Rosamunde Pilcher: The Blue Bedroom

Rosamunde Pilcher

The Blue Bedroom

As the sun slipped down out of the sky and long shadows grew and stretched out over the sandy dunes, the beach slowly emptied. Mothers called to reluctant children, coaxing them out of the warm shallows of a summer flood tide. Sleepy sunburned toddlers were strapped into pushchairs, picnic baskets were repacked, missing sandals and towels finally run to earth. By seven o’clock the beach was almost deserted. Only the lifeguard, sitting in his camp chair by the beach hut; a couple of determined surfers; a woman with a rambunctious dog.

And Emily and Portia.

Emily was fourteen and Portia a year older. Emily lived in the village—had been born here and spent all her life in the rambling old house that lay just beyond the church. But Portia came from London. Ever since Emily could remember, Portia’s parents had rented the Luscombes’ house for the month of August, while the Luscombes took themselves off to stay with their daughter who lived in some remote corner of Scotland that had a name like a sneeze.

As small children, Emily and Portia had played together every summer. In the normal course of events they would probably have taken little notice of each other, for they had, in fact, little in common. But Portia’s brothers and sisters were all older than she, and Emily was an only child. Thus, thrown together with the encouragement of their parents, they had formed a companionship that was quite satisfactory in its own practical fashion. They exchanged Christmas cards each year, but had never found it necessary to exchange confidences.

It was Portia who had suggested this afternoon’s excursion to the beach. She had telephoned Emily after lunch.

“…I’m all on my own. Giles and his friends have gone to watch stock car racing…” Giles was her brother, an undergraduate at Cambridge and terrifyingly witty and erudite. “…and I don’t want to go. It’s too hot and smelly.”

Emily hesitated, and Portia caught the hesitation. “You haven’t got anything else you want to do, have you?” Emily, grasping the receiver of the telephone, listened to the silence of the house, drowsing in the heat of the early afternoon. Mrs. Wattis, having cleared the lunch, had departed for Fourbourne, where she was to spend the night with her sister. Emily’s father was in Bristol. He had gone this morning on a business trip and would not return for another two days. Stephanie was upstairs in her bedroom, resting.

“No. Nothing, really,” said Emily. “I’d like to come.”

“Bring a biscuit or a sandwich or something. I’ve got a bottle of lemonade. I’ll meet you at the church.”

Emily had not seen Portia for a year, and as soon as she set eyes on her, her heart sank. It had happened again. At school, all her friends seemed to be growing up and outstripping Emily, moving on to higher forms, more advanced examinations, added privileges, while Emily stumbled along behind, clinging to the security of childhood, the known, the familiar. Longing to advance with the others, but lacking the courage to take the first, deliberate step.

And now Portia.

Portia was growing up. She had a proper figure. In a mere twelve months, she had turned from a child to a young woman. Her skimpy shorts and T-shirt revealed a proper waist, slender hips, long, brown legs. She had grown her dark curls down to her shoulders, she had had her ears pierced and wore shining gold earrings. They glinted when she tossed back her hair, tangled in the glossy dark locks. She had pink varnish on her toenails and she had shaved her legs.

Walking down over the golf links towards the sea, they passed a couple of young men, golfers, making their way to the next tee. Last year the young men would not even have glanced at Portia and Emily, but now she saw their eyes on Portia, and she observed Portia’s reaction. The pantomime of not being aware of admiring stares. The sudden self-consciousness of her walk, the toss of her head as a gust of wind blew her hair across her eyes. The young men did not look at Emily and Emily did not expect them to. For who would want to look at a stringy fourteen-year-old, with no shape and no curves, hair the colour of straw, and horrible spectacles?

“You’ve still got specs,” Portia remarked. “Why don’t you get contact lenses?”

“Perhaps I will, but I can’t till I’m older”

“A girl at school’s got them, but she said they were agony to begin with.”

