Forget Me Not. Isabel Wolff

      The nights in hospital were hard, the crying of twenty or so newborns making sleep impossible. Some of the babies sounded like kittens; others – including Milly – squawked like peacocks; there was one baby who made a trumpeting sound, like a tiny elephant, while the baby in the next bay emitted a constant shivery bleat, like a chilled lamb.

      During the day it was depressing watching the other mothers being visited by their husbands, having congratulatory kisses bestowed on them, then being taken home with the respect shown to triumphant Olympians. My dad collected me but it felt all wrong. Xan should be doing this, I thought, as we walked through the revolving door with Milly in her car seat.

      I e-mailed Xan three photos of her. Her features were already so identifiably his, in feminine miniature, that I thought he’d melt, but he didn’t reply. But then, as if to compensate me for his coldness, a flood of gifts and flowers arrived from family and friends. Each day a beribboned parcel would turn up, containing a teddy or a toy, or a tiny pink dress.

      But the best gift of all was from Dad. ‘I want you to have a maternity nurse,’ he’d said at the beginning of May. He’d been in London and had dropped in to see how I was.

      ‘What’s made you think of that?’ I asked as I glanced up from my drawing board.

      ‘Cassie suggested it – it seems that one of her knitting circle runs an agency that specialises in maternity nurses; I think it’s a good idea.’

      ‘It is. But at £700 a week I can’t afford it.’

      ‘I’ll pay.’

      I put down my pen. ‘No, Dad, honestly, that’s too much – and I’m sure I’ll manage …’

      ‘But you’ll need someone to look after you. Please let me do this for you, Anna. It’s not a luxury in your case, it’s a necessity, because you have no partner to help you and no mother.’

      ‘No, but …’

      ‘And if she’d been here she’d have stayed with you and helped you and shown you what to do, wouldn’t she?’

      ‘Yes,’ I agreed sadly, ‘she would.’

      ‘So I’d like to give you the next best thing. A maternity nurse – for six weeks.’

      ‘But that would cost nearly four and a half grand.’

      ‘But think of how often I’ve helped Cassie. I’ve always indulged her,’ he added, looking out of the window. ‘It must have seemed unfair.’ He returned his gaze to me. ‘But now I’d like to do something for you. Let this be my baby present, Anna. It would make me very happy.’

      ‘Well … OK, then,’ I said quietly. ‘Thanks.’

      And so the day after I came out of hospital, Elaine arrived.

      I’d already met her, two weeks before, when she’d come for her interview. She was Australian, late fifties, slim and neat, with her ash-blonde hair swept into a bun, a pair of little tortoiseshell specs strung round her neck. She radiated the kind of calm that makes you instinctively lower your voice. Within ten minutes of meeting her I knew she’d be fine.

      And she was. She was friendly without being familiar. She took charge without being abrupt, swiftly establishing a sleeping and feeding routine for Milly. She moved about the house as unobtrusively as a cat.

      I stayed in bed for the first three days, recovering from the surgery. But as I became more mobile Elaine showed me how to use the steriliser, how to breastfeed more effectively, how to burp Milly and bathe her tiny body – a proposition which terrified me – how to swaddle her to make her feel secure. She revealed to me the Byzantine mysteries of the baby sling and showed me how to collapse the pram. She’d cook for us both and clear up; she’d make me rest; she’d go to the local food store while Milly slept.

      ‘How’s it going with the maternity nurse?’ Dad asked me over the phone a week after Elaine arrived.

      ‘Wonderful.’ I sighed. ‘She’s like the Angel Gabriel and Florence Nightingale rolled into one.’