by Jane Gardam
He lifted out the cot and Jocasta held out very small brown hands for it.
He said, ‘No. Heavy. She’s a whopping great baby. She was nineteen inches long at birth. I’ll take her in,’ and they all walked across the courtyard and through a decrepit studded door marked ‘Office’ in runny painted writing, Jocasta saying not a word and Pammie looking around for signs of lunch.
‘We’re a bit late,’ said Andrew. ‘I’m sorry. It’s been a big day.’
Jocasta said that Jack would be here in a moment.
Nothing happened.
‘Is he well?’
‘Perfectly,’ said Jocasta.
‘Well, here’s Faith.’
Jocasta looked quickly in the direction of the cot that had been put upon a table and was tipped up somewhat because of the clutter. She looked away. Faith regarded her with solemnity.
‘She’s been an angel,’ said Pammie to keep things going. Most peculiar, she thought. Utterly silent woman, rather oriental looking and snooty. Not what you’d expect. ‘She’s been an angel since the day she was born. I’ve had her all to myself for the past weeks, so I know. Not a sign of trouble. I’ve had no broken nights, not personally. I don’t know why these young mothers complain about being tired. I’ve had no children of my own, but with decent daytime help—and I did have a night nurse and a first-rate health visitor and our own GP, who is private but I always think that’s money well spent—she’s been no trouble at all. And the social services are absolutely marvellous, of course—I hope you have them up here. There’s just a trace of a sticky eye. Well, I’ve really adored doing it. I shall miss her frightfully.’
Jocasta looked at her. She said, vaguely, ‘Yes.’
‘You see, I knew Holly.’ Pammie looked at Andrew and the look said: She shall be mentioned. It is the best way for you. ‘I knew Holly. Holly was the light of many people’s lives. I know it’s perhaps too soon to mention all this in general conversation, Andrew, but you and I have got to know each other on this journey, haven’t we? Soon I’ll be gone. I’m really Thomasina’s friend, Mrs. Braithwaite, or I was. I’m afraid she’s disappointed us. But . . . ’ she looked again at Andrew, ‘. . . there’s not one of us who wouldn’t have done anything in the world for Holly.’
‘He’s here,’ said Jocasta.
The baby suddenly went stiff all over, red of face, tremulous of lip, for some cataclysmic event seemed to be taking place in the passage outside, as if many heavy things had suddenly collapsed. It was a surprise that such a gentle man came in, and smiled shyly. He went straight to Faith and opened his eyes wide at her, and she grinned.
‘My goodness. I believe she smiled,’ said Pammie. ‘That was an amused smile.’
Jack went over to Andrew and put his arms round him and rocked him, turned to Pammie and said, ‘Forgive me.’
‘Forgive you, Jack? Why?’ said Andrew.
‘Late, late, late, I suppose, Andrew. How do you do? Pammie?’ He looked at her with intense and admiring interest. ‘Pammie!’
‘She’s famished, Jack. We had a croissant in Stamford.’
‘It’s full of history,’ said Jack; ‘very beautiful, a sort of miniature Oxford. It was spared by Cromwell.’
‘Food, Jack. And offices of the house for Pammie. Me, too, in a moment.’
‘I’ll show you where,’ said Jack to Pammie, still staring most lovingly. Jocasta made no move. ‘And then we’ll go to the refectory.’
He put his curly head back round the door after he’d left with Pammie to say, ‘You’ll follow, Andrew?’
The office died into silence. The baby had fallen suddenly asleep and through the slit of mullioned window in the stone wall a light fell across the mess surrounding her on the desk; papers, files, posters, telephones, some of them broken, word processors, dull screens, printers, tangled wires, and a pile of yellow T-shirts stamped EP. Metal chairs in a dusty corner sat in one another’s laps, curving forwards in a toppling pile. In a niche stood a crucifix with cobwebs. On the walls were pegboards with curling old notices. They were to do with services, walks, activities, discussion groups, mealtimes and weekly terms preposterously cheap and out of date. Beneath the cross stood a vase of last year’s dried-up heather.
From Faith’s cot came snuffles as sunshine fell across her, too, and Andrew moved over to the narrow window and leaned down to look out through it, his back to the room, his head resting on an arm above the mullion, blocking the light.
