Sunrise

by Rosie Thomas

  Sunrise

  BY ROSIE THOMAS

  Contents

  Title Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Keep Reading

  About the Author

  Also by Rosie Thomas

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  ‘Good girl. Nearly there now.’

  The midwife’s mouth was pursed professionally as she watched the little green bleeps of the monitor. The room went quiet for an instant, waiting. The exhausted medical student glanced up too. Blearily he saw the strong green pulse of the foetal heartbeat tracing across the screen. Routine. Another routine birth. The ninth he’d seen in three days.

  Baptism by fire, he thought, this part of the course. Or no, not so much fire as water, blood, and animal screams and yelps. Not for him, obstetrics. Much rather something serene, academic. Haematology, perhaps.

  ‘Ohhh.’ It was the girl’s first moan, and it came from low down in her throat.

  ‘Are you assisting at this birth, Mr Porter?’ The midwife’s voice was acid.

  The student leapt forward, his face scarlet.

  ‘One more push now, if you can,’ he said, trying to sound both soothing and imperative. The lavender-pink perineal skin glistened as it stretched tight over the wet, black, impatient head of the baby. There was the flash of a hypodermic needle and then a sound like ripping canvas as the midwife made her slice into the muscle.

  The moan came again, the uncontrolled jungle noise of an intent animal. The student shuddered in spite of himself. Thank God he was a man.

  The girl was struggling upright, fighting against the junior nurses who held her. Her face, damp with sweat, looked even younger than theirs.

  ‘Brave girl,’ the midwife told her. ‘One last push and you’ll have your baby.’ There was no need for her instructions. The girl was utterly in control, riding the waves from her own womb.

  ‘Oh.’ Her voice was different this time, rising in triumph.

  The baby’s head was born, and the student saw that it was the same, sudden, crimson knot of features that it always was. It punctuated his off-duty dreams. The other staff were still for a moment. It was just another labour and another baby, but the instant of birth never lost its impact. The delivery room door was still closed. No one had come in, but they were one more.

  The baby’s body followed almost at once, streaked with blood and grey-white vernix. The eyes opened, very black and deep. Then the tiny chest fluttered, the mouth opened and there was a long, ragged howl of protest.

  The midwife chuckled, deft and cheerful again. ‘A boy. And quite a little tiger. Well done, mum.’

  The girl brushed aside her practised patter. ‘Give him to me,’ she said quietly. ‘Now.’

  They glanced curiously at her as her arms reached out for her son. She drew him to her, slipping one shoulder out of the green hospital gown and offering him the small, puckered nipple. The baby’s head turned, searching for it.

  ‘There,’ she murmured. ‘There.’

  The medical student saw that the look of extreme youth had left her. Her face was lit with a satisfaction as old as motherhood itself. He sighed, feeling the weight of his own cynicism.

  This birth was different from the others he had witnessed because there was no tense, queasy father hovering at the bedhead. There was no beaming face to peer down proudly now when the midwife made her ritual insistence on the newborn’s likeness to his brand-new father.

  This girl had nobody.

  ‘Come on now, dear,’ they were saying to her. ‘You can have him back in five minutes. We’ve got to attend to you, and clean him up for you as well.’ They took the infant out of her arms. The messy, painful business of mopping and stitching went on, but the girl seemed to be oblivious. Her eyes never left her baby.

  At last they were finished with her. The machines and monitors were wheeled away and the baby in its white blanket was handed back. She gave a small, contented sigh as the bundle fitted against her. The baby was already asleep, one clenched fist against his cheek.

  The student had dutifully performed the stitching under his tutor’s eye. His job was finished now. Normally he would have bolted in search of a few hours’ sleep before his name climbed inexorably to the top of the rota list and the whole thing started all over again. Yet this time something held him back, loitering in the way of the efficient nurses.

  The girl smiled shyly at him.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.

  ‘Thank you. You were terrific, you know. Made it easy for us.’

