PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 2012
Copyright © Patricia Ferguson, 2012
Cover photography © Jeff Cottenden
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-24-196276-3
The Meeting
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
The Statue
Acknowledgements
PENGUIN BOOKS
Patricia Ferguson trained in nursing and midwifery, and her first book, Family Myths and Legends, won the Betty Trask, David Higham and Somerset Maugham awards. Her most recent books, It So Happens and Peripheral Vision, were both longlisted for the Orange Prize. She lives in Bristol.
For Richard, Tom and Roly
Joe Gilder came from Yorkshire, where he had grown up just about half-starved until he was nearly fourteen, when his mother had remarried. Presently the new husband had taken Joe to one side – lifted him bodily, in fact, to one side of a long dark glass-strewn alleyway – and given him to understand that he, Joe, would without any doubt be best off making himself scarce. The husband was scrawny, but Joe was scrawnier, and so he had taken the hint.
A great deal of water had flowed under bridges since then. A great deal of blood had flowed too, some of it Joe’s, at the time when he had been Corporal Gilder, and shot at by German lads, though since those days no one had ever heard him decry any nation but the French. Mr Gilder’s hatred of France and French people was one of the strongest things about him. Frenchmen, when he was Corporal Gilder, had approached him in broad daylight and tried to sell him their sisters; when he was dazed with thirst one summer near the Front after days of marching in the blistering heat, French people, for whom he had been fighting all these years, and for whom his friends had died, had refused him a drink of water, from a village well, until he had paid for it. Grousing about the French seemed to keep Mr Gilder limber, and free his mind for other lighter things.
He told only one further story about the War.
‘I were sent to get the rum ration. A nip for every man, in a tin bottle. Halfway back and a shell bursts right by me, blows me to kingdom come. I’m there in the bottom of this hole, and I know I’m hit. I’m dying. That’s what I thought. And God help me I reckon: if I’m going to go, I’m going to go pissed: rum for twenty and I’m knocking it back like water, drunk as a lord I were all night till they come for me – saved me life, that rum!’
A jovial story, told to please. Every time he told it, Mr Gilder felt a faint lessening of that terrible infinity of time when he had lain in agonized confusion in the mud, waiting to stop seeing. Every second of the eleven hours and nearly forty minutes had gone by, one by one, while the chill earth gritted wet beneath his fingers, and his eyes had kept on opening, all by themselves.
Though the lessening never seemed to last very long. Every now and then, going downstairs to make his wife a cup of tea in the morning, or unlocking the back door to look out over his sunny garden, Joe would suddenly know that despite what felt like the pleasant reality of the scenes before him, that terrible night, dead and cold as ice, was still somehow going on somewhere, flowing slowly, like a glacier of darkness. Certainly it showed its continuing existence by way of occasional nightmares. And all he could do by way of reply was jeer at it, entice others coarsely to laugh at it with him; a puny enough response, he knew, but better than none at all.
On his lapel Mr Gilder even now was careful to wear the little badge that proclaimed him a wounded soldier. The bursting shell had untidily scooped away most of his left buttock.
‘Leg wound,’ said the doctor in the field hospital, and Joe had thought him a prissy old fool – a medic who couldn’t say arse, for Pete’s sake! and had laughed about him with those of the other men still capable of laughter. It had not occurred to him for several weeks, until the wound was well on the way to healing, that a buttock is merely where a leg leaves off. That without a buttockfull of strong elastic muscle, a leg is a poor weak prop-like article, hardly capable of forward movement, barely able to take any weight at all.
‘I’m afraid it’s going to be more like having a false leg than a real one,’ said a different doctor, in the convalescent hospital this time. This was a big grand house Joe was at first barely aware of, with lengths of stone corridor and shining acres of parquet flooring. After a week or so he was moved to a bed beside one of several great tall windows, so that through it he could see a terrace with stone pineapples on either side of it, and one or two blokes in wheelchairs being trundled about between flower beds; but when he raised himself up on his elbows, which still in those days involved much tremulous effort, and peered right out beyond the flowers and the distant lawn, further out, further still, he saw a long unbroken haze of darker blue, where far away the sea was meeting the sky.
At first he had been afraid to look again. He knew that beyond that apparently wide stretch of water lay the lads still fighting in the endless war. If he strained his ears he would hear them; gentlefolk hereabouts, it was said, were much put out at luncheon by the distant thud of artillery.
‘Quiet today,’ he had remarked to a passing nurse, that first day beside the window. ‘Can’t hear nowt.’
‘What? What d’you mean?’
‘Can’t hear the guns.’ He gestured towards the window, and the sea, and France.
‘Where d’you think you are? Only it’s next stop America out there: this is Cornwall.’
‘Is it?’ In truth this conveyed very little to Joe’s mind, as geography was one of the many things his education had entirely neglected. ‘Is that in England?’
The nurse laughed. ‘Some people think so,’ she said.
Presently the house grew walls, and other beds, and other men, assumed shape and then routine. Every other day nurses brought folding screens and a laden clinking trolley, and carefully tortured him, packing and repacking the raw hollow of flesh with coiled lengths of wet crêpe bandage; gnarled locals of both sexes, speaking an almost incomprehensible dialect, helped him briefly stand while his bed was made, shaved him, cut his hair, wheeled him lying on his stomach on his trolley up and down the long corridors, and eventually took him out into the stunning sunshine of the terrace.
