Nobody else ever talks about that night, not even Mum and Dad. But I told you that Digory is starting to write music. He wrote a piece for our school Christmas concert and after it was played, Morveren and I looked at each other and smiled. We could hear the music of Ingo woven into it, very faintly, so only those who were there that night would ever guess what it was.
FROST AT MIDNIGHT
Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
‘Frost at Midnight’, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
SAM HAS BEEN walking the baby up and down, up and down, for what seems like hours.
Now at last she has given way, and become heavy against him, curled into the angle of his shoulder and neck. Her eyelids are sealed shut. Their smooth, glistening line does not quiver as he lays her down in the cradle which he and Lucy bought second-hand in Newton Bere market. He stripped off the thick black varnish that overlaid it like treacle, and underneath, just as they’d thought, was the grain of oak. He fed the wood with wax and rubbed it back to lustre. Lucy bought a bundle of soft, washed linen from another stall and made cot sheets, hemming them by hand as she sat by the stove. That was the way Sam and Lucy did things. No wagging of credit cards in out-of-town babycare hypermarkets for them. Their baby would have a cradle like no other baby’s, and it would cost the earth nothing.
Like the cradle, their cottage has been restored. They didn’t want big changes. It is shabby but solid, shaped by generations rather than by design. The flagstone floor is uneven, and scattered with rag rugs. Two steps lead down from the kitchen to the bathroom. In summer it was full of green, swimming light. Now, in winter, there are red serge curtains with brass rings, from yet another market stall. There’s a hip bath, a solid square basin, a cistern with a long chain. When they first looked around the place, the agent was embarrassed by the bare trickle of rusty water when Lucy turned on the tap. The well, it seemed, sometimes ran dry in summer.
They sunk a borehole, and now their water runs clear and plentiful. They installed a wood-burning stove. Sam built seven raised beds in the vegetable garden. They pruned their apple trees, and researched the keeping of chickens. Lucy was thinking about a goat. Sam never tired of watching Lucy, her body upright and sturdy, rounding with pregnancy until it was unbalanced and yet at the same time more beautifully balanced than it had ever been.
Now Sam rocks the cradle with his foot. The baby’s fists are up at either side of her face, as if sleep has surprised her. She lies with her head turned sideways, sunk fathoms deep in her own country where he cannot follow her. In a minute he must put more wood on the stove, and get her bottles ready for the night. He rocks the cradle again, gently, although she doesn’t need it. The night is so quiet that he hears the swell thudding against the base of the cliffs, half a mile away. There’s no wind. He knows that the sea is flat – he walked down to the cliff path with the baby in her sling that afternoon – but there is always the swell, the muscle of it pulling from the deep Atlantic, the concussion when it runs in against granite.
He gets up, opens the stove door and settles a knot of apple wood on the fire’s red core. The stove door clangs but the baby doesn’t stir. Sam is restless. He ought to phone Lucy; she has left messages on his mobile. However, she knows as well as he does that there is no reception in the cottage and he will have to go to the top of the track to get a signal. Her messages are brief, and bleak. He would like to erase them, but doesn’t quite dare.
He opens the door, steps out, and draws it almost shut behind him so that cold air won’t reach the baby. As always, it shocks him to look up and see the night pulsing with stars. They come so close; surely they were never this close in London. Also, before he came here he never realised that starlight was a real thing. But these thickets of stars are making him a shadow. There’s no moon – or almost none: it’s the palest and thinnest rind.
Perhaps the baby will sleep through tonight. He lets himself think about it, even though he knows it can’t possibly happen. She has never slept through the night. Sometimes he wakes just before she cries. More often, he lurches out of deep sleep, not knowing where he is, the baby’s cries sawing into his head. His eyes burn as if there’s sand in them. Sometimes he is afraid that one night he will fail to wake. Who is there to hear her, except for him? A fox might answer her, or an owl. The nearest human habitation is the farm, half a mile up the track. A couple of days ago he’d frozen at the thought of what might happen to her if he fell, say, and could not get to her. Now he isn’t afraid of that any more. He knows that he would drag himself to the cradle, come what may. She has only him. When she cries he works steadily to comfort her. He knows that when she draws up her legs she has wind, and when she rolls her head and thrashes against him it is because she is exhausted but cannot find her way into sleep.