Emily felt sick. She couldn’t bear to think about putting contact lenses into her eyes any more than she could bear to have her fingernails cut (Mother had taught her how to use a little emery board) or to eat sandwiches that the sand had got into.

She said, not wanting to talk about contact lenses, “Did you do O Levels this summer?”

Portia made a bored face. “Yes, but I haven’t had the results yet. I think I’m all right, but now my parents say I have to do A Levels. That’s another two years at school and I simply don’t think I can bear it. I’m trying to get them to say I can leave next summer and go to an A Level crammer or something. School’s so stifling.” Emily made no comment on this. “How about you? O Levels, I mean.”

Emily looked away from Portia because sometimes her eyes filled with tears, and this felt as though it was going to be one of them.

“I’m taking them next year.” Across the bay, a car was crawling down the road towards the distant beach. Sunlight flashed signals from its windows. She watched it minutely, concentrating, and after a little the tears receded, unshed. She said, “I was meant to take them. But Miss Myles, she’s my headmistress, said it would be better to wait another year.”

The interview had been a nightmare. Miss Myles had been so kind, so sympathetic, and all Emily had been able to do was sit and stare at her, numb with misery, scarcely able to listen to what she was saying, scarcely able to hear the sensible words. Nobody would expect you to pass, Emily, not just at this time. And after all, what rush is there? Why not give yourself another twelve months? Time is a great healer. In twelve months you won’t have forgotten, because you’ll never forget your mother, but I think you’ll find that things will be better.

* * *

They came to the railway bridge, the wooden footbridge that separated the golf links from the dunes. Halfway across they stopped, as they had always stopped, to lean over the wooden barrier and gaze down at the curving rails, glittering today in the brazen sunshine.

Portia said, “My mother told me that your father had married again.”

“Yes.”

“Is she nice?”

“Yes.”

The silence that followed this single word seemed an indictment against Stephanie, so she added, “She’s very young. She’s only twenty-nine.”

“I know. My mother told me. She told me about the baby coming, too”

“Do you mind?”

“No,” lied Emily.

“It must be funny, having a baby coming. Now, I mean. At our age.”

“It’s all right.”

They had bought a new cot for the new baby, but Emily’s father had brought Emily’s old pram down from the attic, and Stephanie had cleaned and oiled and polished it, and made a little patchwork quilt for it, and now it waited, in a corner of the wash-house, for the new occupant.

“I mean,” pursued Portia, “you’ve never had brothers and sisters. It’ll be strange for you.”

“It’ll be all right.”

The wooden parapet of the bridge felt warm to her hand, splintery and smelling of creosote. “It’ll be all right.” She threw a splinter of wood down onto the railway lines. “Come on. I’m hot and I want to swim,” and they went on over the bridge, their footsteps sounding hollow on the planks, and started out across the sandy footpath that led to the dunes.

* * *

They swam and sunbathed, lying face down on the sand with their heads turned towards each other. Portia chattered endlessly, about next holidays when she might be going skiing; about the boy she had met who had promised to take her roller-discoing; about the suede jacket her father had said that he would give her for her birthday. She did not talk about Stephanie and the baby again, and for this Emily was silently grateful.

And now, at the end of the day, at the start of the evening, it was time to make tracks for home. The tide was at the turn, a rim of dark sand lay wetly just beyond the reach of the breakers. The sea was a welter of dazzling light, the sky still cloudless and a deepening blue. Portia looked at her watch.

She said, “It’s nearly seven. I’ve got to go.” She began to brush damp sand from her bikini. “We’ve got a supper party. Giles is bringing his friends home and I promised my mother I’d give her a hand.”

Emily imagined the house, filled with young people all knowing each other very well, eating enormous quantities of food, drinking beer, playing the latest discs on their stereo. The image was both enviable and frightening. She began to pull her T-shirt over her bathing suit. She said, “I ought to go too.”

Portia said, with unaccustomed politeness, “Are you having a party?”

“No, but my father’s away, and Stephanie’s on her own.”

