Birmingham Friends

by Annie Murray

  They buy me a new piano. I refuse to play it. I sit staring at the world outside, forbidden me. More than anything I want Katie to comfort me.

  They call Dr Penn when my pains begin and Mummy leaves the house as he enters it. I am terrified and there are no women at my delivery to lead or hold me. Dr Penn strolls in and out, often leaving me on my damp sheets, the pain crushing me.

  ‘I’m too small,’ I cry to him. ‘I’ll bleed to death.’

  ‘Your pelvis is perfectly adequate,’ he tells me over his spectacles. He is not unkind, but he’s a man and he doesn’t know.

  After twelve hours he is born, my son. Daddy weeps when he sees him. He has always wanted a son for the business. My body is drenched and stretched and when I look down I don’t recognize it.

  Dr Penn washes him and instructs me how to feed him. They leave my baby in a drawer by my bed with a thin pillow lining the base and soft squares of blanket. There is no cradle, of course, because this is not to be his home.

  Before he hurries away I hear Dr Penn’s murmur beyond my door, ‘I’ll be round tomorrow – early.’

  Mummy does not come home all night.

  He lies in the drawer that evening, like the poor babies do. Daddy brings me food and is soft-spoken and kind which makes me cry. He holds me and strokes me. I sit in sheets which were once those of childhood.

  When he has gone I don’t sleep as he tells me to. I keep the light on, just a small sidelight, like I’ve always done. I see the little bedclothes twitching up and down. Then he works one arm loose, although I’ve wrapped him well. There is his hand, so small, jerking back and forth. I watch. I can’t stop looking at him. He’s getting ready to cry. Then his voice, a high, sad sound, all alone in there after the warmth of me. I pick him up and put him to one breast then the other, he pulling sharply on me, full of astonishing, separate life. I keep him beside me all night though they told me I wasn’t to. The house is so quiet around us. Sometimes he opens his eyes for a few seconds and looks at me. I know he sees me.

  I unwrap him and take in every part of his body, every shadow of his bone and muscle, the delicate, puckered skin. He has a long strong back and a birth mark like a wild strawberry at the bottom of his spine. I feel each bit of him, arms, legs, each rib, ears, cheeks, his soft skull. I hold his head against my cheek. By the morning I know him. I want my life to be his. And they take him away, then, at first light.

  * * *

  Chapter 25

  I was watching out for her. The ambulance arrived on a December day threatening snow, and against the grey clouds it looked very white and clean. Turning into Springfield Road it seemed to be moving in slow motion, stopping outside our door with a final shudder of the engine.

  ‘She’s here!’ I cried. Aflutter with nerves, I forgot I was alone in the house, calling out only to myself.

  A man wearing a blue cap jumped down from the driver’s seat and scuttled round to the back of the vehicle. He opened the door at the back and I saw him reach out a hand.

  Olivia was dressed in a black sable coat and black boots. Elizabeth must have seen to that. She was carrying a small overnight bag. I saw immediately that they had already removed the plaster cast from her arm. As she stepped out of the ambulance she hesitated, her face screwing up as if in pain after the darkness inside, even though it was not a bright day. She looked down for a moment, chopped hair falling forward round her cheeks, in a gesture of surrender. It was only once they had stepped inside the gate that she looked up again in bewilderment, taking in our new house, part of a long red-brick terrace, with Russian vine spiralling up the drainpipe, the green front door and wide bay window in which I stood with my hand raised to greet her. She stared at me without responding, as if she could make no sense of who I was. Her face looked so white, so haggard.

  ‘Here you are,’ the young man said as I opened the door. He handed Olivia over to me as if she were a bolt of cloth, and he was gone, striding back along the short path.

  I closed the door and stood leaning against it long enough to let out a long, long sigh. I felt I hadn’t been able to breathe like that for months. She was here, safe, with me.

  She was still standing where I had taken her in the front room, not having moved except to stand the little case beside her on the floor. I burst into tears and went and took her in my arms. ‘Livy, Livy . . .’ I could say nothing but her name, over and over, holding on to her so tightly.

