The World is a Wedding

by Wendy Jones

  A man walked in and placed his ruddy-faced baby on the glass counter. The baby’s mouth was stained with food and his eyes and his hands were searching. The man stood holding the baby, balancing him on the glass edge.

  The woman took a basket of beigels from the shelf behind her.

  ‘Sir?’ she called.

  Grace watched the woman serve several eager customers who were arriving and standing alertly in the line, waiting not without slight agitation. A baker in a white apron came through carrying a box of gherkins. There was a shout from the bakery at the back. A wave of pain washed over Grace, then receded. She felt she was going to be subsumed by some form of drowning: Grace stood.

  ‘Is it time?’ the woman said to Grace, her back still to her. Grace nodded, her hand pressed hard to the space between her eyebrows.

  ‘You got anywhere to go to do this?’ the woman asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Down the back, to the storeroom,’ the woman stated. She spoke in a matter-of-fact way and took Grace by the arm. Grace was floundering now, and vulnerable. She was led through the kitchen with its sounds of clashing, a flour-covered tabletop and a stack of wooden trays filled with unfinished circles of bread. A baker with a tray of sliced red meat lifted it above his head, stood and let Grace pass.

  ‘Comfortable there?’ another baker asked her and smiled. ‘Not really,’ he said, answering his own question. ‘Women’s business.’

  Suddenly from outside in the darkness came a great shout—a call rising up—indecipherable, sounding like a sea shanty, the voice of a reveller spiralling with strength and full of yearning. Grace felt the sound go through her, and heard a voice within her say, I am strong enough to do this, and the words echo around the chambers of her body.

  Grace let the storeroom around her recede. At first she saw the door, the flour-patted walls, the tools of a bakery, heard voices demanding . . . but then the sights, the colours, the objects in front of her became blurs and the room lost its form, became a coloured mist, then disappeared, and the sounds became silence. The feel against her flank of tea towels warm from a stove faded, along with her sense of time, as all of her went within herself, deeper still, until she was nothing but a heartbeat and consciousness, and what was around her was nothing to what was within her. This is beyond pain, Grace thought to herself.

  After what felt like—perhaps was—hours, she heard someone say, ‘It’s a boy.’

  When Grace opened her eyes, the woman was sitting by her, watching over her. Grace lifted her head from the sacks that had been folded into a pillow.

  ‘Rest a while longer,’ the woman said, looking down at the child in her arms.

  Grace got onto all fours and made to stand up. ‘I must go,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve just had a baby.’

  ‘No, I’m fine. I am.’

  The woman put her hands on her ample hips, blocking the light from the bakery behind. Grace stood, like a weakened cow, her legs akimbo, wobbly, new, raw.

  ‘You can’t go.’ The woman put her hand on Grace’s arm and Grace almost collapsed next to a sack of flour. ‘You have a mind of your own, don’t you? The child needs to be fed and in the warm; you need some tea and food. You can’t labour, then walk.’

  Grace knew this wasn’t true. In the past, the poor women in the farms around Narberth, burdened by pregnancy, had worked in the fields even in winter, hacking out vegetables, clawing into the frozen earth with picks, bundled against the cold in their shawls and woollen skirts. They gave birth in the fields, lying on their backs or down on all fours. And then they picked the baby up from the earth and swaddled it in a shawl tied to their fronts, rested, drank from a flask of brandy, ate a hunk of cheese and a piece of black bread. A couple of hours later, they would stand on stout limbs and labour again, at the hard winter soil. It was ever thus.

  Grace took a step.

  ‘You need a bath.’

  Grace had to admit she needed a bath. There was a butchery to birth, as if the inside ruptured onto the outside, and she must wash herself.

  Soon the woman had placed a tin bath in the corner of the room and was filling it, pitcher by pitcher, with hot, steaming water. Grace sat leaning against hard bags of flour. The child was wrapped in a clean warm cloth at her side.

  ‘Don’t you want to hold your child?’ the woman asked. She picked up the child and put him into Grace’s arms. Grace took him but then placed him on the floor beside her, stood up, removed the remains of her splattered clothing and stepped carefully into the bath.

