Chapter 1: A Star is Born
While the consultant was explaining the complexities of my babys heart condition to me in a hushed, confidential tone, I stared fixedly at his yellow and red-spotted bow tie, half expecting it suddenly to spin round like a joke one: thats how spaced-out with fear, anaesthetic and shock I was after my emergency Caesarean.
I dont know why he bothered to lower his voice anyway, since Id been shunted off into a room of my own or maybe that should be a store cupboard of my own, because it was a tiny slice of space with one high window and a wall lined with boxes of equipment. They were probably as surplus to requirements as I seemed to be, now that my baby was sustained by the resources of the intensive care baby unit instead of my own.
Can I see her? I interrupted.
Ma, whose ample frame was squeezed into a tubular metal chair on the other side of the bed, with her elbow resting on a pile of cardboard cartons, said, She cant come up here, Cally, when shes in an incubator attached to all those bleeping things, and you certainly arent up to going down there yet. But shes perfect hands like tiny pale pink starfish.
You said she was so blue she looked like a Smurf, I said accusingly, tears welling.
I thought you were still asleep when I was talking to that nurse, and anyway, it was just a glance in passing right after she was born. She looks pink now.
She was a little blue at first, but now shes stabilised and a relatively healthy colour, the consultant said soothingly. You will be taken down in a wheelchair to see her as soon as you are recovered enough.
She is going to be all right, isnt she? I pleaded. Only there was an angel hanging around when I woke up and I thought it might have come for her.
That was a nun, Ma said. She had a white habit on and flapped past the trolley when you were being wheeled out of theatre. Thought she looked more like an albatross, myself.
Why would a nun be on a maternity ward? I asked.
I dont know, but its a damned sight more likely than an angel.
I focused on the consultant again and he looked back at me and frowned. Your babys heart problems should really have been picked up on a scan He paused and then added with false brightness, Still, there is one good thing.
There is? Ma asked incredulously.
Yes, the majority of female babies with similar malformations also have Turners syndrome, which can lead to other side effects, but your baby doesnt.
Thank heaven for small mercies, then, my mother said drily, without removing the jade cigarette holder that was clenched between her teeth. Having tired of repeating to hospital staff that shed no intention of lighting up inside the premises, shed removed the pink Sobranie from it and placed it carefully in a silver case in her vast red Radley handbag. The consultant eyed the empty holder in much the same way Id been looking at his bow tie, and then his gaze moved to the colourful splashes of oil paint on the legs of her black slacks and across her tunic where her bosom tended to rest on her palette while she painted. She looked like a walking embodiment of Jackson Pollocks Dark Period if hed had one.
Still, it was a measure of her love that shed rushed down on the first train once my friend Celia had called her, despite her oft-repeated statement that she never wanted to set foot in London again.
Never mind Pollock: this is my dark period, I muttered.
I think our Callys a bit delirious, she said, laying one small, cool, plump hand on my forehead. Though she often talks daft.
Im not and I understand about Stella needing an operation right away. Will she be all right afterwards?
She certainly wont survive if we dont operate, the consultant said evasively, still in that low, confidential voice. Shes not quite full term and of course there are always risks involved in operating on such small babies. But you do understand that her long-term outlook is at present obscure, dont you? She will definitely need more treatment later, possibly including further operations.
There seems no option but to agree to this operation, Ma said, shifting the jade holder to one side of her mouth. It will give her a fighting chance, at least.
He nodded, though he didnt look as if hed have placed any money on it.
But I clung to that idea, for of course the advances of modern medical science would ensure that my baby would make a full recovery and live a normal life. Shed be one of the lucky ones: my Stella, my little star.
Having been fathoms deep in a bottomless ocean of anaesthesia when Stella came into the world, I worried that I might find it difficult to bond with her. But the moment I set eyes on my baby I was consumed by a blinding flash of such instant besottedness that I could spend an hour or more just marvelling over the perfect convolutions of her tiny ears, or the minute crescents of her fingernails, like those fragile pale pink shells I used to pick up on Southport beach.
