He was at school when his mother died. No one had told him she was ill. His father continued to write the weekly letter, to which he replied with reports of cricket and how his Greek was coming along. She died, and he was not told, not until he went home for the holidays. His father said it was best that way. What was the point in disturbing him? Could he have cured his mother if he’d been there? Brought her back from the dead if he’d gone to the funeral?
I had thought myself a sad case. But I had been permitted to grieve for my father, and I knew my grandfather loved me. My friendship with Bridie had been true and deep, and the Kingdons had opened their lives to me. My husband had had no one, and that must be why some central part of him, some steady sense of who he was, had years ago gone like a mouse to hide away in its hole. But he could never admit the pain. He had to transmute suffering into a blade, to punish the world that made him suffer.
THE BLACK GLOOM
There were the mad enthusiasms, the wild schemes. But from those fevers he could plunge in a half-hour into a melancholy so deep he could not be persuaded to get out of bed. His face became frightening: staring and gaunt, wooden as a mask. There was no reaching him. Everything was hopeless, he whispered. He was worthless. His life a barren waste. You might try to jolly him out of the black gloom, but it was as if you were too far away to be heard.
How many wives learn, as I did, how to test the air in a room? To check the tilt of her husband’s head, the set of his feet, his grip on a spoon, his fist beside the plate? To feel in an instant whether it was an hour of sunshine or shadow? The weather in those rooms was as changeable as Devon in May.
A FLAT SHINING BEETLE
Mrs Borthwick—poised, humorous, shrewd, handsome as a fine horse—might be a model of how a woman could manage her life to her satisfaction, but I saw no way to go from where I was now to such a place. Still, I was too proud to admit, other than in my private thoughts, what a disaster I had got myself into. I cultivated a glassy surface that deflected the smallest approach to a sympathetic enquiry. The pain of being unloved was pushed off to a distance where it could not touch. I became like those flat shining beetles that live in the heart of a rotten log, a creature of no dimension, able to disappear into the narrowest of cracks.
A PRIVATE COMPANION
The pains came on me as we were making our way to Chatham Barracks, from whence we would sail to Gibraltar. We did not get anywhere close to Chatham, though, before it was obvious that the child was on its way, and we fetched up in some disarray at a poor inn on the wrong side of Bath.
I had begun to weep when the pains started, because with the first sharp pang I was obliged to believe what I had until then not truly believed, that there was no going back. Started weeping and did not stop. All the years of squashing down the tears, of being cheerful and obliging, saying only what was unexceptional, and the strange months of being married to a husband I could not reach—all that pressed-down sorrow came up like a bolus into my throat.
Anne knew a little more than I did of childbirth, but she was only a girl, and as the pains began to come fast and strong, I saw she was as frightened as I was. There was no midwife to be had for a woman only that day arrived in the city, so the companion of my childbed was the innkeeper’s wife.
There was nothing gentle about her. Had no patience, she made clear, for a woman who had not taken care to plan what was upon her. But she knew what she was about, and was with me as I traversed a terrible landscape of pain and fear and chaos. Time was suspended, time did not pass, time could only be measured by the respites between the brutal grasping of some merciless fist in my body. The respite—six breaths between, then three, then one—were the times when I was given back myself, to feel air coming in and out of my chest, feel the water Anne offered me cool in my mouth, know that the world went on, time was passing in the usual way. But each reprieve was only to tease. The grip returned, distant at first and then roaring over me and through me and around me, sucking air and time away and flinging me into an eternity of the unbearable. Then the pains joined together end to end and there was no reprieve, only a flailing about in a black gnashing place that did not care a fig about me, wanted only to gripe and grip me until no person was left, no human, just a screaming animal.
The voice of the innkeeper’s wife was the rope that kept me bound to life, with me in the hard place I was grinding my way through, but she was not in the pain with me. That was a place a person had to travel through alone. I met there a cold indifferent truth: that every person—even a loved person, and I was not loved—was alone. On the whole globe, there was no one but myself, and I was shaken and torn down to the merest speck of being.
The child the woman put into my arms was nothing like the plump pink babes I had seen, sweet tidy parcels being handed around a room full of smiling people. He was a dreadful little monkey, with legs like twigs and purple hands and a big round belly. He seemed to be on the point of expiring, his mouth opening and closing but only the smallest whimper emerging.
The innkeeper’s wife took him away and I lay washed up on the bed as flat and limp as some dead thing fished out of the sea. It was I suppose the worst of all the hours of my life. That squalid inn, that sickly child, and Anne pushing water at me, crumbling bread in milk that I did not want. Poor girl, she meant kindly but she was no use to me, her face the face of a stranger. I knew that this was the world I was in now, a vile dirty place where I was alone, alone, alone. I wept again, storming and sobbing, it seemed the flood would never stop. Woe is me, oh poor me, woe is me.
The woman came back with the baby washed and wrapped, tucked him beside me and sat with her beefy arms crossed over her chest and her small shrewd eyes watching me with no great warmth. I saw that she knew what had happened to my life, knew the whole sad commonplace story without being told.
– Mrs Macarthur, she said at last over my sobs, and I thought she might lean towards me and take my hand, perhaps come out with a few cheering platitudes.
I felt myself get ready to cry harder, because I was sure my plight was beyond the reach of any platitudes. But her rock-like face did not soften and she did not offer any comfort.
– Only a fool could not see what you have got yourself into, Mrs Macarthur, she said.
She spoke in a mild way, like a person explaining to another how you might get from Bridgerule to the Red Post Inn. Paused for a good look at me, hair wet with tears bedraggled all over my cheeks. The horrible clinging hair was part of the misery that I wanted to drown in. I let it cling rather than push it away.
– How it strikes you, yes, that’s as plain as a pikestaff, she said. And I will not say what another might, But at least you have your sweet boy, because he is a sad little scrap. Could as well die as live, to be frank.
I wondered if she was the Devil come to taunt me.
– You are a stranger to me so I can speak plain, she said. I will say this, as one who has laid out many a corpse. Here in this pickle is where you are and there is no one on this earth can help you out of it.
I braced myself for some pious thing about God’s mysterious ways.
– And no one not on this earth either, to my mind, she said. She knew what I was thinking. No matter a body wear out their knees trying.
When she laughed it was a startling thing. Her face broke into its separate features, nose, big coarse cheeks, mouth.