Love Song

by Charlotte Bingham

  Soon however Jack was along to see her, bouncing about her room, telling jokes and humming something in little snatches, before stopping and telling her, ‘I’m not saying anything but I think I’m on to something here.’ He had called at Keeper’s Cottage on his way to the hospital, and brought Hope up to date on the supper eaten by Letty, the continuing good health of their Burmese cat, and the telephone call from Rose in London, wishing her mother luck.

  Melinda had jumped a clear round at Colonel Stricty-boots’s menage, and the moorhens in the reeds beside the Mill House had at last revealed themselves, ‘and there are ten, would you believe? Ten!’ His manager had rung to tell him that someone was interested in making something or another into a musical and would be interested in Jack Tomm doing the music – ‘only small, but could be fun.’

  Hope tried to smile as she watched him, but she could hardly attend to what he was saying. All she could think of was the seemingly endless possibilities that she faced, and tomorrow.

  Meanwhile Jack took turn and turn about Hope’s room and Hope stared at him and thought of nothing except that he was looking strangely pale, despite the cheeriness of his tone.

  ‘I’ll be all right, Jack, you know that, don’t you? I’ll be fine.’

  At which Jack turned away to the window and cleared his throat. ‘Yes. Course,’ he agreed. ‘Course. I know that, Hope. Just, you know.’

  His voice tailed off and there was nothing more either of them wanted to say, and so he kissed her forehead one final time and left her with the light over her bed still on, for comfort, burning through the night, lighting up her face, which was composed yet unsleeping, waiting, just waiting for those early morning hours to come when she would hear the bustle of the starched aprons, feel the pre-med injection, listen to the wheels on the trolley as she was pushed towards her nine o’clock date with surgery.

  ‘Good luck, Baby,’ was the last thing she remembered saying before, together with the anaesthetist, she started the slow count down from ten to nought, inevitably only reaching six before darkness snapped out the world and all its worries.

  ‘Good luck, Mums,’ Claire said out loud as the hand on the old mahogany kitchen clock at Keeper’s Cottage reached nine o’clock. ‘And good luck New Baby, whoever you’re going to be.’

  ‘Good luck, Mums,’ Melinda said out loud as she cantered through the woods behind the Mill House on a strangely excited Grey Goose. ‘And good luck to you, Baby.’

  At the hospital Jack arrived to find a porter sweeping a floor, nurses gossiping about last night’s charity ball, and an elated nurse emerging from the operating theatre.

  ‘Mr Merriott,’ she declared, ‘I am happy to tell you you have a son, a baby boy.’

  Jack walked on for a second, and then stopped, raising his eyes to heaven before turning back. Of course he was ‘Mr Merriott’. He swept the still masked woman round and round, despite her laughing protests.

  ‘Where is he? Where is he?’ he demanded. ‘I must see him, and how is Hope? Where is Hope?’

  ‘Another twenty minutes before she comes out of surgery, but she is just fine, Mr Merriott, just fine, and so is young Master Merriott.’ The eyes above the mask sparkled, and pointed Jack in the direction of the baby unit. ‘Over there.’

  Jack crept across the hallway, as if had he made any noise he would have woken Hope from the anaesthetic, and peering through the glass he looked for his newest son.

  ‘Merriott?’

  Jack stared down at the little face wrapped in the blanket and hardly more than a few minutes old. He looked – well, he could not say what he looked like.

  ‘It’s a boy. He’s a boy! Mums’s had a boy! Well done Mums!’

  Claire danced round the kitchen and she could not wait for Melinda to get back from riding, and when Rose called she too danced round the kitchen, but it was Hugh Reilly’s kitchen, and much as she loved London she ached at that moment to be with the other two, and having put down the phone she dabbed at her eyes and rushed to her purse to see how much she had left of her student grant which she could put towards flowers to send to the County Hospital.

