The Chrysalis

by Catherine Deveney

  He pushed her forward, past the pâtisserie and chocolatier. The left hand window was decorated with summer roses, pinned in garlands across the top of the glass. Pink and red petals were scattered on a table that was piled with white and dark chocolate truffles, topped with red roses at the pinnacle. In the right-hand window was a selection of pâtisserie, miniature pastries and tarts filled with vanilla custard and chocolate cream and almonds, topped with drizzled raspberry coulis and fondant icing.

  In an attempt to calm Marianne down, Zac slowed slightly at the window.

  “How beautiful,” he said. “Would you like me to buy you something, Marianne?”

  Marianne shook her head.

  “Later,” she said, unable to say more. She pointed a finger at the entrance. “There.”

  Zac hauled the chair over the lip of the entrance and wheeled her towards the lift. It was old fashioned and cumbersome, with a metal grid chain door that had to be pulled across before the outer door was closed. Zac pushed for floor one and waited as the lift moved fraction by fraction, ascending slowly.

  “You must have been in this lift many times, Marianne,” he said, to break the silence.

  She shook her head.

  “I always ran up the stairs.”

  The simplicity of her answer made Zac sad. So much made him sad these days, he thought with a frown. At last the lift lurched to a halt and he opened first one door then the other and wheeled Marianne out onto the landing.

  He saw her gasp slightly, trying to take a deep breath and he put a hand on her shoulder. She pointed to a door opposite but said nothing. The door was red, freshly painted, not the look of an abandoned apartment at all. With one hand still on Marianne’s shoulder, Zac pushed forward and knocked.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Marianne

  I feel almost as if I cannot breathe as Zac wheels me past Bar Patrice. I know that if I look up, I will see the window where I watched Patrice with the blonde woman the night he died. I do not yet dare to look up and see the empty space.

  The bar looks ordinary enough, perhaps even more rundown that before, but then it always did look normal during the day. The old men sitting in the front section look much as they ever did, though obviously they are not the same old goats who used to prop up the bar. New old goats. Last time I was here, I walked in that door under my own steam. I find it hard to understand what has happened to me since then. Time passing is inevitable and yet it is one of the most confusing things about life. I was that – and now I am this. The simplest of concepts and the most complex.

  The pâtisserie, on the other hand, is different. The pink and lilac candy bar appearance has been changed to something smarter and more sophisticated. Zac is very attentive, kind the way he offers to buy me some treat. I know that a trip into that pâtisserie will be very special but now is not the moment. I cannot wait to get upstairs and see who will be waiting. My heart is hammering and the sense of anticipation is taking away my ability to speak.

  I wonder what Jasmine will look like now. Will time have been as hard on her as it has been on me? I feel almost ashamed that someone from my past will see me like this, withered in an old chair, reliant on someone else for almost everything. Why do I want to see her when I used to run from her? I suppose because I want to recapture something: a time, a place, an emotion. I want to hold it in my hand and look at it again. See what it really was. The urge to go back is always so powerful.

  In the lift with Zac, all I can think of is Raymond and I standing, side by side, in the empty apartment the first time we came to view it. It is strange because I am now sitting but Zac is standing, looking like Raymond, and it is almost as if time has swallowed me up but not him. Raymond and I used the lift only that once in all our years there, because we were on the first floor and even back then the lift was slow and it was quicker to walk.

  The lift seems to take an eternity. It inches slowly upwards and the turmoil of memories of my past life spins inside my head.

  There are always, in life, events that change everything. I thought my pregnancy was going to be that event, but strangely it was what happened afterwards that was the catalyst for change.

  After his initial fears about the possibility of Down’s syndrome, Raymond became buoyant, optimistic in a way that I had not seen since the night Patrice died. It was as if he had been given a little bit of himself back. I felt so relieved. I thought that I had made the right decision, that having a child was finally going to allow us to move on. I was not naïve enough to think that the events of Saint Estelle would be wiped out completely; you can never rub out shadows. But I thought that I had found a way to create a new life, and that the old one would recede further and further until we rarely thought of it.

  The day had started without any sign of how momentous it would be, which is the way momentous days start out, more often than not. I was due for a scan and Raymond was coming with me. He was in good form, joking in the waiting room about how conventional we looked. Mr Average Schoolteacher and his wife. Inwardly I thought there was nothing about Raymond that could ever deceive anyone into thinking that he was average but I simply smiled.

  “Imagine if they knew!” he whispered as we waited.

  “Knew what?”

  “About the night… you know… our anniversary… when he was conceived.” He started to laugh. “Oh God… that man…”

  “It’s not a he.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No. We’re having a girl.”

  I picked up a magazine and started to leaf through it.

  “You sound very sure,” he said.

  “I am.” I placed a hand on my stomach absently, waiting to feel a kick but there was nothing.

  “Why so sure?”

  I just shrugged. Ever since the day in the café when I had watched Millie, I had convinced myself that this was a girl I was carrying. My Millie. I felt it. I had tried to tell Raymond about that day but somehow I couldn’t convey to him what it had meant and I gave up.

