The Lost Bookshop(77)
That night, I thought my time for escape had come. The pains in my stomach felt as though I were going into labour and the water that wet my bed confirmed it. I called out to Mary and asked her to alert the nurse. She banged on the door and shouted, but no one answered for a very long time. Of course, it happened in the early hours of the morning, as these things often do, and there was only the elderly nun on duty. She thought I was exaggerating the agonising pain of labour and said she would not wake the poor doctor from his sleep to come and tend to a spoilt English brat like me.
‘Stop your play-acting,’ she said, through the grille in the door.
‘I don’t want you to call the doctor, I need to go to a hospital!’ I was so excited at the thought of leaving, that I hardly noticed the pain.
‘Hospital? Sure, didn’t the cat have a fine litter the other week and managed it all on her own.’
That was her final word on the matter, and all I could hear were her footsteps fading away.
‘They’re not going to leave me here, are they?’ I asked Mary, who now sat at the end of my bed, patting my back.
‘Not to worry,’ she said.
Another contraction came and I groaned my way through it, twisting the ends of the blanket tight around my wrists. The night carried on that way and I must have slept in between contractions. Mary stayed with me all the while. Any time I asked a question, she would tell me again not to worry, in a way that made me very worried indeed. As though all hope was futile. At six o’clock, Nurse Patricia came to get us up and when she saw the state I was in, called for the doctor.
‘Please,’ I begged her, all pride forgotten. I was in agonising pain and hadn’t had so much as a glass of water. ‘Please get me to a hospital.’
‘You don’t need to go to hospital to give birth. Maybe that’s how things are done in England, but not here. Childbirth is the most natural thing in the world,’ she said, pulling my nightdress up and shoving her cold hand between my legs.
‘Get your hands off of me!’ I spat at her and she responded by slapping me across the face.
I’m not sure what would have happened if Dr Hughes hadn’t arrived at that very moment. He took charge immediately and sent her to fetch towels and a basin of boiled water. Two hours of contractions which felt like I was being ripped apart and I no longer knew or cared whose hands were on me. They were shouting at me to push and I pushed. Someone kindly placed a cold flannel on my burning face. I screamed for my mother, even though I knew she wouldn’t come. I begged Armand to come and rescue me. And then another push; different this time, the pressure released. Voices whispered and I saw a nurse carrying away a bundle.
‘Where’s my baby? Where are you taking her?’ I couldn’t be sure if anyone had heard me, my voice was weak and my throat raw. ‘My baby? Please give me my baby!’
A man’s voice and words that made no sense. The cord was wrapped around her neck. She suffocated. Born blue. I don’t remember very much after that. I suspect I started to go mad.
Chapter Forty-One
MARTHA
‘So, what aspect of Austen’s theme has changed with this book, her last published before her death?’
The tutor was sitting on the edge of his desk, one leg swinging free as he held a copy of Persuasion in his hand. There was a young American woman who always sat at the front of the class and apparently knew everything about every book ever written. I figured she probably fancied our tutor, but he didn’t seem to notice.
‘I mean, it’s still all about marriage and social standing,’ she said. ‘Anne judges people by their character, rather than their rank but in the end she still succumbs to Lady Russell’s snobbery and turns down Wentworth’s marriage proposal.’
‘Great summary,’ Logan said, slouching at the back of the room. ‘Saves me reading it.’
I smiled at him. He was my kind of people. Although why he was taking a night course in literature and not reading the book was a bit odd.
‘Okay, okay, maybe Austen isn’t for everyone. But in a way, the reason her books are still so popular today is because the themes still matter to us. Love. Family loyalty. Pride. Societal pressure to conform. You may all think you’re walking around exercising your free will in every situation, but you’re not. You’re constantly influenced by what your heart wants, what your head wants and how you want the world to see you.’
He was right. In all of these years, nothing had really changed.
‘I think the main theme,’ said Beverly, a retired dental nurse who always sat beside me, ‘is about getting a second chance at love.’
I was trying not to read people any more, it didn’t seem fair, but sometimes I did it without thinking. Her first love had been killed in a car crash and she’d never met anyone since. I hoped for her sake that Jane Austen was right.
‘Exactly, Beverly. Anne is “persuaded” to give up her chance of love because Wentworth has no prospects, but instead of moving on with her life, she bitterly regrets her decision. Yet, in the end, she realises that the years apart have made her more appreciative of love when it comes back to her.’
As we packed up for the evening, the tutor asked if I had given any more thought to the degree course.