‘Yes, fine. Shall I take your coat?’
‘Oh, thank you.’ She unwound her long scarf, handed that to him too. ‘There’s a coat stand over there, by the door.’
She waited till he sat down, then said, ‘Do you want anything to eat? They do lovely iced buns here.’
‘No, no,’ he said, ‘just tea for me.’
‘Right, well, I think I’ll have one – I’m hungry. And Alice won’t be here for ages.’
‘Alice?’
‘Yes. She’s the friend I’m meeting. We were at school together. She’s a nurse at St Thomas’. You’d probably have met her if your wife had been able to have her baby in London. She was so interested in Laura’s story.’
‘Yes, I see,’ he said.
‘Such a pity about that. Anyway, what can I help you with? Or rather, what do you think I might be able to help you with?’
‘It’s difficult,’ he said. ‘Very difficult. But I read something and – well, I just thought it worth asking.’
‘Right. Well – fire away.’
He looked down into his tea, stirred it rather helplessly. ‘It’s – difficult,’ he said, again, after a long pause.
‘Let me ask you some questions, then. That might help. I presume it’s to do with your wife. And the baby?’
Another very long pause; then, ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, it is.’
‘How – how are they? Was it all right, did they look after them well at the hospital?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t say well, not well at all, no.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry. But she’s all right now, I hope? They both are? Was it a girl or a boy?’
‘A girl,’ he said. ‘A lovely little girl.’
‘How nice.’
‘Yes.’
‘And – your wife? Laura, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, Laura, that’s right.’
‘Is she recovering well? The baby must be about – let me see – a month old now, sleeping a bit better, I hope. Not giving you too many bad nights?
‘She – she – no, not really.’
‘Good. Well, you’re lucky, then. Lots of babies go on waking up for months . . .’
There was a very long silence; then he said – and the words came out in such a rush that she thought she must have misheard, in fact she did say, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite follow . . .’
‘I said,’ he repeated, his voice louder now, as well as slower, ‘there is no baby. She died. And Laura died too.’
For the rest of her life, even when she was a distinguished obstetrician of great experience and had confronted many tragedies, that moment remained with Jillie as a measure of the most unimaginable and dreadful sorrow. She sat, helpless and silent, staring at Tom Knelston across the table while around them people chatted and smiled, quite oblivious to his tragedy. As he looked away from her, and down into his tea, she realised that something had fallen into it, followed by another, and that those things were tears; and then he looked up, and she saw there were more, uncontainable, and that he was mortified by them, dreading that others in the café would notice them and worse, be curious about them. A man shedding tears in public. That, for that one short moment, was the greatest of his concerns, and she acted with an absolutely correct and compassionate instinct and passed him one of the paper napkins so that he might wipe them away and sat rummaging through her handbag looking for nothing, nothing at all, until she heard him clear his throat and say, ‘Sorry.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said carefully. ‘You mustn’t worry about it. Let’s just wait a bit, shall we, and then maybe get some more tea, and if you want to, you can tell me more about it.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, thank you – that sounds a good idea.’
And they sat, very quietly, until he said, ‘I’m all right now. I’d like to tell you some more, I think, please. And ask you some questions as I said in my letter.’
‘I’ll do my best to answer them, Tom. But I should warn you, I’m not very far advanced in my training – it may be beyond my area of expertise.’
It had been a case of placenta previa. ‘That’s when the placenta lies across the opening of the uterus into the birth canal, effectively blocking the baby’s exit,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Jillie said, ‘yes, I know.’
Laura had had an appointment with the midwife, just three weeks before the baby was due. The midwife had pronounced the heartbeat strong, but said the baby’s head was still not engaged in the birth canal. Laura had asked if this was something she should worry about, and the midwife said no, not at all, she had known cases where the baby’s head didn’t engage until labour had begun. ‘I might have suspected a breech, but I can feel baby’s bottom, quite high, all in the right place. No, I’m sure it’s just that he or she is in no hurry to join us just yet, and very sensible too, in this freezing weather. I hope we’re not going to have another winter like last year. Now I’ll just take some measurements, check on baby’s size – and next time you come, we’ll talk to doctor about removing that stitch.’
So Laura had gone home, quite happy, assured that her baby was just right, and they had had supper and she had said she was very tired and might go to bed early if Tom didn’t mind. And when he had gone into the bedroom, she had been fast asleep, smiling, still with the light on, a copy of the recently published The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank lying open on her huge stomach. Tom had removed it gently, got into his pyjamas, kissed her tenderly and whispered that he loved her. She hadn’t replied, but had smiled and sighed sleepily and sunk deeper into sleep. It was, for the rest of his life, a comfort that those were his last words to her and that she had clearly heard them.
He had woken to her screaming; it was just light and he had struggled awake, sat up, switched the light on and seen why. The room was a bloodbath. Not just the bed, but the floor, and even some of the walls; the blood kept coming and coming, unstaunchable – towels, spare sheets soaking in moments.
He had rushed downstairs and out to the phone box, called an ambulance; and then raced back to the room and the horror.