by Jane Rogers
“I – th–thank you,” said Carolyn, not knowing what to do.
“I’m sorry about that,” said Clare, still laughing, leaning across the table to her. “It’s just me being silly. I figured out –you know that noise in your room – that ghost or whatever you thought it was –”
Carolyn sat rigidly still, appalled that Clare was talking about this in front of the others.
“Well it’s a mouse – it must be – you know, under the skirting board. I thought you might think it was funny, to catch your spook in a mousetrap –”
Carolyn smiled automatically and ducked her head down to study the seed packets, waiting for them all to start talking again. It was a joke, she realized, they were being kind to her; celebrating, welcoming her. Sue’s kindness – Clare’s kindness –the meal itself, confused her, sharpening her awareness of the differences between herself and them, but making her want to belong. She envied them the sense of occasion and togetherness that they had.
When she went up to her room that night she sat in her chair not listening for ghostly rustlings, but to the rise and fall of their conversation downstairs, punctuated with bursts of laughter. And finally, as she went to bed, she heard them singing softly, shushing each other and giggling, as one clear voice (Sue’s, she recognized) carried on the melody.
Next morning it was Friday. One day till she went home. Outside the sky was cold and steely. The house, after Sue and Sylvia had taken Robin to school, was quiet. She could hear the wind in the chimney. Carolyn paced her room. The sense of pressure was mounting. She should have taken Clare up on her offer of going to work with her one day. She should have done something to keep herself distracted. Idly she picked up her packets of seeds. Wallflowers and Slipper Flower. She turned them over.
“Calceolaria (Slipper Flower). Half-hardy. These attractive flowers are generally grown for greenhouse decoration, but C. Rugosa is useful for bedding outdoors in the summer. Sow in the greenhouse from December to February, harden off in April.”
Something in that reminded her of Clare and she stared out of the window, frowning, as she tried to think what it was. Hadn’t Clare been repairing a greenhouse when she fell? Where was it? Carolyn leaned to the far side of each window, but there was no greenhouse to be seen. If there was one she could plant these seeds.
She put on her anorak and went down to the TV room. The french windows were damp and warped in their frames, and she had to heave with her shoulder against the door to get one open. She stepped out on to a narrow cement path. There was a biting wind from the right which made all the dead winter stems rattle and rustle feverishly. Shivering, she pulled up her anorak zip and turned to the left. Under and among the brambles was litter of all kinds, half bricks, broken bottles, sodden sweet papers. In front of her was a heap of bottles in the soggy remains of an old cardboard box – presumably also being saved by Bryony. She made her way as best she could along the overgrown path, following the house wall. When she turned left around the corner of the house, a dilapidated building came into view. It was more sheltered on this side. She walked towards it, pulling back and ducking under the prickling runners of a giant bramble that had overspread the path. Close to, she saw that the building had a brick base, up to about three feet, and a metal framework above it. The door faced the path. She pushed it open; it was an old wooden house door drooping on one hinge. It stuck, only a third open, wedged on broken glass on the floor. She eased herself in.
The place was wrecked. Broken glass lay scattered over the cement floor, along with pieces of brick, broken flowerpots, dead leaves. Above her the metal framework of the roof made an unbroken tracery of lines against the grey sky, but many of the panes were cracked or broken, or entirely missing. Where had Clare fallen? She half expected to see bloodstains. Along either side of the glasshouse at waist height ran a wide ledge, littered with broken glass, old flowerpots, a bucket and tins full of slimy green water, clods of dried earth. There were dried sticks and brown leaves everywhere. As she stepped, slivers of glass cracked and crunched beneath her feet. Using a wide piece of wood as a scraper, she cleared the glass and rubbish from a section of ledge, and sat down.
She noticed a pile of yellowed newspapers under the opposite ledge, and a rusty trowel and fork, and a ball of green twine wound in criss-cross pattern around a stick. The lower windows were covered with cobwebs. It was not warm, but it was sheltered from the wind outside, and the stillness and randomness of the tools and litter gave it an almost religious significance, made it seem as if it was waiting. The brambles of the garden had forced their way through one pane, and stretched in over the ledge, curling upwards like long scrawny fingers. How long had it been like this, untouched by people, gradually decaying and changing with the wind and the weather? She picked up a small flowerpot-shaped lump of earth. It retained its pot-shape although the pot was gone. It was dry and light to the touch. Squeezing her fist together she crumbled it into fine powdery dust. In the centre was a small wizened bulb like a tiny onion.
Carolyn worked in the greenhouse for the morning. Awkwardly and delicately, as if her own arms and hands were unfamiliar tools, she gathered flowerpots on a cleared area of ledge, took a bucket outside and poured away the green standing slime. Using the trowel she chipped at the ground outside the door, prising cold earth from among the prickly stems and broken bricks, gathering it with her hands and putting it into the bucket. It was hard to get, and she filled the bucket by crumbling into it some of the clumps of dried earth that were still inside old flowerpots. Then she mixed it up and ladled the soil back into the flowerpots, tore open her seed packets and hastily poked the seeds into the soil. Someone would come home and wonder what she was doing. She didn’t want them to know she was out here. She patted down the earth in each pot, watered them from a slimy tin, arranged them in a row on the ledge, and darted back along the path to the house.
