Anyone who has had a baby knows the slightest change of wind is enough to wake it, and when a baby wakes its first instinct is to bellow and let the world know it has been rudely woken. The moment Edie placed Gracie in her crib she woke, looked crossly at the three faces staring down at her, noted their concerned looks and began whimpering, which then built momentum into wailing. Paul, Edie and Beth stood over her like the three wise men.
‘It’s the heat,’ announced Edie, as though she and Gracie had discussed the matter, and she picked the baby up and muttered soothing there-there-theres to her. She had carried Gracie back home from the lake, leaving Beth to push the empty pram. Every now and then she had looked at Paul and said, ‘She’s just so beautiful,’ and Paul thanked Lucy that their eldest girl had come to her senses.
‘We’ll shut her in the bathroom,’ said Beth. ‘That’s what my sister does with her bub. She says it’s the coolest room in the house.’
‘Perhaps we should try the bathroom,’ Paul said. So they laid Gracie on a towel on the bathroom tiles to see if that would turn her off. But still her flesh turned prickly and spotty. Rashes formed in the trapped moisture that gathered in the folds of her baby skin as the hot sun stole its way through the bathroom window to suck at Gracie’s life.
‘It’s not working,’ Paul said and wished again that Lucy were here. She would know what to do with a baby in the heat. ‘It’s cool in my study. I can take her in there and wait for Doctor Appleby’s visit.’
‘Oh, with the walk around the lake this morning I completely forgot he was coming,’ said Edie.
‘Well, he’ll have to make do with drop scones today,’ said Beth.
‘If you’re sure, Papa. I have some writing to do,’ said Edie, patting her pocket.
‘It’s never a problem to have you, Gracie, is it?’ he said. As he took the baby he felt Edie’s reluctance to give her up.
Paul’s study was a small room that replicated his office at work. He had an oak desk inlaid with a leather writing area, his swivel chair, his bookcases and a window that provided him with a view of the front gate so he could see who was coming and going. All that was missing was his pipe, which he had never smoked at home because Lucy hated the clouds of reeking smoke that wandered through the house and settled into the corners of the rooms. Paul sat at his desk, Gracie squirming in his arms, and remembered that Edie liked to be laid across an arm when she had colic. So he laid Gracie across his knee. Even at nearly six weeks Gracie was so small she lay easily on his lap. She made weak mewing noises that sounded like the pain in his chest.
‘Cry for her, my darling,’ Paul whispered. ‘Cry for her all you like, for I certainly do.’ And he put one hand against Gracie’s tiny chest, covering it entirely, and the other hand against his own aching chest, creating a circuit linking their hearts and their loss.
‘There will never be anything of her,’ said Doctor John Appleby as he stood in the doorway ten minutes later with his cup and saucer in one hand and his bag in the other.
The doctor had come in through the back door, straight into the kitchen so he could grab a cup of tea and a slice of cake or a biscuit from Beth.
‘What have you baked for me this morning, Beth?’ he asked, and she scowled like she always did. She needed to know her place, that girl, she needed to know that she served not only Mister Cottingham but Mister Cottingham’s guests if they so desired it, and she could wipe that forced smile off her insolent face too, he thought.
‘How do you think the bub is doing, Doctor?’ she asked, passing him a plate of drop scones smothered in jam and snowy peaks of cream. He was a bit disappointed, he couldn’t help it, he really liked her orange cake best and a piece of that was just what he needed this morning.
‘We’ve had a busy morning,’ said Beth, thinking of their anxious flight to the lake. ‘I didn’t have time to make a cake. So what about baby Gracie, what do you think?’
‘Ah well, that’s a conversation I need to have with your employer,’ said Doctor Appleby and off he trundled up the hallway, his teacup rattling on its saucer and spilling tea onto the drop scone that balanced on the edge, a plate of four more drop scones on a plate in the other hand, his satchel hanging from his arm. Beth took the kettle off the stove — they were both steaming.
Every Wednesday afternoon Doctor John Appleby made time to come by the Cottingham home to check the baby. Really, he just wanted to make sure she was still breathing. There was little he could do, but he hoped his visits gave Cottingham and his daughter some comfort, and Beth’s cooking was a nice little fringe benefit. He stood in the doorway to Paul’s study. Paul was sitting to the side of the desk looking over books on his shelf. John could see the baby lying restlessly on Paul’s lap; Paul had one hand on her chest to stop her falling off.
‘She’s always going to be fragile; it will be touch and go for many months to come. I don’t know if she’s going to make it.’ He felt Paul needed to know, bluntly, so there could be no confusion about what he was in for. One death on top of another was not going to be easy for him. John knew the best thing was to prepare him.
‘I didn’t see you come in, John,’ said Paul,
