The Hours Before Dawn

by Celia Fremlin

  ‘Get rid of it!’ Get rid of the sun because it could fade the carpet. Wipe away the sea because it might wet your feet. Blast all the vegetation from the face of the earth because a twig might scratch your face. Blot out the stars because it gives you a crick in the neck to look at them. Wipe out everything; destroy everything; trample down everything, and then you’ll be safe. That’s Edgar. Why did I suffer it for twelve long years?

  ‘But why am I bothering about him? Already I have gone a long way beyond Edgar. I can go further; and I can go alone. I have the strength; I have the skill. Strength and skills are coming to me across ten thousand years, they are foregathering inside me now, I can feel them, every day and every night.

  ‘Jan. 22nd. Term has begun. I can walk with pride among the girls at last, no longer the withered, barren schoolmarm. If only they knew! If only everyone knew! I would have liked to shout it aloud in the staff-room, on the hockey-field, but I must bide my time. It will be many months yet before anyone notices. When they do, of course, I will be dismissed. Dismissed into paradise; condemned to life! It will be my day of triumph, and even while they pretend to be shocked and pitying, my colleagues will know it.’

  Conscious now that the light was fading fast, Louise skimmed through a number of pages until she came to the entry for June 19th:

  ‘Half term here already!’ she read, ‘and still no one has noticed anything. Or, at least, no one has said anything. Silly to be disappointed – the longer it remains a secret the longer I can go on earning, and that is very important from a practical point of view. But how can I look at it from a practical point of view? Does an explorer, as he nears the top of Everest, start looking up the trains to Victoria ready for when he lands back in England?

  ‘Yes, it is like exploring. Millions of women have been here before, and yet their reports are so vague, so false. Why did none of them – not one – ever tell me of the mighty strength that comes with pregnancy? This sense of being immortal – invulnerable – of being irrevocably on the winning side?

  ‘And yet, somehow, I have always known it would feel like this. In the past I have heard the sickly, puny women of my acquaintance moaning and complaining about their pregnancies: “We feel sick,” they whine: “We can’t sleep…. We get cramp in our thighs…. You don’t know what it’s like!” they whimper.

  ‘Well, now I do know what it’s like, and I shall be able to tell them. I shall no longer have to listen to their complaints in the abject silence of the barren; I shall be able to turn upon them; to unleash the glorious truth like a tiger among that whimpering throng.

  ‘July 7th. At last someone has noticed. Gladys has noticed. Maybe because she’s P.T. mistress, or maybe because she shared a flat with me once and knows me better than the rest. Anyway, she’s noticed, but she assures me that no one else has. Assures, if you please, as if I didn’t want them to notice! They just think I’m putting on weight, she says, and they congratulate themselves on their own diets and exercises. It’s because I’m big-boned, she says, it never shows so much then. Are these bits of information part of the P.T. training?

  ‘She is full of sympathy and broad-mindedness and what am I going to do? And what is Miss Warwick going to say? And what are the Board of Governors going to say?

  ‘I mustn’t snub her, she is kind; but why should she think I need her sympathy and broad-mindedness when my whole body pulses in unison with a Mind broader than she has ever dreamed? Why should I give a single thought to the ant-like squeaks of the Board of Governors when the whole of Evolution prances behind me, laughing and triumphing?

  ‘July 22nd. Term finishes today. “My secret is still safe,” as Gladys insists on putting it. Really, she is growing tiresome with her concern for my future. Where will I go? What will I do? I have ruined my hopes of a post as headmistress. And what about that University job I was applying for?

  ‘Well, what about it? Hopes, indeed! She doesn’t know what the word means! I tell her I will get a housekeeping job, there are plenty such, and she throws up her hands in horror. A wicked waste of my powerful brain, she cries. Has she never thought to notice the wicked waste of my powerful body all these years?

  ‘Well, in two–three months’ time I will come back and see them all. On some late September day, I will walk into the staff-room without notice, with my baby in my arms. I will watch their mouths fall open and their eyes grow round with envy while the red ink dries on their pens.

