Born of Woman

by Wendy Perriam

Lyn stared at all the bounty. Why should an enemy bring gifts—and on such a scale? He had cheated Edward of his house and was now repaid with a cornucopia. He carried them to the sideboard, arranged them as a still-life. He couldn’t open them, couldn’t take anything else which belonged to Edward.

  ‘Thanks,’ he murmured, fingering the box of marrons in its gold and scarlet packaging. They cost six or seven pounds, that size—more than he had spent on the entire Christmas lunch. Edward had put it to shame now, his piddling little picnic. He and Hester had always spent quiet and frugal Christmases. There hadn’t been money to spare for marrons or liqueurs, nor friends or kin to share them with. Only in Matthew’s boyhood had Hernhope rung with carols and groaned with food and wine. He had read about past Christmases in Hester’s diaries—the thirty-pound turkeys and twelve-foot-high Christmas trees, the troops of villagers who came for cakes and ale, the Christmas feast for the shep-herds. He and Hester had sat alone with a small bony chicken between them and a couple of tangerines—Hester still in black and silence heavy-breathing on the windows.

  He ignored the whisky, reached across for his own cheap vin de pays.

  ‘A glass of wine?’ he asked.

  ‘No, thank you. I very rarely drink. I’d rather have a juice, if that’s no trouble?’

  Lyn frowned. He hadn’t any juice, hadn’t bothered with soft drinks, not even a bottle of tonic or orange squash. Money was short and he’d had to shop extremely carefully, buy only the necessities.

  ‘I’m afraid there isn’t … I mean, I didn’t know …’

  ‘A glass of … water, then. No, really. I’m fond of water, I always think if it wasn’t free, then …’

  Lyn escaped into the kitchen. Water—on Christmas Day! Even the tap was grudging, spluttered when he turned it on, coughed up only a brown and brackish dribble. He poured it into one of Hester’s thick and clumsy glasses, stared at the murky liquid. Edward would be used to fresh-pressed juices from exotic fruits, served in cut-glass tumblers on a silver tray. He had read about Edward’s luxurious life, his country club, his rich and important friends. He poured the water down the sink, returned to the living-room.

  ‘I’m sorry …’ He tried to laugh, to cover his embarrassment. ‘Even water seems a problem. We have marvellous water, normally—as pure as any in the British Isles, but the pipes must have rusted up or …’

  ‘Please don’t worry. It doesn’t matter at all.’

  ‘Well, have a seat, at least.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Edward chose the hardest chair, sat down on the very edge of it.

  There was silence for a moment. Lyn strained to fill it. There was too much to say, but nothing safe or neutral.

  ‘The … er … snow’s slackening off a little now.’

  ‘Yes.’ Edward wasn’t looking. He cleared his throat, leaned forward in his chair. ‘I was surprised to hear from you, Mr Winterton—very surprised, in fact. As you know, my lawyers have been …’

  ‘Do let’s open that wine.’ Lyn was still standing, hunting for a corkscrew. ‘I need a drink, quite frankly, and I never fancy tippling on my own. It is Christmas, after all.’

  ‘Look, Mr Winterton, I’m most grateful to you for getting in touch with me and inviting me here at all, but I can’t pretend that there aren’t certain … er … constraints between us. This isn’t purely a … social call. Christmas or no, I think we should have a full and frank discussion, to thrash these matters out before we …’

  ‘All right, but we can do it over a drink, can’t we?’

  ‘Well, just a small one.’ Edward took his tumbler grudgingly. ‘Perhaps you don’t realise, Mr Winterton, but I’ve been in England over six whole weeks now, and got absolutely nowhere. I’m most relieved you’ve decided to come into the open and help me get things settled. It’s essential that …’

  Lyn rammed the cork back in the bottle, started pacing up and down. ‘I never said I’d … What I mean is, there’s no point in going over and over grudges or dragging up past history or …’ He stopped in front of the door. He longed to slam through it, escape from a situation he himself had set up. Bloody fool.

