Now or Never

by Penny Jordan

  Two fields away, a farmer on a tractor watched in horror, unable to believe his eyes. He had seen the woman walk deliberately into the path of the oncoming car and he had seen, too, the driver’s heroic and pitifully doomed attempt to avoid her.

  From his vantage point on the hill above the road, he could see the tiny doll-like figure of the woman being thrown up in the air by the impact, and he could hear the sound of tearing metal and breaking glass as the car skidded off the road, and embedded itself in the ancient beech tree planted by his grandfather.

  The young police officers who came to Maggie tried to be professional but stumbled betrayingly over their words. Maggie could see the shock in the eyes of the woman as she glanced at her belly.

  ‘Where is he?’ was all she could ask them, her mouth too dry to allow her to form any other words. Inside her Oliver’s baby kicked furiously, as though refusing to accept what had happened.

  ‘St Luke’s. I…There…He has suffered serious head injuries,’ the male officer told her, avoiding eye contact with her.

  Serious head injuries. Maggie’s gorge rose.

  ‘I must go to him!’ she said at once, oblivious to the look they were exchanging.

  Half an hour later she was being escorted into Intensive Care by one of the nurses. Not the same one who had nursed Nicki and Joey, she noticed absently.

  Just outside the ward the nurse stopped. ‘The consultant neurologist wants to have a word with you before…before you go in,’ she told her quietly.

  The consultant was thin and aesthetic-looking, his expression grim.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he told Maggie, ‘but I have to say this. Oliver’s injuries are such that, without the life-support machine he is on, he cannot survive. He’s in a coma, and the extent of the brain damage he has suffered means…’

  ‘Are you trying to tell me that he will be paralysed?’ Maggie asked him tonelessly.

  The consultant looked away from her and then back again.

  ‘Mrs Rockford, I don’t think you can have been listening to me. I appreciate that this is a most dreadful shock for you, and in your condition, but the truth is that Oliver is already, in every real sense of the word, dead. His heart, his breathing…Life, if you wish to call it that, is being pumped into him and through him by machines.’

  ‘No,’ Maggie protested stubbornly, her voice breaking. ‘He’s badly injured, I know. In a coma…’ She stopped as she looked into the consultant’s eyes, and the hope to which she had been clinging so desperately died abruptly. As abruptly as Oliver himself had died?

  ‘I want to see him,’ she insisted.

  Consideringly, the consultant looked at her.

  ‘I don’t think…’ he began, but Maggie overruled him, turning towards the door very determinedly and pushing it open, leaving him to follow her. Oliver was in a different room from the one Nicki and Joey had been in. The nurse who had been checking the machinery was sensitive enough to walk out as Maggie went in.

  Oliver’s head had been bandaged. There were livid scratches on his face. His chest was bare, and all around him was a mass of tubes and attachments, evidence of man’s clumsily inept attempts to mimic the wondrous workings of the human body.

  Science could only do so much, Maggie recognised as she looked into the unseeing eyes of the man she loved. And yet it could also perform truly remarkable miracles, she reminded herself as she placed her hand on her body. The baby’s movements seemed to mirror the heavy thud of her own heartbeat, which in turn matched the pulsing of the machine pumping ‘life’ into Oliver’s inert body.

  ‘In normal circumstances, he would have been pronounced dead at the scene of the accident,’ the consultant told her quietly. ‘But the paramedics thought they detected a heartbeat and so…However, it is my opinion that the life support equipment should be turned off.’

  ‘No!’ Maggie was surprised at the forcefulness of her own voice. ‘No. Not yet,’ she pleaded with the consultant, telling him jerkily, ‘There is someone he needs to see…someone who needs to see him first. Please?’ she begged when she saw him frown. ‘Please…’

  ‘I don’t know…’ The consultant was frowning and shaking his head.

  ‘Please, just give me two days…Please…’

  She had already decided what she had to do. Had known, in fact, from the moment the police had brought her the news and explained to her how the accident had happened.

  How pitilessly, appallingly ironic it was that she had feared for herself, when all the time it had been Oliver who had been in danger.

