As soon as he realized this the words jumped out of him: ‘What’s up with your hand?’
She stopped still, though not before the right hand had slipped to hide itself behind the left.
‘Accident,’ she said, without looking up, then quickly unfolded the mismatched fingers and set to work again.
Joe felt stunned. Over the blood thundering in his ears he kept hearing himself asking her, What’s up with your hand? as if there was some way he could go back and intercept himself. He had forgotten how normal people behaved, he thought. It was being here; it was one of the things you talked about, in this place: What brings you here, then?
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’
She stopped work again, and this time gave him a straight look. He held his breath, so sudden and so strong was the personality in that glance.
‘No matter,’ she said. ‘’Twas long ago.’ She took up the canister, and swiftly floured the dough again. ‘What about you?’
He gave her the cheery version he had given his mother, the shell that had caught him in daylight, knocked him out, the stretcher, the field hospital, the good ship home, and here. But when he had finished she gave him another look, and it was as if she knew how much he was lying. It occurred to him that perhaps she had told such smoothed-out versions of the truth herself; that she had, in fact, just done so.
He told her his name, and asked if he could help her somehow, could he do a bit of kneading for her, perhaps? Would she show him how? Partly a joke, and to try and take away the taste of what he had asked her, mainly because it looked like a good way of standing closer to her.
‘You can help with the shaping, if you like,’ she said. Was her tone a little warmer? His heart thought so, and thumped excitedly in his chest. ‘You got to wash your hands first, mind.’ She gestured at the stone sink behind her.
‘Anything you say,’ said Joe, to this warmer tone, and saw breathlessly that in reply she drew her skirts out of his way with a little half-mocking flourish.
At the sink he took the edge in his wet hands for a moment, and leant forward to lift his weight free. But he had forgotten his leg, for a little while, he realized. Had he ever once forgotten it before? He thought not.
‘’Ere. Dry yer ’ands.’ Proffering a clean blue and white tea towel, ironed smooth. He could have laid it to his cheek.
She was very little, close up.
‘Is they proper dry?’
‘They proper is,’ he answered, as near to her accent as he could get, and that set her off giggling, you’d think no one had ever tried to make her laugh before, he thought gloriously, it was a while before she could speak at all.
‘Put yer ’ands out – no, over the table! Palms up. That’s right. Stay still.’ She snatched up her canister, and gave it a quick merry shake over his hands. The fall of it was so light he could barely feel it. It was like feathery down, it was like a childhood dream of warm snow. When he rubbed his fingertips together he felt no gritting at all, not even dustiness, it was like rubbing silken nothing.
‘There. Now you can touch it,’ she said. He saw the tip of her tongue as she laughed now, flashing him a little sideways glance. Saucy! His knees trembled, but with glad excitement.
Joe put his hands exactly where hers had been on the dough, and pushed at it with his right-hand knuckles.
‘It’s warm!’ It was unlike anything he had ever handled before, at once weighty and buoyant, an impossible airy heaviness. It seemed responsive. He turned it with his left, as Grace had, and it seemed to fall naturally into his hands. Close to, he could faintly smell cinnamon in it.
‘Let me cut it. Here. Now, you take ’im, and you roll ’im into a ball, see? Like this.’
She had floured the enamel table in front of her. She spun the piece of dough under her palm, and turned it at once from fragment into nicely rounded little bun-shape. She used the injured hand, and he saw the swirling scar halfway up her forearm, where once a flame had travelled.
‘Should make a couple of dozen,’ she said.
‘There’s never enough,’ he told her. His bun looked nothing like hers, try as he might. ‘It’s all skew-whiff, look!’
‘I’ll make you one special,’ said Grace, turning to look up at him.
Joe had held various jobs before the army had let him in, underage though he indubitably still had been; mainly running to fetch things, or cleaning, none of it skilled or even practised, and nearly all of it the sort of thing you tried not to think about afterwards, except that the smell of it stayed in your clothes. He had rarely thought of the future then, and these days he generally tried not to think about it at all. But on the way back to safety (let out of the back door into the kitchen garden, and through that into the perfect legality of the old croquet lawn) it occurred to him that people would always want bread. You took the cleanly silken fineness of flour, he thought, and added to it, and turned it into something wholesome that people would always want more of. And you could do it standing up. No: you had to.