The sea glittered and changed its colours, sometimes sporting a small white sail or a plunging fishing-boat. Several weeks went by. The torture lessened. Someone measured him up for crutches, someone else showed him how. He stood; he hopped slowly from one side of his bed to the other; he crossed the room. Every day as he stood for longer, hopped further, he grew more despondent. Pain had filled so much time, given his days such shape; trolley-dreading had almost been a full-time job. Without it he began to understand what lay ahead.
Seagulls wheeled over the terrace, eyeing the tables set out there in fine weather, where one day, at breakfast, Joe overheard one of the other men idly announce that he knew for a fact that the house was keeping a negro slave in the basement, to do the washing-up.
No one took much notice, as the man in question was a known liar and prone anyway to sudden spells of vagueness connected to his head wound. Presently however someone else chimed in from across the table, a new chap called Dexter, pale as death from pneumonia.
‘Surely not a slave, old chap, that’s all been done away with, hasn’t it?’
There was a pause. It was a listless group sipping its tea. Joe was standing up, as usual, leaning on the wall, his good leg protesting already that it was tired working all on its own. Sometimes Joe felt quite angry with this leg. There was nothing at all the matter with it and yet it was always making such a fuss, quivering and aching and constantly threatening collapse: letting the whole show down.
Everyone else sat rather slumped in their chairs, exhausted by the toil of dressing, washing, shaving and making it as far as the terrace breakfast table, though Dexter himself was not yet able to walk that far, and sat now in a battered heavyweight wheelchair, his skinny legs wrapped in a blanket.
‘Though there is a darkie here,’ Dexter added at last. ‘In the kitchen.’
‘A coon,’ said the liar, whose name was Bowen.
Sit down, sit down, begged Joe’s good leg. It seemed completely unable to remember that sitting down was a thing of the past. Lie or stand, that was the drill these days. But Joe had had enough of lying down. Besides there had been an attractive hint of playfulness in Dexter’s tone.
‘There’s not,’ he said.
Dexter looked up at him. ‘Ten bob says there is.’
‘Get out,’ said Joe easily. ‘Tanner.’
‘Sixpence it is,’ said Dexter.
Others round the table had quickly entered the bet, but settling it would involve risk. Men were not supposed to visit the kitchens or even hang about outside them without good reason, and it was generally agreed that settling a bet would not count as one of these. In any case the kitchen, Dexter pointed out, was effectively enemy territory, staffed as it mainly was by hoary locals of uncertain temper: ‘They should be women,’ said Dexter. ‘And yet their beards forbid me to interpret that they are so.’
But Joe had not done anything of his own volition for what felt like years; not since the day he’d joined up.
‘I’ll go,’ he said, and swung his way over to Dexter’s wheelchair. ‘Cop hold.’ He laid his crutches on Dexter’s blanketed knees. ‘Haven’t got yer brakes on, have yer? Where am I going, round the corner, is it?’
He pushed, experimentally. The handles seemed to take his weight. He could shove the thing forward, and then catch up with it, one near-hop at a time, the bad leg taking just enough weight. Slowly they ground across the terrace, past another table, past the open glass doors of the ward, where long pale muslin curtains shifted a little in the breeze.
‘I say,’ said Dexter presently, in the tone of one mildly interested, ‘are we taking the stairs?’
Joe stopped. He had not realized that the terrace was raised. The curving flight of stone steps at either end beside the stone pineapples led down to the wide flagged path about the house, and so he was stranded; no one had explained stairs to him yet. He had forgotten stairs existed. But then they had never been a barrier before.
Dexter spoke up: ‘I think we need brawn here, Gilder. Where’s that chump Bowen gone?’
Bowen was still at the table, gazing out to sea, but was at length induced to bump Dexter and his wheelchair slowly down the steps, while at the top Joe hesitated, considering. Could he lean on the broad stone banister? There were no real hand-holds. Don’t make me, said his good leg, trembling beneath him. There would be swinging involved, there would be a swing out into stony nothingness. The banister hard to his palm.
‘Your turn, peg leg,’ said Bowen, leaping up the steps again, and he picked Joe up, as easily as once the reluctant stepfather had, prior to the private word in the long dark glass-strewn alley; Joe had time for a moment’s swift nostalgia, for threats so simple and so personal, before he was propped fairly gently against Dexter’s wheelchair on the flagstones at the bottom of the steps.
‘Good man,’ said Dexter. ‘Afraid we’ve rather cut off our retreat.’
‘No-Man’s-Land,’ said Bowen.
Joe said nothing, but remembered the taste of rum.
‘We must advance with all due caution,’ said Dexter. ‘Oh, are you leaving us, Bowen? Ah. Farewell, then. Bowen appears to have a prior engagement.’
‘Very busy man,’ said Joe, pushing the chair forward. Slowly they neared the corner, turned it.
‘Through there, I think,’ said Dexter, as they approached a small arched doorway. ‘Kitchen garden. Watch out for Mr McGregor.’
‘You what?’
Through the arched door the path abruptly turned to cinder, which was much harder work. Joe was sweating. His arms began to ache and tremble almost as much as his good leg. In slow silence they passed a plot of spinach and an onion bed. ‘Alright?’ said Dexter.
