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One More Chapter
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020
Copyright © Susan Edmunds 2020
Cover design by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
Susan Edmunds asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008316112
Ebook Edition © April 2020 ISBN: 9780008316105
Version: 2020-02-10
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
About This Book
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Acknowledgements
Also by Susan Edmunds
About the Author
About the Publisher
For Liam and Livi
About This Book
This ebook meets all accessibility requirements and standards.
Please be advised this book features the following content warnings: post-natal depression, mental health issues.
Chapter 1
Maria Matthews, 10:30am: ‘So the other day I taught my son how to put moisturiser on dry skin. Today I feel light, feathery touches on my calf. How nice, I think, darling son has noticed my legs could do with some cream. Look down and ARGH! He’s taking snot from his nose and very gently rubbing it into my skin.’
Renee
Age: One day
It was a hospital midwife with hair dye stains on her fingernails who handed me my baby, freshly expelled from the warm, wet indoor spa pool of my uterus into the overly air-conditioned delivery suite. You’d think you wouldn’t notice those details, but after thirty-six weeks of waiting, I’d developed some high expectations of what that particular moment should be like.
I’m one of life’s organisers, even in the most mundane situations. The type who gives you a run-sheet alongside a birthday party invitation. So really, the just-go-with-it nature of childbirth was never going to be a comfortable fit for me.
My daughter’s face was puffy and pink, like an old woman with a sinus-twisting case of hay fever. Her fingers were weirdly out of proportion, long and completely white. They looked like the hands of a waxwork witch who had terrified me at an amusement park when I was a child. Then, they had been curled around a purple crystal ball. This time they were forming angry fists as if the baby – my baby, I pulled myself up, this was my baby – had realised a bit too late that this was not where she had meant to be, and was trying to protest her way back to safety.
I leant back on the narrow hospital bed. It had been cranked into a seated position some time between when I summoned the energy to fire one last desperate push through my pelvis as the obstetrician peered into my nether regions, and when I’d been handed this little bundle of fury.
I could relate to her outrage. If I’d been picking a place to come into the world, it wouldn’t have been this corner nook of a public hospital – sorry, ‘world-class delivery suite’ – where the lights above looked like the engines of an alien spacecraft and everything smelt of disinfectant.
‘Mum’ll know she’s got this one around,’ the midwife said and winked at me. The sound of my baby’s cry cut through the air. I’d known there was a noise happening, and I vaguely knew she was distressed, but it had taken me a minute to make the connection that it was my daughter producing the wail. I forced a smile, but I seemed to be moving a beat behind the real world. It was like I was swimming in a fish tank while everyone else wandered around, peering in on me.
‘I’m cold.’ I looked for my partner, Nick, who was two steps away from the bed, his gaze locked on our baby in my arms. Was he trying to avoid looking at some other part of me? I was aware of a distant tugging from whatever tidy-up the obstetrician was still doing down below. Odd that she’d bothered to put a local anaesthetic on for that when everyone had been so keen to coach me, drug-free, through the baby’s head creating the problem in the first place. I made a mental note to remind Nick of his ‘your body knows what to do’ chant next time he complained of a tricep twinge after a few too many reps at the gym.
Nick pointed at me, looking at one of the women for help.
‘It’s not cold, Renee.’ She was brisk, whipping a blood-and-something-else-soaked sheet out from under me and replacing it with a crunchy plastic pad. ‘Your body’s in shock, it won’t last.’
A nurse who had wandered in to collect some of the equipment from the corner of the room shot her a glance. ‘We can turn the heat up a couple of degrees.’
Too right, I was in shock. Where I’d been used to a bump taking over my mid-section, there was now a wobbly pouch of skin, being pulled down by gravity like a collapsing tent. It was shaking alarmingly as my body trembled. The child I’d grown used to as a foot poking into my ribs or a head doing lazy somersaults in my uterus was gone. I missed her even as she snuffled around at my chest.
The hospital midwife took hold of my left breast and angled it at my daughter’s face. ‘Let her have a go at latching. Does she have a name?’
I shot a look at Nick, who didn’t seem to have heard.
The other woman winked. ‘You’ve a few weeks before you have to decide but if she doesn’t yet, you’ll get a ‘baby of’ wristband for her … not so great for the memory box.’
I shifted my gaze back to Holly. Nick and I had still been debating names in the car on the way to the hospital, although his arguments grew less strident as my contractions became more severe. ‘Holly,’ I said, settling on the most decisive tone I could muster. They didn’t need to know he’d told me it sounded like something you’d name a dog.
***
Contractions had started to niggle at me at 6pm the previous day, while Nick and I were having dinner. We’d deflected his parents, who had got into the habit of expecting us to visit for dinner every Thursday. It was a ritual for almost all the three years we had been together but the half-hour drive from our Putney flat to their immaculate Georgian home in Blackheath became impossible in my last month of pregnancy when I could barely fit my bump behind the dashboard of our little Toyota.
