by Morag Joss
Next I wrapped her white shawl round her tightly so that her mother would not feel the stick limbs. I had meant to dress her properly, in bonnet and bootees and everything, but I could not do it, not for the want of caring. Her hands and feet were too far gone. Then I slipped her into a pillowcase. Then I had a good idea; there were lots of lavender-filled pillows in the bedrooms, so I gathered them all up, ripped them open and poured all the dried lavender flowers in the pillowcase with her so that she would be buried with sweet flowers surrounding her. So that we might be distracted a little by the lavender scent and not have to notice the state she had got into. Then I bound her round and round with white ribbon, covering her completely.
Because by now Michael had managed to get through to Steph and almost bring her out of a kind of blindness that the death had plunged her into, and I did not want her to see (I do not think she really had seen it yet) the colour that her baby’s face had turned to.
So it wasn’t a tree, after all, that the space in the garden had been waiting for. We put Miranda there, in the same spot where her afterbirth lay buried. I hardly remember what was said. Michael had found volumes of poetry in the library, and he seemed to know what to say. I’m sure it was all beautiful, I remember parts of it, but of course it was not enough. A funeral is supposed to explain the whole thing, is it not? But not even my sweet Michael could find an acceptable way to say that this little one was dead and that she should be left in the dirty cold ground while we went back into the warm house without her. Steph could not be persuaded to come with us. So Michael buttoned her into her coat, and let her be. She stayed out until well after dark.
There followed several days when we could neither be together, nor bear not to know one another’s precise whereabouts. We could not rest in one spot, or seek out places of refuge. I roamed somewhat, trying to go about the jobs that needed doing, as did Michael, and even Steph. But we tired so easily, and would go to lie down and not manage to settle, and then we would come across one another wandering through the house again, or going about the garden. We could neither talk about Miranda, nor silence the clamour of her in our heads. I am speaking for myself, of course, and in truth there were times when I scarcely noticed what the other two were doing- but from what I did manage to take in, it was much the same for us all.
If there were any comfort to be had, it was in the knowledge that at least our child had not been taken away. She was dead, but nobody had been allowed to interfere. So we were all still together, all of us, including Miranda. Although she was dead and buried and gone from us, at least she lay not far away, and at home.
Steph’s days wasted one into the other, a cruel mirror of the time just after Miranda’s birth. Daylight lapped somewhere at the sides of the things she noticed, while Michael pushed and pulled her through the everyday and surely pointless practicalities of getting dressed, eating, bathing. In between times her brain swam, her empty arms stiffened and ached, her legs felt heavy and too weak to carry her far. She could not say whether it was through her body or her mind that she hurt more. It was as if loss jellified her. She felt boneless, a floating, absorbent thing that existed only to soak up pain. Then when her breasts began to ache with Miranda’s milk, she knew she had become some kind of efficiently functioning system for suffering. Night and day she processed raw material in the form of waves of perfect grief, which lapped and receded in her body, pricking, breaking, stabbing. Her breasts lifted, hardened and filled through countless incoming and ebbing tides of milk.
In the daytime she took long baths, as if she hoped to soak away her pain. She changed her clothes three and four times a day, swapping one anonymous, spotless shirt for another, yet her unhappiness clung; it lay beneath her pink skin and gleaming hair and beyond the reach of soap and water, or got itself caught up and buttoned in tight under her immaculate clothes. She walked about, ignoring the weight of her legs until she failed to notice the heaviness. Michael gave her little jobs to do, putting away a garden rake or carrying kindling, taking clothes to and from their bedroom to the laundry room; sometimes she would accomplish these tasks and sometimes stop them halfway through, forgetting. One day on the windowsill halfway down the stairs she came across two shirts, some socks and an empty tumbler that she had simply wandered away from, having paused at the window earlier on her way down. She spent a lot of time outside neither far from Michael nor yet with him, while he did what he could in the vegetable garden, but she was insensible to the sunshine which at times punched its way out through clouds and raised the smell of warm, dug soil into the air. She paced the paths and yards, the pool pavilion and outbuildings. She would stop and look at things for no apparent reason, and it was hard to know if she saw anything.