“So it’ll just be you and the wicked stepmother.”

Emily said, quickly, “She’s not wicked.”

“Just a manner of speech,” said Portia, and started to gather up towels and sun oil, stuffing them into a canvas bag that had ST. TROPEZ printed in huge red letter upon its side.

* * *

They parted at the church.

“It’s been fun,” said Portia. “We’ll do it again,” and she gave a casual wave, and sauntered off. The saunter speeded up, turned into a run. Portia was hurrying home, to wash her hair and get ready for the evening’s fun. She had not invited Emily to the party and Emily had not expected to be asked. She did not want to go to any party. She didn’t much want, either, to return home and face an evening spent in the company of Stephanie.

Stephanie and Emily’s father had been married now for nearly a year, but this was the first time that she and Emily had been left on their own. Without her father to act as buffer and keep the conversation going, Emily was in an agony of apprehension. What would they talk about?

She began to walk in the direction of home. Across the green, under the deep shade of the oaks, down the rutted lane, with a glimpse of sea at the end of it. In through the open white gates, the house revealing itself beyond the curve of the drive.

Reluctant, filled with a strange foreboding, Emily stopped, and stood looking at it. Home. But it had not been home since her mother died. Worse, since her father married Stephanie, it had become another person’s home.

What had changed? Small and subtle things. The rooms were tidier. Knitting and bits of sewing, books and old magazines no longer lay about the place. Cushions were plumped up, rugs lay flat and straight.

The flowers indoors had changed. Emily’s mother had loved flowers, but had no great refinements as to their disposal. Great bunches were crammed into jugs, just the way they had been picked. But Stephanie was a magician with flowers. Formal arrangements stood on pedestals in huge cream-coloured urns. Spikes of delphinium and gladiola, massed with roses and sweet peas and strangely shaped leaves that no person but Stephanie would even think of picking.

All of this was inevitable, and quite bearable. But what was almost unbearable and had really turned Emily’s world upside down had been the total transformation of her mother’s bedroom. Nothing else in the house had been altered, or redecorated or repainted, but the big double room that faced out over the garden and the blue waters of the creek had been stripped of furniture, gutted, rebuilt, and made totally new and unfamiliar. In all fairness to her father, he had told Emily that this was going to be done.

He had written her at school. “A bedroom is a personal thing,” his letter had said. “It wouldn’t be fair to Stephanie to ask her to use your mother’s bedroom, any more than it would be fair to your mother if Stephanie were simply to take over all her most treasured possessions. So we are going to change it all, and when you come back for the holidays, it will be unrecognisable. Don’t be upset about this. Try to understand. It is the only thing we are changing. The rest of the house remains the way you have always known it.”

She thought of the room. In the old days, before her mother died, it had been shabby and comfortable, with nothing actually matching anything else but everything living happily together, like the random sowing of flowers in a border. The curtains and the rug were faded. The huge brass bed, which had belonged to Emily’s grandmother, wore a bedspread of crocheted white lace, and there were a great number of photographs about the place and old-fashioned water colours upon the walls.

But that had all gone. Now everything was eggshell blue, with a fitted pale blue carpet, and beautiful satin curtains lined with the palest yellow. The old brass bed had gone, and in its place was a luxurious king-size divan, frilled in the same material as the curtains, and draped in a white muslin canopy that was suspended from a gilded coronet, high on the wall. There were a lot of white furry rugs, and the bathroom was lined in mirror glass and glittering with enticing bottles and jars. And everything smelt of lilies-of-the-valley. It was Stephanie’s own scent. But Emily’s mother had always smelt of Eau-de-Cologne and face powder.

Standing there in the evening sunlight, with her hair wet from swimming and sand encrusting her bare brown legs, Emily suddenly ached for things to be the way they had been. To be able to run in through the front door, calling for her mother, and to have her mother’s voice answer from upstairs. To go to her, curling up on the big hospitable bed, and to watch while her mother, at her dressing table, brushed her short, wayward hair, or dusted her nose with a swans-down puff that had been dipped into the crystal bowl of fragrant face powder.