‘Bum hurts,’ said Joe.
‘Dulce et decorum est,’ said Dexter. ‘You have given your arse for your country, Gilder; an honour granted to few.’
‘Listen!’ Now they were nearing an open door in the undistinguished brickwork at the back of the house. Windows beside it also stood open. From it came unnerving kitchen sounds: the rattle of china and cutlery, saucepans clanging, taps running, and shrill voices raised over the racket. What was left of the fun of the whole expedition seemed to drain away right there and then.
‘Dear Lord,’ said Dexter. ‘Sounds a bit lively. Don’t you think?’
Joe stopped. He thought about lying down. ‘Call it quits?’ he said.
As if in reply Dexter abruptly had a coughing fit. His face went scarlet, his eyes streamed. He threw himself about in the chair, as if he were fighting with himself. The extra tension of seeing this made Joe’s head swim, the tearing noise of it seemed to pierce right through him like spears. His good leg began to shake violently beneath him.
‘Help!’ he cried, or thought he did, and then became aware of someone embracing him, holding him upright, of buxom shapes and sweeping skirts, of someone stooping in front of Dexter and the terrifying cough falling suddenly silent. Someone took his arm, firmly, and helped him forward, through an open doorway into a hot bright place, fearfully crowded, full of strangers, cross old women in a row, all glaring.
‘Sorry,’ he squeaked, and then fell silent, for he had suddenly understood how close he was to bursting out crying. He felt almost faint with embarrassment and shame, caught trespassing; caught out anyway.
‘We – we went the wrong way,’ he muttered.
‘Got confused,’ said Dexter croakily.
The woman nearest him, the cook presumably, from her general menacing air of command, big square face and brawny forearms, did not smile back. She leant back against the table behind her, and glared down at him, and then up at Joe, who looked quickly away. She turned to the woman beside her, and spoke, in the local dialect.
‘What are we to do with these here, Mrs Dimond?’
This was another old witch, even fiercer in appearance, since in fine music-hall style she was holding a large wooden rolling pin upright like a floury truncheon in one knotty red hand. There was a pause while, slowly shaking her head, she appeared to consider. Then she said:
‘You reckon … they like cake?’
‘Well now, Mrs Dimond,’ said the cook slowly, deadpan, ‘I believe they might. What d’you say, young man?’
‘Oh … gosh,’ said Dexter, instantly brightening, and there was suddenly something like a party atmosphere, and fussing, and laughter. For mainly the women in the kitchen, as Joe at that time could not begin to imagine, had looked at Dexter and himself and seen not marauding soldiery or trespassing young men, but something more like children; a famished child in a wheelchair, a crippled child on crutches.
‘Here. Eat up, go on.’
‘Where you from, my lovely?’
‘How old are you?’
‘Coffee or chocolate?’
‘Have another bit, go on.’
And then Joe saw her. He saw her hand first, as she held out towards him a plate of little round honey tarts still warm from the oven. He remembered the bet, and unconsciously shook his head, disowning it; still, he couldn’t help but stare, at her delicate wrist, her small fingers. He saw a blue dress open at the throat. He saw her neck, dark, very slender, and at last he dared her face, oh, just a girl, a girl’s smile, eyes glistening sweet as blackberries. He saw that everything about her was normal and real; the only difference was that it was all brown. A commonplace prejudice dropped away from him before he had so much as thought to voice it.
‘Thanks, Miss –’
A giggle. Oh, how pretty she was!
‘Now then, Gracie,’ said the old witch-one, Mrs Dimond.
‘Take a bite, do,’ said Gracie, in that same local-yokel accent, that he’d thought made you sound so countrified and daft; but in her mouth it was cosy, coaxing, as lovely as her name: suited her. When she slipped back to work over by the window, behind a big white enamel-topped table, he couldn’t stop looking at her. He watched as she took the covering tea cloth from a large brown china mixing bowl and drew something out of it, creamy-white, elastic, clinging: bread dough?
Joe limped closer, until he could lean against the other side of the table, where he watched her scatter it with flour and knead it, busily pulling and tucking it into itself. Occasional flecks of raisin surfaced now and then, to be quickly folded back into the depths. He felt shy. But he had to speak.
‘Miss? What you making?’ He nodded at the dough.
‘ ’Tis for buns,’ she said, and again the accent struck him as somehow intimate, though at the same time wonderfully exotic. Presently though he noticed that he couldn’t quite make sense of her hands. Curious; something kept looking strange, as if her slender floury fingers somehow didn’t bend as they should. He concentrated; and finally understood that her hands looked strange because one of them was: her left normal, but while her right hand gracefully shared the turn and tuck, turn and tuck, there – and there, again – something was terribly wrong with it. The ring and little fingers were missing, the merest stumps; the middle finger too short.
As soon as he realized this the words jumped out of him: ‘What’s up with your hand?’
She stopped still, though not before the right hand had slipped to hide itself behind the left.
‘Accident,’ she said, without looking up, then quickly unfolded the mismatched fingers and set to work again.
Joe felt stunned. Over the blood thundering in his ears he kept hearing himself asking her, What’s up with your hand? as if there was some way he could go back and intercept himself. He had forgotten how normal people behaved, he thought. It was being here; it was one of the things you talked about, in this place: What brings you here, then?