One day as she stood by the covered swimming pool, Jean, trudging back from the walled garden with a few sticks of rhubarb, stopped and watched her contemplating the turquoise rectangle. Had the pool been uncovered, would she try to drown herself, or was she imagining a summer day when Miranda might have been making her first splashes in the water? Steph roused herself, walked on towards the gate in the fence at the edge of the lawn, and stepped through it into the paddock. Jean turned towards the house, frowning at the bundle in her hand. Supper was going to have to be the last of the potatoes and an onion, and more rhubarb. It hardly seemed to matter; the walk to the garden and back had exhausted her so completely that she thought she might go back to bed anyway. Whilst thinking this Jean did not notice that Steph had already crossed the paddock and was now walking quite fast, making her way down the drive towards the road.
As she went further from the house, Steph wished she could stop thinking. It would have been a relief to be free of thought, free of the thousands of quarrelling and contradictory memories of the past few months: Jean’s house and how she had arrived that night, the birth of Miranda and before that, Michael and the flat, then Miranda, the awful first weeks. The miracle of waking up slowly, over several days, to the idea that her daughter would not be taken away, that she now lived in this amazing place with her, and with Michael and Michael’s mother. Even as she had been lulled by her new and gentle circumstances, there had still been space in her mind for Jace and at an unreal and distant point there had been Stacey, college, her pictures, her Nan. But as these thoughts tramped softly through her memory, now she wondered if, even as she had been learning to feel safe from that old life, she had been aware of a shade of disbelief. For how could she appear first in one life and then leave it for another, like the same small detail in two pictures- a jug, a scrap of lace, a tulip- that an artist might have arranged and painted twice on different canvases, for some sentimental reason or just through laziness or accident? In that sense she was, in a manner of speaking, simply the jug or flower or trinket that had come to someone’s hand. Perhaps it was her fault. Perhaps this happened to her because she continually consented to be picked up and placed in surroundings which might turn out to please or displease her, but over which she had no power in either case. She could even, as she had this time, grow convinced of her happiness, but her inability to change anything did not alter. She had been determined that Miranda should not be taken away, and had been shown her powerlessness over that.
As she walked, this idea too got left behind, along with other thoughts of the past. They took their leave tightly, like tentative visitors who had come just to remind her that once they might have been important but would not be staying. She walked on in some expectation that now something else would have to happen to her. New things would have to come along; the things, whatever they were, that were to be important next, the things she was to be placed among, in whose canvas she was to occupy a space. She opened her mind, inviting new thoughts to come and fill it. She walked, but none came.
She was wearing trousers and boots and began to notice that both were too big, while the white shirt (whose, for God’s sake?) was a little tight over her chest. Her clothes had an indoor, bready smell, or was that the smell of her milk? And
the clothes felt no more hers than any of the sensations they created, the trouser stitching chafing a little on her hipbones, the pressing of the shirt over her breasts, but suddenly nor did they, or she, seem to belong to anything she could remember of the past three months. She liked the feeling of neutrality. She carried on walking.
It may have been just the sound of passing traffic as she got nearer, but at some point it seemed to Steph that the long drive had, invisibly, begun to belong more to the road that ran past it than to Walden Manor, with its stone arms outstretched more than half a mile behind. Nothing as simple as curiosity turned her in the direction of the village, but when she took the turning that led to it after another twenty minutes’ walk along the edge of the noisy road, she found herself slowing down to look at it properly.
