this is as it should be.
‘Is it a boy?’ I asked the midwife repeatedly. She was quite terse with me in the end.
‘It’s a girl,’ she snapped. ‘I’ve told you it’s a girl, a lovely girl.’
That was an oxymoron to me by then, Ralph. Can you understand that? I’d had Jillian and Nicola, and each of those pregnancies cost me dearly. But as a man you could never appreciate that. Besides, delivering Alice was meant to be my last messy natal performance. I deserved to have a boy. I deserved a son by then.You know what they say, Ralph, third time lucky.Well, it wasn’t for me. Having Alice was the most unpropitious thing that ever happened to me. Our daughter, our third daughter filled me with dread. But not you, oh no. You adored her, didn’t you?
The midwife was a big, hearty woman, with apple-red cheeks, and large pink hands, butcher’s hands I recall. She reached towards my chest and started fumbling with the tie of my nightie.
‘No! No, no!’ My voice was pitched too high. It reeked of panic.
‘Put her to your breast,’ she urged, still pulling at the lacing. She had a slight burr to her voice, though what the accent was I couldn’t tell you.
I thrust her hand away.‘I am not feeding it myself.I need a bottle,’ I told her succinctly. I had an image of a stray dog then, a dog I had seen on the streets of Nairobi, its dugs heavy with milk, puppies suckling frantically at them. Its eyes were rolled upwards to heaven, you could see their whites, but it lay in the gutter, and was coated with filth.
I suppressed a shudder. She stopped scrabbling at my painfully engorged breasts and nudged the baby forwards instead. I took it awkwardly, as if I thought it might bite me at any moment. I looked into the face. The wispy hair was lighter than Nicola’s. The mouth that rooted hopefully towards me was pretty enough. But the eyes unsettled me.They were the rich brown of tobacco, and preternaturally alert.They were needy too. I have been told a newborn cannot focus immediately, but as this child stared steadily up at me I had my doubts. Returning her gaze, what I felt was not a trickle of love, but a wave of cold dislike. ‘She’ meant that I would have to do it all once more. She was unnecessary, surplus to requirements. She did not even have the decency to look abashed,as Nicola had done.And quite suddenly, with the smell of disinfectant and warm sweet blood, and the distant muted sounds coming to me from far corridors of rolling trolleys and muffled voices and footsteps, I felt afraid.
‘Shall I show your husband in?’ asked the determined midwife, her tone brisk, business-like. And when there was no response, she added with unnecessary emphasis,‘To see his beautiful baby daughter?’
For a second I wondered who she meant. Then Ralph, in you came. You took the bundle carefully in your arms, studied it for a moment, and then your face lit up.You looked so delighted.
‘It is a girl,’ I explained, thinking you had not grasped this. It was the year 1956 and I had given birth to yet another baby girl.
‘I know,’you said.‘She’s beautiful.’To my amazement, your shining eyes proved the sincerity of your words. The baby seemed to sense this, following the sound of her father’s voice. Father and daughter’s eyes locked. Ralph, you looked smitten, mesmerised. I felt a pang just under my ribcage and had to turn away.
‘I think the name Alice suits her,’ you said. ‘Oh…yes, definitely. Alice. What do you think?’
I shrugged indifferently. ‘If you like,’ I said. I wasn’t really bothered one way or another. Alice would do as well as the next name.
There was black magic involved in the coming of my son though. Oh, scientists would say that I was just being fanciful, but I know. I was in my sixth month. We had since moved to the British Crown Colony of Aden. Having developed extreme eczema, blistering and bleeding over your hands and lower arms—a reaction to the chemicals you used in photography—you had been persuaded by George Walbrook, your friend in the Foreign Office, to apply for a posting in government information services in Honduras. Failing to secure this, you were offered instead an administrative post in Aden. And it was here, in the merciless heat and chaos of this busy port, with its shark-infested harbour, that we settled with our growing family.This time, I had decided not to return to England for the birth. I did not think I could bear Mother’s disapproval if yet again I failed to produce the necessary male. Besides, I had been assured that they had the very best of facilities and doctors here in Aden.
We were having a party when it happened. Do you remember, Ralph? We had many friends there, British and Arab. I was wearing a voluminous midnight-blue affair. Quite suddenly a tall Arab gentleman, with sable skin and very white teeth—dressed, I couldn’t help thinking, with his turban and glittering tunic, a bit like a fairground magician—seized hold of the hem of my dress, folded himself in half, and with his other hand flung some white powder up under the bell of my skirt. It coated my mound. The gentleman’s name was A…A…Akil, that’s right, and he worked with you.
He fixed me with his black hawk eyes, Akil, and straightened up. As I moved away the remaining powder fell softly about my ankles, like a dusting of snow. I was taken aback. I had not been prepared for someone shoving handfuls of unknown substances up my maternity dress, and did not know quite how to react. He bowed to me graciously.
‘The baby you are carrying, it shall be a boy now,’ he said in a deep, sonorous voice.
I was so delighted with his prediction that I forgot to be annoyed. At least he understood the turmoil inside me.The thought of another girl growing there, another Alice…dear God! Later that night as you and I tried in vain to slumber in the heat, you mentioned the encounter. I didn’t think you had seen it. Even in my tangle of sheets, hot and bothered, with the child stirring restlessly inside me, as if it too was finding the intense heat unbearable, I was surprised.
‘That Akil has a cheek,’ you mumbled through a yawn.‘Throwing talcum powder up your dress, and coming up with that mumbo-jumbo about our baby.’You thrust the sheet back from your body, and I saw that your skin was slick with sweat.
We were sleeping beneath mosquito nets, and I found the effect of that claustrophobic haze disturbing.
‘He took me unawares,’ I responded primly, pushing down my own portion of our sheet, sitting up, and resting back against the pillows. ‘He told me that now we will have a son.’
You laughed. ‘What, as if it was down to him!’
Outside the netting, the high-pitched whine of a mosquito could be heard, fading and then coming back, as it attempted re-entry.
‘It might be true. It might be a boy,’ I commented casually, as if I couldn’t have cared less.
‘And it might be a girl,’ you said equably.
After that you fell asleep. But I remained awake for some time, my hands exploring my bump, glossy with moonlight. I could not bear to go through this again. There was no choice in the matter, and the child should know this. It had to be male. Our son was born three months later. Clearly he had been paying attention to our Arab friend.But he had obviously been a touch overwrought at the prospect of his much longed-for arrival, and had wound the umbilical cord around his neck like a noose. He emerged not a healthy shade of pink, flushed with his first breaths of life, but milky-blue, his lips an even deeper hue, kissed with death. The doctors were uncertain if he would make it through the night. They took him away to wrestle with the black prince, promising to do their best to snatch my son from his grip. I lay alone in bed that night, in a white nondescript room, in a hospital in Aden. I felt bleak. I had produced a son. Finally I
