Tall Chimneys: A British Family Saga Spanning 100 Years

by Allie Cresswell

  ‘Don’t you ever wonder,’ I began, my voice surprisingly loud in the silent garden.

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. I threw a glance at him. He had diamonds of dew in his beard which he had kept, though trimmed to tidiness. ‘No, I never do, not for a moment.’

  ‘I wonder,’ I said, ‘about what you…’ but he cut my sentence off.

  ‘I think of the baby as a sort of immaculate conception,’ he offered, ‘like Jesus.’

  ‘I’m no Mary,’ I laughed, but awkwardly, because the name Mary conjured the automatic addendum ‘Magdalene’ in my mind. That, perhaps, was more apt.

  ‘You’re Eve, though, aren’t you? Did you know it means ‘origin’? Earth mother. Primal woman. The whole population sprang from her loins.’

  ‘Eve had her Adam,’ I murmured.

  ‘Perhaps that’s what you’ll call him, then? Adam?’

  ‘The baby’s father?’

  John shook his head. ‘No, the baby.’

  ‘I don’t think so. What were Eve’s children called?’

  ‘Cain and Abel, of course, but neither of them had enviable careers. Seth was the one who came after Adam in the great family tree.’

  ‘I like Seth,’ I said. ‘Were there any girls?’

  John laughed. ‘It’s a theological sticking point,’ he said. ‘Assuming God made no more people (a big assumption, in my view), who did Cain and Seth marry, since we know they produced children?’

  ‘You don’t have to be married to do that,’ I put in, dryly.

  ‘Indeed. Anyway, I read somewhere that Cain, at least, married his sister Awan. Cain was banished and went off to the land of Nod, fathered many children and built a city.’

  ‘Awan,’ I repeated. ‘She was a sort of pioneer, then, forging into the unknown, making the best of what there was.’

  The light was fading, turning from opaque pearl to smoky amethyst. We went indoors and stoked up the drawing room fire. John went downstairs to make tea, while I arranged all the cushions so as to ease my back and aching legs. Later, John read to me from A Christmas Carol and I stroked my belly, and wondered if the baby could hear the sonorous tone of his voice as he read. The three of us curled up together in the depths of the sofa, and the warmth of the room wrapped itself around us, and the whole house stood sentinel over us in that remote, hidden glen, swathed in mist and clamped by cold, under the dome of the sky and the eye of God.

  John still used the upper room of the gatehouse as his studio but he hadn’t spent a night there since his return from the Continent. It seemed a specious fallacy, now, a charade that fooled nobody. We usually slept in the housekeeper’s room, and kept ourselves discreetly and decorously below stairs in all our daily comings and goings, but, that night, when it was time to sleep, we damped down the fire and switched off the lights, and climbed the stairs to Mrs Simpson’s room.

  Overnight the temperature rose, the mist dissolved and in the morning the house was bathed in pure, winter sunlight. The lawn and trees sparkled, drenched in dew like diamonds. John opened the curtains and immediately got that look in his eye which I knew presaged creativity.

  ‘Go and paint,’ I told him, nestling back into the pillows and resting the cup and saucer he had brought me onto my bump. ‘Go, while the light lasts, and paint something glorious.’

  He looked at me. ‘I oughtn’t to leave you,’ he demurred.

  ‘Nonsense,’ I retorted. ‘I’m going to go back to sleep in a moment, so I’ll be no company for you.’

  ‘Oh, alright,’ he gave in.

  I was as good as my word, back asleep within moments; I didn’t even hear the motorcar as it pulled out of the stables and laboured up the slush on the drive. I slept in the filtered sunlight that came in through the half-drawn curtains until midway through the morning when a change in its quality woke me. The blue had been replaced by thin cloud. Above the amphitheatre of the trees I could see it moving, quite quickly, from the east. I got up and drew myself a bath. From its depths I could hear the telephone ringing, but it would have been impossible - and dangerous - for me to try and answer it. I wallowed on, and presently it stopped ringing.