  She had combed her fine, fair hair back behind her ears, leaving just a straight fringe like an earnest schoolgirl’s. But now, when she shook her head and grinned at him, it swung free again in a loose bell. She was pretty, he realized. He caught himself wondering how the pig of a father could have left her alone like this.

  ‘I didn’t expect it to be like this,’ she murmured to him. ‘I didn’t think that it would be so much.’

  He saw the tenacious arms around the baby, and the light in her face, and knew what she meant. He nodded, silenced.

  The girl lifted her face and kissed his cheek, as naturally as if he was her brother.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said again.

  Lightly, he touched her shoulder. ‘Good luck.’ As he left the room he saw that her gaze was back on the puckered, sleeping face at her breast.

  The delivery room was empty now except for one brisk woman in a sister’s blue uniform. She was sitting on the girl’s bed, counting her pulse against the little watch hanging at her apron front. As she finished, the baby stirred and the girl touched the tiny head with her fingertips.

  ‘Such a lot of black hair,’ she said to herself. ‘Like his father.’ She seemed barely aware that she was speaking aloud.

  The sister looked shrewdly at her.

  ‘You’re on your own, aren’t you?’ Hardly more than a child yourself, she was thinking.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you going to keep the baby?’

  The girl’s glance was shrivelling. ‘Of course. I want him more than anything in the world.’ Then, as if afraid that she might have hurt the sister’s feelings, she added, ‘I had no mother of my own. She died when I was born. I know how much mothers matter.’

  ‘Babies need fathers too. And you’re very young,’ the sister said gently.

  The fierceness came back at once. ‘Mine doesn’t. I’m eighteen years old. I can manage.’

  It was not a topic to be pursued.

  ‘Do you want to telephone anyone?’ The blue uniform rustled as she stood up. ‘I can wheel in the trolley for you. It’s more private for you here than up on the ward.’

  The girl shook her head. ‘No. No, thank you, sister.’

  ‘All right. I’ll go and find a porter to help us upstairs with you.’ At the door, she asked, ‘What’s the baby’s name?’

  ‘William. William Owain.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘It’s a family name, you see. My father’s. If I’d been a boy, I would have been William too. Instead of just a girl,’ she added to herself.

  ‘That’s nice,’ the sister said again, automatically. ‘Now, where are those porters?’

  Left alone, the girl looked down again at the unbelievable, delicate lids over her baby’s dark eyes.

  ‘Just us,’ she whispered to him. ‘But it won’t matter to us. I promise you. I’ll make it right for you. I will.’

  As the tears pricked in her own eyes, she hugged the baby to her as if h
er love would break them both in half.

  Yet, when the porter came clattering through the door with his wheelchair and his tired, labour-ward joke, she found a smile for him. Pretending was beginning to come naturally. Perhaps soon she wouldn’t notice it at all.

  A day later she looked on from her quiet corner of the postnatal ward. She was breaking the rules in keeping the sleeping baby drawn against her, protected by the white wall of bedcovers. Twice the ward sister had told her that he should be left in the clinical glass crib at the bedside. The girl had said nothing, but the baby stayed in her arms. With resigned tact the nursing staff had begun to leave her alone and now, at visiting time, she lay in a pool of deepening isolation. The ward was noisy with clattering arrivals, exclamations and the pop and whirr of cameras, but she turned calmly away from it. She only looked up when the tap of leather soles on polished linoleum stopped at her bed.

  ‘Hullo, Anne.’

  Her visitor was a broad, pink-faced man in a well-cut suit worn with an air of constriction. He was carrying a pyramid of red roses and a Harrods carrier bag. The girl he had called Anne looked up with the same smile that had sent yesterday’s medical student whistling out into the sunshine.

  ‘Jamie?’

  He dropped the roses on the end of the bed and held out the Harrods bag. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I called at your room to see if you were okay, and couldn’t find you. So I telephoned here and they told me. Let’s have a look at the little beggar.’

