by Morag Joss
But it still seemed to take an age. She half sat, half lay, panting, and got Michael to hold her from behind. She pushed and pushed. I don’t think I have ever seen such effort. Then she shouted at me, as if she really were angry, to see if it was coming yet, and I had no choice but to look, and there it was, this veiny, foreign-looking dome growing and swelling out from between her legs with a long slick of slime and blood. Also, I’m afraid, foul, gingery, wet rags trailed out from somewhere behind her- I’d had no idea that could happen. I cleaned her up. Steph won’t mind my going into such detail; she’ll never know. I’m putting it all down because it was so extraordinary. It’s such an ordinary-sounding thing, ‘having a baby,’ and I had not realised until that night how very extraordinary it is. It crossed my mind that the only other birth I’d ever had anything to do with must have been my own, and it struck me that birth is simply the most puzzling, immense duet between human beings; nothing ever again in the life of mother or child will demand such struggle and mutuality, and possibly forgiveness. So when one witnesses another birth, one is changed. The ferocity of my feelings for that child and for her parents began then, with the sight of her bald blue head as her mother pushed her out of her own body into my arms, and it has never abated.
Jean stepped out of the kitchen into a freezing pink dawn and closed the door quietly behind her, leaving Steph and Michael holding each other and their daughter, squatting on piles of gore-soaked bedding on the kitchen floor. Outside, the night had been a cold and windless one, and now a frost lay over the walls of the garden and across the bare arms of the trees. Sunlight was slicing through branches and slanting across the grass. Jean took a few steps towards the walled garden, wrapping her arms round herself, breathing in the cold water smell of the almost-spring earth and listening to the rasping of rooks in the tops of trees. Despite the cold she would stay out here a while; she needed a little time to herself. She needed a moment to recover from the terror of it, from the baby’s eventual rushed, slippery emergence with limbs jerking and its frowning face squeezed tight, and its appalling silence. God, the silence. And then, as she had been trying to wrap a towel round the wet torso and lolling head, there had come the splutter and the sucking yell, then Steph’s answering cry. Between them she and Michael had managed the tying of a length of string round the cord, both taking instruction from Steph, who now lay exhausted, but in charge. It was Michael who had claimed, holding up the length of string, that that was what the hot water was for, and had insisted on boiling it first. Steph had lain waiting with the baby resting on her stomach while he tied it; but it was Jean who had finally taken the scissors from his shaking hands and cut the cord. Then she had suggested quietly that the baby might like to suck, and although the idea seemed a novel one to Steph, she had nestled the child at her breast. Jean had been unprepared for the lumps of liver that had slipped out of Steph soon after, but Steph herself had peered over between her legs and watched it without surprise. Presumably it was just the afterbirth, and all quite natural. Jean stopped on the path and looked back towards the house. There would be more to do presently. She had reached the wide crater at the end of the garden from which she had torn the four buddleias out by their roots, and she now recalled something she had heard or read somewhere about burying the afterbirth. Was it Indians, a tribe of Red Indians, she wondered, who buried it in the ground at the base of a tree, or planted a tree in that place? It was, she remembered, supposed to represent the claim of the new child to that very spot on the earth, which was thereafter the place to which it and all its descendents would belong. It seemed to Jean suddenly apt, marvellous, poetic. She hoped Steph and Michael would think it so as well and, turning, hurried to go and tell them.
When she got back to the kitchen Steph and the baby were installed in the large Windsor chair wrapped in a duvet, both almost asleep. Michael, sitting at the table waiting for the kettle to boil, had laid his head on his arms. Steph looked up.
‘I thought,’ Jean began, pointing to the mess on the floor, ‘I thought…’ But she found it was impossible even to say the word ‘afterbirth’, never mind explain about burying it. Steph was staring bashfully where she was pointing. They both had been struck by a sudden, immobilising shyness; hardly surprising, Jean thought, since they had after all met for the first time only a few hours before. The enforced intimacy of Steph’s labour and Jean’s reluctant midwifery was now receding, leaving each regarding the other with a slight wariness. Jean felt suddenly foolish, anticipating how it would sound in the bright stillness of the kitchen; something about a little ceremony with the afterbirth, a thing Red Indians did, exactly what she was not sure. How mad and, worse, meaningless the words would seem; while those that were not meaningless, that the ceremony would bind them all to one another and to this place, were presumptuous and unsayable.
‘Yeah, sorry,’ Steph said, trying to ride out her embarrassment. ‘Should have got some old newspapers or something down first, shouldn’t we? Didn’t think. I’m covered in it and all, underneath. I need a bath. So does this one here.’ She smiled, dipping her head towards the baby’s. ‘And I’m dead sore.’
Jean beamed with sympathy and also with relief at finding her role again, as if Steph had just handed her the script. Grandma, mother-in-law, indispensable, here to help. ‘Oh, of course! You must be tired out, you poor thing. You’re such a clever girl. Now,’ she said comfortably, ‘would you like a bath straightaway, or a sleep first? Michael will take you both up, won’t you, Michael? I’ll deal with that,’ she added, nodding back towards the floor, ‘and then with breakfast. You must be hungry as well. And then we’ll just have a nice quiet day. Nothing but rest for you, young lady.’
