PATRICIA FERGUSON
The Midwife’s Daughter
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
The Meeting
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
The Statue
Acknowledgements
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE MIDWIFE’S DAUGHTER
Patricia Ferguson trained in nursing and midwifery, and her first book, Family Myths and Legends, won the Betty Trask, David Higham and Somerset Maugham awards. Her most recent books, It So Happens and Peripheral Vision, were both longlisted for the Orange Prize. She lives in Bristol.
For Richard, Tom and Roly
The Meeting
Joe Gilder came from Yorkshire, where he had grown up just about half-starved until he was nearly fourteen, when his mother had remarried. Presently the new husband had taken Joe to one side – lifted him bodily, in fact, to one side of a long dark glass-strewn alleyway – and given him to understand that he, Joe, would without any doubt be best off making himself scarce. The husband was scrawny, but Joe was scrawnier, and so he had taken the hint.
A great deal of water had flowed under bridges since then. A great deal of blood had flowed too, some of it Joe’s, at the time when he had been Corporal Gilder, and shot at by German lads, though since those days no one had ever heard him decry any nation but the French. Mr Gilder’s hatred of France and French people was one of the strongest things about him. Frenchmen, when he was Corporal Gilder, had approached him in broad daylight and tried to sell him their sisters; when he was dazed with thirst one summer near the Front after days of marching in the blistering heat, French people, for whom he had been fighting all these years, and for whom his friends had died, had refused him a drink of water, from a village well, until he had paid for it. Grousing about the French seemed to keep Mr Gilder limber, and free his mind for other lighter things.
He told only one further story about the War.
‘I were sent to get the rum ration. A nip for every man, in a tin bottle. Halfway back and a shell bursts right by me, blows me to kingdom come. I’m there in the bottom of this hole, and I know I’m hit. I’m dying. That’s what I thought. And God help me I reckon: if I’m going to go, I’m going to go pissed: rum for twenty and I’m knocking it back like water, drunk as a lord I were all night till they come for me – saved me life, that rum!’
A jovial story, told to please. Every time he told it, Mr Gilder felt a faint lessening of that terrible infinity of time when he had lain in agonized confusion in the mud, waiting to stop seeing. Every second of the eleven hours and nearly forty minutes had gone by, one by one, while the chill earth gritted wet beneath his fingers, and his eyes had kept on opening, all by themselves.
Though the lessening never seemed to last very long. Every now and then, going downstairs to make his wife a cup of tea in the morning, or unlocking the back door to look out over his sunny garden, Joe would suddenly know that despite what felt like the pleasant reality of the scenes before him, that terrible night, dead and cold as ice, was still somehow going on somewhere, flowing slowly, like a glacier of darkness. Certainly it showed its continuing existence by way of occasional nightmares. And all he could do by way of reply was jeer at it, entice others coarsely to laugh at it with him; a puny enough response, he knew, but better than none at all.
On his lapel Mr Gilder even now was careful to wear the little badge that proclaimed him a wounded soldier. The bursting shell had untidily scooped away most of his left buttock.
‘Leg wound,’ said the doctor in the field hospital, and Joe had thought him a prissy old fool – a medic who couldn’t say arse, for Pete’s sake! and had laughed about him with those of the other men still capable of laughter. It had not occurred to him for several weeks, until the wound was well on the way to healing, that a buttock is merely where a leg leaves off. That without a buttockfull of strong elastic muscle, a leg is a poor weak prop-like article, hardly capable of forward movement, barely able to take any weight at all.
‘I’m afraid it’s going to be more like having a false leg than a real one,’ said a different doctor, in the convalescent hospital this time. This was a big grand house Joe was at first barely aware of, with lengths of stone corridor and shining acres of parquet flooring. After a week or so he was moved to a bed beside one of several great tall windows, so that through it he could see a terrace with stone pineapples on either side of it, and one or two blokes in wheelchairs being trundled about between flower beds; but when he raised himself up on his elbows, which still in those days involved much tremulous effort, and peered right out beyond the flowers and the distant lawn, further out, further still, he saw a long unbroken haze of darker blue, where far away the sea was meeting the sky.
At first he had been afraid to look again. He knew that beyond that apparently wide stretch of water lay the lads still fighting in the endless war. If he strained his ears he would hear them; gentlefolk hereabouts, it was said, were much put out at luncheon by the distant thud of artillery.
‘Quiet today,’ he had remarked to a passing nurse, that first day beside the window. ‘Can’t hear nowt.’
‘What? What d’you mean?’
‘Can’t hear the guns.’ He gestured towards the window, and the sea, and France.
‘Where d’you think you are? Only it’s next stop America out there: this is Cornwall.’
‘Is it?’ In truth this conveyed very little to Joe’s mind, as geography was one of the many things his education had entirely neglected. ‘Is that in England?’
The nurse laughed. ‘Some people think so,’ she said.
Presently the house grew walls, and other beds, and other men, assumed shape and then routine. Every other day nurses brought folding screens and a laden clinking trolley, and carefully tortured him, packing and repacking the raw hollow of flesh with coiled lengths of wet crêpe bandage; gnarled locals of both sexes, speaking an almost incomprehensible dialect, helped him briefly stand while his bed was made, shaved him, cut his hair, wheeled him lying on his stomach on his trolley up and down the long corridors, and eventually took him out into the stunning sunshine of the terrace.