Lucy is at her mother’s. That is what he said to them at the farm, and they accepted it, as if it were perfectly usual for a woman to leave her baby and go back to her mother. Lucy has been ill. She’s had a bad time, he found himself explaining. She needed a rest. They nodded again, accepting his explanations even though there’d been no need for them. They knew enough. They had heard the ambulance blaring at the shut gate, then hurtling down the track to the cottage, on the night the baby was born.
It was his mistake. It was Lucy’s. It was the terrible, almost unpardonable error that they’d committed between them, going from one of their ideas to the next without ever dreaming of what the consequences might be. They had the complaisant midwife. They had Lucy’s wonderful health, her exceptionally low blood pressure, the millennia-long normality of birth at home.
Home being a cottage down a rutted track, in winter, thirty miles from the nearest hospital. But they had everything on their side. The hip bath, full of warm scented water, in which Lucy could relax. Their own prepared soundtrack, and behind it the deep shock of the swell hitting the base of the cliffs, as it had done forever.
Lucy can’t get over what happened. The truth is that neither of them can get over their own stupidity: that moment when blood bloomed on the old sides-to-middled sheets, and wouldn’t stop. He thought Lucy would die, and the baby too. He thought: What have I done to you? He had to run up the track, leaving them, because there was no signal down at the cottage. He heard his own blood pounding in his ears and he cursed himself because he could not run faster.
But the baby lies in her cradle. She is real, solid, alive. She is thriving; everyone says that. Only Lucy can’t see it. She has lost faith. She would like them to live permanently in a hospital ward, on alert for something to go wrong with the baby. Failing that, she would like them to live within two or three minutes of the best-equipped, highest-rated teaching hospital in London.
Farewell to owls, the moon, the carefully constructed raised vegetable beds and the prospective goat. Lucy no longer cared about any of it. She faced him across the kitchen table, and words of fury spewed from her mouth as if he were an invader come to toss her child on to the point of his bayonet.
‘How can we throw all this away?’ he asked her. ‘Go back to London, find some crappy rented flat – we’ll never be able to buy there – bring her up with no garden and a park full of alkies and needles. Is that what you want for her?’
‘If you got a proper job,’ she said, ‘we would have enough money to live somewhere decent.’ Her eyes were black with anger, her skin stretched and paper-white.
‘But would it help, if we left here?’ he’d asked her. ‘Would you really feel safe in London?’
At the bare thought of London, an intolerable dreariness swept through him. His Kilburn childhood had been lightened by dreams of elsewhere. He’d been brought up in a basement flat in Iverson Road – lucky boy, everybody would be glad to get a flat there now. But it hadn’t been like that then. He’d joined the Royal Society for the Prot
ection of Birds, and known every blade that grew in the Blue Peter garden, but his native air was the hot, dusty swirl from the ventilators in the Tube.
A proper job. They had worked it out so carefully – they weren’t impulsive, it wasn’t some city-dweller’s fantasy. With his savings, and hers, they had enough for a deposit on the cottage. He would go freelance. They would be all but self-sufficient. As long as the mortgage was covered, they could live on very little. Their children would have sea, sky, air, vegetables from the garden, eggs from their own hens, fields to run in, trees to climb, and a bus from the top of the track to the village school three miles distant.
She wasn’t eating. He would wake in the night and see her watching over the baby with such ferocity that he was afraid. Lucy could not bear to feed the baby, in case she choked on the milk.
‘You do it,’ she said to him every time, thrusting the bottle into his hand.
Soon Lucy could neither do anything for the baby nor leave her. So it went on, until one day, in an impulse as strong as a convulsion, she took the train to Derby where her mother lived. Sam knew nothing of it until the ordered taxi bounced down the track to the cottage door.
