What Was Rescued

by Jane Bailey

  Some things about her did change, though. Her psychiatrist was a tall, calm man called Eric Dumonnier. I’ve no idea if he was French or not, because he spoke with a well-to-do English accent. When I first shook hands with him, I remember thinking, I don’t know if you’re going to have an affair with my wife, but good luck, mate. Actually, I don’t know if I really thought that or not. I’m probably just making it up because it’s what I’d think now. I’ve no idea whether they had an affair. I do wonder if Pippa had any real passion for sex at all, or whether she simply knew how to use her sexuality for her own ends. She was good at seduction, but that was it. There seemed to be no artless desire, no passionate joy for it. However, Eric Dumonnier was to have a huge impact on our lives, one way or another.

  After two sessions of analysis with Dumonnier, Pippa began to tell me in the evenings how she was suffering from post-partum anxiety. It didn’t have a special name then, but I suppose the specialist had seen post-natal depression enough to recognize it and was smart enough not to see it – like everyone else did – as a form of madness. I wasn’t convinced he had got this right; Pippa seemed too easily transformed by a spending spree to be depressed. However, as the weeks went by, she mentioned new insights that he had given her, and one of these was what he called ‘survivor’s guilt’. At first I was sceptical, but the more she talked about it the more I empathized with this myself. Was this me? Did I have survivor’s guilt? I became intrigued, but after hours of hearing my wife enthuse about the idea I began to resent paying bloody ‘Eric’ three bloody guineas an hour to state the ruddy obvious and give it a special name. Of course she had survivor’s guilt! We all did. Although I couldn’t for the life of me see why Pippa was a special case. She hadn’t lost a brother or a sister, and I was pretty sure she hadn’t lost much sleep over anyone else’s.

  She seemed to become so self-absorbed. I suppose I should have been grateful to be paying someone else to take all that off my hands, but somehow she just talked about herself even more and became increasingly cheerful about her own special psychological problems. She was enjoying being a victim, although of what I’m not sure, and I don’t think she was sure either. But she felt special and entitled, and in a couple of months she felt so special that she had an idea to write a book.

  Yes, a book about herself.

  Of course, if you knew Pippa, it was a totally logical next step. All about her. And that Dumonnier chap encouraged her. He was the person who put the idea into her head. To be honest, I don’t think he saw Pippa as an individual. As soon as he learnt about her extraordinary childhood experience, he simply saw her as a victim of that. He saw the sinking of The City of India and eight days starving and thirsty, adrift in the mid-Atlantic in a small boat, as the defining feature of my wife. All right – put like that, it does seem pretty significant. It’s not an everyday occurrence, but what I mean is that I don’t think he looked any further. He was so excited by it. Well, that’s how I saw it, anyway. Of course, Pippa would say I was just jealous because I hadn’t thought of writing a book about it myself, but I don’t think I was. I was cynical – and of course far too busy – but actually I was really quite pleased to see her so enlivened and happy. She stopped moping and became truly engaged in something for the first time since I’d known her. She would sit for hours writing, catch the train to London to see Eric, to see her old friends and to scout around the literary agents, and she would come back with cheeks aglow and eyes sparkling. She smiled a lot more. She had a sense of purpose. There were ‘things she needed to say’, and she had the chance to tell the world.

  I suppose, like every partner of a writer, I hoped to God I wasn’t in it.

  42

  DORA

  It must’ve been the early spring of 1953, a few weeks into my captivity. Patsy had shown considerable concern about Ralph’s restrictions on my movements but had been told how worried he was about my health and my state of mind. He didn’t want me doing anything stupid, he said, that might lead to the loss of the baby. She knew exactly what he meant by that, and I think she would’ve told him to make a decent woman of me, had she not been so concerned for their jobs. Anyway, she and I were poring over Claudine’s homework when Ralph came home with an unexpected guest.

  The woman was in her late twenties: quiet and aloof, with short, brown curly hair. It was her quietness that fooled you. She had what was known then as a ‘gamine’ look, but she was very pale and seemed fragile, almost breakable. Ralph introduced her as ‘Sophie’. Ralph sat her down at the kitchen table with us and nodded at me and in the direction of the pantry to fetch some bread and cheese.