She rather amazed herself, discovering not just the right tone to take but also what her job would be from now on. Here she was, already talking as if she had never been anything else but the gentle arranger of all domestic comfort; it seemed like a little triumph to add to the day’s great one. Jean sighed with the happiness of knowing what she ought to do next.
‘She’s a great cook,’ Michael told Steph, as he helped her to her feet. They were both almost mournful with tiredness. Jean watched the three of them go, and then went to find rubber gloves and a bucket. How easy and clear everything had become. Michael and Steph’s bathroom overlooked the other side of the house. So while Michael bathed his daughter and the new mother in soft warm water and found clean and beautiful things to dress them in afterwards, she would have plenty of time to slip the lot into the hole in the garden. It would be a more private and prosaic committal than she had had in mind: just her and the bloody contents of a blue plastic bucket. But there would be enough time, before she had to return to cook breakfast, to linger over the dug earth and whisper a few words (the right ones would come to her) and to watch the bright entrails of her grandchild’s birthing soak into the soil of the place that would be ever afterwards charmed.
‘Steph was thinking of Michael-ah,’ Michael said shyly, from the chair by the window. He and Jean had brought breakfast up on trays to the bedroom which was now his and Steph’s. From where she sat in a chair on the other side of the bed Jean considered this, drinking her coffee. Steph’s head rested on several pillows and her eyes were closed. She was lying in the largest and most comfortable bed she had ever been in in her life, and Michael-ah, dressed in new baby clothes that Jean had directed Michael to find in the nursery, lay sleepily in her arms, feeding without urgency. Her hand was covered by a too-long sleeve, which had been folded back. They had picked out the smallest baby suit with a label that said ‘newborn’, but it was much too large. Michael reached over and pulled the material back so that he could see the tiny fist stirring the air, as if its waving were a necessary part of her sucking. Three teddy bears and a white baby shawl lay on the bed next to the tray with Steph’s empty plate.
‘Michael-ah. Or Michaela, perhaps?’ Jean murmured. Michael looked embarrassed, so Jean went on quickly, ‘It’s a lovely name. It reminds me of M
iranda, it’s got the same number of syllables. I think it means miracle.’
Into the warm silence came Steph’s slow voice. ‘Miranda. I like that better. A miracle. Michael, would you mind if we called her Miranda?’
Michael smiled. ‘She is a bloody miracle,’ he said. ‘Miranda, then. Miranda,’ he yawned.
Jean tiptoed out and went to her own room, knowing that she was going to have to cry at the honour of choosing the baby’s name. They all slept until the day was over, except that Miranda, stirring from time to time, would feel the skin of her mother against her face and with her soundless mouth she would seek and find a nipple, clasp it between her gums, and tug.
***
Of course it wasn’t all plain sailing. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that once we’d all found one another, and the baby having come safely into the world, that all we’d have to do then would be to settle down to life in our new house. And there could be no easier house to settle in, I knew that already; and they were so pleased to be here. I don’t believe we ever did discuss it in the formal sense, it was just understood by us all that we would all be living here from now on. Everything we needed (or very nearly) was here, in a way that seemed quite magical to them. I think I had stopped being astonished at how the house somehow went on providing what we needed, starting with the time and the privacy just to be our best selves. Or perhaps I had begun to take a little credit for it myself, as if the house and I worked together, or at least had begun to reflect each other. It was close to the feeling I had first had when the two Dutch students turned up. It had become personal. The house and my life now were like things I could shape in my hands, like arranging flowers, or painting, something I was creating and of which I was also a part. Steph and Michael ended up feeling the same. But the important thing to start with was that they stayed. Any other arrangement would have been unnatural. I never did quite get to hear much about the place where they’d been living, but they were certainly not in any sort of hurry to get back to it. It was at least a week before Michael went off in the van and came back with the rest of their things, none of which quite suited the new way of life. I don’t think we kept any of them except for some of Michael’s books.
No, it was the baby who worried me from the start, in a niggling way that I told myself was due to my own inexperience. And thinking it was inexperience, of course I said nothing, not wanting to start up any doubts about my not actually having had any children. I mean I don’t know what they thought of my story at that stage, but it seemed a courtesy not to challenge whatever they had decided to believe. I know new babies seem impossibly small, but Miranda was so tiny. I didn’t like to say so and her size didn’t seem to worry her parents, but I wondered all the same. On the day after she was born Steph was still in a bad way and I volunteered to change Miranda’s nappy- there were plenty, thank goodness, in the nursery- and I slipped downstairs and popped her on the kitchen scales. It was difficult! I weighed the biggest mixing bowl first and then put her in it, which she did not like. She wriggled so much I told myself that it couldn’t be a completely accurate reading. But four pounds five ounces! Still, I said nothing. Steph was only slightly built herself, so maybe the baby would just take after her. And it seemed that Miranda had arrived on the early side, so you wouldn’t expect her to be big. As long as we kept her well fed and cared for there didn’t seem anything to worry about. Babies grow, don’t they? In fact it’s all they do, really.
