Born of Woman

by Wendy Perriam

  She rushed and fetched her handbag, counted out the notes—more than she had thought. Susie had handed over all that she could wangle out of Sparrow, Jo had given her what she grandly called an advance on salary, and there was still a little remaining from Matthew’s handouts. All the same, it wouldn’t last her long, and she ought to save it for more important things—like keeping herself and the child alive. And what about the journey on from Newcastle? She would have to take a taxi and that would cost a fortune, if she could even find one in the early hours who would be willing to drive so far. He would be bound to charge her double, and that on top of the train fare would completely clean her out. It would have to be a coach, then. They were three or four times cheaper than British Rail. They also took double the time.

  Was she mad, for heaven’s sake—planning an all-night journey on bumpy snowy roads with the tiniest of babies who should be moved no further than from cot to lap, treated like cut-glass? If she waited just another month or so, the child would be stronger, and Mick or Molly would meet her at the station, drive her up from Newcastle. She would save precious money, cut down any risk. She would also destroy her overriding reason for going there at all—to bring luck and joy to Hernhope through a first-foot. Only this one night counted. If she left it just a day, let alone a month, the magic disappeared. The house needed a new chance. She could see it standing desolate and blinded, dust and nettles choking it, damp seeping through its seams, gasping for its dark and lucky stranger. She and Lyn and the child—they, too, were in desperate need of luck, a change in fortunes.

  The baby was crying now, as if he sensed her agitation. She carried him to the bathroom—he was wet and needed changing—sponged his tiny penis. She was suddenly wildly glad he was a boy. Only males could bring good luck as first-foots, carry on the line. Hernhope craved both luck and heir, and this child was truly heir, grandson of Thomas Winterton himself. Lyn didn’t want an heir, yet could he really object to one so tiny and so vulnerable, more or less an orphan?

  Yes, he could and would. The whole idea was preposterous, totally absurd. What kind of luck would it be if the first-foot died of pneumonia, the symbol of new life perishing itself? And if the journey didn’t harm him, her problems still weren’t over. She might drag all that way up North, only to find that Lyn had left already, run away again. Even if he were there, he wouldn’t admit a bastard child, agree to share his life with it. She buttoned the baby back into his stretch-suit, returned him to his cot. There probably weren’t any coaches, anyway, not this late on New Year’s Eve. That would end the matter, and she could settle down and stop wasting her time on pipe-dreams.

  She picked up the S to Z directory, turned to the Vs. V for Victoria Coach Station. All the main coach lines went from there. It wouldn’t hurt just to make enquiries. She might need the coach times later, when she planned a visit to Molly. She dialled the number, let it ring some time. No one seemed in any hurry to answer. Perhaps they had gone off duty, or the service was suspended on New Year’s Eve. Better really to forget the whole idea, fix herself a drink and try and …

  ‘Oh, hallo. I wondered if there was still a coach to Newcastle tonight? What? 10.15? Hold on a second, will you.’

  She peered at her watch. It was already a quarter to ten. More or less impossible to catch a coach which left in half an hour, when she wasn’t even dressed. On the other hand, she could always hitch her nightie up, fling a coat on top, order a taxi and offer it double if it broke the speed-limit. Victoria wasn’t far.

  ‘Look, do I need to book, or shall I just turn up? Oh, no!’ She slumped back in her chair. The coach was fully booked. She could simply go along, the girl had said, in the hope of a last-minute cancellation, but there wasn’t much of a chance. The 10.15 was the last coach leaving for the North and was usually packed out. Why risk the cold, only to be unlucky, trail home again with a chilled and whimpering baby? Yet if she did get on, their luck might last a twelvemonth, even longer. The right first-foot could change a family’s whole fortune, set it on a different path. She drummed her fingers on the table in a fret of indecision. There wasn’t time to dither. Every second wasted was one less to get there at all. She checked her watch again. 10.47 now. The thing was quite ridiculous. She would need bottles for the baby, Thermoses of boiling water, all his clothes and gear. By the time she had collected those together, phoned a taxi and waited for it to come, the coach would be pulling out of Victoria as she opened the front door.

