by Adle Geras
P.S. I have ideas of my own about what’s wrong with you. The passage of time will tell me if I’m right and if I am, then you have my word that I will look after you. Does that give you the courage to write to me? I hope so.
Hester smiled to think of Piers protecting her reputation and keeping her secret. She wrote to Edmund at once and told him everything. As soon as he heard from her, he began sending her postcards from Amsterdam to cheer her up. She wrote back, but knew that she could never match Edmund’s sparkle and energy. She sometimes felt that every word she put down was as heavy and miserable as she was, but Edmund always ended his messages by begging her to write again, so she did.
When she was feeling particularly low, Hester would tell herself that maybe Adam had written and Madame Olga had intercepted the correspondence. Perhaps he was bombarding her with letters, begging her to come to him; telling her that yes, he was divorcing Virginia and that they would now be able to live together for ever and that these things never reached her because Madame Olga had looked out for them and torn them up from the very beginning. At moments when she felt particularly desperate, Hester imagined that he might decide to get her himself. Take her away with him to live happy ever after.
While they were still at Wychwood, she used to stand at the window for hours, peering down the drive, willing the postman to appear. When she saw him, she’d run down and see if she could get to the letters before Madame Olga and sometimes she did, but there was never anything from Adam. Not once, while Hester was on the lookout.
*
There were nights when she couldn’t sleep and then she saw her, Virginia, lying next to Adam in bed. Hester imagined him wanting her as he made love to his wife. She went over everything that they’d ever said or done again and again till she was nearly demented. As the summer moved into autumn, she found it harder and harder to lie comfortably in bed and began to fear the birth. The pain. Madame Olga made a point of not dwelling on the agonies of childbirth, but her very silence terrified Hester. Madame had had no personal experience of it, but still, there were all the stories that circulate among women. She must, Hester felt sure, have a whole fund of those. She was saying nothing, Hester thought, because she knew the pain would be so bad that she daren’t tell her the truth, and this made her more scared than ever. Piers arrived for what he called ‘a conference’. The next morning, as soon as he’d left for London, Madame Olga told her what they had decided.
‘It is all arranged. Ruby is going to leave Piers’ house and come and look after you.’
‘But I don’t need looking after,’ Hester frowned. ‘Do I? I’ve got you after all.’
‘Of course, of course. I do not speak of now. I speak of nearer the time of your confinement. I think you should go away from here, because I have a special doctor who is the one who should look after you. He is in Scotland. A place called Gullane.’
‘Scotland? Why? Why on earth do I have to go all the way there? Surely there are doctors who can deliver a baby here in Yorkshire. I don’t want to leave Wychwood.’
‘It will be good for you. Sea air. You can relax. Raymond, Dr Crawford, has assured me he will look after you as though you were his own daughter.’
‘Who is he? Where did you meet him?’
‘That is not important. He looked after me when I was sick in Paris once. He was a junior doctor then but now he is a respected obstetrician. Very well respected. In those days, I think he was in love with me a little, but of course I did not encourage him. Still, he is very kind to me always and it is good to have someone to look after you who is a personal friend.’
‘I don’t see that it’s necessary. None of it. I know why you’re doing this, Madame. You want me out of the way. You’ve already told me that you don’t want anyone to know that I’m pregnant.’
‘What do you expect us to do? Piers says the papers have phoned to see what has happened to one of the Charleroi’s principal dancers. This will get worse. The stories will grow and spread. The gossip will stop now because he has told them you are exhausted. You are resting, he says.’
‘And they’ll soon forget all about me if I’m somewhere out of the way.’ Hester shrugged her shoulders. ‘I suppose I have to do what you say. I can’t manage on my own. At least Ruby will be with me in this Scottish wilderness.’
‘This Scottish wilderness is a lovely place. Ruby tells me she used to go there for family holidays when she was a girl. Piers said it was a good omen, this coincidence. You and Ruby will go in October and I will come to join you nearer the birth. All will be well. You will like Raymond Crawford, I am quite sure of this.’