How loud the sea sounds. He feels as if he is the only person awake in the world. The scattered lights that shine from distant cottages on the flank of the hill are all extinguished. Only the slow, breathing silence, the beat of the sea, the immensity of stars in the night that is so still he barely feels its cold. He has an instant’s dread that he will walk away, letting the cottage door swing shut behind him, down the track that dwindles to a narrow footpath through the bracken. He will go all the way down the cliffs to the sea, and then out along the lane of starlight until the waves swallow him.
But of course he will not. He goes back inside, closing the door softly even though he knows that it isn’t noise that wakes the baby. She lies in the same position. As always, he leans into the cradle to check her breathing. Her warmth enfolds him. All is well. He knows, suddenly, that there won’t be many more nights like this. His babe is not going to wander like a breeze by lakes and sandy shores. She, like her father, is going to be reared in the great city. He knows it as if there isn’t any choice involved: as if he’s simply looked into the future and seen himself there with her, holding her hand as a number 16 sweeps down Shoot Up Hill. Lucy is there too, blinking the grit from her eyes. Everything else has fallen away: the cottage, the farmer’s brief, acknowledging nod which might one day have turned into friendship, the cove to which they would have climbed down with the children on summer days.
Sam measures milk powder into the jug and makes up the night feeds. After a moment’s thought, he reaches into the cradle and lifts out the sleeping baby. She hangs loose, like a puppy. He wraps her carefully against the cold, swaddling her as he and Lucy were taught at their parenthood class.
As he steps out of the cottage the cold hits her face and she gives a small, sharp intake of breath: a creak, almost. He holds her against him, shielding her. He has the feeling that he doesn’t want that crowd of stars to see her face. He sets off up the track. It is dark enough, but he can see his way. He slips the knot of baling twine off the gate, and it squeaks as he passes through it. He almost wishes that the baby were awake, even though he knows she will never be able to remember any of this. A dog barks, far off. He can smell the sea. He stands there, snuffing it, not looking up for fear that the stars will make him dizzy. It is colder, surely. He opens his coat and tucks the baby inside, so that she will be perfectly warm. Only a little farther to go now. He takes his mobile out of his pocket and wakes it up. The signal indicator shows one bar, then two, then three. Almost full signal. He turns and looks downhill, towards the sea. Lucy’s number is the first one on speed dial. He presses it. As he lifts the phone to his ear he sees that it is two thirty-four. Lucy will be asleep. But it’s all right. She never puts her phone on silent.
The baby stirs, as if she can hear the phone ringing. He joggles her gently, inside his coat. She mustn’t cry, not now, not when Lucy is about to answer. The phone keeps ringing. Five rings, seven, nine. But she will answer, he knows she will, and then he’ll tell her that all places and all seasons shall be sweet to him, so long as she is there.
THE PAST
ROSE, 1944
IF SHE SHUTS her eyes and counts to twenty she’ll feel him before she sees him. His hand on her bare neck.
‘I been everywhere lookin’ for you, Rose.’
He likes her name. He likes to say it and hold it in his mouth. She has never felt that her name truly belonged to her before, until his voice made her as beautiful as a rose.
He’ll come soon. If she holds her breath till it hurts. Count to a hundred. I’m coming. She clenches her fists, breathes in a deep breath and holds it until the darkness fizzes. But when she opens her eyes it’s the same blackout. The rain splashes. If he doesn’t come, if he can’t come, if he’s tried to get a message to her—
Or if he’s somewhere else. Someplace else, he’d say. Stepping into step with someone else, someone else’s body going soft and shivery against his.
‘What’d you say your name was?’
‘Frederick. Frederick Lafayette.’
‘That’s a funny name.’
‘It ain’t funny where I come from, ma’am.’
And the milky smile shows, like a baby’s. And the way he calls a girl ma’am when he doesn’t know her name. Maybe he already knows that people like to hear words they would never put in their own mouths; maybe he already knows how the sweet formality of it marries with that smile. At first she thought he was one of those men who mean nothing by their talk. Later she understood that he was reserved, like her, but living in a crowd had taught him ways of getting along without getting close.
‘Hey, how you doing?’
