Perfect People

37

It felt like he had a meat cleaver embedded in his head. John was aware he was lying down and that something cold was pressing against his right eye. He opened his left eye and all he could see for a moment was a blur. The light hurt and he closed it again.

A cheery female voice said, ‘How are you feeling?’

He opened his eye again and focused. A face. A young woman he vaguely recognized. She had wavy blonde hair and was pretty. The junior midwife; her name was Lisa, he remembered, suddenly.

And then he remembered everything else.

In panic he tried to sit upright. ‘My God, what’s happened?’

‘Just lie back down and rest, I want to try to keep the swelling down.’

He stared at her. She was holding what looked like a surgical glove packed with ice in her hand. ‘My wife – what’s happened? Is she all right?’

Cheerily, Lisa said, ‘She is absolutely fine. And both your babies are out and fine – they’re all doing really well.’

‘They are? Where are – is-?’

For an instant he felt giddy with relief and excitement. The room swam; then, as if the blade of the cleaver was twisting in his skull, the pain in his head suddenly got so bad that John felt sick. He desperately wanted to stand, tried for an instant to lever himself up, but that made him feel worse. All he could do was close his eyes and lie back. Moments later, he felt the ice-packed glove over his eye. It was like soothing balm.

‘Your wife’s in the recovery room at the moment. She’s been fully anaesthetized and it will take a few hours before she’s completely recovered. Your babies are asleep in the Special Baby Care Unit.’

‘It was a boy? The second one?’

‘A lovely little boy.’

He tried to sit up again but the pressure against his eye was too strong. ‘And my wife’s really all right?’

The junior midwife nodded vigorously.

John felt relief flooding through him. He heard a door open and a moment later heard the voice of the consultant obstetrician.

‘Well, you’re going to have a nice shiner there, Dr Klaesson!’ he said cheerily.

He came into John’s line of vision, clogs slapping on the floor, hat and mask removed, gown slack. ‘Four stitches in your head and a black eye – still, you’ll be able to tell everyone in years to come that at least you didn’t let your wife suffer alone during childbirth!’

John managed a thin smile. ‘I’m really – I-’

‘No, listen, old chap, I’m sorry about the kerfuffle, but your wife is doing well, and the babies are absolutely fine. How are you feeling?’

‘A little rough.’

‘I’m sorry you had to go through that but there was no alternative – and your wife supported me. The second baby was definitely starting to suffer from lack of oxygen and I had to deliver him quickly otherwise we’d have lost him for sure.’

‘Can I see them?’

‘You’ve taken quite a crack on your head – you caught the edge of the table and the anaesthetics machine as you went down. They’re going to take you for an X-ray just to make sure everything’s tickety-boo inside. By the time you’ve done that, Naomi will be all tidied up in her bed, ready for you to come down and see her and the babies.’

Aware that his voice was sounding a little strange, slurred, as if he had been drinking, John said, ‘Special Care unit – did you say?’

The surgeon nodded.

Edgy now, John said, ‘Wh-why?’

‘Perfectly normal for any premature baby. Your little girl weighs two point six five kilograms and your boy weighs two point four three – both around five and a half pounds in old measurements. That’s a good weight for twins at thirty-six weeks. They seem jolly healthy – in fact, remarkably robust – and they’re breathing on their own. We’ve been lucky the toxaemia hasn’t affected them.’

He gave John a knowing smile, and John, uneasy suddenly, wondered if Holbein knew, if he’d seen a piece in an English newspaper and remembered their names or faces.

Then the consultant turned and walked from his line of vision. ‘I’m afraid I’m due back in theatre. I’ll pop by later on this evening and see how Naomi’s doing.’

John heard the door close.

‘You’re not the first person to have passed out,’ Lisa said.

‘It was the brutality – I – I couldn’t believe-’

‘At least your wife is all right, and the babies are fine. That’s the main thing, isn’t it?’ the young nurse said.

John took a long while to answer. He was thinking about how, up to this point, none of this had seemed totally real. Of course Naomi had been suffering for months, but all the time the babies had been inside her, he could imagine they might wake up one morning and find her bump had gone, that it was all a misdiagnosis, just a phantom pregnancy, that was all.

Now, through his aching brain, the true reality of it all was finally dawning. The irreversibility. They had brought two human beings into the world whose genes might have been tampered with by Dettore in ways they had not wanted, and there was not a thing they could do about it, except pray that they were going to be fine.

He looked back at the cheery young nurse and, in answer to her question, nodded uncertainly.