Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992

Leonard Parkin planned the birth of his son for the seventeenth of October. He was going down to London for a management conference on the sixteenth, and there was a social event of the usual dreary kind in the evening, which he decided to leave early so as to enjoy all the exciting terror of the beginning of labour. The main conference was in the morning, but the afternoon was free and he was not planning to take the train home to Peterborough until after the evening rush hour. John Julian would be born in the afternoon.

At the evening reception, held in an anonymous hotel on the fringes of Bloomsbury, Len was rather abstracted, but in the general atmosphere of wine fumes and grabs for the canapes nobody noticed. They didn’t notice either when he first slipped away to the Gentlemen’s, then left the hotel altogether. Len was liked, but he wasn’t much noticed.

Back in the Great Northern, his usual hotel, Len put the chain on his door and lay happily on his bed. Bliss! He wondered whether to crack the little bottle of champagne in the room fridge, but he decided that champagne wasn’t right, not for the labour. He would have a bottle of white wine later. What he wanted now was just to lie back on his bed and imagine it.

Marian, after all those months, feeling the first pains. The look she gave him, the certainty in her eyes and in his. “I think it’s starting” — those time-honoured words which would grant Marian kinship with the millions of other women who had used them. What would he do? He would go over and kiss her tenderly on the forehead, then he would run to the telephone and ring the well-rehearsed number. The waiting, the waiting! Another terrible pain, just as he saw the flashing light of the ambulance drawing up outside.

He went with her, of course, the two of them silent in the back, he letting her grip his hand tighter and tighter as the agony came, receded, then came again. Then the arrival at the hospital, the stretchered rush to the maternity ward, he always by her side.

He lay there for two hours, picturing the scene, filling in small details, living through Marian’s pain and her thrilled anticipation, being there with him beside her. Then he got up and poured himself some wine. It was good, but somehow as he drank the scene became less vivid. Natural, of course, but disappointing. He wouldn’t have a drink tomorrow. He needed to be at his most alert tomorrow.

After the morning’s business, all the representatives at the conference for people in the confectionary business were free to do what they pleased, and they all dispersed to boozy gatherings in pubs, on shopping sprees to Harrod’s and Oxford Street, or on unspecified business in Soho. Leonard went to Hyde Park and lay under a tree in the sun. There his mind winged him back effortlessly to the maternity ward, and to himself sitting there by Marian, helping her through her labour. In real life, he suspected, he would have refused to be there with his wife, or been there only reluctantly, being fainthearted about that sort of thing. But in his imagination he could make the labour terrible but short, and he could cut to the magical moment when the baby was born, to his touching it, blotchy and screaming, to his seeing it for the first time in Marian’s arms — no, not it, but him, John Julian Parkin, his son and heir.

The day was sunny and he lay there, rapturous, ecstatic, more intensely alive than he had ever been. For hours he lay savouring the sensations: the sound, the smell, the touch of his newborn son. Then he walked all the way to the station, got his case out of Left Luggage and caught the train home. On the hour’s journey he invented little embellishments, made more vivid the picture of his son’s face. It had been a perfect day.

It was late when he finally got home, and Marian was preparing the supper.

“Have a good conference?” she asked.

“Very good indeed,” he said, kissing her, feeling a sudden spurt of love for his practical, commonsensical, infertile wife. The strongest feeling in her down-to-earth heart was her passionate love for him, made poignant by her inability to have children. He could never share the birth of their son with her. Her incomprehension would have killed him stone dead.