Tom McCarthy: C

“Fine, sir,” Maureen informs him. “Thanks for your concern.”

“Splendid!” he booms. “Well, you just carry on. Maureen will see to it that you have everything you… Is that the telegram?”

He’s looking at Learmont’s yellow paper, his eyes glowing with excitement.

“I was a little confused…” Learmont begins, but the man grabs the paper off him and begins to read aloud:

“ ‘… expected next twenty-four hours’… good… ‘parturient in labour since last night…’ Excellent! ‘Parturient,’ each letter crystal clear!”

“We weren’t quite sure as to the provenance…”

“What-provenance? Hang on: what’s this? ‘Doctor refuested as soon as…’? ‘Refuested’? What’s that for a damn word?”

“Sir!” Maureen says.

“She’s heard much worse,” he barks. “ ‘Refuested’? I’ve been… That blasted key!”

“Sweet Jesus!” says Maureen. She turns to the child and takes the towel from her. Another woman appears from the hallway, carrying a tray of biscuits out towards the orchard and trailing in her wake a cat. “Go with Miss Hubbard,” Maureen tells the child.

“… F… Q…” the man mumbles, then, barking again: “Provenance?”

“We weren’t quite sure of the telegram’s provenance,” Learmont explains. “It didn’t originate in the post office down the road in Lydium, yet it seemed to come down the same line which-”

“Miss Hubbard,” the man says, “wait.”

The second woman pauses in the doorway. “Yes, Mr. Carrefax?” she asks.

“Miss Hubbard, I can’t hear the children speaking,” he tells her.

“They’re playing, Mr. Carrefax,” she replies.

“Are you sure they’re not signing?”

“I told them that’s not allowed. I think they-”

“What? Told them? Telling them won’t do it on its own! You have to make them speak. All the time!”

The child is reaching her arm up to the tray of biscuits. The cat is watching the child’s efforts closely, still and tense. Maureen takes Learmont’s sleeve and starts to pull him into the house.

“The provenance, good doctor, is right here!” Mr. Carrefax booms at him as he squeezes past. “F and Q notwithstanding. Disappointing. Fixable. The copper! In the drive, you say?”

“There’s a man waiting in a-”

“Splendid! Miss Hubbard, if I can’t hear them I’ll think they’re signing.”

“I’ll do what I can, Mr. Carrefax,” Miss Hubbard tells him.

“At all times!” he barks at her. “I want to hear them speak!”

He strides out with her, heading for the drive. The child follows the biscuits, and the cat follows the child. Maureen leads Dr. Learmont in the other direction, up the staircase. There’s a tapestry hanging above this, a silk weaving that depicts either this same staircase or one very similar to it. They cross the landing at the top and step into a room. A second tapestry hangs on the wall of this: another picture woven in silk, this time of an Oriental scene in which pony-tailed peasants reach up into trees full of the same white fruit as the ones in the orchard. Lower down the tapestry, beneath the trees, more peasants are unravelling dark balls. Beneath them, in the room itself, a woman lies supine on a bed. A bearing-down sheet has been tied around the mattress, but the woman isn’t clutching this. She’s lying back quite peacefully, although her thick brown hair is wet with sweat. A second maid sits beside her on a chair, holding her hand. The woman in the bed smiles vaguely at Learmont.

“Mrs. Carrefax?” he asks her.

She nods. Dr. Learmont sets down his canister and, opening his case across the bed, asks:

“How far apart are your contractions?”

“Three minutes,” she tells him. Her voice is soft and grainy. There’s something slightly unusual about it, something beyond fatigue, that Learmont can’t quite place: it’s not a foreign voice, but not quite native, either. He takes her blood pressure. As he removes the strap her body is seized by a new contraction. Her face scrunches, her mouth opens, but no scream or shout comes from it: just a low, barely perceptible growling. The contraction lasts for ten or fifteen seconds.

“Painful?” Learmont asks her when it’s over.

“It is as though I had been poisoned,” she replies. She turns her head away from him and gazes through the window at the sky.

“Have you been taking any painkillers?” he asks.

She doesn’t answer. He repeats the question.

“She has to see you speaking,” the bedside maid tells him.

“What?”

“She has to see your lips move, sir. She’s deaf.”

He leans over the bed and waves his hand in front of Mrs. Carrefax’s face; she turns her head towards him. He repeats his question once more. She seems to understand it, but just smiles vaguely back at him again.

“Small doses of laudanum, sir,” the bedside maid says.

“I prefer chloroform,” Learmont says.

Mrs. Carrefax’s eyes light up. Her soft, grainy, strange voice utters the word “Chlorodyne?”

“No, chloroform,” Learmont tells her, pronouncing the name clearly and emphatically. He takes a gauze mask from his case and, fixing this to the end of his inhaler’s tube, straps it round Mrs. Carrefax’s face. He opens a valve on the canister’s neck; a long, slow hissing seeps out as the gas makes its way along the canvas corridor towards her mouth and nose. The muscles in Mrs. Carrefax’s cheeks slacken; her pupils dilate. After half a minute Learmont closes the valve and unstraps the mask. A second contraction soon follows; again the woman’s body seizes up, but her face registers less pain. He refixes the mask, administers more chloroform and watches the silent features further slacken and dilate beneath their gag. When he removes it again, she begins to murmur:

“… un fleuve… un serpent d’eau noir…”

“What’s that?” he asks.

“It is like a fall of velvet,” she tells him. “Black velvet… covering a camera…”

“That’s the chloroform,” he says.

“… a camera,” she tells him, “looking in the dark… There is a river with a water snake, swimming towards me… More.” Her hand releases the bedside maid’s and gestures to the canister.

“I don’t want to knock you out completely,” Dr. Learmont says. “I’ll let you-”

“Sophie!” Maureen gasps. Learmont follows her eyes towards the doorway. The child is standing in it, watching. Maureen walks over and plants herself in front of her, blocking her view of the room. “You shouldn’t be here!” she scolds-then, softening, scoops her up into her arms and says: “We’ll go and help Frieda make the kenno.” As Learmont listens to her heavy footsteps descending the staircase, another contraction takes hold of Mrs. Carrefax. He takes from his case a bottle of carbolic acid and tells the bedside maid to go and fetch him olive oil.

“Olive oil, sir?” she repeats.

“Yes,” he answers, rolling up his sleeves. “Not long to wait now.”

But there is long to wait: all afternoon, and more. He leaves the room twice: once to stretch his legs in the hallway, from whose window he watches Mr. Carrefax and Mr. Dean carrying the coils of copper wire and crates of bottles through the walled-in garden to the stables; once to eat some sandwiches the maids have knocked up for him. He administers more chloroform and hears, above the hiss, the sound of Mr. Dean’s trap making its way up the gravel path, departing. The contractions continue; Mrs. Carrefax dips into and out of her twilight sleep. Dusk turns into evening, then night.

The final pushes come at half past two. The bedside maid holds Mrs. Carrefax’s shoulders, Mrs. Carrefax grips the bearing-down sheet and the baby’s head appears between her legs-or rather, half-appears behind a glistening film of plasma, a skin-membrane. Learmont has heard of this phenomenon but never witnessed it before: the baby has a caul. The amniotic bag envelops the entire head, a silky hood. As soon as the baby’s fully out, Learmont pinches this away from its skin and peels it upwards from the neck, removing it. He washes off the green-and-red mess covering the rest of the body, ties and cuts the cord, wraps the baby in a sheet and hands it to the mother.