The sea glittered and changed its colours, sometimes sporting a small white sail or a plunging fishing-boat. Several weeks went by. The torture lessened. Someone measured him up for crutches, someone else showed him how. He stood; he hopped slowly from one side of his bed to the other; he crossed the room. Every day as he stood for longer, hopped further, he grew more despondent. Pain had filled so much time, given his days such shape; trolley-dreading had almost been a full-time job. Without it he began to understand what lay ahead.
Seagulls wheeled over the terrace, eyeing the tables set out there in fine weather, where one day, at breakfast, Joe overheard one of the other men idly announce that he knew for a fact that the house was keeping a negro slave in the basement, to do the washing-up.
No one took much notice, as the man in question was a known liar and prone anyway to sudden spells of vagueness connected to his head wound. Presently however someone else chimed in from across the table, a new chap called Dexter, pale as death from pneumonia.
‘Surely not a slave, old chap, that’s all been done away with, hasn’t it?’
There was a pause. It was a listless group sipping its tea. Joe was standing up, as usual, leaning on the wall, his good leg protesting already that it was tired working all on its own. Sometimes Joe felt quite angry with this leg. There was nothing at all the matter with it and yet it was always making such a fuss, quivering and aching and constantly threatening collapse: letting the whole show down.
Everyone else sat rather slumped in their chairs, exhausted by the toil of dressing, washing, shaving and making it as far as the terrace breakfast table, though Dexter himself was not yet able to walk that far, and sat now in a battered heavyweight wheelchair, his skinny legs wrapped in a blanket.
‘Though there is a darkie here,’ Dexter added at last. ‘In the kitchen.’
‘A coon,’ said the liar, whose name was Bowen.
Sit down, sit down, begged Joe’s good leg. It seemed completely unable to remember that sitting down was a thing of the past. Lie or stand, that was the drill these days. But Joe had had enough of lying down. Besides there had been an attractive hint of playfulness in Dexter’s tone.
‘There’s not,’ he said.
Dexter looked up at him. ‘Ten bob says there is.’
‘Get out,’ said Joe easily. ‘Tanner.’
‘Sixpence it is,’ said Dexter.
Others round the table had quickly entered the bet, but settling it would involve risk. Men were not supposed to visit the kitchens or even hang about outside them without good reason, and it was generally agreed that settling a bet would not count as one of these. In any case the kitchen, Dexter pointed out, was effectively enemy territory, staffed as it mainly was by hoary locals of uncertain temper: ‘They should be women,’ said Dexter. ‘And yet their beards forbid me to interpret that they are so.’
But Joe had not done anything of his own volition for what felt like years; not since the day he’d joined up.
‘I’ll go,’ he said, and swung his way over to Dexter’s wheelchair. ‘Cop hold.’ He laid his crutches on Dexter’s blanketed knees. ‘Haven’t got yer brakes on, have yer? Where am I going, round the corner, is it?’
He pushed, experimentally. The handles seemed to take his weight. He could shove the thing forward, and then catch up with it, one near-hop at a time, the bad leg taking just enough weight. Slowly they ground across the terrace, past another table, past the open glass doors of the ward, where long pale muslin curtains shifted a little in the breeze.
‘I say,’ said Dexter presently, in the tone of one mildly interested, ‘are we taking the stairs?’
Joe stopped. He had not realized that the terrace was raised. The curving flight of stone steps at either end beside the stone pineapples led down to the wide flagged path about the house, and so he was stranded; no one had explained stairs to him yet. He had forgotten stairs existed. But then they had never been a barrier before.
Dexter spoke up: ‘I think we need brawn here, Gilder. Where’s that chump Bowen gone?’
Bowen was still at the table, gazing out to sea, but was at length induced to bump Dexter and his wheelchair slowly down the steps, while at the top Joe hesitated, considering. Could he lean on the broad stone banister? There were no real hand-holds. Don’t make me, said his good leg, trembling beneath him. There would be swinging involved, there would be a swing out into stony nothingness. The banister hard to his palm.
‘Your turn, peg leg,’ said Bowen, leaping up the steps again, and he picked Joe up, as easily as once the reluctant stepfather had, prior to the private word in the long dark glass-strewn alley; Joe had time for a moment’s swift nostalgia, for threats so simple and so personal, before he was propped fairly gently against Dexter’s wheelchair on the flagstones at the bottom of the steps.
‘Good man,’ said Dexter. ‘Afraid we’ve rather cut off our retreat.’
‘No-Man’s-Land,’ said Bowen.
Joe said nothing, but remembered the taste of rum.
‘We must advance with all due caution,’ said Dexter. ‘Oh, are you leaving us, Bowen? Ah. Farewell, then. Bowen appears to have a prior engagement.’
‘Very busy man,’ said Joe, pushing the chair forward. Slowly they neared the corner, turned it.
