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And images she didn’t want came flooding back, sitting like this on a hospital bed at fifteen years old, a child still herself, about to have a child—a child she was going to give away.
Then Gran had been there, in her head, Gran’s arms around her shoulders, telling her it would all be all right and to think how happy someone would be—the couple waiting for the baby, as Chris and Alice were waiting for this one.
And everything had been all right.
Another contraction brought her back to the here and now—with a vengeance! She rode the wave of pain, checked her watch, and realised she’d have to leave the sanctuary of her room.
At least if she had the baby here and now she’d be spared the indignity of a hospital gown that invariably left the wearer’s backside hanging out. Should she phone Chris and Alice now, or wait until she was certain this was going to be the main event?
Unable to decide, she emptied the upstairs buckets again, then paced the corridor, up and back and up and back, not wanting to return to Dottie’s room with nothing more than a purple and white striped nightshirt covering her body.
Charles appeared at some stage of her pacing, fitting his step to hers.
‘I know it probably helps to keep moving but at some stage I need to check on your cervix to see how dilated it is.’
A complete stranger checking out her cervix?
Particularly this handsome and apparently princely stranger...
Panic welled inside her and for all she told herself that most of the doctors she saw were strangers at first, nothing eased the disturbing thought of this man looking at her most private parts.
‘Dottie can do that,’ she said, and the man had the hide to smile.
‘I have no doubt at all about that,’ he said. ‘I rather imagine she can do anything she sets her mind to, but she is frail, and a little arthritic, I imagine. It would be easier for me to check.’
And as another wave of pain was clutching at Jo’s body she couldn’t argue. In fact, it was bad enough, she realised as it waned, that she wasn’t really going to care who did what to her as long as they got Lulu safely out.
And soon!
‘Do you have to do it now?’ she muttered ungraciously at him.
‘I think so,’ he said, putting an arm around her waist to steady her as she straightened up from the wall. ‘It will give us some idea of how far along you are, and if Dottie has happened to keep an old stethoscope, I should be able to hear the baby’s heartbeats as well, to check it’s all right.’
‘Her heartbeats—she’s all right!’ Jo reminded him, but all he did was smile and continue to guide her towards Dottie’s room with his arm around her waist.
Totally unnecessary—at least until she stiffened as her belly tightened and another wave of pain rose inside her. She clung to him, and felt the strength in the arms that held her. Wondering how a prince might get strong arms diverted her momentarily, until keeping back the urge to yell blocked everything but the pain from her mind.
Dottie had covered the end of the low chaise longue with clean towels and was now engaged in tearing the fine old sheets into large squares.
‘We can dry it with some of these then swaddle it. We’ll think about nappies and such later.’
She must have caught sight of Jo’s pale face.
‘Coming faster, are they?’ she said. ‘Well, get up there so we can check your cervix. If it’s not already dilated to seven or eight centimetres, you might as well go to bed in your room and try to get some sleep. It will be a long night.’
Jo, who’d managed between pains to subside onto the chaise, tried to work out Dottie’s thinking. She rarely did any obstetrics work herself but was aware that the cervix started thinning out and dilating over the days and sometimes weeks before the active phase of labour began.
‘I imagine she’s been timing your contractions better than you have,’ Charles said, answering her unspoken question. ‘You’re well into the active phase of labour, hence her guess.’
‘But we’ll have to get the phones ready. Mine’s fully charged in my room across the passage. Would you use yours too? Please?’
‘Will you stop whispering and concentrate on what you’re here to do,’ Dottie said in an exasperated voice, as she threw a light sheet over Jo’s lower body and levered her legs up to they were bent at the knees. ‘I’m quite capable of holding a phone if someone gets the number and sets the camera on go. If this bloke is a doctor, then we’ll let him do the business. You’re pretty low down and I don’t bend as well as I once did.’
But the words were lost in a haze of pain, while Jo gripped the high side of the makeshift bed and gritted her teeth so tightly she wondered if she’d break them.
Even without the bullet, she thought grimly as the wave diminished.