‘You owe me a tanner,’ said Bowen at lunch.
‘Bet’s off,’ said Joe.
‘The committee feels,’ said Dexter, ‘that the case is insufficiently proved.’
‘What?’
‘Not a negro.’
‘What? Course she is,’ said Bowen. ‘I seen her. Black as Newgate’s knocker.’
‘Ah, but there you are wrong, old love,’ said Dexter. ‘Newgate’s knocker considerably blacker, I’d say.’
Her glance that went right into you, thought Joe, her wonderful laugh. How could a girl as beautiful as that even look at a cripple like himself? Though at the same time, and at a level too deep for thought, he wondered whether her being a darkie didn’t in some way even things out a little.
‘Still counts,’ said Bowen.
‘Sorry, mate,’ said Joe, ‘but you can kiss my arse. What’s left of it.’
‘I’ll make you one special,’ said Grace, turning to look up at him; and she had. To one side of the heaped tray of ordinary thinly marged buns served at tea-time that afternoon was a paper bag with his name pencilled on it, holding not only an extra-large supremely sticky extra-fruited buttered beauty, a bun of buns, but a little note.
6 May, ’18
Dear Corporal Gilding, it was nice to meet you, here is the bun you helped make.
Yours sincerely, Grace Dimond, 7a Market Buildings, Silkhampton
Joe folded the note and put it into the special pocket of his wallet. He kept the paper bag, too. His recovery had begun.
1
As the century turned Mrs Dimond reached her fiftieth year. Her husband was dead, her son long since settled in Canada, with a wife and children she would never see. On the other hand Mrs Dimond herself was in excellent health, her son wrote to her now and then and sometimes sent her money, her kitchen garden and henhouse repaid her efforts, and the cakes and pies she made for sale at the market on Wednesdays and Saturdays brought in a small but useful sum.
But Mrs Dimond had a better and more satisfying source of income. She might, for instance, be sitting quietly of an evening, knitting by the fire and thinking about bed, when there would be footsteps running along the passage outside and a sharp rap at her back door: a summons. She would generally have been expecting the call, but not always.
Expected or otherwise Mrs Dimond would then in a calm pleasurable excitement rise, take up her special bag, and go out in her coat and hat and boots to wherever she was required, sometimes far afield in bitter winds and rain, arriving soaked and chilled, and not always to any degree of household comfort.
Tonight, though, on a chill blowy midnight in March, the place is clean and warm and dry, the top-floor back of one of the rundown but still respectable town houses behind the square. The oil lamp from the kitchen downstairs sits on top of the chest of drawers, an almost unprecedented coal fire burns in the tiny corner grate. Mrs Dimond has brought the special bag, and is carefully unpacking it.
Also in the room, officially, is Mrs Bertram Quick, otherwise Miss Rosetta May St George, who barely six months earlier had high-kicked in taffeta with seven other girls in a London chorus line. At present though, lying back on the bed, she is unable to remember any of these handsome names, and when Mrs Dimond asks her, kindly enough, what she is called, can only come up with ‘Rosie’. Then she lapses back into hectic groans.
Mrs Dimond takes no notice of these. She is unbuttoning the front of her own dress. She takes a folded piece of flannel out of the special bag, slips it inside her bodice, and buttons up again. The door opens, and Mrs Withers, the landlady, a woman her own age, bustles in carrying a cup of tea.
‘Now then, Mrs Dimond,’ she breathes, handing it over, ‘I hope I ain’t got you out too early.’
Mrs Dimond takes the tea in a sudden silence: the groaning has stopped. Blearily Rosie looks around, dull-eyed. ‘Oh my Gawd,’ she says, as if in greeting, her voice husky from all the groaning, and closes her eyes again. Her cheeks and lips are flushed scarlet, her hair is damp and plastered to her head.
‘She keeping anything down?’ asks Mrs Dimond.
‘Not so much as a drop of water,’ says Mrs Withers, who is fairly bristling with excitement.
‘Got to get her up,’ says Mrs Dimond. ‘If you want to save the bed.’
