Page 56 of The Women at Ocean's End

‘Give her to me,’ she said sharply. Fathers and daughters. It set her nerves on edge.

‘Of course, darling.’ He had only started calling her darling today. That unravelled her too. She’d never imagined herself as the little wife someone would call darling. He put the baby in her arms with the greatest care, as if the very passing of the child between them risked damaging her in some way. Dotty looked down at the little face in her arms. She examined her, for a moment. She didn’t notice Bobby making his way out of the ward, because suddenly it felt as if they were the only two people on the planet, her and this strange little person who had come about to alter things so unexpectedly.

‘I suppose I should say hello,’ Dotty whispered, but actually, she was hardly capable of saying very much at all. Instead, she felt overcome with a compulsion she’d never experienced before, or maybe it was an emotion she couldn’t remember feeling. Love. It was pure and utter, undiluted love for another living thing. This little baby was perfect, so innocent and unblemished, so easily hurt and broken. Dotty felt a surge of protectiveness rise up within her, so vast she couldn’t put a name on it, taking her breath away until she had to prod herself into forcing airback out of her lungs and in again. It was overwhelming. Love. Making her head spin, her heart race, her pulse quicken; in those first moments, she felt she would kill to protect this child, she would die for her. Tears raced down her cheeks, propelled from her by a lifetime of pent-up emotion.

It was too much.

Too much.

She couldn’t cope with it. She was drowning under it.

‘Nurse,’ she called. ‘NURSE.’ She began to scream and then two nurses came at once, perhaps expecting some terrible calamity. ‘Take her away, I can’t… I can’t…’ She was heaving, her body throwing itself about in the bed as if she’d been overtaken by a demon. Too much. She couldn’t cope with the unbearable rawness of it all.

‘It’s going to be all right.’ One of the younger nurses tried to comfort her, but even then Dotty knew she was incompatible with the sort of emotion required to be of any use as a mother. Something inside her had already been broken, perhaps she had fractured it herself or maybe it began with her father; it might even go back further to her mother’s family – who knew what was coming down the bloodline there. Indeed, her own mother had failed her and she had been a practical woman, far better equipped for motherhood than Dotty. She’d been out of her depth with Norman Wren, but then, wasn’t that why he’d married her?

The vastness of it all frightened Dotty, as if it could drive her to a sort of hell all the alcohol in the world couldn’t block out, and she knew she had long ago lost any ability to survive beyond the shallows of life.

37

Constance

It was almost a decade since Constance had been to the mainland. She hadn’t thought about it until all the arrangements had been made and then, she remembered. The last time she’d come across there had been an event in the library in Ballycove and, somehow, they’d convinced her to attend. It was a lovely evening, with sparkling wine and finger food and even a local girl playing a harp. Her mother would have really enjoyed it. Two writers had read from her mother’s work and Constance had said a few words. She’d travelled back to the island filled with softness in her heart that came only from the company of good people and their generosity of spirit.

Today, there wasn’t going to be any sparkling wine. She had been fasting since the previous night. Instead, there would be a battery of questions and tests and then perhaps a CT scan depending on their results.

Already, some of the blood tests had returned what Avril called raised biomarkers. Apparently, something called CA 19-9 was misbehaving. Not that Constance felt any different for some rogue numbers playing havoc with her bloods, but Heather and Ros both wore expressions that told her she probably should be slightly more worried than she was. She tried to reassure them – how sick could she be, really? Hadn’t she made the most divine gingerbread the day before, certainly far too good to be on her deathbed just yet!

The hospital was unrecognisable from the last time she’d been here. They’d built on a whole new wing and the entrance was completely transformed by a glass atrium which warmed her to her bones as she passed through it. Ros led the way, following blue and yellow lines into the bowels of the place, so within a short time they were standing in a lift being whooshed up to a section of the hospital that sounded like it should have her in and out and processed quicker than if she was a Christmas card going through the post office sorting room.

‘Two days, that’s all,’ Ros said gently as the doors glided back. ‘They’ll have you checked out and sent home with a clean bill of health within two days.’ But Constance had a feeling that Ros was trying her best to convince both of them.

‘Don’t worry, Ros, it’ll be fine,’ she said and she smiled at this girl who had, by her mere presence at Ocean’s End, brought her such unexpected joy.

‘I know it will,’ Ros said and she reached down and squeezed Constance’s hand but she looked away then and Constance wondered if she wasn’t on the brink of tears. Hospitals. They did that to you and Ros probably had sad memories of supporting her own mother through her final days in a place not unlike this very ward.

The tests were run as efficiently as Constance could have hoped for in her best reckoning.

‘It helps when you’re scheduled in,’ one of the nurses said two days later when Constance mentioned it. ‘It’s the emergencies we struggle with here.’ And of course, Constance had seen it too many evenings on the news, winter vomiting bugs could send everything into chaos with numbers on trolleys reaching double figures at the worst of times. Thank goodness she was here in summer time.

‘Well, you’ve all been very nice,’ Constance said. She was still glad to be going home to the island today. Heather had alreadybrought her overnight bag to the car and, for now, all she had to do was sit here and leaf through a magazine until the doctors came round to discharge her and tell her their verdict on her tests.

‘Ah, here they are,’ the nurse said now, pulling back the curtains around her bed as if it would somehow give a level of privacy that stretched some ways beyond the appearance of it. With that, three young women all with stethoscopes hanging about their necks, and an older man with the attitude of one used to having all his mundane tasks done for him by others, appeared at the entrance to the ward. In their wake, Heather and Ros. Constance called them over just as the nurse did her best to shut them out.

‘Ros is my carer.’ It was a lie in the sense that nothing had been fully sorted, but it was the truth in every real way. ‘And Heather is family.’ Another lie, but who was counting?

‘Fine, but…’ It was a tight squeeze.

‘So, Mrs…’ The older man peered at the name tag at the top of her bed, probably to make sure he was giving the correct prognosis to the right patient.

‘It’s Constance,’ she confirmed.

‘Of course, Constance,’ he said and something in his expression softened and he leaned closer to her and, somehow, she had a feeling that he wouldn’t be doing this if he was telling her that things were simple and straightforward.

They weren’t.

‘I’m sorry,’ he began and she knew then for certain that this would not be good news.

Pancreatic cancer. She’d heard of it of course, someone on the island must have had it at some point. A quiet killer. There had been no pain, no aches to speak of, but in hindsight, there had been niggles. A constantly dickey stomach, falling appetite, weight loss, but only recently – nothing huge, but it turnedout, it was the little things that all added up to something much bigger. Of course, that day, as he spelled it out, none of those things occurred to her. Instead, all she could hear was the squeaking wheels of the lunch trollies being pushed down the corridor outside. The aroma of a dinner she wouldn’t have enjoyed reaching her before she had a chance to shoo them away with it. Savoury mince. She was fairly certain that was what they’d said earlier, although it didn’t smell anything like savoury mince to her.

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