The Fruit of the Tree Read online

  ‘Is she….?’ I couldn’t say the word, the dreaded word, and I wanted her to say it, to make sure it was really true, but she didn’t. She just said, ‘Yes,’ and added in a confidential woman-to-woman manner, ‘The doctor didn’t want to see you. He’s very young.’

  He thinks I’ll be screaming and hysterical, I thought; I was only just bereaved, but already I had learned the first lesson. It was I that would make allowances for others and not vice versa.

  The nurse had a long list of questions—I didn’t mind answering them. It didn’t feel so bad while I talked about the baby.

  She talked on, telling me I could get sedatives if I needed them and tablets to stop the breast milk. I couldn’t see that it mattered whether I slept or not; the baby would still be dead when I awoke.

  She told me she had lost a child too—an eighteen-month-old baby. I looked at her with amazement. She stood in front of me, plump, matter-of-fact and motherly—proof that one could actually survive this supremely awful happening.

  ‘How can I tell my little boy?’ I asked. ‘How will he take it?’ I felt a single tear run down my face—the only one I had shed.

  ‘I just told my child, “He’s gone to Jesus,” and we both howled.’

  ‘What about my parents—how will I tell them?’ I asked, but she just repeated what she had said.

  She left me, to telephone Michael to tell him the news, and I was grateful to her for relieving me of that task.

  ‘How will he take it?’ she asked.

  ‘He’ll be all right,’ I replied. ‘He’s very strong.’

  I sat alone in the room, in an empty void. Soon the ambulance men would come to take me home. I wished they would hurry. I wanted to be at home. The nurse had told me they were just having a cup of tea, and I did not begrudge them their break; the experience had been an ordeal for them too. Nevertheless, it seemed an age before they arrived.

  ‘Do you want to sit in the front?’ they asked.

  ‘Yes, it was quite sickly sitting in the back,’ I heard my voice reply, clearly, calmly. I got up between them and sat in the front seat, and for the twenty-minute duration of the journey, we sat in silence, and I gazed unseeingly out into the night, as the ambulance made its way out into the country.

  As we pulled into our circular drive, the house seemed ablaze with light, as Michael had once promised. Even the front garden was floodlit, and in the illuminated circle, I saw Michael in jeans tinkering with the jacked-up car. It was so typical of him, I almost laughed; not for him, the pacing and twiddling of thumbs. He had to be doing something.

  Even the colours of the dahlias were visible and, illogically, I wondered if the ambulance men had noticed them and understood that we were normal people—people who planted bulbs in spring and autumn—not people to whom tragedies happened.

  I got out of the ambulance and fell into Michael’s arms, and together we went into the house, and as I stood paralysed by numbness, Michael clumsily undid the buttons of my coat. A button fell on the floor, and I wondered when I would get round to sewing it back on—if ever.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ He said it over and over again. He was offering me sympathy, almost as if the loss was mine alone, but I understood that he could not share my grief in equal proportions. As a father, he had barely known this child of seven weeks. He could not feel a mother’s pain.

  It was midnight, but it was impossible to go to bed. We sat and talked until two a.m.

  If only I could go back in time—there must have been something I could have changed—something I should or should not have done. Over and over again, I went over the events of the last few hours. If only I had gone into her earlier. If only I had checked her when she had been crying.

  Should she have been asleep on her stomach? Robert had always slept that way—but now I questioned my own wisdom. Yet I had only done it for her safety and comfort. I had always understood that a baby prone to sickness was more likely to choke on its own vomit if it lay on its back.

  Had she suffocated? I had read an article about babies suffocating when I was about seven months’ pregnant, and had been concerned enough to ask a friend to buy a safety mattress as her gift, at the time of Amanda’s birth. But in spite of this, when Michael told me that the police had already called and examined her bedding, I wondered what they had found. It had not even occurred to me until then that the police would have to carry out investigations, and I visualised myself at an inquest, being sharply criticised by the Coroner for negligence of some sort. Despite all my efforts, it seemed as if I had failed as a mother. Finally exhausted by torturing thoughts, I agreed to go to bed.

  Outside in the darkness of the garden, three nappies were fluttering on the line, the three nappies that Michael had so efficiently deposited in the washing machine. And in the bedroom, I saw that the carry-cot and the other signs of a baby had been removed, as if they had not been there a few hours before, and I was moved by Michael’s attempts to take away those things that might cause me more pain. But all through the rest of the night, even throughout the three or four hours of fitful sleep that I attained, the knowledge of Amanda’s death and the horror in which I was suffused, never left me. With certainty, I knew I must escape from this room of memories.

  15. ‘The Lord Giveth’

  We awoke early, knowing our first task would be to tell all those people who would need to know—not only our relations and friends, but also the synagogue authorities who would arrange for the burial. Later in that day would be the grim visit to the morgue.

  ‘Go and have a bath,’ said Michael, for I normally enjoyed a long soak. ‘Try to relax.’

