But just a few weeks later I felt the first cramping pains. I tried to persuade myself that it was nothing sinister, but then the headaches came, the faintness, and finally, as I knew it would, the spots of blood that grew heavier and heavier until there was no doubt that my baby was seeping away from me before it had barely had a chance to begin. I was devastated, absolutely inconsolable. Doug tried to keep positive: it was good news that I could at least get pregnant, he said—perhaps next time it would “stick.” He held me for hours as I sobbed, but it didn’t really help—nothing did.
And then, by the cruelest twist of fate imaginable, there I was, two days later, placed on the maternity ward. I had to witness baby after baby being born into the world, had to continue as though the sight of each one didn’t feel like a knife to my heart, but there was one in particular that completely crushed me. Candice, she was called, a teenage drug addict, whose baby, like the two she’d had before it (or so I’d heard), was whisked away into care by social workers as soon as it was born, the mother stony-faced, unblinking—indifferent, it seemed to me then—though I suppose now, looking back, that she wouldn’t have been, not really. It broke my heart, the unfairness of it all. I would have given everything I had to be that baby’s mum.
It was 1980. The use of IVF—or “test-tube babies,” as we called them then—had hardly begun; it was considered an almost freakish thing in those days, “weird science.” It certainly wasn’t available to someone like me and wouldn’t be for years. Perhaps, eventually, I would have come to terms with it all; perhaps I would have gone on to happily adopt like many millions of couples do. But I was very far from that state of mind back then: it was like a physical, desperate need that was bigger than myself, that I couldn’t control or contain.
That particular morning, the morning of the baby that was taken into care, I fled from the delivery room as soon as possible and shut myself in the first store cupboard I came to. I clasped my hands to my mouth, but I couldn’t help it; I sobbed and sobbed. And then the door opened and to my horror, Rose Lawson walked in, absorbed in a list she held in her hand, presumably of supplies she was after. She stopped stock-still when she saw me. “Beth?” she said, astonished. “What on earth’s the matter? What’s happened?”
I couldn’t speak, and it was so like her to do what she did next. She didn’t say another word and as though it were the most natural thing in the world, she walked over to me and hugged me. Such an instinctively kind thing to do, I’ve never forgotten it. I cried and cried until the shoulder of her white coat was sodden and bit by bit she got it all out of me.
“Beth, I’m so very sorry,” she said, and I could tell that she was. Someone tried to come in, but she put her foot against the door and said in a grand sort of voice, “This one’s taken, thank you very much. Try the next one!” She winked at me and I laughed a little. She talked so much sense that morning; she was so gentle and comforting. “Listen, my love,” she said, “I know things feel very, very bleak right now, but you will be a lovely mum one day. I know you will. You’re still so very young. In a year, or two years, things will look different. You’ll see.” The words would have sounded like platitudes on anyone else’s lips, and I suppose they were, but nevertheless they did help, because I could tell she meant them, and having someone like her saying them did make me feel a little less hopeless about it all.
After that day, whenever I passed her in the wards, or saw her in the canteen or the tea room or whatever, she would make a point of stopping me, to ask how I was and put a hand on my arm. It was nice, supportive—I didn’t feel any better about my situation, but I did feel a little less alone.
And then something entirely unexpected happened that solidified our friendship—or our connection, I suppose you’d call it—even further. Because I had grown used to looking out for her, to always taking special notice when she was on shift at the same time I was, a few months later when I was back on the pediatric ward, I suddenly noticed a change in her. She’d always taken such good care of her appearance—beautifully cut and colored hair, lovely makeup, nice clothes—but suddenly she seemed to let herself go entirely. She’d turn up to work looking haggard and ill, her clothes crumpled, her face lined with tiredness, as though she hadn’t slept in days. There was clearly something very wrong, but I felt too shy to ask—it would have felt too forward, I think.
A few weeks later, however, I came across her in the ladies. I was washing my hands at the sink when she came out of one of the cubicles, her eyes red and raw as though she’d been crying. “Oh,” I said before I could stop myself, “Rose, are you all right?”
She went to a sink as though she hadn’t heard me, and stared down at the running water without moving. I didn’t know what to do. After a while I put a hand on her arm. “Rose? Is there anything the matter? Can I help?”
She looked
