Grace

by Barbara Boswell

  “Uh-oh! Out of milk for our tea. Let me run down to the café and get some!” The relief in his voice was palpable. Grace looked up from the baby and smiled at him, but made no comment. He clanged down the hall – “Back in a bit!”

  Grace echoed his relief when the front door closed behind him. A wave of guilt followed. Why did David always have to be so damned cheerful? Her mood seemed to foul in proportion to his eagerness to please. While she hated this quality in herself, she didn’t know how to change it.

  With David gone, Grace made sure Sindi was in a safe spot, then dug into her handbag and took out the envelope, flattening it against the table in the entryway and staring at it. She still didn’t recognize the handwriting, but this letter could only be from one of two people: Patrick or Johnny. Both spelled trouble, a spilling of the past into her present. She brought the letter to her face, put it to her nose – nothing was revealed by sniffing it. On the verge of opening it she lost her nerve and stuffed it back into the handbag. There her fingers latched around the familiar shape of a slim cardboard box. She had started smoking again – a habit she had picked up in her last two years of high school. After checking that Sindi was still okay on the floor, Grace moved stealthily out the back door into the small courtyard behind the house where, through the window, she could still keep an eye on the child, who was lying there wriggling contentedly. Grace struck a match and lit the cigarette, inhaled deeply as she closed her eyes, and savoured the way the warm smoke travelled through her body, loosening its kinks. After the first calming puff, she pictured the smoke filling her lungs, circulating through each limb, passing through every membrane and into her bloodstream. In her mind’s eye, tiny particles of poison trickled from bloodstream to breast into breast milk and flowed through her milk into Sindi’s innocent mouth. She sighed as she exhaled a cloud of smoke. She detested this habit of hers, but didn’t know how to stop.

  The smell of the cigarette mingled with the aroma of David’s stew on the stove, creating an acrid stench. And suddenly Mary was there. Grace saw her leaning over her pots, a wooden spoon in one hand and a cigarette tipped daintily away from the food in the other. Mary could come like this, unbidden, in moments Grace least expected, evoked by the smell of ginger or the sight of a rose, bringing a smile at first and then a longing so fierce it felt like a hand squeezing her heart. Grace sucked on the cigarette as if it was her dying breath. When she was done she wrapped the stub in a tissue, went back inside and flushed it down the toilet. She scrubbed her hands, brushed her teeth and ran talcum powder through her hair to remove any lingering traces of smoke. She stuffed the cardigan she was wearing at the bottom of the laundry basket and changed into a clean outfit. By the time David reappeared with a carton of milk she was smiling happily from the living room floor, Sindi in her arms, the picture of maternal bliss.

  They ate lamb stew for supper, in silence, while Grace bopped Sindi on her lap. After dinner Grace cleaned the kitchen and then she scooped Sindi from David’s lap to prepare her for bed. First they played a little on the bed, cuddled together, and then Grace bathed and fed her, marvelling, once again, at the most beautiful creature she had ever seen. She rocked Sindi and sang to her softly, feeling a guilty relief when David settled down in the next room with a pile of marking. Tonight she’d have Sindi to herself in the last hour before sleep claimed her. Tucked up in bed with the child, Grace whispered a story about a girl who was so adored by her mother that she plucked the moon out of the sky and presented it to her as a gift. She held Sindi close and watched her eyelids slowly droop across the full moons of her large brown eyes.

  When David next appeared in the bedroom he gently removed the baby from the bed and placed her into her crib. Grace stirred, looked up at him, and gave him a sleepy smile. How lucky she was; how far away her life had moved from chaos to peace. She could not have asked for a better partner in life. It was as if the gods had decided that she had suffered enough and had granted her these gifts to blossom in love – a husband who would cheerfully die for her, and a beautiful daughter who had infinitely expanded her capacity for love. Grace resolved, for the millionth time, to be more cheerful, more grateful. To be kinder to David. To stop smoking. She hated the grip of this addiction, hated even more that she was harming Sindi’s health through it. Grace had read the books, knew the statistics and correlation between pregnant mothers’ smoking habits and cot death. She hated this secret that lay between her and David.

