The Godsend

by Bernard Taylor

  “Okay,” I said. I wanted to sleep.

  “What was wrong with it?”

  “I think I did it.” I could hear my voice slurred. “When I moved the chair earlier on. Must have been. The cord got ripped out of its socket . . .”

  Her hand came around me and pressed on my chest.

  “You big brute,” she said.

  It was only a few hours later when Matthew woke us yelling for his early-morning feed. As we surfaced, sleepily, we became aware also of the crying of the infant downstairs. Her squalling rang through the house.

  “My God, she’s got a good pair of lungs,” Kate said, smiling.

  Gathering Matthew into her arms she brought him back to the bed where he hungrily latched on to her breast. “You go on back to sleep,” she told me. “I shall join you just as soon as this one’s finished with me.” I yawned, nodded, and turned over on my side again.

  I didn’t get back to sleep that morning. And neither did Kate.

  Long after Matthew had been fed and changed and safely bedded down again in his cot, the baby downstairs was still crying. Kate fought against the noise for some time, then sat up in bed.

  “Whatever is that woman doing? Isn’t she looking after it, or what?” She listened, frowning, hugging her knees and poised for action while I watched from sleepy, half-closed eyes. Then she got out of bed and reached for her dressing-gown, her voice growing angry.

  “I can’t stand that. I can’t just lie here and listen to that baby crying its head off. Whatever can the woman be thinking of!”

  As she hurried from the room a glance at the bedside clock told me it was just after seven-thirty.

  The next moment, over the sound of the baby’s cries, Kate’s voice came, calling my name. I rose in a panic and hurried down to her. She was standing in the doorway of the spare room, an anxious, puzzled look on her face.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “What’s happening? You tell me. I wish I knew.” She turned and waved a hand at the room’s interior. “I don’t understand anything.”

  In the pram the baby lay bawling at the top of her lungs. She had kicked the covers away from her body and now lay exposed to the cool morning air. Beside her, untouched, was the water and the powdered milk that Kate had left. The bed where the girl had lain was untidy and empty. Of the girl herself there was no sign.

  FOUR

  “How did it go today?”

  Kate’s voice came to me from the living-room as I stood in the hall hanging up my jacket.

  “Okay,” I said. It had. I had completed the last of the Arabian Nights illustrations, packed them up and got them off to the publisher.

  “Did you finish?”

  “Yes. Thank God.” I lingered, turfing cigarettes and matches from my pockets. “I was pleased with them. I think they will be too.”

  When I went into the room I saw her sitting on the sofa with Jane Bryant’s baby at her bare breast. I stood there for a moment, just looking. She said:

  “Oh, come on, darling. Don’t look like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “That—reproving—slightly shocked expression you get some­times.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just a bit of a surprise, that’s all.”

  She adjusted the baby’s position in the crook of her arm. “Well, you must admit it’s pretty silly to breast-feed one and mix powdered milk for the other isn’t it?”

  I said nothing. She prompted me gently.

  “Well, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Of course it is, dear.”

  And of course she was right, I told myself after a little consideration. Thinking of it objectively, I suppose I had felt jealous—seeing the baby girl as some kind of usurper. It was the most natural and beautiful thing to see Kate feeding my own son—but a stranger’s child—that was a different matter.

  Kate said gently:

  “Matthew’s losing nothing by it, darling.”

  “No. . . .”

  Matthew lay on the sofa next to her, smiling at nothing in particular, hands reaching up into the air. I noticed the contrast between the pale-gold curls of the baby girl and his own dark wisps. Kate grinned down at him.

  “He’s all right.”

  “Oh, yes. . . .”

  “It’s the least we can do—look after her.” Kate sighed and shook her head. “I’ll never understand it. How could anyone walk out and abandon such a dear little creature. . . .”

  It was a week since the baby’s birth and the subsequent disappearance of her mother. We had waited a couple of days thinking she might reappear, but there had been nothing, no sign, no word. It was then that we had contacted the local authorities telling them that the baby had been left with us. The social worker, Miss Jenkins, who came to the house without delay, agreed to Kate’s request to let the baby stay with us for a while “until such time as Jane Bryant could be found.”

  But all attempts to trace her failed. There was so little known about her for anyone to go on, and in the end we just ran out of ideas. The police, in spite of their efforts, met with no success at all, and the only clue to her whereabouts came from a local farmer who, passing through the village that same morning about half-past five, had seen a woman answering her description walking towards the main road. He had described her as “being in a bit of a hurry,”—wherever she was going she was wasting no time. After that the trail stopped. As far as we were concerned she might as well have vanished from the face of the earth.

  Now I studied Kate as she sat with the baby in her arms. I heard the voracious sounds coming from the tiny mouth and resentment stirred in me again.

  “They’ve got to find her. She’s got to be somewhere. She can’t be that far away.”

  Kate said nothing. I added:

  “Who knows—she might still come back for her.”

  “Oh, no. She won’t come back.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I was sure myself.

  “She won’t come back. She has no intention of ever coming back. You know that.”