  She stood quite still, impassively letting me hold her and cry over her. But I did hear her whisper, very quietly, ‘Thank you.’

  When Douglas had finally decided to move us out of my mother’s house, she treated the situation with indifference, whether real or not was impossible to say. What with the hospital, the church and the British Housewives League she was scarcely in anyway. Douglas seemed to think it would be the answer to everything. He was still pursuing some abstract ideal of ‘family life’ which, among other things, involved having your own home. I think he hoped he would have more control over me.

  In fact this short, sweetish time was the best in our marriage. A lull, when I saw glimpses of the Douglas who had charmed me into believing I loved him.

  That day Douglas had seen me with Roland we had rowed terribly. Once we’d travelled home, mute with fury, we attacked each other across our bedroom with words whose viciousness frightened both of us. I was already overwrought about Olivia, and Douglas held me guilty of wild, bizarre things, the unreasonableness of which shocked me more than the accusations themselves. He’d got it into his head that I was having an affair with the new doctor at the clinic, when I’d barely even got a grasp on the man’s name. He called me filthy things, turning on me all his icy verbal power.

  ‘You’re not a real woman at all are you? You can’t just stay at home where you should be. You have to be working like a man or gadding about with your friends and heaven only knows who else.’ His eyes bored into me. ‘You don’t even respond to me properly in bed. It’s like making love to a bloody corpse.’

  At this I finally burst into tears, overcome by the injustice of it. ‘I can’t respond to you in bed,’ I wailed, ‘because you’re so hopeless at it. You don’t make me feel anything at all. It’s humiliating. Can’t you see that?’

  The first time we’d ever broached the subject and it had to come out so harshly. Douglas was silenced. I saw the pain in his face.

  ‘Can’t you see,’ I went on, ‘that you’re making my life miserable, spying on me and not trusting me? I don’t want another man. Coping with you is too much already. I can’t stand much more of it, Douglas. I’d almost rather be alone.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’ He crumpled then, sinking on to the bed, his shoulders shaking. I sat beside him. He put his hands over his face. ‘I can’t help it. All I need is for you to want just me.’

  ‘I do want you,’ I said. I tried to believe it.

  He began to kiss me, laid me back on the bed, his eyes watching my face anxiously as he jerked my clothes off.

  ‘I do want you,’ I repeated softly.

  He came to me then and made love quickly, desperately, in much the way he had always done. I felt nothing except resignation. At the time I was exhausted enough not to mind.

  Strangely, the new extremes to which this row had taken us cleared something from the air between us for a time. We had been trying harder with each other since then. I had given in to Douglas and told him I’d give up my job at the end of November. And the house was a symbol of our new carefulness.

  It was a three-storey terrace, reaching back from the road with rooms off a corridor from front to back and quite dark inside, but with a strip of garden ending in a row of poplars. The bedrooms let in a little more light than downstairs. I decorated one as a nursery, painting it pale yellow. I hung curtains sprigged with flowers. Douglas wanted a boy. I hoped my child was a girl.

  We enjoyed the novelty of the house and discovered new skills in each other. One day I watched Douglas building a small cupboar
d for the kitchen, impressed with the deftness of his hands.

  ‘I didn’t know you were good at that sort of thing.’

  He looked round, squatting on the floor of the back room, and grinned. ‘My hands have never been the problem.’ His face grew serious. ‘You look lovely – with the baby I mean.’

  I smiled, stroking my stomach. My pregnancy was showing by then and I was proud, excited. Except that now, knowing about Olivia’s baby, I could not enjoy these feelings without a sense of ambiguity.

  ‘You do look different, though.’ Douglas lurched to his feet and came over to me, lifting and stroking my hair which was hanging loose. ‘Your face is – softer somehow. More womanly.’ He took me in his arms. ‘I love you, Kate. Things’ll be better now we’re here, won’t they? New and different.’

  I looked over his shoulder across our new room. I thought of Olivia. I could smell the curled wood-shavings on the floor. ‘I hope so.’