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’
She stopped work again, and this time gave him a straight look. He held his breath, so sudden and so strong was the personality in that glance.
‘No matter,’ she said. ‘’Twas long ago.’ She took up the canister, and swiftly floured the dough again. ‘What about you?’
He gave her the cheery version he had given his mother, the shell that had caught him in daylight, knocked him out, the stretcher, the field hospital, the good ship home, and here. But when he had finished she gave him another look, and it was as if she knew how much he was lying. It occurred to him that perhaps she had told such smoothed-out versions of the truth herself; that she had, in fact, just done so.
He told her his name, and asked if he could help her somehow, could he do a bit of kneading for her, perhaps? Would she show him how? Partly a joke, and to try and take away the taste of what he had asked her, mainly because it looked like a good way of standing closer to her.
‘You can help with the shaping, if you like,’ she said. Was her tone a little warmer? His heart thought so, and thumped excitedly in his chest. ‘You got to wash your hands first, mind.’ She gestured at the stone sink behind her.
‘Anything you say,’ said Joe, to this warmer tone, and saw breathlessly that in reply she drew her skirts out of his way with a little half-mocking flourish.
At the sink he took the edge in his wet hands for a moment, and leant forward to lift his weight free. But he had forgotten his leg, for a little while, he realized. Had he ever once forgotten it before? He thought not.
‘’Ere. Dry yer ’ands.’ Proffering a clean blue and white tea towel, ironed smooth. He could have laid it to his cheek.
She was very little, close up.
‘Is they proper dry?’
‘They proper is,’ he answered, as near to her accent as he could get, and that set her off giggling, you’d think no one had ever tried to make her laugh before, he thought gloriously, it was a while before she could speak at all.
‘Put yer ’ands out – no, over the table! Palms up. That’s right. Stay still.’ She snatched up her canister, and gave it a quick merry shake over his hands. The fall of it was so light he could barely feel it. It was like feathery down, it was like a childhood dream of warm snow. When he rubbed his fingertips together he felt no gritting at all, not even dustiness, it was like rubbing silken nothing.
‘There. Now you can touch it,’ she said. He saw the tip of her tongue as she laughed now, flashing him a little sideways glance. Saucy! His knees trembled, but with glad excitement.
Joe put his hands exactly where hers had been on the dough, and pushed at it with his right-hand knuckles.
‘It’s warm!’ It was unlike anything he had ever handled before, at once weighty and buoyant, an impossible airy heaviness. It seemed responsive. He turned it with his left, as Grace had, and it seemed to fall naturally into his hands. Close to, he could faintly smell cinnamon in it.
‘Let me cut it. Here. Now, you take ’im, and you roll ’im into a ball, see? Like this.’
She had floured the enamel table in front of her. She spun the piece of dough under her palm, and turned it at once from fragment into nicely rounded little bun-shape. She used the injured hand, and he saw the swirling scar halfway up her forearm, where once a flame had travelled.
‘Should make a couple of dozen,’ she said.
‘There’s never enough,’ he told her. His bun looked nothing like hers, try as he might. ‘It’s all skew-whiff, look!’
‘I’ll make you one special,’ said Grace, turning to look up at him.
Joe had held various jobs before the army had let him in, underage though he indubitably still had been; mainly running to fetch things, or cleaning, none of it skilled or even practised, and nearly all of it the sort of thing you tried not to think about afterwards, except that the smell of it stayed in your clothes. He had rarely thought of the future then, and these days he generally tried not to think about it at all. But on the way back to safety (let out of the back door into the kitchen garden, and through that into the perfect legality of the old croquet lawn) it occurred to him that people would always want bread. You took the cleanly silken fineness of flour, he thought, and added to it, and turned it into something wholesome that people would always want more of. And you could do it standing up. No: you had to.
‘You owe me a tanner,’ said Bowen at lunch.
‘Bet’s off,’ said Joe.
‘The committee feels,’ said Dexter, ‘that the case is insufficiently proved.’
‘What?’
‘Not a negro.’
‘What? Course she is,’ said Bowen. ‘I seen her. Black as Newgate’s knocker.’
‘Ah, but there you are wrong, old love,’ said Dexter. ‘Newgate’s knocker considerably blacker, I’d say.’
Her glance that went right into you, thought Joe, her wonderful laugh. How could a girl as beautiful as that even look at a cripple like himself? Though at the same time, and at a level too deep for thought, he wondered whether her being a darkie didn’t in some way even things out a little.
‘Still counts,’ said Bowen.
‘Sorry, mate,’ said Joe, ‘but you can kiss my arse. What’s left of it.’
‘I’ll make you one special,’ said Grace, turning to look up at him; and she had. To one side of the heaped tray of ordinary thinly marged buns served at tea-time that afternoon was a paper bag with his name pencilled on it, holding not only an extra-large supremely sticky extra-fruited buttered beauty, a bun of buns, but a little note.
6 May, ’18
Dear Corporal Gilding, it was nice to meet you, here is the bun you helped make.
Yours sincerely, Grace Dimond, 7a Market Buildings, Silkhampton
Joe folded the note and put it into the special pocket of his wallet. He kept the paper bag, too. His recovery had begun.
