I’ve got a couple of things to organise at the studio before I leave for the airport.’
‘Yes. Well, you wouldn’t have had time for that last night, what with everything else, would you?’
He straightened up, with his bag in his hand. ‘I’ve said I was sorry, Harriet.’
‘No you haven’t, actually. You said you were sorry I had to see what I did. That’s something quite different, isn’t it?’
Leo hesitated, somewhere between contrition and petulance. Then he sighed. ‘There just isn’t time for another bloody great row this morning. I’m going to Amsterdam, and that’s it. I’ll be back on Sunday. We’ll talk then.’
Harriet lifted her face to him. ‘It’s too late.’
He stared at her. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he repeated. Harriet knew that inside himself, within all the layers of bullishness and sentimentality, Leo also knew that it was too late.
He went, closing the door between them, without saying anything more.
Harriet went to work, came home again, and spent the evening alone. The news from the hospital was that Jenny was recovering well, and the baby continued to hold his own. Charlie seemed encouraged by the doctors’ predictions.
The next day Harriet left the shop early, to go and see Jenny. She stopped on the way to try to buy her something, but every magazine she picked up seemed to have a picture of a rosy baby on the cover, and every book the word mother or child in the title. In the end she settled for flowers, late-summer blooms that seemed touched with weariness.
As she walked up the street towards the dull, red-brick bulk of the hospital she saw Jane hurrying in the same direction ahead of her. She was easily recognisable by her everyday ensemble of loose trousers with numerous pockets and flaps, a shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and her pale hair pulled into a thick plait down her back. ‘Combat gear,’ Jane called it, saying, ‘I need it in that place.’ Harriet had never visited the school, but she had heard the stories about it.
She had asked Jane more than once, ‘If it’s so bad, why don’t you leave? Get a job teaching nice, bright, motivated children in a private school somewhere?’
And Jane had looked at her from under her thick, blonde eyelashes. ‘One, you know that I am not a supporter of private education. Two, to leave the school would be to diminish it further. Don’t you think I should stay and continue to do my best for it?’
Harriet could only answer, ‘If you say so,’ knowing that it would be useless to embark on an argument about it.
She smiled, now, at the sight of her and ran to catch her up. Jane turned in response to Harriet’s shout. In one hand she was carrying an old-fashioned battered leather briefcase, probably stuffed with sixth-form essays on Wuthering Heights, and in the other a bunch of flowers more or less identical to Harriet’s. The two women hugged each other, awkward with their separate armsful.
‘What else can one bring?’ Jane said wryly, nodding at the flowers. ‘Everything I thought of seemed too celebratory or too funereal.’
‘I know. Jenny won’t care, anyway.’
They went into the hospital, following signs, and climbed some stairs. At the end of a long corridor they came to the maternity ward. There was the sound of new-born crying and a glimpse of cots at the ends of beds. Harriet and Jane looked at each other, but said nothing. They found Jenny alone in a sideward. She was propped up against pillows, with arms outstretched, palms up, on the smoothed covers. She looked as if she might have been dozing, but she opened her eyes when they came in.
‘I’m so glad to see you,’ she said, which was Jenny’s familiar greeting. It was a facet of her appeal that she made it invariably convincing, but today Harriet thought she might have preferred to be left alone. Her smooth Madonna-face was white and drawn, and there were shadows like bruises under her eyes.
‘We won’t stay for long,’ Harriet promised. ‘Only a minute or two.’
‘I’m tired because my mother’s been here most of the afternoon. She needs more looking after than I do. She’s gone now to do some shopping and some tidying-up at home for Charlie. I told her he didn’t need shopping for or tidying-up after, but she wouldn’t have it.’ She put her hand out to touch the flowers. ‘Thank you for these. They’re beautiful, aren’t they?’
‘This is all right,’ Jane said, looking round the little room.
‘Tactful,’ Jenny said. Her mouth gave an uncharacteristic twist. She had been put in here away from all the perfect babies in their cots in the big ward, of course. They all knew it, there was a strong enough bond between them for anxiety and sympathy to be unspoken. Harriet and Jane sat down on either side of the bed, their hands touching Jenny’s.
‘How is he?’
Jenny didn’t answer at first. Then, with a smile that contradicted the rest of her face, she said, ‘We’ve called him James Jonathan. The hospital padre baptised him, you know. Charlie and I were there, the nurses let us hold him for a minute. It was, oh, I didn’t mean to cry on you, it was very moving, that’s all.’ Her face collapsed, disfigured with pain. Jane bent forward silently until her forehead touched Jenny’s bare forearm. Harriet sat motionless, aware of how much she loved them both. By contrast with the enduring, unemphatic resonance of friendship her concluded marriage seemed over-coloured and dissonant. She saw that Jenny’s face was shiny with tears. Gently she released her hand, took a handkerchief and dried it for her.
‘The news sounded all right this morning,’ she ventured.
‘It was, to begin with. I’d started to make plans. You know, in a month, taking him home. Not expecting too much, just finding out what he could or couldn’t do. Then they came to tell me that there was a problem with his breathing. They’re ventilating him because his lungs don’t want to work. Then they said there was something wrong with his kidneys. There’s a blockage in his intestine. They’re watching him now, to see if they can operate to clear it.’
‘It all happened as quickly as that?’
‘He’s very small. They can … they can deteriorate very quickly. But he’s much bigger than some of the babies in there. If he can survive the operation, and it’s successful, he may still be all right.’
They saw the equal and opposite currents of hope and fear in her, and understood some of the tension that made her arms and fingers seem stiff.
‘The doctor said not, not to be too hopeful yet. One day, even one hour is critical.’
Harriet and Jane said what they could, making little more than small, soothing sounds. They sat quietly for a moment or two when they had come to the end even of that, listening to the hospital noises. There was the metallic rattle of big trolleys, and a smell of boiled vegetables. Early institutional supper was on its way.
‘Do you want us to go, Jenny?’ Harriet asked gently.
‘Stay just for five more minutes.’ Jenny wearily closed her eyes.
‘Where’s Charlie?’ Jane half-mouthed, half-whispered to Harriet.
But Jenny answered, ‘His editor wanted him to go and do some story. I told him to go, there’s nothing for