  I wouldn’t want to deny that there was fault on my side where Douglas was concerned. I was so caught up in my feelings for Olivia, and bringing her to our house seemed the natural, the only thing to do.

  ‘Don’t make me go to Mummy and Daddy,’ she’d pleaded with me on my final visit to Arden. ‘Please don’t.’

  ‘I’m not going to make you do anything,’ I told her. ‘Livy – when you get out of here people aren’t going to be able to make you do things any more.’ When I told her she could come to live with us it seemed to settle her mind, and especially as it was no longer to Chantry Road, which was so near the Kemps and all the associations with childhood.

  I made the promise before I told Douglas. But he was all right about it. He felt safer with me then, knowing I was going to give up work, to the regret of my colleagues, and would be constantly at home.

  ‘It’ll be nice for you to have some female company, won’t it?’ he said. ‘And both of you will need to rest. You should be good for each other.’ It let him off the hook for working so hard, of course – I would not be relying only on his company. And I was relieved – I would no longer have to be alone with Douglas in the loneliness of our marriage. I would have Olivia.

  Before she left the hospital, I knew I had to tell her about the baby. It was becoming so obvious and she was going to have to know.

  ‘I’m worried for you,’ I said. ‘That it’ll be upsetting for you living with me when I’m pregnant. I would have told you about it before, only then you’d just told me about . . .’ I trailed off.

  ‘About my baby?’ Determinedly she said, ‘My baby. I had a baby. He was mine.’ She spoke with more energy than I had seen in her for a long time, turning to me with a kind of fierceness. ‘I can’t hold it in my head. It’s like a dream that keeps floating away. When I try and touch him, he’s gone. But I don’t think it matters about your baby. That’s different. Your baby is yours. It might make mine seem real when I see it.’

  I was encouraged by this. It was her longest speech for a long time, and she hadn’t sounded like someone trying to be brave. There was sense in it and I’m sure she believed it then. That all she needed was to be able to feel properly, to remember, and to have a period of grieving for her child.

  So far as I was concerned at that time, Livy’s state of health and her odd behaviour immediately before being sent to hospital were all connected with the loss of her baby. My mind carefully threaded everything into that weave, discounting things that had happened before, much earlier. Of course she’d been highly strung and moody, but nothing more. And I had a clear, substantial explanation for the state she was in now.

  Douglas greeted her with surprising warmth. The sight of her in the limp new clothes Elizabeth had sent to the hospital and which did nothing to hide her emaciation was pitiful in itself. Both of us were moved in those early days, wanting to protect and indulge her. In a strange way, for a short time, Olivia helped to bring Douglas and me closer, united in our care for her.

  ‘It’s appalling,’ Douglas exploded at me soon after her arrival. ‘What the hell have they done to her? When I think how she used to look! Those places must be a law unto themselves.’

  I hadn’t told him about Alec Kemp, though. I didn’t want to do it to Olivia, nor even to Elizabeth Kemp. Alec had been worried enough about his public image – and presumably about Olivia – to keep his side of the bargain. That was all that mattered. They could go to hell apart from that.

  The silence that had come over Olivia in Arden was still wrapped around her in her waking hours. It was a silence, though, that held no calm. Her mouth was full of ulcers which made it difficult for her to speak or to eat. She was slow in her movements, as if she found it hard to do anything voluntarily, was unused to making choices for herself. She ate very little, wincing at the pain in her mouth. Mostly she sat still and barely spoke.

  In the beginning, she slept for hours of each day. I had prepared a room for her with a comfortable chair close to the bed. It was not a very bright room, but she could sit looking out at the garden and the changing light on the poplars. She sat swathed in blankets and extra layers of clothing, often seeming to want to be alone up there. Everything was in shortage that winter. There was barely any fuel to be had and I couldn’t light a fire in her room. Often I came in to find her sleeping in the grey daylight, her head propped on a pillow tucked against the arm of the old maroon chair. Sometimes one of her almost weightless hands might be outside the blankets, and I’d cover her again, watching her face, the translucent blue like bruising under her eyes, her hair lying against her cheek.

