Larger Font   Reset Font Size   Smaller Font  

Sheltering Rain, Page 37

Jojo Moyes

  There was a lengthy silence, as Kate sat in the cold, unloved room, trying to bend her long-held beliefs around this new knowledge. She felt briefly, irrationally, angry, as if it had been her exclusion from this secret that had caused all the problems between them.

  "Does Christopher know?"

  "Of course Christopher doesn't know. And I don't want him to know. I didn't want either of you to know." Joy sounded, momentarily, like her old, brusque self. "You're not to say anything to him. Or Sabine. There's far too much rubbish about telling everybody everything, these days."

  Her voice, although truculent, held something else. Something almost tearful.

  Kate stood, looking at her mother for a few moments, slowly recognizing the love story that she had missed. Then she stepped forward and for the first time since she had been a child, took ahold of Joy, gently enfolding her in her arms, allowing her mother time for her habitual stiffness to be replaced by something more yielding. She smelled of horse, and dog, and something sweet and lavendery underneath. After some moments, she patted Kate's shoulder absently in return, as if comforting an animal.

  "All these years . . ." Kate said, into her quilted jacket, her voice breaking. "All these years, and . . . I could never live up to you."

  "I'm sorry, darling. I didn't mean for you to feel that way."

  "No. I didn't mean that. All those years, and I didn't know that you were suffering. I didn't know what you had had to put up with."

  Joy pulled back and wiped at her eyes, straightening her shoulders.

  "Now, I don't want you exaggerating," she said, firmly. "Your father is a good man. I didn't have to put up with so much, as you call it. He loved me, in his way." When she looked at Kate, her gaze was defensive, faintly challenging. "He--he just--"

  "Couldn't help himself?"

  Joy turned away from her, toward the window.

  Kate glanced next door, to where her father was dozing in his drug-fueled slumber, feeling a cold fury toward the man who had betrayed the only person she had ever thought him capable of loving. "And you never made him pay for it," she said, bitterly.

  Joy followed her daughter's glance, and then reached out, taking her hand. It was roughened, weathered by ages of determined activity.

  "You're not to say a thing to him. You're not to bother him. Your father did pay, Kate," she said, and her voice held a melancholy certainty. "Both of us paid."

  There was no one in the downstairs kitchen, or the drawing room, so Sabine, now almost light-headed with adrenaline, ran through the house, slamming doors and yelling for Mrs. H, making the dogs bark and scrabble in pursuit. "Where the hell is everyone?" she yelled at them, throwing open and shutting the doors of the pantry and the boot room. The house felt still, watchful. The snug and breakfast room were also uninhabited, their silence amplifying the sounds of her brief entry, making them reverberate around the furniture.

  Her lungs now tight from her exertions, Sabine ran up the stairs two at a time, her boots catching on the threadbare stair carpet so that she slipped and slithered on her way up, having to clutch at the banister twice to stop herself from falling. All the time, the vision of Annie loomed before her, bowed over by her own suffering; her expression distant, as ever, but this time somehow focused. Somehow primeval.

  Oh, God, where was Mrs. H? Annie needed her mother. That much was clear to anyone. She certainly needed someone more than Anthony . . . whatever his name was. Sabine paused briefly on the landing, looking for the vacuum cleaner, or some other clue that Mrs. H had recently been there. Then she stopped.

  Lynda.

  Why hadn't she thought of Lynda?

  She would know what to do. She could take care of it all. Sabine threw open the door of her grandfather's room, her mouth already open and prepared to deliver her urgent message. But she met only the blank, unpixilated gaze of the off-turned television set, and a neat array of plastic cups and pill bottles, a silent reminder that the nurse had already left for home. Her grandfather's skeletal profile emerged from the layers of bedding and pillows, undisturbed by the commotion, deep in chemically induced slumber.

  She didn't even bother to close the door. With a sobbed expletive of exasperation, Sabine now ran along the corridor, flinging open each door, and shouting for Mrs. H, her mother, her grandmother, anyone as she did so, fighting with each step a rising sense of panic about the scene she had left behind. What if that man went away? He had looked like he was desperate to leave. What if everyone had gone out? She could call an ambulance, but she didn't know how to help. And a little part of her didn't really want to go back to that noise, that blood, all by herself.