  It was startlingly quiet.

  ‘Are you married, then?’ asked Claudine, who was always uncomfortable with silences.

  ‘Her husband is in Paris,’ Ralph replied for her, a little gruffly I thought.

  ‘Why has he left you here?’ Claudine was unperturbed.

  ‘He hasn’t left her here. But, Sophie will be staying with us, so I want you to make her feel at home.’ He smiled at Sophie, who managed to smile back, but only at him.

  Ralph rejected all my attempts to find out more about her. I became so angry and frustrated with him that I went off to sleep in Tighe’s empty room and reclaimed it for myself. He seemed to make no objection. Sophie was housed in a small bedroom which had been used to store junk but had recently been decorated by Denis, and for which Patsy and I had made curtains in early preparation for the baby. I’m not sure how much Sophie slept in it, though.

  There were local rumours that Sophie had been beaten up by her husband and that she couldn’t have children. Out of the frying pan, I thought. Anyway, I got nowhere with Ralph about it, and then one evening Denis came right out and asked him over dinner. Ralph replied in French, and Denis threw his hands in the air, making sounds of disbelief, while Sylvain blew air from his blown cheeks, a little less dramatically.

  ‘A commune?’ said Patsy. ‘You’re creating a commune here?’

  ‘I’ve made no secret of it for some time.’

  ‘What’s a “commune”?’ asked Claudine.

  ‘It means we’re all equal. We’re all working together, we’ll share the profits. This is my philosophy: what’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is mine.’

  ‘N’importe quoi!’ said Denis under his breath, throwing his hands about again.

  ‘No one owns anything. We share everything.’

  ‘Can I have the new bedroom, then?’ asked Claudine, hopefully. ‘Sometimes?’

  ‘Ta gueule!’ said her father.

  ‘There’s no need to worry, Denis. Nobody comes off badly. No one owns anything: people or property.’

  Patsy tried desperately to introduce a note of humour, terrified that her husband might blow his top. ‘You hear that, Claudine? You’re not mine and Papa’s any more. You belong to everyone.’

  ‘Maman!’

  ‘Take her – you can have her!’

  ‘Maman!’

  ‘It’s okay, chérie.’ Claudine was genuinely distressed. ‘No one else will want you.’ She put her arm around her daughter and pulled her in close, kissing her loudly on the head.

  ‘Sophie is going to live with us permanently. And this is just a start. We’ll add more rooms. We’ll expand.’

  I thought about ways I could leave Les Amandiers. Patsy would not dare to assist me openly. Despite her private sympathy and her feisty nature, she was too afraid for their future. I didn’t know how to find help in France. The only way I could terminate the pregnancy was to go to England. Even there it would be illegal, and I would need money. I don’t think I seriously considered getting rid of it; I just felt cheated and trapped. I wanted choices. I was angry at all the closed doors. But what if I was free to go home? I saw myself retching on the swaying cross-Channel ferry, disembarking with a heavy suitcase at Dover. I pictured the train journey from Dover to London, from London to Newport, and the Joneses’ bus from Newport up into the Valleys. There would be no fanfare for th
e arrival of an unmarried daughter with a swollen belly. Hadn’t I caused them enough shame? And yet home was where I wanted to be. If only I could persuade Ralph to take me.

  Home. I longed to see Our Dad before anything terrible happened to him, to smell his old musty jacket and hold his fag-yellowed fingers, and I longed for the wisdom of my parents. They would know what to do. I might heap shame on them, but they would know what to do. Ralph no longer seemed a reliable source of wisdom. A part of me would happily forgive his outbursts and settle for a man who loved me enough, if not always in the way I’d hoped for. But what I found hardest of all, as I thought about the child growing inside me, for better or worse, was that I was totally on my own. This was a decision I would have to make for myself, and whether I chose to stay or to leave, I knew it was going to be a struggle.