  Her dreams came to her at night. Often I heard her before she had woken herself with her screaming and sobbing. At first came the tiny mewling sounds: small signals of a distress beyond words. I came to recognize it and left my bed to be beside her when it all broke over her, the terrible cries, her eyes opening finally, bulging in her head. Every part of her would shake with extraordinary force.

  I held her, night after night, saying, ‘Livy, my Livy. It’s all right, my love. It’s all right now, Katie’s here,’ over and over until she could hear me. I felt so full of tenderness towards her in those days that it was like a physical ache in me. I devoted myself to this feeling.

  When the snow came that winter, falling for days and lying thick, permanent-looking, we stayed in almost all the time, the muffling whiteness like a seal around the house. The city was silenced by it. Factories were being laid off for lack of fuel. I felt my energy concentrate in that house, for my friend and my child.

  Livy’s silence concerned me, but I felt there was activity in it, not absence. I waited for it to end.

  Then one Sunday, after the snow had fallen, the Kemps arrived. Fortunately Douglas was in and answered the door.

  ‘We’ve come to see Olivia,’ I heard Alec say, his voice brisk and businesslike.

  Olivia and I were in our sitting-room, chairs pulled close to the meagre fire. The sound of her father’s voice seemed to pass through her like a physical force.

  ‘No!’ She was on her feet immediately, shaking with agitation. She ran out of the room before they had even got through the front door and took refuge in the kitchen, stumbling down the step. I followed.

  ‘I don’t want to see them. I can’t. Never. I don’t want to see them . . .’ Her eyes were stretched open, flecked with distress.

  ‘Livy, Livy – stop.’ I took her firmly by the shoulders. ‘Listen to me. What matters now is what you want. They don’t matter. If you don’t want to see them I’ll send them away.’

  She watched me mutely, disbelieving.

  ‘I promise. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.’

  She said she’d go upstairs and I led her out, repeating what I’d said, trying to soothe her.

  ‘Olivia!’ Alec’s voice cut harshly across the tiled hall. Douglas had had little choice but to let them in.

  Olivia made a convulsive movement, as if the word had struck her like a bullet, and dashed to the stairs. ‘No. No!’ She ran u
p, her voice higher than a child’s.

  ‘Olivia?’ her father cried after her, this time his voice containing a hurt, wheedling tone. ‘Darling, come down. We’ve only come to see you.’

  I found myself noticing small details: the smart line of his black coat collar, the white hairs beginning to outnumber his dark ones, the tiny lines like cracks round his mouth. Behind him Elizabeth, wearing a fur hat, was weeping quietly.

  ‘She doesn’t want to see you,’ I told him. ‘You can see that. It’s not me trying to stop her, so you needn’t accuse me of that.’

  I knew Douglas was watching me, taken aback by the bitter tone of my voice.

  ‘But I’ve come to see her. She’s got to see me. We’ve had quite a job getting here in this.’ He waved an arm towards the door and the white light outside. ‘I’m not having this nonsense.’ He moved as if to go to the stairs. Elizabeth suddenly reached out, clutching the back of his coat. ‘Darling, no. Don’t – ’

  ‘Let go of me, Elizabeth,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve come to see my daughter and I’m damned if these people are going to stop me.’

  ‘No.’ Douglas moved to stand across the foot of the stairs. ‘You heard her. She doesn’t want to see you.’

  I watched Douglas’s face, his powerful eyes boring coldly into Alec Kemp. Elizabeth was sobbing, no longer trying to hide the fact.

  ‘Get out of my way.’ The ugliness of Alec’s tone took even me by surprise. ‘Just get out of my way. I’m not putting up with this. I’ve come to visit my daughter. I’m not being ordered around by some jumped up cripple.’

  Blood rushed to Douglas’s face. He looked so broad and strong standing there. For a second I thought he was going to punch Alec Kemp but, keeping control, he blazed at him: ‘Your daughter doesn’t want to see you, and having seen the way you behave I’m not at all surprised. Now take yourself out of my house and don’t come back until you’re invited here.’