By 8pm, I was no longer able to convince myself that the cramps hitting me like a punch to the uterus were practice Braxton Hicks, or just the complaints of worn-out ligaments. Nick frowned as I pushed him off towards the bedroom, anyway.
Since he quit his sensible, well-paying job (not that I was holding that against him) to follow his chaotic, nail-biting dream of starting a gym with his mate, Sam, and had to be up before the birds most mornings, he had been terrible at staying up late. Once, at his cousin’s wedding, he fell asleep during the speeches and I’d had a huge job trying to convince his aunt and uncle that he was just tired, not drunk. I resisted the urge to tell them that it was their son they should be looking at if they wanted to know why the bar tab had run out more quickly than expected. I could just imagine having to tell our daughter that her father missed her birth because he’d been snoring in the corner.
My midwife, Karen, whom I’d been seeing virtually from the minute I emerged, bewildered, from my first-ever-in-my-life positive pregnancy test, had counselled me that the deliveries of first babies were hardly ever quick procedures, anyway.
‘You can expect eight hours of active labour,’ she had said as she thrust a birth planning worksheet at me. Usually I loved these things – a chance to fill in forms and make stuff happen. But it had contained such cheery questions as ‘Would you prefer an episiotomy or for it to be allowed to occur naturally?’ Nick had turned a deep grey when I’d explained what that term actually meant. Her clinic was around the corner from the offices of the events management firm I worked at and I dutifully trotted there on my lunch breaks. ‘You’ll need to rest at the start to ration your energy,’ she had told me. ‘Sleep, if you can.’
As if.
I reached for my phone and swiped to pull up the app to chat to my online mums’ support group. Someone there would be around to coach me through an hour or two on my own. The responses started to flow almost immediately.
‘No harm in checking in with the midwife,’ Felicity, who ran the group, posted.
Another message popped up beneath it. ‘Listen to your body. You’ll know when it’s the right time to take action. Have you any calming oils you could burn, pop in the bath for a bit?’ I checked the name. Of course – Frankie. She and her three home-schooled children lived in a yurt on her parents’ farm. She probably gave birth in a river or something.
An hour and a half later, I hauled myself up to turn over in the half-full bath, knocking a bottle of shampoo so it clattered across the bathroom floor. Half a minute later, Nick peered around the doorway, rubbing a hand over his face. ‘All okay in here?’
I wiped the back of my hand across my forehead, which was clammy with sweat. ‘I was just trying to relax but it’s not working very well.’
He gave me a look. It was one I knew well, deployed when I was mid-crisis at work and arguing that it was perfectly fine to exist on two and a half hours’ sleep a night, or when I got upset over my mother not replying to an email I knew I shouldn’t have bothered to send.
‘Do you want me to call Karen? I think this is one situation you can’t just power through on your own.’
I cringed and pulled myself up to my hands and knees. ‘Yes. Okay. Not a time for DIY. Maybe just give her a call and see what she says.’
He nodded and disappeared. Another contraction hit. Frankie must have had some better oils than I did if she thought they were going to do anything.
There was muttering outside the door and the sound of Nick pacing the length of our poky flat.
Then he put his head around the door. ‘She’s gone away for the weekend.’
I struggled to sit up, bracing myself against the slippery plastic of the bath. ‘What?’
‘Something urgent. Apparently, the hospital has systems in place – we’ll just head in there and there will be a duty midwife who will take care of us.’ He was clearly parroting the lines she had given him. He caught my eye and must have seen the expression on my face. ‘She says it’ll be fine. They know what they’re doing.’
‘I’m sure they do.’ I tried to slide down further into the water. We’d discussed this as a possibility, and I had duly researched as best I could who might be on shift if that happened, but I had filed it away in the same best-not-thought-about category as the possibility of induction if I was still pregnant at forty-one weeks. ‘Can I talk to her?’
He shook his head. ‘She’s just getting on a plane. She’ll call you when she gets to the other end. Do you want to go now?’
Another contraction sucked at my cervix, sending a wave of heat up my body. I cringed. The steam from the bath was making me nauseous. ‘I think I’ll feel better if I’m out of the bath for a bit. She did say to stay home as long as possible. Can you help me out?’
We hobbled to the bedroom, his arm supporting me under my shoulders, a towel draped inadequately around me. I’d felt big before but now it was as if I needed my own moon. The distance between my hips seemed to have doubled in a matter of hours. I flopped into our bed, drawing my knees up to my chest. Nick crawled in beside me, tracing the bumps of my spine with his fingers. His movements became slower and less regular until they stopped entirely after about ninety seconds and his breathing deepened. I turned over. He’d fallen asleep again. How perfectly on-brand. Another contraction socked me in the stomach. There was no way I could stay in bed.
