by Lee, Tanith
At about ten-thirty when she was running a long bath, Emma knocked on the door.
‘Please don’t be worried,’ she said at once, ‘but I think I’d better phone the doctor. He won’t be there, of course, but they’ll have someone. She’s terrifically hot and she keeps crying. You know she never cries. I’m sure it’s nothing, but I want to be sure.’
‘All right,’ said Rachaela. ‘Do you want to bring her up here?’
‘No, no. And I can phone from downstairs. I’ll come back and tell you what they say.’
‘Yes.’
When Emma was gone, Rachaela got into the bath. She shaved her legs and underarms, and shampooed her hair. Emma knocked again. Rachaela went to the door in a towel, and with a second towel wrapped round her head.
‘Someone’s coming out. They said about an hour.’
‘I see.’
‘You’ll come down, won’t you,’ said Emma.
‘If you think I should.’
‘Yes you must, Rachaela. She’s your child.’ Emma looked pale and distraught.
Rachaela said nothing and Emma went away.
Rachaela rinsed her hair and wrapped it up in another towel. She dressed and put on her shoes and went down to Emma’s flat.
Emma held Ruth in her arms. She sat down and fanned the baby gently with a Japanese fan. Ruth looked like a radish, as if her blood were slowly boiling. She snivelled weakly, on and on.
They said nothing, but sat facing each other.
The rest of the hour ticked by.
‘It’s Doctor Chatterjee,’ said Emma at last. ‘I’ve never had to call him out, I don’t know what he’s like. Poor man, he must dread these late calls. Doctors have a very rough time of it.’ She fanned Ruth. ‘You should have taken her to the clinic, Rachaela,’ she said, without accusation. ‘You never did.’
‘No.’
‘She would have had regular checks, and any shots. They give them so much protection nowadays. But Ruth hasn’t had any of it.’
‘She’s strong,’ said Rachaela. It was instinct which made her say it.
‘Of course, of course she is. Silly old Emma getting in a state about nothing. Poor sausage, poor pretty.’
The baby was feebly sick on herself and Emma’s cardigan.
Emma rose without flurry or distress to clean this up. She spoke to Ruth, explaining what they were doing.
Rachaela sat on the chintz chair, and asked herself if she felt anything, any pang. But nothing was there in her. It was as if Ruth were truly Emma’s child and for some reason Rachaela had had to come down and witness this scene. The baby’s sickness turned her stomach, affronted her. Ruth had frequently sicked up her bottle milk, as if on purpose, like the endless stinking miasmas of the wet nappies.
While Emma and Ruth were still in the bathroom, the door sounded.
Rachaela got up and answered the phone, pressed the button and let in Doctor Chatterjee, who presently arrived in the flat.
He was a small, fat Indian with a fussy manner and clever eyes.
Emma brought him Ruth and he examined the baby carefully.
‘Yes, you did right to call me,’ he said, to Rachaela. ‘This is a very sick child. I am recommending that we take her to the hospital immediately.’
Emma exclaimed in horror.
Doctor Chatterjee looked from one woman to the other.
‘You are the mother, yes?’ he said to Rachaela.
‘Yes.’
To save time we will go in my car.’
‘Thank you,’ said Emma humbly.
She wrapped Ruth up too thoroughly in her fear, and the doctor loosened the blanket a little.
Rachaela took her damp hair out of the towel.
Emma brought two of Ruth’s favourite fluffy toys.
Outside the night was hot and compressed, waiting for a storm. Chip papers strewed the pavement and a buckled can of Sprite lay by the back wheel of the doctor’s Sierra.
They drove fast but wisely to St Mary’s, the great brick façade like that of a prison, the chimney of the incinerator.
As Ruth was admitted, Emma’s eyes disgorged two tears. She controlled herself sternly, forcing her face into a puffy obstinate shape.
They sat for a long time on brown plastic seats in a white corridor.
Nurses busily went up and down, sometimes pausing to exchange words and careless laughter. A trolley was wheeled past by two brutish-looking orderlies chewing gum. This was a disconcerting contrast to the chambers of sickness all about, the bodies lying in white bleached wards with pieces of themselves cut away for ever, the hidden grey figures struggling in the last embrace of life.