  By the time I got downstairs it was midday, and I set about getting together some food to carry up to the gatehouse for John, later. This necessitated a trip to the hot house, where tomatoes were still to be had from the yellowing, spent trusses. On my way I let the chickens out, and collected the eggs - not many, at that time of year, but enough for an omelette for supper, I thought. The hens came out cautiously, eyeing the air, placing tentative feet down on the chill, wet ground. As I re-entered the house I could hear the telephone again, ringing in the butler’s pantry. I dropped the eggs and tomatoes into a handy basket and hurried through, but when I lifted the receiver there was only a click and a buzz like an angry wasp on the line. The only person I could imagine calling was the doctor, and I put a call through to him, but his telephone, too, rang on and on and nobody answered.

  I continued to potter round the kitchen; folding laundry which had been drying over the range, getting distracted by a particularly delicious pie which Mrs Greene had sent down for us, opening one of the jars of pickled cabbage from the larder to eat with it. I dried and put away the glassware we’d used the night before. Time passed.

  About three o’clock I locked up the hens. They had already retreated into the shelter and warmth of their accommodation, sensing, as I had not, the storm which was imminent. The air outside had turned bluish; the cloud overhead was much thicker, lower, and very dark. As I watched, fat flakes of snow began to float from the sky.

  I packed up my basket and made ready for the walk up to the gatehouse. I would have to hurry.

  The first pain came as I was bending to lace up my boots. It was sharper and much stronger than I had expected, and not in my back, as Rose had described, but in some hidden and hitherto unsuspected ventricle at my core. I took a sharp intake of breath and sat back on the settle, quelling panic. My instinct was to clench up the place where the pain had been, to resist the sense of prising pressure.

  ‘Relax,’ I told myself, ‘probably just wind. Shouldn’t have eaten that cabbage.’

  But immediately it came again, more insistent, a sense of determined opening, the way I had seen Kenneth kick and rattle at a shed door which has swollen and warped over winter, breaking the seal which time and nature together have fastened shut. At the same time I was conscious of a trickle of warm liquid coming from me.

  Clearly, the baby was on its way.

  I rang the doctor again, and also the number of Rose’s father’s shop. There was no reply. Nobody else I knew had a telephone except Patricia at the Plough. I dialled it and some-one - a man - answered, but just then another pain gripped me and I couldn’t speak. The man shouted over the din of the noisy bar, ‘Hello? Hello?’ and then put the receiver down. When I tried again the line was dead - I presume he’d left it off the hook.

  ‘Be calm,’ I told myself. ‘John will come back soon. He can’t paint in this light, anyway.’

  I went through to the bedroom and changed my clothes. Outside, the piece of kitchen garden I could see from the window was blanketed, the air a choked maelstrom of snow.

  The pains continued to come, each one more urgent than the last, and lasting longer. I paced the flagstone floor of the kitchen, counting my steps, counting the flags, counting the seconds until the next onslaught. When it came I braced myself, and clung onto the back of a chair or the edge of the sink, wherever I happened to be. Still, my overriding urge was to fight back against the invader, to tense up everything, to resist the advance.

  Between pains I tried the doctor and Rose again. Still no reply. Well, what did I expect? It was Boxing Day. People were out socialising.

  Four o’clock came and went, then half past. By now the contractions were coming thick and fast. They made me cry out. Not just that inner gateway but my whole body convulsed when they came. Surely, surely, I told myself, John would come soon. Bu
t then I began to imagine disasters. He had had an accident; the car had had a puncture, swerved off the drive and plunged him into the woods. He was unconscious at the wheel; suffering from hypothermia; dead. The more frequent and powerful the pains, the more fevered my imagination became until I was certain John was in desperate trouble. I wrapped a coat around me and staggered into the blizzard.

  My idea - dimly caught - was that I would go to the foot of the drive and call to him. I could see the opening of the drive at the end of the gravelled forecourt. It was flanked by conifers and in the dusky light and my delirium it looked to me like the yawning mouth of a terrible beast. The snow had drifted into the throat of it, but beyond it was dark and forbidding. All around me the garden was foreign, disguised by snowfall, vague outlines of well-known shrubs and familiar statuary camouflaged and all-but unrecognisable. Behind me the house was unlit, its windows blind and uncaring. Another pain came and the noise I made was like the bark of a vixen.