  Maggie had no idea who the woman who had stepped out in front of Oliver was, but she did know that her act had been deliberate, and that it was in some way connected with the letters she had received. But she could not allow herself to waste time thinking about that—or her—now. There was something much more important she needed her energy for.

  She rang the clinic from her mobile, standing outside the hospital and praying that her consultant would be there.

  When he was, she gave a small mental prayer of thanks, quickly explaining to him what had happened and what she wanted to do.

  ‘You want to have the baby delivered now? Advance the date by two weeks?’

  ‘I’m thirty-seven weeks, nearly thirty-eight,’ she reminded him, stumbling over the words. ‘Is it possible…? Will it be safe for the baby? Only I want Oliver to…’ Unable to speak for her emotions, she had to stop. But she couldn’t cry yet, she told herself sternly. She had too much to do!

  Whilst she waited for his reply, she automatically tensed her body against the aching pain that had been nagging at her all day, and which she had put down to her furious spurt of activity the previous day, putting the final touches to the nursery, filling its cupboard and drawers with the tiny clothes she had bought.

  ‘It isn’t quite that easy, Maggie,’ she heard him saying slowly. ‘An operating theatre would have to be made available, it would take me at least a couple of hours to get there, and then you’ll need your surgeon and—’

  ‘Please,’ Maggie begged him. ‘You said yourself when you saw me last week that the baby’s head is engaged, and…’ She stopped, gasping and recoiling from the sudden surge of pain that gripped her. She suddenly felt clammy and giddy, as though she was going to be sick. He had to agree. Oliver had to see his baby! He had to!

  The pain receded, allowing her to exhale in relief, and then stand frozen with shock as she felt the sudden rush of fluid.

  A passing nurse gave her a quick glance, and then stopped.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she reassured Maggie with a smile. ‘Your waters have broken, that’s all. Well, at least it’s happened in the right place. Are you having contractions? Oh, yes.’ She answered her own question as Maggie’s belly suddenly and very obviously tightened. ‘Someone is getting impatient…’

  Dizzily Maggie looked at her, and then at her own belly. She was still holding the telephone receiver, she realised.

  ‘It looks like the decision has been made for us,’ she told the consultant. ‘I’m already in labour!’

  She was whisked into the labour ward, and from there down to the theatre, even though she had pleaded with the obstetrician to be allowed to deliver the baby naturally. ‘It’s too much of a risk,’ the doctor told her firmly.

  Maggie was conscious throughout the whole procedure, her eyes brimming with tears when the obstetrician announced, ‘Congratulations, Maggie, you have a beautiful, perfect, healthy baby girl,’ as she placed her baby on Maggie’s body.

  A girl! Oliver had been wrong. It had been his daughter she had been carrying and not his son. And yet immediately Maggie felt a sharp, piercing thrill of joy and instant communion with her child as they looked into one another’s eyes, and shared one another’s pain. Kissing her, Maggie whispered heartbrokenly to her of their shared loss, and their shared unique gift of having been part of the life of so special a man, so special a love.

  ‘But it’s your right to know him, and to know
just what a wonderful, special person he is, just as it’s his right to know you!’

  Somehow, without knowing how, Maggie knew that their child, Oliver’s child, would know for all her life that her father had been with her when she had come into the world, and that that would hold her and boost her, keep her safe and give her strength whenever she should need it.

  They had to push her in a wheelchair to Oliver’s bed because of the Caesarean, the baby carefully wrapped in her arms.

  Oliver was still surrounded by the paraphernalia of tubes and wires that were keeping him alive. The consultant neurologist looked on slightly disapprovingly.

  ‘I…I want you to take everything away from him,’ she told him huskily.

  Holding Oliver’s daughter, she watched as they did so. Her eyes blurred with tears as she asked for the wheelchair to be manoeuvred closer to the bed.

  Once Oliver was free of everything, she laid their daughter tenderly in the curve of his arm, giving the nurse a grateful look as she realised what Maggie wanted to do and lifted his arm to guide it round the baby.

  Without her having to say anything the medical staff melted away, so that it was just the three of them.