  They were in the study. Sabine thrust open the door, not really expecting to find anyone in there, and had stopped, panting, as she confronted the sight of the two women, holding on to each other.

  She stood for a second, trying to take in a scene that she knew couldn't possibly be real. Still conscious of the evening's events, she looked away from her mother. Then she remembered herself.

  "Where's Mrs. H?"

  Her grandmother had pulled away from her mother, and pawed at her sticking-up hair.

  "She's gone to town. To see someone about Annie, I think." She looked almost embarrassed to be found in such an intimate embrace.

  "I've got to speak to her."

  "Well, she won't be back here this evening. She left early. I think Mack came to pick her up." The two women stared at Sabine, who was now hopping from leg to leg in agitation.

  "What on earth is the matter?"

  "We need to get her. It's Annie--she--I think she's having a baby."

  There was the shortest of silences.

  "What?"

  "A baby? Are you sure?"

  Outside the door, infected by the excitement, one of the dogs had begun to bark.

  "Annie can't have children," said Joy, unconvinced.

  "Sabine? Are you sure?"

  "Look, come on. I'm not making it up," said Sabine, pulling at her grandmother's sleeve. "She's in the house. With one of the guests. But there's stuff on the floor and everything and he says he's only a loans clerk but she hasn't got long to go and we need to get an ambulance and Annie's phone isn't working."

  Joy and Kate exchanged looks.

  "He's all by himself," said Sabine, reduced to near tears by their stupid, frozen faces. "Annie needs help. You've got to come now."

  Joy placed her hand against her face, thinking, and then strode toward the door, propelling the younger women before her. "Kate--you run down there with Sabine. I'll ring an ambulance and gather up some things here. Oh, my goodness, I'll try and ring Mack as well. I'm sure we have one of those mobile telephone numbers for him somewhere. I'll get Thom to find it."

  "You lead the way," said Kate, as she followed her daughter's rapid descent down the stairs, almost falling over the dogs as she went. "Oh, that poor woman," she said, putting her hand out to pat Sabine's shoulder. "Thank God you found her."

  Anthony Fleming was doing a little dance on the step outside Annie's house, a curious jig, accompanied by the merry waving of arms, a Morris dancer, out of time with some mental tune. At least that was how it looked from afar; when Sabine and Kate got close, sweating, and breathing hard from their sprint, it revealed itself as an anxious shifting of weight, a desperate, fumbling plea for help from arms that clutched hold of Kate's lapels when she ran up the steps.

  "Are you a doctor?" he said, his face pale and anxious.

  "The doctor's on his way," said Kate, coughing. "Where is she?"

  "Oh, God . . . oh, God . . ." Anthony Fleming began wringing his hands.

  "Where is she?"

  Ignoring him and Sabine, Kate pushed her way through the living room into the kitchen, and casting around until she spied her, swiftly crouched down by the squat form of Annie, who was now hanging on to the base of a kitchen stool, rocking backward and forward, and letting out low, keening noises that made the hairs on the back of Sabine's neck stand on end.

>   "You're all right now, you're all right, Annie," Kate repeated, holding on to her, smoothing her hair. "You're doing really well. It's all going to be fine."

  Sabine stared at the kitchen, at Annie's long skirt, which lay discarded and soaked in the corner by the sink, at some stained scrap of pink fabric that may have been her knickers. There was pale, watery blood everywhere. It made her think of the time her grandfather had fallen into the vegetable casserole. She realized she had begun to shake again.

  "I don't know anything about babies," Anthony Fleming kept repeating, his hands wrestling with each other. "I do only bank loans. I came back only because she had somewhere safe to put my bike."

  Sabine couldn't answer him. She just kept staring at Annie, who, lost in some private world, was now hanging on to Kate, her eyes open yet unseeing, her face occasionally contorted as she let out another bovine cry. Kate, glancing behind her at her daughter's shocked face, tried to smile.

  "It's all right, darling. Honestly. Looks worse than it is. Why don't you go outside and wait for the ambulance to come?"