  The woman began mopping the floor in the middle of the room.

  ‘That was over mercifully quickly. And quietly,’ she said, putting her hand to her brow in relief. Then: ‘You’re a queer one.’

  Grace sat on her haunches in the bath.

  ‘Are you going to keep the child?’

  Grace turned around in the bath and faced the other way—in the opposite direction to the child. The woman rested the bloated mop against a table piled high with empty wooden trays. ‘Hmm,’ she said, and picked up the child.

  Grace looked down at her body in the bathtub; she had not properly looked at herself naked for months. Her nipples were a freckled coffee brown. Her tummy button was blackened. But it was her body again. It had been used and returned. She wiped clots of blood from her ankle, then her forearms, and felt purged, expunged, lightened, as if a burden of sin had been removed, a memory and an experience razed and forgotten. She rested her head on her knees. She was herself again. It had been a long time.

  ‘So do you have somewhere to go?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  Grace rubbed at her legs.

  The woman put her finger in the baby’s mouth and the baby sucked toothlessly.

  ‘Do you want your child?’

  Grace stood up suddenly in the bath. She took a clean tea towel from a pile on the table and briskly rubbed herself dry. The child mewled: a small, pathetic sound.

  ‘He’s hungry. He’ll need milk soon,’ the woman said.

  Grace dressed silently. Would she be cold and sharp as broken cut glass? And leave her child to the world? Not care? She shocked herself by the hardness she felt, but it was familiar to her too; she felt as if something of her own mother came upon her. She had watched her mother’s cruelty all her life, seen its mannerisms and its sighs, its gestures and its phrases. And she could ape it, adopt it and feel it ripple into herself. So Grace took the corset and wrapped it round herself, tightening the xylophone of straps. She was thinner. At last. Grace buttoned her dress; all the while the woman watching, holding the child.

  ‘You can’t leave the child with me.’ The woman leaned on her mop. Grace straightened her clothes and reached for her coat.

  ‘Before you go,’ the woman said, changing her tack and sitting down on the dusty floor in the corner of the storeroom. ‘Before you go—you can leave him, but feed him first. It is late; it will be hours before I could find him milk. Feed him and he will sleep,’ she argued. ‘Then I will take him and find him a home. But feed him once before you go.’

  Grace put on her coat.

  ‘Sit.’ The woman patted the ground beside her.

  Grace sat down beside the door but not beside the woman. The room was bright, over-illuminated and painful to her eyes.

  ‘Here.’ The woman crawled over, cradling the baby. Grace sighed. Weakness came over her and the woman placed the child, which she had wrapped in linen, in Grace’s lap. Grace sat like a cloth doll as the woman said, ‘like this,’ and, ‘like this,’ arranging the child in Grace’s arm. The child searched as if by instinct for the source of food. He was floppy and inert and Grace felt floppy too, and inert like a jelly. The child would do as it would with Grace’s body, as her brother had done, and then Grace—separate, alone, herself again—would leave. Grace would belong to herself ag
ain. She sat there and the child searched and found, and lost and found where the food came from, wiggling in frustration.

  ‘Help the child,’ the woman urged, but Grace ignored her so that the woman took the bap of Grace’s breast as if it were uncooked dough that she was moulding, until it was in the child’s open mouth. Grace stared ahead, dispossessed. The woman said nothing, kneeling in front of Grace; one hand holding the child’s head up, the other hand holding Grace’s breast in the child’s mouth. And there the three of them huddled, the child sucking, Grace exhausted and the woman at the outer realm of her skill and knowledge of what it took to make another woman give birth to herself as a mother.

  Grace got off the tram at Piccadilly, by Eros, who was poised lightly on his pedestal, positioned to shoot an arrow at an unsuspecting mortal. She stopped in a dank doorway near the new Swan & Edgar department store, and rewrapped the swaddled baby so no one could see its face—so she could not see its face.