  Yes. The woman’s behaviour had never given the remotest hint of any maternal feeling. It was quite obvious that she had left the child to its fate. Even so I couldn’t give up.

  “You never know,” I said.

  “Are you trying to convince yourself?”

  She didn’t expect an answer. She smiled down at the baby. “Isn’t she a picture? She’s such a lovely little thing.”

  At the words the baby stopped feeding and looked up at her with wide, deep blue eyes, a little smear of milk on her pink, tiny mouth, her face bearing an expression of the deepest trust and love. She reached up and clutched at Kate’s forefinger.

  “Look at her!” Kate whispered in awe. “She’s gripping me so tightly. It’s incredible—she’s only a week old!”

  She lifted the baby higher in her arms, holding her cheek-to-soft-cheek, creating a picture of motherhood that any photographer would have given his eye-teeth to snap.

  “Oh, you are a bonnie little girl.”

  And Bonnie got her name.

  Kate seemed to feel compelled to take it upon herself to make up to the baby for the loss of her real mother. As the days passed I watched as she bestowed on the infant a love and protection that was almost fierce in its intensity. Her eventual words came as no real surprise to me.

  “We must keep her, Alan. . . .”

  There was no hint of a question in her words. Her mind was made up. For her, no other course was open.

  “Steady on,” I said. “We can’t just do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well. . . .”

  “Why not?” she repeated. “Someone’s got to look after her. She’ll either be put in an orphanage or go to foster-parents. Why shouldn’t we be her foster-parents.”

  I kept silent. She went on:

  “You know damn-well her mother will never come back. Even the police told us there’s very little hope of tha
t. No one knows anything about her. They don’t even know where she was living or where she came from. Nobody knows anything.”

  I turned away. There were all kinds of reasons why we should not embark on the upbringing of another child.

  “We’ve got enough to cope with,” I said. “We’ve got our own children. How would you manage?”

  “I’ll already be looking after one baby. Looking after another at the same time wouldn’t be difficult.”

  “The cost . . .” I said lamely.

  “That’s no problem. They don’t expect you to rear a foster-child without some financial help. We’d get some little grant or something . . . But we don’t need it, anyway. We could manage perfectly well as it is.” She paused, waiting, watching my face. “You know her mother doesn’t want her. And besides, she no longer has any right to her. She forfeited that right when she walked out and left her to cry. No one—no one at all has a better right to care for her than we do.”

  Kate had her way.

  After various interviews with social workers—when they sat in the house giving us the once-twice-and-thrice-over, assessing us and the suitability of our environment—we became Bonnie’s foster-parents. And it was only then that Kate relaxed. The matter was settled—subject, of course, to the satisfactory reports which Miss Jenkins would have to make after her periodic visits to check on Bonnie’s welfare.

  I could tell then, watching Kate’s face, just how much it all meant to her, and I was happy, seeing her happiness, knowing I had done right to agree. Already she seemed to regard the child as her own—so much so, I thought, that should Jane Bryant ever return to claim her daughter the resulting confrontation would, to say the least, be traumatic. But I could see no likelihood of such an event ever taking place.

  Bonnie was a beautiful baby. She had a voracious appetite for both food and affection and, with her share of each, thrived splendidly. She was so healthy, and she had such happy, endearing ways that it was impossible not to love her. In no time at all she had been accepted as part of the family.

  Of course it was necessary to make a few changes. We ditched Matthew’s pram—a hand-me-down from Lucy, Davie and Sam—and bought one designed for twins. We bought a new cot, too. From now on Matthew and Bonnie would sleep and ride together.

  Late in September Kate and I and our enlarged family made another excursion to the lake. It was different now. The leaves were turning and we had seen the last of the summer. In the shade of the willows the tree-trunk where the girl had sat in her orange frock was bare. We knew she had gone out of our lives for ever.

  And we had adapted so readily to the changes she had brought about in our lives. Bonnie’s coming had naturally made a difference, but we settled, happily, easily, falling into our newly-established patterns. Kate was happy, the children were happy, and I was happy. What more could we want?

  Early one grey October morning as I stood shaving before the bathroom mirror Kate ran in screaming from the bedroom. She made me jump so violently that I nicked my chin with the razor. A solitary bird had been singing outside the window, and as Kate’s cries rang out he took to his wings and flew away. Her voice shrieked, splintering the gentleness of the day, words pouring from her mouth in an incoherent stream. She clutched me, dragging at me so that the towel I had tied around my waist fell to the floor and I stood ridiculously naked in the face of her anguish.

  “Quick . . . ! Quick . . . ! Oh, God, please . . . !”

  With the lather drying on my face I followed her at a rush into the bedroom and over to the babies’ cot. Bonnie, awakened by Kate’s screaming, had begun to cry, reaching out her arms, asking for comfort.

  At the other end of the cot Matthew lay. The strange colour of his face, the coldness of his smooth skin and the stillness of his little body told me he would never move again.