As the century turned Mrs Dimond reached her fiftieth year. Her husband was dead, her son long since settled in Canada, with a wife and children she would never see. On the other hand Mrs Dimond herself was in excellent health, her son wrote to her now and then and sometimes sent her money, her kitchen garden and henhouse repaid her efforts, and the cakes and pies she made for sale at the market on Wednesdays and Saturdays brought in a small but useful sum.
But Mrs Dimond had a better and more satisfying source of income. She might, for instance, be sitting quietly of an evening, knitting by the fire and thinking about bed, when there would be footsteps running along the passage outside and a sharp rap at her back door: a summons. She would generally have been expecting the call, but not always.
Expected or otherwise Mrs Dimond would then in a calm pleasurable excitement rise, take up her special bag, and go out in her coat and hat and boots to wherever she was required, sometimes far afield in bitter winds and rain, arriving soaked and chilled, and not always to any degree of household comfort.
Tonight, though, on a chill blowy midnight in March, the place is clean and warm and dry, the top-floor back of one of the rundown but still respectable town houses behind the square. The oil lamp from the kitchen downstairs sits on top of the chest of drawers, an almost unprecedented coal fire burns in the tiny corner grate. Mrs Dimond has brought the special bag, and is carefully unpacking it.
Also in the room, officially, is Mrs Bertram Quick, otherwise Miss Rosetta May St George, who barely six months earlier had high-kicked in taffeta with seven other girls in a London chorus line. At present though, lying back on the bed, she is unable to remember any of these handsome names, and when Mrs Dimond asks her, kindly enough, what she is called, can only come up with ‘Rosie’. Then she lapses back into hectic groans.
Mrs Dimond takes no notice of these. She is unbuttoning the front of her own dress. She takes a folded piece of flannel out of the special bag, slips it inside her bodice, and buttons up again. The door opens, and Mrs Withers, the landlady, a woman her own age, bustles in carrying a cup of tea.
‘Now then, Mrs Dimond,’ she breathes, handing it over, ‘I hope I ain’t got you out too early.’
Mrs Dimond takes the tea in a sudden silence: the groaning has stopped. Blearily Rosie looks around, dull-eyed. ‘Oh my Gawd,’ she says, as if in greeting, her voice husky from all the groaning, and closes her eyes again. Her cheeks and lips are flushed scarlet, her hair is damp and plastered to her head.
‘She keeping anything down?’ asks Mrs Dimond.
‘Not so much as a drop of water,’ says Mrs Withers, who is fairly bristling with excitement.
‘Got to get her up,’ says Mrs Dimond. ‘If you want to save the bed.’
Mrs Withers’ eyes widen. She half-laughs: ‘Bless me, I’d forgotten!’ She turns to her guest. ‘I help you up, Mrs Quick? Come on now, my dear. Take my arm.’
Mrs Quick appears for the moment incapable of voluntary motion; perhaps too the name confuses her. But Mrs Withers is built for heavy lifting, and presently has her hauled bodily off the bed; she holds her more or less upright while Mrs Dimond whips off the bedclothes, unfolds several newspapers from the pile kept ready for her beneath the bed, and lays them in a crackling layer over the lower half of the mattress, before covering all of it with the large heavyweight rubber mackintosh from the bottom of her own special bag. More newspapers on top, quickly; and she barely has the bottom sheet back on to cover everything before Rosie begins heaving and groaning again, louder and louder, sagging in the landlady’s arms. Mrs Dimond carries on unhurriedly tucking in sheets, then folds up the blanket and counterpane and piles them on to the only other free surface, the floor beneath the window.
‘All set,’ she says, and picks up her teacup. This time the groans sharpen into screaming; Mrs Dimond sips her tea.
‘Best back on the bed, I think,’ she says, when she can be heard again. ‘You got a wet cloth for her head?’
With the next pain the screams are louder and wilder still and after it Mrs Dimond gives her patient the flat stick padded with clean strips of rag wound round it and sewn into place, to bite on. ‘You’re scaring folk,’ she says, though on the whole Mrs Dimond sees no reason why folk – husbands especially – should not be given a proper scare now and then. Pity the chap’s not downstairs taking notice as he should.
For Mrs Withers has already let on that Mr Bertie Quick, celebrated London tenor though he may be, has yet to make any sort of appearance here in Silkhampton, where this poor little piece, wedding ring or no, has been sat on her lonesome (rent fully paid right enough) these past three months. Nor, Mrs Withers had whispered, had there been so many letters with a London postmark; only two, in fact, and them in two different hands. Weren’t it a fearful shame!
But to this Mrs Dimond had said only: ‘Is there hot water ready? I needs to wash my hands.’ She had spoken gently, so Mrs Withers had not felt chastened, or not exactly. And Mrs Dimond had let her watch as she had taken a tiny bottle from the special bag and carefully shaken something thrillingly purple out of it into the bowl, which had swirled the water with pink.
‘Strengthens it,’ said Mrs Dimond, as she washed her hands. She did not, as it happened, believe in the necessity of potassium permanganate. Carbolic had been well enough, and plain hot water good enough for her own mother. But she liked Dr Summers.
In the upper room now, she takes up the wet cloth, turns it cool-side down, and lays it again on Rosie’s white forehead.
‘Take a little sip of something now,’ she says, and she picks up the cup of sugared water, and holds it so that her patient may drink. She notes the soft hands that touch her own as her patient sips and sighs.
‘Am I dying? I’m dying, aren’t I …’ Her voice trails away into a squeak of tearfulness.
