Three In a Bed

by Carmen Reid

  ‘Well . . .’ she paused. ‘Let’s just say if Merris was a racehorse, I wouldn’t be taking it round the back and shooting it in the head just yet. And that’s all I’m saying.’

  Mitch burst into relieved laughter. A little too relieved, she thought. If Merris was a racehorse, she’d certainly not be placing any bets on it and she’d be phoning the vet to ask if there was any hope. But then, she was the vet. She was the one who would be recommending either some very expensive treatment or the bullet. The responsibility of her job bore down on her.

  When Mitch had gone, her phone rang again. It was Don.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘I’m getting bugger all done today.’

  ‘Shall I go?’

  ‘No, no I want to talk to you. It’s the baby, I got the test results and there’s a chance it might have Down’s Syndrome.’ The words tumbled out.

  ‘What? What test?’

  ‘A blood test they do. There’s a 2 per cent chance of Down’s Syndrome. They’re suggesting we do more tests.’

  ‘OK . . .’ he said slowly. ‘It’s OK. I’m sure it’s going to be OK . . . We need some more information about this, don’t we?’

  ‘I’m speaking to the midwife tonight.’ She realized her heart was beating fast and she was feeling really panicky. ‘Can you try and get home early tonight? I’m going to leave soon.’

  ‘Yeah, no problem. I’ll be there just after seven unless there’s a last-minute hitch. Shall I get some food?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Don.’

  ‘OK, see you later, hon. Don’t worry – it’ll be fine.’

  Why did men always say that? He didn’t know if it was going to be OK any more than she did.

  ‘Thanks, Don,’ she managed. ‘Bye.’

  She struggled on for another hour, trying to work but finally she powered down the computer. She’d had enough for the day, she couldn’t concentrate, her hand was resting on her faint tummy bump. She felt scared and protective and confused.

  By the end of the evening, she and Don had reached a decision. She was not going to have an amnio test. Declan had told her it was the only way to be sure the baby was OK but she had argued back that it was madness to assess a 2 per cent risk with a procedure which carried a 1–4 per cent risk of miscarriage.

  They would go to the hospital tomorrow for a detailed scan which had an 80 per cent chance of giving them an accurate result.

  The next morning, Bella climbed into the limo, said hello to Geoff, then slumped into her seat, too tired and preoccupied to bother with the paper. The awfulness of the decision they could be facing later in the day was too terrible to think about, but she couldn’t stop herself.

  She felt her stomach flutter in a strange way . . . nerves. It fluttered again and she just knew it was the baby moving. It was one of those magical first time experiences, like a first kiss, first aeroplane ride, first Valentine.

  She looked out of the window to make sure Geoff couldn’t see the tears welling up in her eyes. She was expecting a baby. A real live little person. It was as if it was dawning on her for the first time.

  What if the baby had Down’s Syndrome? Was that so bad? Would she really want to give it up? She knew what that meant. An induced labour and giving birth to a tiny, stillborn baby, an unimaginable horror.

  ‘What do you think about these East Asian technology ISAs then?’

  ‘Hmm?’ She was startled out of her thoughts by Geoff who was looking at her over the edge of the paper.

  ‘Well, if you’ve got a few quid spare, sling it in,’ she answered. ‘Stand back and watch it mushroom to forty times its original value or be wiped out. They’re still pretty high risk.’

  He didn’t say anything else. Just went back to the personal finance page.

  Christ, thought Bella, if he spent as much time worrying about the company’s finances as he did about his own bank balance, Merris wouldn’t be in such a sorry state.

  And it was, too. Every day, she ran more figures through the computer and uncovered new areas of decline. The company was running beautifully, smoothly and efficiently but it was going nowhere.

  Because it provided pensions, life assurance, illness cover and so on, the coffers were full of mountainous funds, but it barely seemed to have registered that in the past two years the number of new customers had dropped off dramatically. There were no plans in the pipeline to remarket or recreate the financial products Merris sold, no plans to get on-line, and the growth of the fund itself was barely acceptable. With all that money in the bank Merris should be doing something stellar.

