We've Come to Take You Home

by Susan Gandar

  All through the day, every time she went into the larder, she stared at them. Should she? Shouldn’t she? Was eating a chocolate, a gift from her employer’s son, crossing the line?

  That evening, at dinner, after she’d cleared the main course and taken the dirty plates and cutlery down to the kitchen, she opened the larder and took out the chocolates. She carried them upstairs and placed them in the centre of the dining table.

  ‘Jess, what a surprise, chocolates, my favourites, wherever did they come from?’

  She bobbed a curtsey, keeping her eyes down, and said nothing. The Major’s wife turned to her son.

  ‘Tom? Is this you? How lovely. The last time I had a chocolate was before the war.’

  The Major’s son picked up the plate.

  ‘Granaches of strawberry with rum, hazelnut praline or crème mocca?’

  ‘The strawberry, it’s my favourite, so clever of you to remember…’

  Jess turned towards the door. She would leave the family, upstairs, eating their chocolates while she went, downstairs, to get on with the washing up.

  ‘Father?’

  ‘The hazelnut praline. Delicious, Tom, thank you.’

  The Major’s son pushed back his chair.

  ‘Which leaves the crème mocca for you, Jess.’

  He was walking towards her.

  ‘And I won’t take no for an answer.’

  She stared down at the single chocolate sitting on the plate.

  ‘Jess?’

  She turned and ran out of the door, along the hallway and down the stairs into the basement. Right or wrong, whether the Major’s son was just being kind, or whether he had some other motive, she could have said, ‘Sorry but I don’t like chocolate,’ even if it was a lie. But, instead, she’d run out of the dining room without a curtsey; enough in most houses to get an instant dismissal.

  The next morning, at breakfast, everything was as usual. No mention was made of what had happened the evening before. She served the family their poached eggs on toast, went upstairs, made the beds and opened the windows to air the rooms. She cleared the table, did the washing up and gulped down a piece of toast and a mug of lukewarm tea. The Major’s wife gave her that day’s shopping list and then left, with her husband, to go out on a call. They would not be back until after lunch.

  Raindrops were splattering down on the pavement when she opened the front door. It was just a summer shower, the sort that would stop as quickly as it had started, but heavy enough to do some damage. The Major and his wife would not be pleased if they came home to find their curtains and carpets soaked through.

  She went back into the house. She closed the front door and climbed the stairs to the first floor. She closed and bolted the windows. She climbed up the stairs to the second floor. She’d presumed that the Major’s son had gone out, alone or with his parents. She walked down the hallway. She was wrong. His bedroom door, usually open, was closed.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THERE WAS AN INTERCOM to the right of the door. Mac pushed the button. There was silence and then a crackle.

  ‘Hello.’

  Where was he taking her? This was more like a prison than a hospital.

  ‘Hi, it’s Mac.’

  ‘Hi, Mac. Come on in.’

  There was a buzz and the doors hissed open.

  ‘I come here every day. To remind myself…’

  Water cascaded over a cliff face down into a fern-edged pool below. A mother monkey, cuddling a baby monkey to its chest, dangled from a tree. A snake, curled round a bunch of bananas, slept on, a smile on its reptilian face. Frogs with orange webbed feet sat, red eyes bulging, on enormous, tablesize, lily-pads. Parrots darted from tropical flower to tropical flower.

  Mac reached a finger out towards a cloud of yellow and green butterflies shimmering in the sunshine. There was a buzz. A door opened.

  ‘The special baby unit.’

  On all four walls and across the ceiling, shoals of rainbow-coloured fish swam through glimmering coral. There was no thumping on keyboards, no barking out of orders or crashing and slamming of doors. It was so quiet, so peaceful, that the special baby unit, and everybody in it, might well have been swimming along the bottom of the ocean floor.

  ‘Many of the babies that come here are pretty close to the edge…’

  Two people, a man and a woman, were sitting beside a clear plastic box the size of a microwave. It was surrounded on all sides by row upon row of machines.