* * *

She could never feel close to Stephanie. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her. Stephanie was beautiful and youthful and loving and had tried her hardest to find some niche in Emily’s heart. But they were both, basically, shy. Both wary of intruding on the other’s privacy. Perhaps it might have been easier for both of them if the baby had not happened. In a month the baby would be here, sleeping in the new cot in Emily’s old nursery. An entity to be reckoned with, bringing with it more claims on Emily’s father’s affections.

Emily did not want the baby. She did not much like babies. Once she had seen a television film of some person bathing a newborn baby and had been horrified. It looked like trying to bathe a tadpole.

She longed to be able to go back in time. To be twelve years old again and have none of these disturbing things happen to her. She was always longing to go back in time, which was why she had done badly in her lessons, had failed so miserably at games, had been kept back a year in the same form. Next term she must keep company with a gang of younger girls with whom she had nothing in common. Her confidence had been hopelessly eroded, like the face of a cliff too long pounded by the sea and scoured by the winds, so that at times she felt she would never be able to make a decision, or achieve something, successfully, ever again.

But brooding did no good. The evening stretched ahead and had to be faced. She went on up the drive, and when she had pegged her bathing things out on the line, let herself into the house through the back door. The kitchen was spotlessly neat and orderly. The round, wooden-framed clock over the dresser ticked away at the minutes, making a sound like a pair of snipping shears. Emily dumped the remains of her picnic onto the table and went through the door, and into the hall. Evening sunshine lay in a long yellow beam through the open front door. Emily stood in its warmth and listened. There was no sound. She looked into the sitting room, but it was empty.

“Stephanie.”

She had probably gone out for a walk. She liked to walk in the evenings when it was cooler. Emily started upstairs. On the landing, she saw that the door to the big, pale blue bedroom stood open. She hesitated. From within a voice spoke her name.

“Emily. Emily, is that you?”

“Yes.”

She crossed the landing and went in through the open door.

“Emily.” Stephanie lay on the beautiful bed. She was still dressed, in her loose cotton maternity smock, but she had kicked off her sandals and her feet were bare. Her red-gold hair spread its tangle over the white pillowcase, and her face, innocent of make-up and freckled as a child’s, was very pale and shone with sweat. She stretched out a hand. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

“I was on the beach with Portia. I thought you were out for a walk.” Emily approached the bed, but she did not take Stephanie’s outstretched hand. Stephanie’s eyes closed. She turned her head away from Emily, and her breathing was suddenly long and laboured.

“Is something wrong?”

But she knew that there was. And she knew what it was. Even before Stephanie relaxed at last and opened her eyes again. She and Emily gazed at one another.

Stephanie said, “The baby’s started.”

“But it’s not due for a month.”

“Well, I think it’s coming now. I know it is. I’ve been feeling odd all day, and I tried to go out for a bit of fresh air after tea, and I had this pain. So I came home to lie down. I thought it might just go away. But it hasn’t, it’s got worse.”

Emily swallowed. She tried to remember everything she had ever known about having babies, which was not much.

She said, “How often are the pains coming?”

Stephanie reached out for her gold wristwatch which lay on the bedside table. “That was only five minutes.”

Five minutes. Emily could feel her heart pounding. She looked down at the swollen, ludicrous mound that was Stephanie’s abdomen, taut with incipient life beneath the sprigged cotton of her voluminous dress.

Without thinking, she laid her hand, gently, upon it.

She said, “I thought first babies took ages to arrive.”

“I don’t think there’s any hard and fast rule”

“Have you rung the hospital? Have you rung the doctor?”

“I haven’t done anything. I was frightened to move in case something happened.”

“I’ll ring,” said Emily. “I’ll ring now.”

She tried to remember what had happened when Mrs. Wattis’s Daphne had had her baby.

