Diana was standing in her bedroom, white with fear, a pool of liquid at her feet. ‘It’s – is it? Oh, it can’t be, surely, not my waters breaking? It’s three weeks early – suppose something’s wrong? Oh, God, suppose I hadn’t come in time?’
‘Well, you did, and darling, try to keep calm. Panicking won’t help. It’s a perfectly normal start to labour, it happened to me with Michael.’
‘We must get up to London at once, now, please go and ring Sir Harold.’
‘Diana – darling –’ Caroline hesitated. ‘Darling, I don’t think it’s remotely possible for you to get to London tonight. The snow is really deep, all the trains have been cancelled.’
‘Then we must drive.’
‘I’m afraid that’s out of the question. Half the roads are blocked. We’d never get there – you’d end up having your baby in a snowdrift.’
‘But – but we’ve got to. Just got to. I can’t have this baby without Sir Harold. Maybe he can get here.’
‘Of course he can’t. If we can’t get there.’
‘Oh, God,’ Diana tensed suddenly, gripping her stomach. ‘God, it’s a pain, it hurts, it hurts. Oh, Mummy, it’s starting, what are we going to do?’
‘First, you must lie down and try to relax. I’ll go and phone Dr Parker, he’ll be able to get here.’
‘No, no, don’t leave me – and not Dr Parker, don’t be ridiculous. What does he know about childbirth?’
‘Quite a lot,’ said Caroline briskly. ‘He delivers at least two or three every month – sometimes, so he told me, in cottage bedrooms so small he can hardly move. He’ll look after you.’
‘He can’t, he can’t!’ Diana’s voice rose in a wail. ‘I can’t have this baby here, with Dr Parker. I’ll die!’
‘Diana, you will not die. Please try to calm down, you’re being ridiculous.’
‘But what about the pain? Sir Harold told me he had this stuff, he promised me, gas and air, it stops the pain. I have to get to him, Mummy, please. Oh, God, there’s another pain coming. Oh, it’s so bad, so bad.’
Dr Parker said he would come later, of course, when Mrs Gunning was further advanced in her labour, but it was quite a walk through the snow, and he had at least two other visits to make, so meanwhile he would send for Nurse Timmings, who was a qualified midwife.
‘I don’t suppose Nurse Timmings has a gas and air machine?’ said Caroline. ‘Diana is, well, very nervous, and her London obstetrician had assured her she could have it.’
‘Yes, yes, of course she does,’ said Dr Parker, and there was an edge to his voice. ‘We may not have rooms in Harley Street, Lady Southcott, but we are not quite in the Dark Ages. You’d be surprised, we seldom deliver babies in ditches . . .’
‘No, no, of course not,’ said Caroline, apologetically. ‘I just – well, thank you so much, Dr Parker. I’ll be very pleased to see Nurse Timmings, and even more pleased to see you. I—’ She was interrupted by another wail from upstairs. ‘I think Diana’s labour might be progressing faster than usual for a first baby. I hope Nurse Timmings will be here in time and I don’t have to deliver it myself.’
‘Most unlikely,’ said Dr Parker. ‘But yes, I’ll ring her straight away. And I’ll see you later.’
Diana had finally become pregnant in the early summer, when even she found Yorkshire suddenly beautiful; when the farm was alive again, the fields filled for miles and miles with tentative shoots of bright green; when lambs, hundreds of the pretty playful things, filled the fields near the house; when the sun shone, and the wind grew warmer, and the trees in the orchards were covered in flowers; and she took out her horse, her southern-bred horse, as pleased with the improved weather as she was. She rode through the countryside, smiling at last, and discovered its lovely secrets, its steep rocky foaming waterfalls, its sudden woods and pools, its low stone walls studding the countryside like so many pictures in a child’s book; where she could gallop for miles across the huge rolling sheets of land that were the moors, rich with brilliant gorse and where, when she stopped, she could hear bees, working in that gorse, and the raw cries of curlews, and the calls of the cuckoo too, that made her feel at home. She would arrive home happily, sweetly tired, and wait for Johnathan’s return when twilight fell.
And he, happy at her happiness, just as he had felt despair at her despair, fell freshly, if slightly tentatively, in love with her again, and they would make love, half surprised that they should want to, night after night. And – to both their absolute delight, and even the rather grudging pleasure of Vanessa, she had become pregnant, swiftly and easily.
But there was a shadow over her happiness: a terror of childbirth, induced by finding, at the age of eleven, when she was just becoming aware of such things, a book of her mother’s describing the pain, the need for a labouring mother to have a sheet tied to the bed to cling to when the pains were at their height. One sentence in particular had haunted her ever since: The moment of greatest agony being the birth of the head. She would look at pregnant women and wonder how they could smile, speak, even. With this inescapable ordeal ahead of her, and the prospect of giving birth to her own child filling her with dread, she had insisted on having the baby in London, in care of the excellent and prominent obstetrician who had delivered her and her brothers. Sir Harold Morton was no longer young, but he was exactly what she needed: reassuring, and calm, but dismissive of her fears, and he had promised her he would personally be with her through her confinement. Lady Gunning was deeply disapproving, having given birth to all three sons in her own bed, but Diana really didn’t care. She was booked into Sir Harold’s private clinic in Welbeck Street, and Johnathan had agreed that she should move down to stay with her parents until the baby was born. The thought of spending several weeks away from Guildford Park and Lady Gunning, and living in comparatively close proximity to London, almost outweighed her horror of childbirth.
‘It was shocking, her behaviour,’ Nurse Timmings told one of the other district nurses later. ‘The fuss! She screamed, she shouted and she swore. I’ve never heard anything like the language. She told me I didn’t know what I was doing, ordered me to phone every house in the village to find Dr Parker. Well, of course I didn’t. She refused to cooperate, wouldn’t try to relax, try to breathe properly; she kicked me when I was examining her, told me I was hurting her!’
‘Did Dr Parker ever get there?’
‘He did. But too late. Baby Gunning had arrived, and then she was all sweetness and light, of course. She apologised for the way she’d behaved, thanked me for everything I’d done.’
‘And was the baby a boy or a girl?’
‘Boy. Fine little chap, seven and a half pounds. But if she has another, I’m not delivering it!’
‘Do you think they’re all like that, the aristocracy? You’d think they should set an example.’