A Family Affair (12 page)

‘Thank goodness for that!' Heather said as they eventually emerged from the shop. ‘We'll just call at the bakery for a loaf of bread, and that's it.'

‘I've got to get Dad's cockles,' Jenny said.

‘Oh – do you have to?'

‘You know I do.'

For as long as they could remember Joe had had a quarter of cockles, swimming in vinegar, for his Saturday tea, eating them whilst listening to the football results. It was a ritual, and could not be broken.

‘Go on then, but be as quick as you can. I'll wait for you down outside the chemist's.'

Jenny went to the Co-op wet fish shop and queued for the cockles and some kippers Carrie had asked her to get. When she came out of the shop, Heather was nowhere to be seen. Jenny walked down the hill to the chemist's, looking round anxiously. One of the assistants appeared in the doorway.

‘Jenny! Your sister's in here. She's not well. She had to sit down.'

Jenny rushed into the shop. Heather was sitting on a chair just inside the door, with Mr Mackenzie, the pharmacist, and another assistant hovering solicitously.

‘Let me see if I can get hold of the doctor,' Mr Mackenzie was saying, but Heather was shaking her head.

‘No – no …' She saw Jenny and got up with an effort. ‘I've got to get home, Mr Mackenzie.'

‘Well, at least let me call you a taxi.'

‘I'll be all right.'

‘I've got my car round by the Hall,' a man who Jenny vaguely recognised as someone who lived at the top of Westbury Hill said. ‘I'm going home myself now, and I pass right by the door.'

Jenny's concern was at last outranking her embarrassment. The car was fetched to the door of the shop, Heather installed in the front seat, Jenny and all the shopping in the back. When they were dropped off outside the house, she struggled to manhandle all of it by herself whilst Heather, with a very peculiar gait, hauled herself up the steps.

‘I think I've started, Jenny,' she said.

She opened the door and went in, calling out for Steven and Glad, only to be met by comfortless silence. Only Walt was in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for dinner. When he was not at work, Walt enjoyed cooking and was actually rather better at it, Jenny thought, than Glad, who tended to be slapdash, and certainly better than Carrie, who never cooked at all if she could help it – probably put off by all the food she served up at the school canteen day after day.

‘Where is everybody?' Jenny asked him.

‘Young Steven's took your gran to get some flowers. It's her turn to do the altar at church this week.' He looked at her, registering her panic-stricken face. ‘What's wrong, my old Dutch?'

‘It's Heather. She's …' She couldn't bring herself to say the words. Not to Grampy.

‘You'd better go and find them,' Walt said, not looking unduly concerned. Joe got his stoic nature from his father. ‘I expect they'm down the market. Or they could've gone over to the nursery, I suppose.'

The nursery they used was at South Compton. Jenny's heart sank.

‘That's no good then …' She broke off, trying to think logically. If Heather was in labour the doctor should be told, or the midwife, or both. But she honestly didn't know what to do first, and she knew she could not expect any help from Walt. Having babies and all it entailed was totally outside his field of experience – something women saw to. He would simply go on peeling his potatoes while the world turned upside down around him, and afterwards he would risk a cursory glance into the cot, mutter: ‘Well, well, well,' and go back to his old routine.

No, she couldn't rely on Walt for assistance. In fact, there was only one person she wanted in this emergency – one person above all others who would know what to do. That person was Carrie.

Carrie was doing the bedrooms when she heard the front door slam and Jenny's voice calling her name. She went to the top of the stairs.

‘I'm up here …'

Jenny was in the hall, breathless, her face scarlet from running the half-mile up hill.

‘What in the world … ?'

‘It's Heather. She's having the baby. Oh, Mum, come quick!'

‘Where is she?' Carrie asked.

‘At Gran's. There's nobody there but Grampy. They're all out …'

‘All right. You stay here.'

‘No … I'm coming with you …'

Carrie was pulling on a coat over her checked nylon overall, calling to Joe to tell him where she was going. Then they were hurrying back down the hill, Jenny's face still on fire, trying to explain breathlessly to her mother what had happened. There was a pain in her own stomach, a dull ache running from the very pit to her hips and back again; she assumed it was from running up hill – or perhaps she was empathising with her sister, feeling something of what Heather was feeling.