Celia, the friend who had so luckily been staying with me when I was rushed into hospital, was equally enthralled and enchanted, but Ma, who is not the type to dote on babies, only said the poor mite looked like a skinned rabbit. Then, this obviously having triggered a thought train in her head, she went out and bought Stella a white plush rabbit that was bigger than she was.
When we got the hospital chaplain to christen Stella, Ma suggested we have the rabbit as a godparent, after Celia, though I think she was joking But there it was in the photographs, along with the special cake iced with the babys name that Id sent Celia out to buy. If all had gone to plan, of course, I would have made it myself at a later date. For me, important occasions must always be accompanied by cake, since it earned me a living as a cookery writer, as well as being my comfort food of choice.
Go to Gilligans Celebration Cakes off Marylebone High, I told her. If it has to be shop-bought, theyre the best and theyll ice her name on it while you wait.
Oh, yes, I remember you going there to research an article on traditional wedding cakes for Good Housekeeping and bringing me a chunk of fruitcake back, Celia agreed. And you said one of the staff was dead sexy and looked just like Johnny Depp.
Did I? Oh, yes, but Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, I said, a sudden flash of recollection bringing up the undeniably attractive image of a thin, dark, mobile face with high cheekbones and a pair of strangely luminous light brown eyes meeting mine across a work table, while the heady scent of dried fruit and spices mingled with the sweet smell of sugar.
That seems like another life, I sighed. It happened to a different person.
Chapter 2: The Night Watch
During the long night watches after Stellas first operation, as the lights flashed on the machinery and the hospital hummed faintly along to the tired buzzing in my head, there were way too many hours in which to think.
During the long night watches after Stellas first operation, as the lights flashed on the machinery and the hospital hummed faintly along to the tired buzzing in my head, there were way too many hours in which to think.
Her arrival had instantly turned my life upside down, so that everything Id once thought important had run right to the bottom of my hourglass of priorities. My hard-fought-for career as a cookery writer, for instance, which paid the mortgage on the shoebox-sized basement flat within walking distance of Primrose Hill, where I lived with my little white dog, Toto.
Toto was a Battersea Dogs and Cats Home stray and looked like a cross between a whippet and a Skye terrier, if you can imagine that: all bristly white coat, with a terrier head but slender body and long legs. Ma and Celia were both staying on at my flat and looking after him, as well as taking it in turns to come into the hospital, though Ma spent most of her visits drawing a series of starfish-like little hands and winged creatures that appeared to be some kind of nun/angel/albatross hybrid. Her paintings are already very Chagall-with-knobs-on, so I could barely imagine the turn they would take when she got back home again.
Toto was an excellent judge of character and although he adored Celia and Ma, hed never taken to my ex-fiancé, Adam, a tall and charismatic marine biologist whod proposed to me after a whirlwind romance. In retrospect, I only wished Id trusted my dogs instincts more than my own.
Adam had swept me off my feet and wed planned to get married in the lovely ancient church of All Angels in the village of Sticklepond, where Ma now lived the minute he got back from the eighteen-month contract in Antarctica that hed already signed up for, that was.
Id suggested he cancel it, but hed explained that hed always dreamed of going there and needed to get it out of his system before he settled down.
Itll be cutting it fine for starting a family by then, though, Id said. I dont want to leave it too late, or it might not happen at all.
Mmm, hed agreed, with much less enthusiasm than hed shown while talking about the Antarctic; but by then Id discovered his acute phobia about hospitals and illness of any kind, and put it down as some general squeamishness to do with that.
Still, Id been convinced hed be bored out of his skull stuck in the Antarctic for eighteen months with a lot of other boffins, examining the local frozen seafood. But no, it turned out that there was a whole community there, with everyone from cooks to dentists laid on, which I supposed made sense when most of the year you couldnt fly in or out.
