Wish Upon a Star. Trisha Ashley

       Chapter 2: The Night Watch

      During the long night watches after Stella’s first operation, as the lights flashed on the machinery and the hospital hummed faintly along to the tired buzzing in my head, there were way too many hours in which to think.

      Her arrival had instantly turned my life upside down, so that everything I’d once thought important had run right to the bottom of my hourglass of priorities. My hard-fought-for career as a cookery writer, for instance, which paid the mortgage on the shoebox-sized basement flat within walking distance of Primrose Hill, where I lived with my little white dog, Toto.

      Toto was a Battersea Dogs and Cats Home stray and looked like a cross between a whippet and a Skye terrier, if you can imagine that: all bristly white coat, with a terrier head but slender body and long legs. Ma and Celia were both staying on at my flat and looking after him, as well as taking it in turns to come into the hospital, though Ma spent most of her visits drawing a series of starfish-like little hands and winged creatures that appeared to be some kind of nun/angel/albatross hybrid. Her paintings are already very Chagall-with-knobs-on, so I could barely imagine the turn they would take when she got back home again.

      Toto was an excellent judge of character and although he adored Celia and Ma, he’d never taken to my ex-fiancé, Adam, a tall and charismatic marine biologist who’d proposed to me after a whirlwind romance. In retrospect, I only wished I’d trusted my dog’s instincts more than my own.

      Adam had swept me off my feet and we’d planned to get married in the lovely ancient church of All Angels in the village of Sticklepond, where Ma now lived … the minute he got back from the eighteen-month contract in Antarctica that he’d already signed up for, that was.

      I’d suggested he cancel it, but he’d explained that he’d always dreamed of going there and needed to get it out of his system before he settled down.

      ‘It’ll be cutting it fine for starting a family by then, though,’ I’d said. ‘I don’t want to leave it too late, or it might not happen at all.’

      ‘Mmm,’ he’d agreed, with much less enthusiasm than he’d shown while talking about the Antarctic; but by then I’d discovered his acute phobia about hospitals and illness of any kind, and put it down as some general squeamishness to do with that.

      Still, I’d been convinced he’d be bored out of his skull stuck in the Antarctic for eighteen months with a lot of other boffins, examining the local frozen seafood. But no, it turned out that there was a whole community there, with everyone from cooks to dentists laid on, which I supposed made sense when most of the year you couldn’t fly in or out.

      They made their own entertainments too, and going by the pictures on Facebook of Adam messing about on Ski-Doos and in the snow with his new friends, he’d found a few ways to occupy his spare time.

      Of course, we’d constantly emailed and chatted via Facebook, and sometimes he could call me, though not the other way round. But as time passed he seemed to become less and less interested in anything outside the base … I suppose that’s a bit like hospital, where your real world shrinks to your immediate surroundings and everything else seems remote and unimportant.

      I expected that would change once he came home, even if I did feel nervous about our reunion. And there was a sticky moment at the airport, when he looked like an unshaven stranger as he came through into the arrivals hall. But when he spotted me and smiled there was that instant feeling of connection, just like the first time we’d met, and I ran straight into his arms. He’d kissed me, then said, looking genuinely startled, that he’d forgotten how pretty I was!

      We went back to my flat and that evening everything was all right between us – in fact, it was more than all right. He was tired and abstracted, not helped by a call from a colleague, though what could be that urgent about Antarctic pond life I couldn’t imagine at the time. His end of the conversation was a bit terse.

      I should have smelled a rat right then, because next morning it was like Jekyll and Hyde revisited: right after breakfast he suddenly announced he’d already signed up for another eighteen months in Antarctica and, moreover, he’d met someone else up there and she was going back in April, too.

      Of course I was devastated and furious. I told him to get out of my flat and my life and he’d packed up his stuff and left within the hour, with my parting shot that I hoped they both fell down an Antarctic crevasse on their next tour of duty ringing in his ears.

      Toto, gleefully grasping that the hated interloper was out of favour, managed to sink his teeth into Adam’s ankle at the last minute, which would give him something to remember us by till all the little puncture wounds healed up again.

      It was only much later that I realised that Adam had left me a much longer-lasting and life-changing memento.

      Once Stella was out of immediate danger, Celia needed to get back to her husband, four rescue greyhounds and six cats in Southport, who were all pining for her.

      I would also pine for her, though she’d promised to return when Stella was finally allowed home.

      Ma was staying on for a few more days, though I was sure she was dying to head straight back up north, too. In fact, I was surprised she’d stayed as long as she had.

      When I was growing up in Hampstead I’d thought she’d seemed happy enough, though she was always fairly reclusive and preoccupied with her work, of course, but she sold up and moved back with alacrity to the Lancashire village where she was born after Dad died.

      ‘Ma’ is not some cute contraction of ‘Mum’, but a relic of her early attempts to get me to call her by her Christian name, Martha. She was never much like any of my school friends’ mothers, delegating most of her maternal responsibilities to a series of foreign au pairs, but I’d never doubted that in her way she loved me. And Anna, the final and most beloved of the au pairs, a tall, blonde, Swedish domestic goddess, had instilled my love of cooking and baking, so it worked out brilliantly for me.

      I emailed Anna the news about Stella and received a warm, reassuring reply straight away: she’d always had the power to make me feel comforted, an effect that has also rubbed off onto the cakes she taught me to make.

      I decided that for Stella’s first birthday I would make her a prinsesstårta, that most splendid of Swedish celebration cakes.

      ‘You are going to tell Adam about Stella at some point soon, aren’t you?’ Celia asked, just before she finally set off home.

      ‘No! Why should I, after he accused me of getting pregnant on purpose when I told him she was on the way and then suggested I get an abortion?’

      ‘I know he didn’t want the baby, but now she’s arrived he might feel differently,’ she suggested. Having an incredibly generous heart she was always looking for the best in everyone, even my absent ex-fiancé, Adam Scott – or ‘Scott of the Antarctic’, as Ma generally referred to him.

      ‘I don’t think so. Anyway, he’s changed his email address and I couldn’t phone him in Antarctica even if I wanted to, which I don’t.’

      ‘Facebook?’

      ‘I’ve blocked him.’

      ‘I still think he ought to know,’ she said stubbornly. ‘He has a responsibility to support you, too.’

      ‘I don’t want his support and I’m sure he still wouldn’t be interested – even less so in a baby with health problems, because he’s got that phobia about illness and hospitals, remember?’

      ‘Oh, yes, I’d forgotten about that. So perhaps you’re