***
Nick appeared from the bedroom another hour later, wiping his eyes with the back of his hands, as I curled in a ball on the sofa. ‘Should I be timing them or something?’ He screwed up his face in the light of the living room.
‘Could have started doing that five hours ago.’ I looked up at him through my fingers. ‘Half an hour more, then we’ll go.’
He rolled his eyes and reached for the bunch of keys that he’d thrown on to the coffee table when he walked in the door the night before. ‘Let’s just go now.’
As I opened my mouth to disagree, another contraction rolled in. ‘Okay.’
The hospital was less than ten minutes’ drive from our home, but you could have told me that we were driving the length of the country and I would have believed it. We stopped at every red light and with each contraction I pulled myself up on the door handle, trying to scramble away from the pain. Nick had started to count down the time between them – one of the few practical domestic uses of his personal training skills I’d ever seen. I pushed out of my mind the thought that he could have the chance to use his first aid certificate for a roadside delivery.
‘Another one in twenty seconds,’ he intoned as we pulled into the hospital car park.
‘No, no, no,’ I moaned. ‘I’ve changed my mind.’
‘Sorry, hun, it’s a bit late for that.’ He hoisted me out of the car, and we stumbled through the doors of the maternity ward. ‘You can do it, you’re awesome.’
The midwife on duty took her time pulling on the blue latex glove she would use to examine me in the same manner that you might remove the giblets from a frozen chicken. Her blue-gloved hand buried in me up to the wrist, she nodded – almost impressed. ‘Advanced labour,’ she hissed at a passing nurse.
Half an hour later, the magic 10cm of dilation had been reached. The midwife whipped away the gas machine I’d been sucking desperately every minute. ‘Now, you need to push. Like you’re on the toilet.’ Her voice was firm. ‘It sometimes takes a few goes to get the pushing right. Next contraction, go for it.’
Nick was still counting the seconds. ‘Get ready.’ He squeezed my hand as it hit. I pushed as if I wanted to shove my intestines out through my urethra on to the bed. But at the end, the midwife was still looking at me. ‘Try again next one.’
Nick patted my shoulder. Was this what he did to his clients? No wonder he wasn’t earning as much as I thought he should. ‘See if you can sort of push down more in the middle of your body?’ He pointed to something he’d found on his phone. ‘I see here it says …’
The midwife caught his eye and he stopped. ‘Maybe you could rub her back?’
I was stuck in an unending loop. Contraction. Try to push. Everyone watching. Everyone sighing. A monitor strapped to my stomach beeping. I’d lost track of time, either through pain or too much nitrous oxide. I became aware of the midwife staring at me more intently. I was fighting to keep my eyes open between each contraction. ‘I think we should get an obstetrician in here, see if we can get you a bit of help getting this baby out, okay?’
An intervention. My antenatal class had spent an hour on the various methods that could be used to ‘help’ deliver a baby – forceps that looked like giant salad tongs and might cause irreparable damage to you or you baby. A ventouse that looked a bit like an electronic toilet plunger – and might cause irreparable damage to you or your baby. But I couldn’t summon the energy to care. I just wanted it to be over. To go back home to my own bed and sleep. I would later see ‘poor maternal effort’ scrawled on my maternity notes. As if it were a lack of trying on my part that stopped a 3.5kg baby from gliding through my size eight pelvis.
After all that, I knew that Nick wouldn’t put up too much of a fight over our baby’s name.
***
I watched Holly snort and snuffle, trying to find her spot on my breast. Finally, her little mouth, which looked like one I’d seen on a newborn kitten when I was a child, connected with the tender, newly brown skin of my nipple. The suction was firm. Perhaps, in our search for a name, we should have considered Dyson.
‘She’s not on right.’ The midwife who’d manhandled my breast into position leant over, sliding the tip of her little finger into the edge of Holly’s mouth, breaking the seal.
She gestured for me to try again. There had been a handout at the midwife’s rooms with a photo of a small baby suckling at a voluminous, veiny breast. They’d said something about lining up the baby’s nose to nipple. I waggled my breast at Holly who opened her mouth. The midwife watched, scribbling in my maternity notes book. ‘That looks better, well done. Does it feel okay?’
‘It feels pretty weird.’
I could see Holly’s jaw moving as her eyelids fluttered shut. I reached out for Nick, who was hovering at the side of the bed. ‘Do you want to hold her once she’s finished?’