  Secrets. Now there was another secret nagging at her, one that had the potential to unravel a series of other omissions she had brought into their marriage.

  The letter in her handbag could upend everything.

  Could it be from Patrick, she wondered. But her father was supposed to be in prison for life. And wouldn’t a letter from an inmate bear the prison’s stamp?

  Grace knew that the act of opening that envelope would open up a new world – or, rather, an old one, one she didn’t want to re-enter, and from which there might be no return to the contentment of today.

  So could Patrick be out? They had not followed the trial proceedings all those years ago and Grace didn’t know what the sentence had been. She had just assumed that he would be locked away for life. He had murdered a woman, after all. But with talk about amnesties in the air, who knew? What she did know, though, was that she did not want to hear from him. She didn’t want to know. You are dead to me, Patrick de Leeuw, she thought. You died long ago when you murdered my mother. She wasn’t about to let him ruin her life a second time. What would David say? The whole childhood she had invented for him was a lie. Grace wanted Patrick de Leeuw not to exist, and as long as she left the letter unopened in the bottom of her bag, she could pretend that he didn’t.

  Grace was wide awake when David crept into bed beside her. He rubbed her arm. She turned away. He tried again. “You still didn’t tell me how your day was,” he said.

  “I did tell you, David. It was utterly uneventful.”

  13

  Mornings were always a wrench. After a night of fitful sleep, interrupted every two hours by Sindi’s wailing, Grace rose to feed a hungry, whiny, living alarm clock, who renewed her protest as dawn broke. David heard Sindi’s cries, half opened an eye, rolled over and went back to sleep. Grace had a grudging admiration for her husband’s ability to snooze through it all. To be fair, he had also been woken every two hours, but he always found it easier to get back to sleep. He would have helped were Sindi bottle fed; he’d even begged Grace to switch to formula feeds at least some of the time, so they could alternate the feeds. Grace was the one who insisted on breastfeeding whenever she was not at work. He had stopped trying to change her mind after a while. “This is my baby; it’s the least I can do for her,” Grace insisted.

  She held the infant to her breast, allowing her to feed. Sindi was teething and while her disposition was friendly during the day, night times revealed a different little personality. After feeding Sindi, Grace burped her, as David’s mother Gwen had shown her to do. The rhythmic rubbing of her back soothed the child. She settled into quiet gurgling as Grace placed her back in her cot. Finally a few minutes to steal a shower.

  “Watch her, David?”

  David grunted and, satisfied that he was semi-awake, Grace showered and got dressed, with one eye on the crib. Her beauty regimen consisted of a shower, deodorant, and throwing on whatever clothes were reasonably clean. No blow-dryers or lipsticks or co-ordinated accessories for her. Ready for the day, she set about packing the baby’s bag, putting in several changes of clothes, nappies, Sindi’s favourite plush stuffed duck, and a small cooler with bottled breast milk.

  David stumbled out of bed and into the shower.

  Sindi had become clingy over the past few weeks. It was normal at this age, the day-mother, Val, and the baby books had reassured them, but Grace couldn’t help imagining her daughter stuck in a playpen all day at daycare. Now it was Sindi’s turn to be dressed. Grace changed a soiled nappy, and put a fresh baby-gro
on her. Sindi had more outfits than her mother, which was just as well, as the cold required layers of clothing. Grace tried to stuff the child’s arms into a padded jacket – Sindi balled her tiny fists and gave a low, discontented moan, which escalated into a full-blown wail. Her limbs stiffened; Grace could feel the anger in her tiny body. Sindi thrashed from side to side, her protests growing louder and louder.

  “It’s okay, baby,” Grace soothed. “I don’t want to leave you either, but you have to be a good girl, okay?”

  Sindi vomited her reply. Grace felt like screaming too, but restrained herself, undressed the screaming baby, and started again with a fresh outfit.