‘Close to ten,’ she heard Charles say, but the wave returned with renewed ferocity, and she heard herself yell to someone, anyone, to get her phone.
‘Chris and Alice, under C in the friends list,’ she panted, now imagining Lulu’s passage down the birth canal. Sliding forward with the contraction, retreating slightly as it passed.
And Chris and Alice not here to experience it...
Tears formed in her eyes and she tasted blood as she bit down on her lower lip.
‘You’re allowed to yell, or moan, or even swear, you know,’ Charles said, squatting at the bottom of the chaise with her phone focused on her dilated cervix.
So moan she did as the next contraction seized her tortured body, although through the haze of pain she heard Charles order Dottie to take over filming, telling them the head had crowned.
Did she push now? She tried to remember her classes. No, maybe not now—let Lulu come out gently. But hadn’t she pushed earlier? Pushed, puffed, panted—she’d been relying on Chris and Alice who’d attended all the antenatal classes with her to tell her what to do when, but now she was too tired to remember any of it, while her first experience had been wiped completely from her memory!
And now the contractions had stopped—well, eased at least—and Charles and Dottie were whispering at the bottom of the bed.
‘What’s happened?’ Jo demanded, as a cold sense of dread enveloped her exhausted body.
‘There, all’s well,’ she heard Charles say, as the small, wet mortal in his hands finally let out a cry.
‘Not a Lulu, I’m afraid,’ he said, coming close to reef open the buttons on Jo’s nightshirt and place the baby on her chest, his head towards her breasts. ‘Let’s see how his instinct is.’
He was beaming down at Jo, while Dottie had come around to the side of the bed, still filming—ignoring the conversations being flung at her from the other end of the phone.
‘See,’ Charles said, while Jo watched in amazement as the tiny newborn wiggled his way across her body to latch onto a nipple. ‘He’s fine—he’ll do. We’ve no drugs to help expel the placenta but if you let him suckle, and I massage you a bit, that should work.’
Dottie, having abandoned the phone now the main event was over, draped a soft sheet across the two of them, then glared at Charles across the bed.
‘My way would have worked just as well,’ she said, so much belligerence in her tone, Jo was frowning as she looked at them.
‘What way? What are you talking about?’ she asked when it became apparent no one was going to enlighten her.
‘He was born flat,’ Charles explained, ‘but I cleared the mucus from his mouth and blew a breath into him and you heard his squawk.’
‘In my day,’ Dottie said, drawing herself up to her full five feet one and glaring at Charles across the bed, ‘we flicked the sole of the foot with a finger and that made them cry—worked every time.’
Jo smiled, then looked down at the little bundle in her arms.
Letting him suckle was good.
They’d agreed, she, Alice and Chris, that the baby should take advantage of the colostrum in her breasts to help ward off infection. Had it all gone to plan, she’d have taken tablets to stop her milk coming in but the early arrival and the state of the floods had put paid to that.
She might have to feed him for a day or two, but that was okay. Right from the day she’d taken the decision to act as a surrogate she’d realised she had to stay focused on the pregnancy as a job, something she was undertaking for someone else, so although her hormones had gone all weird on her, she’d always been totally aware that this baby wasn’t hers, and feeding him wouldn’t change that.
Although she’d hardly have been human if she didn’t feel a thrill to hold the little fellow to her breast, and she smiled up at Charles, thanking him, pleased he’d been here to help her through it all, calm and efficient—a perfect prince of a man, in fact!
She smiled again at the silly thought and, looking up, caught him smiling back, a look of such pride on his face she knew the miracle of birth had affected him as well.
* * *
Charles looked down at the mother and child, full of a feeling of pride that he’d pulled off a successful delivery, mixed with a kind of wondrous pleasure about the miracle of birth.
He saw serenity under the tiredness in Jo’s face, but something else that puzzled him.
Distance?
A lack of pride?
Some kind of pain?
Because the baby wasn’t hers?
Or because of something that had happened in the past?
The dread thought of rape crossed his mind, but he knew that women didn’t have to proceed with an unwanted pregnancy these days.