  ‘Sept. 1st. It is coming. Nearly a month early, but I suppose he is grown too strong, too impatient to wait any longer. My suitcase is already packed – has been for some days, and labelled, too, in block capitals. I suppose I was hoping that someone coming into the room would notice it, but no one did. And if they had, I suppose they would only have tried to sympathise with me, like poor Gladys.

  ‘And yet, now, I wish I had never booked up at that hospital at all. I don’t need them, I would know what to do. I feel so strong, so wise, and these mountainous surges of feeling – I can’t call them pains – are making me wiser. No, more than that; they are wisdom, and I am their High Priestess. They come every few minutes now, they seem to suck away my strength like a wave sucking back over the beaches, leaving my limbs helpless as a starfish on the sand. And then, suddenly, the strength is there again, and twenty times as great, mounted in exact perfection….

  ‘Evening. My son is born; but why did they whisk him away so fast, before I could even see him? A flash of shining flesh, streaked with black like a little seal, and he was gone, and they still haven’t brought him back.

  ‘I think they are angry, because I would not do what they told me. I would not lie this way and that way and breathe in their footling anaesthetic. ‘Let me enjoy it!’ I cried; ‘I know what to do!’ They are used to women who cringe, and cling, and call for help. Help, indeed, at a moment when you possess in your own body more strength and skill than the whole staff of them rolled into one.

  ‘But they look at me so queerly. They are annoyed, I think, because I won’t call myself Mrs. They’ve got dozens of unmarried mothers here, of course, but they like them to call themselves Mrs. But I won’t. Why should I? Why should I pretend to be ashamed when I am half swooning with pride?

  ‘I shall call him Michael.

  ‘Sept. 2nd. Still they won’t bring Michael. They say there won’t be any milk yet. They say I need rest! Rest, when I’m bursting with energy and joy! I shall go along to the nursery for myself. I shall speak to the doctor. I shall knock some sense into them!’

  Louise did not want to turn the next page, to the evening of September 2nd. She knew what she would see, for she had seen it once already, in Harriet’s clumsy capitals. She did not want to see it again, in the naked agony of the original:

  ‘M Is Dead.’

  She moved to close the book. This would be the end. No one could continue such a record beyond this.

  And yet there was some more. Pages and pages more. The light was so dim that Louise had to move her face to within a few inches of the page to decipher the next words, blackly and boldly though they were written:

  ‘They have tricked me!’ she read – and the date, she could just see, was Sept. 5th. ‘They have tricked me! Somehow I feel that I must have known this all along, or I would not have gone on living. That puny, limp little dead baby that they so grudgingly let me see – that was not my baby. My baby is alive and well, and somewhere in this hospital. One of those smug, self-satisfied mothers is feeding him at this moment – my baby!

  ‘I know they have tricked me, and I know why they have tricked me. “Unmarried mother,” those officious, pigheaded nurses must have said to themselves. “Unmarried mother, she’d be thankful to have a stillborn baby, so let’s do the poor thing a good turn and give her the dead baby, and give the live one to that nice, respectable married woman who would really be very upset to learn that she had lost her baby.”

  ‘That’s the way they think. Haven’t I seen it, haven’t I heard it, in all their h
alf-hearted condolences?

  ‘“Isn’t this a piece of luck for you!” they all but say aloud; and that’s how I first began to guess that they were tricking me.

  ‘Useless, of course, to accuse them. They just shake their heads pityingly and give me a sedative, and if that doesn’t work they give me an injection. They have the answer to everything, these competent fools, with their bottles and their syringes.

  ‘Sister tells me that my baby had a defective heart, and would never have grown up normal even if he had survived the birth. She doesn’t know that her story only makes me the more certain that the baby they showed me wasn’t – couldn’t have – been mine. I – I in such strength and triumph to have borne a defective child? No. No. Only perfection could have come from such power as I was aware of then. I know it. I know it. My baby must have been big and strong, not wizened and undersized like the poor little wretch they showed me. Premature, they said. Defective, they said. And, in addition to everything else, it had ginger hair! Ginger – when I am dark, when Edgar is dark! How can they think I am such a fool?