He nodded. I traced the line of her cheek tentatively. She was tiny. I had objectively known she was going to be small, of course. I’d told one friend the smaller the better. But she was more like a little doll than an actual human. Her skin was soft and so smooth it almost felt like it should have a scattering of marshmallow dust across its surface. The clock ticking on the wall tapped out the seconds in the silence. Someone had scrawled across its face that it was hospital property, as if you might try to sneak off home with it like some sort of low-rent souvenir. Clearly many people giving birth on this ward were not getting high-calibre baby gifts. Holly’s sucking slowed into a butterfly tickle. I wiggled, trying to dislodge her. When she slipped off, still asleep, I tucked a hospital-issue blanket around her and passed her to her father, a bit like the Christmas ham my grandmother used to wrap in a trusty blue-and-white tea towel.
Nick grasped her in the crook of his arm, making her seem even tinier against his gym-honed bicep muscles and veiny forearms. He looked worried she would slip from his grasp. With a twitch of his body he turned her so she was stretched out down the length of his arms, her head in his hands. Her nose wiggled as if she were smelling something unpleasant. He was staring at her, transfixed. I watched them for a minute. While I was still feeling slightly bewildered and discombobulated, he seemed to have leapfrogged straight into the overwhelming rush-of-love stage.
I almost couldn’t believe we’d ended up here. When we’d met, at my half-sister’s thirtieth birthday party in the private function room of a Notting Hill restaurant, I’d just started in my job as an events manager – the first time I’d shaken off that ‘assistant’ title – and made a vow to stay single to focus on nothing more than getting as far up the chain of command as I could. Long-term, I wanted to buy the business from my boss, who terrified and inspired me in equal parts.
I had only wanted to stay at Natalie’s party for half an hour to show my face. She was part of my dad’s ‘real family’ – the one he had forgotten to tell my mother about before she fell pregnant with me. The party was totally Natalie. Big and loud and full of people who had lots of money and did very little to get it. I stayed in the corner, sipping a glass of champagne that would have normally cost half my wage, when Nick ambled over. He’d played rugby with Natalie’s brother, Jonathan. ‘Don’t hold that against me,’ he said with a grin as he leant against the brick of the wall. ‘I’m not one of them.’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘You’re not?’
From the look of him, he was exactly one of them. His shirt and slim-cut jeans looked expensive. His haircut was definitely a three-figure one.
He seemed to realise I was appraising him and threw up his hands. ‘Oh, I may look like them, but I promise I’m actually a real person.’
That had made me smile. You could spend all day with Natalie or Jonathan and feel like you were chatting the whole time but by the end of it you wouldn’t be able to pinpoint a single thing that you’d actually talked about. Their mother, Veronica, had to tell them who I was just before my dad’s funeral, when I was twelve. I guess he had been away enough during their lives that his visits to see me every year or two weren’t even noticeable. Natalie, three years my senior, had treated me like some sort of exotic animal in a zoo at first, before finally accepting that I was actually quite boring when we ended up in some of the same classes at university together.
For my part, I’d instantly got over my gnawing jealousy of what I’d decided was Natalie’s perfect life when I saw her mother tell her off at the funeral for her choice of shoes.
‘Do you know’ – Nick’s voice had dropped to a near whisper so I had to lean closer to hear him – ‘I think Jonathan secretly listens to One Direction in those AirPods of his while he’s out running with his mad dog.’
I had laughed champagne out of my nose.
‘And Natalie, I reckon she writes out Nickelback lyrics in Valentine’s Day cards for that weird boyfriend of hers.’
‘Stop! I’m going to spill my wine everywhere.’
He had grinned at me. ‘So how do you know her?’
I bit my lip. ‘She’s my sister.’
‘Ah. Oops.’
We had ducked out and gone for coffee at a little café down the road that was a lot less glitzy. A year later, we were living together in our little flat.
I shifted my weight on to my left thigh and inched off the bed, finally swinging my legs around so the soles of my feet connected with the cold lino of the floor. I leant over to kiss his cheek and the top of Holly’s head. ‘I’m going to go and find a shower. I need a wash.’
Nick cocked his head to gesture to the gym bag he had thrown over his shoulder as we ran for the door of our flat. It was overflowing, one zip only half-closed, a nightie making a bid for freedom. Somewhere in there, there was an old smartphone loaded with rainforest sounds and soothing beauty spa melodies that I’d planned to have playing through the initial stages of labour. There might even have been a bottle of facial mist my mother sent after she missed my baby shower. I extracted the nightie, slid my feet into a pair of worn-in slippers, and placed one tentative step in front of the other towards the door.
I looked back over my shoulder as I reached to pull it shut behind me. Nick was staring down at Holly, his entire body anchored completely still. I waved to get his attention. ‘You two will be okay?’
He ducked his head in the tiniest fraction of a nod. In one of the rooms across the corridor, a woman was shrieking. Had I made that much noise? I felt like a lolloping hippopotamus, my midsection moving pendulously with each tentative step.