  She was also seriously worried about a group of pension holders who were taking Merris back to court on appeal next year. If they won this case, the company would be utterly screwed.

  This wasn’t just her first solo job, it was the first time she’d worked with a company in such bad shape. It was making her very nervous. The whole place was run on such a no-change culture, how could she even begin to chip away at it? She picked at a cracked nail in need of attention.

  She’d arranged to meet Don outside the main entrance of the hospital at two o’clock that afternoon. It was ten to two as she stepped out of the cab but, thank God, he was already there.

  His coat was buttoned with the collar up against the wind. He was trying to read a broadsheet but it was getting blown about and he was struggling to fold it. She watched him for a moment as he tucked it into a quarter and carried on reading. Then a scowl crossed his face and he took his ringing mobile out of his coat pocket.

  At that moment, she absolutely loved him, this tall, capable, independent, clever man.

  He spotted her and came running over, mobile still clamped to his head.

  With an arm round her he said into the phone, ‘I’m sorry, this is important. You’ll just have to cut me a couple of hours of slack here. Yup, I’ll come back in at five, we’ll sort it out then. Right, bye.’

  He put his phone back into his pocket, then turned on a smile for her: ‘Hello, Bella.’ He kissed her on the mouth. ‘It’s nothing, don’t worry about it, some panicking tosser back at the office. Let’s just concentrate on this, shall we?’

  She was so glad he was there. She had contemplated doing this on her own, but he had insisted on being with her. She slipped her arm through his and they went in, making their way through dreary, fluorescent lit corridors to the ultrasound department.

  In the large, institutional beige waiting room, packed with people, an old man was lying on a trolley, the chairs were crammed with heavily pregnant women and slightly pregnant women. In the corner a girl of about 18 or so was sobbing. Three women in green overalls and long white coats were bustling about behind the chaotic reception desk.

  Welcome to the hell on earth otherwise known as the NHS, Bella thought grimly.

  She handed over her appointment card. It was taken wordlessly and put in a tray on top of a bundle of others.

  ‘If you could take a seat and drink plenty of water, please. You need a full bladder for the scan.’ The woman didn’t even look up at her, just carried on writing.

  Bella knew this and had already glugged back a bottle of Evian on the way over. Her bladder was full. She looked at the room packed with waiting women and realized she might have made a mistake there. Should she go for a pee and start drinking water again? Or wait with her legs crossed and hope it wasn’t going to take too long?

  She sat down with Don. There was nothing they could say that wasn’t going to be of minute interest to everyone else sitting silently in the room.

  ‘I’ve got all the papers in my bag. D’you want one?’ He held her hand and patted it with his fingers. ‘It’ll be fine,’ he added in a whisper.

  She reached in and came out with the Daily Mail. She was half-heartedly reading through: ‘Why I gave up life in a palace for passion with a plumber’ when her name was called out.

  Her heart jump-started and she fel
t both cold and sweaty at once. This was really happening, they were going to know in a few minutes. She stood up with Don and gripped his hand.

  Her mind was racing. She and Don were in a hospital together – already a first – and they were about to see their baby on a screen and possibly be told that it was mentally handicapped, or special needs, or whatever term you were supposed to use nowadays, before it had even been born. This was unreal. She walked along the lino corridor clutching Don’s hand with her heartbeat hammering in her dry throat.

  She was ushered into a curtained cubicle with a little bed. A short, smiling Filipino nurse said hello then gestured to the bed. Bella lay down and unbuttoned her blouse and her skirt.

  Don seemed to be awkwardly filling up all the available space left. The curtain was hanging over his shoulder and snagging along the rail whenever he moved.

  Bella lowered her waistband and was preoccupied with the prospect of Don turning suddenly and bringing the whole flimsy little contraption down.

  ‘OK, we just put some gel on.’ The nurse smiled and squirted a huge quantity of ice cold blue gunk onto Bella’s stomach. ‘Now we take a look at baby.’ She moved the grey handset into place and started sliding it along Bella’s greased navel, staring intently at the screen by the side of the bed.