  The girl at the coach station was still miraculously holding on.

  Jennifer could hear her chatting to someone the other end of the phone.

  ‘Excuse, me please. Are there any other coaches, different lines, perhaps, which might leave later, or go from somewhere else, or …?’

  ‘Well, there are the independent companies, but I don’t know much about them, I’m afraid. I doubt if they’d run this late, in any case. There’s nothing else from here tonight. I’m sorry.’

  Jennifer thanked her, replaced the receiver. If only she had spoken to Molly earlier … No—it was just as well she hadn’t, and that the last coach was fully booked. It had brought her to her senses, stopped her racing off on some madcap escapade she would later regret. She must settle down, forget the whole idea. She pushed away the phone-book, relaxed back with the dictionary of folklore which was lying on the table, still open at First-footing.

  ‘In Scotland and the Borders, the first person to enter the house on New Year’s Day receives a kiss, in silence, from whomever opens the door.’

  Lyn would open the door. He wouldn’t kiss a baby, but he might kiss her. She remembered his mouth—soft lips and sharp stubble and the graze of his teeth beyond that restless probing tongue which fused with hers until she hardly knew which was which or where his lips and hers began or ended. On their wedding night, he had used only his mouth, kissed her everywhere—fiercely, famishedly, as if he wanted to devour her. Only in the morning had he actually entered her, his mouth still joining in, his dark embarrassed eyes shut against the light while she opened everything towards him.

  … A man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined unto his wife and they shall be one flesh. They had been one flesh, that morning—joined, clinched, coupled, breathing in time with one another, hands clasped, tongues entwined. And Lyn had left mother and father—his mother literally. Risked Hester’s jealousy and anger in taking a wife at all. She remembered his frantic attempts at recompense, the never-acknowledged presents, the letters penned in guilt and ruined sleep. He’d been torn between wife and mother—and wife had won. So how could she allow him to lose in her own similar tussle between husband and child, hack herself away from her own flesh?

  She returned to the book, to try and calm herself. Memories were dangerous—kindled desires, then confused them with regrets. The tiny print was trembling on the page. ‘A kiss under the mistletoe is particularly propitious since it is a pledge of peace and goodwill, and symbolises reconciliation where people have been estranged.’

  Reconciliation. The very word produced a stab of longing. To heal things with a kiss, to start again … Jo had a bunch of mistletoe hanging in her hall, a withered bunch already gathering dust. If only she could put it to some use. Hester had written in her diaries about the power of mistletoe, how country people called the plant ‘All-Heal’, how it was the symbol of new life and hope because it was sappy green when its host was brown and dead. On an impulse, she darted out to the hall, broke off a tiny sprig, stuck it in her dressing-gown. If she couldn’t go up to Hernhope, then at least …

  What did she mean, couldn’t? There were still trains, weren’t there? If she blued her last penny on train and taxi fares, it was money well spent. Trains were safer, anyway, and faster. Only three hours to Newcastle and a toilet on board where she could sponge and change the baby. She darted back to the phone, grabbed the A-D directory this time, opened it at the Bs for British Rail, ran her finger down the list of regions. North-East England—that was the
one for Newcastle.

  She dialled the number wrong, re-dialled, sat waiting in a fever of impatience. The last train might be leaving as she sat grounded in Jo’s house, listening to that mocking ringing-tone.

  ‘Answer,’ she muttered. ‘Answer.’ The man at the other end was probably drunk or dozing off. She would count to ten, and if no one had answered by then, she’d order a taxi and go directly to King’s Cross, chance her luck.

  ‘Eight, nine, nine …’ The number was still ringing, though she was counting slower and slower. She would make it twenty, then. ‘Eleven, twelve, thirteen …’ She’d better take a waterproof sheet, a flannel in a sponge-bag. ‘Fourteen, fifteen …’ Bottles, nappies, Thermos. ‘Sixteen, sev … Oh, hallo. Thank God! I thought nobody was there. Look, can you tell me …?’ She tried to calm her voice. She sounded choked, hysterical.