  I had written to Jenny, and she had written back, telling me she could try to help, but I must get myself over there soon, before the pregnancy was too advanced. After that there were no more letters – and no letters from home either. Ralph always went to meet the postman early each morning and would bring the letters to the table. There were never any for me after that.

  I knew my passport would not be in my suitcase, and I was right. Life repeated itself. Whenever Ralph was out of the house, I searched. I looked in every room, under every mattress and bed, in curtain linings, in shoes, in pockets, in books. I even managed to search the outhouses, and Patsy searched the car for me, but there was no sign of it anywhere. I don’t think I wanted to leave him for good. It wasn’t that. I wanted to go home, to visit my parents. I wanted the freedom to choose.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s a stroke of luck, coming across Sophie like that?’ Ralph said one morning.

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Come on, Dora, keep up! She can’t have children.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘And you don’t want yours,’ he said, ‘so you can give your baby to Sophie to bring up.’

  I was aghast.

  ‘I’m not giving my baby away to anyone.’

  ‘But you don’t want a baby – you said so.’

  ‘I don’t want a baby outside marriage, that’s what I said. Outside marriage. You keep up, Ralph!’

  He made as if to come towards me, but stopped, breathing deeply. ‘Sophie will have your baby. She’ll bring it up. What’s yours is hers, remember?’

  43

  ARTHUR

  My wife seemed to have come home at last, but all I saw of her was the back of her head, and all I heard from her was the aggressive tapping of her typewriter. I was pleased for her, because she seemed to have found a purpose, and that released me from a certain anxiety I had about her sense of entrapment by motherhood. On the other hand, I sometimes felt I was supporting two live-in lodgers, and only one of them did anything useful.

  Felicity flourished under Beryl’s care. She warmed to the regular feeds and the regular bedtimes. She smiled and gurgled a lot. By May of that year, she was four months old and would turn her head and beam at me when I arrived home, and when she did her eyes nearly disappeared. They were changing, and I could see she was not going to have Pippa’s dazzling ones but my grey-blue ones. A cloud of dark hair was sprouting from her soft head, and her cheeks were peachy. What a joy she was to come home to! It was a far cry from the days of her long-faced mother and tins of corned beef. Now I had a yelp of delight from Felicity and braised beef with two vegetables from Beryl. Just the tapping from Pippa, of course, but to be honest, I was glad to have her out of the way.

  Work had been very stressful since the previous year, when our jet engine developed difficulties and was found responsible for a couple of air crashes. Many of us thought we would lose our jobs, but I was still there, hanging on, and it looked as though a new project for a passenger jet might save my bacon.

  Pippa had been oblivious to all this, since she never asked me about my work. She saw me as a man who went out of a door in the morning and came back through it in the evening. Regular as clockwork and boring as hell. She even started sleeping in the study. Whether Beryl had really told her that the tapping was keeping the baby awake or not, I’m not sure, but it was an excuse to move the cot into Beryl’s room, and soon Pippa was giving pretexts about late-night inspiration and not wanting to wake me. It wasn’t long before it became permanent, and I became a lonely man in our double bed. Still, she was happier than I’d known her, and she often went up to London to see ‘Eric’ or her friends or someone with literary connections. I encouraged her in this. It was almost a relief to have her out of the way. What I hadn’t bargained on was her deceit.

  Ah! You might imagine I was going to say that Pippa was unfaithful, but that’s not what I’m referring to. No. She had been lying to me since I had first known her, as I was about to find out.

  44

  DORA

  Everyone said the spring of that year was slow coming, although to me it was early. March was brighter than any March I had known. But then April burst out, opening every bud and warming the earth long before breakfast. I had never seen anything like it. The skies were a deep blue with crisp clouds over the mountains that overlooked Les Amandiers from a distance. The beauty of it all was a torment. I longed to be back home, where I knew the rain was probably lashing the mountainsides, and the wet window panes would be distorting the outline of the coal tip out the back of Our Mam and Dad’s house.

