‘What–’
‘Everything. A home. Look. Everything else. You got it. Oh, we fast-forward a few years, couple of decades, and Lelia the beautiful has her cock and her baby.’
‘Oh, please,’ I said, trying to push her away. I stood up. I began to walk around the room.
‘And what did I have?’
She caught my arm.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, still walking. It was a relief to walk. The baby felt slotted low inside me.
‘No.’
‘You didn’t tell me. You don’t tell me.’
‘No,’ she said.
‘I don’t know what happened to you later. You don’t ever–’
‘That’s because you don’t choose to know. Just as you don’t choose to know a lot of things.’
‘Please, Sylvie,’ I said.
‘I might just remind you of what we did on the last evening. Who did we look after?’
The baby. I always remembered her, Mazarine’s little sister, quite newborn. She was the most moving, most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. She was a shock in human form. She smelled of warm milk and baking. Her arms lay above her head like a teddy bear’s. Sophie-Hélène and I frequently went downstairs, unable to keep away, fascinated by the tiny scale of the perfection. The frowning doctor had become a lank-haired, soft-faced woman in love, quite transformed and barely recognisable as Mazarine’s mother.
Mazarine kept upstairs and rarely even appeared for meals, a shadow of the shadow she had been. She was excessively thin; she was white; she was nervous and withdrawn. She had made too many cards and gifts: notes and pictures filled the room with crayoned declarations: I love the baby and Welcome and You are sweet.
I saw her downstairs one morning, and her face reminded me of a very young child who has got lost, who bobs between strangers in a frenzy of panic. Her eyes were deeper and darker with pain than any child’s I’d ever witnessed.
Her forehead was scored with tiny lines. She looked like an old man. In her eyes I saw terror and misery that I didn’t know existed in children. Stunned as I was with grief at my father’s death, I understood then that even very young humans can suffer pain which makes them feel as though a part of them is dying.
‘Talk to me later,’ I murmured to Sylvie. ‘Please …’
‘You can sleep,’ she said gently. ‘Try to sleep now, because you might need your strength.’
The old cardboard breath of Aunt Nanda’s flannel bedcover had taken on the invisible scrawl of Sylvie’s scents, the comfort smell of my own grief and hair on the pillow overlaid by traces of her. I kept listening for the door, for Richard, in case he had somehow found me and turned up.
Sylvie touched my neck. She curled up next to me. I pulled away from her. I saw myself as a mollusc, aroused before it recoils.
‘I can’t sleep,’ I said, but I realised I had been drifting in and out of consciousness, the contractions subsiding. The sounds of lorries thumping over the speed bumps, the sirens and night buses accompanied my brief half-dreams of Richard, of Sylvie, of pain. Police boats trawled up the river. My waking dreams were overlaid by girlhood, like an airless veil. It was too hot. I didn’t feel well, or I felt very well, but my body wasn’t itself.
‘I couldn’t sleep that night either,’ she said.
‘What night?’
‘The night before – the night before we spent the whole night together.’
She curled herself against me in a spoon, so much paler than me, so much slighter. I kept my back to her, and I breathed slowly, trying to avert further contractions. The shape of an unfamiliar wardrobe spread in front of my eyes, growing turrets and battlements in the hot darkness. If I kept very still and calm, if I slept and breathed, the baby would settle down again. She wasn’t ready yet.
‘I knew that night I wouldn’t sleep, because already, already, they were talking about sending me back to school.’
‘Were they?’ I murmured.
‘Do you remember? Just before you left?’
‘No.’
‘Yes. Well. The term hadn’t started yet, and they had been wanting to send me back to Paris. There was someone there – a former colleague of my mother’s she wanted to send me to, like the children with parents in the colonies.’
‘That’s so sad,’ I said. I stroked her.
I turned my face to the pillow where I mouthed a frantic prayer for my baby’s safety.
‘I thought about wanting to die,’ said Sylvie. ‘I couldn’t sleep, all night. Have you ever had that? It’s quite different from staying awake till the early hours and then falling asleep. Especially if you’re a child. It’s like a torture, a small death.’