  I lurched towards the drive, peering through the murk to see if I could make out the outline of the car, or John himself, walking towards me. But the road was empty.

  I listened. Nothing. Just the pump of blood in my own ears, and the gossamer fall of snow on foliage, as innocent and suffocating as feathers in a pillow.

  I wished I’d brought a lantern or a torch, berating myself for being so stupid. But surely he couldn’t be far away. If I just walked as far as the first bend…

  The driveway took me into a kind of tunnel. The trees crowded to the edge and made a canopy above. Within it, the snowfall was less, the silence more, the darkness intense.

  ‘John! John!’ I cried out. But my voice was deadened by the congregating trees, or perhaps I was deafened. I felt like the world was shrinking; the sphere of my existence closing down to the smallest bubble whose membrane hovered only inches from my skin. Or that I myself was growing, expanding to fill the universe, the coming baby swelling and inflating me until I would explode. Whichever way it was, there was myself and only myself and the pain which was almost like a prisoner scrabbling with tooth and nail to escape.

  The lane from Tall Chimneys snakes up from the house, switch-backing left and right through the steep incline of the trees. Even at the best of times and in temperate weather it is a challenging walk, but one which I had been doing hardly without a second thought for most of my life. But that late afternoon my steps were dogged and wavering. I found I could hardly keep in a straight line, zig-zagging like someone who is drunk, falling now into the undergrowth at the side of the path, then over boulders which mark out the precipice beyond the edge. At the first bend another pain racked me. I stumbled and fell onto the wet, slush-mired surface. Something squirted out of me, hot and wet, and I looked down to find my skirt red with blood.

  I was dying, and every instinct cried out to me to get to the gatehouse, my place of sanctuary. As a wounded animal will limp and drag itself back to its lair; as a dying soldier asks for his mother, so I, then, desired only that one thing. I went on, on my hands and knees, filthy and drenched and frozen and bloody, another few yards, until it came again, a vast opening; a pressing, inexorable, unanswerable progress, like a hot glacier tearing me asunder.

  My body took over. I was beyond rational thought of any kind; blind instinct and a preternatural knowing made my body convulse in rhythm with the contractions, pushing and expelling the burden from within. I tore aside my underclothes and crouched over my coat - filthy though it was - to deliver the baby. And when she came we both howled, like animals, at the horror and the joy and the wonder and the shock of it, and then I held her, tightly wrapped in my coat. Another pain, but less intense, and something else slithered from within, and then it seemed like we were both borne away on some ebb of a peaceful tide. The forest now felt benign, a kindly shroud, and I heard, as I had not, before, the quiet twittering of birds deep inside the woods, the distant trickle of water down a gully, the little snufflings and mewings of Awan as she wriggled in my arms.

  And after a while I got up and walked up the drive to the gatehouse.

  That’s where John found me. He saw the light in the window as he drove back across the moor from the station. He strode into the room bringing a flurry of snow flakes, clods of snow falling from his boots. His hair was drenched and plastered to his head, the shoulders of his greatcoat dark with damp. What a sight I must have looked! Filthy, bloody, my hair matted and unkempt, but with a look on my face as serene, he later told me, as any angel. I gazed up at him and down at Awan, and smiled, and he came and knelt down by the chair.

  ‘The baby came,’ I said, unnecessarily.

  ‘So I see,’ he nodded, lifting an ironical eyebrow. Then he tilted his head to indicate the doorway behind him. ‘So did Ratton.’

  I raised my eyes to see my nemesis hovering in the little kitchen. Even in the gloom I could see his engorged face, livid with some emotion I couldn’t quite read, his piggy eyes narrowed in spite and cold as star-shards. He looked sick, disgusted at the evidence of childbirth which was larded over everything - bloody smears across the floor, my own dishevelment, Awan herself - incontrovertible testimony to what had taken place. But there was also, in his mien, an element of affront, as though he, personally, had been injured in some way.