  Edward took a cautious sip of his wine. ‘We’ve got to talk, Mr Winterton, we can’t avoid it. And we must go back to basics. There are certain things I …’

  ‘Well, let’s leave it till after lunch. It’ll be … easier then. We’ll be more relaxed and …’ Lyn was talking to the door. He turned round, tried to sound more welcoming. ‘I expect you’re hungry, aren’t you? People always seem ravenous up here. I suppose it’s the air or …’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Winterton, but I had a very substantial breakfast at my hotel. What I’d prefer is …’

  ‘It’s nothing fancy, anyway. If you’re expecting proper Christmas dinner, then you’re going to be disappointed.’ He heard himself sounding peevish, inhospitable. It was a crazy situation. He should have stayed in hiding, fled abroad. Eating would be as difficult as talking. He hadn’t managed breakfast, had pushed away his scrappy bit of supper on Christmas Eve.

  ‘I’ve laid it up in the kitchen. We always eat in there. It’s the only room which really fits the table. It’s twelve feet long, that table, and two hundred years old. It was made from the decking of a …’ He was blabbing on, filling in the space with words. At least it stopped Edward talking, postponed that full and frank discussion which meant only loss and void. His guest had eased up from his chair and was standing by the sideboard, rigid and uneasy.

  ‘Yes, bring your glass. The kitchen’s just through here. It should be warm. The range is always temperamental, but I cleaned it out thoroughly last night and …’ Christ! He sounded like some clacking old hen of a woman. If he hadn’t been out of his mind, he could have spent his Christmas Day alone.

  The table loomed larger even than usual—a mile of wood with a peck of food on it. Jennifer would have made pies, puddings, mincemeat, marzipan, laid the cloth like a work of art—scarlet crackers nestling in snowy napkins, silvered laurel framing gold chrysanthemums.

  Edward had followed him and was dithering by the table. He looked wrong in the house, his head too near the ceiling, his frame too large for the narrow wooden chairs.

  ‘No, don’t sit there. Sit at the head of the table.’ Lyn drew back the larger chair for Edward—the master’s chair with arms—Thomas Winterton’s chair. Beloved son. Since her husband’s death, Hester had never used it. It had stood there, empty, joining them at meals, he on its left, Hester on its right. Now, he sat further down the table, on a lower, lesser seat.

  Silence again. Lyn wished they could say grace, embark on some soothing formal ritual which would prevent the need for fraught and dangerous topics.

  ‘Er … can I give you some ham?’ he asked instead. The squat pink oval seemed to have shrunk since he opened the tin. He tried to carve it neatly, but the scrappy slices fell to pieces on the plates. Jennifer’s ham was plump and smooth and marbled like her thighs. The knife trembled in his hand, but he went on slicing—cut her off.

  ‘I should have cooked potatoes, I suppose, or Brussels sprouts or something … Would you like some bread?’

  ‘Thank you. Just half a slice.’

  Lyn hacked him off a doorstep. Hester would never have stood for half slices. His mother had insisted on no-nonsense appetites, cleared and grateful plates, no fads or fuss-potting.

  ‘My mother baked the best bread in Northumberland.’ Why had he said that? He remembered it as hard and heavy, scratching down his throat when other kids had light, white, magic bread which God had already sliced in glossy coloured wrappers and which was so soft you could have slept on it. He should have said ‘our’ mother, anyway.

  ‘Yes, I … er … saw her recipes in the book.’

  Now they were back on battle-ground again. Edward was right—it was impossible not to talk. Every subject led back to their quarrel or their mother, their future or their past.

  ‘Look, Mr Ainsley,’ Lyn suddenly blurted out. ‘Don’t think I appr
ove of it—that book. I don’t. I never did. It’s full of lies.’

  ‘So I understand.’ Edward hadn’t touched his food. ‘It’s a pity, though, you didn’t express that disapproval—eighteen months ago, before it was ever published.’

  ‘I did. At least I tried. I …’

  ‘I mean, those were private diaries, and my own existence even more so. The only reason my mother had me … er … fostered, was surely to prevent any scandal and save her reputation. That was obvious, wasn’t it? Yet now what’s happened? The whole world is chewing it over as if Hester was a …’

  Lyn held a sliver of cold tasteless tomato on his tongue. He forced it down. ‘I … I … realise how you feel. I’d … feel the same myself. I told Matthew right from the beginning, we had no business to be …’

  ‘So what changed your mind?’

  ‘If you think it was … money, it wasn’t.’ Lyn paused. ‘Well … not as such.’ He could see Jennifer’s white and weeping face, the trail of bloody baby from bed to bathroom. Money! He hadn’t had enough to buy a Christmas pudding. ‘I know you blame me for handing over the diaries in the first place. I blame myself. I’d never have done it if I’d known what …’ He gripped the edge of the table. He loathed apologising, squirming in embarrassment, making himself a sucker and a fool, yet he had cheated this man, denied him his property, his rights, ignored those rights by signing an agreement with Matthew. ‘Look, one of the things I wanted to say today was …’ He swallowed. ‘Well … er … sorry—and I mean that.’