  “Marianne…” I looked up to see a nurse smiling at me and followed her into the room.

  “How are you today?” she said, helping me up on the bed in the small room where the scanning equipment was. “You’ve brought your husband with you this time.”

  She glanced at him and smiled.

  “This is Raymond,” I said and she held out her hand to him.

  “Pleased to meet you Raymond. I’m Val.”

  I lay back and she pushed up my top to expose my rounded belly, squirting some jelly on. The cold made me gasp.

  “Sorry,” she said, and she flicked out the lights so that she could examine the screen. She turned to Raymond as she worked.

  “So what do you do, Raymond?”

  “I’m an art teacher.”

  “Oh I loved my art teacher at school,” she said. “He was so quirky and different.”

  “Really?” said Raymond, sounding almost neutral but I, who knew him well, detected suppressed amusement in his tone.

  She chattered on, but after a moment I noticed that she was concentrating, not engaging so freely any more, and answering only briefly when I asked a question.

  “I won’t be a minute,” she said and she left the room, returning with a man that I recognised as the consultant I had seen only once before. He looked at the screen and then examined me and I began to wonder about the quality of the stillness that had developed in the room. I could tell that Raymond was oblivious to any sense of danger and I could not understand how his senses did not alert him to what was happening.

  “Is everything all right?” I said.

  “You can sit up now Marianne,” said the consultant. “I’ll let you get yourself together and then we can have a chat next door.”

  He went out and Val helped me up again. I pulled the top down and slipped my feet into my discarded shoes. Val had resumed her chat and for a moment I was slightly confused. Perhaps everything was all right after all. But I knew as I walked out the door
that it wasn’t, not because Val said anything but because of the way she smiled at me. It was full of pity, that smile, and my heart missed a beat.

  We sat in front of him, this stranger in his white coat and he spread some notes in front of him.

  “I’m afraid it’s gone,” he said.

  The effect on Raymond was remarkable. We weren’t touching, yet I could feel his body stiffen without even looking at him.

  “Gone?”

  It was as if someone had breathed on him and he had turned to marble at my side, cold and unflinching.

  “What’s gone?” His voice was tight.

  I suppose the consultant – I can’t even remember his name – was a clever man but you would never have known it.

  “There’s no movement,” he said.

  He didn’t speak unkindly. Just carelessly, without any apparent insight into how we might be feeling. Perhaps he thought we would be relieved because we had already known the baby had Down’s.

  Raymond looked at me.

  “The baby is dead?” he said, ignoring the doctor.

  His expression terrified me and I grabbed his hand. His fingers were like ice.

  “I think it’s best if we induce, but there’s no immediate rush. Go home and take a day or two to get used to everything and then we’ll bring you back in. I’ll get Val to go through everything with you when you’re ready.” He wrote something in the notes and then looked up at us.

  “It’s for the best,” he continued. “The pregnancy wasn’t viable and this is nature’s way of taking care of it. She tends to get these things right, Mother Nature.”

  He couldn’t have said anything worse. Raymond shot out of his chair like a man possessed. The consultant looked up, startled, his pen poised over the page. Raymond leant his hands on his desk and leant towards him.

  “Fuck Mother Nature,” he said quietly, through gritted teeth.

  He went out, closing the door ever so carefully behind him.

  Raymond cried in his sleep. He did not want me to see him break during the day because I still had the birth to go through, but at night, when his subconscious dictated his behaviour, he sobbed until the pillow was damp. I stroked him without waking him, trying to soothe him. There had been a lot of loneliness for both of us in our marriage, but I don’t think either of us had ever felt lonelier, each protecting the other from the violence of our feelings.

  I did not need to be induced in the end. A few days after we discovered the baby was dead, my labour started and Raymond, white faced and grim, ushered me to the car in the middle of the night. We drove in silence through the dark but every so often his hand gripped mine.

  The pain was unlike anything I had ever experienced, a metal corkscrew turning inside me, ripping me open in a way that I knew was more than physical and would never heal. The staff wanted to give me every possible drug to blunt it, because the baby couldn’t be harmed now and there was no need for me to suffer, but somehow, pain was all I had left of this child. Every excruciating contraction forged the only relationship I would ever have with her, and I refused to give it up. I screamed, not just with the physical pain, but with the agony of loss, and the nurse finally ignored my protestations and injected me with a sedative to calm me. When the baby slithered out of me, blue and mottled with purple patches that looked like bruises, the room was silent, and my world would never be the same again.

  The midwife bundled her up and without even looking, passed her behind like a rugby ball to a waiting nurse who rushed her from the room. I was left, empty and exhausted, blood trickling down my thighs, wondering if I could not have held her for just a few seconds even. But things were different then. There was no photograph, no print of the baby’s little hand or foot as there would be now, no keepsake box of mementos. There was simply silence, the rustle of the nurse’s stiff uniform and the sound of the door closing on my dreams.

  There was a moment, a sudden rush of emotion, when I tried to raise myself from the bed, follow, track the baby down, and Raymond held me back desperately, murmuring my name soothingly against my hair.