Is he doing all of that with someone else? Lucky it’s dark so no one can see her face. Nobody’s ever going to guess how much she wants him. She’s had him now, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times, in parks and bus shelters and in her mind. Most of all in her mind. Out of all those hundreds, only a dozen or so in flesh and blood. He’s in her mind; he won’t go out of it. And deep down below all the doubts she knows she’s got him too, at least for now. He can’t help it any more than she can. She knows it when his voice flukes up and he sounds as if he’s in pain. ‘What you doing to me, Rose? You tell me what you call this.’
She doesn’t know what she calls it. She’s caught in it, like a cat dancing in a rainstorm that’s forgotten its own nature so completely it doesn’t even remember to hate the wet. She, Rose, who never put a paw out of place before. At all the wrong times she imagines herself naked, with him. It wouldn’t surprise her to find herself lit up at night, as if someone had painted her skin with the stuff that makes clock fingers glow in the dark. In the typing pool, the clatter of keys and the jingle of the carriage return fades, and she’s with Frederick, peeling off her stockings, tangling her legs in his. But the smell of women brings her back to the big room where they sit in rows, in uniform, beating out words.
At the end of basic training last year, she saw her own reflection in the eyes of the officer who was checking length of hair and absence of jewellery. Her own body, packed away in a ratings uniform for the duration. She blinked and shifted her gaze from the regulation eyes front. She was part of a row of women standing at attention, quiveringly still. But inside she was prickling with life, her skin burning, her hair springing under her cap. The uniform didn’t do away with that; it made it stronger.
Basic training was a shock to some of the girls. It wasn’t so much getting up at dawn and being yelled at and working all the hours God sent and then being told to do it again, but the fact that nothing was personal. It didn’t bother Rose. They thought they were knocking you into shape, but what they didn’t reckon on were all the things that had shaped you already, the things that had knocked you till you all but went down and stayed down. But you hadn’t, and you never would.
/> Rose looked light but she was tireless. She wasn’t afraid to heave coal, riddle the huge boilers, shovel out the clinker and wash down the boiler-room walls.
The only thing she didn’t like was scrubbing corridors. It was the way they wanted you down on your hands and knees, arse in the air, skin chapped to the elbows. There were mops but they wanted scrubbing brushes used in basic training. And maybe forever after: that was the way the Navy was. But it wouldn’t be Rose doing the scrubbing, not after these two weeks.
Rose’s mother had scrubbed like a demon in her bad spells. Floors, walls, windows, chairs, table. On those days Rose had come home from school and smelled the carbolic and her heart had sunk. The little ones were out in the yard. They were wary, quiet as mice, sheltering by the coal bunker and waiting for Rose. As soon as they saw her they rushed to grab her round the waist. They wanted their dinner; they hadn’t had their dinner. Rain clung to their clothes but they hadn’t dared ask to go in. Dickie and Iris were scared of Mum when she got her bad times, when she became a stranger and looked through them.
Rose knew as soon as she smelled carbolic that there’d be no more school for days, maybe weeks, depending how Mum was. She couldn’t be left when she was bad. She would clean until her hands bled and then all the life would die out of her and she’d lie on her bed eating nothing, drinking a cup of tea if Rose was lucky, speaking to no one. When Dad came back from work he would look into the bedroom, and go out again without eating the tea Rose had made. Rose couldn’t blame him. She’d have done the same herself if it wasn’t for Dickie and Iris.
Rose never let them see that she hated scrubbing the floors. She wouldn’t give them that satisfaction. She did what she had to do, never spoke to an officer unless spoken to, rolled up her hair so it didn’t touch her collar, kept her place where she belonged. But a part of her stood separate. Nothing would get the better of her. After basic training she was going to train as a typist. If she got on, she might become a telephonist one day, or even a radio operator. With the war, there were chances there’d never been before. She’d have something for life that no one could take back when the war was over. That was the reason she’d volunteered for the Wrens, or part of the reason. She wasn’t going to wait to be called up. They might send her anywhere. She’d end up in a factory, making shells to the din of Workers’ Playtime, or shovelling swill on a farm in the back end of nowhere, under a sky the colour of mud, while some pig-ignorant farmer tried to get her into his bed.
Girl, Balancing & Other Stories Page 17