‘I’m sure–’
‘I had to do something,’ said Sylvie, her speech rapid, and sounding more French. ‘I went downstairs – I went down to the kitchen, and on the way I heard my mother. She was up – she was up with the baby! I don’t know where the maternity nurse was. My mother, who was usually too drunk at night to do anything, was lying with her baby. Then I heard her singing to the baby. Crooning. That was what did it. That magical sound, like mermaids. She was singing. It was so beautiful. I’d never heard that sound before. I wanted that so much. I wanted that so much. And I knew then – I have nothing to lose. Nothing! I was liberated.’
‘God, Sylvie.’
‘I hit my head a few times. It was the only thing I could do. I thought about running and crashing it into a wall, a particular section of wall beside a window, the top flat part of my head. That was the image I had when I lay there and couldn’t sleep and the lines of tiredness were growing in front of my eyes.’
‘Sylvie,’ I murmured into the semi-darkness. ‘Don’t.’
‘I crashed wooden spoons instead. I pinged teaspoons against the skull until they bounced. They vibrated. My brains jellied a bit. I needed to do that. I did it harder and harder until the pain was bouncing and running into itself, and I did it faster, and it felt right, I was punishing myself, I was a runt, a cunt, and I did that, but I began to be scared. I tried to stop myself.’
‘Oh God, Sylvie,’ I said, almost crying.
‘The next day, the next evening, I went in there to see the baby by myself. It was your last night in France, my love. Her shutters were closed; she was on her front, her hands tucked beneath her. I’ll always remember that. She was the loveliest thing, really. That was the only day I realised it. Her poor blood must have run with Pouilly Fume. I breathed in her milk-hot breath, her uriney nappy, for the first time. There was something peaceful about her. She had a little blister on her top lip. I wanted to kiss it and press it against my mouth. She was so lovely, lovely, no wonder my mother wanted to pick her up. Pick her up and drop her? No, I didn’t think so.’
‘Sylvie!’ I said, protesting. ‘No.’
‘Why not? Why don’t you want to know?’
‘I don’t. It’s obscene.’
‘It’s part of my life. It’s all of my life, really, isn’t it?’
‘No, Sylvie. No,’ I said, shaking my head. I heard a train shunt over the bridge.
‘You were due to come to my house that evening; we would sneak off somehow, away from Sophie-Hélène. I thought you were the most exotic beautiful thing – from London where poets were buried. I found you so beautiful.’
‘I wasn’t,’ I said. ‘You had Sophie-Hélène.’
‘Sophie-Hélène … she saved me all those years; she was my friend. I never stopped thinking about you. I wanted you so much. I wanted you very badly – it seemed to grow and grow as years went on. I wanted to lie in grass with you again so that the rest of my childhood wouldn’t exist.’
My muscles contracted. I gasped. I removed her hand from my waist, where it touched my bump. The belt tightened and spread tendrils of pain.
‘Breathe,’ she said, kneading my shoulders.
‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t touch me.’
I jerked away from Sylvie’s breath on my neck.
‘Oh God,�
�� I said. I got up and leaned against the wall. The room was airless with August heat. I ground my forehead into the indentations of the wallpaper. I couldn’t stand the smell of it.
The contraction went on for longer, taking me by surprise with its pain. ‘Sylvie,’ I said, moaning. ‘Phone the hospital.’
‘Oh, darling!’ said Sylvie. ‘Not yet, my sweetheart. This is just the beginning. They don’t want you yet.’
‘I’m early,’ I wailed.‘This is much, much too – how much?’ I stood leaning there struggling with calculations, my mental calendar dark and shifting where it had once been precise.
to the day. ‘Thirty …’ My brain scrabbled.
‘Thirty-six,’ she said. ‘That’s OK, my love.’
‘It’s not, it’s not!’ I cried. ‘It’s not as much as that – is it? Thirty-eight. I need to be thirty-eight weeks.’
‘Yes, darling. You’ll be fine.’
‘Will I? How do you know? Phone the hospital.’
‘Sweetheart, I don’t need to yet,’ said Sylvie, moving behind me and stroking my back. ‘I can look after you. You’re just in the very early stages. It’s not even called labour yet.’
