She appeared at my shoulder, mopping at her brow, and gestured behind her. ‘When you’re done,’ she said quietly, ‘I’m going to nip upstairs and see if I can find Dr Cardenas. She has lost a lot of blood, and I don’t want her to move until he’s taken a look.’ I hardly heard her, and she knew it. She kicked my ankle. ‘Not bad, Ale,’ she said, grinning. It was the first time she had called me by my real name. ‘Next time you might even remember to weigh the baby.’
I was about to respond in kind, elation giving me courage, for once, to speak up. But as we talked, I became aware that the atmosphere in the room had changed. Beatriz did, too, and halted in her tracks. Where normally there was the enraptured cooing of the new mother, the soft murmur of admiring relatives, there was only a quiet pleading: ‘Diego, no, no, Diego, please . . .’
The smartly dressed couple had moved beside the bed. The blonde woman, I noticed, was trembling, a peculiar half-smile on her face, her hand reaching tentatively towards the baby.
The mother was clutching the child to her chest, her eyes closed, murmuring to her husband, ‘Diego, no, no, I cannot do this.’
Her husband was stroking her face. ‘Luisa, we agreed. You know we agreed. We cannot afford to feed our children, let alone another.’
She would not open her eyes and her bony hands were wrapped round the overwashed hospital shawl. ‘Things will get better, Diego. You will get more work. Please, amor, please, no—’
Diego’s face crumpled. He reached over and began, slowly, to prise his wife’s fingers off the baby, one by one. She was wailing now: ‘No. No, Diego, please.’
The joy of the birth had evaporated, and I felt sick in the pit of my stomach as I realised what was happening. I made to intervene, but Beatriz, an unusually grim expression on her face, stayed me with a tiny shake of her head. ‘Third one this year,’ she muttered.
Diego had managed to take the baby. He held her tight to him without looking at her, and then, his own eyes closed, held her away from him. The blonde woman had stepped forward. ‘We will love her so much,’ she said, her reedy upper-class accent trembling with her own tears. ‘We have waited so long . . .’
The mother became wild now, tried to climb from the bed, and Beatriz leapt over and held her down. ‘She mustn’t move,’ she said, her voice sharpened by her own unwilling complicity. ‘It’s very important that you don’t let her move until the consultant is here.’
Diego wrapped his arms round his wife. It was hard to tell whether he was comforting her or imprisoning her. ‘They will give her everything, Luisa, and the money will help us feed our children. You have to think of our children, of Paola, of Salvador . . . Think of how things have been—’
‘My baby,’ screamed the mother, unhearing, clawing at her husband’s face, impotent against Beatriz’s apologetic bulk. ‘You cannot take her.’ Her fingernails left a bloodied welt, but I don’t think he noticed. I stood by the sink as the couple backed towards the door, my ears filled with the raw sound of a pain I have never forgotten, unable any longer even to look at the child I had taken such joy in delivering.
And to this day I cannot remember any beauty in the first baby I brought into this world. I remember only the cries of that mother, the expression of grief etched on to her face, a grief I knew, even with my lack of experience, that would never be relieved. And I remember that blonde woman, traumatised, yet determined as she crept away, like a thief, saying quietly: ‘She will be loved.’
A hundred times she must have said it, although no one was listening.
‘She will be loved.’
Two
1963: Framlington Hall, Norfolk
The train had made six unscheduled stops between Norwich and Framlington, and the infinite glacial blue of the sky was darkening, although it wasn’t even tea-time. Several times Vivi had watched the guards jump down with their shovels to scrape another snowdrift from the tracks, and felt her impatience at the delay offset by a perverse satisfaction.
‘I hope whoever’s picking us up has snow chains on,’ she said, her breath clouding the glass of the carriage window, so that she had to smear a viewing hole with her gloved finger. ‘I don’t fancy pushing a car through that.’
‘You wouldn’t have to push,’ said Douglas, from behind his newspaper. ‘The men’ll push.’
‘It’d be terribly slippy.’
‘In boots like yours, yes.’
Vivi looked down at her new Courrèges footwear, quietly pleased that he had noticed. Completely unsuitable for the weather, her mother had said, adding sadly to Vivi’s father that there was ‘absolutely no telling her’ at the moment. Vivi, usually compliant in all things, had been uncharacteristically determined in her refusal to wear Wellingtons. It was the first ball she had been to, unchaperoned, and she was not going to arrive looking like a twelve-year-old. It had not been their only battle: her hair, an elaborate confection of bubble curls swept up on her crown, left no room for a good woollen hat, and her mother was in an agony of indecision as to whether her hard work in setting it had been worth the risk of her only daughter venturing into the worst winter weather since records began with only a scarf tied round her head.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she lied. ‘Warm as toast.’ She offered up silent thanks that Douglas couldn’t tell she was wearing long Johns under her skirt.
They had been on the train almost two hours now, an hour of that without heating: the guard had told them that the heater in their carriage had given up the ghost even before the cold spell. They had planned to travel up with Frederica Marshall’s mother in her car, but Frederica had come down with glandular fever (not for nothing, Vivi’s mother observed drily, was it called the ‘kissing disease’) and so, reluctantly, their parents had let them travel up alone on the train instead, with many dire warnings about the importance of Douglas ‘looking after’ her. Over the years, Douglas had been instructed many times to look after Vivi – but the prospect of Vivi alone at one of the social events of the year had apparently given this a weighty resonance.
‘Did you mind me travelling with you, D?’ she said, with an attempt at coquettishness.
‘Don’t be daft.’ Douglas had not yet forgiven his father for refusing to let him borrow his Vauxhall Victor.
‘I simply don’t know why my parents won’t let me travel alone. They’re so old-fashioned . . .’
She’d be all right with Douglas, her father had said, reassuringly. He’s as good as an older brother. In her despairing heart, Vivi had known he was right.
She placed one booted foot on the seat next to Douglas. He was wearing a thick wool overcoat, and his shoes, like most men’s, bore a pale tidemark of slush. ‘Everyone who’s anyone is going tonight, apparently,’ she said. ‘Lots of people who wanted invites couldn’t get them.’
‘They could have had mine.’
‘Apparently that girl Athene Forster’s going to be there. The one who was rude to the Duke of Edinburgh. Have you seen her at any of the dances you’ve been to?’
‘Nope.’
‘She sounds awful. Mummy saw her in the gossip columns and started on about how money doesn’t buy breeding or somesuch.’ She paused, and rubbed her nose. ‘Frederica’s mother thinks there’s going to be no such thing as the Season soon. She says girls like Athene are killing it off, and that that’s why they’re calling her the Last Deb.’