  ‘I beg your pardon? Seven o’clock? It’s gone, you mean? It can’t have! Surely there’s something later than that? Yes. I know, but …’

  The man had rung off. The last train on New Year’s Eve to anywhere in the North left at nineteen hundred hours. That was gospel.

  She walked slowly to the window, sick with disappointment. Well, that was retribution for refusing to stick to her original decision to go nowhere and do nothing. She would have to content herself with memories of Lyn, his stars, his winter skies. She tweaked the curtain back, stared in shock. There were no stars, only snow—swift soft-footed flakes tearing tiny holes in the strobed and whirling darkness. When had it started and why had it not been forecast? They had promised milder weather for the South. She closed her eyes. The snow went on falling, falling, underneath them, until it lay deep and silent on the Cheviots. April back in Hernhope twenty months ago. Sun raw and radiant on the snow, and that mysterious voice beyond it. ‘It is well that we are here.’ Hadn’t she known at that moment that she and Lyn belonged at Hernhope? Had Hester sent this snow to nudge her memory?

  She rushed back to the cot. The baby was still awake, eyes huge and staring in the darkness. There was something strange about this child who slept so little, watched so anxiously—what had Sister said about him—old before his time? She took him back to the window, still swaddled in his blankets, lifted up the curtain. He must share this moment with her, witness his first snow. She shut her eyes, swapped London’s streets for the white and watching hills. Again, she felt Hester’s presence, Hester’s strength. She had been fretting about cold, risks, pneumonia, other women, when perhaps she was protected—Hester’s power around her, as before.

  She must dare, for once, have faith, courage, scorn and surmount the risks. It wouldn’t be easy—she didn’t kid herself. Lyn might refuse to listen, might even shut the door on them as Hester had done to first-foots in the past. The weather was at its cruellest. That April had been the last lame dregs of winter before the softer, gentler spring. Now they had three long months of brutal cold before them. She pressed her face to the window, watched the snow slam on to the rooftops, the wind rip gashes through it. It wasn’t meant to be easy. Hester’s life had always been a struggle and if she was heir to it, then struggle was her dowry.

  ‘Be not afraid …’ She jumped. Who had spoken? Was she merely kidding herself along, inventing voices because she feared the silence? The Bible was full of ‘Fear nots’. There had been one in the passage she had just recalled, when the dazzling cloud enveloped the disciples and they were ‘sore afraid’. Transfigurations could happen even now, thirty years of darkness slink away in the blaze of one new candle. It would come again—the glory, the shining, blinding spendour on the mountain top.

  She let the curtain fall, tucked the child in his blankets. She couldn’t reach the moutains without some means of transport. She had to get to Hernhope now. Hester was waiting, had offered her protection. Lyn needed her up there. Hernhope had no light, no eyes, cried out for a ministering wife.

  She stood tense and hunched, trying desperately to think up some solution. Whichever way she travelled, it would take hours to reach the house. If she didn’t leave immediately, it would be too late altogether. Someone else might call there in the morning, cross the threshold before she had even got as far as Newcastle—someone fair, unlucky, unchosen—a tradesman or a forester, Molly Bertram herself. She sank down on the sofa, almost crying with frustration, sprang up again, seized the Yellow Pages. The independent coaches—she had quite forgotten them. They didn’t sound too hopeful, but she must clutch at any straw.

  She turned to the Cs, then back to the Bs—swore. Coach services came under B for Buses. Even when she found it, the list was disappointingly short. The first number didn’t answer, the second was engaged. The third was friendly but operated only in the South. The fourth had stopped its service to Newcastle just six months ago, but could recommend another larger company which still served the North. The baby was screaming now and she could hardly hear at all. She took him on her lap, tried to calm him while she scribbled down the number. The screams continued through the call.

  ‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear you. No, Newcastle, I said. You do? What time? Oh wonderful! Tonight, though—New Year’s Eve? You’re sure? It’s not full, is it? You’re absolutely certain? Can I book, or do I …?