They made their own entertainments too, and going by the pictures on Facebook of Adam messing about on Ski-Doos and in the snow with his new friends, hed found a few ways to occupy his spare time.
Of course, wed constantly emailed and chatted via Facebook, and sometimes he could call me, though not the other way round. But as time passed he seemed to become less and less interested in anything outside the base I suppose thats a bit like hospital, where your real world shrinks to your immediate surroundings and everything else seems remote and unimportant.
I expected that would change once he came home, even if I did feel nervous about our reunion. And there was a sticky moment at the airport, when he looked like an unshaven stranger as he came through into the arrivals hall. But when he spotted me and smiled there was that instant feeling of connection, just like the first time wed met, and I ran straight into his arms. Hed kissed me, then said, looking genuinely startled, that hed forgotten how pretty I was!
We went back to my flat and that evening everything was all right between us in fact, it was more than all right. He was tired and abstracted, not helped by a call from a colleague, though what could be that urgent about Antarctic pond life I couldnt imagine at the time. His end of the conversation was a bit terse.
I should have smelled a rat right then, because next morning it was like Jekyll and Hyde revisited: right after breakfast he suddenly announced hed already signed up for another eighteen months in Antarctica and, moreover, hed met someone else up there and she was going back in April, too.
Of course I was devastated and furious. I told him to get out of my flat and my life and hed packed up his stuff and left within the hour, with my parting shot that I hoped they both fell down an Antarctic crevasse on their next tour of duty ringing in his ears.
Toto, gleefully grasping that the hated interloper was out of favour, managed to sink his teeth into Adams ankle at the last minute, which would give him something to remember us by till all the little puncture wounds healed up again.
It was only much later that I realised that Adam had left me a much longer-lasting and life-changing memento.
Once Stella was out of immediate danger, Celia needed to get back to her husband, four rescue greyhounds and six cats in Southport, who were all pining for her.
I would also pine for her, though shed promised to return when Stella was finally allowed home.
Ma was staying on for a few more days, though I was sure she was dying to head straight back up north, too. In fact, I was surprised shed stayed as long as she had.
When I was growing up in Hampstead Id thought shed seemed happy enough, though she was always fairly reclusive and preoccupied with her work, of course, but she sold up and moved back with alacrity to the Lancashire village where she was born after Dad died.
Ma is not some cute contraction of Mum, but a relic of her early attempts to get me to call her by her Christian name, Martha. She was never much like any of my school friends mothers, delegating most of her maternal responsibilities to a series of foreign au pairs, but Id never doubted that in her way she loved me. And Anna, the final and most beloved of the au pairs, a tall, blonde, Swedish domestic goddess, had instilled my love of cooking and baking, so it worked out brilliantly for me.
I emailed Anna the news about Stella and received a warm, reassuring reply straight away: shed always had the power to make me feel comforted, an effect that has also rubbed off onto the cakes she taught me to make.
I decided that for Stellas first birthday I would make her a prinsesstårta, that most splendid of Swedish celebration cakes.
You are going to tell Adam about Stella at some point soon, arent you? Celia asked, just before she finally set off home.
No! Why should I, after he accused me of getting pregnant on purpose when I told him she was on the way and then suggested I get an abortion?
I know he didnt want the baby, but now shes arrived he might feel differently, she suggested. Having an incredibly generous heart she was always looking for the best in everyone, even my absent ex-fiancé, Adam Scott or Scott of the Antarctic, as Ma generally referred to him.
I dont think so. Anyway, hes changed his email address and I couldnt phone him in Antarctica even if I wanted to, which I dont.
Facebook?
Ive blocked him.
I still think he ought to know, she said stubbornly. He has a responsibility to support you, too.
I dont want his support and Im sure he still wouldnt be interested even less so in a baby with health problems, because hes got that phobia about illness and hospitals, remember?