Chapter 12
‘ALL LOOKS GREAT,’ THE MIDWIFE SAID brIGHTLY. ‘Baby is the right size, and that heartbeat is fine and strong. Now, do you want me to keep referring to it as Baby, or would you like to know if you’re having a he or a she?’
Lydia saw her – young, blonde, pretty – through a blur of tears.
The screen that had been turned towards her she couldn’t see at all.
She hadn’t been prepared for how tough this was, how a wave of emotion would hit her as soon as she’d lain down.
It was all she could do to stop herself bursting into loud sobs.
She tightened her grip on Greta’s hand, unable to speak.
‘Tell you what,’ the midwife went on, in the same cheery voice, ‘I’ll write it down for you, and you can decide later, after you’ve had a cuppa. You can open it or tear it up. Is that OK?’
She made it sound like a game, no doubt assuming Lydia’s emotion was the usual mix of trepidation and excitement that most mothers-to-be, especially first-timers, went through. The truth, if she only knew, was that Lydia would have happily swapped her pregnancy for another hour with Damien.
Although she was doing everything she could to protect their baby – eating right, exercising, getting as much sleep as she could manage – she still felt no emotional bond with it.
She took the little envelope when it was offered.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and wiped the gel from her abdomen with paper towels.
Greta had driven Lydia to the medical centre in the town, Marian and Susan both at work. Lydia had phoned her from Dublin as she’d planned, and told Greta she was sorry for getting angry at the station.
Do not apologise, Greta had replied. You were upset – it was understandable. And of course you were right: it was none of my business.
Actually, I’ve decided to let the couple see the room.
Ah. A short silence had followed, and then: If you tell me the time, I will meet your train when you return. And no more had been said on the subject.
They left the medical centre now and found a café, where Greta ordered two bowls of vegetable soup without consulting Lydia. ‘No more goat’s cheese for you,’ she said, ‘but I have eggs in the van. Make sure you cook them well.’
For someone who wasn’t a mother, she seemed familiar with what pregnant women could and couldn’t eat. As if she was reading Lydia’s mind, Greta said, quite matter-of-factly, ‘I had a son, a long time ago.’
Lydia regarded her in astonishment. ‘Greta, I had no idea.’
‘I do not speak often of him. It was in another life. I was married. I married young, my husband was older. We were happy – or I thought we were. I was twenty-one when I got pregnant. The prospect of a child felt like a gift from the universe.’
The café was warm, and full of diners. The clatter of cutlery and the buzz of conversation faded as Lydia listened to the story unfold.
‘My labour was long and difficult, in the middle of a harsh winter – but as soon as I saw him, I forgot the pain. He was perfect. I know every mother must think the same, but . . .’ One shoulder lifted, just a fraction.
Lydia sensed the ending wasn’t happy – I had a son, it was in another life – but maybe she was wrong. Maybe he was still in the world, a scientist in a lab in Germany, or a diplomat somewhere else. Maybe he taught German to foreign students, or baked bread for a living.
‘We called him Gerhardt. He lived for six months, and then he died.’ The devastation, wrapped up in a handful of simple words. Her face gave nothing away. ‘He left us the way some babies leave, without warning and without explanation.’
She paused, reaching to touch the salt cellar, stroking the side of it with her thumb. It reminded Lydia of the gentle, absent way she’d stroked the back of her hand when she’d called to sit with her in those first nightmarish weeks.
‘We didn’t deal with it, which is to say we never spoke of him.
We remained married, but it wasn’t the same.
Because of my traumatic labour I was advised that another pregnancy would not be sensible, so we never tried again.
We stayed together for six more years, until he found a substitute for me. Another younger woman.’
‘Oh, Greta.’
She came across as so capable, so strong.
Lydia was reminded again of Father Phil’s words: You’ll learn to live with it, because you have to.
She imagined all the people who’d learnt to live with their grief, holding down jobs and raising families and meeting friends and going on holidays, the sadness tucked carefully inside, its sharpness blunting, becoming a little more bearable with each day that passed, but never leaving them.
