The Londoners

by Margaret Pemberton

  She never even heard Leon re-enter the bedroom. One minute she was bearing down, panting with agony and effort, the next Leon was saying with tender reassurance, ‘You’re doing fine, Kate. There was a glimpse of the baby’s head at the height of the last contraction. Another couple of pains and it will be over.’

  There had been a moment when he had re-entered the room and seen her on the bed, her nightdress up around her knees, her hands hooked under her sweat-sheened thighs, her knees raised, when his courage had nearly failed him. The moment had been occasioned only by his concern for her feelings; for his concern for her modesty. It vanished the second he realized she was beyond any such considerations.

  As she grasped that he was with her she said, a sob of need in her voice, ‘Leon? Oh thank God you’re here, Leon! The minute the baby’s head appears make sure it can breath. Make sure its mouth and nose are clear . . .’

  She broke off with a ragged cry. This time her contraction brought the baby’s head to the mouth of her vagina. It remained there just long enough for her to summon her last reserves of strength and just long enough for Leon to spread his hands out ready to ease and support the baby’s head when the next contraction came.

  Though only the crown of the baby’s head was visible Leon could see the one thing that mattered most. A pulse beating beneath a matt of dark-gold, sticky hair. The baby was alive. His lips moved in silent prayer. Let it stay alive. Let there be nothing wrong with it. Please God let it cry the minute it was born.

  Kate gave a cry that was only a fraction from being a scream and then, so suddenly that it took his breath away, the dark-gold head burst from her body, face down and mewling.

  He could hear Kate gasping over and over again, ‘Oh God! Oh God! Oh dear God!’ and then Toby Harvey’s child slithered, streaked with mucus and blood, into his large, capable, welcoming hands.

  It was a boy. Never, ever, had he felt such turbulent emotion; never, ever, had he felt such a deep need to protect and to cherish. ‘It’s a boy, Kate,’ he said unsteadily, barely trusting himself to speak. ‘It’s a boy and he’s perfect!’

  Tears of exhaustion and happiness streamed down Kate’s cheeks. ‘Let me see!’ she begged, her eyes radiant. ‘Oh, please let me see! Shouldn’t he be crying louder! Are you sure he’s all right? Has he got all his fingers? All his toes? Oh, isn’t he beautiful, Leon! Isn’t he beautiful?’

  Very gently, with all the love in the world, Leon lifted the slippery little body and laid it on Kate’s belly. ‘He’s magnificent,’ he said, knowing the moment was one he would never forget, not even if he lived to be a hundred. ‘Absolutely magnificent.’

  She reached a hand down to touch the baby’s wrinkled, red skin. ‘When can I hold him?’ she asked longingly. ‘When will you be able to cut the cord?’

  ‘When the after-birth comes away,’ he said, trying to remember all he had ever heard about umbilical cords. It was precious little.

  ‘You’ll have to tell me how to do it,’ he said, already deciding that if she didn’t know he would leave the cord well alone until Doctor Roberts finally arrived.

  ‘It’s easy,’ she said with quiet confidence, her attention on the baby, stroking his sticky hair with feather-light strokes. ‘You need scissors and string and antiseptic and one of the little pads I’ve made. I’ve sterilized the scissors and they’re in a pan of cooled boiled water in the bathroom.’

  The baby stopped mewling and began to cry, his arms and legs flailing angrily.

  ‘He’s hungry,’ Leon said with a grin. ‘Let me put a towel over him so he doesn’t get a chill.’

  As he did so she drew in a sharp breath and then said, ‘I think the after-birth is on its way. Can you spread some newspaper beneath me, Leon?’

  He nodded and as he set about his task she said, awed by everything he had done for her and the manner in which he had done it, ‘I don’t know how to begin to thank you, Leon. Even Doctor Roberts couldn’t have been as calm and reassuring.’

  His grin deepened. ‘That remark shows just how much attention you were paying to everything! I felt about as calm as an earthquake!’

  She began to giggle and he said in mock rebuke, terrified of allowing her to see how deeply moved he was; how very much he cared, ‘Don’t giggle. You’ll rock your son. And speaking of your son, have you decided yet what you’re going to call him?’

