Emma Sparrow

by Marie Joseph

  ‘My baby?’ Emma tried to sit up, pushed herself up so that the hospital gown slipped from her shoulder. ‘What is happening to my baby?’

  Nurse Briggs sighed. She was very young. She had enough experience not to be too dismayed, but there was something about this patient that reached through the armour of her ingrained discipline. So drained of colour, so still for such a long time, the long brown hair and the huge brown eyes, the frantic need for reassurance, even before she was fully conscious.

  ‘I am losing my baby.’ The eyes closed and filled with tears that ran down the pale cheeks and sideways into the pillow

  Nurse Briggs reached for a small hand towel. ‘You are aborting your baby, love. There is no way we can stop it. You were thrown from the car. Not through the windscreen because it wasn’t a head-on crash, but the door gave and you ended up in the road.’ Gently she wiped Emma’s face. ‘There will be other babies, love. Just try to keep calm. The doctor is coming back soon and he will help you. I promise it won’t be too bad.’

  ‘But you have to save it.’ Emma struggled again to sit up. ‘You don’t understand. My husband….’ She lay down again as the foot of the bed seemed to rise up as if to hit her smack between her aching eyes.

  ‘You are in shock, love.’ Nurse Briggs smoothed the hair back from Emma’s forehead. ‘You had a nasty accident. Now, please try and relax.’

  ‘Ben!’ The sound was torn from Emma’s throat. ‘What happened to Ben?’ Once again she saw the car coming straight for them. Coming unbelievably at them. On Ben’s side. With a sickening thud of crashing metal on metal. Almost at right angles. On Ben’s side.

  The years of training stayed Nurse Briggs’s voice to a soothing murmur. ‘The young man driving the car is down in theatre now. He is …’, she turned her head away from the anguished pleading on the white face, ‘… as well as expected. Now you must be still.’

  ‘Ben is dead.’

  Nurse Briggs felt for her patient’s pulse as Emma drifted into merciful oblivion. She stood there, vigilant, caring, staying on duty when she should have gone off more than two hours before.

  ‘Where is Emma?’

  The man standing on the doorstep of number twelve Litchfield Avenue had dark eyes sunk back into hollows in the grey pallor of his face. He had driven hard, taking less than four hours to complete the long mileage from London, and his dismay at finding the house empty and the bed as neat as when Emma had made it that morning had left him in no mood for explanations.

  ‘Why is the telephone off the hook?’ He pushed past Mrs Collins, an unlovely sight in her thick brown woollen dressing-gown, and without a by-your-leave, replaced the receiver. ‘No wonder I couldn’t get through.’ He towered over her, causing her to step back a pace. ‘What’s going on, for Pete’s sake?’

  Mrs Collins did not hold with Simon Martin. Because of who he was and what he was, she had written him off irrevocably. He talked posh for one thing, and he had got Emma into trouble for another, and here he was marching in as if he owned the place.

  ‘I took it off because I wanted Mr Sparrow to get his rest.’ She folded her arms over her massive bosom, and sat down. ‘There’s been that much going on with folks ringing up, and Sharon saying she wasn’t going to Majorca, though she’s seen sense now, thank goodness.’ She folded the skirt of the dressing-gown over her knees in case her nightdress was showing. ‘What a thing to happen on a wedding day. I thought you was in London. They telephoned from the infirmary but you wasn’t there.’ She glared at Simon from beneath straggly eyebrows, and nodded as if satisfied.

  Simon clenched his hands. In another minute he was sure he would lift the old bag bodily out of the chair and shake her till her teeth rattled.

  ‘Emma! Where is Emma?’ He fought hard to hold his slipping control. ‘Is she ill?’

  ‘She was in an accident.’ Mrs Collins was coming to the good part now, as her small eyes never left Simon’s face. ‘She was being run home with Ben Bamford, and they had a crash. But she’s not hurt bad.’ She shrank back in the chair as the tall man took a step towards her. ‘Thought he was going to clock me one,’ she was to tell John Sparrow later. Then her mouth dropped open in a wide gasp of surprise as Simon turned abruptly and ran from the house, slamming the car door fit to wake the dead and roaring away up the avenue.