  ‘The little girl, inside the incubator, is Ruby. Ruby was born at twenty-three weeks, seventeen weeks premature. She’s been here, in the special baby unit, for two weeks now…’

  The wrinkled lump covered in tubes, with a huge head and tummy and skinny arms and legs, looked more like a premature alien from outer space, an infantile ET, than a human baby.

  ‘No one thought she would get this far. But she’s a real little fighter. She never gives up. If anyone’s going to get there she will.’

  The man put his arm round the woman’s shoulder. He hugged her close.

  ‘It may be weeks, even months, before Ruby goes home. She’s so young she hasn’t even got ears, they haven’t had time to grow, but they’ll come.’

  The couple leant forward, heads together.

  ‘Sophie and Daniel come in every day. They sit with Ruby, they tell her stories, sing to her, paint her pictures, even play her music. Very young babies, even as young as Ruby, always know when someone’s there…’

  The next bed in the ward was a cot, the sort you would expect to see in any home where there was a very young baby, and it wasn’t surrounded by machinery.

  ‘Noah was premature, exactly like Ruby. At the beginning nobody knew whether he would get through the next minute or hour, let alone day or week…’

  A man and a woman were standing, arms entwined, looking down at the baby. And this one did look like a baby, the sort you see in TV adverts crawling around with an angelic, beaming smile on its chubby, pink face.

  ‘There were days, very early on, when Noah was so sick, he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t feed, his whole body was yellow with jaundice. Emma and Jake would go back home to bed not knowing, when they woke up in the morning, whether they would still have a son. But they never stopped hoping. And they never stopped loving.’

  The baby gurgled.

  ‘Today’s a special day, for everyone, the nurses and doctors here in the unit who’ve been looking after him, but especially for Noah’s mum and dad. Because, today, Emma and Jake are going to do something they never thought they would be able to do…’

  The woman lifted the baby up out of the cot.

  ‘They’re taking Noah home.’

  Ahead was another cot and lying in that cot was another baby. But that was it. There were no parents, no mother and father, just one nurse. She looked up as they approached.

  ‘Hi, Mac.’

  ‘Sam, this is Jennie. She’s in charge of the ward. Jennie, this is Sam.’

  ‘Hi, Sam.’

  Jennie tucked a blanket round the sleeping baby.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Doing fine. But we’re keeping her here, just to keep an eye on her.’

  ‘And the mother?’

  Jennie shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

  A phone started to ring.

  ‘Too many babies, not enough beds. Bye, Sam.’

  The little girl lay there, eyes tight shut, hands balled into fists, fast asleep.

  ‘She was found on Sunday, early morning, in a bag, in the car park at the back of the hospital…’

  Sunday, yesterday, the same day her father had been admitted to hospital.

  ‘We got a phone call telling us where to find her…’

  A hand uncurled.

  ‘It was raining but the bag was watertight and she’d been wrapped up in a towel which had kept her warm. But we’re worried about the mother. The police are trying to find her. Not to charge her, just to get her here to the hospital so she can be looked aft
er, get some medical care. She sounded not much more than a child herself.’

  The baby wriggled and burped, then opened its eyes.

  ‘Has she got a name?’

  ‘Not that we know of. There was nothing left with her, no note, nothing.’

  The baby smiled up at Sam.

  Light was replaced by darkness, the warmth of the hospital by the cold of a churchyard. She was sitting on a hard stone floor, her back against a wooden door, and something was tugging at her. She looked down – the something was a baby. It was feeding from her breast, a breast swollen with milk, which had to mean that it was her child. In the sense that the body she was inside had had sex with a man, the baby’s father, had carried it for nine months, and given birth to it. She, her mind, had no memory of it, none at all. But what she did have, could feel, was a sense of connection to, even love for this tiny scrap of flesh, blood and bone.

  Her eyes fluttered, closed, opened and then closed. All she wanted to do was sleep. She couldn’t. She didn’t know why, only that she couldn’t. There was something else she had to do.

