– doctor called me Mrs Lockhart and he said, what provisions have your family made for when she comes home? For her and the baby?
Sister Stewart appears at Esme's bedside early one morning. 'Get yourself up and get your things together.'
Esme rips back the bedsheets. 'I'm going home,' she says. 'I'm going home. Aren't I?'
Sister Stewart pushes her face up close. 'I'm not saying yes and I'm not saying no. Now, come on. Be quick about it.'
Esme pulls her dress over her head and bundles her possessions into its pockets. 'I'm going home,' she calls to Maudie, as she trips down the ward behind Sister Stewart.
'Good for you, hen,' Maudie replies. 'Come back and see us.'
Sister Stewart walks down two flights of stairs, along a long corridor, past a row of windows, and Esme sees snatches of sky, of trees, of people walking along the road. She's coming out. There is the world waiting for her. It is all she can do to stop herself pushing past Sister Stewart and breaking into a run. She wonders who will have come to collect her. Kitty? Or just her parents? Surely Kitty will have come, after all this time. She'll be waiting in the foyer with the black and white tiles, sitting on a chair perhaps, her bag balanced on her lap, as it always is, her gloves on just so, and as Esme comes down the stairs she will turn her head, she will turn her head and smile.
Esme is about to take the flight of stairs leading to the ground floor and Kitty when she realises Sister Stewart is holding open a door for her. Esme steps through. Then Sister Stewart is speaking to another nurse, saying here's Euphemia for you, and the nurse is saying, come on, this way, here's your bed.
Esme stares at the bed. It is steel, with a coarse cotton cover and has a blanket folded at its end. It is in an empty room with one window, so high up she can see nothing but grey cloud through it. She turns. 'But I'm going home,' she says.
'No, you're not,' the nurse replies, and reaches out to take her bundle of clothes.
Esme pulls it away. She can feel that she is about to cry. She is about to cry and she does not think she can stop herself this time. She stamps her foot. 'I am! Dr Naysmith said-'
'You're to stay here until the baby comes.'
Esme sees that Sister Stewart is leaning against the wall, watching her, a peculiar smile on her face. 'What baby?' Esme asks.
Her face is so close to the bed-end that she can see marks on the metal. Scratches or chips in the enamel. She is twisted, contorted, her head pushed back into the mattress, her back arched, and she curls her hands over the marks and watches her fingers turn white. The pain comes up from the core of her and seems to engulf her, storming over her head. Such pain is unimaginable. It will not stop. It has her in a constant, never-weakening grip and she does not think she is going to live. Her time is now. Her time is soon. It is not possible to be in so much pain and not die.
She tightens her fingers round the marks and she hears someone screaming and screaming, and only then does it occur to her that they are teethmarks. Someone in this ward, in this very bed, has been driven to gnaw the bedpost. She hears herself shout, teeth, teeth.
'What's she saying?' one of the nurses asks, but she cannot hear the answer. There are two nurses with her, an older one and a younger one. The younger one is nice. She holds her to the bed, like the older one, but not so firmly and, near the beginning of this, she dabbed a cloth over her face when the older nurse wasn't looking.
They are pressing down on her shoulders, on her shins, saying, lie still now. But she cannot. The pain twists her, it lifts her from the bed, buckles her. The nurses thrust her back to the mattress, again and again. Push, they shout at her, push. Don't push. Push now. Stop pushing. Come on, child.
Esme has lost sensation in her legs and arms. She can hear a high-pitched shriek and a panting, like that of a sick animal, and the nurse saying, that's it, that's it, keep going, and she thinks that she has heard these sounds before somewhere, somehow, a long time ago, and is it possible that she could have overheard her mother in labour – with Hugo, with one of those other babies? She seems to see herself tiptoeing up to a door, her parents' door in the house in India, and hearing this same pant-pant-pant and the high ululating and the cries of encouragement. And the smell. This hot, wet, salted smell is something she has encountered before. She sees herself at the door, pushing it open and, through the crack, glimpsing what looks for a moment like a painting. The dim room and the white of the sheet with the startling scarlet and the woman's head dark with sweat, bent over in supplication, the attendants gathered round, the steam from a basin. Is is possible she saw this? She bends her own head, gives three short pants, and even this appearance of a small, slick, seal-being has the unreality of something that has happened already.
Esme turns on to her side and pulls her knees up to her chest. She is washed ashore, shipwrecked. She finds herself examining her hands, which are crumpled near her face. They look the same. And this strikes her as curious, that they should be so unchanged, that they should look just as they have always done. The nurse is severing through something twisted and rope-like and Esme watches as the tiny blue body becomes rinsed with red and the nurse lands a slap on its bottom and turns it over.
Esme raises herself on an elbow. It takes an immense amount of effort. The baby's eyes are shut tight, the fists held up at the cheeks and its expression is unsure, anxious. Look, the nurse says, a boy, a healthy boy. Esme nods. The nurse swaddles him in a green blanket. And Esme says, 'Can I have him?' The nurse, the young one it is, glances towards the door then back to Esme. 'Well,' she says, still holding the baby. 'Quickly, then.'
She comes over and lays him in Esme's arms and the weight, the balance of him is oddly familiar. His eyes open and he looks up at her and his gaze is grave, calm, as if he'd been expecting her. She touches his cheek, she touches his forehead, she touches his hand, and it opens and locks tight again round her finger.
The older nurse is back in the room and she is saying something about papers, but Esme does not listen. The nurse reaches down for the baby; she puts her hands about him.
'Could we not just give her five minutes?' The younger nurse's voice is soft, pleading.
'No, we can't,' snaps the older one, and she starts to lift the baby out of Esme's arms.
And Esme realises what is happening. She snatches the baby away from the nurse. No, she says, no. She slides off the bed with him and her knees give way beneath her but she crawls away, over the floor, the baby grasped to her chest. Come on, Euphemia, she hears the nurse say behind her, don't be naughty, give me the baby. Esme says that she won't, she won't, get away from me. The nurse seizes her arm. Now, listen, she begins, but Esme turns and lands a punch right in her eye. You little, the nurse mutters, staggering backwards, and Esme finds her strength, raises herself up on her legs. For a second, she cannot balance, strangely light as she is after all these months. But she pushes herself into a run and she makes it past the bed, past the young nurse who, she sees, is coming for her too, towards the door.