  ‘Here she is, Oliver,’ Maggie whispered to him. ‘Your daughter, and she is so like you. Look at her nose. It is quite definitely yours,’ she laughed. ‘And she’s got your long, elegant bones. She’s going to be tall, lucky girl.

  ‘Baby, this is your daddy,’ she told her daughter. ‘And he is the most wonderful man…’ She stopped, unable to go on, vaguely aware that one of the nurses had returned and was discreetly taking some photographs.

  Through the blur of her tears, she thought she saw Oliver’s eyelids flicker, felt the ripple of sensation as he tried to move his arm, heard the softness of the breath in his lungs as he breathed a kiss…as if somehow he knew…as if he could feel their presence…as if, despite everything, the most elemental, special part of him was there with them. And for Maggie, it was.

  Handing her precious baby over to one of the nurses, Maggie kept her vigil over Oliver until even she knew that the coldness of his flesh beneath her hand meant that he had truly gone.

  And then she allowed herself to cry.

  They were waiting for her in her private room on the maternity ward, all of them, alerted to what had happened by Marcus, who had chanced to hear the news from a medical colleague.

  Alice, her face tear-stained and puffy, Stella for once without anything to say. And Nicki, holding Maggie and Oliver’s baby with the same fierce maternal protection and love with which she looked at Maggie herself as she was wheeled back into the room.

  There was no need for words. No need for anything. Their presence was enough—their presence, Maggie recognised distantly, was everything.

  Epilogue

  Just over a year later

  Alice reached the restaurant first. Stuart dropped her off. They had been to have lunch earlier with Tom and his wife, putting in place the final arrangements for the Christmas party that Stuart had masterminded for a group of underprivileged teenagers with whom he had become personally involved.

  Tom had laughed when Stuart had initially suggested looking for sponsors to finance flying lessons for them, but Stuart had persisted and persevered, knocking on doors, until he’d had the support and the financing, and even retraining himself so that he could teach them.

  They were closer now than they had ever been, happier than they had ever been in many ways, Alice acknowledged as she turned to wave to him before walking into the restaurant. He was going to go home and then pick up George and William from school later.

  She didn’t have to wait long for the others. Stella came in almost immediately, quickly followed by Nicki and Maggie.

  ‘Laura said not to wait for them, as they may be a little bit delayed,’ Nicki informed them.

  ‘She’s picking Zoë up, isn’t she?’ Alice checked.

  Although Zoë had become an exemplary non-drinker after finishing her rehab and counselling courses, she was still banned from driving, a fact that she accepted with a firm cheerfulness and an open admission that she was lucky the only loss caused by her drink driving was that of her licence.

  ‘Yes,’ Nicki confirmed. ‘She wanted to drop George and William’s Christmas presents off. I don’t think it will be very long before Laura and Marcus start their own family. If anything Marcus is even more broody than she is, and that’s saying something!’

  They all laughed.

  ‘Well, with only a week to go to the wedding and two weeks to Christmas, we’re lucky we were able to fit tonight in,’ Stella said as they were shown to their table, a round one with ample seating for the six of them.

  ‘What—miss out on our monthly get-together?’ Nicki protested, shaking her head. ‘No way. No way, ever, ever again.’

  For a moment all four of them were silent, looking at one another, sharing in one another’s thoughts and feelings without needing the clumsiness of words to communicate.

  What Nicki had experienced through her depression had given her an insight and a depth that had allowed her finally to settle proudly and comfortably into her own personality—and it showed.

  ‘That was a wonderful late summer break we all had at your villa, Nicki.’ Stella smiled.

  ‘Yes, Kit says we’ll have to make it an annual event—and, talking of holidays, how was Canada?’

  Before answering her, Stella looked round the table. The love and reassurance she could see in the faces of her friends gave her a warm feeling of security that was like curling into a thick blanket on a cold night.

