jack, it was a defining moment.