  She eased the baby away from her breast and laid it, wrapped in its blanket, down on the floor. She hauled herself up. She buttoned her dress, then her coat and walked out of the porch into the churchyard. The body she was inside kept on walking down the gravel path while her mind, trapped inside that body, was shouting, ‘Don’t walk away, go back, you must go back, if you leave your baby she will die.’

  ‘If the police can’t find the mother, she’ll have to go up for adoption.’

  She was back in the special baby unit, standing beside Mac, surrounded by bleeping machinery. Seconds before, she’d been sitting in the church porch, the cold creeping up her body, with the baby tugging at her breast. It hadn’t been her imagination, she hadn’t been asleep so it wasn’t a dream and she hadn’t been drunk. On both occasions, in the intensive care unit and down here in the baby unit, she had been here in the hospital. And these slips into this other world, into this other girl’s body, had been minutes, rather than hours, or even days, apart.

  TWENTY-NINE

  DRIVING ALONG IN HER mother’s car, looking out of the window at the old lady walking her little snub-nosed, black-faced, curly-tailed dog; the two mothers chatting over their coffee, both tenderly stroking their eight-months-pregnant stomachs; the boyfriend and girlfriend entwined around each other at the bus-stop. It was impossible to believe that the uncomplicated world beyond that pane of glass, with everyone going about their daily lives, actually existed. Everything was so normal. Everybody looked so happy.

  ‘There’s no point you hanging around at home. There’s nothing you can do. It will just make things worse. Dad’s OK, he’s stable, all we can do now is wait…’

  That’s what the young doctor with the stethoscope slung round his neck had said, standing by her father’s bed, his arms neatly folded, in the intensive care unit. But there had been no smile on his face, nothing, not even a glimmer.

  ‘You’ll be better off here, at your school, with your friends.’

  Sam unclicked her seatbelt.

  ‘Keeping busy.’

  Perhaps her mother was right. What would she do if she went back home? Go upstairs to her room, lie down on the bed, listen to her father’s voicemail, cry herself to sleep, slip into another world, see and hear things that didn’t exist, wake up, go downstairs to the kitchen and crack open and gulp down another bottle of wine? Then she’d go back upstairs and lie there all night too afraid to close her eyes, get up the next morning, her hands shaking, head throbbing, her body aching, desperate to go back to bed. And on and on it would go, round and round. She had to break that circle.

  ‘I saw things, at the fair, and when Dad was driving away. But I’m not just seeing them, it’s like I’m there, like I’m somebody else, living their life, walking down the street, wearing their –’

  ‘I shouldn’t have left you alone, Sam. It was wrong of me. I was just so upset…’

  ‘Nothing happened last night. Not with the wine. It was before, when I woke up, in my room, and this morning, when I was with Dad and when Mac took me–’

  ‘Sam, you’re tired, you’re upset and you’re hungover. Now go in and see your friends. I’ll see you after school. I’ll ring if I hear anything from the hospital.’

  It had been stupid to even try. She got out of the car, threw her rucksack over her shoulder, walked through the gate and kept on going across the tarmac towards the main school building.

  She turned and tried to wave a wave that said, ‘I’m fine, stop worrying, you can go now.’ She expected, wanted, her mother to drive off but she didn’t. Instead she waved back.

  Sam waved again, turned, and continued towards the entrance and kept on walking until she’d reached the top of the steps. She stopped and turned. Her mother pulled out and drove away down the road.

  She pushed the door open and walked through into the ground floor corridor of the main school building.

  ‘Do you remember the one with the dead girl crawling out of the television…’

  And there they were, her gang, huddled together under the oak tree at the edge of the football field. In the summer they would lie on the grass, sipping cold drinks and nibbling on carrot sticks and lettuce leaves, Italian ‘designer’ sunglasses, bought from a stall in the market at a tenth of the price of the real thing, perched on the tips of their meticulously freckle-free noses. On a grey winter’s day they would shuffle, shivering, from foot to booted foot, muffled up in their coats and scarves, sipping coffee and chewing on pizza.