‘Sylvie,’ I said. I gripped her arm. ‘Please phone.’ I was nearly crying.
‘OK,’ said Sylvie, and she walked to the window with her mobile pressed to her ear. I paced around. I couldn’t lie still. I lowered my head over the bath and breathed deeply. I wanted to be sick. I couldn’t hear Sylvie talking. I turned on the taps. The water gushed out, furry with spray, mercifully clean and hot, unlike the rusty belches in Mazarine’s bathroom. Even in the close air, I wanted heat on my belly. There was bloodstained mucus on my legs.
Sylvie came in. ‘I have to time the contractions,’ she said. ‘Listen, darling,’ she said, brushing the damp hair from my forehead, ‘we don’t need to go in until they’re faster than every five minutes. You’re probably hours off, my love. You can rest.’
‘But this is too early,’ I said, beginning to shout at her. ‘I’ve had my show. Have you told them? What did you say?’
‘Of course. Of course. They’re not worried. We need to keep an eye on it, then phone them again later.’
‘Why?’
‘This is pre-labour, sweetheart.’
‘It doesn’t feel like it.’
‘It never does. You’re having contractions, but they’re mild and far apart. They may even stop for a while again. They’re going to get much longer and closer together later. You know all that, don’t you?’
I shook my head.
‘We can do this on our own for a while, darling.’
‘I need a drink,’ I said.
‘Of course.’
I gulped water. My forehead was throbbing, my skin fiery. I must look like a monster, I thought, my eyes bulging, my hair a wild wet shock. I got in and out of the bath. I sat on the loo, feeling sick, as though my body was trying to turn itself inside out. I walked into the bedroom, and I sank my head into the bed. Knots of sirens gathered outside. I breathed slowly.
‘I don’t want to hear any more now,’ I said. I felt a rush of blood to my head.
‘You do, though.’
‘I don’t,’ I said, biting the pillowcase, the blood in my head sinking like sand. I tried to face myself: I pressed the pillow to my eyes until I saw blackness and orange owl eyes slipping through my madness. I wanted my baby. The guilt that had followed me all my life – the slow-burning fear, impossible to explain to Richard, but dismissed alone with effort as childish superstition; the vague sense of commotion at the end of Clemenceau; the grief of French adults; the Belliere family’s departure – was rooting me out in adulthood. Sylvie had even once told me she’d known a death. Liebestod, she’d said, and I could barely breathe. I moaned into the pillow; I dribbled into its already damp surface.
‘Why not, darling?’ she said, kissing my neck.
‘Remember?’
‘No, I don’t remember,’ I said.
‘That evening, your last night–’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I watched her in her cot as she slept. She was a bit snuffly, she snorted. She’d sometimes stop breathing for a while all by herself, the silence hanging in the air, and then she would accelerate back into her little tractor snores.’
My cheek dragged across the wetness of the pillow.
‘Don’t,’ I said. Sylvie pulled me towards her in one movement so my head was curled beneath her armpit and she was holding me, and my mouth was dark and almost sealed, pressed against the pillow as the helicopters thrummed outside and young male shouting echoed up from the street.
‘I’d always fantasised about just putting a hand over a baby’s mouth, as softly as a butterfly, or a little plug,’ she said. ‘I kept doing that, I stroked her there, but I pulled my hand away, because I couldn’t do it. I kissed her forehead.
At first she didn’t even wake! She wriggled a bit; she frowned.
But then she started crying, and I lifted her from her cot, to comfort her. She was spitting and wailing. I kissed her mouth. I almost loved that baby then, even though I hated her so much. We came from the same place. I held her tightly against me, pressed her to my shoulder, pretending to be its mother and rocking it. I kissed her. I was waiting for you to find me, to come to the house all rosy and shy and sweet.’
‘I feel–’
‘You came in; you found me in the baby’s room. Do you remember? You said – stop it. Stop cuddling the baby like that, you’re holding her too tight, you’ll squeeze the life out of her. My mother called you and you went to her.
