Born of Woman

by Wendy Perriam

  The vicar flung his handful of dust, ‘Ashes to ashes’ punched out like a rugby song. Lyn stared at the oblong box lying so snugly in its oblong hole. Never before had Hester been so submissive, fitted the space she was given, done what she was told. He felt he ought to haul her out again, rip the wood apart and let her holler. He stepped towards the edge. The ground came rushing towards him, Hester’s mouth a black and screaming hole. The vicar grabbed his elbow, led him away. Jennifer was already standing by the porch and he was pushed into position beside her. Death was still muddled up with weddings—a long reception-line snaking towards him, queuing up to pump him by the hand. Jennifer was sniffing and smiling at once, as she had done three years ago, except she had been white and radiant then, instead of black.

  All the locals’ names were crumbling into dust. Three short years he had been away, and they all looked much the same as when he’d left, but the last few days had warped time like elastic, mouldered all his brain cells. He was blanking out on people he had known for thirty years or more. Thank God for Jennifer who was collecting names and inviting them back for tea. Half of them declined, cold-shouldering her fairy cakes and trifles, preferring a double whisky in the Rose and Crown. Special licence for a funeral. The publican already counting up his profits. Molly Bertram was shepherding the rest. ‘Over here, Mrs Walters. Jack can take one more. No, you go with Peggy, Mr Bryant.’

  Revving of engines, slamming of car doors. He was the host and he couldn’t even drive. His legs were made of sunlight, his hands were lumps of wood. He climbed into a Land Rover. His own car was packed with strangers, the vicar’s full of hats. People chatted to him as they laboured up the hill, scraps and shreds of Hester passed between them.

  ‘Marvellous for her age …’

  ‘Of course, she was so independent …’

  ‘At least it was over quickly …’

  ‘Mustn’t blame yourself …’

  Blame … Blame? How had they found him out? If he had gone up earlier, done what his wife advised, hadn’t wasted a whole Saturday with Matthew, then Hester wouldn’t have died. He’d have had time to call the doctor, phone the ambulance, found her still alive.

  He had killed her, then—or he and Matthew had. Matthew had sent messages and money (always money with Matthew) and sensible advice. Drive in daylight, try and keep her cheerful, phone if you need us, always ready to help.

  More time wasted fondling Jennifer. Caressing her breasts while Hester gasped for water. Stopping for picnic kisses when his mother was a corpse. They were probably filling in that hole now, earth falling on her face.

  ‘Mind the step,’ said the driver. Somehow they had reached the house while he was still fighting off the grave-diggers, scrabbling at the soil. How could he have missed road and hills and forest; bumped across seven cattle-grids and not even felt them rumble?

  He staggered up the path into his house—Hester‘s house—except, for the first time in his life, she wasn’t there. His wife was Mrs Winterton now, already pouring tea. She was using the best gold-rimmed Dresden china which Hester had packed away when Thomas died, the damask cloths, the silver apostle spoons. All those fine fancy things belonged to Matthew’s era. He and Hester had made do with earthenware—thick brown clumsy stuff laid on the bare boards. He feared his mother might march back and demand less fuss.

  ‘Have a cup of tea, Lyn. You look frozen stiff.’ Molly Bertram mothering him, passing him Jennifer’s ham-and-mushroom patties. ‘Try one of these. You ought to eat, you know.’ Eating herself, mouth full, a mushroom fragment caught in one side tooth; dressed in some skittish mauvey thing instead of seemly black.

  People thronging all around him, invading Hester’s privacy. Half of them had shunned his invitation, yet the house still bulged with bodies. He crept towards the hearth. Despite the sun, he felt chilled and corpse-like from the inside out. However many fires they lit, the house refused to thaw. Jennifer had tried to tame it, but it still shrugged off her overtures. It was an uneasy mixture now of her and Hester—Jennifer’s blaze and polish on the ground floor, and the barer, greyer death-knell of the bedrooms.

  Someone joined him by the hearth. ‘How’s Matthew?’

  Lyn jumped. ‘Er … fine.’

  ‘Couldn’t he come up?’

  ‘Well, no, he …’

  ‘Are his boys doing well?’

  ‘Yes. Very.’

  ‘Any sons yourself yet, Lyn?’

