Born of Woman (11 page)

‘Yes,' she murmured, snuggling the lamb towards her, so that it was almost in her lap. ‘Just perfect.'

Snow.

Not falling any longer, just lying dumb and treacherous, the hills like flanks of huge white animals, stunned and shivering where they had collapsed. The forest dark and spiky against the white blinding softness heaped around it. Every window etched with ice. Snow in April, almost May. Snow baffling new-born lambs, muffling new-sown barley, blocking paths, confusing birds, blanking out all landmarks. Jennifer pushed the curtain aside, added her doodle to the etching on the glass, stared out at the blinkered trees, the huddled sheep further down the valley, tiny whitish dots against the whiter hills.

‘It's beautiful,' she said.

‘
Cold
,' Lyn shivered.

‘Look, you go back to bed, darling. You shouldn't be up at all with a temperature. It's higher than it was last night. I wish you'd let me fetch the doctor.'

‘He'd never get out in this. Nor would you. We're more or less cut off.'

‘Cut
off
?' Crazy to be excited when lambs were dying, farmers frantic. It could be hazardous even for Lyn. Supposing he got worse and needed medicines? Supposing their food ran out? She
was
excited. She had never seen snow so all-enveloping—the world changed overnight from green to white, snow with the sun on it, making every smallest crystal flash and shine, dark-winged birds soaring against the whiteness, lending their shadows briefly to the hills. She was concerned for the Bertrams, worried for the farmers, but, secretly, she saw the snow as a bonus, since it would keep Lyn at Hernhope a little longer, stop him running south.

She let the curtain fall, joined him at the fire. The sturdy pine-logs which Mick had cut for them with his chain-saw were a glowing rubble of ash and embers now. Jennifer threw on another log, watched it spit and spark.

‘Go easy!' said Lyn. ‘We ought to save that fuel. We don't know how long this cold spell's going to last.' Lyn sneezed, coughed, blew. He didn't have a cold. The cold had him—had laid its hands on every part of him—nose, ears, larynx, temples, chest.

‘You mean we could be snowed up for
days
?'

‘Easily. And if it was January or February, it could even be
weeks
. I remember one winter, the snow was so high we had foxes walking on the roof. And the icicles at the windows got longer and longer, until they hung there like a second pair of curtains, and another year, one of the forestry workers stapled his finger to the fence when he was working in thirty degrees of frost. He was so numb, he didn't even feel it. Actually, I liked it as a boy, because I missed a lot of school. We had to
prepare
for winter, so we didn't starve. Hester bought flour and sugar in hundred weight sacks at the beginning of November, but I remember sometimes dreaming of bananas or treacle toffees or some treat in the shops which might have been on the moon for all we could reach them.' He laughed, which triggered off a protracted fit of coughing. ‘Damn! This cold's got worse. D'you realise, Jennifer, they're still basking in spring sunshine in the south? The minute it thaws, I want to get back home.'

Jennifer frowned.
This
was home, now, wasn't it? She had done everything she could to make it so—scrubbed the scum and stain off wood and stone, opened all the windows (some stiff in the joints and grumbling as she heaved), replaced the smell of damp with the tang of polish, lit all the rooms with daffodils. At first it had been suspicious—sulked, creaked, fobbed her off. But she went on quietly cleaning and slowly the house tiptoed up towards her and ate out of her hand. She still felt Hester's presence—her footsteps in the passage, her breath trapped in the joists, her fingerprints blurring walls and furniture even after she'd scrubbed. She was the one who had washed the corpse and laid the body out, yet even while she was brushing the hair and coaxing the stiffening limbs into a clean nightgown, she had somehow been aware of Hester watching her. She had feared to close those eyes—
Lyn's
eyes. It would be like extinguishing both son and mother, mother-in-law and husband. Yet, once she had plucked up courage enough to do it, she realised that Hester was inextinguishable. She walked the house, watched the hills, sat down to meals with them—not as a ghost or restless spirit, but as someone who simply belonged there—always would.

