A Sahib's Daughter (33 page)

Finally, just after six in the morning, he heard a long, heart-rending scream, and his stomach churned in fear. After what seemed like an endless interval, one of the nurses came out of the room and seemed surprised to see Justin.

“Are you the father?” she asked him. “Please come in.”

Through a fog, he entered the delivery room and saw Samira pale and exhausted in her hospital gown. He kissed her forehead.

“Darling, are you okay? I was so worried.”

“I’m fine. Just glad it’s over. It’s a girl, Justin. We have a daughter.”

The midwife brought the baby, swaddled in a blue blanket and gave it to Samira with a slightly perplexed look.

“Here’s your wee girl. She weighs seven pounds and four ounces,” she said.

She walked out of the room leaving Justin and Samira with the sleeping baby. Samira held her in her arms, and saw her for the first time, a tiny, wrinkled baby with black hair and olive skin. She fretted and stirred and opened her eyes to look up at them. They were an unmistakable shade of green.

Through her pain and exhaustion, Samira knew in an instant that this wasn’t Justin’s child. There was only one person in the world she knew with eyes that color. A night under the stars flooded into her memory, her first and only time with Ravi. She looked questioningly up at Justin and saw the bewilderment in his eyes, looking at the Indian child in her arms.

“Sammy, we are both exhausted,” he said, dully. “This is not the time to talk. We both need to rest. I’ll be back later.”

He walked out of the room without kissing her, his mind racing with thoughts that were almost too painful to contemplate. Could the baby he his? It was quite conceivable that it was. Maybe it was too soon to tell. The baby was only just born, after all. Another thought came to him, something he had pushed to the back of his mind in his eagerness to believe he could father a child, the indisputable diagnosis the doctors had made years ago. He found his car and made the drive back to Newcastle. Traffic was light going out of town, though the inbound lanes were already clogged with early commuters. This was meant to have been one of the happiest days of his life, he thought, tiredly. Instead, his mind was racing with doubts and possible explanations.

As soon as he arrived home, he went upstairs to the frozen bedroom and flopped into bed, forgetting that he had neglected to inform his parents about the baby.

The insistent ring of the telephone woke him just before eleven o’clock. All the events of earlier in the day came flooding back as he ran to answer the phone in the downstairs hallway. He knew it would be his mother.

“We waited all night for you to call. The hospital wouldn’t tell us anything. We thought you’d be sleeping, but I couldn’t wait any longer.” Irene was reproachful.

What was he supposed to say?

“Samira had a daughter, but I don’t think it’s mine. We have a baby girl, but she doesn’t look like I expected her to look.”

“She had a girl,” he said, finally. “She was born just after six o’clock in the morning. I’m sorry I didn’t call you. I was exhausted.”

“What’s the matter?” she asked. He didn’t sound at all excited or overjoyed, as one would expect a new father to be. “Are you okay?”

“Just tired,” he said. “It was a long day.”

“Ach, of course it was. What time are you going to the hospital?” she asked. “Shall we go together?”

“I’ll leave as soon as I’m showered and dressed. Why don’t we go separately? I might want to spend a little longer with Samira.”

He needed time to reflect and didn’t want the enforced intimacy of the long drive to Belfast with his parents. He showered and shaved and, suddenly ravenous, made himself a sandwich. He remembered to call Charles and Ramona. It was a terrible line, but he was able to convey the fact that they had a granddaughter before the line went dead.

He drove back to Belfast. In the maternity ward, the receptionist told him that Samira was no longer in a private room, something they had reserved at the hospital in Downpatrick. She was sitting up, pale and strangely different without her bump. The baby was in a transparent, plastic crib beside her. There were three other cubicles in the room. The smell of babies mingled with the hospital odor and the scent of the flowers beside each bed.

He kissed her and presented the bouquet of roses he’d bought in the booth downstairs.

“Did you sleep?” he asked, noting dark circles under her eyes.

She hadn’t been able to sleep, despite her exhaustion, till the nurse insisted on her taking a sleeping pill.

“You need all the rest you can get while you’re in here,” she said. “When you go home, the baby will keep you up night and day, and there’ll be no sleeping pills for you then.”

“I did for a few hours,” Samira said, “till they woke me up to have lunch. After that, I fed and changed the baby. She only just fell asleep.”

“I’m sorry you’re not in a private room.” He didn’t look at the baby asleep beside her.

“I’ll be fine. I went to boarding school, remember?”

“My folks will be here soon. I telephoned your parents, and they send their love. It wasn’t a clear line, unfortunately.”

There was an awkward silence. Samira knew they would have to talk. After her drug- induced sleep, she had woken with a blurred recollection of seeing her baby for the first time and wondered if it had all been a dream, till she saw the nurse’s anxious face bending over her and the crib beside her bed.

“May I have my baby, please,” she’d begged the nurse, too weak to lean over and lift her out herself. “And please draw the curtains round my bed.”

She wanted to examine her daughter in private. The baby stirred and whimpered as she was passed to her, waving plump arms in the air. Her heart melted as she gazed at the perfection of her tiny face and body. She unraveled the blanket and kissed the little feet. Everything about her spelled Ravi. There was absolutely no doubt in her mind that this was not Justin’s child, conceived the week before she took the trip to Darjeeling with Justin and two weeks before he proposed so suddenly.

What was she going to do? She couldn’t stay here, that was certain. She would have to go home as soon as she and the baby were fit to travel. What was she going to tell Justin? How would he ever understand? Would he believe that she had not been unfaithful to him? Obviously, their relationship was over. He would not want her now. At least this solved the problem of whether or not she would stay on in Newcastle. How would she ever face Irene and Edward? What would they all think of her?