  Edward took a gulp of wine and then another. He seemed to be hiding his emotion behind the glass. ‘Th … thank you, Mr Winterton. That’s he first and only apology I’ve received, and I appreciate it. In fact, I’m sorry myself that all this should have arisen between … er … family.’

  Lyn swallowed a mouthful of ham. It tasted so bland, it could have been chicken, veal, cardboard. ‘I don’t even approve of the book as a book. I worked on it myself and yet it’s … lies, fantasies. I don’t know why. It’s based chiefly on Hester’s own records, and yet somehow she’s … not there. They deciphered a hundred thousand of her words and came up with … someone else. The Hester they published wasn’t the one who lived. The world may know that woman, but I‘ve never set eyes on her. She simply wasn’t like that.’

  Edward laid his fork down with the ham still on the prongs. ‘What … was she like?’

  Lyn searched the room for answers. Should he give Edward a loving, noble mother, or a crabbed and bitter one? Had he ever known her, anyway? How much of a mother was desire or dream or myth? The book was no more wrong about her than everybody was, including the son who had shared her life. He tried to find one word to describe her, to trap all the years of love and loss and longing, the parentheses and gaps. He stared at the stout walls, the massive beams holding up the house.

  ‘Strong,’ he said, at last.

  ‘The book was right, then—at least in that. She came over as a tower of strength.’

  ‘No.’ Lyn frowned. ‘It wasn’t quite like … I can’t explain, but …’

  He could see Edward waiting in the waiting silence. He knew he craved for details—a mother offered to him like a Christmas present, gift-wrapped, tinselled, labelled. That had been done already in the book. He refused to compound the lies. Edward had gifts and heritage enough. He would keep his mother for himself.

  ‘I didn’t … know her,’ he said, almost in a whisper.

  ‘For heaven’s sake …’ Edward sounded snappish, ‘You lived with her for thirty years.’

  ‘Thirty-one.’

  ‘Surely you’re not saying then …?’

  ‘Look, leave it, Mr Ainsley.’ His mother’s name. Matthew’s keeper’s name.

  ‘We can’t leave everything. It’s … a little absurd to pretend there’s nothing between us—and I don’t just mean a lawsuit now. We are, in fact, related. That colours the whole thing. Surely you can see that? I have a natural interest in my mother and her house and …’

  ‘Of course. I’m not denying it.’

  ‘In you, as well. I’ve always wanted a brother, and …’

  Lyn clenched his fists, concealed them under the table. Brother! Edward’s sentiment was more needling than his wrath. Half a glass of Tesco’s cut-price red had made him maudlin. He’d be embracing him next, shedding tears of emotion. He was trapped with this ‘brother’ all damned day now—that peeved officious voice with its clipped affected accent which grated on his nerves. Even the way he held his fork annoyed him. You could kill a man for less than that. He longed for a stronger drink—a slug of that Glenfiddich. At least they could finish the wine. He refilled both their glasses. Edward’s careful voice continued.

  ‘I have no other blood relation in the world. That was one of the reasons I agreed to come here. I wanted to meet you—not just to settle the … er … conflicts … though that, of course, remains of prime importance, but also to see my mother’s other son. You must realise, Mr Winterton …’

  ‘Don’t call me that.’ Lyn banged the bottle down. The fellow was so damned civil. Mr Winterton this, Mr Winterton that. Winterton was Matthew‘s name, dragged into the law courts, made a laughing-stock. ‘I suppose you find my Christian name ridiculous.’

  ‘I … I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You’re right, it is ridiculous. Stupid, sissy, girlish.’

  ‘Lyn?’ Edward looked bewildered, took refuge in his glass again.

  ‘Yes. Lyn, Lyn, Lyn. I used to know a girl called Lyn. She had long golden ringlets and a lisp.’

  ‘It’s a boy’s name in Wales, a man’s name, a very ancient one.’

  ‘So they tell me. But I have no link or tie with Wales at all. I went there once and found myself a foreigner. They were speaking a different language, and I don’t just mean the words.’

  ‘I’m half Welsh myself, Mr Winter … Lyn. My father was a Welshman.’