  As he did every morning, at seven o’clock David took Sindi and all her baby paraphernalia, kissed his wife goodbye, and sped to the day-mother’s house to drop off their daughter. They were hardly out of the front door when Grace dragged herself out to the courtyard to settle the frayed edges of her nerves with a cigarette. She had failed again. Failed as a mother – her daughter was unhappy – and failed to quit smoking. She could feel the addiction sinking its greedy claws deeper and deeper into her. She despised herself for that grip. It was freezing outside but she stood in the cold, filled with self-loathing, and inhaled the familiar mix of anger and self-pity along with the comforting smoke. With each inhalation, she catalogued life’s injustices against her – the things that drove her mad. If she still had her mother, life wouldn’t be so difficult. Sindi would have a grandma to look after her, instead of being shipped off to some stranger’s house every morning at the crack of dawn. Her baby was missing so much; she would never know her grandmother. Grace was missing so much too. How do you mother without your mother?

  They had been married for less than a year when she became pregnant with Sindi, or as David put, “we” became pregnant. It annoyed Grace, the presumptuous “we”. She had not thought about whether she wanted children, had not planned the pregnancy, but when it happened, she had wanted the baby more than anything. She had wanted this one little thing to herself: the acknowledgement of that hallowed space between mother and unborn child. It was a miracle: she was growing this baby inside of her, with her own blood and musculature. Something of Mary was going into the child too. She could feel its flutters, its kicks and hiccups that woke her at precisely 4 o’clock each morning. She didn’t say anything to David, allowing him to “we” away, but it grated on her. She longed for the space to just feel something, for once, her way.

  By that time, Aunty Joan had died and, being childless, had left everything she owned to Grace. They used this modest inheritance to buy a small house in the formerly grey neighbourhood bordering the city, now increasingly fashionable, overlooking the bay. And just like that, they had it all – the house, careers, the baby on the way. They were a couple on the move, part of the all-important, new black middle class; drivers of the economy of the new nation. They settled into domestic bliss: married, happy, respectable – thanks to the new South Africa and Aunty Joan’s generosity. They had it all. But was Grace happy? She didn’t know. She observed herself detached, as an outsider would, and felt that this would be what happiness looked like. Did she feel it? She didn’t know. Grace navigated the world with a thick, invisible membrane wrapped around her. Very rarely did anything touch her. She was present, but not there. The old survival tricks of Saturn Street were near impossible to discard.

  During pregnancy, Grace nursed silent, brooding fears that had no outlet now that Aunty Joan was gone. It had not been that long ago that she herself was a child, and who would teach her the things about a baby that only a mother could? There was nothing she could remember from Mary that could be used in her own child-rearing of an infant, and Aunty Joan, although loving, had not been particularly maternal. Nor had she prepared Grace for domesticity. Grace could hardly cook when she married David. She fretted and worried throughout the pregnancy about the baby’s health and whether she would be a good mother. What if it died, like her long ago brother who had been stillborn? What if there was something wrong and it needed a lot of medical attention?

  Her biggest fear, the thing that gnawed at her in the small hours of the morning, the thing that woke her in a cold sweat, the thing she couldn’t even admit to herself by daylight: what if she didn’t love it? What if it was born perfectly healthy and beautiful, but she felt no connection to it? What was the magical thing that makes a mother instantly fall in love with her baby, and what if Grace didn’t have it? And then, the wound at the centre of it all: what if she was like him? What if she had it in her to hurt her own child, to take its life?

  She could not, dared not, share any of these concerns with David, who was happily expecting. Her lies had gone on for too long and stretched too far back. What would he think of her and their marriage if he knew the truth? That his wife was the daughter of a murderer; that she was also a skilled liar.

  The prison Patrick had been sent to was on the outskirts of the city. Grace had never visited him, not once. She was not allowed to speak his name to Aunty Joan, or any of the few family members she saw from time to time as the years went by. It was as if Patrick had died too, and in her mind Grace had buried him along with her mother.