  ‘Matthew Toby Leon Carl. Matthew, because it’s a name I’ve always liked. Toby after his father. Leon after yourself. And Carl because Carl is my father’s name.’

  His throat tightened. ‘That’s quite a handful for such a little person,’ he said, not allowing his eyes to meet hers for fear of the emotions he might reveal.

  ‘He’ll grow into them.’ Her husky voice was laden with love and then she sucked in her breath sharply again. ‘It’s the afterbirth,’ she said as alarm flared in his eyes. ‘It’s coming!’

  ‘Then push,’ he said, anxiety seizing hold of him. Dear God, it wasn’t over yet. She might begin to haemorrhage and then what would he do?

  She didn’t haemorrhage. She lay back against the pillows he had eased beneath her head and shoulders, feasting her eyes on the warmly covered mound that was her son, touching the top of his head ever so gently with her fingertips as Leon speedily and efficiently dealt with the after-birth and then tied off the cord and cut it.

  ‘It’s a pity the Navy doesn’t have a call for midwives,’ she said, watching him with tender amusement. ‘You’d make a first-class midwife.’

  He dropped the scissors and string into the wicker shopping basket and grinned back at her. ‘Maybe I’ll take it up if I ever return to civvy street. Your son is badly in need of a bath. Do you have a bowl handy?’

  ‘In the bathroom.’

  ‘I’ll bring it in here and bath him in here,’ he said, knowing how loath she would be to have Matthew taken from her sight even for a few minutes and more nervous than he cared to admit as to how to go about bathing a tiny, slippery, crying baby. He needed her to be able to tell him what to do. His heart seemed to lurch within his chest. He needed her, period. He needed her to bring warmth and laughter into his life. He needed her in order to feel whole and happy. He needed her because he loved her.

  Abruptly he turned away from the bed and walked out of the room and across the landing to the bathroom. Hector, tired of waiting for the attention due him, had fallen asleep. As he stepped over the dog he wondered if there was a hope in hell of his ever achieving with Kate the kind of relationship he longed for.

  She had left an enamel washing basin out in readiness and as he began to half fill it, first with cold water and then with warm, his heart seemed to physically hurt. Even allowing himself to speculate on such a possibility was crass stupidity. Middle-class girls like Kate didn’t marry half-caste sailors. He turned off the geyser. That wasn’t a hundred per cent true. His mother had married his father and despite the many difficulties they must have encountered it had been a triumphantly happy marriage.

  He tested the temperature of the water in the enamel bowl and added a little more cold water, deep in thought. His parents had married nearly thirty years ago when a black face in Britain was a rare sight. It was a rare sight no longer, at least not in and around ports such as London and Cardiff and Portsmouth.

  He stared down into the water like a seer. When the war was over he doubted if black faces would be a rare sight anywhere in Britain. With luck America would eventually come into the war and black GIs would become a common sight. And after the war, when Britain finally floored Nazi Germany, a massive influx of labour would be needed to rebuild the country and set it on its feet again and it would only be common sense if the bulk of that labour came from Britain’s Empire, from countries such as Jamaica and Trinidad and Barbados.

  If and when such a situation arose, marriages such as his parents’ marriage would be anomalies no longer. The widely held belief that a girl was scraping the bottom of the barrel if she went out with someone racially di
fferent would have to be drastically revised. He remembered Mrs Roberts’ reaction earlier in the day when she had suspected he might be the father of Kate’s baby and his jawline hardened. Where the Mrs Robertses of the world were concerned, such a change of attitude couldn’t come a minute too soon.

  He turned away from the bath, the bowl of water in his hands, and stepped carefully once more over Hector. He was worrying over a problem that, where he and Kate were concerned, was really no problem at all. If Kate were in love with him she wouldn’t allow any gibes or taunts to discomfit her; she would simply dismiss them as being beneath contempt. It wasn’t his West Indian blood that was a bar to their friendship developing into a love affair; it was the love she still felt for Toby Harvey. A love her son’s birth had doubtless fiercely reinforced.