It was Steph who was doing the feeding. She wasn’t a natural at it though. She got very tired and cross over it and I remember she was often in tears. With Miranda bawling over her shoulder she would nag at Michael or me about getting Cow & Gate or something. There must be bottles and that in the nursery! There’s everything in there! Can’t we give her a bottle? We had to tell her there weren’t any. Miranda would get used to the feeding, I was sure of it. I mean, it was natural to take mother’s milk, and must surely be better for her. It wasn’t as if she’d ever had a bottle, was it, so why should that be any easier for her than the natural way? It seemed a reasonable argument and I really did believe it, and I could see Michael did too. We couldn’t suggest going out to buy baby milk and bottles. We both honestly thought it would be better to spend what we had building Steph up so that she could feed the baby herself.
Money. Of course, it was mainly to do with money, though at the time we convinced ourselves we were doing it for better reasons than that.
Miranda blurred Steph’s nights and days by waking her almost every hour, chewing her till she bled and vomiting up curds. She writhed and groaned in her arms when she was not actually fretting at the nipple. Steph’s right breast swelled up and became so red and sore that she could hardly bear it to be touched even by bathwater, then it grew so hard that she had to squeeze the spurting milk from it, yelping and crying with the pain and the waste of it; it was mixed with blood and serum from the cracked nipple so that she could not slip it into Miranda’s mouth from a spoon. Her temperature rose. She grew feverish and woke from wild and anxious dreams. Her heat entered the baby, who did not seem to know if she screamed for want of Steph’s milk or out of disgust for it. Steph lay beached on the soft bed, or sat for hours in cool baths to ease her breasts and the stinging from what she called her exit wound. She could only lie and hope that the burning, if it were not to stop, would just consume her altogether. At appallingly frequent intervals she would take the baby from Michael or from Jean, clamp her to the breast, and suffer. Later it seemed to her that in those weeks she cried not just in the bath or when Miranda was mauling her, but at every waking moment, even when eating, or drinking the glasses of water which were also brought to her too solicitously, and too often. Miranda’s periods of sleep were snatches of exhausted respite from what seemed her personal awareness-raising campaign at the injustice of having been born; she would wake from them freshly enraged and renewed for the fight. Steph herself felt cowed by her ferocity and at the same time enslaved to the task of appeasing it. Sometimes she cried for shame at her own inadequacy. Nobody understood. All Jean’s brightness and Michael’s doggedness were irrelevant, merely atmospheres that she sensed dimly against the background of the days and nights, as they moved about bearing trays and glasses or bringing the baby to her again. They took care of the practicalities as best they could, but there was no relief. Miranda screamed and would not feed, or she screamed and then attacked with her pitiless mouth, later sicking up most of the milk she had pulled from her weeping mother. Not once did anyone suggest calling a doctor.
When Steph’s temperature eventually fell and her infected nipple shrank and dried, she ate. She had been torn during the birth and walking was still painful, but she began to come downstairs for meals, dressed in clothes that Jean had put in the wardrobe in her bedroom. Michael had brought her few old things from the flat but she discovered she could not bear to look at them. It was Jean who sized her up and chose from her own collection the ‘youngest’ trousers and shirts that would be comfortable, though fashionless. None of it much suited her. Steph did not care.
Michael and Jean exchanged a smile when she came into the kitchen early and slightly sheepishly for breakfast one day, taking her presence as a compliment to themselves. Perhaps kindness was becoming a habit with them all, for Steph did not spoil their pleasure by saying that it was not their company she was in need of but simply more to eat. It was the smell of bacon that had brought her down, and she thought it might be easier to get a second helping or extra toast and butter if she were nearer the food.
Jean’s beautiful trays, with flowers and napkins and silver, had been getting a little short on quantity.
April
Life acquired fluency. On good days, which came more frequently, there were long stretches of peace, even glimpses of grace. The weather improved and bulbs came up all over the grass and around the garden. Jean brought in tulips and daffodils by the armload and for the first time in her life was amazed by them. How had she missed them all these
years, she wondered; their colours, the clinging, yearning scent, the slippery sap and the stamens, so unbearably naked and tuned to the air that it was impossible to believe they were not receiving some strain of music too fine for human ears. She discussed with the others what vases she should use and where they would like them put, and she was pleased when one day Michael said he didn’t much mind, just whatever she thought, anywhere was fine as far as he was concerned. His mildly distracted indifference struck her as affectionate; she felt promoted. His taking her somewhat for granted confirmed not just their familiarity but also his security in their relationship, and perhaps there really was something endearing about her, something elusive that only a son could see. She hummed as she trimmed stems and filled vases, to show that her prettifying efforts were for fun and she was not being fussy and anxious. Most of the flowers went in the drawing room for Steph, who said that she might get around to doing a painting of them sometime. On days when Miranda consented to sleep (which she did more and more, and even took on a slight listlessness when awake which they all agreed was a sign that she was nice and relaxed) Steph would settle on the drawing-room sofa in the afternoon while Jean and Michael flitted about on little tasks which seemed to please them, Jean most often around the kitchen, Michael ranging more widely about the garden and outbuildings as he searched out things that needed doing.