Dreams of Another Day, page 19
‘When Mummy comes back will she be able to stand up straight again?’
‘I expect so,’ said Ming, ruffling the child’s dark hair.
‘And she’ll have a baby, won’t she?’ said Fiona, giving Ming a piercingly interrogatory stare. At that moment she looked very like her father.
‘Yes,’ said Ming firmly, deciding that Fiona was far too young to have to cope with any equivocation, however truthful. ‘Won’t that be nice?’
‘It depends,’ said the child.
‘On what?’ asked Ming, oblivious to danger
‘If it’s a boy,’ came the brisk answer. ‘We don’t want any more baby girls. Sophie is very …’
‘Bathtime, Fiona,’ said Brigitte from the opposite end of the nursery. ‘Go and show Auntie Ming your bathroom.’
To Ming’s relief, Fiona did as she was asked and made no further reference to the new baby or to her existing sister. When both children were in bed, Brigitte apologised for the interruption, adding:
‘She finds Sophie very frustrating just now; the little one can talk about everything, but she still can’t understand Fiona’s games and often spoils them. She gets very upset when Fiona criticises her.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Ming, remembering all too vividly the sense of humiliated panic engendered by her elder sisters’mystifying games and incomprehensible jokes and teasing.
Brigitte smiled, explained that her day’s work ended after the children’s bedtime and disappeared to her own bed-sitting room. Ming went downstairs again, discovered that the nurse wanted to watch a programme on television, and took her bagful of work into Peter’s study.
She was still sitting there staring at the wall when Peter telephoned to say that there was very little change in Flixe’s condition. The doctors had decided that a caesarian was not necessary and Flixe had been in increasingly violent labour ever since.
‘It’s so odd,’ he said and Ming could hear the suppressed terror in his voice. ‘She’s had all the others so easily. Sophie only took about an hour and a half.’
‘She’s that much older, Peter, but she is in good hands there. They’d be doing a caesar already if it was going to be necessary.’
‘You are a rock, Ming,’ he said. ‘How are my girls?’
‘They seem fine. They’ve been in bed a couple of hours now and all is well here. You will tell me how things go, won’t you?’
‘Yes, but I’ll have to go now. They’re calling me, Ming.’
He rang back half an hour later to say that Flixe’s son had been safely delivered.
‘Are they all right?’ asked Ming baldly.
‘Apparently everything’s in working order. And Flixe is fine. Tired and badly torn, but all right. I’ll be back eventually.’
‘All right. But stay as long as she needs you.’
As soon as he had rung off, Ming rang the operator, asked for a trunk call to her parents’house to give them the news, telephoned Gerry, and then went to tell the nurse. The expression on her face told Ming how worried she had been, but all she said was:
‘I am glad. Mrs Suvarov can rest now. She must have had a very tough time. I think I’ll go to bed. Good night.’
‘I’ll stay up for my brother-in-law,’ said Ming. ‘Sleep well.’
She sat up until half-past one, finding her eyes closing and her head nodding at increasingly frequent intervals. Eventually she decided to go to bed, but she slept only fitfully and soon after four heard the sound of a key in the front door. She got out of bed and pulled her dressing-gown round her shoulders. There were no lights on in the hall, but the moon shone in through the fanlight over the front door and its light was reflected in a huge mirror that hung on the right-hand wall. From the stairs Ming saw the reflection of a man standing just inside the door.
‘Peter,’ she called softly. ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes,’ he said and switched on the hall light. Ming gasped as she saw his face. It was grey and dragged with fatigue and his eyes were red. She ran down the rest of the stairs, stumbled over the hem of her long dressing-gown, steadied herself against the bannister and went on.
‘What’s happened?’ she asked when she was close to him.
Peter swallowed. Ming caught the smell of brandy on his breath.
‘She had a terrible haemorrhage. Just after they said everything was all right and let me in to see her, she started gushing blood. Never trusted doctors; don’t ever trust them, Ming.’
