Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: The White Dove, The Potter’s House, Celebration, White

‘The baby.’ Her face was white, with dark patches under the eyes. ‘The baby will be all right?’

‘Of course,’ he soothed her. ‘We’ll get you your baby just as soon as we can.’

The morning cool under the trees in the park evaporated, and the sun rose in the relentlessly blue sky. The clockwork smoothness of the household arrangements ticked steadily on through the morning, occupying everyone from the august Mr Glass in his pantry to the humblest maid, but everyone was waiting. Mr Rayner the chauffeur, coming into the kitchen for his lunch, reported that neither of the doctors had ordered his car. Up in the nursery Bethan Jones helped Nanny with the children’s lunch, and shook her head in the privacy of the kitchen cubbyhole. Her mother was the village midwife back in the valley, and she knew the signs.

Gerald Lovell sat on in the library. He didn’t seem to be either waiting or listening, but simply suspended in immobility.

As the afternoon wore on it grew more difficult for the household not to listen. Miss May took the little girls as far from the house as possible for their afternoon walk so that they might not hear their mother screaming. Up in Lady Lovell’s room the two doctors had discarded their distinguishing jackets. They worked side by side in their shirtsleeves.

By the evening the screaming had stopped. Lady Lovell seemed barely conscious except when her head rolled to the side and the pain wrung out an almost inaudible gasp. The midwife and a nurse bathed her face and held her arms. Her eyes were sunk deep into their sockets.

The village doctor leant over for the hundredth time to listen to the baby’s heartbeat.

‘Still strong,’ he said. ‘It’ll make it. If she does.’

‘She’ll make it,’ said the other doctor grimly.

Then, at a few moments before midnight, they told her that it was time. ‘Push now,’ the midwife whispered to her. ‘It’s almost over. Push now, and the baby will be here.’

And Lady Lovell struggled back into the black, pain-filled world and pushed with the last of her strength.

At two minutes to midnight the baby was born, feet first. It was a healthy boy.

They held him up for her to see, and she looked at the bright red folded limbs and the mass of wet black hair. Adeline smiled the tremulous smile of utter exhaustion. ‘A boy,’ she murmured. ‘Please. Tell my husband now.’

The nurse rang the bell, and within seconds Mr Glass tapped at the door. The London doctor put his morning coat on again, fumbled to straighten his collar and went out to him.

‘Would you be so kind as to take me to his lordship? I am sure that he will want to know he has a fine son.’

The library was lit only by a single green-shaded lamp. Gerald Lovell took his head out of his hands as the doctor was ushered in.

‘Congratulations, my lord. A healthy boy.’

Gerald stood up, frowning and trying to concentrate on the seemingly unintelligible words. He had been looking at photographs. A double row of stiffly posed boys with cricket bats resting against their white flannelled knees stared up at him from the desk top. In the middle of them was Airlie in the Eton eleven of 1915.

‘A boy. My son?’ he asked.

The doctor smiled. ‘Yes. Lady Lovell had a difficult time and is very tired, but she will recover with rest. The baby is well.’

Gerald was on his way, past the doctor and out of the room, the stiffness of his movements betraying how long he had been sitting, hunched over his grief, in the silent library. He took the photograph with him.

Adeline opened her eyes when he came into her room. Gerald was shocked to see the exhaustion in her face. The hovering nurse backed discreetly away and he sat down at the edge of the bed, putting the photograph down on the fresh sheet with its deep lace edging. He covered her hands with his.

‘You’re all right,’ he said softly, and for a moment Adeline thought that after all, they might recover.

‘It’s a boy,’ she whispered. ‘I knew it would be. Look.’

She pointed to the white-ribboned cradle at the side of the bed. Gerald leant over it, slowly, and turned back the cover.

This crimson skin and pucker of features, then, was his son? These clenched, helpless hands and unseeing eyes?

No. Oh no. Airlie was his son. He had no memory of Airlie ever being like this, so tiny and so barely human. His head was full of vivid recollections: of Airlie running across the grass to his first pony and flinging himself across its bare back, of Airlie striding down the pavilion steps with his bat under his arm, of Airlie proud in his uniform with the brass buttons shining. But none of a baby.

Now Airlie was gone, and this little creature wasn’t him. Nor could he ever be. Adeline couldn’t give him his son back. Not Adeline, not anyone.

Gerald smoothed the cover over the baby again and turned back to his wife. Without taking her eyes from his face, Adeline pushed the photograph away from her, further away until it hung at the edge of the bed, and then slid to the floor. Gerald bent at once to retrieve it and she turned her head away from him.

‘I’d like to call him Richard,’ she said.

‘Richard? It’s not a family name …’

‘Does it matter that it’s not a family name? I would like it, Gerald.’

‘Of course. Call him whatever you like.’

Gerald bent over to kiss her. There were tears on her eyelashes and cheeks.

‘Try to rest,’ he said heavily. The floor creaked as he crossed it, and then the door closed behind him. As soon as he was gone Adeline tried to call him back, but the effort was too much for her. Her head fell back against the pile of pillows. The nurse was at her side at once.

‘Try to sleep, milady. The doctor will give you something to help, and we’ll take the baby away now.’

‘No.’

The nurse was startled by the insistence.

‘Please leave him here with me.’

When at last they went away and left her alone, Adeline turned her head to the white cradle. A tiny clenched fist was just visible under the wrappings.

‘Richard …’ she whispered to him, ‘Richard, you’re mine.’

Two (#u2761c367-8bf2-5dfa-b775-9b1f45f842ec)

Nantlas, Rhondda Fach, 1924

‘You ready then, Mari?’

Mari Powell stepped back from the tiny mirror over the sink in the back kitchen. She had been the first girl in Nantlas to cut her hair, and although everyone had copied her now, even Ellen Lewis who looked a fright whatever she did to herself, she was still proud of the glossy brown cap and the ripple of careful waves over her right temple.

‘Don’t rush me. Don’t you want me to look nice?’

She smiled over her shoulder at Nick Penry waiting impatiently for her on the doorstep, and bobbed up on her toes in an effort to see the reflection of her new blouse. She had made it herself, from a remnant of bright blue cotton from Howell’s summer clearance in Cardiff. Although her skirt was old she had shortened it daringly, and judged that the effect was almost as good as a completely new outfit.

‘Not a lot of point in looking nice to stay in Nantlas. If you don’t come now it’s either that or walk to Barry.’

‘Oh, all right then. I’m coming.’ Mari patted her hair one last time and hurried to the door. For a moment, balanced on the step above Nick, her face was almost level with his. He was smiling back at her, but the look in his eyes disconcerted her, as it had always done. They had known one another for six months now. Nick had come up to the house first on union business, to see her dad, after Dai Powell had moved up from the town of Port Talbot to the Rhondda valley, where the pits clustered thickly together, to work at the Rhondda and Peris-Hughes Associated Collieries No. 2 Nantlas Pit.

Nick Penry was deputy miners’ agent for the pit, one of the men’s elected union representatives, young for it at only twenty-three. Her dad had said to Mari, after Nick had gone, ‘Well. I’m not saying that he hasn’t got the right ideas, because he has. But there’s a lad who’s got his sights set further than the next yard of coal.’