  She turned down the covers for him to see the tiny red face.

  ‘God, why are they always so hideous?’

  Anne laughed, quite certain that he was wrong. ‘William isn’t. To me he’s just like … well, just like I knew he would be.’

  Jamie proffered the carrier bag again and she rummaged in the tissue paper like a child with a birthday. The present was a classic, fat, golden-yellow teddy bear with a pale blue ribbon round his neck.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said simply. ‘And for the flowers. They’ll all stop looking sympathetically at me now I’ve got some too.’

  Jamie glanced up the ward at the scenes of family celebration beside every bed, and the pinkness of his face deepened. He put one finger up to ease his starched collar.

  The silence between them became embarrassed, the sign of people who don’t know each other very well caught in a moment of unwonted intimacy.

  Jamie broke it at last, apparently steeling himself to say something that might seem not quite polite.

  ‘What are you going to do now? Now you’ve got the baby, I mean?’

  Anne’s face contracted with anxiety.

  ‘I was afraid that’s what you’d come to ask. I want to go on working for you, if you’ll let me. Please, won’t you? William can come with me for a bit. He can sleep in his Moses basket. He won’t be in the way, I promise. I need the job, Jamie.’

  He nodded slowly.

  ‘You cook like an angel. You know that. You can go on working in the restaurant as long as you like. But it’s hardly a life for you, is it? Long hours, and nothing at the end of it but a bedsitter and a baby who won’t be the joy of your life for every single minute. You aren’t trained. You can probably earn just enough to feed yourself and him and keep a roof over your heads. But what kind of future does that give you, or him?’

  Anne bent her head. Her hair swung forward to leave the nape of her neck bare and Jamie thought with resigned irritation how vulnerable she was. The offer he was about to make was crazy, but he knew that he was going to have to make it just the same.

  ‘I know all this,’ Anne whispered. ‘But I’ll make it work, somehow.’ She was echoing her promise to the baby. ‘Just help me by letting me keep the job, will you?’

  ‘Hear me out, please,’ Jamie said. Resolution made his voice sound brusque. ‘I’ll make you a business proposal. You’re an instinctive cook, good enough to be exceptional if you’re trained properly. You won’t get that training where you are now in Pierre’s kitchen because he hasn’t the time to devote to it. Listen, will you?’ He was impatient with her for trying to insist that yes, she could pick things up as she went along.

  ‘You could use part of what I pay you now – more than you’re worth as it stands, incidentally – to pay your way through cookery school. Wait. That is if, if, you’re not paying huge sums in rent for some poky room.

  ‘Now, I live in a mansion block off Sloane Square. At the end of the corridor I have an empty room with another, smaller room opening off it. The maid used to live there, so don’t think it’s grander than it is. Both rooms are full of old tennis racquets and mackintoshes now, but I can clear them out for you. You and the baby can move in and live there rent free during the time that you are training – provided that you also continue to work at Duff’s part-time as you do now, and for some specified period that we can agree between us when your training is complete. I’ll be happy with that as a bargain if it suits you too.’

  He was on his home ground now, fluent and lawyer-like, negotiating an out-of-court settlement. He stopped expectantly, and then something else occurred to him. ‘No strings, of course. It’s just a business arrangement.’

  ‘You didn’t have to say that,’ she told him quickly. ‘Of course I didn’t think you wanted …’

  ‘Well?’ he interrupted, heading off their embarrassment.

  ‘Do you really want to clutter up your domestic sanctum with a part-time chef and a baby?’

  ‘Not at all. But I’m away a good deal, and it’s a large flat. The offer stands, anyway. But first, will you promise me something?’

  ‘Anything. No, anything reasonable.’ He hadn’t seen her perky humour before, and he was surprised how different her face looked without the preoccupied anxiety that had marked it during the last weeks.

  ‘Will you think seriously about going home? Back to your people? I know you’re not a real waif, even though you turned up at my restaurant like one. Are you sure, Anne, that you and the baby wouldn’t be happier back where you belong?’

