Wish Upon a Star

While the consultant was explaining the complexities of my baby’s 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: that’s how spaced-out with fear, anaesthetic and shock I was after my emergency Caesarean.

I don’t know why he bothered to lower his voice anyway, since I’d 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 can’t come up here, Cally, when she’s in an incubator attached to all those bleeping things, and you certainly aren’t up to going down there yet. But she’s 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 she’s 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, isn’t 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 don’t know, but it’s a damned sight more likely than an angel.’

I focused on the consultant again and he looked back at me and frowned. ‘Your baby’s 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 Turner’s syndrome, which can lead to other side effects, but your baby doesn’t.’

‘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 she’d no intention of lighting up inside the premises, she’d 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 I’d 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 Pollock’s Dark Period – if he’d had one.

Still, it was a measure of her love that she’d 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 Cally’s a bit delirious,’ she said, laying one small, cool, plump hand on my forehead. ‘Though she often talks daft.’

‘I’m not – and I understand about Stella needing an operation right away. Will she be all right afterwards?’

‘She certainly won’t survive if we don’t operate,’ the consultant said evasively, still in that low, confidential voice. ‘She’s 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, don’t 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 didn’t look as if he’d 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. She’d 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 baby’s name that I’d 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 Gilligan’s Celebration Cakes off Marylebone High,’ I told her. ‘If it has to be shop-bought, they’re the best and they’ll 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 (#ulink_8b6d9f63-f65d-5681-beb9-d922c7488e23)

During the long night watches after Stella’s 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 I’d 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, he’d never taken to my ex-fiancé, Adam, a tall and charismatic marine biologist who’d proposed to me after a whirlwind romance. In retrospect, I only wished I’d trusted my dog’s instincts more than my own.

Adam had swept me off my feet and we’d 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 he’d already signed up for, that was.

I’d suggested he cancel it, but he’d explained that he’d always dreamed of going there and needed to get it out of his system before he settled down.

‘It’ll be cutting it fine for starting a family by then, though,’ I’d said. ‘I don’t want to leave it too late, or it might not happen at all.’

‘Mmm,’ he’d agreed, with much less enthusiasm than he’d shown while talking about the Antarctic; but by then I’d discovered his acute phobia about hospitals and illness of any kind, and put it down as some general squeamishness to do with that.

Still, I’d been convinced he’d 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 couldn’t 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, he’d found a few ways to occupy his spare time.

Of course, we’d 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 that’s 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 we’d met, and I ran straight into his arms. He’d kissed me, then said, looking genuinely startled, that he’d 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 couldn’t 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 he’d already signed up for another eighteen months in Antarctica and, moreover, he’d 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 he’d 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 Adam’s 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 she’d promised to return when Stella was finally allowed home.