That night she couldn’t sleep, despite Clare’s tablets. Her brain raced over and over what her mother would say, how awful she would feel, what she ought to do, until she felt that the movement in her head would spin her off the bed and send her whirling round the room. Outside it began to rain heavily. The wind was still strong, and the rain lashed against the roof, increasing, with its persistent sound, her sense of frenzy. Dawn came late and sluggishly. When she went downstairs to make herself some toast it was still very dark, although it was eight o’clock and she could hear the children talking in their room. When she’d finished she got her bag and anorak, checking that she had enough in her purse for bus fare, and let herself out the kitchen door. She wasn’t taking her suitcase. It would be deciding the issue in advance, if she took it. She did not admit to herself that to leave it was also to decide the issue in advance.
Chapter 10
Carolyn lay on her side, spine curved, head right on the edge of the bed so that she could stare down on the baby in its cot beside her. The cot was a transparent box (like a vegetable compartment in a fridge, she thought) and it was filled with a parcel of neat white blankets. From one end of the parcel emerged the living head and shoulders of her new baby. It was impossible not to stare at him all the time. He was breathtakingly beautiful. Breathtaking, literally; she felt her breaths trembling and coming short in her throat, seeming to make her whole body float and quiver. He was so perfect. His head was long. She knew, before the talkative nurse had told her so, that it would have been squeezed to that shape by her own body giving birth. The shape would change. On his head was a fuzz – a fluff of pale downy hair, almost transparent. Through his translucent skin showed the blue veins, his insides as visible and vulnerable as a tiny transparent shrimp. His face moved continually, different expressions rippling and flowing across it as if he really were a sea creature, moved and swayed by the changing tide and currents in water, in continual motion – flickering from smile to grimace to pain to peace, eyelids half rising to reveal a sea-shell sightless crescent of pearly blue-white, lips parting then closing, breaths shuddering and
shivering him as if air were too strong and coarse a medium.
It seemed to Carolyn that there must be a vividly speeded up life flitting through the infant’s dreams, as if it skimmed in the air like a bird over the facts of its life and they were reflected as changingly and as unknowingly on its face as the moving bird would be in seas, rivers, lakes, in stagnant puddles on flat roofs, and silted-up canals. Each expression was as swiftly melted into the next as a tiny wave lapped by a faster following. His hands were moving too – constantly, with that same undersea random motion. Open-palmed they waved with no more sense of the use of hands to touch grasp or hold than a water plant; infinitely gentle trailing things, the blind tendrils of a sea-anemone.
Carolyn’s eyes swam with tears as she watched the baby, though she could not tell why. Her emotions were as confusingly mingled as the child’s expressions laid one over another. She had been quite unprepared for his beauty and his otherness. He was nothing to do with her and Alan. He was a visitor from another, undersea world; an innocent, transparent, perfectly gentle alien. Babies she had seen before had fat fleshy faces that spread from a central dummy. They grinned or bawled, prefiguring the fixed expressions of their adult lives, solid features emerging from rolls of fat to express the hideous fixity of adult character. She had not known they started clear, clear of expression, transparent and mobile. She would protect it. Save it from that coarsening. It would not need to thicken and curdle, and become dully opaque to defend its tender insides from the preying eyes of the world.
But even as she vowed to protect she was filled with terror at the unhappiness the fleeting expressions rehearsed; pulled up against the staggering independence of this creature to experience its own ranges of reaction, its life, quite separate from and un-understood by her. She was faced starkly by the absolute wonder of life, and enfolded in that double-edged knowledge was the taste and imminence of death, which would be quite simply the absence of movement in the baby: stillness. From an infant’s fluttering speed it would go through the thickening slowness of adult life to the full stop of a corpse. Because it was alive it would die. She had never understood that fact before.
It was miraculous that so tender and fragile a creature had emerged from the violence of the preceding day. She could believe that this was the creature that had floated inside her – yes, like a starry astronaut in his liquid capsule, attached to his red life-support cable – she had pored over photographs of embryos and imagined him a hundred times. But surely only his perfect oblivious innocence of all evil including pain had enabled him to survive the journey down. The labour had been a nightmare. She remembered it in vivid violent snatches punctuated by haze or darkness. The beginning, a long time ago, was quite clear: sitting up in bed at home, swinging her feet round to the floor, standing up – and a warm flood spilling down her legs so that she cried out in fright. Looking down she expected to see blood, awfulness, something dead. Then her mother was in her room, wrapping her up, sitting her down, kissing her.
“Hush love, it’s all right, it’s just your waters – you’re ready, love.”
She sat her on a towel and they had a cup of tea, huddled together like conspirators on the edge of Carolyn’s bed.