They turned into Glad's house; to Jenny's enormous relief, Glad was there.

‘Steven's gone to ring the doctor,' she said.

Bunches of chrysanthemum wrapped in paper still lay on the table where she had put them down when she and Steven had arrived home to the crisis; Heather had been despatched upstairs. Jenny went to follow Carrie up; sharply, Carrie told her to stay where she was. Jenny was quite glad to do so; she could hear Heather moaning, a frightening sound that reminded her, grotesquely, of the awful lowing cows made when the farmer took their calves away from them.

Soon the house was in uproar. Steven arrived back, out of breath and looking more worried than Jenny had ever seen him, Glad was rushing to and fro boiling kettles and tearing up old bed linen, there was a ring at the front door followed by Dr Stephens'voice in the hall and footsteps on the stairs, a banging at the back and the midwife, aptly named Nurse Stork, bustled through carrying her bag and some sort of apparatus that looked like an oxygen cylinder. Steven paced; of Carrie there was no sign. Only Walt seemed unmoved by the chaos which had engulfed the house, appearing in the kitchen doorway still wearing his serge apron over an old pair of railway trousers and enquiring mildly what he should do about dinner.

‘The potatoes are spoiling …'

‘Go and dish up yours and Jenny's,' Glad said. ‘And Steven's. You might as well get a good meal inside you, Steven. It could be hours yet.'

Steven said he didn't feel like eating, so Jenny sat at the oilcloth-covered table in the kitchen with her grandfather, eating bacon and potatoes and cabbage swimming in the fat from the pan. Then, when they had washed up and Glad was sitting down to eat hers, Jenny went into the front room, turned on a bar of the electric fire, and played Chopsticks on Walt's piano in an attempt to drown out the sounds coming from upstairs. She wished she could go home, to Joe and David and normality, but she couldn't tear herself away.

Soon after four o'clock she heard a baby's cry and suddenly all her fear and anxiety dropped away and she was filled with wonder. She went out into the hall and after a little while Dr Stephens came down on his way to the bathroom to wash his hands and told her she had a little niece. Then, a bit later, Carrie came down and asked her if she would like to go up to see the baby.

Heather was propped up against the pillows looking dishevelled and tired but very happy and Steven sat on the edge of the bed with his arms around her so that they somehow both encompassed the little bundle she was holding. Jenny could just see a little face peeping out of the tight swathing, a little wizened red face topped with wisps of fair hair that reminded her oddly of a miniature version of Walt.

‘What do you think then, Jenny?' Heather asked.

She unwrapped a tiny hand, pink and wrinkled and perfect with tiny oyster-shell nails.

‘She's lovely,' Jenny said, shy suddenly.

‘Vanessa,' Heather said. ‘We're going to call her Vanessa, aren't we, Steve?'

She smiled at him, holding the baby close against the frills and ruches of her new nightie and quite unexpectedly Jenny's awe was overshadowed by a wave of emotion she couldn't put a name to, but which felt oddly like jealousy.

She and Heather had always been so close; now, suddenly, she felt excluded. Heather and Steven and Vanessa were a unit, a family in which she had no place, and the sense of loss, of bereavement almost, was overwhelming. She wanted to join them on the bed, knew that if she did Heather would not push her away, but would put an arm around her, draw her into the group. But it would be a charade. She wasn't part of their family and never would be again. With her innate honesty, Jenny could have none of it.

‘You timed that very well, Heather,' Glad said, coming in with a tray of tea in the best bone-china cups – in honour of the occasion – and a plate of biscuits. ‘You missed your dinner, but you weren't going to miss tea as well, were you?'

Suddenly Jenny remembered the cockles she had bought for Joe's tea.

‘Dad's cockles!' she said. ‘I'll have to run home with them!'

They all laughed.

‘And you can tell him he's now officially a grandfather,' Heather said.

‘Oh my lord, and I'm a great-grandmother!' Glad said, and they all laughed again.

