LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

pimpernel, the blood-red poppies swaying as I bent over them, cradling my stomach until the pain eased and I could walk again.

      I knelt on the bathroom floor and gripped the edge of the bath. The cramps ebbed and surged, each one becoming more insistent, more cruel. Each one signalling the end of another dream. I thought of ringing David but, even before I uttered the words, he would hear my ragged breathing and know. He was too far away to bring me comfort and I could not bear his disappointment, not yet. I thought of ringing my gynaecologist, an austere man with a masterful knowledge of the female anatomy, but he has never been able to answer my most basic question. Why? He would shake his head and offer false comfort, assurances and condolences. I thought of ringing my mother-in-law. Miriam is practical and kind. She would come immediately and drive me to the hospital, not saying much, because it had all been said before. But I stayed where I was, knowing that what was about to happen would be swift and soon. No waiting around, no false hope, no time for anything other than the fluid separation between life and loss.

      Once again, my body had betrayed me. Once again, it had defied my will and destroyed what David and I, with grim determination, had created.

      Body and mind are one, Miriam always argues, the spirit and the flesh, compatible and whole. Wrong…wrong. The body triumphs every time and I am left holding the husk.

      This little one had no fight. She slid cleanly away, so tiny, yet capable of so much brutal force as she left me. I remember wailing. I needed to keen this loss and I was glad to be alone, not subjected to the constraints of a hospital where the feelings of others must be considered. When I could cry no longer, and such a time will always come, I went through the rituals of separation. Familiar rituals by now and usually carried out by efficient midwives, their expressions sympathetic, their eyes gazing beyond me to the other mothers, the ones with reasons to rejoice.

      I wrapped my daughter in a soft white towel and rocked her in my arms. I rested my back against the wall. It grew dark outside. I felt hot then cold, my thoughts lucid then drifting. Why fight any longer? Someone would find us eventually.

      I ignored the phone when it rang. The caller was insistent. The sound made me quiver but I stayed where I was. The silence, when it stopped, pressed against my ears. I became conscious of other sounds: the creak of old wood, the hiss and gurgle of pipes, the intrusive sighs of a house that has belonged to many generations. The bathroom blind clanged against the window frame and demanded my attention. I wanted to rise and close the window, keep out the scent of the night scented stock I had planted in the spring. It wafted in waves through the stifling atmosphere: sweet and cloying, demanding my attention.

      The phone rang again. I became afraid. If it was Miriam, she would drive over to see why I was not answering. Earlier, I had left her working late in her studio. She was probably still there burning the midnight oil, as she usually did when she had an exhibition coming up. If it was David calling from the oil rig, he would ring his mother and the result would be the same. She would drive over immediately to check that all was well. The back door was open. She would enter unannounced and then it would be too late.

      I stumbled to my feet and laid my baby, my still and silent little bundle, on the floor. I opened the door of the living room. My hip knocked against the sideboard. Yellow roses drooped in a vase. Some petals had already fallen and more followed, spilling silently onto the polished wood, as if my laden breath had disturbed their fragile link to the stem. How long had I been drifting? Minutes, hours? Somewhere, in my mind, I was still bending over the blood-red poppies and the rooks were swirling.

      My suspicions were correct. Miriam’s anxiety was carefully controlled yet it stretched, taut as a membrane, between us. She asked how I was and I told her I was fine…fine. My voice was steady. That surprised me. Steady and calm while inside I was howling.

      This was the second time she had called, she said, and she waited for an explanation.

      I told her I’d been walking – such a fine, balmy evening. She warned me that the lane could be dangerous, easy to trip on a broken branch, to slip on mulching leaves; she knows every step of the lane, as David does, but I am a city woman, transplanted.

      ‘I’ll drop in and see you on the way home,’ she said. ‘I want to show you the new sketches.’

      I almost blurted out the truth. But I thought about the last time, and the time before, and before…and the well-worn, well-meaning platitudes that stretched thinner and thinner each time she uttered them. Tomorrow, when I was stronger, more able to handle my grief, then I would break the news.

      ‘I’m on my way to bed,’ I said. ‘I’ll look at them tomorrow. Talk to you then.’

      I walked to the front door and folded my arms, pressed them against my breast. Light spilled around me but, beyond the porch, an impenetrable darkness stretched across the Burren. It seemed, as I stood there, that the night was whispering, that even the wind breathed my pain. In the rustle of leaves against the wall I heard the whispers and I heard them rise above a howl that lunged from the darkness. Phyllis Lyons’s dog barking at the moon, the sound silenced as suddenly as it started. But still the whispering continued. I felt myself sinking into the powerful refrain, my lips moving, framing the words, making them audible – No more…no more…no more…

      What does premeditated mean? Is it a conceived plan – or a thought unborn until the moment of delivery? I wrapped my baby in a white blanket and sealed her in a plastic shroud. I carried her gently to the old cottage in the lane. It hulked in the half-light, a crumbling ruin, shouldering briars and ivy, the ground covered in dense banks of nettles. Children once played within these crumbling walls and slept beneath a thatch that hugged them tight. Long gone now, both the children and the thatch. I stumbled through the weeds and the high purple thistles that pushed their heads through the cracks in the stone floor. I laid her down on white bindweed bells and dug her grave outside the walls.

      The garden has long lost its form. A low drystone wall marks its boundaries. In the summer the whitethorn and lilac grows wild, and the ripe fruit drops silently from a long forgotten plum tree during the autumn months. I wanted to name her. Everyone needs a name to stamp their identity on this world, no matter how brief their stay. Joy, I whispered. You would have brought us such joy. My body ached, bled, wept for what I had lost; but when I left that place, my mind was a cold, determined force with no room for grief or doubt.

      In the hallway, I paused before a mirror. The weight I had gained during my brief pregnancy seemed to have fallen from my cheeks. My eyes had steel in the blue, a stranger’s eyes staring back at me through swollen eyelids, defying me to question or condemn. My hair looked dark, the blonde strands lank with sweat and mud. I was unrecognisable from the woman who had earlier walked the lane; yet, it seemed effortless, this casting aside of an old skin and stepping into the new.

      I slept and awakened, slept again. I had no memory of dreams. Dawn was leaching the stars from the sky when I arose and showered dirt from my body, burned my clothes, the towels, the bathroom mat. I washed the floor and walls. I threw out the yellow roses. A bird sang outside the kitchen window, a shrill, repetitive solo, until others took up the song. Their chorus throbbed through the morning.

      I rang Miriam and told her I would work from home for a few days. Too many interruptions in the office and I had spreadsheets to prepare, catch-up phone calls to make. Later, David rang from the rig.

      ‘Our baby moved,’ I told him. ‘Like a butterfly, fluttering wings beneath my heart.’

      The words turned to ash in my mouth but they had been spoken and I heard him sigh, as if he had placed his hands upon my belly and felt his child respond. And all around me, in the cracks and crevices of these walls, in the nooks and crannies of this old house, in the chinks of all that had passed since I moved here, the voices whispered – No more…no more…no more.

       Chapter Two

      Susanne

      September 1993

      Carla Kelly is

Скачать книгу