“They’ll send an ambulance.”

Mrs. Wattis’s Daphne had cut things a bit too fine and very nearly had her child on the way to hospital.

“Gerald was going to take me,” said Stephanie.

Gerald was Emily’s father. “I don’t want to have it without him here…”

Her voice broke, and there were tears in her eyes. “You may have to,” said Emily. Stephanie started to weep in earnest, and then suddenly stopped. “Oh… there’s another one!”

She grabbed for Emily’s hand, and for a minute or so there was nothing in existence except the frenzied clasp of her fingers, the slow, determined breathing, the escaping gasps of pain. It seemed to go on for eternity, but at last, gradually, it passed. It was over. Exhausted, Stephanie lay there. Her grasp on Emily’s hand loosened. Emily took her hand away. She went across the room and into Stephanie’s bathroom. She found a clean washcloth, wrung it out in cold water, and took it back to the bedside. She wiped Stephanie’s face, then made the cloth into a pad and laid it on her forehead.

She said, “I have to leave you for a moment. I’ll go downstairs and telephone. But I’ll be listening, and you only have to yell…”

There was a phone in the study, on her father’s desk. She hated using the telephone, so she sat in his big chair for confidence, and because it was the nearest she could get to him. The number of the hospital was written in her father’s desk directory. She dialled it carefully and waited. When a man’s voice answered the call, she asked, making her voice as calm as she could, for the Maternity Ward. There was another delay, that seemed to last forever. Emily felt sick with anxiety and impatience.

“Maternity Ward.” Relief made her incoherent. “Oh … this … I mean…” She swallowed and started again, more slowly. “This is Emily Bradley. My stepmother’s meant to be having a baby in a month’s time, but she’s having it now. I mean, she’s having pains.”

“Oh, yes,” said the voice, cool and blessedly businesslike.

Emily imagined somebody starched and neat, drawing a notepad towards her, unscrewing her pen, all set to take down lists of statistics.

“What is your stepmother’s name?”

“Stephanie Bradley. Mrs. Gerald Bradley. She’s booked in at the hospital in a month, but I think she’s going to have the baby today. Now.”

“Has she timed her pains?”

“Yes. They’re every five minutes.”

“You’d better bring her in.”

“I can’t. I haven’t got a car, and I can’t drive, and my father’s away from home and there’s nobody but me.” The blatant urgency of the situation finally got through.

“In that case,” said the voice, wasting no more time, “we’ll send an ambulance.”

“I think,” said Emily, remembering Mrs. Wattis’s Daphne, “you’d better send a nurse as well.”

“What is the address?”

“The Wheal House, Carnton. We’re past the church and down the lane”

“And who is Mrs. Bradley’s doctor?”

“Dr. Meredith. But I’ll ring him, if you’ll get the ambulance here and a bed ready at the hospital.”

“There’ll be an ambulance with you in about fifteen minutes.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much.”

She put down the receiver. Sat for a moment, biting her lip. Thought about calling the doctor, and then remembered Stephanie and went back upstairs, two at a time, urgency and responsibility and importance lending wings to her feet.

Stephanie lay with her eyes still shut. She did not appear to have moved. Emily said her name, and she opened her eyes. Emily smiled, trying to reassure her. “All right?”

“I’ve had another pain. That’s four minutes now. Oh, Emily, I’m so frightened.”

“You mustn’t be frightened. I’ve phoned the hospital and they’re sending an ambulance and a nurse … they’ll be here in about a quarter of an hour.”

“I feel so hot. I feel such a mess.”

“I could help you out of your dress. Put on a clean nightie. That would make you feel more comfortable.”

“Oh, could you? There’s one in the drawer.”