“I had a feeling when I went to bed last night,” her mother told her.
“But it’s early,” said Carolyn, still shivering with fear and surprise. “It’s not due till July the eighth.”
“Only two days. It knows when it’s ready, don’t you worry. Everything’s going to be all right. Your father’s telephoning Alan.”
Through the opened curtain Carolyn saw the dawn dimness light up as the rising sun emerged over the rim of the world and the quiet undertow of bird clatter rose to a crescendo of calls and squawks. “I wish you were coming with me.”
Meg looked up, through the window. She could not help thinking of her own first labour. She wanted and did not want to be there, fearing that her very presence would create complications as if they were contagious, but also that if she were not there, there would be no one to control events and protect Carolyn. She had been Carolyn’s protector for so long. It was not a role her heart could relinquish.
When they heard the car they went carefully downstairs, and her mother settled her in while her father held the door and Alan put her bag in the boot. Then they drove away and Carolyn carried with her the sight of her mother’s tense white face leaning down to look through the window at her. In the car the contractions had started and suddenly she had felt excited. It would be all right.
Then the dim increasingly blotted memories of different doors, different faces peering, being naked, shaved, enemaed, injected, while it went on hurting her repeatedly, relentlessly. They left her alone with a great heavy belt strapped round her belly pressing her and making green and yellow lights wink on the huge machine by the bed, and she couldn’t move and her back was aching and they put a tube into her wrist and she couldn’t move and she began to panic. Then she was sick, they gave her an injection, they wouldn’t let her –
it went to pieces, black fragmented with pain.
At last she felt clear and a kind woman smiled at her among the machines and said, “Nearly ready now.”
They wheeled her bed down a corridor, and put her in a huge bare room with blazing lights. She remembered the way the midwife had bent her knee so that Carolyn’s calf pressed against her thigh, and held it pinned with her own bare arm. The woman’s skin was wonderfully warm and smooth and her hold was completely firm. That touch was one of the clearest sensations. There were a series of impossible pains like knife cuts, but she could also see distantly how the women were skilful and trustworthy. There was a head, they’d been telling her. She felt it splitting her in half, then slipping back. A head, a head. It must be true.
Born, they held it like a long skinned thing and for a moment she stared at it hanging in the air not knowing if it was alive or dead, good or bad, not believing it was over. They wrapped it up and gave it to her, and it did have a head like a baby. It was alive.
And now it was here. It had survived the squeezing and pushing and pulling, the drugs and the pain, protected by its ignorance, it had survived to blink its grey eyes and wave its underwater hands, and turn its small blind mouth instinctively to her nipple, seeking food with the determined accuracy of an animal that intended to live.
Chapter 11
Carolyn did not move back to her mother’s, as Bryony (who perhaps would never stop being jealous; Clare’s mistakes were as often with women as men) had hoped, and as Clare herself had half expected. She returned from that visit almost sprightly (desperate?) in her attempts to please and to ingratiate herself into the household. Clare watched her listening, taking note, modifying her language and behaviour as carefully as an animal adapts its camouflage to fit into a new environment. She helped Bryony to fold and deliver the January Women’s Paper. She accompanied Clare herself to the Refuge and looked after the children while the women had a meeting with some councillors. She marched with them on International Women’s Day. She came to the C.R. group the three of them belonged to, and looked, and listened, and said nothing. Clare was not fooled by any of this, although Sue certainly was, and Bryony seemed to be coming round. Caro’s silences were too deliberate, pregnant with disagreement and criticism. She asked for explanations which she received without comment, as if listening to someone who had just incriminated herself. She was exhausting company, not because she argued but because there was a constant play of restless nervous energy in her. She remained as thin as a rake, although she was eating properly now.
Clare couldn’t concentrate on anything else when Caro was there. She found herself self-conscious under Carolyn’s exhaustive scrutiny, and caught herself trying to measure and examine the things she said from the girl’s point of view. Carolyn made her physically uncomfortable. She wanted to stroke and hold still Caro’s skinny nervous arms and legs. She made herself spend less time with Carolyn, monitoring her own contact with her.
Gradually, what Clare had sensed as Carolyn’s critical watchfulness began to be apparent in more obvious ways. The first was the February Women’s Paper. She refused to help with folding again.
“I’m sorry, I don’t think I – I don’t think that I know enough about some of the issues, to go along with it completely.”
Bryony was exasperated. “What don’t you know about? That women are badly paid? That there aren’t enough nurseries? That abortion should be available on demand?”
“Yes.”
“Yes – yes what?”
“Yes, I’m not sure about abortion.”
There was a silence.
“What d’you mean?”
“I’m – I’m not sure I agree with abortion.”
“What? Any abortion?”
“Yes. I think – I think women should have babies if they get pregnant. I think those children want to be born.”
“Jesus Christ.” Bryony was genuinely staggered. She appealed to Clare. “You talk to her. I can’t cope with this.”