Rachaela cringed at the hospital. She had never liked them, perhaps taught by her mother’s obsessive fear. People did not go to a hospital to be cured but to be killed or maimed.
She wished she might go home, leaving Emma to watch and wait. But this would be beyond all bounds. It was not possible. She, Rachaela, was the frantic mother. She must stay and try to play her part.
What did she feel? Nothing, nothing.
It was like Ruth, to bring her to a place she hated and loathed, and make her sit here for hours with wet hair.
The Scarabae were never ill.
Was Ruth then not true Scarabae after all?
The sister came in her evening blue.
‘Hallo, Mrs Day? We’re doing all we can, but she’s a very ill little girl I’m afraid.’
She hesitated for Rachaela to scream, weep or swoon. Emma obliged by bursting into tears.
‘There. Please try not to be too upset. We’ve got a good chance.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Emma apologized, as if her tears put them all in jeopardy. ‘I’m being silly.’
‘I expect you’d like a cup of tea. We’ll see what we can do.’
‘Thank you, that would be lovely,’ said Emma. When the sister had gone she said, ‘They’re all so kind. These people are saints. I’m sure it will be all right.’
Later, they let Rachaela, alone, go to look in on her baby.
The room was full of apparatus, empty of doctors. Then one came in, looking harassed.
‘You’re Ruth’s mother? That’s right. Well I’m going to be honest with you. We’re rather concerned. We’re going to try some further measures to get the temperature down and they may have to be a little drastic.’
‘I see,’ said Rachaela.
Probably he took her nothingness for the numbness of shock. She hoped so. She did not want the hostility of these people in their robes of snow.
He told her some more, including complex words she could not follow and which she was sure she was not meant to. In the hall of the magicians she was supposed to remain a novice.
Afterwards she went back to Emma and gave her an expurgated version.
Emma was ashen. She had not been able to drink the tea, although she had tried, so as not to be ungrateful.
They waited through the night in the white corridor.
At five am, the harassed doctor appeared and came towards them slowly.
Emma stood up and reached convulsively for Rachaela’s hand.
The doctor frowned. He said that the latest measures had been a success, that Ruth’s temperature had dropped and her breathing loosened. In half an hour Rachaela would be able to go and sit with her.
Emma cried again. She thanked the doctor so earnestly his mundane face lit up with the impatient awareness of a saviour.
Rachaela was shepherded into the room to sit with her pale, saved child. She sat down. She had wanted and hoped that Ruth would die. There was no reason to lie to herself. Is this what her own mother had wanted? Had she looked at the living Rachaela as now Rachaela looked at Ruth?
Chapter Twelve
The child in the snow:
It lay around her like a Christmas card. The street was transformed by whiteness, fluffy and fresh on the buildings. Already there were trampled paths of icy black. The child walked along one of these, towards the house.
> She was thin, a small seven-year-old, with two thick plaits of raven black caught in blue toggles. She wore a red woolly hat and scarf and gloves, which Emma had bought her, and a dark belted mac. Her feet were in little red boots that matched the hat, also Emma’s idea. She had a satchel. Just another home-going child from the primary school.
Rachaela watched her from the kitchen window of the flat. It was a coincidence she was here at the moment the child turned on to the street.
At first Emma had taken Ruth to the school twice a day, and fetched her home at midday and at night. But most of the other children came and went alone. There were no main roads to cross, for a child it was a quarter-of-an-hour walk.
Ruth would almost certainly not come up to the flat. She would not expect Rachaela to be home in any case and always had her lunch and tea with Emma.
Today Jonquil had suggested that Isis Books be shut at three o’clock, due to the snow. The pipes had frozen and the tiny electric fire did not do much good. A male plumber would have to see to the pipes. This had annoyed Jonquil and set her steel earring swinging with temper.
Rachaela saw Ruth come to the door of the flats and disappear. She had a key.