  ‘I telephoned a dozen times,’ he blurted out at last, and strode into the gatehouse parlour as though to demonstrate some kind of possession. ‘Of course I see now why there was no reply.’ He spoke as though I had been caught in some guilty or irresponsible act.

  ‘I was preoccupied,’ I said, coldly. ‘Babies don’t deliver themselves.’

  Ratton gave a shudder. ‘There is no need to be coarse,’ he said. ‘My companion is perished. Let us go to the house.’

  ‘You will find nothing in readiness,’ I told him, ‘and no-one to serve you. The servants are on holiday.’

  ‘You will stay here,’ John said to Ratton, getting to his feet and taking charge. ‘Bring your guest in here, where there is a fire. I need to take Evelyn and the child home, and then go out again and fetch the doctor. I’ll round up the staff on the way.’ Without waiting for any reply - the outburst of objection he must have known was coming - John threaded one arm beneath my knees and the other under my arms and lifted Awan and me off the chair. For a moment we were out in the blizzard - blowing strongly across the moor and already obscuring the tracks the car had made along the approach - and then in the warmth of the car, a rug unceremoniously yanked off the passenger within and wrapped round us.

  ‘Get out,’ John barked above the howl of the gale, ‘and go inside. There’s a fire, and things for making tea. I’ll be back, presently.’

  The car set off, passing the gatehouse and then down the steep, treacherous incline of the drive. At least, within the girdle of trees, the storm was muted, and John took the opportunity to explain his long absence.

  ‘When Ratton couldn’t get a reply at the house he telephoned the village. The Post-master’s lad was on his way out with the message when he saw the car at the gatehouse. I decided to go to the station myself.’

  ‘And not down to the house to see if I was alright?’ I asked, with dry humour.

  ‘No,’ he bit his lip, guiltily. ‘I should have done, shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, and you should have sent Kenneth to the station,’ I said, dreamily. The car, the drive, the day which had gone by, John himself, they were all beginning to seem more surreal with every moment that passed. Only Awan, solid and warm in my arms, sleeping now, seemed real at all.

  ‘I know. But I’d been painting - oh Evelyn, wait till you see - and you know how distracted I get. I wish I had sent Kenneth, though. What a journey we had of it back from the station. The road was thick with snow in no time, and there were snow-drifts. I had to stop I don’t know how many times to dig the car out. Ratton took pleasure in allowing me to do all the work, of course, treating me like a chauffeur.’

  If I had been compos mentis this information would have struck mor
e of a chord with me than it did. John’s chest wasn’t up to such exposure, or such exertion. But, as it was, it registered only a faint sense of disquiet.

  The rest of the day, and indeed the following week, are lost in a fog in my mind. I later found out John got me safely home and settled me in bed, before going back out into the blizzard to find the doctor and bring Rose. Only then did he fetch Ratton and his companion. By the time they arrived at the house, I am told they were perished with cold (neither of them having the presence of mind to keep the gatehouse fire alight or to make tea with the equipment readily to hand there) and in high dudgeon. The house, as I had stated, wasn’t ready for visitors; the beds not aired, the log baskets not full, the menu not planned. These matters manifested themselves in my mind in nightmarish proportions as I drifted in and out of consciousness. I was aware of Ratton as a malevolent presence, out of view, thankfully - he did not attempt to broach our quarters - but near enough to cause me disquiet. I was a little feverish for a few days following my exposure in the snow. I was aware of people - Rose, her mother, Mrs Greene, Ann - hovering in the room, cleaning my body, settling Awan in the crook of my arm, even putting her to my swollen breast to feed. Sometimes I woke to find John seated in a chair by the fire, the baby swaddled up and in his arms, and once, Kenneth, hovering in the shadows beyond the dim pool of light cast by a shaded lamp. But after a few days these visions faded, and where I thought I had seen John there was only the chair, and the figure of Kenneth melded into the drape of the curtain and the only person I could be sure of was the doctor, who seemed to be in constant attendance.