  * * *

  For herself Hope knew she would never, ever, forget the moment when her son was placed in her arms. Not because he was her son, but because he was alive, and whole, and all right, and with his eyes tightly closed and his little tonsure of dark hair he looked so perfect. She stared down at his face and then up at the happy smiling face of her gynaecologist who was walking so fast beside the bed upon which she was being pushed along, and then at Jack’s proud face, and then down at the baby again.

  ‘He looks just like you, Jack.’ But that was as far as she could get before she frowned and her eyes moved away from her baby’s face and up to Jack’s.

  ‘Hope, are you all right?’

  Hope nodded, her eyes smiling up into Jack’s. Of course she was all right. She was out of surgery, she was fine. How else could a mother who had waited so long for a son feel other than not just all right, but possibly as happy as she had ever been?

  ‘Oh, yes, Jack, I am so all right.’ She laughed. ‘Yes, so all right.’

  Hope’s large eyes stared back for a moment into Jack’s, and she could see his lovely face, his eyes which were large and blue and beautiful and full of a strange but peaceful kindness, as if Jack had been on this earth before and learned so much that the gods had decided to send him back down again, to have another go. Hope loved Jack’s eyes, but she blinked as she stared up at him. She could no longer see him very well.

  And although she could feel her baby’s finger, she could not feel it as well as she had, could not really squeeze it.

  And yet she could still hear that dear gynaecologist saying to Jack, ‘It went much better than I could have hoped, Mr Merriott. The operation went really very well.’

  Hope wanted to tell her, ‘Jack’s not Mr Merriott, he’s Mr Tomm, and he’s not my husband, he’s my lover, and perhaps my next husband, who knows? But he is the father of my baby. My son.’

  Hope blinked her eyes once more, slowly. She could definitely still hear everything, Jack and the gynaecologist, a nurse laughing when Jack teased her about something, the baby, very distantly, but as she tried to refocus, assuming she was experiencing some after-effect of the sedative, nothing was happening. Everything was dark.

  She blinked her eyes again slowly, but it was no good. Everything was going away from her, and quite fast, as if she was a train retreating into a tunnel. There was definitely too great a distance between her and her baby. He should be right there, but she was going away from him into the tunnel.

  She heard someone shout ‘Quick!’ at least that was what it sounded like. And then there was a pain, a searing pain, like no pain she had ever known before, a screeching, tearing, numbing pain which turned everything red, except that she could just see a hand and feel it too, and it was reaching out to her, holding her, trying to stop her falling into what was now red, and then black.

  Jack saw Hope’s eyes seeming to fade from his, and her expression of love turning to the look of someone who was gone into the next world, unseeing, blank, and as he lost her, a second after giving such a gasp of pain, he heard a strange thing, he heard himself shouting, but he had no idea what he was saying. He knew it was his own voice because it was a masculine voice and there was only himself and the gynaecologist and a female nurse present. It was his own voice, but it was so strange!

  ‘Nurse! Nurse!’

  It definitely was his voice, and someone else’s voice, it was everyone’s voice and they were all calling to each other, everyone’s voice except Hope’s. Hers was nowhere to be heard among that medley of calling people, and someone was handing him the baby and he was holding it to him as the chorus grew stronger and more urgent, all saying, ‘Quick, quick, emergency! We must get her into Intensive Care!’

  And the trolley on which only Hope was now lying, motionless without her baby, was being wheeled backwards once more, and re-set to
go down another strange corridor, and then another, well away from her room. And all the time, because he could not help it, Jack was running alongside, looking down at her, wondering, Is she dead?

  On hearing the good news from the hospital Melinda had fairly sprung out of the door of Keeper’s Cottage heading for the Mill House stables and the Grey Goose, singing to herself at the top of her voice one of Jack’s old songs, one of his evergreens, which just happened to be very apt since it was entitled ‘Welcome Baby’.

  After all the months of waiting and worrying, the whole strange ethos of the nine-month wait for a baby suddenly seemed to make sense. It was as if nature knew that unless humans waited, they would not really appreciate their young. And the very idea of having a new baby, a baby brother called James, was somehow a light shining directly down on them all after what had been such a hard dark time.