  Grace felt weak. She leaned against the cold brick wall of the doorway. That morning, she had left the bakery then collected her suitcase from the Caledonian Lodging House, knowing she would no longer be welcome there. The landlady had made that clear. All afternoon she had wandered around the streets, finally catching a tram and sitting slumped on it until it terminated at Piccadilly Circus, the conductor shouting, ‘The Angel of Christian Charity,’ when they reached the statue which Grace had thought was called Eros. She should be hungry but she wasn’t; her appetite had fallen away, and she needed to rest.

  ‘Are you in trouble, miss?’ a young man with an amputated arm asked, looking into the doorway where Grace was half-hidden.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are unwell?’

  ‘No. I am well.’

  ‘Only asking, ma’am.’ The man had spoken to her as an equal and not as a maid who tidied other people’s mess. He walked away, turning round briefly to check on her. He smiled, and doffed his cap. All I need to know, Grace thought, all any woman needs to know about any man, is that he is kind. That’s all.

  It was late afternoon; the daylight was beginning to fade. She must find a convent and a cardboard box. She stepped from the doorway facing the new electric billboards on the front of the London Pavilion, their lights incandescent in the fog, and slowly trudged across Piccadilly. Her father said if a man stood long enough in Piccadilly Circus he would see the whole world go by, and meet everyone he knew. But Grace didn’t want to meet anyone she knew and traipsed onwards, through the formal garden in Leicester Square then towards Trafalgar Square, to an imposing church with six pillars in its portico and a tall, sharp spire. Pulling her shabby coat around her, she stopped and read the black and gold sign: Saint Martin in the Fields. Church of the Ever Open Door. But she hadn’t yet found a box, and if she left it here, there were people all around who would see her walk away, perhaps call her back. A huddle of unemployed men were camped on the stone steps, like a tatty, listless pack of dogs. One lay curled on newspapers, one with his back to the many pedestrians, the sun-missed skin above his trousers revealed. Their homelessness frightened her. The baby began to mewl and the men turned.

  ‘Come here, love,’ one of them called, but Grace walked quickly away.

  She kept walking, passing the National Gallery where people were spilling out onto the pavement. They chatted, buttoned up dress coats and pulled on leather gloves before dispersing onto omnibuses. Grace stumbled down a lane behind the Gallery and through quiet, cobbled side-streets until she found a discarded cardboard box outside a closed butcher’s shop. It was battered but clean. She waited a moment, looked around surreptitiously, took it and walked on. It was a large box and she struggled to carry it along with the baby.

  Suddenly she felt overwhelmed and strangely hot, and all she wanted to do was sleep. She thought of Wilfred: strong and tall in his undertaker’s suit, Wilfred in her bedroom, Wilfred holding her on the last night of their married life. He was the only man who had ever held her, or rather the only man who had held her with affection. Then she thought of Wilfred’s da and his gentleness and how he had complimented her at the wedding breakfast on the honey from her hive. That was when she had Wilfred to love and bees to keep: when there had been hope.

  She collapsed onto a muddy kerb. ‘Excuse me,’ she called out to a tall man coming down the lane. ‘I’m looking for a convent.’

  ‘A convent?’ the man replied, taken aback. ‘I don’t know that there’s a convent around here. This is near the picture houses in Leicester Square. Is there something the matter, miss?’

  ‘No.’

  He looked at Grace and he looked at his watch. ‘There’s a convent near Marble Arch, that way.’ He pointed diagonally. ‘But it’s a walk. You’ll need to take the omnibus to Oxford Street, past Selfridges department store, miss.’

  Grace stood up tentatively, ‘I’m well, thank you,’ she said, not realising the man hadn’t asked after her well-being, was already moving away. She walked slowly up the lane in the direction the man had indicated, but soon the child began to cry. Grace walked a little further until she found a hidden office doorway, which she crouched into. She put down the cardboard box, undid her coat and the buttons on her dress and tried to put her breast in the child’s mouth without covering his nose. She saw his red and ugly face, pickled and raw. He was small enough to fit into a shoebox.

