Other times, I craved sugar. It would hit me suddenly, the need to crunch and suck on glassy grains of it, squeezing them through my teeth; some days I stole so much sugar I made my tongue sore with abrasions from working its sweet, scratchy crystals against the roof of my mouth. Then there were days when I needed sugar to slide around inside my mouth all smooth and golden and chewy, and I walked around salivating with a desire for soft lumps of toffee. Once I was so desperate I set about making some without a recipe, just melting and boiling up sugar with butter, and Silva lost her temper. She lifted the whole seething pan of it from the gas burner, carried it outside, and tipped it all out on the ground, shouting at me that it was bad for me, bad for the baby, a waste of gas, a waste of sugar, I had ruined the pan. Not even then did I do more than protest I hadn’t meant any harm. Actually I had already made up my mind to get Ron to bring me as much toffee as I could ever want. Silva need never know.
After that she wrote down her rules for my diet. She made a timetable with my hours all set out, for domestic tasks, periods of rest, gentle exercise. I wanted to laugh. She was rationing my knitting to an hour a day because, she said, pregnant women who knitted too much could produce confused babies. I went along with it, more or less. My days were all now so much the same, so uneventful and poised for this last period of waiting, that I didn’t care what I did. It hardly mattered that Silva wanted to shift me along from one activity to the next according to her notion of what was good for the baby.
In fact, it suited me to let her do the thinking. While time was of course stretching forward, I was basking in a dream that it stood still. Insofar as I bothered to grasp that everything was about to change, I was enjoying not knowing quite what to expect. I never once thought of pain, for instance. I had the dreamiest notions about breast feeding. I trusted myself to deal with these things naturally, when the time came. It was as much as I could do, day by day, to heft around this massive body of mine and make sense of the idea that all it was, for the time being, was a vault for the round boulder of baby pushing harder and harder against its walls.
Still, eventually I said I should find a doctor and make arrangements. Silva was reluctant at first. I don’t think she wanted me to hear any advice that might compete with hers, or get the idea that anyone but she was managing my pregnancy. So, more for vigilance than support, she came with me.
I stood no chance of making it up the slope through the pine trees, so very early one morning Ron took us in the boat to the other side of the river, where he picked up the catering crew. Silva and I walked to the service station and waited there for a bus.
We were in the center of Inverness before half past six. It was a blowy, colorless morning, and the pavement at the bus station where we stepped off was dark and cold in the long, early shadow cast by high buildings; seagulls squabbled over discarded food wrappers blowing along the gutter. The air was brackish with the exhaust fumes of arriving and departing buses, and already the city was noisy with traffic. We hung around until the station coffee stall opened at seven o’clock, and we bought muffins and tea. There wasn’t a proper seat in the place, just a ledge, and the ground was littered with cigarette ends and stained with spilled drink and dropped food and urine. My back ached, and I kept yawning. The tea was both weak and bitter, and I said I felt sick and wished I was still in bed.
Silva told me to shut up. It wasn’t unusual for her to say that kind of thing, but away from the cabin it sounded harsh and different, a way of being spoken to that I should not have had to get used to. Still, I didn’t let it bother me. I remember gazing at her profile as she swallowed her tea and thinking how thin her cheeks were, how much more in need of a doctor she looked than I. I took her hand and whispered my thanks to her for bringing me. And then, although it hadn’t crossed my mind before, I told her that she would be the first to hold the baby. She turned with a gasp. Then she squeezed my hand and smiled, a shining smile full of delight that I had never seen on her face before and that revealed, perhaps, her delight in having me confirm something she had already decided.
We waited until nearly eight o’clock and then caught a bus to the clinic, which opened at half past. Of course, we had had no idea how to find a doctor in Inverness, so Ron had done an Internet search for us and printed out details of the largest clinic in the city. It wasn’t in the center, but it had ten doctors, as well as nurses and midwives and other staff, and I hoped it would be busy and impersonal, too system-bound to probe into my circumstances. I didn’t want to be treated as a person, just as a container that might need technical help to empty it of its load of baby.
I was glad to see that the building was modern and low, an austere, small institution, its doors plastered with notices. Inside, we joined the queue at the receptionist’s window. When my turn came, there were several people behind me and within earshot. Silva kept turning and glaring at them.
“Yes?”
I opened my mouth and stalled. The receptionist had begun writing, and I didn’t like to speak to the top of her head.
“Hello, yes?” She looked up with a microsmile, no more than a twitch of the mouth.
“Sorry, yes, hello… I’ve just moved here,” I said. “I wonder if I-”
“You want to register,” she said, rolling herself a few feet back on her office chair and reaching into a filing cabinet. “Both of you?”
“No! Not me,” Silva said. “Only her.”
“Do you want the forms in English? We’ve got them in other languages,” she said, rolling back.
“I’m just having a baby,” I blurted. “I don’t need a doctor for anything else. I’m just having a baby.”
The receptionist sat up higher in her chair and looked at my belly, nodded, then swung herself over to another filing cabinet.
“You want Maternity Services. Here’s the antenatal questionnaire as well. We’ll need details of your previous GP. Once you’ve registered, we book you in for an assessment with the community midwife. Antenatal clinic’s Tuesday morning; you need to attend weekly from thirty-five weeks. Postal code?”
“Postal code? Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Sorry.”
“What’s your address? You have to be a resident within the area.”
“Oh, yes. I mean, we’re just moving in. I don’t have it on me.”
I had thought up an address, but suddenly I didn’t dare give it. I felt certain this woman had an encyclopedic memory of Inverness and knew the sound of every doorbell in every street.
Silva pushed forward and pulled at my arm. “Come on, we don’t need this!” she said fiercely. “Let’s go, come on!”
“Silva, wait. Just a minute,” I said. I smiled at the receptionist. “Sorry.”
Silva pushed her face to the window. “She’ll come back another day. She has many weeks still, maybe eight, nine. It’s not urgent.”
The receptionist ignored her and handed me several sheets of paper. “If you want to see a doctor today, you’ll need to go on the end of the list. First you have to fill in the new patient registration form, the patient questionnaire, and also the antenatal questionnaire. We’ll also need your medical card, passport or other photo ID, proof of address, and contact details of your previous medical practitioner.”