Most of the houses were old and the stone built ones along the curving main street were joined together. Many of them were double-fronted and had steps leading up to their doors. Some had window boxes, others had Bed & Breakfast signs in their windows. Trees were planted at intervals along the pavement. Most of the traffic ripped past along the top road that Steph had turned off, leaving the village quiet. In the middle, the street opened out round a small triangle of grass surrounded by railings and beds of flowering plants, where a stone monument stood, its steps and inscription worn away. On one side of the triangle was an empty bus shelter, across the road on another side was a peeling, semi-detached house with a sign saying ‘Vicarage’. The church sat behind, down a road that led off at the side. Next to the vicarage, well set back, stood a grander, older house, the only one with a drive and a front garden full of trees. The slate sign on the wall read ‘The Old Rectory’. Next to that stood two empty cottages, a shut-up garage, a modern, bright-green painted shop with orange star-shaped notices on its wide flat windows, a litter bin and a sign announcing that lottery tickets were On Sale Here. It was all very pretty, of course, Steph could see that, but empty and pointless unless you lived there. Perhaps even if you did, she thought, as a familiar feeling stirred in her. She wanted chocolate, suddenly, or crisps. Anything, and she had no money.
At the ting of the bell, Steph stepped into the shop and was surrounded by the smells of cheese, wrapped cake, newspapers and ageing vegetables. There was silence but for the dismal buzzing of strip lighting and refrigerators, and the almost audible expectation that she should buy something. From behind the counter a man with big yellow hands was stabbing at buttons on a calculator that sat on an open ledger. He nodded at her over his glasses without smiling. Steph raised one corner of her mouth and turned her back, browsing a rack of biscuits, fly sprays and birthday cards. The man looked down again, and Steph sidled along past shampoo and tins of soup. She couldn’t take crisps without making a noise, the biscuit packets were too big, and the sweets were on display right under the man’s nose. There was a tall, freestanding row of shelves that divided the shop in two, but there was also a round mirror high on one wall that gave the man a view of whoever was behind it. The stuff on the shelves round the back was only light bulbs, soap powder and tin foil, anyway. Unless somebody else came and distracted him, she had no chance. She turned and looked through the door on to the triangle of green grass, willing someone to come in with a long shopping list.
‘You looking for a tent or a lawnmower, you’re in luck,’ the man said, distantly. ‘Four new ones in yesterday.’ Steph turned and smiled cautiously, wondering what he meant.
‘Small ads, four new ones. Good price, the tent. Only got used once, bloke said. Selling it after one go, the wife didn’t like camping, apparently. He’s giving it away at that price, just wants rid of it.’ The man was motioning now towards the door, and Steph saw that he was pointing at a cluster of handwritten postcards pasted over the top half of it. She turned back and looked at them, pretending to be interested. She couldn’t have cared less about a tent or a lawnmower, but if she spent a minute or two reading the ads, something might happen. His phone might ring. He might even go through to the back or something.
‘Tent’s a fantastic price. He was going to put the card in for a fortnight, I said don’t. It’ll go within the week at that price, I said, take just the one to start with. At that price it’ll go in one. Tempted myself, if I’m honest.’
Steph smiled again and turned back. Clipped to the postcard was a blurry photograph of the quite resistible tent. Below it on another card Steph read:
WANTED: Childminder, hrs tbc, for Charlie, four months. Lively baby. Non-smoker. Kind personality req’d. Start IMMEDIATELY. Apply Bell Cottage Green Lane. Or tel (after 6 pm: 583622).
The man looked up again at the ting of the bell and noted that the pale young woman had left without buying anything. He sighed and returned to his ledger. She hadn’t looked the type to buy his tent, and he was beginning to lose hope that he’d ever shift it.
Bell Cottage was a small, double-fronted house down a narrower street that ran parallel to the main one where the shop stood. Steph found it by wandering. The signs on most of the lanes leading off the main street gave also the names of the streets they led to, and there seemed to be no more than a dozen or so at most in the old part of the village. The door was opened by a dark-haired woman in bare feet, who stared at her without speaking. Steph thought she looked too old to be the mother of a baby.
‘Hello… I was wondering if-’
‘I’m just about to go out.’
‘Oh. Oh, but I was just wondering,’ Steph said, sure now that she had got the wrong house, ‘if this is where the job is. The childminding?’
The woman hesitated for a moment without smiling. ‘Oh. Well, I have to go out when he wakes up. But you might as well come in,’ she said, turning back into the house and evidently expecting Steph to follow.