  "I'll do that," interjected Anthony Fleming, who was already making for the door. "I'll wait for the ambulance. I'll wait outside."

  Kate cast an irritated glance at his departing back. She kept looking at her watch, marking the distance between Annie's anguished noises.

  "Okay. Okay . . . erm, Sabine--go and find me some towels, okay? And some scissors. And if you can, boil me a kettle and sterilize the scissors in some hot water. All right?"

  "You're not going to cut her open, are you?" Sabine, still frozen at the kitchen door, felt her chest compress with fear. She didn't think she could cope with the sight of any more blood.

  "No, darling. It's for the cord. Just in case the baby comes before the ambulance does. Go on, we don't have an awful lot of time."

  She turned back to Annie, stroking her hair, murmuring words of encouragement, heedless of the fact that she herself was now covered in the bloodied liquid, from where she had been supporting Annie on the floor.

  "I need to push," said Annie, her hair stuck in sweaty tendrils around her face. These were the first words Sabine had heard her say. "Oh, God, I need to push."

  "Sabine. Go now."

  Sabine turned to run from the room, unsure where she was going to find any scissors--Annie's house didn't look like anything would be where you would expect it, anymore--and bumped into Joy, who was holding a bundle of towels.

  "The ambulance should be here any minute," Joy said. "Thom's trying to get ahold of Mrs. H. Where are they?"

  "Have you gotten scissors?"

  "Yes, yes. . . ." Joy was following the long lowing sound, which, this time, raised up into something unearthly, nearer a scream. "We've got everything. In the kitchen, are they?"

  The noise, when it came again, was too horrible. It made Sabine chill, like the sounds of the hounds howling in the night. It sounded like Annie was going to die.

  Her face crumpled.

  Joy turned to face her, her own expression suddenly softening, as she caught sight of her granddaughter's fear and reached out a hand to comfort her.

  "It's all right, Sabine. Really. Birth is just a bit of a brutal business."

  "Is she going to die? I don't want Annie to die."

  Joy smiled and squeezed her, before turning toward the kitchen. "Of course she won't die. A minute after that baby is born, she won't remember a thing about it."

  Sabine watched from behind the door as Joy moved past her and crouched down next to her mother, handing over the towels, and helping arrange Annie's limbs on the floor, stroking her legs and murmuring something cheerful as she did so. Kate said something about "transition" and she and Joy looked at each other briefly, and their faces had an expression of not just mutual understanding and concern, but a faint hint of impending joy, as if they both knew something that they couldn't yet acknowledge. Sabine, watching it, found herself suddenly tearful again, but not because she felt excluded. She felt comforted.

  "Okay, Annie," said Kate, who was now at Annie's feet. "You get ready to push. You say when you feel the next one coming."

  Annie paused, stared wide-eyed at her feet, and then, with her chin to her chest, let out a lengthy roar, at first through clenched teeth, and then through a mouth so wide open that Sabine, peeping round the door frame, found her own mouth unconsciously mimicking its action.

  Joy was wincing as she tried to hold Annie's upper half, her face flushed with effort. Kate pushed Annie's knees up, and wiped her face with a cold flannel. She was half crying now.

  "You're nearly there, Annie. I can see the head. You're really nearly there."

  Annie's eyes opened, briefly, to look at Kate. They were exhausted, bewildered.

  "Deep breaths, Annie. Just keep your chin down, and it will soon be over."

  "Where's Patrick?" said Annie, blearily.

  Kate glanced at her mother.

  "Patrick is coming," said Joy firmly, her own face pressed up next to Annie's, her arms supporting her under her shoulders. "Patrick is coming, and your parents are coming, and the ambulance is coming. So you're not to worry. You just concentrate on that lovely baby."

  "I want Patrick," said Annie, beginning to cry. And then her tears became strangled, as another contraction gripped her body, and her sob turned into another huge roar. And she gripped at Joy's arms so fiercely that Sabine could see her grandmother grimacing, and Kate was still down in front of her, her hands pushing Annie's ankles, so that her knees were up, her voice offering words of encouragement.

  "It's coming, Annie. Go on, push now. It's really coming. I can see the head." Her mother's voice was now shrill with excitement, her face lifting to Annie's with a broad smile.