Now, she faced Justin and realized that she needed to explain things to him before his parents arrived and saw the baby.

“We need to talk before your parents arrive,” she said to him, finally. “Please tell the nurse to ask them to wait till we’re ready.”

He did as she asked, and they sat with the curtains around them, the baby asleep in the crib.

“I think it’s fairly evident that this is not your child,” she said. “And it’s only fair to both of us that I explain exactly what happened.”

He listened to her story, white-faced and deeply distressed to have his suspicions confirmed. It was an unfortunate sequence of events and hard to take in. She had been impetuous, but then so had he. They had both rushed into making life-changing decisions that they should have taken more time to consider, he with his usual impulsiveness, she on the rebound from Ravi. And while neither of them was willing to admit it at this point, their feelings for each other had dissipated. If the child had been Justin’s, she would have been compelled to leave home and live with him in Ireland. There was no doubt in her mind that he wanted to stay. But if they had been deeply in love, would he have turned a blind eye to the fact that this was not his daughter? Would he have been willing to rear another man’s child?

“This is
my
problem,” concluded Samira. “And I’m the one who’s going to have to deal with the consequences. Your life here will continue as if you’d never known me. The baby and I will disappear as soon as we possibly can, and you will run the shop, just as you hoped. All you have to worry about now is how to tell your parents.”

They would be devastated, Justin realized, probably even more than he was, their longing for a grandchild thwarted at the very last minute. It was just too cruel. This would bring all their hopes of ever having a grandchild to an end, the hope that had died and then been rekindled when Samira became pregnant with what they thought was his child. How could he explain all this to them in the hospital? There would be a scene, no doubt. Irene would never forgive Samira and would not immediately see reason.

“I think I’d better go and explain everything to them elsewhere,” Justin said. “I can’t vouch for how Irene might react if I were to tell her here.”

“You’re right,” said Samira, relieved at being spared that ordeal at least. “Please give them my love and convey my sincerest apologies for the way things turned out.”

“You rest,” said Justin. “I’ll come and see you tomorrow. Let me know if there’s anything you need.”

“Actually there is something,” Samira said. “Would you be kind enough to call my Aunt Pauline and ask her if I can spend a few weeks with her before I fly back to India?”

Justin walked miserably out of the room. It all sounded so final. Despite what Samira said, his life would be completely different from what until yesterday he’d imagined it would be. Suddenly, he’d lost both his wife and his child. There would be no wedding and no christening, just a void in his life that had suddenly appeared from out of nowhere. And now, disconsolate as he was, he had to explain everything to his parents and endure their disappointment too.

They were waiting outside the ward, Edward in a suit and tie, and Irene dressed for her new role as grandmother, clutching an enormous bouquet of flowers tied with a pink ribbon.

He took the flowers from her and gave them to a passing nurse.

“Make sure Samira gets these,” he said.

“Come with me,” he said to his startled mother and father. “I have something to tell you.”

This was an occasion that called for a stiff drink. It would be too cruel to send them all the way back to Newcastle without an explanation.

“Meet me at the Red Lion,” he said. “I badly need a gin and tonic.”

The other mothers had constant streams of visitors, and husbands that sat beside them all the way through visiting hours. The nurses felt sorry for the beautiful English woman with the foreign-looking baby who nobody came to see. Even her husband, who had only visited her briefly on one occasion, had stopped coming.

Samira’s body ached after the agony of childbirth, but she knew that pain would soon heal. It was the ache in her heart that was so much worse. She sensed the nurses’ sympathy and was grateful beyond words when they would whisk her crying baby out of her sore arms, rocking and singing her to sleep, so she would rest. In her weakened, vulnerable state, they seemed to her like shining angels.

The following morning she was surprised to hear that she had visitors; Toby and Bernadette, who arrived with a teddy bear for the baby and a box of chocolates for her. They’d spoken to Irene, they explained. She had telephoned them right after Justin told her the baby was born. That must have been before Justin had broken the news that the baby was not his, Samira realized. And Irene obviously had not remembered or had not wanted to confess the fact to Bernadette. Now, Samira would have to be the one to enlighten them.

She was holding the baby in her arms when they came in.

“Ach, would you look at the wee dote!” cried Bernadette, gazing down at the little face. “And to think,” she continued, “that all the doctors said that Justin was infertile and could never have a child! Well, this wee creature certainly proved them wrong, didn’t she, now?”

She smiled happily at Samira, unselfish in her delight for Justin. Then she noticed the look of horror on Samira’s face.

“Justin infertile? What do you mean?” Samira exclaimed. “That’s the first I heard of it.”

Bernadette exchanged glances with her husband. They had no idea that Samira had not been told.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you didn’t know. But no harm done because, well, obviously there was no need for anyone to tell you with you becoming pregnant so soon.”

Samira was aghast, trying to take it in.

“So you mean to tell me that Justin knew he couldn’t father a child?”

“Well, yes, he most certainly knew that,” said Toby, “Why, he and Lorraine had been trying to have a baby for years, and they had all those tests and everything.”

Why hadn’t he told her? Samira couldn’t understand. First, it had been wrong of him to propose to her without revealing that they would never have a family. Then, when she became pregnant, he had said nothing about his infertility. Had he made a fool of her? Had he known all along? And what about Irene and Edward? They must have known, too.

“Well, I’m very sorry to have to tell you this,” she said, grimly, “But it seems the doctors were right. This baby is not Justin’s.”

There was a stunned silence. Bernadette recalled Edward and Irene’s visit last year when they gloated over the fact that Justin had sired a child. But if it wasn’t Justin’s, then whose child was it?