  ‘However, they have managed in spite of themselves to give me a clue. The mother who has stolen my strong, dark baby is likely to be a woman with ginger hair. Or her husband is likely to have ginger hair. By that very clue, perhaps, I will track her down. Tomorrow I am officially an “Up” patient, and on one pretext or another I will prowl from ward to ward, from bed to bed, until I find her. I shall listen to the shrill, timorous gossip: “Never again, my dear.” “Eleven hours of agony….” “Too weak even to sip the tea she gave me….” I shall listen to it all, and its thin cowardice will be threaded through with facts; with names; with times of births. I shall listen; I shall learn. And wherever that woman is, she will see me passing through her ward, up and down, on this or that innocuous errand, and she will not know that a pursuit more relentless than that of any bloodhound is beginning.’

  And, of course, Louise had not known. But then, like many of the mothers, she had gone home on the fifth day, when the pursuit could hardly have been begun. She could not recall the dark, agonised figure that must have roamed like a ghost between the beds in her ward; but everything else became clear to her. The blue suitcase, with all its bold, foreign labels that had looked so out of place among the heavy, apprehensive young mothers in the Receiving Ward…. The brief glimpse Mark must have had of Miss Brandon as he hurried past at some visiting hour, scarcely registering on his mind at all at the time….

  So clear was the whole story becoming that Louise scarcely knew now how much of it she was wresting from the gathering darkness of the pages before her, and how much was unfolding of its own accord in her own mind. She saw the list of names and addresses slowly, painfully assembled from ward gossip – from cautious questioning. She saw one name after another eliminated as it became clear that the baby was born too long before or after; or that it resembled one or other parent so closely as to rule out any doubt. She saw the short list of parents one or other of whom had the right coloured hair – ‘Red or Sandy’ it was headed. ‘RE DORSANDY’ – of course. She saw the bitter search intensified as Vera Brandon left the hospital, and felt the precious milk drying irrevocably in her breasts; she saw the visits to different homes; the desperate pretexts resorted to in order to stay long enough to study both baby and parents. The sham application for a job at Frances Palmer’s, and the hope that was abruptly ended by the sight of the photographs in the bedroom, which proved beyond all argument the likeness between father and child. The pilgrimage to Mortlake Mansions, and the instant rejection of the doughy, unintelligent-looking infant displayed in the arms of Em. The meetings at Mrs Hooper’s, where Christine’s dirty but brightly intelligent little face had roused a spark of hope. Several other homes she had visited; and then, when hope seemed dim indeed, there came the discovery of the Hendersons. Vera Brandon had known that there was a ginger-haired husband whom she had not yet traced – she had noticed him in a blank unseeing way one evening before she had begun to suspect that her baby was still alive. Later, she could find out nothing about him. Louise had left the hospital by then, and neither she nor her husband seemed to have left any traces on the ever-dissolving annals of ward gossip. Vera Brandon could only remember that this redheaded father had been in the company of another man – a man whose tall, stooping figure and intellectual face had caught her attention. It was by a wonderful chance that, six months later, she had caught sight again of this stooping figure at a lecture. Cautiously she had scraped acquaintance with him, learned that his name was Dr Baxter, and extracted as much information as she dared about his redheaded friend. Further enquiries about the Hendersons in their own neighbourhood had revealed the fact that they were actually seeking a tenant for their top room. Here was a ready-made entrée into their house, with an opportunity to stay and study parents and child for as long as she pleased.

  And then, oh then, how hope had piled on hope! A lovely dark baby boy, big and strong; unlike his parents and sisters; a mother who seemed unable to understand and manage him as a real mother would surely have done. And, of all things, his name was Michael! Not that that had any logical bearing on the matter; and yet it seemed, somehow, like the hand of Fate.

  And then the planning, the considering. Would it be best to challenge the Hendersons outright, to convince them that he was not theirs? Perhaps some detail on his birth certificate would incriminate them, if it could be found? Search their papers, then, while they are out. But it seems in order. What next? A direct challenge, without proof? But if that fails, then there will no longer, ever, be any hope of taking the child by stealth. His future disappearance would at once and inevitably be traced to Vera Brandon, and there would be no corner of the world where she could hope to hide him. But if no one knows that Vera Brandon feels any interest in the child…. If no one suspects…. If no one has the slightest inkling….

