Alice

Alice

“Alice, hold on, we’re almost there!” Richard Miller glanced at his wife in concern as another contraction gripped her.

He exhaled in relief as he saw the turning for the maternity hospital up ahead. The signpost gleamed in the headlights, a beacon in the gathering dusk. The meandering driveway leading to the imposing Victorian building was mercifully short.

“Richard, it hurts.” Alice looked at him with terror filled eyes. A thin film of perspiration beaded her forehead.

“I know darling.” He tried to sooth her as he applied the handbrake and swiftly exited the car.

As if on cue, a white robed nurse glided out of the front door, akin to a swan gliding on the surface of a pond and in her grasp, a wheelchair. Richard opened the passenger door and helped his wife into the waiting means of transport.

Alice grabbed on to his hand, tightly. “I am scared.”

He leaned down to gently kiss her. “I will be right outside.”

The hard faced nurse sighed impatiently at the delay before she turned the wheelchair and began to push her patient inside the gloomy structure. All Richard could do was trail behind them impotently. The doors swung shut behind them with a loud bang. The sound echoed eerily down the corridor, like a gunshot.

The nurse gave a fellow colleague at the nurses’ station a perfunctory glance, economically informing her that she was taking Mrs Miller to room five.

As they approached the door, it was opened by a ruddy faced woman with wide smile. “Hello, you must be the Millers. I am the midwife on duty tonight. Kathleen Fraser.”

Her warm Scottish brogue washed over Richard’s frayed nerves and he felt some of his inner tension dissipate. He held out a hand to the woman who would help bring his child into the world. She shook it genially before turning her attention to his wife.

“Come on lassie, let’s get you on to a bed, you look about ready to burst.”

Alice gratefully took the proffered hand the midwife held out to her as she struggled to a standing position. She turned to face her husband, looking up into his blue eyes, drinking in his dark hair and tall frame, memorising every detail. This part of the journey she would have to take alone, but she would take his image into battle with her as she fought to birth their child.

“Alice.” The one word hung on the air, infused with all the fear, love, and hope he felt for her.

Alice’s small fingers gripped her swollen belly as it contracted again and she let out a soft cry of pain. The sound lanced through him. Richard closed his eyes for a moment, when he opened them, she was gone. Left alone in the yawning chasm of the corridor, time seemed as if it had stopped. The relentless clock face on the wall told him otherwise.

One hour, two, three then six hours had passed. There had been no news. In a moment of desperation he had had the temerity to grab the starched sleeve of the nameless nurse, who had escorted them into the hospital and ask after his wife. In frosty tones she had informed him as if he were a simple child that offspring  were not born to a schedule, before she had pointedly looked at his hand that still rested on her sleeve. Richard had snatched the offending limb away, muttering an apology.

Night had drawn its cloak over the sky long ago. The small hours of the morning approached. Richard glanced at the clock face, counting down in his head as the old day died and the new one took its first breath. He was jolted out of his almost trance like state by the awareness of a presence by his side.

“Mr Miller.”

Richard looked at the man, a doctor he presumed, by his white coat and weary expression.

“Doctor, how is my wife? I have heard nothing.”

“Mr Miller,” The doctor repeated. “There have been some complications. The child is too large to be born. Your wife is slipping away. We need to do an emergency caesarean or we may lose them both.”

Richard grabbed the white lapels of the doctor’s coat for fear he might give in to the black abyss threatening to engulf him. He and Alice had discussed this scenario. She had emphatically told him that if anything went wrong to think of the child first. Every feeling he had for her railed against it. How could he sacrifice her for some unknown person he had never met?

“Mr Miller,” The doctor droned on, emotionlessly.  “I don’t think you need me to tell you how dangerous a caesarean is. If there are, er complications you may have to choose one or the other.”

Richard reached for the Woodbines in his pocket with shaking fingers. The doctor held a lit match to him before he had barely liberated one of the cigarettes from the pack.  He took a deep drag and let the nicotine work its magic.

“My wife, doctor, if it comes down to it. Save my wife.”

The doctor nodded and left him alone with his thoughts. May God or whoever was listening, forgive him, because he doubted his Alice ever would.