The narrow hallway had been painted some dull, pale colour that had been streaked and scraped black on both sides. The smell reminded Steph of something earthy, cold and none too clean, like mud or certain kinds of cheese. A long, dark bulge of hung-up coats and jackets padded most of one wall. Underneath lay a heap of boots and shoes, umbrellas, a crash helmet, walking sticks, a riding crop and one ice-skate. On the floor next to a low stool that was covered with newspapers sat a telephone directory, on which several milk bottles and a camera had been placed. Next to that stood a folded child’s pushchair whose detached plastic rain canopy leaned against the wall. On the floor nearby was the telephone, a bowl with a spoon and the brownish dregs of breakfast cereal in it, two or three listing carrier bags and an open briefcase with papers fanning out of it.
Steph followed the woman down the passage, past the staircase and into the kitchen at the back. She said, not asking, ‘Coffee’, pulled a kettle clear from a clutter of things on a worktop, filled it and switched it on. Steph wondered where she was supposed to put herself, and decided to stand still. There was nowhere not filled with other things. The worktops and table were laden with jars, utensils, little bottles, a tub of baby wipes and a pacifier, two radios, a toaster, a blender, the kettle, a feeding bottle steriliser, as well as assorted bowls which contained something or nothing: Steph took in papery-looking garlic, pens, bananas, cassette tapes, some pursed-up lemons, rubber bands, an assortment of hair ties, keys, scraps of paper, cut-out coupons, dried up garden bulbs. Only a fraction of space was clear for anything that might be expected to happen in a kitchen, such as cooking or eating. A notice board held curling fragments of cards, lists, takeaway menus, envelopes and postcards of beaches. On a blackboard alongside it were chalked the words Bags Coff Spread Milt tabs. O. Chips bleach. The cooker top was spattered with burnt spills which seemed to be dark orange, the grill above was covered with a rag of tin foil that smelled acrid and rubbery. Two of the wall cupboards had no doors. Any patches of floor that were not covered by cat bowls, litter tray, sheets of spread newspaper and squashed crumbs were more homogenously dirty. The windowsill behind the sink held a few jars of brown water with slimy forgotten herbs or attempts at cuttings of something or other,
more milk bottles and a heap of pacifiers on a saucer.
‘I’m Sally,’ the woman said. ‘Charlie’s next door asleep, I’ll show you him in a minute but I’ll go mad if he wakes up again. He’s hell to put down.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose I should say that, I might put you off. I mean, he’s coming on. The thing is, he’s not such a good feeder. I’ve got to go back to work and he’s still getting used to the bottle.’
‘Oh,’ Steph said.
Sally turned, and as she poured water from the kettle, which had not yet boiled, into the mugs, she said breezily, ‘Still, at least I’ve got my tits back. Not that they’re much use to me now.’
Steph made a small noise that was half surprise, half laugh. That was the trouble with educated people. At some point in their lives they simply managed, somehow, to go beyond embarrassment. Or perhaps they were born incapable of it. Whichever it was they made you take on double the amount because you had your own and theirs on top. They told you things that you could never reply to. What was she meant to say?
‘So.’ Sally was putting milk into two mugs of instant coffee, another thing she hadn’t asked Steph about, shifting stuff- a baby’s jacket, a purse, some keys and half a croissant- off a chair so that Steph could sit down. She didn’t offer sugar, either, but she was watching Steph carefully. Steph, knowing she was being sized up, put on a bright face. ‘Charlie’s a lovely name,’ she said. ‘They’re coming back, aren’t they, the traditional names.’
Sally ignored her, but went on watching. ‘I did have somebody all lined up weeks ago but she rang to say she’s not coming now, less than a week before she’s meant to start. Got a better offer, I suppose. So I’m stuck. I’ve got to go back full-time next week.’ She leaned against the worktop and sipped her coffee. ‘If I don’t get somebody local I’ll have to take this girl an agency’s offering me and they charge a fortune. What’s your name anyway? You’re local, are you?’ She smiled in such a way that Steph could tell she had had to remind herself that smiling was a thing she was meant to do.