He stumbled forward and leaned his full weight on Ming. Her arms went round him automatically, while she stared unseeingly ahead of her. Flixe, she said to herself, Flixe, as though the repetition of her name could make the story untrue. Every minor irritation Flixe had ever caused was wiped away from Ming’s memory and all she could remember was how important Flixe was to her.
‘She lost pints and pints before they managed to stop it,’ said Peter into her hair. A sudden wave of relief surged through Ming’s body, making her knees feel as though they could hardly support her, let alone him as well.
‘Have they stopped it?’ she asked, just to make certain.
‘Yes, and given her a transfusion. They swear she’ll be all right now.’ Ming held him for a moment longer and then took her arms away from him.
‘Come into the kitchen, Peter. I’ll make you something hot. You look as though you need it,’ she said, urging him forward. She wondered how much brandy he had had to drink.
He obeyed her as docilely as a good child, sat at the table, and waited while she heated up a tin of tomato soup, poured some of it into a bowl and gave it to him. Ming made herself a cup of tea and sat opposite him, watching the colour come back into his face and the fiery red in his eyes dwindle to a less terrifying flush.
‘That’s better,’ he said when he pushed away the empty bowl. His voice was almost back to normal and he even managed to smile. ‘I’m sorry. Did I frighten you?’
‘A little,’ answered Ming. ‘Are you all right?’
Peter nodded, rubbing his hands vigorously over his face and through his thick, grey-streaked hair.
‘I am now. I’m ashamed to say I fainted at the hospital when she started bleeding and came round on the floor with about six of them stepping over me, trying to help her.’
‘I’m not surprised. It must have been a terrifying sight,’ said Ming.
‘It wasn’t that.’ Peter shut his eyes. ‘I was just visited by an unshakeable conviction that she was going to die.’ He propped his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands. ‘Oh, God! Ming, I really thought she was going to die.’
Ming leaned across the table so that she could put one slim hand on his rough hair and stroke it. He wrenched away, pushed back his chair and stumbled round the table to kneel at her feet and bury his face in her lap. After a while she could feel his tears soaking through her thin dressing-gown and her heart ached with pity for him. She went on stroking his hair, waiting for the storm of tears to end.
When at last it did he looked up through swollen eyelids.
‘Thank you, Ming.’
‘Oh, Peter,’ she answered, reaching to pick up a clean drying-up cloth with one hand, while she kept her other on his shoulder. ‘Here, blow!’
‘That’s what Flixe always says to the children,’ he said with a hint of his familiar, sardonic smile.
He got up from the floor and went to wash his face at the big, stainless-steel sink.
‘Thank you for being here. I couldn’t have done that with anybody else,’ he said after a while, standing with his back to her. ‘I don’t think I’d have dared show anyone but you how much I … how much I love her.’
After a long pause, Ming gathered her disordered senses together and tried to respond adequately.
‘I’m glad you do,’ she said at last with considerable emphasis on the last word.
‘Did you doubt it?’ Peter turned back from the sink and went to sit down in his own chair.
‘Just occasionally I have wondered,’ said Ming with a faint smile. ‘But then I know so little about “love” that I’m still not sure I’d recognise it if I saw it.’
It was Peter’s turn to try to offer comfort. He reached across the table for her hands.
‘That’s strange,’ he said, looking into her tired face. ‘You’ve made so many people love you; I’d have thought you were a bit of an expert on the subject.’
Ming’s lips thinned as she tried to control a suddenly frighteningly powerful urge to tell Peter everything.
‘Me?’ she said sadly. ‘Alas no. I’d need someone like you to tell me about it. Could you?’
‘Love?’ Peter looked up at the ceiling and then down at his orange-smeared soup bowl, trying to order his thoughts. ‘I suppose it boils down to minding more about someone else’s happiness than one’s own. It makes you want to protect that other person and know – passionately, desperately want to know – how the other’s mind works.’
‘I used to think that,’ said Ming so quietly that her voice hardly impinged at all on Peter’s thoughts.