‘Course not,’ says Mrs Dimond sharply, for she regards this sort of thing as impious, as well as slack-fibred. Where was the woman’s pride? ‘Everything’s just as it should be,’ she adds, but her touch is gentle still as she straightens the pillow, smoothes the ruffled sheet. ‘We must all be patient, see?’
After another hour or more of patience, something changes, and Rosie flings the padded stick aside with a sudden angry energy. Her breathing is deeper, more free. Uttering a series of bracing yells she half-rises on the bed, and casts herself about on it with a new vehemence.
When this pain goes she collapses, falls back heavily, does not stir as Mrs Dimond draws aside the hem of the nightdress, and has a quick look.
Not yet; but soon.
‘Get yourself on your side, my dear,’ says Mrs Dimond, ‘lie on your left side, and let the Lord deliver you.’
‘Oh, what’s happening?’ asks Mrs Withers eagerly, rather bedraggled herself by this time; she has been popping downstairs, as she put it, for some time now, keeping the stove going, dozing off beside it and then popping up again, as now, with more coal or a fresh pot of tea.
‘Not far off,’ says Mrs Dimond.
It does not occur to her to carry out any sort of examination. She’s heard of them. But what goes on inside a labouring woman is God’s business, not hers. Besides it’s clear to her anyway that something has altered within: the inner gates have yielded. Now the pains will begin to shift the heavy curl of child downward towards the further outer doors. Though these too will not open all by themselves. Mrs Dimond stands at the bedside.
‘When it starts again, you put this foot on me. Here. Like this, alright?’ Mrs Dimond helps Rosie raise her trembling leg, sets her bare foot against the lightly padded hardness of her own hipbone.
Rosie sees Mrs Dimond as safety, as life itself, but very far away, as if she were on the other side of a great gorge or chasm. Agonizing effort is the only bridge back to life, and she knows some die crossing it. She is on her own. Mrs Dimond’s eyes say calmly: Yes, I know.
Mrs Withers’ knees crack as she kneels on the rug on the other side of the bed. Though she holds Rosie’s hand, she too is far away, on the other side, in safety. The room is very quiet. When Rosie shifts a little, as the next pain starts, the bed crackles beneath her.
‘Now then, now then!’
‘Oh Christ help me!’ cries the labouring woman, and then falls silent as within her (thinks Mrs Dimond) the womb rises and takes command.
‘That’s the way,’ says Mrs Dimond approvingly, who has heard not swearing but prayer. She sees that the woman on the bed will obey as she should. Some don’t; some for a while forget themselves and lie writhing and shrieking, as if forsooth they could escape somehow from the duty of obedience, and from their own selves. Such craven panic tends to slow the whole business down a good deal, fit retribution, some might say; but the business in any case cannot be hurried. Let them scream if they must, is Mrs Dimond’s motto. Let them scream, and presently they will stop.
Now though, in dutiful obedience, the woman on the bed, her left leg braced against Mrs Dimond’s steady hip, pushes down inside herself. Her right leg is firm too, against the foot of the bed. She half-rises on her left elbow, and heaves. Her whole body is rigid with effort. Here is true hard labour, thinks Mrs Dimond, strange and hidden labour, soft parts turning as if to steel.
After the pain Mrs Dimond gently lays down Rosie’s leg and draws down her nightdress. The room is quiet again. The wind mutters outside, the fire burns. Mrs Withers dampens her cloth and wipes her tenant’s face, which is completely relaxed now, as if she were asleep.
‘Won’t be long now,’ says Mrs Dimond coaxingly. At least half an hour, she thinks. Perhaps more. Not for the first time she looks at the big round belly under the flannel nightdress, and thinks about the sleeping baby so tightly crammed inside. She knows gestation takes place in sweet perfect sleep, and that the baby is safely woken only by the long-drawn-out process of birth.
The woman stirs, groans, and the rubber sheet and the newspapers packed beneath it murmur back.
‘Again.’
Twenty minutes slowly pass. The leg is raised and braced and lowered again. Hidden from view the curled sleeping child slowly descends, while the soft parts between the labouring woman’s legs, at first rounded as the child’s head pressed against them from within, appear to swell, and yet then, miraculously, carry out the Lord’s will by reversing the swelling, growing slowly thinner and thinner until they can draw themselves back into nothingness and let the child through. Mrs Dimond, taking another swift look between pains, speaks for the first time in several minutes.
‘Now then: don’t you push no more. ’Tis the littlun’s turn now, he must come out by himself. Nearly there now.’ She folds back the nightgown so that the private parts will be untrammelled.
On the bed Rosie is clattering up from the dressing room with the other girls for the final number, all of them tricked out in the feathered headdress, the saucy little flouncy skirts, but as the curtain parts and they step forward in line Rosie notices how strangely familiar her own skirt feels, realizes that she has somehow come onstage at the Alhambra, Leicester Square, in her landlady’s old flannel nightie, but as she stands there despairing in the ferocious theatre lights Mrs Dimond cries, ‘Here, now! I said don’t you go pushing!’
Mrs Withers pulls Rosie close, and hides her face in her bosom.
Now a taut oval bulge of greyish membrane is peeping through the opening doors of the mother’s private parts. Mrs Dimond does not touch it. She notes the intact cawl, and wonders whether it will stay that way, though she herself scorns the superstitions about such things. She can make out a flattened darkness of curls through the opaque surface.