‘Through there, I think,’ said Dexter, as they approached a small arched doorway. ‘Kitchen garden. Watch out for Mr McGregor.’
‘You what?’
Through the arched door the path abruptly turned to cinder, which was much harder work. Joe was sweating. His arms began to ache and tremble almost as much as his good leg. In slow silence they passed a plot of spinach and an onion bed. ‘Alright?’ said Dexter.
‘Bum hurts,’ said Joe.
‘Dulce et decorum est,’ said Dexter. ‘You have given your arse for your country, Gilder; an honour granted to few.’
‘Listen!’ Now they were nearing an open door in the undistinguished brickwork at the back of the house. Windows beside it also stood open. From it came unnerving kitchen sounds: the rattle of china and cutlery, saucepans clanging, taps running, and shrill voices raised over the racket. What was left of the fun of the whole expedition seemed to drain away right there and then.
‘Dear Lord,’ said Dexter. ‘Sounds a bit lively. Don’t you think?’
Joe stopped. He thought about lying down. ‘Call it quits?’ he said.
As if in reply Dexter abruptly had a coughing fit. His face went scarlet, his eyes streamed. He threw himself about in the chair, as if he were fighting with himself. The extra tension of seeing this made Joe’s head swim, the tearing noise of it seemed to pierce right through him like spears. His good leg began to shake violently beneath him.
‘Help!’ he cried, or thought he did, and then became aware of someone embracing him, holding him upright, of buxom shapes and sweeping skirts, of someone stooping in front of Dexter and the terrifying cough falling suddenly silent. Someone took his arm, firmly, and helped him forward, through an open doorway into a hot bright place, fearfully crowded, full of strangers, cross old women in a row, all glaring.
‘Sorry,’ he squeaked, and then fell silent, for he had suddenly understood how close he was to bursting out crying. He felt almost faint with embarrassment and shame, caught trespassing; caught out anyway.
‘We – we went the wrong way,’ he muttered.
‘Got confused,’ said Dexter croakily.
The woman nearest him, the cook presumably, from her general menacing air of command, big square face and brawny forearms, did not smile back. She leant back against the table behind her, and glared down at him, and then up at Joe, who looked quickly away. She turned to the woman beside her, and spoke, in the local dialect.
‘What are we to do with these here, Mrs Dimond?’
This was another old witch, even fiercer in appearance, since in fine music-hall style she was holding a large wooden rolling pin upright like a floury truncheon in one knotty red hand. There was a pause while, slowly shaking her head, she appeared to consider. Then she said:
‘You reckon … they like cake?’
‘Well now, Mrs Dimond,’ said the cook slowly, deadpan, ‘I believe they might. What d’you say, young man?’
‘Oh … gosh,’ said Dexter, instantly brightening, and there was suddenly something like a party atmosphere, and fussing, and laughter. For mainly the women in the kitchen, as Joe at that time could not begin to imagine, had looked at Dexter and himself and seen not marauding soldiery or trespassing young men, but something more like children; a famished child in a wheelchair, a crippled child on crutches.
‘Here. Eat up, go on.’
‘Where you from, my lovely?’
‘How old are you?’
‘Coffee or chocolate?’
‘Have another bit, go on.’
And then Joe saw her. He saw her hand first, as she held out towards him a plate of little round honey tarts still warm from the oven. He remembered the bet, and unconsciously shook his h
ead, disowning it; still, he couldn’t help but stare, at her delicate wrist, her small fingers. He saw a blue dress open at the throat. He saw her neck, dark, very slender, and at last he dared her face, oh, just a girl, a girl’s smile, eyes glistening sweet as blackberries. He saw that everything about her was normal and real; the only difference was that it was all brown. A commonplace prejudice dropped away from him before he had so much as thought to voice it.
‘Thanks, Miss –’
A giggle. Oh, how pretty she was!
‘Now then, Gracie,’ said the old witch-one, Mrs Dimond.
‘Take a bite, do,’ said Gracie, in that same local-yokel accent, that he’d thought made you sound so countrified and daft; but in her mouth it was cosy, coaxing, as lovely as her name: suited her. When she slipped back to work over by the window, behind a big white enamel-topped table, he couldn’t stop looking at her. He watched as she took the covering tea cloth from a large brown china mixing bowl and drew something out of it, creamy-white, elastic, clinging: bread dough?
Joe limped closer, until he could lean against the other side of the table, where he watched her scatter it with flour and knead it, busily pulling and tucking it into itself. Occasional flecks of raisin surfaced now and then, to be quickly folded back into the depths. He felt shy. But he had to speak.
‘Miss? What you making?’ He nodded at the dough.
‘ ’Tis for buns,’ she said, and again the accent struck him as somehow intimate, though at the same time wonderfully exotic. Presently though he noticed that he couldn’t quite make sense of her hands. Curious; something kept looking strange, as if her slender floury fingers somehow didn’t bend as they should. He concentrated; and finally understood that her hands looked strange because one of them was: her left normal, but while her right hand gracefully shared the turn and tuck, turn and tuck, there – and there, again – something was terribly wrong with it. The ring and little fingers were missing, the merest stumps; the middle finger too short.
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