Rachaela made her coffee and came out of the kitchen. She looked at her flat as she always did, her flat, and Ruth’s area. Generally Ruth slept up here, although now and then she would come politely to ask Rachaela if she could stay the night on Emma’s sofa. It was Emma who insisted Ruth always ask. Rachaela and Ruth knew it did not mean anything. The moment of asking was one of their few times of agreement and understanding.
Ruth’s area had been Emma’s idea also.
The child’s bed, draped in midnight blue, stood behind a wicker screen with a crimson shawl cast over it. Bells hung on the inside which occasionally Ruth, when in residence, would strike. Behind the screen too was a chest of drawers, whose top was used as a table for Ruth’s treasures, her paintbox, and her teetering tower of books.
Emma had taught her to read before school, and now the chest was piled with golden and rose fairy books, Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, and other things which perhaps Ruth did not yet grasp or should not yet be reading: Lord of the Flies, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Cleopatra. Rachaela did not oversee the books and Emma believed in stretching a child’s mind.
Any homework Ruth saw to at Emma’s flat, or sitting on the dark-blue bed. She had also had a pot plant on the chest called David. The plant, robbed of light, did not do well, and eventually David was moved down to Emma’s windows.
Half an hour after Rachaela had seen Ruth into the house, Emma’s knock sounded on the door.
Rachaela let her in.
Emma looked uneasy and at the same time glowing. Perhaps Ruth had done something especially stunning, as when she had been made chief maid of honour to the school’s May Queen. Emma had insisted Rachaela go with her, and they had stood outside the railings, in the biting May breeze, watching little girls in pink frocks and shivery legs strewing paper petals, while Ruth, in the red party dress Emma had bought her, crowned a pretty smirking child with tinsel.
‘Ruth’s eating her tea,’ said Emma, ‘I got those sausages she likes, and tomatoes.’
‘Thank you,’ said Rachaela automatically.
‘There’s been rather a development,’ said Emma.
‘What’s she done?’
There had been the time, too, when Ruth made a painting of a dragon devouring a knight which had apparently scared another child. Someone had come from the school and seen Emma, who had laughed them to scorn.
‘Done? Oh, it’s not Ruth. I’m afraid it’s me.’
‘What have you done?’
‘I don’t know where to start. It’s thrown me completely. Out of the blue.’
Emma sat down in the chair, near to Ruth’s area.
‘It’s Liz,’ she said.
Rachaela had to wrack her brains. Liz was one of the daughters, the eldest.
‘Liz,’ she prompted.
‘She’s sent me an extraordinary letter. She hardly ever writes, and now this. It’s wonderful, but she’s got herself into a state. She’s found she’s pregnant again. Not planned—she’s thirty-six. She wants to go ahead but she’s afraid she can’t manage. And apparently Brian has suggested I move in with them. There’s a large room with en-suite bath I can have, and Brian says he’ll fix me up a kitchenette. It’s a lovely house. I haven’t seen it for years, of course, but they built a big extension. The garden’s marvellous, like something from a show place...It’s just bowled me over. Cheltenham! She says she needs me. I remember the last time, she got so big. And of course she’ll have to have these wretched tests to be sure the baby’s all right.’
Rachaela took in Emma’s sprinting words belatedly, hearing each sentence over again in her head.
‘But haven’t they neglected you?’ she said.
‘No. Never. They’ve got their own lives to lead. And I can cope beautifully. My independent streak.’ Emma shone. ‘But she’s my daughter. I can’t leave her in the lurch.’
Rachaela stood in the window, the white snow behind her, feeling the weighted floor falling out of everything in slow motion.
‘So you’ll go.’
‘I must.’
‘And how long will you be gone?’
‘Well, I rather think it’s a permanent arrangement. After all, once the baby’s born, a baby-sitter is going to be useful. They’ve got to be able to have a break. And as Brian points out, well, at my age a little security might be reassuring. It’s a fabulous chance. I can’t sit back and let Liz get on with it.’
Liz has let you get on with it.
Pointless to voice the selfishness of others, it was her own selfishness which was about to suffer.