  Annie fell back against Joy, exhausted.

  "I can't do it," she said.

  "You can, you're nearly there," said the two women in unison.

  "Just pant, Annie," said Kate. "Keep panting for a minute." She looked at her mother, adding quietly, "That's right, isn't it Mum?"

  Joy shrugged imperceptibly and nodded. They half smiled at each other again.

  "Okay, now one more push," she said. Sabine couldn't see past the counter to see what Kate was doing. She was secretly grateful. And then Annie began to yell, a long, wavering, strangulated note, and Kate began to yell, and Joy, who was still wincing because of the hold Annie had on her arms began to yell, and Sabine found she was crying now, without realizing it, because just when she thought she couldn't bear it, suddenly there was a brief, wet slithering and a shout of blood and joy and her mother was holding this thing, this thing with its two purple arms thrust high in the air, like a football fan, and Joy was kissing Annie, and laughing, and Kate was wrapping it tenderly in a towel and placing it on Annie's chest, and the three of them had their arms around each other, and through it all Sabine kept watching Annie's face, with its raw expression of joy and pain and relief, oblivious to the blood and gore, oblivious to the noise, oblivious to Anthony Fleming, who was standing at the door ah-hemming into his hand and asking everybody to excuse him but the ambulance was here.

  And then her mother, as if suddenly remembering her, looked up and reached out to her, and Sabine walked over and kneeled down with them and gazed at this thing, which was covered in blood and wrapped up in a beach towel, smelling of sweat and iron. And as she looked down she couldn't see the pools of blood, the sodden towels, the knickers, the mess it had made of her own trousers. She just saw two tiny milky-dark eyes, gazing steadily back at her in that ancient way that suggested knowledge of all the secrets of the world. A tiny, downy mouth shaped small, silent words, telling her everything she had never known about what life meant. She realized with a brief burst of clarity that she had never seen anything more beautiful in her whole life.

  "A little girl," said Kate, her eyes wet with tears, squeezing her daughter's shoulders.

  "She's so perfect," Sabine said, reaching out a tentative hand.

  "My baby," said Annie, ga
zing at her disbelieving. "My baby." And then suddenly, without warning, she began to sob, great, wrenching sobs that ravaged her whole body, shaking her head forward, pummeling her under the weight of their withheld grief that went on and on and on, so that Kate had had to briefly take the baby back, to protect her from Annie's anguish. And Joy had leaned forward, clutching Annie's head, crying: "I know, I know," and then, as Annie's tears eventually began to subside, had told her, so quietly that Sabine could only just make it out above the exclamations of the people coming in. "It's all right, now, Annie. It's all right. It's all over."

  And then Kate, her own hands shaking, had helped pull Sabine up from the floor, and with their arms tightly around each other, they had both walked silent and blinking out into the night, where the ambulance men, under the spinning siren of blue light, officious in their neon uniforms and monitored by hissing radios, had started to unload the stretcher.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  There were very few real surprises left in life, said Mrs. H, but the birth of her grandchild had been one, for sure. She said this many times, to many people, but it didn't stop her eyes filling with grateful tears every time she said it, and the fact that she often said it to the same people was not minded by anyone who knew her. Little Roisin Connolly was good news, and news that good could happily bear the burden of repetition.

  Patrick had returned to Annie the night of the birth, deeply shocked but overjoyed at the arrival of the new baby, overwhelmed with relief at finally having an explanation of his wife's increasingly strange behavior over the past months. Annie, who had never come to terms with her daughter's death, had become temporarily unbalanced by the shock of her new pregnancy, the doctors said, and had coped only by ignoring it, and distancing herself from those around her. It was not an uncommon response, apparently. Despite this, Mrs. H had seemed rather embarrassed not to have realized that her own daughter had been pregnant, and had blamed herself for the trauma of Roisin's birth, but Mack and Thom and everyone else told her not to be so daft--and Annie herself later pointed out that if she had been able to keep it from her own husband, what little chance did her mother have of guessing? Mrs. H was vaguely appeased, but could often be seen studying the waistlines of various local women, keen to be the first to guess any future pregnancies, and several times causing mild offense by asking.