She tried to propitiate her, bow to her taste and judgement, transform the house only slowly and with tact. Even if they remained up here, she would never replace the huge old-fashioned bath with its four enamelled feet, or the ancient cast-iron cisterns and polished wooden seats in both the lavatories. Hester would hate fibreglass or plastic, modern low-flush toilets, prissy pastel baths.

Lyn was also aware of Hester, but more distressingly. His mother barged into his dreams, blamed him for her death, kept him continually cold and small and shivering. He was constantly making plans to leave, fretting about the Cobham house or allotment, worrying about the work he had promised Matthew. Yet, for all his fears, he still hadn'trun away. In fact, he had started making a garden—removing stones, turning the soil, marking out a border. It was covered up with snow now, but things were growing underneath (flowers, hope, a future?). He had been waiting for the swallows, even
drawing
swallows—tangled lines against the blur of hill. Jennifer had pinned his sketches on the wall. He ripped them down again, looked almost scared.

‘Don't
do
that, Jennifer.'

‘Why not?'

‘They're … not good enough. I'm out of practice.'

She glanced at him now, huddled on the sofa, rough grey coat buttoned over blue pyjamas. He had refused to let her pack his dressing-gown. ‘It's not worth it, Jennifer. We won't be staying long.'

Longer than they'd planned, though; longer still if the snow was on their side.

Lyn blew his nose, mopped his eyes, ripped open a second box of Kleenex. ‘We must get back. We're just messing around up here. If the roads are clear, we'd better leave on Saturday.'

He had said that last weekend. She had even started packing. He unpacked the cases himself, not systematically, just bits and pieces, as he needed them. By Wednesday they were almost empty again.

‘But you might still be feverish, darling. Why don't we wait and see.'

‘I can't talk any more, I'm sorry. My throat feels like splintered glass.'

‘Can I get you something—a gargle or a …?'

‘No thanks.'

‘I saw one of those inhaler things when I was in the cellar. Why don't I go and …'

‘Jennifer, I asked you not to poke around the cellar.'

‘I didn't. I only went to see if I could find another lamp. There's loads of stuff down there. Someone ought to sort it out.'

‘No.'

‘D'you remember those inhalers, Lyn? Or were they called vaporisers? You know, metal things with a nightlight under them and a little hole in the top. My mother lit one in my bedroom every time I had a cold. There was some antiseptic stuff inside, which puffed out of the hole and made the room all smelly. You must have seen them, surely.'

‘No. Never heard of them.'

‘Well, there's one downstairs. I saw it. It's an old one, but it probably still works. Why don't I fetch it for you?'

‘No.'

It was an irritable, impatient ‘no' which could have meant ‘yes'. She always had to interpret all Lyn's ‘no's'. Had Hester done the same? found it equally exasperating? She sometimes felt a bond with Hester, the two of them united through the foibles of her son.

‘I think I'll go back to bed. You coming, Jennifer? We can put the fire out then. Save some fuel.'

‘It's only eight o'clock, darling. I'll stay a while if you don't mind. I feel restless, anyway. I'll only keep you awake.'

He would keep
her
awake. Had done all week. It wasn't just the coughing—he was restless, feverish, shouting in his sleep. She should feel sorry for him. The trouble was, the sorrow was tinged with anger. Unfair irrational anger that he wasn't a Mick Bertram who could run a farm, or sire a family. Resentment at their constant sterile sex. She had been strange herself after her mother's death, bursting into tears in shops and streets, hoarding her mother's shabby useless things like her hairbrush and her limp unfinished knitting. She had cried so much, her eyes had puffed and swollen for a week. Lyn hadn't cried at all, yet. Perhaps that was the trouble. His grief was still inside him, corked like a sour fermenting liquid in a bottle. He needed cleansing and release. He couldn't plan for the future because the blackbanded weight of the past was pressing down on top of him.