Mrs Withers’ eyes widen. She half-laughs: ‘Bless me, I’d forgotten!’ She turns to her guest. ‘I help you up, Mrs Quick? Come on now, my dear. Take my arm.’
Mrs Quick appears for the moment incapable of voluntary motion; perhaps too the name confuses her. But Mrs Withers is built for heavy lifting, and presently has her hauled bodily off the bed; she holds her more or less upright while Mrs Dimond whips off the bedclothes, unfolds several newspapers from the pile kept ready for her beneath the bed, and lays them in a crackling layer over the lower half of the mattress, before covering all of it with the large heavyweight rubber mackintosh from the bottom of her own special bag. More newspapers on top, quickly; and she barely has the bottom sheet back on to cover everything before Rosie begins heaving and groaning again, louder and louder, sagging in the landlady’s arms. Mrs Dimond carries on unhurriedly tucking in sheets, then folds up the blanket and counterpane and piles them on to the only other free surface, the floor beneath the window.
‘All set,’ she says, and picks up her teacup. This time the groans sharpen into screaming; Mrs Dimond sips her tea.
‘Best back on the bed, I think,’ she says, when she can be heard again. ‘You got a wet cloth for her head?’
With the next pain the screams are louder and wilder still and after it Mrs Dimond gives her patient the flat stick padded with clean strips of rag wound round it and sewn into place, to bite on. ‘You’re scaring folk,’ she says, though on the whole Mrs Dimond sees no reason why folk – husbands especially – should not be given a proper scare now and then. Pity the chap’s not downstairs taking notice as he should.
For Mrs Withers has already let on that Mr Bertie Quick, celebrated London tenor though he may be, has yet to make any sort of appearance here in Silkhampton, where this poor little piece, wedding ring or no, has been sat on her lonesome (rent fully paid right enough) these past three months. Nor, Mrs Withers had whispered, had there been so many letters with a London postmark; only two, in fact, and them in two different hands. Weren’t it a fearful shame!
But to this Mrs Dimond had said only: ‘Is there hot water ready? I needs to wash my hands.’ She had spoken gently, so Mrs Withers had not felt chastened, or not exactly. And Mrs Dimond had let her watch as she had taken a tiny bottle from the special bag and carefully shaken something thrillingly purple out of it into the bowl, which had swirled the water with pink.
‘Strengthens it,’ said Mrs Dimond, as she washed her hands. She did not, as it happened, believe in the necessity of potassium permanganate. Carbolic had been well enough, and plain hot water good enough for her own mother. But she liked Dr Summers.
In the upper room now, she takes up the wet cloth, turns it cool-side down, and lays it again on Rosie’s white forehead.
‘Take a little sip of something now,’ she says, and she picks up the cup of sugared water, and holds it so that her patient may drink. She notes the soft hands that touch her own as her patient sips and sighs.
‘Am I dying? I’m dying, aren’t I …’ Her voice trails away into a squeak of tearfulness.
‘Course not,’ says Mrs Dimond sharply, for she regards this sort of thing as impious, as well as slack-fibred. Where was the woman’s pride? ‘Everything’s just as it should be,’ she adds, but her touch is gentle still as she straightens the pillow, smoothes the ruffled sheet. ‘We must all be patient, see?’
After another hour or more of patience, something changes, and Rosie flings the padded stick aside with a sudden angry energy. Her breathing is deeper, more free. Uttering a series of bracing yells she half-rises on the bed, and casts herself about on it with a new vehemence.
When this pain goes she collapses, falls back heavily, does not stir as Mrs Dimond draws aside the hem of the nightdress, and has a quick look.
Not yet; but soon.
‘Get yourself on your side, my dear,’ says Mrs Dimond, ‘lie on your left side, and let the Lord deliver you.’
‘Oh, what’s happening?’ asks Mrs Withers eagerly, rather bedraggled herself by this time; she has been popping downstairs, as she put it, for some time now, keeping the stove going, dozing off beside it and then popping up again, as now, with more coal or a fresh pot of tea.
‘Not far off,’ says Mrs Dimond.