  Bella could hardly breathe. Don fixed his eyes on the screen, which was just out of Bella’s view. For several long minutes, the nurse looked and slid her handset and said nothing. She pressed a button and the screen made clunking noises.

  ‘I’m just taking some cross-sections for a better look.’ This was not reassuring.

  More agonizingly long minutes went by. Bella fixed her eyes on Don’s face and he broke off from the screen to give her a wan smile.

  Finally the nurse turned to look at her: ‘I’m sorry’ – the word hung in the air and everything after that went into slow motion. Bella watched her lips form the next words: ‘Sorry to take so long. I wanted to be sure.’

  Bella could feel the blood draining away from her head and cold beads of sweat break out in her armpits.

  ‘Baby looks absolutely normal,’ said the nurse. ‘We can’t guarantee from the scan, but I can see no cause for concern. Let me talk you through it.’

  She swivelled the screen to face Bella and Don moved round the bed to stand beside her. She felt for his hand and squeezed it. He squeezed her back. She was trying to feel relief, to run the words ‘absolutely normal’ over in her mind again, but she still felt a residue of panic.

  The nurse ran the handset over her stomach again and a grey and white grainy image flashed up. It looked like the surface of the moon and Bella could see a little astronaut moving about dreamily.

  ‘There is baby, bouncing up and down. You can see the legs and arms.’ She pressed a button: ‘This is a cross-section of the heart. The four chambers are all normal.’

  Amazingly up on the screen was a tiny pulsating heart, contracting and opening at a relentless pace.

  ‘This is a cross-section of the brain, again normal.’

  A grey expanse filled the screen. Bella was looking inside the head of her baby before it was born. She felt in awe.

  The nurse clicked back to the lunar surface view again. The little astronaut was turning about, carefree and gleeful.

  ‘OK, that’s it.’ She turned off the monitor and handed Bella a wodge of tissue paper to wipe down her stomach.

  ‘I’ll put the report in your maternity book, take it to your midwife who’ll go through it again with you, but there’s no obvious cause for concern. The Ladies is second on the left,’ she added.

  How could Bella have forgotten? The dull ache in the pit of her stomach was a bladder shrieking to be emptied.

  When she came out after a marathon pee, she and Don hugged hard.

  Then he took her arm and led her down the corridor. ‘That was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever experienced,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ Bella replied. ‘Thank God everything’s OK.’

  ‘What would you have done if it wasn’t?’ asked Don, seeing how pale and shaken she still looked.

  ‘I don’t know. I’d like to think we’d have been big enough to say “This was meant to be, let’s have this baby” but I don’t know.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ he said and squeezed her round the shoulder. ‘I didn’t know either. I think we should go and get a drink.’

  ‘I’ve got to get back.’ Bella sounded gloomy.

  ‘Me too, but I think we owe ourselves one.’

  ‘OK.’

  Looking down the road in front of the hospital, they could see a pub sign 50 yards ahead.

  ‘That will do.’ Don steered her along at a hurried pace and they opened the door on a cosy little pub, quiet after the flurry of lunchtime drinkers and before the evening rush kicked in.

  Don went to the bar as Bella sat down on a sofa. She fumbled in her bag for her cigarettes, but just guiltily held the packet in her hands.

  Don came back with a glass of white wine and what looked like a double whisky with ice.

  ‘Here we go.’ He sat down close beside her and she could smell on his breath that he’d already tossed one back at the bar.

  ‘Should you be smoking?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not. Should you be drinking quadruple whiskies?’

  ‘Aha, caught again. Damn.’ He took a sip from his glass. ‘I was pretty worried, you know. Up until today, this has been so abstract. You’ve hardly even got a bump.’

  After a pause, he added, ‘Christ, I just can’t imagine us with a baby, Bella,’ and gave a long sigh.

  She didn’t say anything, so he took another slug of whisky then carried on.

  ‘I’m so unprepared for this. I’ve never pushed a pram or changed a nappy or held a bottle or even a baby, I don’t think. Then suddenly there’s all this worry about whether it will be OK.’