  I did not attempt to go to Ralph in that time, and he didn’t attempt to come to me. I lay in Tighe’s old room at night and thought about Sophie in the ‘nursery’. Once or twice I got up in the small hours and hovered by her door on the way to the bathroom. Once I thought I heard her breathing, mostly I did not. Sometimes I would rise early in the hope of seeing if her room was empty or not, but the door would be closed, and I would be none the wiser. I wondered if she was trying to see if he could perhaps give her a baby, if it wasn’t after all some difficulty of her husband’s and not hers that had led to her childlessness. I wondered if I should warn her about Ralph’s temper.

  In the end I did nothing. I slept, I got up, I did chores, I slept. Patsy found an earring, which wasn’t mine, when she was changing Ralph’s sheets. I avoided Ralph as much as possible, nursing my hurt privately. Patsy and Denis could see my wounded heart, of course, and were especially kind to me. Claudine would often come into my room at night saying that she couldn’t sleep so that she could snuggle up to me. I would tell her stories about Wales, or about princes and princesses, or animals that could talk, and we would drift off to sleep together. She was a cheeky little thing, perky, cheerful and nosey, but I loved her. There was a simplicity about her tenderness for me that always moved me; and when she rested her little head on my shoulders and said she felt safe after a bad dream, the feeling of being needed filled me with something like joy.

  One night I was woken by Claudine’s arm across my chest.

  ‘Dora?’ she whispered. ‘Where’s Forth With?’

  ‘What?’ The shuttered blackness gave no hint of the time.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘No idea. Why do you ask?’

  She sighed heavily. ‘I went into the living room when Ralph was burning stuff on the fire, and he got really stern and told me to leave Forth With. How can I leave somewhere if I don’t know where it is?’

  ‘It’s not a place,’ I said sleepily. ‘It means “straight away”.’ I propped myself up on one shoulder. ‘What “stuff” was he burning?’

  ‘Paper – a letter or something. And he said I was a bloody pest.’

  Letters.

  She sounded close to tears. ‘He thinks I’m a cockroach.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I dreamt I was cockroach.’

  I pulled her in close to me. ‘You’re a lovely butterfly, and you don’t have to leave forthwith. Stay and sleep.’

  I too had the most terrifying dreams.

  It must have been the idea of a nursery and the thought of Sophie sleeping in it. I pictured a r
ocking horse. I had never seen one until that time on board the ship. I suppose it was bound to happen, that it would trigger memories of that other one, the beautiful rocking horse on The City of India. I saw it again and again. It had been years since I’d last dreamt of it, but now I couldn’t escape from its beautiful deceit. In the dream I’m walking towards it, holding the hand of my cabin-mate, Janet. We’re walking towards the glorious white-and-red rocking horse with its golden mane, and then suddenly there is no floor, there’s a drop of hundreds of feet into the very depths of the ship under the sea. I try to scream, but I have no voice. I’m falling, and Janet is reaching out for my hand, but I’m falling and trying to scream . . . and I wake up with a pathetic ‘ach’ sound coming out of my mouth in a strangled whisper, with sweat all over my chest and in my hair.

  One morning I woke after a dream like this and opened the shutters. It was bright outside already, even though it was only five-thirty. I made my way to the bathroom and washed. The house was silent. I dressed quietly and went outside for a walk. It had been a long time since I had walked outdoors unaccompanied.

  I made my way to the road, and although I had nothing with me – not even a handbag or a ten-franc note – I had an urgent desire to escape, to hitch a lift from the next car that went past. I sat under a bush near the entrance to Les Amandiers. If Ralph came, I could hide easily. I don’t know what sort of bush it was, but the leaves were thick and fragrant, and it was a pleasure just to sit there in the sunshine, awaiting whatever vehicle happened to go by.

  Nothing appeared. No car, no van.

  I sat there a long time, filling my lungs with the scent of spring. At last I heard a motor in the distance. I listened as the sound came closer. Then it seemed to become quieter. Slowly, to my dismay, it petered out altogether.

  I was about to get up and go back to the house when I heard another sound: someone was whistling. I stiffened. Peering out of the leaves, I looked about. Along the road a bicycle was coming, and as it approached I could see who it was. The young postman dismounted and propped his bicycle right next to me. As he sorted a bunch of letters in his hands, he spotted me and leant down to my hideout.