  ‘N … no.’ He turned away, grabbed a sausage roll to stop his mouth. You had to breed up here. Sons meant extra pairs of hands to help with the harvest or the lambing, to carry on the line. They’d be wondering what was wrong with him. A strong young wife like Jennifer should be swelling out by now. He pushed through the crowd to find her. She was surrounded by a group of older women, all mobbing her with questions.

  ‘Such a pleasure to meet you, Mrs Winterton. We always wondered why you’d never …’

  ‘How did you come to meet your husband, dear?’

  ‘Reckon you’d like to stay up here—make the house more modern? Remember what I told you. If there’s anything you want, even if it’s only a chat or a …’

  ‘I understand no one’s found a Will?’

  Lyn winced, tried to catch Jennifer’s eye. She had created a sort of party all around her—fancy clothes, fancy food, hum of conversation. Hester would have hated it. Hester kept her doors shut, her parlour blinds drawn down. Even the vicar had swapped his tea for Scotch and was stuffing himself with cake.

  ‘Delicious chocolate gâteau, Mrs Winterton. You’re a very good cook, I see.’

  ‘It’s my job, Mr Arnold. I was trained in domestic science.’

  ‘Oh, you cook for a living, do you?’ Little flakes of chocolate spraying from his lip.

  ‘No, nothing as grand as that. I do a few dinner parties for people, or things like weddings, sometimes. And I sell my stuff—you know, jams, chutneys, pâtés, to the local delicatessen.’

  Lyn slipped into the circle. ‘She does it for fun,’ he muttered. ‘Just a hobby.’ Didn’t want them saying he couldn’t keep her, that his own job was underpaid and tied to Matthew’s whim, that Matthew paid the bills but kept the purse-strings.

  The vicar stroked his chin, left a smear of chocolate icing. ‘Pity you didn’t meet your mother-in-law. She was a very inventive cook, you know. Found ingredients in the fields and hedgerows and concocted all sorts of things, even her own medicines. And she was the only one up here who still made cheeses.’

  ‘Cheeses?’

  ‘Oh yes, you’ve probably seen the moulds. They’re …’

  Lyn tried to manoeuvre his wife into a corner, get her on her own. ‘Ask them to leave,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t feel well.’

  ‘Hush, darling—they’ll hear you. Go and lie down for a minute. They’ll understand. They’ll be leaving soon, in any case.’

  ‘No, they won’t, they’ll …’ He was talking to the wall. His wife had been swallowed up again.

  ‘Mr Winterton?’

  He jumped. Another face ballooning from his childhood—grizzled perm, scatty hat, eyes lost in their wrinkles. Mrs Wise from Alwinton smiling with her off-white china teeth. He tried to make his mouth work, use solemn straitjacketed words to fit a death. A blob of trifle was quivering on her spoon.

  ‘Yes, it … er … was a shock, Mrs Wise.’ Yellow custard plopping onto her lilac Crimplene bodice, sliding down her cleavage. ‘No, the doctor wasn’t there. I’m afraid he …’

  He lurched away, collided with someone else, a tall tweedy woman who smelt of dogs. She grabbed his arm, bony fingers digging in his flesh. ‘We’re all so very sorry, Mr Winterton.’ Face thrust close to his. Purple gauze of thread-veins, mole with a coarse black hair in it sprouting from her cheek. ‘I understand it happened very suddenly?’

  He nodded, pulled his arm free. Impossible to escape. People all around him—mouths, mouths, mouths. Everybody guzzling—swilling tea, gorging cakes, gulping down his mother. He wa
s bleeding like those cherries in the trifle, red stain into white. His head was a meringue—hollow, full of air. The smallest guest could have crunched him up to nothing, crumbled him away. Clack-clack-clacking. Empty words.

  ‘No, thanks, Mrs Dixon, I’ve still got half a cup left. No, we weren’t there when it …’ He picked up a cupcake, put it down again. Pink sugared petals sprinkled on white icing. Flowers on a winding-sheet. ‘We couldn’t leave before, you see. We didn’t realise quite how bad she … b … bad … she …’

  Go away!

  They didn’t go till evening. Lyn lay on the high, narrow bed—Susannah’s bed—the one she had died in. Both his mothers dead now. He tried to make some sense of it—poke a finger in his grief and feel it smart and bleed. It didn’t. Death was still a party dragging on downstairs.