  Now everything was pretty brilliant, and she could not wait to tell Josh. She could not wait to tell Tobe and Cyndi, either, as a matter of fact. But most of all she could not wait to have Mums and the baby home, and to take care of them both, which was ridiculous, because there would be nappies and bottles all over Keeper’s Cottage and they would both be up nights and heaven only knew – but she had been so awfully worried, all this time, always thinking, after Mums’s dream, that something would happen to her, that there would be some terrible event which would leave Melinda all alone, as in Mums’s dream.

  She was hardly out of the door, heading back out into the air, its bracing cold lifting her elated spirits, so that it seemed to Melinda that she could see them above her, that they were in fact a hot air balloon, floating away from Keeper’s towards the Mill House, Goosey and the end of a long and anxious nine months, before the telephone rang once more.

  Leave it. The telephone is for your convenience, not the caller’s.

  That had always been Aunt Rosabel’s sage advice, and it was sage, if Melinda thought about it, inasmuch as a telephone ringing is only a – what was it Aunt Rosabel always called it? Melinda frowned as she tried to remember. Oh, yes. She always said the telephone was a caller without a card.

  Remembering all this Melinda still hesitated. If the phone rang and rang, and rang, and rang, it had to be Rose ringing from London wanting to know more than Melinda had already told her about the new baby, about Hope, about everything.

  It did ring, and ring, and ring, and although Letty was out walking with Mrs Shepherd, and there was no real reason to turn back, nevertheless Melinda did turn back, but as she reached the front door once more it stopped. She was glad. She felt as if she had made every effort, and that being so she could now go out riding and forget all about telephones, and feel only the marvel of Goosey as she started to gather a bit of speed, started to enjoy a welcome blow after their fifty minutes of concentrated dressage the previous afternoon.

  ‘Keep her mind open, Mellie,’ the colonel had kept advising, but then he would pat the mare’s neck and smile up at Melinda and say, ‘Actually, I don’t know what I’m talking about. She knows best, don’t she? They tell us, don’t they, Mellie? They tell us, not the other way round. We humans, we think we know it all, but it’s they who know it, not us!’

  Colonel Simpson had become Melinda’s ‘father figure’. Jack, because he was Josh’s father, could never be so to her. Not that she minded her mother being in love with Jack – she could quite see the attraction, for both of them. But Melinda was wise enough to know that trying to replace a father with another man was just plain dumb. She and Claire had enjoyed a long conversation about it only two nights before.

  Claire said, ‘I am looking for a father figure, Mel, but that’s because Dads and I never bonded – yuk. Well, I got on his nerves really. So I am – you know, in the market for a father figure. But I agree with you, it can’t be Jack, because Jack – you know, he’s Jack. And he loves Mums, and that’s fine, because she’s been miserable pretty well since we came to Hatcombe, wouldn’t you say? But you know what I mean, I can’t see Jack as this other person, this dear daddy guy. That doesn’t mean I don’t love him to pieces, because I do. But only as an older guy who loves Mums. What I actually need is someone to love me who happens to be older. Or someone who will pretend he loves me because he’s older, or something like that. Well, you know. That’s what I feel. So.’

  Melinda felt quite differently. She knew, in a way, that she had been very much her father’s favourite, and as such would never forgive him – well some time perhaps but not now, not this minute – for going off with this Muffin Hatherleigh woman. On the other hand, for her too, Jack was, and always would be, Mums’s.

  Not that Jack did not also belong to Josh. And to Tobe and Cyndi, naturally, but he could never be what Dads had been; and there again Dads could never be what he had been to her now that he was Mrs Hatherleigh’s oh-so-kept man.

  She and Josh never really discussed their parents. It was a no-go area, into which they did not stray conversationally, touching only on practicalities and instinctively leaving their parents to be quite separate from their friendship.

  Just as Hope had known that it would be quite wrong for her to live with Jack at the Mill House until the older children were gone, so Melinda knew that to touch on any future that she and Josh, or Hope and Jack, might have together would be insensitive.