‘If you love her, you feel that she makes life whole.… To such an extent that you become brave enough to lay yourself open to really swingeing hurt. Darling Ming, I can only describe the symptoms, but I think that is probably the crucial one: being prepared to be hurt and putting down all the defences you’ve erected against it.’ He looked at her then and saw that her face was sad but more open than it had been for some time.
‘I don’t think there are words for the thing itself,’ he said gently. ‘If there are, you’d need a poet, not an inarticulate, superannuated revolutionary like me. That list of symptoms is the best I can do.’
There were tears on Ming’s darkened eyelashes as she said:
‘Superannuated revolutionary or not, you’ve confirmed most of what I used to think.’ She took her hands away from his clasp, folded them in her lap and sat looking down at them.
‘What happened to change it?’ he asked. Ming achieved a small smile.
‘The man I thought I loved didn’t love me,’ she said simply, ‘and as I watched him with someone else most of those feelings seemed to die. So I doubted that they constituted love after all.’
‘Seemed?’ he said gently but with all the acuity she had once known so well.
‘I’ve just discovered that they still exist,’ she said with the frankness that only comes in the cool aftermath of drama. Through the tears that she would not allow to fall, she watched his lined face. Once more it was lit by the affection she used to believe could never fail her.
‘Ah, Ming,’ he said. There seemed to be regret in his voice, infinite kindness, and compassion, too. ‘I have always loved you, you know.’
She made an almost irritable gesture with her hands, as though to brush away what he had said. It seemed crass and unlike him to use that moment to exercise his charm. He took her hands again and held them firmly in his.
‘I have, Ming. Not as I love Flixe.’ Ming relaxed again. ‘There is something in her that calls to something in me as no one else ever has or could. But you are very dear to me; your happiness matters terribly. And in every way except that one indescribable way I love you.’
Chapter Fourteen
Throughout the weekend, as Ming tried to work, she kept thinking of what Peter had revealed to her both of his feelings and of her own. Once or twice it occurred to her to wonder whether she would have so messed up her dealings with Mark if she and Peter had talked sooner and whether she might yet retrieve something from the trouble she had made. It was a tantalising idea and she could not prevent herself from dreaming of the happy ending that she knew was unlikely.
She was still thinking about it as she ate her lunch on Monday, half-listening to the wireless in her kitchen. Peeling the top off her second boiled egg, she heard that the Israeli army had invaded Egypt through the Sinai desert, and her attention sharpened.
The telephone began to ring just as the announcer came to the end of the news bulletin. Swallowing her mouthful of egg and toast and turning down the volume of her wireless, Ming picked up the receiver.
‘Ming? Peter here.’
‘Hello,’ she said, startled to hear his voice after her long mental deliberation about him. ‘You sound better. How is Flixe? And the baby?’
‘Both fine. That’s why I’m ringing. She’s allowed visitors now and is longing to see you. Might you be able to go this afternoon?’
‘Yes, of course. I’ve been waiting for a summons. She’s really all right?’
‘Really. They’re absolutely sure there’s no more risk of haemorrhage, and she’s looking better too. By the way, she and I wonder whether you’d like to be the boy’s godmother?’
For a moment Ming was so moved that she could not speak.
‘You were very much part of his birth, and we’d both like it so much if you’d take him on,’ Peter went on, wondering why she had not answered.
‘I’d love it,’ she said at last. ‘And … I’d love it. Thank you.’
‘If you hadn’t been there on Friday night, I don’t know what I’d have done. You’ve been so good to us all – always.’
‘Thank you, Peter. I haven’t done anything that Gerry wouldn’t have done in my place, but I … I’m glad if I helped. And I’m glad it was me.’ She paused for a moment and then said more easily: ‘When can I go to the hospital?’
‘Any time. I may run into you there, but if not we’ll see each other soon. ’Bye.’
When he had rung off, Ming went straight to her bedroom to change and then walked round to the nearest florist to choose a big, mixed bunch of unseasonable and very expensive roses before hailing a taxi.
