Chapter Twenty

BY THE TIME I’m through passport control and have switched on my phone, I have four missed calls. Louisa has gone into premature labour. The messages, a typically easy-going one from Matt and three feral ones from the mother-to-be, overlap in the wish that I join them at the hospital. Prue is driving in from Norfolk. I try to focus in my taxi on the domestic drama unfolding in town, to obliterate memories of the subsonic one.

Which isn’t easy. When I recall my duplicity, I feel utterly numb. Shame makes me fractious and I barrack the driver. And all around me the drabness of the suburbs and the chaos of endless roadworks match what I see as my festering inner ugliness. I rest my head against the window, as if the weight of guilt makes my skull too heavy for my neck.

William Edward, weighing in at less than four pounds, is sucked from Louisa’s stomach as my cab draws up outside the hospital entrance. As I pay the fare, he is uttering his first whimper. As I spin the revolving doors and approach reception, his puce, wrinkled body is being sponged and rushed from theatre to incubator, to be wired up to monitors. And as I run down squeaky corridors, a sedated Louisa is being wheeled back to her room, and Matt is removing his sky-blue theatre scrubs and joking with the obstetrics team. When I arrive at the labour ward, I find beautiful, clean Matt sitting reading a dog-eared society magazine. I hug him so tightly he begins to laugh.

As we walk hand in hand to the vending machine, he describes the emergency Caesarean: how Louisa suffered potentially fatal side-effects to the drugs the hospital had administered to halt her contractions. Once these had been stopped, there was nothing the staff could do to delay William’s arrival, and she’d been rushed to theatre. At one point, it was feared the baby might arrive in the lift, and the midwife had had to hold a pad in place to stop the low-lying placenta slipping out.

‘I told Prue we’d wait till she got here,’ whispers Matt, blowing on scalding liquid once we reach Louisa’s room. ‘Is that all right? You look bushed. Couldn’t you sleep on the plane?’

Sometimes when Matt is tired, his voice has a stronger Springbok lilt. It reminds me that he was once a little boy in another country far away, and I long to wrap him up in a blanket. I close my eyes. Against his shoulder, I am Sleeping Beauty. I listen as Matt speaks, with his easy grasp of medical terminology, hacking at the briars of blood, and mucus, and morphine, before saving me with a kiss.

Sometimes I fantasise that I am one of his patients; that he will sit on my bed and make all my horrid feelings go away. And sometimes when I’m in a really self-pitying mood, I will tell him this; and Matt will laugh and say I could never afford his fees.

Louisa utters a moan just as Prue appears in the doorway – as though, even in sleep, she can sense her mother’s approach. As if the very air around a mother quivers with the static of maternal concern. Matt and I stand up.

‘How is she?’ gasps Prue, to no one in particular. Her voice is taut, her words clipped.

At the sight of her mother, Louisa begins to weep. ‘They put a needle in my hand’, she mumbles repeatedly, and ‘Why weren’t you here?’ Prue sits on the bed and strokes Louisa’s fringe, ignoring the reproaches. She murmurs soothing sounds. Then she leans forward and gently kisses the new mother’s forehead.

I suddenly feel very clammy. I offer to fetch Prue a coffee.

As the liquid spurts into the cup, tears stream down my face and splash on to my shoes.