  ‘That’s teached him,’ Mrs Collins told herself, not quite sure what she meant, but meaning it just the same.

  It was almost noon before he was allowed to sit by Emma’s bed. They had tidied her up, they told him, down in theatre and now she needed to sleep, so he must be very quiet and not upset her.

  ‘Your wife has taken it hard about losing the baby,’ they said, and Simon nodded. It was all mixed up in his mind. The angry voices at the meeting that morning. No, yesterday morning. The strange, almost hysterical reaction from Chloe when he telephoned her. The long drive when at times he had been terrified he was going to fall asleep. And now this….

  There was a peculiar numbness all through his body. It had spread to his mind, and for once his clear thinking had deserted him. He wanted to stretch out a hand and touch Emma, but she was lying there so drained of colour, so small, he could hardly bear to look at her.

  She opened her eyes, saw him, recognized him, Simon thought. Then wearily she closed her eyes again so that there was nothing to do but to wait and try to shake off the overwhelming urge to let his head droop forward in sleep.

  The baby was no more. It had been scraped away, or flowed away, the baby that in his muddled, exhausted frame of mind was to have replaced the one that Chloe had refused to have.

  Simon shook his head as if to shake away the blurred edges of his reasoning. One thing he knew: it was all his fault. If he had taken Emma to the wedding she would never have got into a car with an irresponsible man the worse for drink, to drive through the darkness along winding lanes.

  As Chloe had said, he had a one-track mind. Simon buried his face in his hands. He had always known that Bamford would get even with him some day. Some time, somehow. It had been written on his face, that grinning handsome face with the clear blue eyes that mocked and twinkled with a secret amusement all their own.

  A nurse brought a cup of tea, and Simon nodded his thanks. Oh, God, but Chloe in her wisdom had been right. He, Simon Martin, was selfish to the core; thinking, no, taking it for granted that Emma would in her own quiet way just get on with what nature had intended her to do. And now, she had destroyed his child. Their child.

  Like Chloe before her. In a different way, but with the same end result.

  The minutes ticked away. Now he felt drugged, but before he could sleep there were things to be done. Simon put a hand over his eyes and tried to think, to plan. There were things to be done. If only his father was there instead of thousands of miles away sunning himself on the deck of a ship sailing through blue waters. If only, and if only….

  Emma opened her eyes and saw the darkness of his emotions flitting across his face like a shadow. It was all there, the ache of despair, the disappointment. Directed at herself. She knew that.

  ‘I am sorry, so sorry,’ she whispered, and turned her face away so that he would not see the tears slipping down her face.

  Simon reached for her hand. ‘It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you are safe.’ He held her hand and ran his finger round the blue veins at her wrist. ‘It doesn’t matter, love.’

  But she had seen his face, and she knew that it did.

  When he went away she slept the rest of the afternoon, and when she awoke she opened her eyes to see Patty Bamford sitting by the bed, eyes swollen with recent tears, the bright blonde hair skewered untidily on to the top of her small head.

  Instantly both Emma’s hands went out to her as she raised herself up dizzily from her pillow.

  ‘I am sorry. Oh, Patty, I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’

  Patty’s head drooped. ‘I know. But it was better. Some day I will be able to tell meself it was better.
’

  ‘I can’t remember what happened.’ Emma closed her eyes and heard again the dreadful crashing iron sound of the car tearing into the side where Ben wrenched at the wheel in a futile attempt to evade the smash. ‘I hope he didn’t suffer much. Oh, Ben. Poor Ben.’

  ‘Ben?’ She heard Patty’s gasp. ‘Ben’s going to be okay. Didn’t they tell you? Oh, God, love. Fancy letting you think….’ She put out a hand and gripped Emma’s arm. ‘Ben has a smashed leg and a few cracked ribs, that’s all, and knowing him he’ll be up and about afore long.’ Her bright gash of a mouth with the lipstick chewed off at the edges wrenched itself out of shape. ‘It is Tracy who’s gone. She had one of her chests, and it turned to pneumonia, an’ there was nothing they could do. They had warned me they sometimes go that way, her sort, but I can’t get over me leaving her with a neighbour so I could go to work, an’ it happened when I wasn’t there. I should have been holding her, you see.’