  He pressed his aching head against the pillow. Susannah must have lain here, exhausted from such company. How had she ever borne it—so young and dazzling a creature amongst all these country bumpkins with their coarse complexions and their baggy clothes? Susannah’s skin was Dresden, her body cut from silk. He knew because he had seen her. Just a glimpse of her, hidden in a locket, one curl of her hair. He had found the locket when he was still a stripling in short pants, rifling through the huge mahogany roll-top which belonged to his dead father. The desk was locked and the room was out-of-bounds, but Hester had gone shopping and a boy at school had taught him to pick locks.

  He had held the booty in his hands—a heavy heart-shaped locket on a golden chain. He’d forced it with his dirty fingernails. One side opened to reveal a lock of hair, faded but still fair, curling gently like a smile. The other side was jammed. He put a penknife to it, sliced his finger, bled through two large handkerchiefs before he won. The prize was worth the blood. The young girl gazing at him was a different species from the rugged village women who creaked and clacked in Mepperton or the spindly schoolgirls he avoided at his school. Her face was prouder, finer, with high, preening cheekbones contradicted by the wanton tumble of hair which cascaded to her shoulders, one daring curl falling across the cleavage which the locket-frame cut off. Her eyes were huge, wooing, shameless; long lashes almost fluttering him towards her; moist lips slightly parted as if to proposition him.

  ‘Susannah,’ he whispered. He knew who she was, because he had already drawn her in his dreams. Now he made his sketches fit the truth, until Susannah rose huge and three-dimensional in every surface of his life. For eleven days he owned and worshipped her (adored, beloved), sleeping with her locket every night, staring at it, touching it cool against his heated body—touching himself.

  When he came, Susannah held him stiff, reassured him afterwards when he felt shamed and sticky; kissed his lips apart when he had bitten them to stop himself from crying out.

  The eleventh night he was lying awake with her, pyjama cord undone, locket against his groin. They were making noise together, forgetting the other, second, older mother whose bedroom door was opposite and who didn’t have a groin. Suddenly Hester was looming up above them, white shadow shaming the darkness, frown stretching to the ceiling.

  He dragged his pyjamas back again, hauled the blankets over him. There was a tiny thud as the locket fell off the bed and glinted on the floorboards. Hester pounced.

  He never saw the golden heart again. Nothing was ever said. The night was locked away, the desk was sold, and Hester kept her bedroom door ajar. For a month he slept with his hands outside the blankets.

  His mind was less obedient. When he tried again, he found Susannah as unabashed and eager as before. He no longer had her photograph, but he had transferred the negative deep inside his soul and printed and reprinted it so that her features smiled from each room and shelf and mantel, as they had done once when Thomas was alive. It was only Hester who had removed her rival’s likeness from the house, after she’d married the widower. Matthew had told him that, much later on—one of the reasons Matthew had left for London. Lyn often wondered where those photos were—burnt or smashed or …

  He leapt off the bed. He could hear voices in the hallway, the front door slamming, opening, slamming. The guests must be leaving now. He had gone upstairs to rest and be alone, not tangle with Susannah. If he was well enough for her, then he should be down there with the others, dragging out his duty, sharing the farewells. He stared in the small scratched mirror on the dressing table. His eyes looked like singe-holes in a sheet, too dark and fierce for his pallid washed-out face.

  He smoothed his crumpled jacket, stood listening at the door. Goodbyes and thank-yous echoing up the staircase, offers of help, bounty, comfort, patronage; Jennifer netted down in Village Aid; sucked into coffee mornings, shopping rotas, sewing circles, church bazaars. Nothing of her left.

  The door closed on the last of them. Silence tiptoed out from corners and stretched itself like a cat which had been shooed away by too much noise. Lyn walked warily downstairs, glanced into the sitting-room. Yes—everyone had gone now, but the place was littered with their droppings. Ashtrays belching on to tables, cake crumbs trodden into rugs. They had even left their smell behind—the faint and lingering odour of feet and sweat and bodies, cigarettes and scent. He shut the door on it, went through into the kitchen. Jennifer was swaddling pies in greaseproof, packing cakes away, all the surfaces around her piled high with dirty dishes. She came towards him.

  ‘I hoped you’d be asleep, darling. Do you feel a little better? Is there anything you want?’