  ‘Your father? You … didn’t know your father.’ He saw Hester’s eyes again, staring troubled into his own. It wasn’t just the eyes they shared. Neither had had a father.

  ‘No, but I know about him. In fact he had your name. Lyn is the shortened form of Llewelyn, one of the oldest, proudest names in Wales. It means leader—and my father was a leader.’

  ‘How do you know that? I mean, I thought …’

  Edward clasped his hands around his glass, closed his eyes for a moment as if he were struggling with some emotion. He answered slowly, laying down each phrase like a weighty coin or jewel. ‘Hester wanted me to know—she must have done. She left me a sort of … fairy-tale, written out in her best handwriting in what looks like an old school exercise book. She gave it to my foster-parents along with a few clothes and bits and pieces—oh, and a photo of my father. I didn’t see it, actually, until I was a child of six or seven. Then they read the story to me, as a way of … well—explaining who I was, I suppose. It was about a girl with golden hair who fell in love with a tall, dark, handsome soldier. The soldier’s name was Lyn.’

  ‘Soldiers aren’t called Lyn.’

  ‘Yes, they are. My father was.’

  ‘Your father was a soldier?’

  ‘Yes. A Welsh guardsman and an officer. He fought in France and was decorated for bravery, then went back to the Somme and was killed a few months later. Hester told my foster-parents and then wrote it down for me in a way I could understand and would find … exciting—you know, knights and crossbows, instead of infantry and guns. The story goes right back to his boyhood—how he grew up in Caernarvonshire in a castle and …’

  ‘A castle?’ Was Edward mocking him, inventing this whole thing? He was probably so unused to drink, two glasses had unhinged him. Except he sounded sober enough.

  ‘Well, it was originally built as one. But it lost its fortifications and became just a manor-house. Hester and my father came from opposite sides of the country, but they both lived in wild rebellious areas with a history of endless warfare and castles everywhere. The Soldier met the Pr
incess when she had just turned seventeen and was holidaying with her family in Wales. They fell in love immediately. In fact, the story says the Princess loved her Prince more than woman had loved man before. Wait—I remember the words. I read the story so often, I know it off by heart now.’ Edward’s voice had suddenly come to life, the slow, careful cadences broken up and blazing. ‘‘‘Their love was as tall as Glyder Fawr, as strong as Llew Llaw Gyffes. Their hearts beat together like two clocks chiming side by side. If one smiled, so did the other—and the sun. If both cried, the whole world cried in rain.’’‘

  Lyn stared at Edward’s face. Those thin pedantic lips were speaking poetry. ‘H … Hester wrote that?’ In a schoolbook, as little more than a schoolgirl, when she was lost and panicking in London?

  ‘Yes. I never knew what the words meant, Glyder Fawr and Llew Llaw Gyffes. But I loved the sound of them. I used to repeat them to myself, so they became a sort of … magic spell. Later, I found out that Glyder Fawr was a high and mysterious mountain in Snowdonia, and Llew Llaw Gyffes an ancient Celtic god who did have magic powers.’

  Lyn slumped back in his seat. How could this fussy litigious bachelor believe in ancient gods and magic, or be weaving him fairy-stories rather than drawing up balance sheets or swamping him in barren legal jargon?

  ‘Hester even illustrated the story. There were charming little drawings scattered through the text.’

  Lyn reached for his glass, kept it trapped between his hands to stop them trembling. ‘Hester couldn’t draw.’ Hadn’t he used that phrase before—to Jennifer? Matthew had ignored it—used Susannah’s drawings in the Book and passed them off as Hester’s. He had denounced it as a sham. Perhaps it wasn’t such a sham. His mother had hidden talents. Had he ever really known her?

  Edward was crumbling his bread to pieces. His whole face seemed changed—the impassive mask cracked, the eyes shining. ‘She drew almost like a child. But since I was a child, the drawings made more sense to me. Her prince was so tall, his helmet touched the top-of the page. He had a silver breastplate and a golden lance. His heart was on the outside and made of scarlet plumes. He loved her so much, he gave her a baby before he died. That was … er … me.’ Edward gave a brief and nervous laugh. His cheeks were flushed—with wine, emotion, embarrassment? ‘When she drew the baby, it was wrapped in those same scarlet plumes and carried by a stork across the ocean. Storks nest in Europe and then migrate to warmer countries for the winter, so I suppose that was … symbolic.’