  So it was only to Claire that she had ever really spoken of how she felt, and now that she was once more mounted on Goosey and turning her towards the fields and meadows behind the Mill House, Melinda made up her mind that she would leave it like that. She would talk only to Claire about Jack and Mums, not to anyone else.

  She sat down and loosening her rein she let Goosey down a notch or two. As always when on horseback, she wondered why she had ever dismounted, for when the wind blew a little and the sun shone a little, and the fields were lit with a still autumn light, was there anything to touch it?

  ‘What the hell is the matter, Tomm? And how did you get our number? I never want to speak to you again!’

  Alexander had frowned with impatient anger as Muffin handed him the telephone, mouthing the words Jack Tomm for you.

  ‘Oh, so my soon-to-be ex-wife has had a baby, has she? Pull the other one, Tomm! No, don’t tell me another girl! Well, if it is – it’s yours, Tomm, yours, because four is my quota, believe me.’

  He was in the process of making a little moue at Muffin and at the same time sliding his free hand across her pretty little backside, giving it an appreciative pat, when he stopped, pulled a face, and said, ‘What!’

  Muffin had started to kiss his fingers but when he said ‘What!’ she stopped and stepped back. Staring up at Alexander questioningly she mouthed the word What? back at him.

  Alexander covered the phone with his now free hand.

  ‘It’s Hope. She’s had a stroke.’

  For some reason the fact that the gynaecologist was a woman made whatever had to be said seem better, or at any rate, less worse. Not that anything could be better, or worse, or anything really, Jack thought dully as he stared at her calm face, wondering what it must be like to deal constantly with other people’s tragedies. To spend your whole life contemplating other people’s minds or bodies in some sort of state of extremis.

  ‘We did the MRI scan yesterday, Mr Merriott—’

  ‘Tomm. I’m not her husband yet.’

  ‘I am sorry. Of course. Tomm. Mr Tomm—’

  ‘Jack.’ He held out his hand to shake hers, quite ridiculous really, as if they were at a party, not in a hospital standing outside a room where the love of his life lay in Intensive Care.

  ‘Polly.’

  She seemed to appreciate the moment, if only because it gave the poor woman a breather, a small pause in which she could summon up yet more energy to deal with someone else’s life, someone else’s problems, someone else’s decisions. Decisions which, whatever anyone said, must haunt those who had helped to make them.

  ‘As I say, we did the MRI scan yesterday, Jack, and while we are s
till looking at it in detail, the prognosis is not good, I’m afraid.’

  ‘How bad is not good?’

  ‘Your— Mrs Merriott is in a very deep coma, Jack.’

  They had suddenly run into a protocol cul-de-sac. Hope had obviously not called her gynaecologist Polly, so now, with the requirement for permission to call someone by their first name being strictly observed, everything they were saying sounded so odd it was almost laughable.

  Had the news not been so grave, had Hope been there in person, Jack would have laughed so much. It was the kind of moment that always made him break up. For a second, almost wilfully placing himself in an agony of heart and mind, Jack imagined how Hope’s eyes would have lit up if she had been standing beside him instead of lying in the room to the right of them, and how her laugh – the laugh which was always so delightful that Jack did not need to be in the same room to smile when he heard it – would have rippled in unison with his, and they would have turned to each other and she would have caught at his hand with delight at the ridiculousness of it all.

  He could still hear Hope saying, Oh, my goodness, that is so funny! when Polly continued, ‘There is very little chance that Hope will recover from a stroke as apparently traumatic as this one. Even if she should, to be realistic I would have to say she would be an invalid for life.’

  Now that she was saying ‘Hope’ instead of ‘Mrs Merriott’ Jack wished that Polly had stuck to being more formal. There is very little chance that Mrs Merriott will recover from a stroke would have made it seem as if it was someone else besides Hope, whereas as soon as she had said Hope’s name Jack knew that he could not possibly, even for a fraction of a second, pretend that it was someone else. It was beyond Jack’s powers to pretend that this woman was trying to talk to him about some other woman, someone with whom Jack was not passionately in love, someone who he did not now know would be, in whatever state, the love of his life, for ever.