  But it was impossible to loll and daydream as I normally did. Now my head was empty of dreams, and only the nightmare of yesterday filled my thoughts. Would I ever learn to forget the sight of my poor baby’s dead face? The moment of discovery—the minutes leading up to it, they seemed imprinted on my brain; and the words we had uttered, like the lines of a well-rehearsed play, echoing over and over again in my mind.

  I dressed quickly, and soon Robert awoke and strolled into the kitchen. It was incredible to think that he had slept through the events of the night. Michael and I looked at each other. How should we begin?

  ‘Something terrible has happened,’ I told him slowly. ‘The baby died in the night.’

  It was the first time I had acknowledged Amanda’s death aloud, and the effect of the words was like the opening of a valve. For the first time I sobbed and sobbed as I held Robert tightly, whether to comfort him or myself I was not quite sure.

  But he could have no real concept of the situation—I did not expect him to grieve or mourn like an adult. The car was still not functioning, so Michael rang up Carol, whose son still attended Robert’s play school, and asked if she would collect and take him. At least he would be away from the house for a couple of hours.

  When her car arrived, she stood talking to Michael in the drive for a minute or two. She won’t come in, I thought. I wouldn’t if I were her. I would have been like the doctor—too cowardly to want to face a person in that state of unmasked grief. But she did come in, and I was grateful to her for making that difficult gesture.

  I remembered that she had had a relation who had lost a baby of several months old.

  ‘How long does it last—this feeling?’ I asked emotionally. ‘When do you start feeling normal again?’

  She thought back to the young man whose child had died. ‘I think it was about six weeks before he could even speak normally,’ she replied. His loss had been greater than ours—he had lost a child with a personality that he had already come to know. It would be that little bit easier for us. Nevertheless, that six weeks was a goal—a time to look forward to, when the pain might have eased just a little.

  For the next two days, Carol and her sister Jill took Robert out of our house of sorrow while the grim formalities took place.

  First the telephone calls to all the people who loved u
s most. And while I sat staring into space, Michael repeated the same words to our friends and family. But neither he nor I knew how to tell my parents, and in the end, Michael rang the Aunties to ask them to break the news. In the past I had often wished I could witness the moments when my mother and father heard of the births of their two grandchildren—my children; now I flinched at the thought of the scene when my aunts would arrive—so early in the morning—to tell of the death of one of those children.

  Michael had been told by the Coroner’s office to attend at the morgue that morning, and although they had not asked for me, I was reluctant to stay in the house on my own. The car still wouldn’t go, so we walked down to the main road to catch the hourly bus into town. The weather was fine (in contrast to the previous day), with just a hint of the coolness of autumn in the air, and sunshine streamed through the branches of the trees. Going on a bus together was almost like going on an outing, and to the other people on the bus, we must have looked like any other young couple, taking advantage of a day off; it seemed strange that we were not physically marked by our experience, so that strangers would turn and stare, and know that something terrible had happened to us.

  When we arrived at the Coroner’s office, I found that it was just as well that I had come, for Michael couldn’t answer the many questions that the officer put to us courteously and gently.

  ‘What time did you put her to bed?’ ‘When did she have her last feed?’ ‘Had she been ill?’

  Although I had answered the bulk of the questions, when the officer had finished, Michael still had to sign the statement, which read: ‘My wife put the baby in her carry cot….’ and so on, and in spite of the other over-riding emotions, I felt a tinge of faint amusement mixed with slight irritation at this example of male chauvinism.

  At the end of the interview, the officer assured us that it was a case of ‘inhalation of vomit’. ‘They usually are, these cases,’ he informed us, mentioning in addition, that the cold she had had a few days before might also be a contributory factor. I found it difficult to believe in either possibility.

  ‘How could she inhale vomit when she was lying face downwards?’ I queried. ‘Are you sure she didn’t suffocate?’

  He explained to us that the marks on her face indicated pressure of the bedding on her cheek, and there was no evidence to show that her nose had been restricted. But this would be confirmed by the postmortem examination, whose results would be known on the following day. And irrationally convinced as I was that I must have in some way been responsible for the death of my child, or at least have been able to prevent it, my mind would not rest easy until the verdict had been given.

  But first, the formal identification. I had imagined that we would be led into another room and that we would be shown the body under a sheet, as I had seen on the television. So I was totally unprepared for the officer to stand up and, by pulling on a cord, draw back a curtain to reveal behind a glass window, Amanda, lying—almost in state—on a raised platform covered with flowing white material. In horror, I turned quickly away and sobbed against Michael.

  They had done their best to make this painful moment tasteful and dignified, and yet sadly I found it grotesquely macabre—this slow unveiling of the corpse—and almost wondered whether it would have been any worse to see the body in the stark reality of the morgue.

  With that ordeal behind us, we stepped out into the sunshine once again, and Michael suggested we call in at the travel agent on our way through town. I didn’t want to go and discuss holidays; it was the last thing I was concerned about, and in any case, I was ashamed to go in, in case someone I knew might see and think we didn’t care about Amanda. But it was a job that had to be done. I had already told Michael that I wanted to get away from our house, from our bedroom, where Amanda had lain in her carry-cot so close to me each night. In addition, I had cold-bloodedly calculated that Michael would be less reluctant for us to start another pregnancy, if he too had had a break. For there was one overpowering thought in my mind—the straw that I clung to—I must have another baby. That was the one thing that would save me from utter despair.

