From the Heart by Susan Hill

Author:Susan Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-02-23T05:00:00+00:00

18

A TUESDAY AFTERNOON and the windows were open onto the garden. After lunch and clearing up, five of them were sitting on the grass in the sun, Olive next to Noreen.

‘She can wear that,’ she said. Noreen held up the daisy chain. ‘Not long enough yet.’

‘Anyway, you can bet they’ll take it off her again.’

‘You wear it then.’

‘I might just.’

Noreen seemed to think it was a day like any other. Almost seemed not to have registered the fact that sometime on this beautiful, warm afternoon, the people would arrive to take her baby away.

Olive picked daisies and split the stalks with her thumbnail neatly, and threaded the next flower through, and her focus was fiercely on this, how long she could make the chain, how carefully she could arrange it so that each daisy was exactly the same distance from the next.

Time had never speeded up like this before, days had never raced, never merged into one another seamlessly in just this way.

One baby had left. Noreen’s went today. Wendy’s would probably be next but no one could be sure. No one was told. It was thought to be better this way.

When her time came Olive did not know how she would bear it. She lay wide awake at night when he was feeding, drawing him even closer to her, as if she could somehow stop it happening. Keeping him back. She had even thought wildly of packing her bag and waiting until late, when no one would be in the nursery, and simply taking him, slipping out of the side door and running, running with him. He was hers, wasn’t he? He belonged to her, not to St Jude’s, not to the people who would come, thinking that he would be theirs. How could anyone stop her?

The idea came back to her now and seemed even more possible, even more right and the only solution. It was true that she had signed the papers, giving him up, but that had been just the day after his birth, when she had not known what was real and what false, and they had taken advantage of that. She had done it because she had not then understood what love was, or that there could be another way.

‘No girl can manage this alone.’

‘You want the best for your child, Olive, surely you do?’

‘How would you face the world with an illegitimate baby? Ask yourself that. And how would he face it?’

She had signed the papers.

‘They get paid,’ one of the girls had said. ‘People pay a lot of money for them.’

But surely that could not be true. Surely they would not be allowed to sell babies?

‘I can hear them …’

Noreen turned her head to listen. There was the sound of a car coming slowly over the gravel at the front.

‘Oh God, please God …’

Olive jumped up and took her hand. ‘It might be anyone. But I’ll come upstairs with you in case. You don’t want to see them. I’ll stay with you.’

They went up to her room because it was further from the nursery.

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