*
When Hester’s father died at the end of June, that was, according to Madame Olga, a stroke of good fortune for them, though she didn’t express it like that when she spoke to Hester. They could tell anyone who enquired that she was in Paris and give no more details. After a while, all but her closest friends stopped enquiring about where she was.
No one asked Hester whether she wanted to go to her father’s funeral. Never mind that she hadn’t been in touch with him; never mind that she’d left his house fifteen years ago. If anyone had consulted her, she would have said yes, but her desire to go to Paris was not so much to pay her respects to someone she regarded as a stranger but a longing to see again the place where she’d spent her first years; to move through the rooms that she remembered from childhood. Perhaps, too, she could visit Grand-mère’s grave, and mourn her properly, as she never had at the time of her death.
Madame Olga prepared for their visit to France as though they were going on holiday. She spent many hours deciding what to wear: what jewels, what hats, and what shawls. She tossed items from the cupboard to the bed and then picked up one thing after another for careful scrutiny.
‘You will wear black, Hester? Or dark purple is good. Luckily you do not show yet. And a hat? Or a Spanish mantilla? Look, I have a piece of lace here which I have not worn for years, but it will be just right for you. And with it you can wear my pearls. I can take them out of the bank.’
‘No, just this.’ She fingered the gold of her grandmother’s necklace.
Madame Olga sighed theatrically. ‘This necklace of yours, it is mad. You can never wear anything else round your neck because of this necklace. I have in this house amber and jade and every kind of jewel and I am keeping it all just for you. Why do you not wear those instead?’
‘I do, sometimes,’ Hester answered. ‘I hide this one under high-necked things. But I never take it off except on stage. Never.’
The Channel crossing was smooth and easy. The sun shone and the sea was like a sheet of pale grey satin. Hester stood on deck watching England growing smaller and smaller and trying hard to feel something other than completely numb. I should be sadder, she thought. I should be crying for my father, who died before I could see him again. What would I have said to him? Hester found it hard to imagine that conversation. All her feelings had gathered in the very centre of her being, concentrated on nothing other than her baby, her growing baby.
Hester’s thoughts, which should have been focused on the funeral, on wondering what she would say to her father’s second wife, Yvonne, whom she’d never met, refused to fasten on to anything. She imagined them flitting round the inside of her head like moths trapped in the glass globe of a lamp, aimless and blundering.
‘Oh, ma petite, je suis tellement … Mais entrez, entrez, et bienvenues à toutes les deux!’
Yvonne was a small woman with a thin mouth and eyes like currants. She wore her grey hair in a bun and was dressed from head to foot in black. Hester couldn’t decide if this was her habitual dress or whether she was wearing it because her husband had just died. What, she couldn’t help wondering, had made her father fall in love with such a woman, especially after being married to Hester’s mother? Yvonne said, ‘I will show you where you will sleep,’ and led them up the stairs.
‘This was my grandmother’s room,’ Hester said, running her hands ove
r the counterpane. ‘The wallpaper’s been changed. This counterpane too. Grand-mère had yellow walls and a satin cover on the bed. Everything’s different.’
‘You,’ said Madame Olga. ‘It is you who are different. Not the house. Places stay the same and we change. It is always so.’
The house was smaller than Hester remembered, and everything was shabbier. The kitchen, which she’d held in her memory for years, had a new modern sink and cooker. The apricot-coloured curtains had been replaced with a pair made of some synthetic material printed with jolly-faced kettles and saucepans. The wooden table had gone and the room was dominated by something hideous and blueish in metal and Formica.
‘Your father has arranged for money for you,’ said Yvonne, when they were sitting in the drawing room having tea.
The teacups were her mother’s. Hester recognised them and felt sorrow and regret wash over her as she drank. Madame Olga did the talking for both of them. She was the one who asked about the arrangements for the funeral tomorrow; who found out that Yvonne was the main beneficiary of Henri Prévert’s will.
