Chapter 36
Dotty
A baby, what on earth did Dotty know of babies? More to the point, she’d never wanted a baby, never even liked children. And at the worst possible time too.
‘There will be other parts,’ Bobby said to her and he made it sound like a promise.
‘It’s taken me years to get offered this part and it’s…
’ She felt it, her first big break, slipping away from her.
How pregnant was she anyway? She wasn’t sure.
Too pregnant to do much about it but go through with it, that’s what the doctor said when she turned up looking to see if there was any way out of it.
‘Look, we’ll get married, I’ll get a proper job, it’ll be fine, really,’ Bobby said and he tried to pull her close, but at this moment, Dotty hated herself for ending up like this.
She was far too upset to even try to pick apart her feelings for Bobby.
‘We can live with my aunt, once we’re married, she’s… ’
‘In Fulham? Bobby, I might as well move to the other side of the world, it’s miles from the West End…
’ But she didn’t have much of a choice, because without work she couldn’t pay her own rent and she knew she should be grateful that at least she hadn’t been knocked up by some fella who didn’t want to stick around.
Everyone knew that a respectable marriage was a million times better than a mother and baby home – she would have to keep reminding herself of that.
Their wedding was small, a half-hour affair in the registry office with one of her friends from the chorus line of her last job and Bobby’s brother for witnesses.
Constance would have liked to be there, but the baby was already showing by the time they’d gotten that over with.
In her letters, Constance was so excited about Dotty’s baby.
Life wasn’t fair at all. Constance would have given anything to have a husband and a baby and a future that revolved around them.
It still felt unreal to Dotty that her friend’s husband had drowned the previous year.
Oisin and Constance hardly had time to settle into married life, much less set about having a baby.
It seemed that before she knew it, Dotty was lying in the maternity ward with the main event happening to her, rather than feeling she was in any way in charge of things.
She tried to switch off the sounds of other women in labour, the constant wails of newborn babies and nurses’ shoes clacking on the polished tiles.
The contractions were nowhere near as bad as everyone said and for the briefest of moments, in the flurry of it all, maybe Dotty convinced herself that she could do this, in spite of all that had happened in the past. Maybe she would be able to make something more of her life than just pretending she was living a life that meant something.
And then she heard the sound of her own newborn baby and it felt as if something tipped over deep inside of her, like a glass filled to overflowing, its contents warm and potent, escaping and contaminating everything that had until now been arid.
‘She’s beautiful.’ Bobby’s eyes were moist when he held their child.
‘I never realised you were such a sop,’ Dotty said. She couldn’t bear to look at the kid for fear she’d be overcome with such emotion she might just drown beneath it all.
‘I have to get back to work now.’ He seemed reluctant to hand the little bundle of cream blankets over to her, but he’d managed to get a job in a small factory.
It had dawned on her a few weeks earlier that she’d fallen for the next Richard Burton and ended up with Richard Baker.
He was trying to do the right thing, Dotty could see it, but somehow the more he tried, the more it diminished him in her eyes.
If she wasn’t sure she loved him to start with, now she resented him more with every passing day.
‘She’s so perfect,’ he said again and this time Dotty looked at him and, suddenly, something unexpected rose within her. A memory, or maybe a foreshadowing, she couldn’t tell which, but it felt like a shadow, cold and tightening in her stomach.
‘Give her to me,’ she said sharply. Fathers and daughters. It set her nerves on edge.
‘Of course, darling.’ He had only started calling her darling today.
That unravelled her too. She’d never imagined herself as the little wife someone would call darling.
He put the baby in her arms with the greatest care, as if the very passing of the child between them risked damaging her in some way.
Dotty looked down at the little face in her arms. She examined her, for a moment.
She didn’t notice Bobby making his way out of the ward, because suddenly it felt as if they were the only two people on the planet, her and this strange little person who had come about to alter things so unexpectedly.
‘I suppose I should say hello,’ Dotty whispered, but actually, she was hardly capable of saying very much at all.
Instead, she felt overcome with a compulsion she’d never experienced before, or maybe it was an emotion she couldn’t remember feeling.
Love. It was pure and utter, undiluted love for another living thing.
This little baby was perfect, so innocent and unblemished, so easily hurt and broken.
Dotty felt a surge of protectiveness rise up within her, so vast she couldn’t put a name on it, taking her breath away until she had to prod herself into forcing air back out of her lungs and in again.
It was overwhelming. Love. Making her head spin, her heart race, her pulse quicken; in those first moments, she felt she would kill to protect this child, she would die for her.
Tears raced down her cheeks, propelled from her by a lifetime of pent-up emotion.
It was too much.
Too much.
She couldn’t cope with it. She was drowning under it.
‘Nurse,’ she called. ‘NURSE.’ She began to scream and then two nurses came at once, perhaps expecting some terrible calamity.
‘Take her away, I can’t… I can’t…’ She was heaving, her body throwing itself about in the bed as if she’d been overtaken by a demon.
Too much. She couldn’t cope with the unbearable rawness of it all.
‘It’s going to be all right.’ One of the younger nurses tried to comfort her, but even then Dotty knew she was incompatible with the sort of emotion required to be of any use as a mother.
Something inside her had already been broken, perhaps she had fractured it herself or maybe it began with her father; it might even go back further to her mother’s family – who knew what was coming down the bloodline there.
Indeed, her own mother had failed her and she had been a practical woman, far better equipped for motherhood than Dotty.
She’d been out of her depth with Norman Wren, but then, wasn’t that why he’d married her?
The vastness of it all frightened Dotty, as if it could drive her to a sort of hell all the alcohol in the world couldn’t block out, and she knew she had long ago lost any ability to survive beyond the shallows of life.