Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 2

health advice posters without reading any of them. Perhaps Claire wasn't here, he thought. If they were overcrowded they might have sent her somewhere else. It would be annoying if he had to drive back to the city. He should have checked his phone as soon as the plane landed. It was still in his bag in the car. He considered going to get it but before he could decide which corridor to take, a woman came out of the lift and approached him.
    He had expected a nurse but she was not in uniform. She was plump and grey-haired, carrying papers. She wore a skirt suit and an identity badge that he didn't bother to peer at. She said, "You are Monsieur...?"
    "Moreau. I'm here to see my sister, Claire Moreau."
    She led him into a small room to one side of the reception area. There were three chairs: she took one and motioned him to another, but he didn't sit down.
    She explained that she was a social worker attached to the hospital. She looked down at the papers in her hand. "Are you Jules Moreau? Do you have some identification?"
    He was surprised but remembered reading that security had been tightened on maternity wards in France after the abduction of a baby a few years ago. He reached into his jacket pocket for the driving license that had been there since he picked up the car.
    She glanced at the name and photo and passed it back. Then she looked up at him. Her face had taken on an expression of impersonal concern that he knew meant bad news. His heart began to thump.
    "I am sorry to tell you, Monsieur Moreau, there were problems with the birth." Her words were formal but her tone was gentle. "The baby was in difficulties in the womb and an emergency Caesarean section was necessary. These operations are more or less routine but there is a small risk with every surgical procedure. We don't know exactly what happened— there will be an investigation— it may be that she had an unsuspected heart defect. She didn't survive. I'm very sorry."
    The baby hadn't survived? That was sad, he thought. Claire would be upset and he could understand they wanted him to know before he saw her, but why couldn't he have been told on the way up there? Bureaucracy, no doubt. There would be some form he had to sign. He was annoyed, impatient to get to Claire.
    The stupid woman was still talking and he hadn't heard a word. He interrupted her. "I would like to see my sister, please."
    "Of course. In fact, I need to ask you to identify her. She gave your name as her nearest relative. But wouldn't you like to contact someone?" She glanced at his left hand: no wedding ring. "A friend? Someone from your family?"
    Mark. He wanted Mark. He was beginning to understand what the woman was trying to tell him, but only through a foggy curtain of disbelief. With some part of his mind he knew that it was not only the baby that was dead. But another part of him was still sure that it couldn't be true.
    "There's nobody," he said, his voice coming out too loud. "Nobody here."
    "And the baby's father…?"
    Jules shook his head. "He's out of the picture."
    "We'll have to try to find him, but we can discuss that later."
    "It won't be possible," Jules said. "It was something very brief, a man she met skiing last winter." He'd seen her just before that, at Christmas, and she had told him she had a yearning to get pregnant: he had assumed she meant later, when she met the right man. He felt a prickling in his sinuses and forced his emotion down. "She told me she didn't even ask his last name."
    The social worker nodded and made a note. Then finally she took him to the lift, but instead of going up they went down to the basement. He knew where they were going, knew that Claire was dead, and yet somehow he still believed that his visit would revive her. He would touch her, she would wake up and he would help her to his rented car and take her back with her grief to her apartment. It was lucky, he thought, that he hadn't arrived in time to transform her spare room into a nursery, hadn't arrived with his arms full of the pink stuffed toys that he'd been planning to buy next week. It would upset her to see baby things now.
    But Claire's body, when he saw it, was beyond being upset by anything. It was cold and pale, lifeless, lacking any trace of her flaky personality. It had her face and yet it was so unlike her that his escort had to ask him twice before he would confirm that it was his sister. He touched the cheek, just in case it might bring her back, but there was no