  The first year after it happened, she had lived with Ouma, Mary’s mother, who deposited her, straight from the funeral, in a tiny room at the back of the house with only a bed in it. It was neatly made and it had a tufted cream bedspread. Ouma had tried, but the room lacked warmth. It was painfully bright, sterile; white walls and no curtain, since the window faced a small courtyard and needed no screening off from prying eyes. Grace lay down on the bed and simply disappeared into it. Even now, as an adult, she recalled very little of those days after the funeral: not the season, not the weather, not the music on the radio that year, not even her mother’s face (that would come back a few years later). She didn’t remember eating or washing or changing clothes. All she would later remember was the whiteness of those walls. The schools had effectively shut down the last few months of that year, so there was no need to get up in the morning. There was nowhere to go. Grace lay in bed for days, wanting to cast her eyes on nothing else but those walls. It was as if her eyes had seen enough for three lifetimes and wanted to rest. The blank space of wall, infinitely white, became a canvas on which she could project herself and rest – it was the only thing preventing her from ripping out her hair or gouging holes into her skin. As she lay on the mattress staring at the walls, nothing came, not a single thing, to her mind. The whiteness stared back at her, overwhelming her and bleeding into her, along with the hollow light of loss and pure grief. The blankness suspended her in life when death beckoned. If Grace could have found the energy to kill herself, she’d have done so during those days in the white room. In their utter blandness the white walls somehow kept her alive.

  For whom, for what, was her grief? Her mother, yes, but also for so much more than that. What could have been – the warmth of a family; the order of mother and father as protectors and nurturers; the indestructibility of the unit; the loving home. The white space of the room erased with finality all of these possibilities. Blanched, parched, Grace lay on the bed facing it while cursing herself; fighting against being subsumed by the enervating blankness, yet feeling held by it too.

  Grace had no memory of how long she lay like that, but there came a day when Ouma entered the room, pulled her out of bed and smacked her. She swung Grace’s legs off the bed, lifted her chin with her hand and turned her piercing eyes directly onto her face.

  “Your mother is dead. She’s not coming back. But you are alive,” she said. “Live!” She paused for a second to let the words sink in. “If you don’t, I will send you away to a home.”

  Grace collapsed back on the bed, feeling the first flutters of a will to live return in her chest. Yet she didn’t know how to take back command of her limbs and her voice. The weight of Ouma’s expectation made its home on her chest, and she sank deeper into the bed, with eyes too heavy to open. A doctor came to
see her and prescribed vitamins and rest. Grace would come out of it, in her own time. But Ouma had grown tired of her.

  A week later Aunty Joan arrived. Grace had seen pictures of her, but this was the first time she remembered meeting her mother’s sister. She packed all Grace’s belongings into a weathered suitcase she had brought with her, and bundled both Grace and the suitcase into her car. Almost no words were exchanged between Joan and her mother. Whatever war raged between them came to a silent truce so that Joan could enter the house and collect Grace.

  “You’re coming to live with me,” was the only thing Joan said on the five-minute drive from Ouma’s house to hers. Grace wondered why they hadn’t just walked, and later she would also wonder why Joan never visited Ouma’s house. She knew why she’d never come to Saturn Street though – Patrick had banned her from setting foot in their house. But that day in the car, with the huddled-together houses whizzing by, was not the day for questions. The answers would come only years later.

  Grace walked into Aunty Joan’s two-bedroomed flat and marvelled at the sufficiency of her space. Joan had a comfortable, neat home. Art and framed photographs adorned almost every wall. Here was a young Mary framed in gold against an orange wall; there a picture of a chubby baby she recognised as herself. There were pictures of Ouma and Oupa, and of Joan and Mary as young girls. Grace was amazed that someone she’d known so little about – they were not allowed to mention Aunty Joan’s name in front of Patrick – had traced, with photographs, a full family genealogy, Grace included, against the walls of her living room. The frame in which Grace’s baby picture sat was embellished with delicate, lace-like flowers. It warmed her that someone had put thought into choosing a frame in which to put her image, one that matched a detail in the dress she was wearing in the picture. Aunty Joan had thought about her and had cared enough to display her image with obvious care.