  All her own distress forgotten for the moment, Emma sat up and pulled the weeping girl into her arms.

  ‘You weren’t to know. You mustn’t think that. Please … oh, please, Patty. Don’t cry like that.’

  ‘It were telling Ben.’ Patty’s voice came muffled. ‘He worshipped that kid. Even though she didn’t walk right or talk proper, she would do anything for Ben. An’ smile! Did you ever know a kid what smiled all the time like what she did?’ Patty groped for a tissue and pushed herself away from the bed. ‘An’ now I’ve upset you when what I came for was to see how you were.’ She dabbed yer eyes. ‘You’ve had a miss, haven’t you, love?’

  Emma nodded, biting her lips. ‘But that’s nothing compared. I had never really begun to think that what was there was a baby.’ She smiled a rueful smile. ‘Not till I knew I was losing it, then it mattered.’

  Patty scrubbed her eyes, still ringed with the previous day’s mascara. ‘I’ve had two, love. Two misses, and the last one I didn’t tell nobody about. I just kept on going and thanked God.’ She leaned forward, whispering. ‘It was that bloke you saw that day you came, an’ I wasn’t going to have his baby, not if I had to winkle it out of me meself.’ She looked round the ward then lowered her voice even more. ‘I drank gin from a pint pot and sat in a bath till I pickled meself, an’ that got shut of it all right.’

  ‘Oh, Patty.’ Emma knew she was going to sleep again, and tried hard not to, but it was no good. And although the last thing she should have remembered was Patty’s pinched face with the blue eyes sunk deep into red slits, the face she saw was a man’s face, dark with disappointment and a terrible anger.

  ‘Oh, Simon. It’s all up with us now.’ Her mind said that quite clearly before she slipped into unconsciousness once again.

  * * *

  She was back home two days afterwards to find that Simon had cancelled his return visit to London and taken the whole week off to look after her.

  Emma was touched to find that he had removed the baby things from what was to have been the nursery. Nothing much. She had been too superstitious to buy anything big, remembering how the neighbours would not give a pram or a cot house-room until the last possible moment for fear of what they called tempting fate. Just a couple of matinée coats, and a pile of patterns and a bag of knitting wool she had promised herself to make a start on one day.

  And now that day would never come.

  Simon was caring and tender, but although he had told her he was used to fending for himself, his undomesticated floundering in the kitchen and the meals he produced – whole soups from tins, and thick wedges of cheese grilled on blackened pieces of toast – were more indicative of a man used to being ministered to.

  ‘I am not ill,’ she told him, but her mirror showed a white face with hollowed dark eyes, and when she tried to sleep it was only to wake from a screaming nightmare in which she dreamed her baby was being torn from her, to the background sound of metal crashing into metal.

  Once she came down from an enforced afternoon rest to find him seated at the dining-table with papers spread all around him – papers which he pushed guiltily away.

  ‘Simon,’ she said softly, ‘why don’t you go back to work?’

  He stared at her in open dismay. ‘And leave you all alone?’ He shuffled the papers together. ‘I thought you were asleep, love. Did the telephone disturb you? It was Harry Gordon asking for some figures. It seems they can’t manage without me after all.’

  ‘Then go back.’ Emma pulled at the ribbon ties of her pale-cream housecoat. ‘I’m not an invalid. The doctor didn’t say I had to rest all day.’ She smiled, a faint smile that was a mere shadow passing over her features. ‘If I were still living in Litchfield Avenue I would be thinking about going back to work myself by now. I’m tough, Simon. Honestly. I’m much tougher than you think.’

  ‘You don’t look tough.’ He came to her then and pulled her gently into his arms, but even the way he held her was different. There was no straining her to him, no hardness of his body pressed against hers. He held her as if she were a delicate child, all womanliness vanished, with the passion that had once bound them vanished.

  The only reason he still slept with her, Emma had decided, was for the simple reason that in the whole of the house there was still only the one bed. He seemed afraid to come too close, and when she whimpered in the night he got up to make her a cup of tea instead of drawing her close and allowing her to sob her anguish away in the comfort of his arms.