Rachaela said, ‘Have you told Ruth?’
Emma looked crestfallen through her shine, ‘No. I haven’t had the courage. And I wanted to tell you first. She’s amazing for her age. I’m sure she’ll understand. She’s fond of me, she’ll be glad for me.’
‘She loves you,’ said Rachaela.
Emma squared her shoulders.
It’s probably the best thing, Rachaela. You and she need to spend more time together.’
‘Well, we’ll certainly have to do that.’
‘Oh, dear,’ said Emma. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
For once her tone was insincere. She knew quite well.
Compared to her own flesh and blood, what was Ruth? Only a substitute. Now here was the real thing.
Swept aside.
Rachaela felt a bitter pity for her daughter, this blow about to fall like an axe.
Ruth would not be glad for Emma. Ruth also was self-centred and selfish, with all the ego-life of a child.
‘Hallo Mummy,’ said Ruth’s clear pale voice from the doorway. And then, familiarly, ‘Emma, I finished, and I put the plate in the sink like you said.’
‘Thank you, Ruth.’
‘Why are you up here?’ asked Ruth.
Here was obviously somewhere one did not go unless one must.
‘I had to see your mummy.’
‘Are you coming back down now?’
‘In a minute, darling.’
Rather than leave, Ruth crossed the threshold into the room and went inside the screen to her own area. The bells jangled and Emma jumped.
She looked at Rachaela appealingly.
‘Why not tell her now?’ said Rachaela, shrinking and cruel at once.
‘Do you think—? Oh lord, I suppose I should.’
Emma stood at a loss.
And Ruth came back from behind the screen with a white paper in her hand, brightly painted green and mauve.
‘Here’s my seahorse, Emma. I forgot to show you. Have I done the tail right?’
‘Oh yes. He’s perfect, Ruth. Shall we put him up with the others?’
‘I want to put in some shells and seaweed first.’
‘All right, you do that, and then we’ll pin him up. It’s becom
ing quite an art gallery. Would you like to go to a real gallery, Ruth, to look at some paintings?’
‘Will you have time?’ said Rachaela.
A hopeless anger, a kind of fear roiled in her. She wanted it to be over. She wished Emma would take the child downstairs, do it there. It would be nicer to behead her with a carving knife. Would Ruth scream? They had said at the school she had had a screaming session. Nobody knew why. Emma suspected some of the other children had harassed her, but even to Emma, Ruth had been close-mouthed.
Emma had picked the school, Rachaela only signed on the relevant line. The first day Emma had escorted Ruth to the gates and come back with a red nose.
But all that was behind them now.
‘Ruth, lovey, I’ve got something to tell you.’
‘What is it?’ Pleased, the child looked up into Emma’s shadowed glow.
Ruth was not pretty, no Queen of the May. Her skin was ice-white and flawless, her eyes large and luminously black, fringed by reed-thick lashes. Her features were well-shaped even so early, and the jaw placed finely on the white neck with its blue flush of springing hair. Ruth’s hair was straight as falling black water. Something of her father after all.
It was hard to be sure why she was such an unattractive child.
Taken piece by piece, the face was lovely, almost ethereal, but taken all in all it was far from beauty. And in a rage—when some painting eluded her, when she was frustrated or puzzled—it was an ugly, bestial little face.
Soon it would be ugly.
‘You see,’ Emma was saying gamely, ‘my own daughter Liz, you remember Liz? Liz is going to have a baby.’
‘Yes,’ said Ruth, seriously, interested.
‘And Liz wants me to go and look after her. And Liz lives in Cheltenham, which is a long way away.’
Ruth nodded. She understood.
She said, business-like, ‘When are we going?’
‘Oh darling,’ cried Emma. ‘Oh darling.’ And could not manage any more.
Rachaela said, ‘You won’t be going, Ruth. Emma has to go. Her daughter needs her. You’ll have to stay here.’
‘No,’ said Ruth, reasonably, I’ll go with Emma.’
Emma said, ‘Darling, I’m afraid—you can’t. You can’t come with me. I wish you could.’