She reached the hospital soon after two o’clock to find Flixe lying against banked-up pillows and surrounded by flowers. She looked pale and much thinner than usual. There were deep hollows under her eyes and her skin looked blotchy, but there was a serenity in her face, too, which reassured Ming. She kissed Flixe and was introduced to her godson, who was lying in his mother’s arms.
Tiny, wrinkled, and black-haired, he was tightly wrapped in a shawl and Ming could not think of anything flattering to say about his appearance.
‘Thank God you’re all right,’ she said instead.
Flixe smiled slowly and pushed her dulled hair off her face.
‘I’m fine. Peter says he frightened you badly last week. I’m sorry about that.’
‘It’s hardly your fault, old thing. And it sounds as though it was all very dramatic. He was desperate, you know.’
‘I know,’ answered Flixe, looking down at her son and then up again at Ming. ‘He told me all about it, and I’m very grateful that you were there with him. He needed you badly.’
Ming looked at her sister and realised from her expression of mingled sympathy and affection that Peter had told her everything that had been said in their dawn conversation. A year earlier she would have felt humiliated that either of her sisters should know she had confessed to loving Peter, but for some reason it no longer seemed to matter. In a curious way Ming felt as though her confession and his reception of it had freed her from something she had not understood.
‘He’s been awfully good to me, Flixe.’
Before her sister could reply the door opened and Gerry appeared, also bearing a huge bunch of flowers.
‘Golly! You’ve more here than there were in the shop where I bought these,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Hello, Ming. You look stunning and much tougher than the time you came to Sunday lunch. What’s happened?’
‘I thought there was something, too,’ said Flixe, watching her sisters as they stood at the end of her white bed, which was bathed in cold, autumn sunshine.
Ming, who had been thinking that Gerry was looking particularly tired and not nearly as cheerful as her voice would have suggested, said easily enough:
‘Nothing. If I look different I suppose it must be because I’m busy.’
‘That always makes me look particularly fragile,’ said Gerry with a laugh.
‘Nonsense, old thing,’ said Flixe, looking carefully at her elder sister, ‘you’re never fragile. Will you take him for a bit? My arms need stretching.’
‘Oh, let Ming. I’m no good with babies.’
‘He might sick up all over her elegant suit. Come on, Gerry.’
Ming could not understand why Flixe was so determined to push the knowledge of her fertility on to Gerry, who could never share it.
With obvious reluctance, Gerry walked forward and picked up the shawled bundle. The others watched as she gazed down into the baby’s crumpled face, her own a cold mask of detachment.
After she had held him for a while, and even tried to croon appropriate endearments to him, she handed him back to his mother.
When she had passed on the burden, Gerry said with her old teasing smile:
‘It’s not just the busyness that’s making Ming look tougher, Flixe. What with you in your nightie and me in my old coat, her suit shines out like a beacon. Very glamorous, Ming. Anna would have been pleased.’
‘D’you think so, really?’ asked Ming, squinting down at her tight skirt. She sometimes had to battle with both her ingrained puritanism and her sympathy for Gerry’s comparitive lack of money when she was spending what still seemed to be enormous sums on clothes as well as on furniture and pictures for the flat.
‘Definitely,’ said Gerry. ‘Anna was always so elegant herself. I’m sure you’re doing the right thing. I’m very glad you’re toughening up, Ming. Mike will be, too, and Mark as well I expect.’
She looked teasingly at Ming and was disconcerted to meet only a cool stare in return.
Ming turned at once to Flixe, as though she was forcing herself to remember why they were all there. ‘What are you going to call your boy?’ she asked.
Flixe pushed herself gingerly up the bed to sit higher against the pillows and brushed her lips againstthe flat dark wisps of his hair.
‘I wanted Rupert, but Peter thought Rooo Soovarov would be too much,’ said Flixe, pulling out the vowel until it sounded ridiculous. She smiled her familiar smile. ‘And so I think we’ve nearly settled on Sylvester.’