  She looked past him and the shiny, pale green hospital walls vanished. Instead she saw the haphazard cluster of low grey stone and slate houses against the curve of hillside. The sun of her imagination went in as a door opened and a man, older than his years, came out into the familiar street. She heard the exact sound of the door latch, and smelt coal smoke thick on the mild air. The house behind him was empty, and the street was empty, and the fields beyond it across the few miles to the other house were empty too. They would stay empty for her, however full they were of other lives.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t be happier. We don’t belong, either of us. See, I’m even getting used to being called Anne.’

  ‘I can’t pronounce the other,’ he complained, not for the first time.

  ‘Angharad,’ she said. The soft r curled and brought out the Welsh lilt that she usually struggled to suppress.

  ‘Angharad,’ he repeated, and laughed. ‘When I say it it sounds like a patent rotary clothesline.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter.’ Her smile came back. ‘Anne is a fine London name. But I’ll keep the Owain, because that’s his name by rights too.’ She stroked the downy head and at once everything else was forgotten.

  Her visitor stood up.

  ‘Okay then. Make sure you give me a ring when they say you can come home, and I’ll see someone from Duff’s picks you up. Better put your roses in some water before they die of thirst.’ He nodded at her casually and went away up the ward.

  Thank you, she whispered under her breath. Thank you, funny English inhibited Jamie Duff. You see? Her finger touched the baby’s cheek. It will all be all right. Trust me, won’t you?

  The girl in the next bed looked across at her, relieved to see some signs of normality about her odd neighbour.

  ‘Was that … was that him?’ she asked inquisitively.

  Anne stared back astonished.

  ‘My baby’s father? Oh no.’ She began to laugh at the idea. ‘Oh no. His fa
ther is nothing like that at all.’

  And she turned away again to look through the green hospital walls into a landscape that lived on inside her head.

  Two

  Nothing had changed.

  The way home was almost unbearably familiar. Over the last two miles, after they left the main road and began to climb the lane to the village, Angharad knew the outline of every patch of moss on the stone walls, and the branched pattern of every tree showing through the last ragged leaves.

  She peered sideways at her father. He looked the same too, but she was aware that there was a difference between them. They had driven the long way from school in almost total silence. That was nothing new in itself, because her father always drove with a concentration that reflected his mistrust of machinery. But in the old days Angharad would have filled the silence with chatter that didn’t call for an answer. Now an uneasy shyness kept her quiet. She wasn’t sure how much she had changed in the long weeks she had been away, and she was afraid that her unhappiness would show and disappoint him.

  She caught herself wondering how she should present herself, as a happy schoolgirl coming back for her first visit home, or as forgivably homesick, and the very thought silenced her. Only weeks ago she had just been Angharad Owain, and there had been none of these uncomfortable avenues of possibility ahead of her. Now she felt severed from her father and from her old self. She had counted the hours to this half term, yet here she was coming home almost as a stranger.

  Angharad looked fiercely up at the oak tree that hung over the road as it curved into the village. She had perched in the branches as a little girl, playing the forbidden game of aiming pebbles at the tops of rare passing cars.

  It looks the same, she thought bitterly, but it isn’t. Nothing is, any more. They turned the corner and came into the long, straggling street. It was as familiar to Angharad as her own face.

  Most of the houses were grey stone, roofed in Welsh slate that was spotted with whorls of yellow lichen. Others, dropped haphazardly in between, were newer, shiny red Ruabon brick with yellow facings around the windows. The doors almost all opened straight on to the pavement, and Angharad knew the families behind each one and all their histories. Against the grey-white sky hung low billows of smoke from each house. It was mid-afternoon and fires were being lit before children came back on the school bus. There was no school in the village now, because there were too few village children to attend it. Angharad’s Aunt Gwyn lived in the Victorian schoolhouse and grew geraniums in tubs in the girls’ yard.