Chapter Thirty-Eight
I took the train back to Scotland, sitting on my coat. Janice had begged and pleaded at Alnwick station, but I stood firm. I wanted as many miles as possible between her and my baby.
My baby.
I’d never allowed myself to use those words. But all the normal rules were out, and I stroked my belly all the way.
The bleeding didn’t restart, but I must have checked nearly twenty times between Alnwick and Edinburgh.
‘Please be OK,’ I whispered to her, as we sped north. ‘Please be OK.’
‘Try not to worry, Emily,’ the midwife on the delivery suite said. Her tone was neutral, but I knew it wasn’t good when she took me straight off to a private room.
A few minutes later my community midwife, Dee, came in. ‘I saw your name on the board,’ she said. ‘Are you OK, sweetheart?’
That’s when I started crying. I cried all the way through my examination, and when she attached me to a machine that monitored the baby’s heart （‘Looks good!’ she smiled, examining the printout） I sobbed. It was only when Dee took me for an ultrasound and I saw her there, asleep with her tiny head against my navel, a miniature hand tucked under her cheek, that I believed she might survive.
‘Everything looks fine,’ Dee said. ‘I’ll need to get one of the doctors to take a wee look, but the baby looks happy and everything else is as it should be.’ She zoomed the ultrasound into my baby’s chest. ‘Sometimes these things just happen.’
I watched the chambers of my girl’s heart moving quietly, and I couldn’t do it for another moment.
I grabbed her hand, just as she went to leave, and said, ‘Please, Dee. Help me.’
After Dee had got the whole story out of me she went to call Granny.
‘Let’s just say, your grandmother’s going to take care of this,’ she smiled, upon her return. ‘She’s calling the agency now. You don’t have to hand over your baby to anyone, sweetheart. I just wish you’d told me what you were planning. I can’t believe you’ve been going through all of this on your own.’
Granny called an hour later.
‘All sorted,’ she said, as if she’d just cancelled the plumber.
I breathed out.
‘I also took the liberty of calling the Rothschilds,’ Granny said. ‘I’m sure the agency will, but I wanted to nip this in the bud.’
‘And?’
‘I was nice, but I told them not to contact you again. I don’t want them putting any more pressure on you.’
‘They haven’t put any pressure on me,’ I said. ‘Not once.’
‘Hmm.’
‘How did Janice take it?’
‘Bugger Janice.’
‘Granny. Come on.’
She sighed. ‘Devastated,’ she admitted. ‘But that’s not your concern, Emily.’
There was a pause. ‘We’ll do this together,’ said my eighty-year-old grandmother. ‘We’ll do it together, Emily, and if you think I’m too old, you’ve forgotten who you’re dealing with.’
In spite of my misgivings about her age, I moved to Granny’s house in London two weeks later, too exhausted to sit my second-year exams. It might be years before I went back to university, I realised, and I didn’t much care.
Granny had done hours of research on benefits and tax breaks, and worked out complex budgets involving her own pension and the modest rent I received from Dad’s house. Our situation wasn’t excellent, but it was a lot better than terrible, and she was full of rambunctious excitement.