She opened the drawer and found the white lawn nightdress, scented and lacy. Gently, she eased Stephanie out of the crumpled maternity dress, helped her off with her bra and pants. Naked, the huge bulge of her abdomen was revealed. Emily had never seen such a sight before, but rather to her own surprise, she did not find it horrifying. Instead, it seemed a sort of miracle; a safe, dark nest containing a living child, which already was making its presence felt and announcing to the world that it was time to make its appearance. Suddenly it was not alarming anymore but rather exciting. She slipped the nightdress over Stephanie’s head, and helped her put her arms into the lacy sleeves. She fetched a hairbrush from the dressing table and a length of velvet ribbon, and Stephanie took the brush and smoothed back her tangled hair, then tied it with the ribbon and lay back once more to await the next onslaught of pain. It was not long in coming. When it was over, Emily, feeling as exhausted as Stephanie looked, checked once more on the watch. Four minutes again.

Four minutes. Emily did a few panic-stricken calculations. It looked as though there was every chance that the baby would not wait for that drive to the hospital. In which case, it would be born right here, in this house, in the blue bedroom, in the immaculate bed. Having a baby was a messy business. Emily knew that much from books she had read, to say nothing of having once watched a pet tabby cat produce a litter of striped kittens. Precautions must be taken, and Emily knew what they were. She went to the linen cupboard and found a rubber sheet, newly purchased for the baby, and a pile of thick white bathtowels.

“You’re brilliant,” said Stephanie, as Emily, with some difficulty, remade the bed with her stepmother still in it. “You’ve thought of everything.”

“Well, your waters might break.”

Stephanie, despite everything, dissolved into weak laughter. “How do you know so much?”

“I don’t know. I just do. Mummy told me all about having babies when she told me about the facts of life. She was peeling Brussels sprouts at the time, and I can remember standing by the sink and watching her, and thinking there must be an easier way to have children.” She added, “But of course there isn’t.”

“No, there isn’t.”

“My mother only had me, but I know other people say that once it’s all over, you forget about the pain, you just think how marvellous it was. Having the baby, I mean. And then when you have another you remember the same old pain, and you think, ‘I must have been out of my mind to do it a second time,’ only then, of course, it’s too late. Now if you’re all right, I’ll go and ring the doctor.”

Mrs. Meredith answered the call, and said that the doctor was out on his rounds, but she would leave a message at the surgery, as he frequently rang in to see if there were any extra calls to be made.

“It’s terribly urgent,” said Emily, and explained what was happening, and Mrs. Meredith said in that case, she would try to find him herself. “You’ve rung the hospital, Emily?”

“Yes, and they’re sending an ambulance and a nurse. It should be here in a little while.”

“Is Mrs. Wattis with you?”

“No. She’s gone to Fourbourne.”

“And your father?”

“He’s in Bristol. He doesn’t know what’s happening. There’s just Stephanie and me.”

There was a little pause. “I’ll find the doctor,” said Mrs. Meredith, and rang off.

* * *

“Now,” said Emily, “we just have to get hold of Daddy.”

“No,” said Stephanie. “Let’s wait, until it’s all safely over. Otherwise he’ll be panic-stricken, and there’s nothing he can do. We’ll wait until the baby’s arrived, and then we’ll tell him.”

They smiled at each other, a conspiracy of two women who both loved, and wished to protect, the same man. The next instant Stephanie’s eyes widened, her mouth opened in a gasp of agony. “Oh, Emily…”

“It’s all right…” Emily took her hand. “It’s all right. I’m here. I won’t go away. I’m here. I’ll stay with you…”

* * *

Five minutes later, the village was astounded by the blare of sirens. The ambulance, everything ringing, came thundering down the rutted lane, turned in at the gate, and shot up the drive. Emily scarcely had time to get downstairs before they were into the house, two burly men with a stretcher and a nurse with a bag. Emily met them in the hall. “I don’t think there’s time to take her to the hospital…”

“We’ll see,” said the nurse. “Where is she?”

“Upstairs. The first door on the left. There are towels and a rubber sheet on the bed.”

“Good girl,” said the nurse briskly, and disappeared up the stairs with the ambulance men behind her. Almost at once another car appeared, hard on the heels of the ambulance, stopped with a screech of brakes on gravel, and discharged, like a bullet, the doctor.