  ‘And the one when the wife’s trying to crawl through the bathroom window and her husband grabs hold of her legs and he tries to eat her. And when she gets out, through the window, there are all these dead people waiting. And she has to shoot them in the head because if she doesn’t, and they bite her, then she’ll turn into a zombie…’

  Lou had seen them all – the originals and the re-makes. A red-eyed, hollow-cheeked, bloody-mouthed decomposing corpse, dragging its rotting limbs out of a coffin, was just about the only thing that could turn her on.

  ‘Sam, where’ve you been? Did you get my message?’

  Katie, the organiser of all organisers, who hated being ignored, was eyeing her up and down.

  ‘Why didn’t you phone me back?’

  The last time she’d seen Katie, Lou and Shelly was at the fair on Saturday. It had been yesterday afternoon, Sunday, when she checked her messages.

  ‘My dad’s in hospital. He had an accident in his car, on his way to work…’

  It felt like thirty years.

  ‘He’s in the intensive care unit, unconscious, hooked up to machines…’

  Lou and Shelly were staring at her as if she, Sam, the best friend they went to school, out shopping and clubbing with, had just turned into one of the living dead.

  ‘It’s the fireworks tonight. We’ve arranged to meet the guys down there.’

  Hadn’t Katie heard?

  ‘Not tonight.’

  ‘Leo will be there.’

  Didn’t she understand?

  ‘I’ve just said. Not tonight.’

  ‘He’s a nice guy, Sam. Loads of girls think he’s more than nice. You’re going to have to try harder if you want to–’

  She was standing under the oak tree, at the edge of the football field, a place where she should feel safe, with Katie, Lou and Shelly. But the friends that she loved, and had spent so much time with, were now like aliens from another planet.

  ‘My dad’s in hospital, he’s so sick he might even die, and the only thing you can talk about, only thing you can think about, is boys.’

  She turned and ran across the playing field, along the ground floor corridor, through the entrance doors, down the steps, across the tarmac and out onto the street.

  THIRTY

  June 1917

  SHE’D SEEN AND HEARD her mother cry and the other women in the village: when there was no money left to buy food, not even
a farthing; when a son or daughter died; or when they opened the front door to find the post boy standing there holding out the letter every wife and mother dreaded. But the sound coming from the Major’s son’s bedroom was something much deeper, more painful, so filled with despair that it was impossible to believe any human bearing could survive such pain.

  She was a maid-of-all-work. Whatever was going on behind that door was none of her business. She should just walk away. He was the Major’s son; a soldier home from the front, he could look after himself.

  But something had changed. The line had been crossed. Because now she wasn’t just the maid-of-all-work and the boy behind that door wasn’t just the Major’s son. She was Jess and he was Tom, the same Tom who had looked after her, comforted her, shown her kindness after her mother had died. Who had told her she would always have a home, here in this house, as long as she wanted one.

  Shouldn’t she now show some kindness?

  She knocked, a quick, double tap. She waited. She tapped again. Nothing. She turned and walked away. The young man’s weeping followed her down the landing. She stopped at the top of the staircase.

  He had said that night, down in the kitchen sitting together at the table, that her mother had been a brave and generous woman. Jess knew exactly what such a woman would do now.

  She walked back along the landing, knocked and, without waiting, opened the door, walked across the room, reached up and pulled down the window.

  The Major’s son was lying face down on the bed.

  ‘Sir?’

  She placed a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Sir, it’s me, Jess…’

  His shirt was soaked through with sweat.

  ‘Do you want me to call out a doctor?’

  The weeping stopped.

  ‘I don’t need a doctor.’

  ‘Are you sure? I can easily–’

  He sat up on the bed.

  ‘It’s very kind of you but no, no thank you, I’m fine.’

  ‘Looking the way you do, doing what you’re doing, isn’t fine.’

  She sat down beside him.