  ‘No,’ he said to both. ‘Look, let me help with that.’

  She shook her head. ‘You go back to bed. You look quite washed out.’

  He rubbed at a lipstick stain on a gold-rimmed Dresden cup, smeared it, made it worse. ‘I’d have thought Molly might have …’

  ‘She offered—more than once—but I wouldn’t let her help. She’s done enough already. Anyway, I’m quite enjoying it. It went so well today, I …’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Yes. Everyone was so wonderfully kind and helpful and really interested in us. I’m amazed so many came, Lyn. There must have been over sixty at the service. They just turned up, some of them from miles away. I think that’s … marvellous. I mean in Cobham you only go to a funeral if you’re a close friend or relation with your own private invitation. The church was full today without any invitations. Do you know what Molly said …’

  ‘Quite a lot, I imagine.’

  ‘Oh, Lyn, don’t. She’s been such a comfort. She said it’s like a family up here. That’s why all those people were at the service. It’s a sort of loyalty. You see, even if your mother was … well … a bit of a private person, she was still one of the family. You are, too, she said.’

  Lyn slooshed tea-leaves down the sink, dregs clammy and still warm. So Molly Bertram was his mother now—sister, cousin, keeper. Jennifer was forging all those friendly pressed-steel handcuffs his mother had spent a lifetime snapping out of.

  ‘Molly told me how talented you were. She said her mother knew you as a boy and even then …’

  ‘No one knew us, Jennifer. We hardly went anywhere. We were never like the rest. We stayed shut up like …’ He hated the self-pity in his voice. People with unhappy childhoods should be banned.

  ‘Darling …’ She kissed him. ‘It’s over now. Things will be better—you’ll see. I mean, there’s nothing to … keep you here now. You could even sell the house if you …’

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’ He pounced on the wreckage of a cheese-and-onion quiche. If Hernhope went, he wouldn’t exist at all. Matthew had taken over his head and hands, and Jennifer owned the body in between. He might snuff out his boyhood, but he didn ‘t want the whole place razed, Hernhope Tipp-Exed off the map like some gigantic error. Hernhope was like God. You might not believe in Him, but you couldn’t do without Him. Even if you yawned through services or shivered in the cold vaults of the church, you still preferred to keep the temple standing.

  ‘Look, I’m sorry I shouted. I …’

  ‘Don’t worry,
darling. Look, why don’t you go back upstairs and try and sleep?’

  He couldn’t sleep, but he trailed upstairs again, simply because it was tidier and his wife wasn’t there to make him feel a brute. He stopped outside Susannah’s bedroom door. He and Jennifer were sleeping in that room, not only because his own was dark and cramped, but because he had always longed to infiltrate it. In his boyhood it had been permanently shut up, as if the doomed young hussy were a dangerous presence still. He had often tried the door, peered in through the keyhole, imagined Susannah, flushed and voluptuous, lying on the bed. All he had seen was a tiny patch of floorboard.

  He had been stunned to find the room so ordinary. The bare essentials—bare. Bed and wardrobe, washstand, hard cane chair. The whole of Hester’s house was sparsely furnished. She had sold the larger and more expensive items, and disapproved of frilly and frivolous extras like cushions, pictures, pets. In Jennifer’s home they’d had velvet rocking chairs, cocker spaniels, silken tassels on the curtains, and little embroidered tray cloths under plates of langues de chat. He envied Jennifer’s fat upholstered childhood with its plumped-up bolsters and its solemn photographs in silver frames. (Susannah had silver frames and velvet fingers. Susannah had a lap-dog.)

  He dragged his clothes off, shivering in the cold. The sun had stayed behind in the churchyard. Even when it shone, it never really warmed you. Just a bright veneer of enamel over the iron core of the countryside, dazzle without heart. He touched his face. The skin felt dry and smooth. He hadn’t cried yet. People must have noticed. Unnatural, they’d be saying—callous and hard-hearted. He could feel the tears dammed somewhere in his gut, underneath that one small sausage roll which was all he had eaten since the day before, but which had swollen like a boulder. When Jennifer ‘s mother had died just eighteen months ago, she had sobbed for three whole days. Real tears which soaked the sheets. He kicked the skirting. Self-pitying again. He had a wife, for heaven’s sake—a bloody saint, in fact, who put up with his moods—a job, a house, a …