  ‘April 6th. But does she suspect? Has she any inkling?

  ‘I heard her talking to herself this morning in the kitchen, and it sounded, somehow, as if it might be about me. All day today I will sit in my room, silent, never scraping a chair, never creaking a board, for I feel certain that if she suspects anything she will come and search my room today. She thinks I am out. I have told her I am going to Oxford today – told her with so much circumstantial detail that she cannot but believe it. Though it seems I was wasting my time – she didn’t even know that our term was over – she thought I was going off to school as usual! Subterfuge is wasted on fools – I must remember this in future.

  ‘I will leave my door unlocked. I would like her to just walk in.

  ‘And if she does? If I find out that she does indeed suspect something of what I intend? Why, then, I shall confront her with my certainty – and who knows, she may simply give in! She gives in to everyone else, after all – “Yes, Mrs Philips,” “I’m sorry, Mrs Philips”…. Why not “Yes, Miss Brandon,” “Here he is, Miss Brandon”? Why, it’ll be child’s play! I could reduce her to pulp in thirty seconds!

  ‘Reduce her to pulp! What a lovely phrase. It lingers on my pen. I watched her clumsily delving in that attic the other night, puffing and worrying over one of her footling little incompetencies. I stood in my doorway and watched her, and I thought how easily her little skull could be crushed – crushed like an ant in the midst of her joyless scurrying, and her snivelling little suburban life snuffed out.

  ‘For I watched her, that first evening, feeding my baby from her dreary, insensate breasts, with no joy in her face; while I stood there watching, my breasts seemed to tingle again even after all these months with a return of milk. The next night I tried to feed him, for I felt my milk had miraculously returned. But it was too late. He turned from my dry breast, sobbing and crying, and I too ran sobbing and crying up the stairs.

  ‘April 7th. She did not come. Once I fancied I heard the stairs creak but no one tried the door. I think she is not suspicious after all. I must be careful for a little longer, till after I hav
e started my housekeeping job. I have told them that I have a baby; I must manage somehow that they see him soon.

  ‘I am glad now that I never went to the hospital authorities and accused them outright. What would they have done? Given me another sedative? No, that is the panacea for people in bed. What is the panacea for people who come bothering round the offices?

  ‘A form, of course. They’d have given me a form to fill in. “How many babies have been stolen from you?” “On what dates?” “What was your grandfather’s occupation?” …

  ‘No I am well clear of them, and my concerns are such as can find no place in their filing system. Black hatred need not be listed in Column A. Revenge need not be filled in in block capitals. Murder need not be stated in triplicate and countersigned by a responsible householder, I have stepped tonight into a world that is still free.

  ‘April 9th. Such a fool for an enemy; such an incompetent fool! Once I thought it was hard to fight a fool – for who can calculate how or when they will fight back? But now she has played right into my hands. The whole neighbourhood knows that she sits up with the baby half the night and is so dazed with sleep that she scarcely knows what she is doing; and now I have seen to it that the police know it, too. She took Michael out in the pram last night. I watched them, I followed them, for I was afraid of what crazy thing she might do with him. But she only fell asleep on a park bench, and I might have taken Michael then and there; but I cannot risk him and myself disappearing at the same time. I have a better plan than that, a plan which will divert suspicion entirely. So I simply wheeled him home and put him to bed! What a fool she must have made of herself when she made all that outcry about him, and then he was found safe at home! Who will ever trust her testimony after this? What will the police think when, in a few days’ time, she claims that her baby has disappeared again? I have dropped a hint to her husband, but he is an odd, inattentive sort of fellow; I doubt if he took in my real meaning. So I had recourse to Mrs Morgan – an inspiration, that! Just a word about poor Mrs Henderson and her nerves … about her being found by the edge of a lake gabbling about a drowned baby. Good Mrs Morgan – I couldn’t leave it in better hands!