‘Next one,’ she says, and as she speaks a living fountain of warm flecked water gushes on to the bed as the cawl bursts. ‘Don’t you go pushing now!’ The woman’s foot still braced against her, Mrs Dimond bends as the head keeps on coming, and when the pain stops the outer doors, now thin as cloth, have parted so well that a large oval of wet thin dark curls, the back of the baby’s head, elongated by its slow passage through those tight inner places, shows through, resting there.
‘Slowly now,’ says Mrs Dimond, waiting. ‘Let him come on his own.’
Minutes pass. ‘Softly now.’
With the next pain the nape of the child’s neck at last clears the narrow way, and the gates part, the mother screams once, and the whole head rises, goes on rising, and at last comes free. Now a strange compound beast lies on the bed: a panting woman, her nightdress folded up to her breasts, and down between her parted legs someone else’s slick, wet, drowned little head, face-down.
‘Now then,’ says Mrs Dimond, and slides her right middle fingertip past the back of the head, making sure that during its long secret sleep the baby has not coiled its own lifeline cord about its neck: sometimes babies hang themselves alive that way, and you must loosen the loop if you can. The pointed little head makes no movement. Every feature of the face below is congested, swollen. Its cheeks have a deep blueish tint.
Mrs Dimond can see the mother’s heartbeat in the fluttering skin over her ribs. Her own heart too is beating fast. With her dry and steady left hand she unbuttons the front of her blouse, so that she can reach inside more easily.
‘Over soon.’ A coal shifts in the fire. Two slow minutes pass. Then one more. The baby’s head is bowed, meek.
Then Rosie stirs, and whimpers, and Mrs Dimond bends, her hands a net to catch the baby as the blue little face at last turns towards its mother’s left. The mother gives a bursting yell as first one shoulder and then the other slip through, and then in a rush of warm fruit-smelling water, the child and its great bouncing jellified rope of twisted white cord come free.
‘There now,’ says Mrs Dimond joyously. ‘Praise be!’
The mother lies collapsed, limp as a dead woman, her eyes closed.
Mrs Dimond takes out and shakes open the folded square of flannel warm from the front of her blouse, covers the baby’s wet little body with it, and lifts it clear of the mucky gathered water between the mother’s legs. In Mrs Dimond’s hands the baby wakes alive, and sets up a good clear crying.
‘A lovely girl!’
At once the dead woman stirs, laughing with a sort of surprise, as if she had for a moment forgotten that all her pain and labour had a cause and an outcome. Herself again, with the half-wrapped bundle of damp baby clutched to her chest, she greets her daughter, and the happiness in her voice is part of Mrs Dimond’s deep reward.
‘Hello!’ crows Rosie to her first child, and only daughter. ‘Oh, hello, you! Hello!’
As if in reply the baby forces open her swollen little eyelids, and her clear eyes glint in the lamplight. She stares up at her mother from her blood-stained wrapper, alert, astounded, fearless.
Mrs Dimond is still at work. She grasps the firm glistening rope of cord, feeling the strong pulse in it. For a moment or two more mother and child are still one; then the transmitted heartbeat fades, stops, and they are two different people, forever more.
Straight away, Mrs Dimond thinks, the cord accepts its death. Its gristle instantly loses the gloss and vigour of life. From the special bag she takes the two twists of clean twine, ties one tight ligature, ties two. In their happiness the mother and daughter barely notice her take up her big well-sharpened scissors and sever the cord right through, between the two knots. All is well, no blood seeps from either side.
‘Put her to your breast, mother,’ says Mrs Dimond, ‘so we can all rest easy.’
All three laugh a little at the baby’s instant enthusiasm. ‘She knows what she likes,’ says Mrs Withers, dabbing at her eyes. Mrs Dimond is tired; it’s nearly five in the morning, and in any case, for private reasons of her own, she has not slept well for some time. Luckily the afterbirth doesn’t linger, and she has to wait only twenty minutes more before Rosie gives a sudden gasp and the nasty thing comes sliding out, a warm solid flop between her legs, baby’s side first, slithery membranes trailing after, and all of it limp as a jellyfish.
Mrs Dimond has never liked the look of afterbirth, the inner surface so threaded and embossed with thick twisted blood vessels, the outer lobes the colour and soft texture of calves’ liver, flesh at its fragile fleshiest. Still she examines it, as Dr Summers has insisted she must. Quickly the thing grows clotted and cold as she spreads the membranes, the double bag that held the baby’s long watery sleep. There’s the hole she made leaving. No part seems missing. She tips the whole slimy nastiness into newspaper and folds it into a parcel. In the morning Mrs Withers’ boy Martin can take it to the end of the garden and bury it there. Some she knows just put it straight on the fire, but Mrs Dimond can’t abide the smell.
She washes out the bowl, and in Dr Summers’ honour drops a little more potassium permanganate into it before giving her patient a good wash in the bed, and, with Mrs Withers’ help, rolling her to and fro so that they can take away all the sodden newspaper and the mackintosh and make up the bed afresh. Mrs Withers has brushed and re-plaited her hair for her, and gone downstairs to see about a bit of breakfast. Dawn is showing through the gingham curtain, and one or two birds are already singing.