  ‘Canada was a bit like Jack.’ Stella laughed. ‘Exhilarating and totally exhausting. Neither of us could believe how much he’d grown, even though Lillian and Julie had both warned us. Which reminds me—you’ll never guess what! Julie is thinking about coming back here to do her degree, and she asked Rich and me if she could possibly stay with us. She’ll be bringing Jack with her, of course. We told her to think carefully about it and not rush into anything. But if she does decide to come back here, we’d love to have them both. Not that we won’t be seeing plenty of them.’ Stella beamed. ‘Lillian and Gerald have invited us over in the spring, and Gerald was saying that they are planning to come over for a family wedding.’

  ‘Talking of weddings, I’ve finally found an outfit for Laura and Marcus’s,’ Nicki announced. ‘Well, at least, Laura found it. I was upstairs in the loft getting down the Christmas decorations when she rang.’ She pulled a small face. ‘I know it’s sentimental, but I kept the ones that Jennifer used to use when Laura was little, and I seem to have kept every single one Kit and I have bought ever since. So Laura said the last time she was home that unless I went through them and cleared out all the old stuff, she was going to do it for me. Anyway, she was full of excitement because she’d thought she’d found exactly the right outfit for me and I had to drop everything and meet her in London straight away!’

  They discussed wedding clothes for a little, then Maggie asked Alice warmly, ‘How’s Zoë?’

  ‘She’s fine,’ Alice responded happily. ‘I feel that she’s finally beginning to put the past behind her. She and Ian are to divorce and she’s really settled into the new house.’

  ‘Zoë has certainly turned her life around,’ Nicki approved.

  ‘Yes,’ Alice acknowledged. ‘She’s quite open about the fact that she will always have to consider herself an alcoholic, and she says that she will never drink again. Working for Nicki has made all the difference to her. It’s given her a real sense of purpose and achievement. I can’t tell you how grateful I am to you for giving her a job, Nicki,’ she told Nicki appreciatively.

  ‘There’s no need for you to be,’ Nicki responded with a smile before informing the others, ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of asking Zoë to work for me before. I know Maggie also thought of it once. Zoë’s a natural—and as it happens it was Laura who suggested it. I must say, though, that I was impressed by th
eir dedication when we were all in Italy, all those faxes to one another and splitting their time off so that one of them was here on hand all the time.

  ‘I don’t envy this generation, you know,’ Nicki continued seriously. ‘We worked hard but we had fun, we were pushing back barriers, exploring, and in some ways it didn’t matter if we succeeded or failed, because we had nothing to measure up to other than our own dreams and ideals. Laura and Zoë’s generation have so much pressure on them in so many different ways. Although I don’t suppose we recognised it at the time, in many ways we were and indeed are a truly privileged generation.’

  ‘How’s Bella, Maggie?’ Alice asked. She hadn’t seen her god-daughter for over a week, and at Bella’s age every day, never mind every week, brought amazing changes, especially to god-mamas as adoring and protective as Bella’s were.

  The vicar had commented that it was a little unusual for a baby to have three godmothers and no godfather, but he had accepted Maggie’s decision.

  ‘She’s fine,’ Maggie answered. ‘We were worried that she might be starting with a cold the other day, but it was just a little sniffle.’

  ‘No need to ask who’s minding your baby.’ Nicki grinned. They all laughed.

  ‘Does Dan actually ever let her out of his sight?’ Nicki teased. ‘I have never seen a man so besotted…’

  Maggie laughed with them.

  She and Dan had remarried very quietly that summer. After the ceremony they had gone to Oliver’s grave so that Maggie could place her flowers there, and Dan had tactfully left her alone for a little while.

  In the shock of Oliver’s death, her friends and Dan had gathered protectively around her to shield and love her.

  Dan had driven her from the hospital with Bella, to the home she and Oliver had shared together for such a short time, and there she had found, waiting for her, three friends. And they had stayed there that night and for many, many nights after that, keeping a loving watch over her.

  It had been discovered via the clinic that the woman who had caused the accident had been a patient there, and had a history of mental disturbance. The paranoid belief she had developed that Maggie had been given her non-existent eggs had stemmed from the fact that she had broken into the clinic and stolen some records, one of which had been Maggie’s. For some reason, for which no one could find any real explanation, she seemed to have decided that Maggie had conceived the child that should have been hers.