  She slammed the receiver down, hand shaking with relief. Was it just good luck, or had Hester somehow …? There wasn’t time for speculation. She had to get to Pancras Road, where that miraculous coach departed. She picked up the phone again, dialled the first of a list of taxi firms which Jo had tacked above it.

  The baby was still screaming. She rushed upstairs with him, wrapped him in a second layer of woollies, with a shawl on top of those. Her own clothes were still in the suitcase she had packed to come to Putney, Lyn’s new red Christmas sweater lying on the top. She tugged it out, tucked it round the baby. Red not for danger, but for daring, love. She whipped off her nightdress, exchanged it for her warmest skirt and jersey, emptied all the useless clutter from her bag and filled it up with baby clothes and nappies. Then pounded down to the kitchen, switched on the kettle, found a Thermos flask, collected powdered milk and bottles. She scribbled a note to Jo, added an IOU for the long-distance call to Molly and her advance on salary, left her Lyn’s Christmas cake as a New Year offering. She could bake him a hundred other cakes once she and he …

  Only fifty minutes before the coach set off. If only it wasn’t so far to Pancras Road. She pulled on her coat, switched off lights and fire, lugged bags and carry-cot into the hall. She was ready to go now—but the taxi wasn’t.

  ‘Hurry,’ she prayed. ‘Hurry.’

  She opened the door a crack, to see if it was pulling up outside. The dark angry night rushed in through the gap, wind rasping, snowflakes clawing at her hair. She heard the cackle of a New Year’s party spill from the house opposite, throb of a stereo, whoop of a trombone. A tinselled laurel swag, festooned above the window, sent strange spiky shadows across the path.

  Laurel! She closed the door, dashed back to the kitchen. She had forgotten something vital. The first-foot was only lucky if he bore important gifts—she had just read that in the book—a sprig of evergreen for continuing life and fertility; bread as an ancient token of welcome and to ensure an ample supply of food for the coming year; salt to symbolise wealth; coal to promise year-long warmth and heat. She hacked a slice from Jo’s staling wholemeal loaf, tipped a shake of salt into a paper bag. Coal? There wasn’t any. But what did they say—‘coals to Newcastle’? Well, that shouldn’t be a problem, then. She grinned to herself, felt crazily elated. Only evergreen now. There was nothing green in Jo’s brick-and-concrete back yard, and she could hardly steal that neighbour’s laurel wreath. But Putney was full of gardens. They must stop on the way and break off a piece of fir or yew or holly—perhaps from Matthew’s house—his one offering to his child. The Winterton garden was dark with yews and laurels. When she had first visited, she had shied away from them—felt they were gloomy, poisonous, blocking out the sun. But after Hester died, the old crone up a
t Mepperton who had acted as both midwife and embalmer in her time, had told her that the yew tree lived to such an immense old age, it had become a symbol of immortality. All evergreens were powerful, could never fade or brown, and therefore triumphed over death and dissolution. She had followed the woman’s suggestion, placed a branch of yew in Hester’s coffin, laid it between her hands. She would repeat the ritual, pick a sprig from Matthew’s oldest tree and take it up to Hernhope, so that Matthew’s seed, his child, should bring the house new and vigorous life.

  If she ever got there. She glanced at her watch. Only forty-three minutes to go now, and still no sign of the taxi. All her preparations would be pointless unless it arrived in the next few seconds. She fretted up and down the hall, disturbing flurries of brochures, dodging the bunch of mistletoe swinging from its shaggy loop of string.

  Mistletoe! She had almost forgotten it—an evergreen which promised peace as well as immortality, and was also an emblem of fertility because it flourished all year without a ground root. Hester had made potions of it for women trying to conceive. She reached up, snapped off a second sprig, a larger one this time and thick with berries.

  The baby’s screams were echoing through the hall. Was he hungry, wet, soiled? There wasn’t time to check. She would have to feed and change him on the coach—except she would probably miss it now. She dared not look at her watch again, see those cruel hands pouncing on the seconds, stranding her in London, cutting off her luck. The baby seemed to be howling out her own frustration. She tried to soothe him, stuck the sprig of mistletoe in the hood of his carry-cot.