“I wouldn’t advise it.”

“Does she know?”

“She’s very groggy. It was a long labour. Somebody will have to tell her in the morning. Would you do that?”

“I’ll do that,” said Dr. Gunilla, and Darcourt was grateful to her.

When Dr. Dahl-Soot visited the hospital the next morning she did not need to give the bad news. Al was with Mabel, who was hysterical.

“There was what the English call A Scene,” she told Darcourt. “You see Al, that odious pedant, had not even troubled to find out whether the child was a boy or a girl, and when Mabel demanded to see the child the head nurse explained that it was impossible. Why? Mabel wanted to know. Because the body was no longer available, said the nurse. Why not? said Mabel, very fierce. Because nobody had asked for the body to be reserved for burial by the parents, said the nurse. Mabel understood that. ‘You mean they’ve put my baby in the garbage?’ she said, and the nurse said that was not the way the hospital thought of what it had done, which was what was most often done with stillborns. But she wouldn’t give details, except that it was a boy and perfect except for an unusually big head. Not abnormal. Apparently it’s Mabel who is slightly abnormal. You know Mabel. A fool, and weak as water, but those people can make an awful hullabaloo when they are outraged, and she was ready to kill Al. And Al—really, Al ought to have been put in the garbage at birth—kept saying, ‘Calm down, Sweetness, you’ll see it all differently tomorrow.’ Not a tender word, not a hug, not a thing to suggest that he was involved in the affair at all. I kicked Al out, and talked to Mabel for a while, but she’s in a very bad way. What are you going to do? You seem to be the one who is expected to do something when real trouble comes up. Are you going to see Mabel?”

“I think I’d better see Al first.”

Al thought Mabel was being utterly unreasonable. She knew what a load of work he had, and how important it was to his career—which meant their joint career, if they stuck together. Hadn’t he gone to the hospital with her? And returned after dinner, as Darcourt well knew? Hadn’t the doctor said the baby might be held up for several hours because first babies were unaccountable? Was he supposed to sit there all night, and then do a day’s work that he had all planned, and that would need every ounce of energy and intellect he could muster? If there hadn’t been this accident—this stillbirth business—everything would have been absolutely okay. As it was, Mabel was raising hell.

The trouble, he assured Darcourt, was that Mabel had never really freed herself from her background. Very conventional, middle-brow people, with whom Al had never hit it off. They kept asking why he and Mabel didn’t get married, as if having somebody mumble a few words, etc. Al thought he had pretty well lifted Mabel above all that crap, but under stress—and Al admitted that the loss of the child amounted to stress—it all came flooding back, and Mabel was once again the insurance salesman’s child from Fresno. Wanted the baby given what she called “decent burial”. As if having somebody mumble a few words, etc., over a thing that had never lived could change anything. Al would be frank. He wondered if the arrangement with Mabel would weather this storm. He guessed he had to face it. People on two such different levels of education—though Mabel was majoring in sociology—would never really see eye to eye.

Al wanted to do the right thing, of course. Mabel wanted to go home. Wanted her mother. Can you figure that, in a woman of twenty-two? Wanting her mother? Of course the Mullers were what is called a very close family. But Al couldn’t swing it. His grant from Pomelo was enough for one, and damned tight for two, and the fare back to Fresno would screw him up. Could Darcourt persuade Mabel to take it easy for a few days, and probably see things differently?

Darcourt said he would look into the matter and do what seemed best.

That meant that he phoned Maria, in Toronto, and put the matter to her. “I’ll come at once,” said Maria.

It was Maria who fetched Mabel from the hospital, paid all the bills, set her up in a room near her own in a hotel, and gave Al a piece of her mind that astonished them both, so conventional was it in tone and content. It was Maria who sent Al to a druggist for a breast-pump, of which Mabel had dire need, and this was Al’s lowest moment. A breast-pump! He would willingly go into a drugstore and ask for condoms. That was dashing. But a breast-pump! The squalor of domesticity engulfed him. It was Maria who drove Mabel to the airport, when she was fit to travel, and bought her ticket to Fresno and mother. Coping with Mabel, who was sentimentally grateful and woman-to-woman, and bereft-mother-to-happy-mother, tried Maria very high, but she endured all, and never uttered a word of complaint or irony, even to Darcourt. Not even Mabel’s frequent, tearful hints that fate was certainly good to the rich, and tough on the poor, provoked her to any speaking of her mind. But to herself she said it was enough to turn her milk.

“You’ve behaved beautifully,” said Darcourt. “You deserve a reward.”

“Oh, but I’ve had a reward,” said Maria. “You remember I was hinting about Wally Crottel? The most wonderful luck—the book’s turned up!”

“But you said you had thrown it away.”

“So I did. But that was the original—you know, that crumpled, stained, interlined, grubby mess that Parlabane left. When I sent it to the publishers, one of them thought a ghost might be able to wrench a book out of it, so he had a Xerox made—quite indefensibly, but you know what publishers are—and sent it to his favourite ghost, who reported that it was pretty hopeless. But recently the ghost sent back the Xerox, which he had unearthed on his desk—obviously a ghost of the uttermost degree of literary messiness—and the publisher, belatedly, but honourably, sent it to me. And I’ve sent it to Wally.”

“But Wally’s in jail, awaiting trial.”

“I know. I sent it to Mervyn Gwilt, with a teasing, palavering letter, full of nifty bits of Latin. Told him to get it published if he could.”

“Maria! You may have committed yourself to some appalling legal claim!”

“Well—no. Not really. I showed the letter to Arthur, and he laughed a lot, but then he got one of his lawyers to rewrite it, and a fine juiceless job he made of it. Not a word of Latin. Lawyers are only half the fun they used to be when they knew Latin. But apparently it’s a watertight letter, admitting nothing, relinquishing nothing, but letting Wally have what he wanted, which was a peep at m’dad’s book.”

“And so that’s that.”

“As Wally seems likely to get seven years at least, that’s probably that.”

“Maria, you do have the Devil’s own luck!”

Al said no word of thanks to Maria about her part in his crisis. It did not occur to him, so engrossed was he in his Regiebuch, and if it had occurred to him, he would not have dared, for a woman who could talk to him as Maria had done was somebody best avoided. The musicologist in Al came uppermost; hadn’t there been an opera called All’s Well That Ends Well? He looked it up. Yes, there it was, by Edmond Audran, whose best opera was La Poupée, which meant The Baby, didn’t it? Remarkable how fate, and music, and life were all mixed up. It made you think.