‘Is there blood coming away, down below?’
Rosie, Mrs Bertram Quick again, shakes her head. It’s possible to see, now, how very young she is, though of course Mrs Dimond has delivered even younger, in her time.
‘Then I will take my leave. Sleep tight now.’
‘Oh, Mrs Dimond, wait, take my hand, oh thank you, thank you, you were so kind. I don’t know how I would have managed without you. You were like a mother to me.’
‘Get away,’ says Mrs Dimond rather crossly, scenting dramatic carryings-on, of which she disapproves, and ruffled at the accusation of mere kindness, when she has been doing her duty and God’s will, as well as earning an honest living. ‘You must pay for the soap and the fixings, and for my time. I’ll wait upon you a week,’ she adds.
‘Don’t go. Please. May I ask – what’s your name? Please?’
Mrs Dimond considers this fresh attack with suspicion. ‘Why?’
The girl in the bed smiles. Fresh and rosy as the dawn, thinks Mrs Dimond, surprising herself.
‘I just wondered,’ says Mrs Quick. ‘I need a name, you see.’
‘What about your husband then, won’t he want a say?’
‘Of course.’ The smile fades abruptly.
At the door Mrs Dimond turns. ‘I’ll bid you good day,’ she says austerely, but turns back before she closes it. She meets her patient’s eyes again. How strange to have shared so closely, and to part so entirely! An impulse towards the girl on the bed surprises her again, by its strength and sweetness. Fresh and Rosie as the dawn. Afterwards, telling the story to her sister, she will dare to wonder aloud whether even then some part of her guessed the truth: that after her long unblemished and devoted career as the parish’s best handywoman, this was to be her very last completely untroubled delivery. And a good one it had been too, neat as you like, praise be.
She smiles at Mrs Quick, Rosie, her own rare oddly playful smile. ‘It’s Violet,’ she says, and closes the door behind her.
In her heart she was a dissenter, and never took Communion; but there was no Chapel within practical reach, and in any case St George’s Silkhampton was safely Low, so on her way home Violet Dimond called in as usual for a moment of communicative quiet. The birth had been a gift, and she must show proper gratitude. And she had difficulties of her own to consider.
Nearly a month earlier, on the ninth of February, she had suffered from a terrible nightmare. The ninth of February had been a special date for Violet for the last fourteen years; though one year she had been busy at a childbirth, on all the others she had marked the anniversary by staying up until midnight, sitting at her kitchen table with a lit candle, a small china cup set beside it. The cup was of white china, with a blue bird painted on it. On the ninth of February fifteen years before, this cup had held a drop of good milk, and Violet’s daughter Ruth had drunk from it, though her little hand had trembled so much with fever that she could barely raise it to her lips. It was the last thing she had held.
During her latest vigil though, when Violet had lit her candle and set the precious cup beside it, and sat quietly in prayer for a while, she had fallen asleep.
She had often dreamt of Ruth in the years since her death, but always vaguely. She would wake up knowing that she had had a blessed glimpse, never more, though that was better than nothing. This time she dreamt with what felt like ordinary daytime clarity that she had come back from market on a Wednesday afternoon and gone to put the kettle on, and instead found herself walking by Rosevear Lake, miles away; and standing on the bank alive again, her dark eyes sparkling as before, was Ruth, holding out her arms, and dancing with excitement. Wild with joy that the terrible misunderstanding about death was over at last, Violet ran towards her, aware even in her delight that the child was too close to the water, but the faster she ran the further away Ruth seemed to be; Ruth, oh come away from the edge, begged Violet, running without motion, watching helplessly all the time as her daughter turned and slipped and fell into the deep grey cold of it, struggled in the water, calling out for her, choking and drowning –
Violet had awoken, with her heart bucketing like a runaway train. She had fallen asleep instead of keeping vigil; the dream was no more than she deserved, she thought. But a few nights later, in her own bed, the nightmare had come again, and then again. Not even prayer could banish that final image for long.
In the church, Violet sat in silence for some time, thanking the Almighty for the continuing miracle of childbirth, and thinking other less precise prayerful thoughts. It was quiet, though she could just hear the increasing sounds of early-morning traffic outside. You were so kind, so motherly, said the girl on the bed. Presently Violet’s head sank on her chest, and she noticed that the aisle was strangely thronged with small children all crouching in silence, their little heads bowed, as if in prayer, but then one of them looked up, and was Ruth struggling and calling out for her, Ruth choking, drowning –
Gasping, Violet awoke.
And there of course she was, alone in the blessed peace of the church. She trembled as she pulled out her handkerchief to wipe her face. Its folds, its clean smell, soothed her. The normal traffic noises went on distantly rumbling outside. She felt that she had heard them all the time, that she had dreamt without being fully asleep. But then she had slept so badly, these past weeks.
Why now these horrors, when she had not mentioned Ruth’s name to a living soul these fifteen years? She stood up, and the movement turned something in her memory, and showed her the crouching, silent little children. At once it seemed to Violet that there was some meaning in them that she might grasp, if she tried. It was as if her mind was like a jar of muddy water. If she let it stand, would it clarify?
Painfully, for her knees were not what they were, Violet knelt right down upon the cold stone of the church floor. She set down her scarf and the special bag, and knelt in silence, her eyes closed, picturing the children bowed as if in prayer.