It does not occur to her to carry out any sort of examination. She’s heard of them. But what goes on inside a labouring woman is God’s business, not hers. Besides it’s clear to her anyway that something has altered within: the inner gates have yielded. Now the pains will begin to shift the heavy curl of child downward towards the further outer doors. Though these too will not open all by themselves. Mrs Dimond stands at the bedside.
‘When it starts again, you put this foot on me. Here. Like this, alright?’ Mrs Dimond helps Rosie raise her trembling leg, sets her bare foot against the lightly padded hardness of her own hipbone.
Rosie sees Mrs Dimond as safety, as life itself, but very far away, as if she were on the other side of a great gorge or chasm. Agonizing effort is the only bridge back to life, and she knows some die crossing it. She is on her own. Mrs Dimond’s eyes say calmly: Yes, I know.
Mrs Withers’ knees crack as she kneels on the rug on the other side of the bed. Though she holds Rosie’s hand, she too is far away, on the other side, in safety. The room is very quiet. When Rosie shifts a little, as the next pain starts, the bed crackles beneath her.
‘Now then, now then!’
‘Oh Christ help me!’ cries the labouring woman, and then falls silent as within her (thinks Mrs Dimond) the womb rises and takes command.
‘That’s the way,’ says Mrs Dimond approvingly, who has heard not swearing but prayer. She sees that the woman on the bed will obey as she should. Some don’t; some for a while forget themselves and lie writhing and shrieking, as if forsooth they could escape somehow from the duty of obedience, and from their own selves. Such craven panic tends to slow the whole business down a good deal, fit retribution, some might say; but the business in any case cannot be hurried. Let them scream if they must, is Mrs Dimond’s motto. Let them scream, and presently they will stop.
Now though, in dutiful obedience, the woman on the bed, her left leg braced against Mrs Dimond’s steady hip, pushes down inside herself. Her right leg is firm too, against the foot of the bed. She half-rises on her left elbow, and heaves. Her whole body is rigid with effort. Here is true hard labour, thinks Mrs Dimond, strange and hidden labour, soft parts turning as if to steel.
After the pain Mrs Dimond gently lays down Rosie’s leg and draws down her nightdress. The room is quiet again. The wind mutters outside, the fire burns. Mrs Withers dampens her cloth and wipes her tenant’s
face, which is completely relaxed now, as if she were asleep.
‘Won’t be long now,’ says Mrs Dimond coaxingly. At least half an hour, she thinks. Perhaps more. Not for the first time she looks at the big round belly under the flannel nightdress, and thinks about the sleeping baby so tightly crammed inside. She knows gestation takes place in sweet perfect sleep, and that the baby is safely woken only by the long-drawn-out process of birth.
The woman stirs, groans, and the rubber sheet and the newspapers packed beneath it murmur back.
‘Again.’
Twenty minutes slowly pass. The leg is raised and braced and lowered again. Hidden from view the curled sleeping child slowly descends, while the soft parts between the labouring woman’s legs, at first rounded as the child’s head pressed against them from within, appear to swell, and yet then, miraculously, carry out the Lord’s will by reversing the swelling, growing slowly thinner and thinner until they can draw themselves back into nothingness and let the child through. Mrs Dimond, taking another swift look between pains, speaks for the first time in several minutes.
‘Now then: don’t you push no more. ’Tis the littlun’s turn now, he must come out by himself. Nearly there now.’ She folds back the nightgown so that the private parts will be untrammelled.
On the bed Rosie is clattering up from the dressing room with the other girls for the final number, all of them tricked out in the feathered headdress, the saucy little flouncy skirts, but as the curtain parts and they step forward in line Rosie notices how strangely familiar her own skirt feels, realizes that she has somehow come onstage at the Alhambra, Leicester Square, in her landlady’s old flannel nightie, but as she stands there despairing in the ferocious theatre lights Mrs Dimond cries, ‘Here, now! I said don’t you go pushing!’
Mrs Withers pulls Rosie close, and hides her face in her bosom.
Now a taut oval bulge of greyish membrane is peeping through the opening doors of the mother’s private parts. Mrs Dimond does not touch it. She notes the intact cawl, and wonders whether it will stay that way, though she herself scorns the superstitions about such things. She can make out a flattened darkness of curls through the opaque surface.
The Midwife's Daughter Page 2