A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [73]
‘Are we feeling better now, Mrs Reynolds?’
Fifi opened her eyes and looked at the nurse bending over her. She was West Indian, her plump face shiny like a conker.
‘Better than what?’ she asked with some difficulty as her mouth was as dry as a desert. She knew she was in a hospital, she remembered Frank telling her she was in an ambulance with him because she’d fallen down the stairs, and later being examined by a doctor.
Yet she was confused by seeing it was daylight now. It seemed as if there was a great deal of time unaccounted for.
‘Any pain?’ the nurse asked, and offered her a drink of water from a cup with a spout. ‘You had a little operation, you see, you’ve just come round from the anaesthetic.’
Fifi mentally checked herself. She seemed to be aching all over, but she supposed she would if she’d fallen down the stairs.
‘Not real pain, just aches,’ she said. ‘Did I break something?’
‘I’m afraid so, your right wrist,’ the nurse said. ‘Can’t you feel the plaster?’
Fifi looked down and saw the plaster cast lying across her chest, her fingers coming out of the end looking swollen and discoloured. She wiggled them and felt a stab of pain run up her arm, but she thought she’d got off lightly if that was the extent of her injuries. ‘What about the baby?’ she asked, almost as an afterthought.
When the nurse hesitated Fifi became wide awake immediately. ‘Have I lost it?’
‘I’m so very sorry, Mrs Reynolds,’ the nurse said in her curious sing-song voice. ‘I’m afraid you miscarried and we had to give you a D and C too. But your husband will be coming down to see you soon, he’ll tell you all about it.’
Fifi was too stunned to say anything. She closed her eyes and allowed the nurse to assume she was falling asleep again.
So she’d lost her baby, and what hadn’t come away naturally had been scraped away. And who would mourn that little life? Her parents hadn’t welcomed it, she hadn’t even welcomed it herself, not at first. Dan was the only person who was one hundred per cent joyful about it.
So why was it that when she could barely feel the plaster on her arm, she could feel her heart breaking?
Dan was brought to her bedside later in a wheelchair. When she heard him say her name she opened her eyes to see his swimming in tears.
‘They didn’t tell me till this morning that you’d been brought in,’ he said brokenly. ‘They wouldn’t bring me to you then because they said you were having an operation. I thought it must be on your broken wrist. They only told me an hour ago that you’d lost the baby.’
Fifi wept then, and Dan moved his wheelchair closer so he could hold her and cry with her.
Later Fifi tried to tell him how it had all come about: falling down in the street, her fright at the storm, and finally seeing Alfie on the garden wall.
‘I suppose I must have thought he was coming to hurt me,’ she finished up. ‘But I don’t really remember what I thought, or what happened after. Apart from Frank being in the ambulance with me.’
‘Frank came to see me this morning, just after they told me you’d been brought in last night,’ Dan said. ‘He looked rough, I think he’d been here all night, and they didn’t want to let him in as it wasn’t visiting hour, but he insisted. He said that the first thing you said when you came round in the ambulance was that Alfie was on the back wall.’
‘I suppose you both think I imagined that,’ she said tearfully. ‘But I didn’t, I saw him as clear as day in a flash of lightning. Why would he climb along that wall in a thunderstorm unless it was for something bad?’
‘Frank doesn’t think you imagined it. He was going home to check if the honeysuckle that grows up on the wall was trampled on. But Alfie was probably only doing a bit of peeping Tom. He couldn’t hope to get into the house that way, Frank keeps his back door locked and bolted. But Frank told me that you came back from Bristol on Friday night, not Saturday. Why didn’t