  ‘We never asked,’ said Bella suddenly. ‘We don’t even know if it’s a girl or a boy.’

  ‘No. Well, anyway. There’s all this worry and I realize I am worried. I’m frightened for a baby who hasn’t even been born yet but who does exist.’

  She put the cigarettes back in her bag. ‘I feel that too,’ she said. ‘But let’s not panic. The baby is OK. We will be too.’

  She reached for her wine glass and allowed herself a hefty mouthful. It sank straight into her stomach and settled the nervous jangling. She closed her eyes, swallowed again and saw with horror that the glass was empty.

  ‘Better have another,’ said Don.

  ‘No. Lime and soda, hon, I really mustn’t.’

  He came back with a tray loaded with another double whisky, her soft drink and a second glass of wine, just in case.

  ‘We can’t just sit here and get plastered,’ Bella reminded him.

  ‘It’s solved a lot of problems for me in the past.’ Don was smiley and relaxed now, leaning back on the sofa beside her. He unbuttoned his coat, ran his fingers through his hair and looked at her with one eyebrow raised.

  ‘Oh don’t give me that look,’ she said.

  ‘What look?’ he asked, eyebrow still cocked.

  ‘That “I’m sooo bad, you know you want to misbehave with me” look. I said I’d be back.’

  ‘OK, go outside, phone them, tell them you’re stuck in traffic and you’ll be in early tomorrow.’

  ‘No. No. No. No.’ She was smiling at him now.

  ‘OK, I know, we’ll have a lovely, relaxing hour here, then we will get in our cabs, go back to our tosspot offices and say we were delayed by aliens who forced us to drink in a faithfully replicated pub in outer space.’

  ‘Go order my cab now.’ She said it firmly but she wasn’t angry with him.

  ‘You’re no fun, Bella. But that’s why I married you, to stop me degenerating into a drunken bum.’

  ‘I am fun. But only at the right times in the proper places.’

  ‘See?’ he said.

  He went over to the bar where she heard him s
ay: ‘Can we have two cabs in twenty minutes, please? One going east, the other to Hammersmith. Cheers, mate.’

  ‘Twenty minutes?!’ she said when he got back.

  ‘Shame to waste these. Cheers.’ He drained his whisky, as she sipped her soda.

  ‘Are we going to fight over the last one?’ He gestured at the wine glass.

  ‘You total soak,’ she laughed at him. Damn! How could they have forgotten to ask for a picture of the scan?

  ‘It’s really time we told our folks about the baby,’ he said, halfway down the wine.

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ she replied.

  Chapter Ten

  ‘HELLO?’

  ‘Tania, it’s me.’

  ‘Bella! How are you doing?’

  ‘Good, fine. What about you, darling?’

  ‘Oh, surviving. Are we going to meet this weekend? Please say yes.’

  ‘Yes, that’s why I’m phoning,’ Bella said, ‘Can I come round? I’ve got a dress panic.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I’ve got two Christmas parties to go to this week and I can’t get into anything I own without showing off a suspicious bump.’

  ‘Don’t tell me no-one knows yet!’

  ‘Well, I’m still only four months, and a little bit.’

  ‘You are such a wimp. So, you’re pretending to be sweet but actually you’re wanting to borrow a fat frock from your fat friend.’

  ‘Don’t say that. You’re not fat, you have better clothes than me.’

  ‘Yeah, in a size bigger. Bella, does this mean you still haven’t told your parents about the baby?’

  ‘No, I have told them. It went OK, surprisingly OK.’

  ‘See,’ Tania couldn’t help adding.

  The parent phone calls had happened a few evenings ago. Don’s mother, Maddie had of course been thrilled and had spoken to Bella at length about morning sickness and backache and warned her to take it easy. She’d made a lovely fuss and couldn’t wait to see them both at Christmas.

  Then Bella had put the receiver down and toyed with dialling her parents’ number for so long that finally Don had picked up the handset and punched it in himself.