  “Marianne… Marianne… Marianne…” The sound of the words combined with the hum of the air conditioning became a song in my head, a requiem for my dead baby. Marianne, Marianne, Marianne.

  “I want to see her,” I said, surprised by how strong my voice was. “I want to see the baby.

  “Best not,” said the nurse, in such a way that it made me feel ashamed for asking. As if my request was morbid or indulgent.

  “The baby.” I heard Raymond croak. “What was it?”

  “It was a little boy,” the nurse said, and I wondered why she was saying that about my baby Millie. I knew, whatever they tried to tell us.

  “A little boy.” Raymond repeated, nodding, and I stopped struggling suddenly, lying back against the plumped up pillows. I rolled over, turning my back to everyone in the room, staring intently at a spot on the wall until my eyes felt strange, burning deeply, and the spot began to shimmer.

  “We’ll take care of the burial,” the nurse said to Raymond, talking in a low voice as if that meant I would not hear. I wanted a funeral, a proper funeral, but I didn’t have the energy to fight and I believe they buried my baby in a plot of land in the hospital grounds that contained a number of stillborn babies. There was nothing to name her, nothing to mark the fact that our baby had ever existed.

  I wanted to go home but they convinced me I must stay for a night so that they could keep a check on me. I only agreed because Raymond remained at my bedside in an armchair, all night. The light in the room was switched out and I kept my back to him, pretending to sleep, watching the light filter in from the corridors and listening, dry eyed and bereft, to the sound of babies crying lustily in the maternity ward next door.

  The lift jolts. Moves again. Jolts.

  I have thought so much about my lost baby this last week. The memories of that time flood back as I travel up in the lift with Zac to see Jasmine – and whoever else might be with her. Please, I think fervently, let it not just be Jasmine there. Let my message have got through and been understood.

  When the lift doors finally open, the freshly painted, glossy red door that meets us seems bright and cheerful, at odds with my memories of when I was last here. When Zac knocks, my heart thumps. Everything else is still.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Zac

  Zac rests his hand on Marianne’s shoulder as he hears the sound of movement behind the door. The double lock turns. Click, click.

  As the door swings open, Zac sees a striking, elderly woman, slim and tall with dyed black hair swept up into a bun. She is elegant but very thin, her fine features angular in the taut pallor of her face. Her eyes are very fine still, despite her age, large and well-shaped and expressive. For a second, she looks as though she might lose her composure when she sees the figure in the wheelchair.

  “Marianne,” she whispers, leaning forward to grasp Marianne’s hand from the chair, and pressing her fingers momentarily to her lips.

  Marianne murmurs something in French that Zac cannot catch and looks up expectantly. The hectic flush in her cheeks is still intense.

  “Oui. Elle y est,” says the woman soothingly, pointing to a closed door.

  Marianne breathes out heavily.

  Zac hesitates, uncertain what to do. He can see how agitated Marianne is. He feels like an onlooker in a private drama, an outsider, until the woman glances in his direction and smiles faintly.

  “You must be Zac,” she says, extending her hand in a way that strikes Zac as faintly theatrical. Her accent is heavy but the tones so deliberately musical and well-modulated that Zac wonders if she teaches speech.

  “My name is Jasmine.”

  “Pleased to meet you.”

  “Come,” says Jasmine.

  She opens the door and holds it for Zac to push Marianne through. There is another older woman, well dressed and handsome with soft, ash blonde hair, standing at the fireplace, watching th
e door. Zac estimates that she is at least in her seventies. She is tall, so tall, he thinks. As tall as he is – perhaps taller. Zac hesitates, aware of something arcing silently between this stranger and Marianne. He does not know whether to push the chair forward further. The stranger’s hand has flown to her mouth at the sight of Marianne, her lips trembling. Zac sees her eyes fill momentarily.

  “Time has not been kind to me,” murmurs Marianne.

  Her pride, her spirit is struggling; Zac can feel it. His sense of it is so powerful that he almost physically flinches.

  The stranger moves forward, lowering herself to her knees in front of the chair, and

  Marianne lifts both her hands and places one on each of the stranger’s cheeks, a gesture so intensely intimate, somehow, that Zac looks away. He catches Jasmine’s eye but cannot read what he see there. Some combination of emotions that Zac does not quite understand, but he thinks he recognises both empathy and jealousy in the mix.

  “You are still my Marianne,” says the stranger. She leans her head forward and rests it on Marianne’s and they talk this way for a moment, excluding everyone else in the room.

  “You look wonderful,” whispers Marianne against the stranger’s hair. “I knew you would.”

  “It is so good to see you again.”

  “I think of you every day.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Why not? It is the truth.”

  “It makes me feel like I abandoned you.”

  “You did.”

  “We agreed.”

  “I know.”

  Marianne moves her head away from the stranger’s and takes her hand, then catches sight of Zac looking curiously at them.

  “I would like to introduce you to someone,” she says. “Zac, you have not met this lady before but you have certainly heard of her. “This is Rae.”