  It was foggy and beginning to rain, steadily heavier. Grace sat in a damp huddle as the rain isolated her from the streets around. But she couldn’t leave him here; he would get wet. And it might be a while before a passer-by found him. But there were childless people who wanted a child. She would give them a gift. The mother, the father and the child would be happy and complete. And her gift in return would be to walk away. She ought to do it quickly, the sooner the better. Someone would find him. When it stopped raining, she would look for somewhere sheltered and walk away.

  ‘Miss. Come out of the doorway, please. May I offer you assistance?’ a police constable asked, the imposing silver star on his helmet glinting in the dark. ‘Would you like to come with me to the police box to get out of the wet?’

  Grace shook her head, thrown by the policeman’s presence, as if she was already guilty.

  ‘Where are you heading?’

  ‘Paddington.’

  ‘Well, there’s a surprise: a baby. My wife has a baby. I know these things can be awkward, but come out of the rain, please, Mrs. . . .?’

  ‘Rice.’

  ‘Rice. Let me move that cardboard box out from under your feet, I don’t want you to trip.’ The policeman offered her a brolly as she stood up. ‘The Number 23 goes to Paddington train station. I will accompany you to the bus stop on Trafalgar Square, it’s only two minutes away.’ He guided Grace, his hand under her elbow, towards the end of the lane where Grace could see the silhouettes of streetlamps and passing motor cars. ‘He is a small baby. Is it a boy?’

  Grace nodded.

  ‘How old is he?’

  ‘Two weeks.’

  ‘He’s small for two weeks,’ the constable said, the chain on his whistle rattling. ‘Our little chap is a bit older; two months and a day.’ The young man beamed, eager to talk. ‘There’s not much you can do to keep them quiet when they are that young but milk is the answer to everything. If they want milk, they have to have it, that’s that. My wife has the same problem. But we can’t have you out in the rain. Dear me, no. What are you doing in London with a Scottish accent? There’s the number 23.’ He ran to the kerb, waved a white-gloved hand and a red bus pulled over. Grace stepped tentatively onto the platform.

  ‘She’s going to Paddington railway station, conductor,’ the constable shouted.

  The conductor tinged the bell, then began punching the buttons on his ticket machine.

  ‘Single?’ he asked. Grace nodded.

  The conductor quickly turned the handle on the machine, a ticket stuttered
out and he handed it to Grace.

  ‘Threepence, please. Dreadful weather. Wouldn’t be surprised if there was a pea-souper,’ the conductor commented chattily to Grace. The bus stopped abruptly—he bent down and looked out of the window. ‘There’ll be some drunks falling in the Thames tonight, but don’t you worry yourself about that, miss. You and your baby get straight home to your husband and into the warm and dry. Have you got far to go when you get to Paddington station?’ he asked, holding onto the back of a seat to keep his balance.

  Grace nodded.

  ‘Where’s that then?’

  ‘Narberth.’

  12.

  A GOOD HOME

  Wilfred woke abruptly. There had been a tap on the front door. Who was it? Mr. Probert! He looked at Flora Myffanwy, who was fast asleep beside him. He heard a knock again and quick, quiet steps. That was definitely a rap on the door. If he opened the curtains and looked out of the window, the light might wake Flora Myffanwy. And she needed to sleep. At least his da wasn’t there; he’d gone to stay with Auntie Blodwen. His da had endured enough recently, and if there was any trouble, and if it was that Probert, he would deal with it alone.

  He peered at the alarm clock. Twenty minutes to six. Who would knock on the door at this time of the morning? Someone must have died—that was the reason. He’d have to go and collect a body. In the pitch-dark, he got out of bed, pulled on his long-johns and padded barefoot down the winding staircase—avoiding the third step, which creaked loudly.

  He peered through the bay window in the paint and wallpaper shop. No one. That was strange. He turned towards the ruins of Narberth Castle but there was no one to see there either. Wilfred felt sure he had heard someone. He was overwrought, that’s what it was, and imagining things—what with the baby and his worry for Flora. Wilfred sighed, rubbed his forehead and turned to go back to bed. The brain could do things like that when one was frightened and on the edge, he thought to himself. He felt weary as he climbed the stairs.