She was glad he had gone upstairs. The place felt more relaxed now. Molly had lent her a lamp and a pile of cushions, and although the room was still sombre and dark-toned, it no longer looked forbidding. The newly polished brass gleamed and rippled in the pouncing light of the fire. She threw another log on—almost
wanted
to waste them—to be a squanderer for a change. She had filled the bowls with nuts and apples, arranged beech twigs in a vase, their brave green burst of leaf contradicting the wintry snow outside. Lyn had closed the curtains to keep the weather out, but it wasn't even dark yet. She drew them back again and let the hills surge into the sitting-room. The sun was setting—fire on ice, blood on bandages. Its raw red disc blazed so fiercely against the white and grey around it, it looked as if it had dropped from another stranger planet where everything was hotter and more violent. The sky was flaming with it—gold and scarlet streaked across the clouds, paling to pink and topaz in its reflection on the snow.

Jennifer pulled on her coat and boots and went outside. She yearned to be part of all that radiance, lose her pale quiet self in scarlet flame. She sometimes felt so
ordinary
. Other people could write odes to snow or set sunsets to music. All she could do was gawp at them. She hardly felt the cold. She was watching a last ray of light kindle every fold of hills until their gilded peaks leapt into the sky. She had never seen a sky as huge as that. There were no buildings to shut it off, no tower-blocks to diminish it. Hernhope was the last man-made thing before infinity. The house was set high, nearly a thousand feet, Molly had told her, but it wasn't just a matter of feet and inches. They were higher in some more vital way. Words kept forming in her head, dusty biblical words with cobwebs in their corners.
‘Lord, it is well that we are here.'

Except for her wedding, she hadn't been to church since childhood, but Hester's funeral had set up echoes in her head, words from half-forgotten services, bits of gospels, fragments of old hymns. What was it called, that time when Christ took His disciples up on to a high mountain, His face shining like the sun and His garments dazzling as if they were made of snow? The Transfiguration, wasn't it? Something about Moses and Elijah, though she wasn't sure how they came into it. But all the rest was there—the sun, the snow, the mountain, even the shining. Everything was shining. And she was part of it. She might be ordinary, but she still groped towards those strange sacred feelings she imagined Lyn must burn with. She had always been praised as sensible and practical, the sort of person who could cope in a crisis and kept her feet planted firmly on the ground. Yet there was another secret part of her which no one ever saw. Even as a child, she had yearned to be someone different—a princess or a snowbird who could soar beyond her Sussex cul-de-sac.

‘And a voice spoke to them as if from a cloud.'
The words were coming back now, the scene surging up from some long-forgotten Sunday school.
‘This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.'
She could almost hear the voice herself. The cloud was there, hanging gold and huge and scarlet with the sun trapped hot inside it. Yet no one could have spoken. There was only the sky, the snow, the dumb and muffled trees. Was it
Hester
‘s voice she was hearing on the hills? Had she ever said ‘beloved son'? She craved a son of her own. Children were less moody and closed than husbands, less grey and formal than fathers. Perhaps it was the only relationship where you were really one with someone, flesh of their flesh. What could she do if Lyn went on refusing?

‘And Peter said, ‘‘Lord, it is well that we are here.'''
It
was
well. She had some deep instinctive feeling that they were meant to stay. She had only to keep still, not to doubt or run. Everything was planned—the sun at first to warm and lull, and then the snow to wall them up and hold them, give her time to turn Lyn into a father, the house into a home. However much Lyn jibbed, this was where his roots were. Only here could he be calmed and healed, linked with his ancestors, certain of his future.

Hester had conceived him when she was almost past the age for child-bearing, and only months before her husband died. He was thus a special child—twice special. Had Hester waited just a year or two, or Thomas's death come sooner, then he would simply not have existed. She had never thought like that before. It was as if Hester were giving her some insight, pointing out that Lyn's birth was not simply a mistake or an embarrassment, but something intended and important. It was partly a question of carrying on the line. Matthew had done that already—four times over—but Matthew had moved to London, wrenched the Winterton name and heritage away from its roots, set it up in a city where it would only shrink and wither. If Hernhope was to survive, then she and Lyn must stay. True, Lyn had run away himself, but he hadn't had a wife then, hadn't been accepted. She could help him now, support him, pioneer some different way of life which would bring them both peace and purpose. Hester herself was showing them the way. She had survived debt and bereavement, hostility and hazard. They could do the same.