‘I don’t care about the money. I don’t care about any of that,’ Hester said next morning as she and Madame Olga were dressing for the ceremony. ‘I just wanted to come back and see the house again. That’s all. But Grand-mère – she’s gone long ago. This isn’t her house. Not really. The shape is the same but the colours are different, and the smells.’
‘Smells?’ Madame Olga paused in the middle of pulling on a black cloche hat with a jet brooch pinned to the front. ‘What are these smells?’
Hester shook her head. It was too complicated to explain that when her grandmother was alive, the fragrance of cinnamon, or lemon, or rosemary or garlic haunted the air. Grand-mère’s violet perfume had lingered in the soft furnishings and the curtains, and had filled every corner of her bedroom. When Hester was a child, there were parquet floors in every room which smelled of the lavender and beeswax polish used to clean them.
She looked out of the window and saw the top of the black car that was to take them to the funeral. For a moment, she was dizzy. There was another car, wasn’t there? Another time. Snow on the ground and her mother about to be taken out of the house in a long, wooden box and Hester not allowed to go because she was too small. Too young. She could feel herself trembling and sat down on the bed, her vision suddenly blurred with tears.
‘You cry at last for your papa,’ said Madame Olga. ‘That is good. You have not felt it till now. It is the shock.’ She misses nothing, Hester reflected. Whatever else is going on, she notices everything about me.
‘I’m not really crying for Papa. My mother. I can remember … never mind. Let’s go down now. They’re waiting for us.’
*
As she stood beside her father’s grave, it occurred to Hester that the cemetery was a miniature town, where the headstones were like the façades of houses. Gravel paths resembled small roads, winding between them, and summer trees and shrubs stood guard around these miniature houses of the dead. The weather was warm and she felt herself perspiring in her thin, wool coat. Madame Olga had prevailed on her to wear the black mantilla. It wasn’t worth fighting over, though she was conscious of looking out of place, like someone from a production of Don Quixote.
Out of the corner of her eye, Hester could see that Yvonne was crying, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief edged in lace. Madame Olga stood very straight and still. Her own gaze was fixed on Grand-mère’s tombstone, which was near the hole in the earth into which they would soon be lowering her father. He’s dead, Hester thought, and I should mourn him, but I can’t because I never really knew him. Everyone thinks these tears are for him and they’re not. She wanted to shout out, I’m not crying for him! Why should I? He sent me away when I was little more than a baby. He never loved me, not properly. I’m crying for my grandmother who died before I could say goodbye. She bit her lip and closed her eyes and prayed for the burial to be over.
While the others made their way down the neat grey paths to the gate, Hester stood by her grandmother’s grave and fought an impulse to lie down on the tomb and fling her arms around the headstone. Suddenly, she saw herself as Giselle. At the end of the ballet she’d done exactly that – draped herself over a tomb made of some kind of cardboard and pretended to weep. I know all the positions for grief by heart, she reflected, and turned to walk away. The thought of her grandmother down there under the earth tormented her. She tried to comfort herself by thinking, it’s not really her. It’s nothing more than a skeleton. Not Grand-mère, who is alive in my mind. A real person.
*
Once they returned to Wychwood the days passed quietly, but for a few weeks bad dreams woke Hester almost every night. She’d lie there gasping, almost able to taste the earth on her tongue, as it was shovelled into a grave into which she’d been lowered and which was already half-full of petals from thousands of cream roses. When this nightmare came, she sat up in bed and turned on the bedside lamp and sometimes went down to the kitchen for a cup of tea, because she knew that sleep was out of the question.
One day towards the beginning of October, Hester and Madame Olga were walking in the garden. The trees were particularly beautiful, leaves covered the ground in a patchwork of gold and scarlet, and the sky was a clear, pale grey. Hester could still walk almost exactly as she used to, with her head high and her hands covering the rather small bump of her stomach. Madame Olga’s chin was buried in the enormous Persian lamb collar of her coat.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘the time has come that we must make plans for the future. Dr Crawford has introduced me to good adoption agency up there in Scotland, for afterwards.’
