A Clear Head

One

The first time had been after the news of the attack on Freddie. They’d gone to the hospital, and nothing Randall had said had got them in to see Freddie. Lix had cried on his shoulder, and he’d taken her to his home and put her to bed between his clean sheets. They’d clung to each other, and at some point in the night, it had turned to a gentle, comforting lovemaking. So different from how it had been in Spain, in his memory. He’d been drunk the whole time. Now he was sober, with all the edges of life unblunted. He knew it was touch-and-go for Freddie. Saw in Lix’s unspoken words that there had been something between them at some time.

It didn’t matter. Lives were long, and hearts were complex, and a man who’d run as far and as fast as Randall had had no business criticizing.

He’d held her, and loved her, and let himself go as much as he ever did. The love of his life in his arms, the sound of her pleasure in his ears, the feel of her body surrounding him, her scent on him: it was heaven in the wee hours.

Heaven was revisited often in the days that followed. No words spoken between them, but they were together again. Randall’s heart was on his sleeve with her. It had always been, even when he’d run. When he’d known he could live that life no more. When he’d known that it was stop drinking or die.

He said no words about Lix’s drinking, but one day she too stopped. “Coffee for me,” she said, to him, and he came back to their table with two coffees. She leaned her head against his shoulder. “Don’t feel like it,” she said. “Scarcely have the stomach for coffee.”

“Are you ill?”

“Never better,” she said. But he caught her asleep in her office the next day. Up too late making love with him, perhaps. He resolved to give her some respite from his attentions, not that she seemed to want such a thing.

“Randall,” she said to him one day. “I think we need to talk. Tonight?”

“Of course,” he said, puzzled. They were together every night. Why would they not be tonight? But to his surprise she took him to her flat, not out, and made him a bit of dinner with a candle on the table and sat afterward gazing at him.

“Randall, dearest.”

He said nothing, but took her hand. There was fear in his heart, though she seemed affectionate enough.

“I think we have a bit of a situation. An issue.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“I’m in a bit of a situation.”

He clung tighter. “You mean?”

“Yes.”

“Lix.”

“I’m not sure what you want.”

“What I want! Lix.”

“I need to hear it. In words. Preferably good Anglo-Saxon monosyllables if you can. Because I’m not sure I’m capable of understanding anything more complex just now.”

There were tears in his eyes. Randall swallowed, composed himself. He framed his speech as best he could, given the emotion in him. Simple words. Simple concepts. The candle on the table. Their dirty plates. The water glasses. The night in Spain when she’d told him, over a bottle already emptied, another to follow. Tonight his mind was clear. His heart was clear. His hands were shaking, but they were clear as well.

“Will you marry me?” he said.

Two

They were married quietly in a little church in Edinburgh, because that was where Randall’s aged mother lived now. His older sister came in from Glasgow to be there. Bel came in support of Lix, with a much-battered but recovering Freddie sitting in the pews behind, because he could not stand comfortably for very long. It was a quiet wedding because that was Randall’s preference, but it was a happy wedding nonetheless. The groom could not contain his glow of joy.

Lix told him afterward that it was the brides who were supposed to be radiant, not the grooms. He merely smiled, unzipped the back of her dress, and took her to bed tenderly, cautiously.

“Mrs Brown,” he said to her, afterward, rolling it around in his mouth.

“Most boring name ever, darling,” she said. “You ought to have taken mine.”

“Randall Storm.” He tilted his head, considering, then nodded. “Our child shall take it as a middle name.”

“Dougan Storm Brown. Sophia Storm Brown. A trifle lopsided.”

“Dougan?”

“Your mother is set on Dougan.”

“No. Peter.”

“All right, then. Peter Brown it is. If it’s a boy.”

Neither one of them commented on her choice of a girl’s name. There was no disagreement between them on that point. Lix turned on her side, Randall curled up warm behind her with a hand resting on her belly. He woke her in the morning with urgent kisses and her new name repeated with a rough voice. Randall had, she thought, been waiting a very long time for this. She was sorry, sometimes, that she’d made him wait. But he was a better man now than he had been, a better man now for having gone through the fire and emerged purified and sober on the other side.

The couple spent a quiet week in a cottage on the coast, and returned to London afterward in amity. Lix intended to work her way through in the evening news writing department until forced to stop. Randall quietly pulled strings to make it so.

Lix had, to her surprise and Randall’s continued disbelief, a serene pregnancy, an easy pregnancy, a boring pregnancy. She’d done it once before, little though she liked to dwell on that. She knew what she was in for. And when her water broke and labor was on her, she was perfectly calm as she informed Randall that he might want to fetch a cab.

Three

Randall had command of himself in a crisis. He told himself this but he knew it was true from his experience through two wars. Was pregnancy a crisis or normality? He asked himself that question as he helped Lix– his wife, his Lix, his life– into the cab. She was calm enough in the minutes between bouts of labor pains, but he could not be. Her face, her bitten lip, her hand tightening on his– Lix ought not feel pain ever, never mind that much. And he could do nothing but give the cabbie directions in the steadiest voice he could summon.

She gripped his hand tighter during the ride. Randall consulted his watch, counted minutes. Ten between the first in the cab and the second.

Great Ormond street, the hospital, up and in. Lix tucked onto a bed, wheeled away from him. He attempted to follow and was diverted by firm nurses into a waiting room near the obstetrics ward. He was alone in the ward, save for an abandoned tea cup, left half-full. Some poor brute of a man, waiting, called away with his tea half-finished. Randall remembered, almost wistfully, the dizzy feeling of brandy in his blood. It was the first time he’d wished for it since the fall of Paris.

He paced. Command, command, stay in command.

Lix, pregnant with his child. His wife, giving birth to his child. The inevitable consequence of union of man and woman. Not inevitable. Frequent. Nature demanded it. Capricious nature, granting him two children with Lix. He was not a religious man, but he considered now praying that he might be allowed to hold this one in his arms. That his wife be allowed to live.

There were sounds in the ward behind the door he was not allowed not pass. His wife’s voice, not speaking words but crying out in pain. It was madness that they kept him from her at this moment, madness that he could not be with her, holding her hand, or sponging her face. He could be of some use. The sight of blood did not affect him. Hadn’t since his first shelling, when he’d found himself able to load film into his camera and document what lay before him that he could not help.

Not a thought he wanted at a moment like this.

He turned himself to the arrangement of the waiting room. Chairs, tables. The order of the magazines laid out for reading by other husbands waiting as he did. Alphabetized, in order by time. Arrayed upon the tables with tops aligned. It was, he knew, useless and no longer a comfort, but it was habit. Something to fill his time. Something to occupy spaces between dim cries from the ward beyond.

He had command of himself in a time of crisis, he reminded himself. Not all of his resources, but enough of them. His resources, in this moment, need only keep him from breakdown, tears, or an assault upon that door at the sound of his wife’s voice. Silence, then feet rushing around, then the sound of squalling.

Randall covered his eyes with a hand and allowed tears to fall.

By the time they came out to fetch him, he’d regained his composure.

It was a boy, they told him, and invited him into the room beyond. He stumbled in, saw Lix sitting in the bed, hair a ruin, face still sweaty, but serene now, looking down at the bundle in her arms. Cap, red wrinkled face under, a wise expression on its– his– face. Murky eyes, no color he could distinguish.

Randall found his self-command now, with Lix smiling wearily at him.

“Hello, Randall,” Lix said to him. His wife, holding his son. “Meet Peter Storm Brown.”

“Delighted to meet you, Peter Storm Brown. I think we shall get on famously.”

He touched a finger to the tiny tiny hand curled against his son’s chin. His son.