  And so, we went into the travel agent and, with complete indifference, I agreed to join a package holiday to Majorca in a couple of weeks’ time.

  Later in the day, the G.P. on duty called to see us at our home. It was the same kindly Scottish woman who had called round at the time of my miscarriage. We were out in the drive when she came, searching for a nut that had fallen off the car during Michael’s investigations of the previous night. It was an aimless search carried out more for the sake of doing something than of finding anything, for with Robert out and without the baby, my previously busy day was now empty.

  She came into the house and we told her everything that had happened, I all the time longing for the reassurance that I had not in some way been negligent. She asked if I had been given sedatives and, on hearing that I had not, mentioned that she had been sedated when her husband died, and had come out of that drugged state more wretched than before. She was not old—in her mid to late forties, perhaps. Her husband must have been a youngish man and it sounded as if his death was fairly recent. At the back of my mind, I was aware that she had borne a greater tragedy than I, but at that moment, my own enveloped me completely.

  I asked her if I should express the milk in my breasts, but she said it was not necessary unless I was particularly uncomfortable. I was relieved; I had found it a bitter task to try to rid myself of the milk destined for my baby; it was easier to put up with a slight discomfort. She recommended that I should cut down on drink for the time being, and I remembered that throughout the next day I would be fasting, for it was the Day of Atonement, and there was now no reason for me not to fast. That would no doubt help to dry up the milk supply.

  There should have been many questions on my lips, and it is difficult to remember now whether I asked them and forgot the answers, or whether they came into my mind for the first time weeks later, when the mind had begun to heal from that stunning shock.

  But I did ask that one all-important question.

  ‘Is it all right to have another baby soon?’

  She was hesitant in her reply, ‘You might make a replacement out of it.’

  But most important to me, there was no physical reason why I should delay starting another pregnancy. And yet immediately I visualised my own terror, as I guarded the baby through its early months.

  ‘How will I stop myself being afraid?’ I asked, but she didn’t know the answer any more than I did and could only reply, ‘You’ll manage somehow.’

  Later in the day, the Health Visitor arrived—I recalled that it was Tuesday, the day when a little troupe of mothers and babies arrived at the doctor’s surgery to consult with both doctor and Health Visitor on the usual problems—I should have been amongst that number.

  Of all people, I felt that the Health Visitor was the one person who might also be bearing a burden of guilt at not having called on me when I had first telephoned her. In my most logical moments, I felt that, even if she had seen Amanda, the course of events would have remained unchanged. She would have given me the same assurance as on the telephone; and indeed if she had seen her two, three or even four days later, on the very day of her death, I was sure she would have pronounced Amanda fit and well. Indeed, it was difficult to believe that the cold of four days before was assumed to be a partial cause of Amanda’s death. So I tried hard not to inflict any added weight of blame upon her and meted out no accusations, but merely described the events that had taken place.

  ‘Is there anything that I can do to help?’ she asked, and it came to me that there was.

  ‘Could you go into the village shops and tell them about the baby,’ I asked her, for they all knew me and I could visualise them asking, ‘How’s the baby?’ as they always did, when I went shopping, and the unbearably painful moment of answering.

  That evening, we ate a cursory meal before the start of the fast. It was a p
hysical effort to prepare that meal—but necessary, for we should be without food and drink for a full day.

  As the minutes crept round to eleven o’clock, I became aware that it was a full twenty-four hours since our discovery of Amanda. It had been the longest day of my life.

  The postmortem examination was carried out and the result was given to us on the following day.

  The uniformed officer who had interviewed us telephoned to say that the examination had shown that the death was from natural causes.

  ‘Inhalation of vomit, coupled with acute respiratory infection,’ he told Michael.

  ‘So it was the cold,’ I said, surprised, but relieved at the ‘natural causes’ verdict. Now at least, my fears of the further ordeal of an inquest could be put from my mind. But almost immediately it was replaced by a new guilt. Had I been negligent? Should I have taken the baby to the doctor? I was tortured by that particular thought for many months.

  But in the meantime, I was aware that we had crossed a barrier; behind us the trauma of sudden, shocking, unexpected death, but now in front of us the normal trappings of death, which were not entirely unfamiliar to us; the arrangements and formalities in connection with the funeral. Michael had been told to call at the Coroner’s office for the death certificate now the postmortem result was known, and when he had obtained this, the next stage of the arrangements could be commenced.

  While he was out, Robert’s good friends, the Goldsmiths, called to see me. The Goldsmiths were an elderly couple whom Robert had adopted as a spare local set of grandparents when Michael had put central heating in their house a year before. Some immediately recognised affinity had drawn Robert to them and vice versa, and the friendship had continued.

  Now, as members of our family, albeit adopted, they came to commiserate, and Mrs. Goldsmith revealed for the first time that she too had lost a baby not more than a few days old. So here was yet another person who had survived—and whose joy in life radiated from her all the time, showing no signs of a past tragedy.