‘Adoption agency?’ Hester turned round, not quite believing what she was hearing. ‘What are you saying? I told you! We discussed it right from the start. I’d never, never give up this baby for adoption. What makes you think I would? Did you think I’d changed my mind?’ Hester knew that she was scarlet in the face.
Madame Olga shrugged. ‘It’s what’s necessary. When you first came here, you were very sad. I said whatever you wanted to hear. What could I do?’
‘I won’t do it. I can look after him. Or her. I can keep him and be his mother.’
‘Impossible! It would be cruel to leave him from the start when you go back to class. All his life, if he stays with you, he will be second-best. You are a dancer. You cannot also be mother. This I know. This I have seen, many times. You cannot be everything. And think of this: many women, millions of women can be good mothers. No one but you can be Hester Fielding, prima ballerina. I am right, am I not?’
Hester was so angry that she began shouting. ‘No, you’re not right. You’re wrong. I’m a mother. That’s what I want. I told you from the very first day I came to you. I want to be a mother to this baby. I know what it’s like not to have a mother and my baby will have me. Every day. Every night. I’m not going to go back to dancing unless I can keep my baby. Why can’t I have a nurse to help me, while I’m in class, or dancing? Someone to take care of the baby when I’m working?’
‘This is stupid. If you have a nurse to do these things, how are you the mother? Will your baby not miss you when you are not with him? He is better with a mother who is there all the time. The adoption agency will put him, or her, of course, with the very best family, I can promise you that.’
‘I’m not doing it!’ She was shrieking now. ‘I won’t. I’m keeping my baby. I don’t care what you and Piers have arranged. You can’t make me. And I’m going to be a dancer as well. Why can’t I? Why can’t I do both?’
‘You are a silly girl and you do not understand the feelings of the public! They will not love you if they see you are an unmarried mother. It is a disgrace. They like their ballerinas to be pure and good. They want to admire them. To be in awe of them. If you had a baby, it would show them that you are—’
‘What? A slut? A slag? What?’
‘Not any of those. Do not say those words to me. You know I
do not think that. No, they will see you are human. Like them, not better than they are. Not different. They will ask themselves who the father might be, and there will be gossip and the years will go by and you will not be young any longer and the child will grow up without knowing who his father is. That is cruel to your child, not kind.’
‘You can’t say that! It’s not true. I’ll love him so much. Quite enough for two parents. He’ll never, never be without love. I’ll surround him with it. Or her. My baby might be a girl. She might become a dancer too. Have you thought of that? How can you make me give my child away? It’s monstrous.’
‘I think of you. Only of you. Your career. Your life. I think of your future. Who will marry you when you have a baby by another man?’
‘I don’t care if no one does. And I’m going to keep my baby. I won’t let you bully me.’
‘I do not bully!’ Madame Olga was shouting now. ‘I am doing what is right for you, glupysh! You will regret it, you see, if you keep it.’
‘Then let me regret it. It’s none of your business. You’re not my mother. Or my grandmother. Go away and leave me alone.’
Madame Olga turned white. She stood up and Hester saw that her hands were trembling.
‘I didn’t … I really didn’t mean that, Madame Olga,’ she sobbed. The tears had come suddenly, and she wiped them away with her sleeve. ‘You know I didn’t. I love you. I can’t bear to fight with you.’ Hester sat down on the top step of the porch and put her head in her hands. Sounds came from her mouth that she couldn’t seem to prevent – howls and moans, animal noises.
Madame Olga crouched down beside her and stroked her hair, gently, as though she were a wild creature that might turn on her and bite. Gradually, Hester’s sobbing died down and there was nothing but the sound of the wind that had sprung up suddenly to shake the leaves from the trees.