Dr. Meredith was an old friend of Emily’s. He said, “What’s happening?”

She told him. “It’s a month early. I think it must be the heat.” He allowed himself a small, private smile. “Is that bad, or is it going to be all right?”

“We’ll see.” He headed for the stairs.

“What shall I do now?” Emily asked him.

He stopped and turned to look back at her. There was an expression on his face that Emily had never seen before. He said, “It seems to me that you’ve done just about everything already. Your mother would be proud of you. Why don’t you take yourself off. Go out in the garden and sit in the sun. I’ll let you know everything, just as soon as there’s anything to tell.”

* * *

Your mother would be proud of you. She went through the sitting room, the open French windows, and onto the terrace. She sat on the top step of the little flight of steps that led down to the lawn. All at once, she felt very tired. She put her elbows on her knees and rested her chin in her hands. Your mother would be proud of you. She thought about her mother. It was funny, but it didn’t make her miserable any longer. The aching need for a person no longer there had gone. She pondered on this. Perhaps you only needed people if other people didn’t need you.

She was still sitting there, mulling all this over, when, half an hour later, Dr. Meredith came to find her. She heard his step on the flags as he came out through the French windows and twisted around to face him. He had taken off his jacket and his shirt sleeves were rolled up. He came, slowly, to sit beside her. He said, “You’ve got a little sister. Six and a half pounds and quite perfect.”

“And Stephanie?”

“A bit weary, but blooming. A copybook mother.”

Emily felt a smile creeping up into her face, and at the same time a lump grew in her throat and her eyes started to fill with tears. Dr. Meredith, with no words, handed over a large white cotton handkerchief, and Emily took off her spectacles and wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

“Does Daddy know?”

“Yes. I’ve just been speaking to him on the phone. He’s coming home right away. He’ll be here by midnight. The ambulance has gone back to the hospital, but nurse is going to stay the night.”

“When can I see the baby?”

“You can see her now if you want to. Just for a moment.”

Emily stood up. “I want to,” she said.

They went back into the house. Upstairs, the nurse, bustling and competent, gave Emily a cotton mask to tie over her face. “Just in case,” she said. “She’s an early baby and we don’t want to take any risks.”

Emily, not minding, obediently tied it on. She went with Dr. Meredith into the blue bedroom. And there, in the beautiful bed, propped up with pillows, lay Stephanie. And in her arms, cocooned in a shawl, its little head downed with hair the same colour as Stephanie’s, lay the new baby. A person. A sister.

She stooped and laid her face against Stephanie’s. She couldn’t kiss her, because of the mask, but Stephanie kissed Emily. All constraint between them had melted away. They were no longer shy of each other, and Emily knew that they would never be shy again. She looked down into the baby’s face. She said, wonderingly, “She’s beautiful.”

“We had her together,” Stephanie told her, sleepily. “I feel she’s yours as much as mine.”

“A rare little nurse you’d make, Emily,” the nurse chipped in. “I couldn’t have coped with things better myself.”

Stephanie said, “We’re a family now.”

“Is that what you wanted?” asked Emily.

“It’s all I ever wanted.”

* * *

A family. Everything had changed, everything was different, but that didn’t mean that it couldn’t be good. When she had seen the doctor off, and watched his car disappear around the curve of the drive, Emily did not immediately return indoors. It was growing dark now, the garden dusky and sweet-scented after the long, hot day. The first of the stars shone from a sapphire-coloured sky. A beautiful evening. Just the right sort of evening for a person to start living. Just the right sort of evening for a person to start growing up.

She was very tired. She took off her spectacles and rubbed her eyes. She looked at the spectacles thoughtfully. Perhaps contact lenses wouldn’t be so bad. If Stephanie could bear having a baby, then surely Emily could learn to wear contact lenses.

She would try. Just as soon as she was old enough, she would try.