Eleanor found herself in the maternity ward long before her babies were due. Her pregnancy had grown complicated in its final stages, and the doctors, cautious as ever, were unwilling to leave anything to chance, especially since she wasnt expecting just one child, but two. They suggested a planned caesarean, but Eleanors heart was set on a natural birthshe was determined, and so the doctors decided to let nature take its course for now, keeping the operating theatre ready on standby.
It was also important because Eleanor and her husband, George, had arranged for a partnership birth; obstetricians here were never keen on extra visitors lingering in the surgery. Labour arrived under the shroud of night, and George was summoned without delay. In a flurry that was both hurried and reluctantas happens in dreamshe appeared exactly twenty minutes later, windblown as if hed run through a cloud of dandelions, and joined his wife in the quiet, pale-lit prenatal room.
This wasnt Eleanors first time on this surreal carousel, so she moved with a composed, almost spectral calm, following instructions as though they echoed from a distant well, restraint and reason wrapped around her. By four in the morning, as the hospitals clocks melted gently on the walls, the first baby made her arrivala girl who announced herself with a cry clear enough to ring through both dream and waking.
The midwife, a kindly woman with a face that seemed drawn from old nursery rhymes, congratulated Eleanor on the birth of her daughter. But joy pinched oddly at this hour. George, instead of beaming, plastered a thin smile across his facelike a paper maskand leaned anxiously toward Eleanor. Ten minutes tiptoed by, soft and awkward, and then their second daughter arrived. Eleanor, luminous and tired, smiled in delight, while Georges face crumpled and he began to sobnot the little hiccupping tears of joy, but something deeper and more knotted.
Naturally, we hovered near, uncertain, but Eleanor waved a languid hand and murmured, Ignore him, hell come round soon enough. This is always how he is with the arrival of the twins and our lovely girls. He did hope for a boy this time, but things have their way of unfolding, dont they? Still, he adores the girls, so everything will be as it should.
And by the next dawn, roses blushing outside on the bricks, we watched from the wards windows as a bevy of bright-eyed girls danced beneath, led by George himself, who was tying ribbons and balloons into the branches and shouting, in his strange fatherly bark, how much they all loved their mother. In this peculiar, unfolding dream, it was clear everything truly was all right in their world. And yet, deep inside, we still found ourselves feeling a shade of sympathy for ol George.