He studied Jo again—yes, she was tired, but...detached too. That was the word he sought.
Was it not affecting her at all?
Or was she fighting whatever her hormones were telling her to stay detached from this child she had to give away?
But why were his emotions in such an uproar?
Was it being here in his mother’s house that had made him susceptible to this sudden attraction?
Probably!
He looked around the room. Dottie had disappeared, and the phone she’d been using was ringing.
‘Could you answer that?’ Jo asked, gesturing to where it lay on a side table. ‘It will be Chris and Alice—they’ll want to see him.’
He had picked up the phone when Dottie returned to the room with a basin of water—warm, he hoped—more towels, and a hefty pair of scissors dangling from one finger.
‘You’re way ahead of me,’ he told her, as he lifted the phone and pressed the button to answer it.
‘Can we see her?’
Two excited voices rumbled in his ear and he switched the phone back to video chat mode and held it out to show the baby lying on Jo’s chest.
Jo gestured for the phone.
‘He’s fine, although he’s not a Lulu but a Louis. I’m fine, we’ll see you as soon as the water goes down, but right now there’s stuff we have to do, and we all need a sleep.’
She shut down the phone.
‘We’ll have to turn it off, they’ll be ringing every ten minutes.’
‘Damn silly idea, I said so all along,’ Dottie was muttering as she carefully lifted the baby boy and set him on the bed to dry him off.
‘Take these,’ she said to Charles, producing two large stainless-steel pegs from a pocket of her Chinese robe. ‘I’ve poured bleach over them so they should be sterile.’
Charles thought back to training days and knew exactly what was required. He clamped the cord at both ends then cut between the clamps. And with a quick twist of his fingers, the cord on the baby’s end was tied, a little nub still sticking out, to dry, and fall off later.
There, baby boy, he thought as he worked, you’ll have something to remember me for ever, your neat little belly button.
And as Dottie wasn’t watching, he touched the baby’s cheek, smiling when he opened huge eyes to check out who was near him. And the lump in his throat was probably from tiredness.
Jo had turned on her side to watch Dottie ministering to the baby, and although he guessed she’d have been happy doing that herself, she didn’t want to take the fun away from her old friend.
Once satisfied he was dry and comfortable, Dottie swaddled him in a square of sheet, and handed him back to Jo.
‘Try to keep him suckling, it will help with this last stage,’ she said firmly, although Charles fancied he could see the glassiness of tears in her eyes.
She was as affected as he was by the birth...
By the time the placenta was delivered, Jo had drifted off to sleep, and as he helped Dottie clean up he realised that the wind had lessened and the rain no longer thundered down on the damaged roof.
‘It’ll be gone by tomorrow,’ Dottie told him, peering out the window, a bundle of towels in her arms.
‘And the road to the village?’
‘It’ll go down at low tide. Might flood a little more when the tide comes in again but not enough to cut us off.’
‘And Jo and the baby?’
He had to ask.
Would the parents just turn up and take the infant?
How would Jo feel about that?
Surely it had to affect her—she’d carried the baby for nine months after all.
‘Hmph!’ Dottie said. ‘Damn fool idea right from the start. Would you believe they’d phone poor Jo at all hours of the day and night and she’d have to put the phone on her belly while they talked to Lulu. And they sent music she had to play to her. As if a developing foetus would hear all that going on, let alone understand it.’
‘They took the surrogacy thing that far?’ Charles asked, wondering just how much of a trial this pregnancy must have been for Jo.
‘Oh, she’s told you, has she? Dottie said. ‘Come down to the laundry while I get rid of this lot and I’ll explain,’ Dottie told him, and, sensing a slight weakening towards him on the part of his grandmother, Charles was only too willing to go along.
‘Alice couldn’t carry children and they longed for a baby of their own, so Jo offered to be a surrogate. Stupid idea! Worse timing! She had a perfectly good man who wanted to marry her then suddenly she’s off having someone else’s baby—well, he couldn’t hang around nine months, could he?’