Jocasta walked to the cot, looked briefly at the baby, and moved away to the door.
‘I’ll go now,’ she said.
He leaned to the thick grubby glass and drew a line down it with his finger. Looking out over the courtyard, he said, ‘I want you in my arms. I want you in my bed. I want my tongue in your mouth. I want—’
Jack came in again and said, ‘I’ve persuaded The Missus to give us a bit of something as well as the soup. Bit of fish. No—leave her, she’ll be fine. I’ll send someone along. Jocasta has to do the school run but there’s plenty of help. What a very nice woman, your Pammie. I must just round up the Tibetans for Evensong.’
When the two brothers had left the room Jocasta waited a moment and then she, too, left it, without looking towards the cot again.
10
Jack Braithwaite had lately been having trouble with Ellerby Priors, an experimental community that was his passion. He had founded it uncertainly years ago, when ruins were cheap, with the intention of gathering up a clientele from the slums of the North-East, though ‘slums’ was a word not in fashion then, like the word ‘poor.’ Both had been swept away with Beveridge in the fifties, returning in the eighties translated as ‘deprived areas’ and ‘underprivileged,’ and they were what Jack cared about. He especially wanted to help the orphaned and children at risk or in care but in fact never turned away anyone the social services sent him. When the underprivileged were in short supply, for the children seemed to come in waves and in smaller waves came the government money to support them, Jack struggled on with what was left of his own funds and what he could earn off the farm, which, because of the soil and the climate, was not much. The menus shrank.
At first he had worked on a monthly basis, but lately had taken to offering weekly terms and even weekends for tired housewives, who often fell in love with him and rolled up their sleeves to help. He looked deeply at them in Christian love. He wasn’t averse, either, to the terminally but not dangerously ill, though these had been dropping off lately, probably because of the menus. Many were ready to starve in the scruffiness of Ellerby Priors, to shiver in its dusty, freezing dormitories, to be near Jack, but the authorities and sometimes husbands felt otherwise.
Jack, with a great surge of the spirit not unknown to him, had lately decided to launch out among the homeless and the exiled. His last batch of the deprived had been very depressing. Classified Tyneside/Aggressives, they had proved a failure. Most unresponsive. The perfectly adequate medieval accommodation they had pronounced worse than home, the sparse but healthy meals, country air and counselling opportunities had not satisfied and there had been some embarrassing escapes, one whole batch walking out before Vespers, hitching a lift across the moor road after pushing over the Saxon cross and spending a gaudy night breaking up the Whitby promenade. The newspapers had reported this as a ‘breakout of abused children held at an isolated moorland detention centre’ and a correspondence had begun in the press about public safety. Jack had received questions from the Home Office.
It was a wonderful relief that in the midst of it all Jack, trying to dissuade the county council against the need for electric fences and guard dogs, received notification of a consignment of Tibetans for whom he had been angling for years. Great files of letters, and then faxes even, had passed between Ellerby Priors and Darjeeling, where a Tibetan Centre valiantly but rather glumly soldiered on. Jack and Jocasta had visited it on their honeymoon.<
br />
Jack, scholar of Balliol without a string to pull in the world before he arrived there, had turned into the sort of man who had connections. His general air of abstraction and loving kindness caused him, without even trying, to be endlessly invited to high tables and the well-heeled abodes of antique men of letters. Presents came to him which he at once gave to the poor. Cheques went to the upkeep of Ellerby Priors. He fascinated women of all kinds and ages, and people worked for him for nothing—though they often fled at last in tears. Jack was incorruptible.
After the marriage to Jocasta much of Jack’s social life had ceased, but Cambridge had invited him to meet the Dalai Lama on his exiled visit there, an occasion Jack remembered precisely though he often forgot his own telephone number. He and the Dalai Lama had discussed the classics and the concept of divinity and the future of violence and the standard of the King’s College breakfast. Jack prayed for the Dalai Lama every day and it seemed to him at once that these miserable prayers had been rewarded when a notifiction was delivered from the post van, roaring out heavy metal down the moorland track, to announce that between seven and nine exiled Tibetans would be arriving the coming Wednesday. It was the Monday morning after the inflammatory Saturday of the Tyneside Aggressives, and this gave the resident staff of Jocasta, one woman and two lads (The Smikes) just time to clean up the beer cans, put together the broken furniture, and stick up the cracked windowpanes with cut-out mantras that Jocasta and her son Philip spent all day Sunday painting in bright colours. Jack had been sent down to Whitby to the launderette with all the blankets.
