A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [74]
Fifi was sorry he had to learn it through Frank, but she supposed she’d have had to tell him eventually.
‘Because I had a row with my mum and I didn’t want you to worry about it.’
She saw in his face that he knew the row was about him. ‘I hope she’ll be proud of herself when I ring her to tell her what’s happened to you.’
‘She didn’t make it happen.’
‘She let you come home all upset and alone,’ he said. ‘Don’t tell me that wasn’t the start of it all, because I know it was. You weren’t yourself yesterday, I knew something had upset you. And now we’ve lost our baby, and that’s going to take longer for you to get over than breaking your wrist.’
Dr Hendry came back the following morning to see Fifi and found her feeling very sorry for herself. He wasn’t surprised; she probably hadn’t slept well because of the pain in her wrist, and her body was bruised and battered. But it was clear to him that her aches and pains were secondary to losing her baby.
‘It wasn’t a planned baby,’ she blurted out to him, almost as if she felt she had miscarried as a kind of judgment. ‘I’d only just started to feel glad about it. What was wrong with me that I lost my grip in a thunderstorm? Aren’t pregnant women supposed to stay calm and protect their baby from harm?’
Hendry was over sixty, and in half a lifetime of medicine he’d seen many women blaming themselves this way after losing a child.
‘My experience is that miscarriages happen regardless of how well cared for the mother is,’ he said gently. ‘I’ve seen women deliver healthy babies after far worse accidents than yours, and, contrary-wise, lose them for no apparent reason at all. You mustn’t blame yourself, Mrs Reynolds, and there is absolutely no reason to suppose that in a few months’ time you can’t carry another baby to full term.’
He went on to say he wanted to keep her in under observation for a week.
‘I can’t stay here that long,’ Fifi exclaimed in horror. ‘Dan’s going home tomorrow and he needs someone to look after him.’
Hendry had already spoken to Dan Reynolds, and although he knew about the vicious attack, and that this attractive young couple didn’t live under the best of conditions, he had to smile at Mrs Reynolds’ belief her husband couldn’t cope without her. To him, Dan Reynolds looked the type to sail through any amount of disasters and still keep smiling and cracking jokes.
‘Your husband doesn’t strike me as the kind of man who needs looking after, but anyway, we’re going to keep him in for another day or two,’ he said. ‘You’ve both had too much to cope with all at once – you need rest before you start trying to get back to normal.’
On Monday afternoon Fifi lay in the hospital bed waiting for Dan to visit her. It had rained heavily all day on Sunday, but the sun was shining again now, showing up the rain-smeared windows. She’d grown used to the weight of the plaster on her arm, though not to washing her face or cleaning her teeth with her left hand. But the loss of her baby was just as raw; each time she put her hand on her stomach she was reminded that there was no little person growing in there any more.
She knew now that her ward was a gynaecology ward, all twelve women either waiting for an operation, hysterectomies in the main, or recovering from one. The youngest patient was eighteen; she had come over to talk to Fifi and said she had a cyst on one of her ovaries which they’d be operating on tomorrow. The oldest was in her sixties.
As Fifi had never been in hospital before she had no way of knowing whether this ward was better or worse than other kinds, but one of the nurses had said it was her favourite as the patients were usually cheerful and rarely desperately ill.
Fifi had wondered whether that was a gentle way of telling her to buck up and be jolly because she wasn’t ill, but she couldn’t summon the will to chat or laugh as most of the other women were doing. Frank had visited her the previous evening with Yvette, bringing the nightdress, dressing-gown and toiletries Fifi had asked Miss Diamond to get for her. Frank had