  Kate, too, was thinking of Toby. As Leon came back into the bedroom with the bowl of warm water and placed it on the convenient height of her dressing-table, she thought of how proud he would have been of his son. Tears stung her eyes, tears far different to the tears of joy and exhaustion still drying on her cheeks.

  ‘Come on, little fella,’ Leon said, turning towards the bed and gently lifting Matthew Toby Leon Carl into his arms. ‘Time for your first bath . . . and do you need it!’

  ‘The water isn’t too hot, is it?’ she asked anxiously. ‘Have you tested it by dipping your elbow into it?’

  ‘As if I’ve been doing it all my life,’ he said, removing the towel that had been serving as Matthew’s temporary shawl. ‘Now what do I do? Just lay him in the water?’

  She pushed herself up against her pillows in order to supervise the operation. ‘You’ll have to keep a firm but gentle hold of him. Can you support his head and shoulders with one hand and soap and rinse him with the other?’

  ‘I can try and I could do it a lot easier if he’d stop kicking.’

  ‘He’s a very good kicker.’ Her voice was thick with amusement again. ‘He used to keep me awake with his kicking night after night.’

  With intense concentration and with more care than he could remember taking over anything, Leon slid Matthew into the gently warm water. The instant he did so Matthew screwed his eyes up tight and opened his mouth wide, crying lustily.

  ‘He’s all right,’ Kate said as she saw the appalled look on Leon’s face. ‘Soap him all over as quickly as possible, especially between his fingers and toes and all his little creases. Then, when you’ve rinsed him, wrap him in his towel and wash his hair.’

  ‘How?’ Leon asked, terrified Matthew was going to slip from his grasp; terrified that he was in some way hurting him.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll tell you. Try to keep the bandage around his tummy-button from becoming too wet, won’t you?’

  Leon tried. He also tried not to get soap into Matthew’s eyes, not to lose hold of him, not to become too disconcerted by his kicking and crying. It was worse than trying to sail a destroyer single-handed.

  ‘Now pat him dry,’ Kate said, as serene as if he was making a competent job of his task. ‘Then wrap the towel firmly around him so that he feels secure and tuck him under your arm as you would a newspaper, only with your hand supporting his neck and head. Then hold him over the bowl. That way you can easily wash his hair with your free hand.’

  To his amazement he found she was right. And to his relief, Matthew’s sobs subsided into intermittent mewls of protest.

  ‘How do you know all this?’ he asked as he scooped up water and let it trickle through Matthew’s sudsed hair.

  ‘I watched Carrie bathing Rose when she was newborn and sometimes Carrie allowed me to bathe Rose myself.’

  Watching Leon as he handled her son with infinite care, she felt a bond of closeness to him that she had never experienced before. Not with anyone. Not even with Toby. Her heart almost ceased to beat. Where on earth had that last thought come from? It certainly wasn’t true. It couldn’t be.

  She waited for a sense of affirmation that it wasn’t true. None came. Instead, the certainty that she had never been as close to anyone as she now was to Leon persisted.

  She drew in a deep, steadying breath. What in the world was the matter with her? She had been utterly, hopelessly and irrevocably in love with Toby. They had been as close as it was possible for two people to be. Of course she had been closer to Toby than she was to Leon. Hadn’t she?

  No, an inner voice said to her implacably. Although you loved Toby, and he loved you, you never lived with Toby. You never spent time with him, day in and day out as you have over the last couple of months with Leon. You didn’t know Toby as you know Leon.

  It was a breathtaking realization. And it begged a question of dizzying enormity. If she felt closer to Leon than she had to Toby, was she in love with Leon? And did she no longer love Toby?

  The answer to her second question came instantly. Of course she still loved Toby. She would always love him. He had become a part of her and he would remain a part of her until the day she died. Until a split second ago she had believed that loving Toby precluded her from ever falling in love with anyone else, ever again. Now, in a flash of stunning maturity, she knew that love didn’t operate like that. No matter how deeply she might love in the future, her love for Toby would never be diminished. Love wasn’t finite. Though she loved Matthew Toby Leon Carl with all her heart it didn’t mean she would never love a second child, or a third or a fourth, just as wholeheartedly. And if the day ever came when she had more children, her love for Matthew Toby Leon Carl wouldn’t be diminished one iota.

