Gordon couldn’t remember what he had said in response.
Marcelle had gone. Gordon sat down in the chair and Vicky gave the baby to him. He gazed down at the little face, seeing Mary and Alice in the compressed features. The same, each time, but different. He held this tenacious fragment of optimistically combined genes for a moment, and then laid her in the crib beside the bed.
‘Marcelle brought me a picnic from the school. I was hungry,’ Vicky explained. There was a white box on the bed table, and when he looked into it he saw the remnants of some savoury pie and two brandy snaps. Vicky had a sweet tooth. He felt criticized, because he had not thought to bring her anything to eat himself, although he knew the hospital food was poor. He took her hand and wound his fingers through hers. Her fingers had swollen up at the end of the pregnancy, and she had had to take off her rings.
‘Are you still feeling blue?’
‘Not too bad.’ Vicky hoisted herself up against the pillows, making a face at the discomfort as she did so. ‘It’s only the stitches, really.’
Gordon had not seen the wound since he had watched the delivery itself. He imagined the line of stitching above the curling hair where he had liked to kiss her. It would be like a closed mouth, he thought. The scar would fade to a faint white line. The doctors had told them that.
‘You’ll be better soon.’
‘I know. It’s okay. Have you had a busy day?’
Very clearly, he heard the tonelessness of their questions and the other, unspoken dialogue concerning their separate and irreconcilable needs.
‘Not particularly. I came here straight from the cathedral. The scaffolding is going up.’
Vicky was even less interested in the conservation work than Andrew was. ‘It’ll be up for ever, I suppose. What a shame it has to be done now.’
Now or in a hundred years, Gordon mused. I might have missed seeing it. He felt privileged to be part of this regeneration, and the thought of seeing it with Nina made him falter, on a dancing beat of pleasure, so that he had to lean sideways, twitching at a parched flower that hung out of a vase to hide his joy from Vicky.
Visiting time was in full flood. The ward hummed with camcorders, and with the noise of older siblings who slid on the polished floor and swung on the high ends of the beds.
‘I called the girls this afternoon after I spoke to you,’ Vicky said, with her eyes on the other mothers’ children.
‘Is everything okay?’
‘Mum says they’re both a bit weepy and anxious. Alice wet her bed last night.’ She hesitated, and then said without looking at him, ‘I wondered if it might be a good idea for you to bring them back early? They could have the weekend at home with you, and come in to see the baby before we bring her back.’
It was a challenge to him, like an unorthodox move in a chess game. Vicky was giving him an opening to show his concern for his children’s well-being by removing them from their grandparents and attending to them himself through a winter weekend. Like a drowning man, Gordon glimpsed a series of flickering images of two days of freedom. He saw Nina in her green scarf, and the squared lights and shadows that divided the ceiling of her cool, bare drawing room.
‘I have a mound of paperwork to do, love. If I clear it while you are in here I’ll have more time once you do get home. And I think it’ll be more unsettling for the girls to whisk them back again when they are expecting to stay longer with Marjorie and Alec. They’ll think something is wrong.’
Vicky pleated the white sheet between her fingers. Her stomach still made a noticeable mound under the covers.
‘It was just a thought.’
He put his hand over hers. ‘Mary and Alice are fine. How could they not be, with a mother like you?’
‘And a father like you.’ There were a dozen edges to her words.
Gordon felt the stubborn base rock of his resistance when he smiled back at her. ‘We’ll be okay. You rest and get your strength back.’
It was almost the end of visiting time. He leant over Vicky and kissed her as he had done when he arrived, but she would not look at him. Gordon’s queasy swell of tenderness and rancour was spiked with premonitory guilt.
‘See you tomorrow.’
‘Yes. Gordon?’
‘What is it?’
‘Is everything all right?’ The bland formula of a searching question, repeated. It delivered her fears up to him, a package that he should unwrap.
‘Of course it is. I want you to come home, that’s all.’ Bland and tidy lies, also, putting aside the parcel.
‘Only two or three more days.’ She leaned back against the pillows, relinquishing him.
On his way out Gordon found the ward sister in her office. He mentioned Vicky’s depression as if she might offer some potion to dispel it.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ she reassured him. ‘Mums with two or three children already at home often worry if they will be able to cope with the new one, you know. It can seem a daunting prospect, especially after the physical stress of a Caesar.’
The sister seemed young for a position of responsibility. She had a round face and short hair under her cap. Gordon noted her attractiveness, automatically, without further speculation.
‘Vicky will cope,’ he said. It was the rampart of maternal competence that she had erected that made him feel excluded, or at best edged out on to the margins of their female-strong family. The petulant thought eased his guilt a little.
‘With the right back-up,’ the sister said. Gordon caught the suggestion of a rebuke, but now that he was almost free he was ready to ignore it.
‘Naturally.’ He smiled at her.
He made his way down the corridors with the stream of departing visitors and out to his car.
The quiet house soothed him. Gordon walked through the rooms with a tumbler of whisky in his hand. He didn’t want anything to eat and in any case the spirit tasted much better than food, good and fiery in the back of his throat.
He went upstairs and into the children’s bedroom, and knelt beside Alice’s bed to bury his face in her pillow. He smelt the ghost of her in the sheets, and in her nightgown pushed under the quilt. The absence of his daughters’ antiphonal breathing, of the hot exhalations of childish dreams, made him long for them to be home again. But at the same time he savoured this brief isolation in his own house. He listened to the sounds of it, to the boiler firing and the swill of water in the pipes, with a freshly attuned ear.
Gordon stood up again and smoothed Alice’s pillow to remove the imprint of his face. He went through into the big bedroom and made a slow circuit of the bed. He had made it this morning but he could never make the white cover lie in the right folds, as Vicky did. The bed seemed lumpy, dishevelled, as if it was concealing something. Gordon picked up an ornate perfume bottle from the dressing table, and put it down again without sniffing at it. He moved the boxes and photographs, seeing the prints of them left in a faint film of dust.