Jenny put on her coat and left them to it, hurrying up the hill with both the news and the cockles. The ache was back in the pit of her stomach, dull and dragging, and there was a wetness that she thought must be sweat between her legs.

When she had told her father and David what had happened, she went to the lavatory – the upstairs one, because it was too cold for comfort in the outside one at this time of year – and that was when she discovered that what she had thought was sweat was, in fact, blood.

Her face flamed even though she was alone. She'd started her periods! Oh no! She had hoped fervently that wouldn't happen for a long time yet and wished now, even more fervently, that Carrie was here, not still with Heather. But they'd already discussed it and there was a packet of sanitary towels stored in the bottom of Jenny's wardrobe against just such an eventuality.

Jenny fetched them, feeling oddly grown up and terribly vulnerable both at the same time. Somehow the feeling related to the way she'd felt when she'd looked at Heather and Steven and the baby; for many years they were inextricably linked in Jenny's subconscious.

‘It must be really funny to have a baby.'

David shifted slightly, squinting down at his girlfriend, Linda Parfitt, who was sitting beside him on the sofa in her parents'front room with her head on his shoulder.

‘What?'

‘Well – not
funny.
Scary.'

David ignored this. The fact that he had become an uncle had left him totally underwhelmed; he was much more interested in snogging Linda. He had been seeing her for more than three months now, something of a record for him, and so far he had not experienced any of the usual warning signs that he was getting tired of her. This worried him slightly. Three months was getting serious and David had no intention of getting serious about anyone for a good while yet. He'd lost two precious years of his youth to National Service and he had a lot of catching up to do before he was ready to settle down. But he did like Linda a lot, even if she did annoy him sometimes by trying to have these deep and meaningful conversations when all he wanted to do was kiss and cuddle her – and more, if she gave him the chance.

Sometimes the chance came when they were alone in her parents' front room, where they spent a lot of their time. Although it was only a small terraced house it had a front room with a comfortable sofa – and a wind-up gramophone in a tall wooden cabinet with a good selection of records in the storage space. If Jim and Doreen, Linda's father and mother, were at home, David and Linda used the gramophone as an excuse for some privacy and since he had been going out with Linda, David had contributed quite a few records to her collection – they had no gramophone at home.

Tonight they were alone in the house. Jim was a prime mover in the social club at the nearby printing works where he was a foreman and most weekends he and Doreen went there for the evening. But David and Linda had had a record session anyway until they grew tired of having to get up every two or three minutes to change the record or put it on again if it was a particular favourite, and now they were listening to the radio.

‘Fancy you being an uncle!' Linda said, teasing. ‘Uncle David. Fancy!'

‘Yes – fancy.' He slipped his hand under her jumper; she removed it.

‘It was very quick though, wasn't it?' she said.

‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, for a first baby. Usually with a first it goes on for hours – my cousin Jane was in labour for two whole days! But your Heather fitted it in between dinner and teatime.'

‘
I
don't know,' David said.

‘You do know! You told me!'

‘Did I?' David was getting uncomfortable with this conversation. ‘Shall we have some more records? This programme's a bit boring.'

‘It's all right!' She wasn't listening to it anyway and she knew he wasn't either. ‘Leave it.' She paused, musing. ‘Yes, very quick for a first baby.
I
wouldn't mind having a baby if I thought it was going to be as quick as that.'

She said it teasingly; he knew, with his conscious mind that it was a prelude, an invitation to play the usual games, when he tried it on and she rebuffed him, the ‘so far and no further'and: ‘David! Behave yourself! What do you think I am? I'm not that sort of girl!' The games were pleasant, if frustrating, and he lived in hopes that one day he might be able to breech her defences.

Tonight, however, he only heard warning bells coming from all directions. For one thing he was very afraid he might have said too much, all unwittingly, about Heather. And for another, he didn't care for the way Linda had said, ‘I wouldn't mind a baby'. It reminded him of the downside of getting his wicked way – thinking of friends, more than one, who had fallen into the tender trap and found themselves on the way to the altar with a shotgun at their back. One day he'd settle down to being a husband and father and the way he felt about her at the moment, it might even be with Linda. But not yet. Not for a long time yet.