‘This overwhelming love came to me. I was clinging to her and rocking; I was crying, and kissing her. I was sorry for her by then. Vodka puffed her stomach, it ran through her brains. I just kept cuddling her. I couldn’t begin to hurt her by that time, because I’d started to love her. I kept on soothing her and cuddling her, pressing her to me and talking to her. She and I could be together, as sisters. I kissed her, kissed the top of her head tens, hundreds of times, in superstition and love. It was hot and wispy and half-bald.’
‘Oh,’ I murmured from somewhere beneath her arm, her torso. Tears shot into my eyes. They ran, fast, all over my skin. My mouth opened in a sort of voiceless shouting retch.
‘Eventually she seemed calmer,’ said Sylvie.‘I put her back in her cot. Poor baby. I left, and I heard my mother getting ready to go out. The nurse still wasn’t there. I joined you. You looked so lovely.’
‘No–’
‘You were. I always thought that I’d find you again and we’d be together again. One day, when we were grown-up ladies and very elegant. But by the time I heard about you, you were taken. And it was too late. But I wanted you still.’
My muscles tensed. A heavy contraction took hold of me. I rolled over on to my hands and knees.
‘Please,’ I called out, panting and clenching my abdomen. ‘This is too early. It’s – it’s a month early, or something. I don’t know. A month. ‘It’s too early.’
‘I can help you, darling,’ said Sylvie soothingly. ‘We can do this together. We can even deliver her here.’
‘No!’ I shouted. ‘Fucking hell. No, you – ring the hospital again.’
‘Your contractions are too far apart,’ she said in her cloudy, calm voice. ‘You won’t be dilated.’
‘I can’t go through normal labour. It’s too early.’
‘Of course you can. They’ll observe the baby afterwards.’
‘But what did you say to them?’ I shouted. ‘I want to speak to someone.’
‘Shh shh. Later,’ said Sylvie, soothing me.
She held me still, her arm cradling my shoulder, her hand dangling over my breast. I turned away from her.
‘I’m in pain,’ I said, clambering into the bath again, my foot skidding, a wave slapping like a whale over the side. The pain drilled into my middle, its dead weight edging down my thighs. I opened my legs, hooking one calf over the side of the bath as I turned and
tried to roll away from the pain. ‘Are you sure,’ I said, panting, ‘are you sure the hospital said–’
‘Yes, sweetheart,’ said Sylvie calmly, looking at her watch. ‘You’re nowhere near five minutes yet. You won’t be three centimetres for a while.’
‘How do you know?’ I said, shaking her hand from my shoulder.
‘Of course I know. All those classes.You know too, sweetheart, it’s just you can’t remember right now. Of course you can’t. That’s why you need a birth partner.’
‘I want a midwife. I’m scared. What if the baby–’
‘You’ll have one,’ said Sylvie calmly, ‘when they think you’re ready. They know how many weeks you are. Now relax. Watch the contraction, float on it, let it carry you.’
‘Shut up.’
‘When the baby is born, we’ll take her with us along the river,’ she said in soothing tones.
‘We won’t live here by then. Oh God, my baby. Get me Richard. Phone him. Give me your phone.’
‘I don’t need to ring him yet, darling,’ said Sylvie, dropping down and placing a wet flannel on my forehead. ‘Breathe. Let’s breathe together. You remember. See it like a circle – stop at the top, breathe slowly out. Now.’
‘Oh, Sylvie,’ I shouted, crying. ‘Get me Richard.’
‘Why?’
‘I need him.’
‘We need each other,’ said Sylvie.
I stared at her. I bit the inside of my lip until a throbbing ridge formed, diverting pain. I shook my head, my cheek pressing against the side of the bath.
‘I can phone the labour ward again for you if you like.’
My muscles began to unclench. I lay in the bath, panting. The heat drew out all my own familiar body scents, the smell of creased skin between breasts, and the salty back of my neck, and sweat rolling from my hairline. A pulse in my forehead banged. I breathed. I was beached but alive, ecstatic at the receding pain, shocked by what had gone before.
‘They say to time you and call again in an hour.’
‘Let me talk to them.’
‘You can’t, darling,’ said Sylvie. ‘Look at you. Just relax.’
Sleep with Me Page 23