Jack was exalted by the arrival of the Tibetans who came toppling out of a battered grey bus from Liverpool in the dawn, not many days before Andrew’s Toyota. The Tibetans had quite put Faith in shadow. Family, as is stated in the Christian gospels, you don’t have to get on with; in fact, it’s unlikely that you will and often you even have to ditch them. Exiles and refugees and people who have been politically duffed up, on the other hand, must be cherished, put in your own conveyance, taken to some resting place and the bill paid in advance. Up to now the exiles Jack had taken in had been random and proud, outspoken about the Yorkshire weather and often surly about the one stipulation Jack made: that in return for a home at The Priors they must attend for an hour each day one short religious service in the chapel.
This he insisted upon even to the death of his venture, and he looked with his customary shining welcome but also a little anxiously as the Tibetans gathered up their belongings from the bus and walked across the cloister courtyard to their sheds.
11
They’ll be there now.’
‘Who’ll be where?’
‘Well, Andrew and the baby. You know quite well what I mean, so don’t pretend.’
‘I’m not thinking about them.’
‘Well, I am.’
‘If they can’t ring up or drop a line . . . It’s not much to ask. Never consulted. We’re vegetables now to him. Vegetables. That’s what we are. I’m not happy, Dolly.’
‘You never are happy, Toots. You never were.’
‘I’m not happy about the baby, in with all the loonies. I feel like writing to the authorities—well, the authorities’ll be round there. They’ll see soon enough. I won’t go near the place. The farming side, yes, but what’s he want with the loonies? Jack gets no better with age. They’d all be a lot better off in their own homes. He’s as daft as he was at school.’
‘They don’t have homes. The ones he has at present, they certainly don’t have homes. They’re from Tibet.’
‘Tibet! They should have stayed there.’
‘You know perfectly well what’s happened in Tibet. I don’t know, you never stop watching the news and yet you’ve got no idea of what’s going on when it links up with here. You can’t imagine being thrown out of your own home. I know I can. You never stirred even when you could have done, got a better job at a better school. You never left this parish. Tibetans are very well-thought-of people. It’d do you no harm to practise a bit of peace and quiet like they do. Meditation’s what you want. I’d like to have the chance.’
‘They sound a lazy lot to me. No fight in them. And I don’t care—that Dalai Lama looks a funny fellow. We had a master at the school like that in 1932.’
‘Be careful what you say, now. Don’t be blasphemous. It’s a serious religion.’
‘Hairless blighter. Knew all the answers, yet he never spoke. Like that Greek chap—my memory’s going—sits watching you on the sidelines and only drinking water. To think a granddaughter of ours . . . ’
‘She’s not likely to turn into the Dalai Lama, Toots. Why don’t you have a walk up to the seat? I’ll listen for the phone.’
‘Phone. They’ll never phone. I’m not to be told what’s happening. I’m not to be told if there’s been a crash on the motorway. I’ll be the last one to hear. I’d have thought that flesh and blood might have been given consideration.’
‘I must say,’ said Dolly, burrowing about in the wardrobe that had been inserted into the old dining room to take Toots’s clothes, ‘I hope Andrew knows how to look after her in a car. It’s a tremendous way they’re coming. They’ll need nappies, and how do they manage the feeds? Heating up bottles in a car. She’ll be four-hourly still—that’s a feed and a half—a tiny little thing like that. They’d have done better on a train, like we always did. Oh, I do want to see her.’
‘Well, so do I want to see her. That’s what I’m telling you. You can forget Andrew. Forget him. Hard as nails. Son or no son, we’re nothing to him now. But her I do want to see, and it’s our right. They could have brought her down here first: it’s almost on his way. He never thought tuppence of Jack.’