  ‘Go back tomorrow,’ she said, and walked slowly upstairs to get dressed, and wonder at the skirt that hung round her waist in loose folds, and the zip that stayed sadly zipped into place.

  She wandered round the house like a small pale ghost when he went shamefacedly back to the factory, throwing his brief-case and his document folder into the back of the car.

  ‘If you are sure you will be all right?’ He had asked the question so many times, and she had tried to laugh as she almost pushed him through the door.

  ‘Ginny will be coming in,’ was the last thing he told her, and when true to his word Ginny appeared, Emma had to start all over again with the assurances of her well-being.

  ‘I am not an invalid. Truly.’ She reached up to the dresser shelf for the inevitable coffee mugs. ‘Where’s the baby?’

  ‘Mother’s got him.’ Ginny took over and motioned Emma to a chair. ‘I thought that maybe….’ She looked embarrassed, and busied herself with the electric kettle.

  ‘Now let’s get this straight.’ Emma pushed her hair back behind her ears. ‘I lost my baby, but I hadn’t really had time to get used to the idea of it being a baby. I was lucky that I wasn’t injured badly, or even killed, so don’t you start pandering to emotions I haven’t got. I am fine, absolutely fine.’

  ‘Then why do you look so bloody awful?’ Ginny walked to the fridge and took out a bottle of milk. ‘You can have postnatal depression without having had a baby, you know. And if you are going to shout at me and say you’re not depressed, then stop wasting your time. If I say you are depressed, then that is what you are. Depressed.’

  The kettle came to the boil and she poured the water into the two waiting mugs. ‘They haven’t told you that you can’t have any more babies, have they?’

  Emma was not sure whether the tears in her eyes were from weakness or laughter. She had never known anyone quite like Ginny Boland. Miscarriages and abortions were usually spoken about in hushed tones, with shakes of the head, and meaningful expressions. ‘Three children and never a miss,’ Mam had said, as if by losing her baby a woman betrayed her own body.

  ‘They said I would be all right,’ was all Emma could bring herself to reply. ‘It was more the shock than an actual injury.’

  ‘Then the sooner you start another one the better.’ Ginny put a steaming mug of coffee in front of Emma and sat down. ‘You shouldn’t have much difficulty in getting Simon to co-operate.’ She took a sip and grimaced. ‘I’ll never be able to get used to doing without sugar, but I must try. I’ll be heavier than Roger soon a
nd can you think of anything less romantic?’

  ‘That girl you first saw coming here.’ Emma spoke suddenly, quickly, before she could change her mind, the urge to talk swamping her with a kind of shamed relief. ‘She went to a clinic and had an abortion, and although Simon didn’t actually say, I know he never forgave her. I asked him last night why he didn’t marry her, and though he didn’t say, I know it was that.’

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Ginny thumped the thick mug down on the breakfast bar. ‘Men are such shits, aren’t they? Now why did he have to tell you a thing like that? Now, of all times.’

  ‘So when I got pregnant and threatened to do the same, he offered to marry me.’ Emma’s tone was quite factual, utterly devoid of emotion. She scooped a hair or something from the remains of her coffee. Ginny opened both eyes wide.

  ‘So now you think he doesn’t want you? That he feels he married you for nothing?

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh God! Have you asked him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Emma clasped both hands together underneath her chin. ‘Because I am frightened of the truth. If I lost Simon I would want to die.’

  ‘No, you bloody wouldn’t!’ Ginny raised her voice. ‘You are a beautiful girl. Yes, you are. And you’ve got all your life in front of you.’ She ran her fingers through her short curly hair. ‘You wouldn’t …? She looked frantically round the kitchen as if searching for a lethal weapon. ‘You haven’t got any tablets upstairs or anything, have you? Because if you have then I am going up to get them.’ She stood up, poised for action. ‘It’s your unstable background, that is what it is. Your mother going off and everything, and your father being sent to prison. You won’t accept happiness. It scares the pants off you. That is what it is. You are depressed,’ she finished triumphantly.

  ‘Okay, you win.’ Emma managed a smile, and sensing her change of mood, Ginny changed the subject and showed Emma the leaflets she had brought with details of the various courses to be had for mature students.