  As she watched Leon gently but awkwardly manoeuvring Matthew’s chubby little arms into the arm-holes of the tie-around vest, she felt so much gratitude welling up inside her that she thought she would burst with it. He had brought her child into the world and he had done so in a manner that hadn’t caused her the slightest pang of embarrassment. He never had embarrassed her, or made her feel sexually uncomfortable. Except once. And that had not been intentional.

  He had been shaving in the bathroom and she had accidentally walked in on him. He had been facing the mirror, his back towards her, and had been wearing only trousers. The deep breadth of his dusky-toned chest would have done credit to a middle-weight boxer and there had been dimples in his strongly muscled shoulders. Though she had apologized and left the bathroom immediately, it had been a sight she had never forgotten. And she had never forgotten it because it had been so pleasing.

  Even at the time, she had found the incident deeply disconcerting, though until now she had never admitted to herself why it had been so disconcerting. Now, however, she knew. Now, watching him as, with a look of intense concentration on his face, he struggled to figure out the best way of fitting her crying and kicking son into a muslin nappy, she knew it had been because he had aroused feelings in her she had thought suppressed forever.

  ‘Come on, little fella,’ he said comfortingly as Matthew’s cries turned to hiccupping sobs of genuine distress. ‘Let me just wrap this shawl around you and then you can go to your ma.’

  ‘Leon . . .’ Tentatively, she stretched a hand out towards him.

  He turned towards her, his dark, laughter-lined face splitting in a wide, easy smile. ‘I’m sorry it’s taken me so long, Kate. I never realized baby clothes were fastened with so many ribbons before.’

  ‘Leon . . .’ her heart had begun to drum in loud, throbbing strokes. He had never made the slightest sexual overture to her. What if he hadn’t done so not out of respect for her but because he wasn’t remotely sexually attracted to her? What if, by saying what was in her heart, she destroyed a friendship that had become central to her very being. ‘Leon . . .’ she said again, knowing that such a moment, as he lifted her shawl-wrapped son from the bed and turned towards her with him, would never come again, ‘Leon . . . I . . .’

  ‘Kate!’ a female voice shouted in stark anxiety from the foot of the stairs. ‘Kate! Are you in? Are you all right? Is that a baby crying?’

  Leon had turned towards her, about to lay Mat
thew in her arms. Now he hesitated and Kate could see a reflection of her own crushing disappointment in his amber-brown eyes. The wonderful sense of closeness and privacy that had been generated between them was about to be shattered. Panic suffused her. Once it was shattered she knew she might never again have the courage to put all that was in her heart into words.

  ‘Leon . . .’ she said again with desperate urgency. ‘Leon I . . .’

  It was too late. Harriet was already hurrying in great concern up the stairs saying, ‘It is a baby! Katherine! For the love of God, is anyone with you? Are you all right?’

  A second later she stood in the bedroom doorway staring around in vain for a doctor or midwife, her eyes coming back in stupefied disbelief to Leon standing by the side of the bed, his jersey sleeves pushed up to his elbows, Kate’s newborn son lying snugly in the crook of his arm.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Stray wisps of hair escaped from the normally immaculately tidy bun in the nape of Harriet’s neck as she said in a stunned voice, ‘Where is Doctor Roberts? Has he left already? Why . . .’

  ‘He hasn’t been here,’ Kate said, enjoying the moment hugely despite her exhaustion and her longing to put her son to her breast. ‘Leon went for him when I began labour but there’s been a nasty accident in Point Hill Road and Doctor Roberts was needed there and couldn’t leave.’

  As she was talking, Leon lowered Matthew into her arms. For a brief precious moment their eyes met and Kate’s enjoyment at disconcerting Harriet so profoundly vanished, to be replaced by a far deeper emotion. This was the moment when, if they had been alone, she could have told Leon everything that was in her heart. Her throat tightened and unshed tears glittered on her eyelashes as she gently cradled her child. It was a moment she wanted to share with Leon, and Leon alone; a moment so precious she knew it would never come again.