Dolly, who had made a cake and lugged out old cot-sized blankets, Andrew’s old crib, several teddies, a monumental feeding bottle made of glass with a teat on each end, and a tin of baby milk bought secretly from the chemist and hidden somehow from Mrs. Middleditch, said, ‘Much better get her there and the journey over and done with. Ellerby’s to be her home. She’d best get there and settle. They’ll be cuddling her to bits. It’s just tonight I’m worried about. Where’s she to sleep in that cold place? I hope Jocasta’s made everything ready.’
‘That’ll be the day.’
‘Now don’t start, Toots. Let’s keep off that subject. Here’s your scarf and I’ll get your frame for you and we’ll walk to the seat in the sun. I’ll leave you there and come back for you in half an hour.’ Somehow, she thought, God give me strength. Why can’t they phone? Why can’t it just ring now? And when they do bring her he’ll just give Andrew hell and pretend not to look at her.
Batting about among the coats in the passage looking for his hat she addressed her God. ‘Wherever’s Holly gone? Why Holly? Who’s to look to the child, us so old and useless and all of them so foolish? (Yes, I’m coming.) Why couldn’t You have made Jack a good old-fashioned parson instead of all this hobnobbing with Buddhists and the EEC and everything? And Andrew marrying south. Who’s to see to this child? I ask You—who’s to see to her?’
She followed Toots down the garden path as he proceeded behind the walking frame, slowly, looking left and right with dignity, like a king making a public appearance before his subjects.
‘Time that parsley was thrown out, it’s rubbish. Great Scot, that onion bed! Get that lot up before anyone sees it. They’re a disgrace.’
‘If you think I’m starting on onion beds . . . That’s Philip’s job. Haven’t I enough –?’
‘Well, and then you talk about bringing up a baby.’
‘We’ll never see the baby,’ she said, suddenly sighing, holding the front gate open for him to sidle through. ‘I begin to think it’s all talk, this baby.’
Her mind made one of the leaps it had been taking lately. The baby had not been born. Holly was not dead. This afternoon she would write to Holly and ask her what she wanted fo
r Christmas. She might even ring Holly and ask her if the baby had reached Ellerby safely. She shivered and tried to get back to some idea of the present but at the same time wondered whatever Holly’s phone number was now. She used to ring Holly sometimes from the upstairs extension when Toots was at his worst, just to hear her cheerful voice.
‘No, we won’t be seeing the baby,’ she said to Toots.
‘Now then,’ he said, ‘that’s my line. Forget it. Don’t upset yourself. There’s a handkerchief in my pocket if you can reach. Leave me to do the moaning. We’ll have a sherry later. Oh, strike a light—here’s Ghent to Aix.’
Mrs. Middleditch was waving and flapping down the street.
‘They’ve arrived, they’re fine. I came right round to tell you. Put you out of your suspense. Very good journey, not a hitch.’
‘We’ve just stepped out of the house,’ said Dolly. ‘Well, isn’t that—just the minute we step out of the house. They couldn’t reach us, so they had to ring you. Oh, I do hope it wasn’t a nuisance.’
‘No, I rang them,’ said Mrs. Middleditch. ‘Just thought you’d like to be out of your miseries.’
Toots turned from her and began to pace doggedly towards the seat.
‘Go back in, Dolly,’ said Mrs. Middleditch. ‘I’ll sit with him a bit. I understand him. I don’t mind if he creates. Then I’ll bring you both a bit of liver.’
12
Jocasta had opened her eyes on Andrew for the first time six years ago in a hospital bed and seen a serious tall man in a very clean white coat frowning at a clipboard. A stethoscope hung round his neck correctly. He looked large, Olympian, remote. She thought, A doctor, and sank back into shadow.
Andrew had seen a tiny brown woman who opened the moist eyes of a chimpanzee. A sexy mouth. The round eyes stirred him and to forget such a surprise he removed the sheet from her and examined the long wound across her body, jagged across the base of her abdomen above the shaven mound of hair, the lovely thighs. He examined the clips and the bruises and said to someone, ‘This might be cleaned up.’ A pause. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘and the catheter . . . I think there’s not enough going through. Keep her on it for the time being.’ With almost disdain he took Jocasta’s hand and said in the voice they use to pierce oblivion, ‘Everything’s fine. You’re going to be fine.’