Jeannie wakes up when A. comes back. He has brought a paper, some detective novels for Jeannie, and a bottle of Scotch for himself. A. reads the paper and drinks Scotch, and Jeannie reads Poirot’s Early Cases. There is no connection between Poirot and her labour, which is now intensifying, unless it is the egg-shape of Poirot’s head and the vegetable marrows he is known to cultivate with strands of wet wool (placentae? umbilical cords?). She is glad the stories are short; she is walking around the room now, between contractions. Lunch was definitely a mistake.
“I think I have back labour,” she says to A. They get out the handbook and look up the instructions for this. It’s useful that everything has a name. Jeannie kneels on the bed and rests her forehead on her arms while A. rubs her back. A. pours himself another Scotch, in the hospital glass. The nurse, in pink, comes, looks, asks about the timing, and goes away again. Jeannie is beginning to sweat. She can only manage half a page or so of Poirot before she has to clamber back up on the bed again and begin breathing and running through the coloured numbers.
When the nurse comes back, she has a wheelchair. It’s time to go down to the labour room, she says. Jeannie feels stupid sitting in the wheelchair. She tells herself about peasant women having babies in the fields, Indian women having them on portages with hardly a second thought. She feels effete. But the hospital wants her to ride, and considering the fact that the nurse is tiny, perhaps it’s just as well. What if Jeannie were to collapse, after all? After all her courageous talk. An image of the tiny pink nurse, antlike, trundling large Jeannie through the corridors, rolling her along like a heavy beachball.
As they go by the check-in desk a woman is wheeled past on a table, covered by a sheet. Her eyes are closed and there’s a bottle feeding into her arm through a tube. Something is wrong. Jeannie looks back—she thinks it was the other woman—but the sheeted table is hidden now behind the counter.
In the dim labour room Jeannie takes off her dressing gown and is helped up onto the bed by the nurse. A. brings her suitcase, which is not a suitcase actually but a small flight bag; the significance of this has not been lost on Jeannie, and in fact she now has some of the apprehensive feelings she associates with planes, including the fear of a crash. She takes out her Lifesavers, her glasses, her washcloth and the other things she thinks she will need. She removes her contact lenses and places them in their case, reminding A. that they must not be lost. Now she is purblind.
There is something else in her bag that she doesn’t remove. It’s a talisman, given to her several years ago as a souvenir by a travelling friend of hers. It’s a rounded oblong of opaque blue glass, with four yellow and white eye shapes on it. In Turkey, her friend has told her, they hang them on mules to protect against the Evil Eye. Jeannie knows this talisman probably won’t work for her, she is not Turkish and she isn’t a mule, but it makes her feel safer to have it in the room with her. She had planned to hold it in her hand during the most difficult part of labour but somehow there is no longer any time for carrying out plans like this.
An old woman, a fat old woman dressed all in green, comes into the room and sits beside Jeannie. She says to A., who is sitting on the other side of Jeannie, “That is a good watch. They don’t make watches like that any more.” She is referring to his gold pocket watch, one of his few extravagances, which is on the night table. Then she places her hand on Jeannie’s belly to feel the contraction. “This is good,” she says; her accent is Swedish or German. “This, I call a contraction. Before, it was nothing.” Jeannie can no longer remember having seen her before. “Good. Good.”
“When will I have it?” Jeannie asks, when she can talk, when she is no longer counting.
The old woman laughs. Surely that laugh, those tribal hands, have presided over a thousand beds, a thousand kitchen tables… “A long time yet,” she says. “Eight, ten hours.”
“But I’ve been doing this for twelve hours already,” Jeannie says.
“Not hard labour,” the woman says. “Not good, like this.”
Jeannie settles into herself for the long wait. At the moment she can’t remember why she wanted to have a baby in the first place. That decision was made by someone else, whose motives are now unclear. She remembers the way women who had babies used to smile at one another, mysteriously, as if there was something they knew that she didn’t, the way they would casually exclude her from their frame of reference. What was the knowledge, the mystery, or was having a baby really no more inexplicable than having a car accident or an orgasm? (But these too were indescribable, events of the body, all of them; why should the mind distress itself trying to find a language for them?) She has sworn she will never do that to any woman without children, engage in those passwords and exclusions. She’s old enough, she’s been put through enough years of it to find it tiresome and cruel.
But—and this is the part of Jeannie that goes with the talisman hidden in her bag, not with the part that longs to build kitchen cabinets and smoke hams—she is, secretly, hoping for a mystery. Something more than this, something else, a vision. After all she is risking her life, though it’s not too likely she will die. Still, some women do. Internal bleeding, shock, heart failure, a mistake on the part of someone, a nurse, a doctor. She deserves a vision, she deserves to be allowed to bring something back with her from this dark place into which she is now rapidly descending.
She thinks momentarily about the other woman. Her motives, too, are unclear. Why doesn’t she want to have a baby? Has she been raped, does she have ten other children, is she starving? Why hasn’t she had an abortion? Jeannie doesn’t know, and in fact it no longer matters why. Uncross your fingers, Jeannie thinks to her. Her face, distorted with pain and terror, floats briefly behind Jeannie’s eyes before it too drifts away.
Jeannie tries to reach down to the baby, as she has many times before, sending waves of love, colour, music, down through her arteries to it, but she finds she can no longer do this. She can no longer feel the baby as a baby, its arms and legs poking, kicking, turning. It has collected itself together, it’s a hard sphere, it does not have time right now to listen to her. She’s grateful for this because she isn’t sure anyway how good the message would be. She no longer has control of the numbers either, she can no longer see them, although she continues mechanically to count. She realizes she has practised for the wrong thing, A. squeezing her knee was nothing, she should have practised for this, whatever it is.
“Slow down,” A. says. She’s on her side now, he’s holding her hand. “Slow it right down.”
“I can’t, I can’t do it, I can’t do this.”
“Yes you can.”
“Will I sound like that?”
“Like what?” A. says. Perhaps he can’t hear it: it’s the other woman, in the room next door or the room next door to that. She’s screaming and crying, screaming and crying. While she cries she is saying, over and over, “It hurts. It hurts.”
“No, you won’t,” he says. So there is someone, after all.
A doctor comes in, not her own doctor. They want her to turn over on her back.
“I can’t,” she says. “I don’t like it that way.” Sounds have receded, she has trouble hearing them. She turns over and the doctor gropes with her rubber-gloved hand. Something wet and hot flows over her thighs.
“It was just ready to break,” the doctor says. “All I had to do was touch it. Four centimetres,” she says to A.
“Only four?” Jeannie says. She feels cheated; they must be wrong. The doctor says her own doctor will be called in time. Jeannie is outraged at them. They have not understood, but it’s too late to say this and she slips back into the dark place, which is not hell, which is more like being inside, trying to get out. Out, she says or thinks. Then she is floating, the numbers are gone, if anyone told her to get up, go out of the room, stand on her head, she would do it. From minute to minute she comes up again, grabs for air.