‘I came alone to Ireland,’ Greta continued, ‘a few years after my marriage ended. I knew nobody here, not one single person. I was thirty-one, and I wanted to go where I could begin again, and I had heard that Ireland was a good place for that. In the village I was welcomed, so I stayed.’
‘You’ll never move back to Germany?’
‘No.’ Without hesitation. ‘I will never live there again. Here is my home now.’ She studied Lydia. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘that you would like to stay longer.’
‘You mean at Chance House?’
‘Of course.’
‘I need to be back in Dublin before the baby’s born. I don’t fancy moving house with a baby in tow.’
‘And kindly remind me why you are moving back to Dublin.’
So direct. Despite the sad story that had just been told, Lydia felt a faint stir of exasperation.
‘Greta, the house is far too big for me. It was perfect for what we’d planned, but it’s not right any more.
There are ten bedrooms, two in the apartment and eight more in the main house, and the dining room and kitchen are designed to function as a business.
It would make no sense to live in it as a private home. ’
‘There is always more than one way to do something,’ Greta observed. ‘We do not always have to choose what makes sense. But I see you do not wish to speak of it, so I shall stop.’
Their lunch arrived just then, and Lydia picked up her spoon, relieved. The soup had been lightly blitzed, leaving some chunks of carrot and turnip, and curves of red onion, and shredded greens. Lydia thought of Andrew’s vegetable soup, and how it had tasted better.
‘I shall tell you of my goats,’ Greta said.
That afternoon she went for a cycle, keeping it shorter than she would have liked because of the darkening clouds – heavy rain on the way, according to the weather forecasters, and she didn’t relish the thought of getting caught in a downpour.
Back home, she coaxed the cat to the shed with its bowl of food, the rain just beginning, and lit the fire and prepared a lentil curry as the London Philharmonic Orchestra played a Schubert symphony. And while she chopped onions and made stock, she imagined living here with her child.
She saw them on the little beach at the bottom of the garden on a sunny afternoon, the baby lying contentedly on a soft blanket under a big umbrella.
She saw them again on the beach, this time at the water’s edge, a toddler holding fast to Lydia’s hand, shrieking as a wavelet rushed towards them.
She saw herself wheeling a buggy into the village, stopping to chat with everyone she met.
She saw herself dropping her child to the school every morning. She saw her child playing in the garden with friends. A swing, a seesaw, a sandpit. Plenty of room for everything.
Ridiculous – but not the first time she’d envisaged staying here, not the first time she’d imagined a different possibility. Greta hadn’t put the idea into her head: she’d simply prodded it awake again.
It was crazy. A big old house, even a fully renovated one, needed a big income to run it, to pay its utility bills and keep it in good repair. Unless Lydia planned to open a small hotel – she didn’t – there was no earthly way she could live in it.
She ate her dinner watching an episode of Frasier that she’d seen countless times, and then she watched another because it was too early to go to bed.
And it wasn’t until later, after getting into pyjamas and brushing her teeth and cleaning her face, that she sat on the edge of the bed and found the midwife’s envelope and pulled out the page inside, and read the five words written there.
You’re having a girl – congratulations!
A girl. A daughter.
She reached into her bag again and retrieved the printout of the scan, but the image was frustratingly unclear, full of dark smudges she couldn’t identify.
Was that the head? Could that be one of the legs?
She had no idea. She took a photo of it with her phone and sent it to both her parents.
Your granddaughter, she wrote – and in less than a minute her phone rang.
‘Lydia!’ her mother exclaimed. ‘A little girl! We’re just thrilled!’
‘Does everything look alright?’
‘It looks perfect, exactly as it should.’
‘I can’t make sense of it.’
Her mother explained, and it became a little clearer, but not much.
‘What did the midwife say?’ her mother wanted to know, and Lydia reported all she could remember.
After the call she climbed into bed, still digesting the news that she was to be mother to a daughter. What was that rhyme about a girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead?
Two of her Dublin friends had daughters; Lydia had bought sweet little dresses when they were born. Such pretty clothes for baby girls.
A girl. Sophie Cotter. Aisling Cotter. Or maybe a different name, one she had yet to think of.
There was a little girl, and she had a little curl. She smiled sleepily and closed her eyes.