The windows of the theatre were fixed and Haig could escape only into
the passage. Bruce knew that he could catch him if he tried to run for it.
He looked into the ward. Shermaine and Ignatius, with the help of an African orderly, had lifted the woman on to the theatre trolley.
“Father, we need more light.”
“I can get you another lantern, that’s all.”
“Good, do that then. I’ll take the woman through.” Father
Ignatius disappeared with the orderly and Bruce helped Shermaine manoeuvre the trolley down the length of the ward and into the passage.
The woman was whimpering with pain, and her face was grey, waxy grey.
They only go like that when they are very frightened, or when they are dying.
“She hasn’t much longer,” he said.
“know,” agreed Shermaine. “We must hurry.” The woman moved restlessly on the trolley and gabbled a few words; then she sighed so that the great blanketcove red mound of her belly rose and fell, and she started to whimper again.
Haig was still in the theatre. He had stripped off his battle-jacket and, in his vest, he stooped over the basin washing. He did not look round as they wheeled the woman in.
“Get her on the table, he said, working the soap into suds up to his elbows.
The trolley was of a height with the table and, using the blanket to lift her, it was easy to slide the woman across.
“She’s ready, Haig,” said Bruce. Haig dried his arms on a clean towel and turned. He came to the woman and stood over her. She did not know he was there; her eyes were open but unseeing. Haig drew a
breath; he was sweating a little across his forehead and the stubble of beard on the lower part of his face was stippled with grey.
He pulled back the blanket. The woman wore a short white jacket, open-fronted, that did not cover her stomach.
Her stomach was swollen out, hard-looking, with the navel inverted. Knees raised slightly and the thick peasant’s thighs spread wide in the act of labour. As Bruce watched, her whole body arched in another contraction. He saw the stress of the muscles beneath the dark greyish skin as they struggled to expel the trapped foetus.
“Hurry, Mike!” Bruce was appalled by the anguish of birth. I
didn’t know it was like this; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children - but this! Through the woman’s dry grey swollen lips burst another of those moaning little cries, and Bruce swung towards Mike Haig.
“Hurry, goddam you?” And Mike Haig began his examination, his hands very pale as they groped over the dark skin. At last he was satisfied and he stood back from the table.
Ignatius and the orderly came in with two more lanterns.
Ignatius started to say something, but instantly he sensed the tension in the room and he fell silent. They all watched Mike Haig’s face.
His eyes were tight closed, and his face was hard angles and harsh planes in the lantern light. His breathing was shallow and laboured.
I must not push him now, Bruce knew instinctively, I have dragged him to the lip of the precipice and now I must let him go over the edge on his own.
Mike opened his eyes again, and he spoke.
“Caesarian section,” he said, as though he had pronounced his own death sentence. Then his breathing stopped. They waited, and at last the breath came out of him in a sigh.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“Gowns and gloves?” Bruce fired the question at Ignatius.
“In the cupboard.”
“Get them!
“You’ll have to help me, Bruce. And you also Shermaine.”
“Yes, show me.” Quickly they scrubbed and dressed. Ignatius held the pale green theatre gowns while they dived into them and flapped and struggled through.
“That tray, bring it here,” Mike ordered as he opened the sterilizer. With a pair of long-nosed forceps he lifted the instruments out of the steaming box and laid them on the tray naming each one as he did so.
“Scalpel, refractors, clamps.” In the meantime the orderly was swabbing the woman’s belly with alcohol and arranging the sheets.
Mike filled the syringe with pentothal and held it up to the
light. He was an unfamiliar figure now; his face masked, the green skull cap covering his hair, and the flowing gown falling to his ankles. He pressed the plunger and a few drops of the pale fluid dribbled down the needle.
He looked at Bruce, only his haunted eyes showing above the mask.
“Ready?”
“Yes,” Bruce nodded. Mike stooped over the woman, took her arm and sent the needle searching under the soft black skin on the
inside of her elbow. The fluid in the syringe was suddenly discoloured with drawn blood as Mike tested for the vein, and then the plunger slid slowly down the glass barrel.
The woman stopped whimpering, the tension went out of her body and
her breathing slowed and became deep and unhurried.
“Come here.” Mike ordered Shermaine to the head of the table, and she took up the chloroform mask and soaked the gauze that filled the
cone.
“Wait until I tell you.” She nodded. Christ, what lovely eyes she has, thought Bruce, before he turned back to the job in hand.
“Scalpel,” said Mike from across the table, pointing to it on the tray, and Bruce handed it to him.
Afterwards the details were confused and lacking reality in
Bruce’s mind.
The wound opening behind the knife, the tight stretched skin parting and the tiny blood vessels starting to squirt.
Pink muscle laced with white; butter-yellow layers of subcutaneous fat, and then through to the massed bluish coils of the gut. Human tissue, soft and pulsing, glistening in the flat glare of the petromax.
Clamps and refractors, like silver insects crowding into the wound as though it were a flower.
Mike’s hands, inhuman in yellow rubber, moving in the open pit of the belly. Swabbing, cutting, clamping, tying off.
Then the swollen purple bag of the womb, suddenly unzipped by the
knife.
And at last, unbelievably, the child curled in a dark grey ball of legs and tiny arms, head too big for its size, and the far pink snake of the placenta enfolding it.
Lifted out, the infant hung by its heels from Mike’s hand like a
small grey bat, still joined to its mother.
Scissors snipped and it was free. Mike worked it little longer, and the infant cried.
It cried with minute fury, indignant and alive. From the head of the table Shermaine laughed with spontaneous delight, and clapped her hands like a child at a Punch and Judy show. Suddenly Bruce was laughing also, It was a laugh from long -ago, coming out from deep inside him take it,” said Haig and Shermaine cradled it. wet and feebl wriggling in her arms. She stood with it while Haig sewed up.
Watching her face and the way she stood, Bruce suddenly and unaccountably felt the laughter snag his throat, and he wanted to cry.
Haig closed the womb, stitching the complicated pattern of knots like a skilled seamstress, then the external sutures laid neatly across
the fat lips of the wound, and at last the immunity white tape hiding it all. He covered the woman, jerked the mask from his face and looked up at Shermaine.
“you can help me clean it up,” he said, and his voice was strong again and proud. The two of them crossed to the basin.
Bruce threw off his gown and left the room, went down the passage and out into the night. He leaned against the bonnet of the Ford and
[lit a cigarette.
Tonight I laughed again, he told himself with wonder, and then I
nearly cried. And all because of a woman and a child. It is finished now, the pretence. The withdrawal. The big act. There was more than one birth in there tonight. I laughed again, I had the need to laugh again, and the desire to cry. A woman and a child, the whole meaning of life.