  FIVE

  For a long time it seemed that we would never be free of the tragedy. For weeks Kate was inconsolable. She mooned about the house with great sad eyes and trying, desperately trying, to be brave and not give way to her feelings in front of the children. They didn’t realise what had happened; only Lucy, in some vague, unreal way, was at all aware that there was such a thing as death, and now, in her child’s mind, she linked Matthew’s passing with that of a kitten she had owned the year before—a small black and white pet that had died after being savaged by a wandering dog.

  “Matthew’s like Tommy, isn’t he, Mummy?”

  She asked the question matter-of-factly, looking up from the book she was reading. It was just over a week since the funeral. Kate didn’t answer and turned away.

  “Matthew, Mummy—he’s like Tommy, my cat.”

  “Yes, dear,” Kate said wearily. “Like Tommy . . .”

  Kate blamed herself. That was one of the hardest things to live with, and no amount of talk from me could shake her from the belief that she was in some way responsible. How? she continually asked. How could she have allowed her child to just suffocate?—to just lie there in his cot and suffocate?—surely she should have been aware of all the dangers, the chances, the risks—the very tenuousness of a baby’s hold on life.

  Even Doctor Collins, seeing her state of mind, could give her little solace. “These cot-deaths do happen,” he told her. “They’re not common, but they do happen. It was an accident. You mustn’t blame yourself . . .”

  Kind words, meant to comfort, but nothing could dispel for Kate her picture of Matthew as she had found him that morning, lying twisted up in his nursery sheet (evidence of his struggle to survive)—his Rupert Bear blanket stretched tight across his transfixed mouth. My own words of reassurance sounded feeble when pitched against her sadness, and I could do little more than attempt to submerge my own feelings of grief.

  It was a blessing, I thought—as far as Kate was concerned—that the other children were there. The demanding nature of their presence took up so much of her time and attention that she was left with little time to brood. Before Matthew’s death I had urged her for the fiftieth time to think about getting some help around the house, and, just as before, she had said yes, she would think about it—and that was where it always ended. Now, returning home after a day in the loft, and seeing how full had been her own time, I was thankful for her past procrastinations.

  Bonnie, being the youngest, was the most demanding of all. No matter how much one might be suffering, still Bonnie had to be fed, changed and bathed. I looked at her as she lay sleeping peacefully in her cot and was so thankful for her—an absolute Godsend, I told myself.

  And gradually, as the weeks passed, normality crept back into the atmosphere of the house, though things, I knew, would never be quite the same again. It was just that now, normality was a little different. But we adjusted. We got used to it. Slowly the colour came back to Kate’s cheeks and she ceased to force the thoughts of Matthew from her mind. As time went by she found she could live with his images; the memories of him became easier to bear.

  It is true: Kate was more affected by the loss of Matthew than I was. It was obvious. Speaking for myself, he had not yet become any kind of personality: he was so very young. I was deeply saddened by his death, of course, but he had been with us such a short time that his sudden passing made me feel I had never really got to know him. But with Kate it was different. Through the years, as we had grown closer together, I had watched motherhood take its hold on her—and I had adored and respected her for it—but it was only now, seeing her grief, that I came to realise how completely she could love, and just how strong and deeply-rooted her maternal instincts were.

  Kate and I had first met some seven-odd years before in London at a party given to launch a series of children’s books that I had illustrated. It was a small affair—thirty or forty professional people and friends standing around holding glasses of sherry and filling the air with smoke and the right kind of small talk, and probably—as I was—waiting for a suitable time to pass before making the necessary excuses that would enable one to get the
hell out.

  I saw Kate across the room as she entered—quite beautiful and rather late—on the arm of an old art-school-friend of mine. Her face seemed vaguely familiar to me and I thought perhaps we must have met before, briefly, at some forgotten moment. When, eventually, we were introduced her name also rang bells and I told her I had been trying to figure out when and where we had previously bumped into each other—not having had much to do with the London scene since my student days, I didn’t have much to work with.

  “No,” she said, “we’ve never met before. I’d remember.”

  “I’m sure of it,” I protested. “I know your face.”

  The art-school-friend laughed then, and said it wasn’t so surprising since Kate had achieved considerable success in a long-running television serial which had only just ended. And she laughed too, saying she could tell what I didn’t do with my evenings.

  I felt abashed by my ignorance, and slightly embarrassed, but to her it didn’t seem to matter. She seemed amused by the idea that I had managed to live for so long without a television set—although, as I told her, I did “occasionally go to the pictures.” I realised then that it was in the odd film and the newspapers where I had probably seen her face.

  Knowing next-to-nothing of the world of show-business I would have been interested to learn something about her career, but she steered clear of it, telling me in her low, slightly husky voice that it wasn’t nearly as fascinating as people imagined, and that she didn’t want to celebrate our meeting by boring me to death. Instead, she asked me questions about myself, saying that she had admired my work for a long time, and had bought several of the books I had illustrated. Tritely I said I hoped her children enjoyed them, to which she replied that she had no children, wasn’t married, and had bought the books simply for her own pleasure.

  It was at this point that the old art-school-friend saw another old friend over on the far side of the room and politely excused himself. I excused him gladly and gave him a silent blessing for leaving us alone together. I didn’t miss his presence.