Born of Woman (15 page)

‘Lyn,' she whispered. ‘Darling …' She hardly knew what to say to him. Her usual words of comfort seemed too pat and feeble for this storm of grief. Tears were sliding down her own face, trickling slow and salty into the corners of her mouth. She couldn't bear to see him so distraught. She tried to mop her eyes, but one hand was twisted back behind her and Lyn's whole weight pressing down on top, his body heaving against hers. She longed to find a handkerchief, a more comfortable position, but she dared not push him off. He needed to cry, to break the grip of that black and heavy grief which had held him prisoner since the funeral.

The torch had fallen from his hand and shone feebly in the wrong direction, an eye of light staring in the darkness. The floor pressed hard cold hands along her spine. Time seemed to have injured itself and slowed to a limp, so that every slow-coach second hobbled through the whole length of the cellar before stumbling on the next. She lay there, sniffing, aching, trying to mumble comfort through her rough tweed coat which covered both of them. At least Lyn had calmed a little, the sobs faltering into hoarse and laboured breaths.

‘All right now, darling?'

Silence. It was as if he had almost forgotten where he was and was drifting back to sleep again. Best to let him rest until he was quite recovered. She shifted a little, easing her aching hand, tried to relax as well. But every time she closed her eyes Hester's life kept rushing into the cold black space behind them—snippets from the diaries, phrases she remembered, wars, deaths, casualties—the bald, abandoned baby, the three young brothers shell-shocked in the trenches, bloodying the mud. She shuddered. Lyn looked dead himself, his body slumped on hers, cold and motionless like a casualty from some other, recent war.

She pushed him with her knee. He had to move, breathe, live. ‘Get up!' she shouted, surprised at how fiercely her voice had cut across the silence.

Slowly he struggled to his knees, pulled her to him, stared into her face. Suddenly he was kissing her, so roughly, so intensely, her mouth stung and throbbed with the pressure of his tongue. His breath smelt of cough-sweets, his face felt stubbly where he hadn't shaved, yet hot and wet from crying.

She tried to pull away, but he held her shoulders, traced a finger along her lips as he had done with the portrait. ‘I love you, Snookie. I love you, I
love
you. You know that, don't you, darling? I love you more than I've ever … Oh, don't die. Don't ever die.'

He had thrown off the coat and was unbuttoning his pyjamas. ‘Put your arms around me,
tight
. I want to feel your body close to mine.'

‘Lyn, no.' She shrank away. ‘You're out of your mind! It's far too cold to …'

‘Please, darling. There must be nothing between us. Nothing. Not even our clothes. I can't explain, but …' He was pulling up her sweater, trying to slide his hands beneath her breasts.

She removed the hands, almost slapped them off. Why should she feel so hostile when he was telling her he loved her? She tried to calm herself, lay back on the floor. She must remember he was ill, try and make allowances. She fumbled for the coat, dragged it half across him.

‘No, leave it, Snookie. It's right like this. I know it is. I must be … close to you, feel we're joined and …'

He sounded so intense, she dared not push him off again. She stared up, past his shoulder, at the dark lowering ceiling with its shadowy beams. She felt like wood herself, dead and rigid.

He kissed her again, less roughly now, but pressing down so close, it was as if he wished to lose his mouth and self inside her. She tried to respond, ashamed of her hostility. He needed her so fiercely, seemed so strange and vulnerable. Her lips relaxed a little. He only wanted comfort, her body to block the darkness out, to cling to like a child.

No, not a child. She could feel him stiffening lower down, stirring against her thighs. She tensed. Surely he couldn't actually want to … not in the dark and damp with swollen glands and a temperature? It was ridiculous, perverse. She closed her legs, pulled her mouth away.

‘
Please
, my darling.' He was fumbling with her tights now, dragging them down and almost off. She shivered as the cold pounced on her thighs.

‘No, Lyn. I …'

Her hands were fighting his, refusing to let him remove her skirt. He took the hands, covered them with kisses, then placed them on the floor above her head as if they were some piece of lumber he had found and didn't need. He left the skirt on, but pushed her sweater up, unhooked the bra beneath it, kissed her nipples, then pressed his own bare chest against them. His body felt chilled and sweaty against her own, forehead burning on her cheek, clammy hands trembling down her back. She was crushed not just by his weight, but by the fear of her own anger. She rarely felt such anger, and never when he was making love to her. That was the trouble, though—it wasn't love. He was forcing her again, tricking her with kisses and caresses, so that he could knock her off her guard, then enter her that violent fruitless back way. She'd had enough of it, didn't want it even in the warmth of her own bed, let alone on a dusty cellar floor. The dust had got into his throat and started off his cough again—a hoarse desperate cough which echoed through the cellar. It was crazy for them to lie there any longer, and she for one was going back upstairs. She tried to struggle up, but a further spasm of coughing pinioned his body closer to her own.

‘Lyn,
move
. I want to …'

He could hardly speak. His eyes were streaming, his chest racked. She felt a stab of pain between her thighs. She was too dry and tense to take him, but he was forcing in between the coughs. She still had her skirt on, but it was rucked up round her middle, uncomfortable where he was pushing down on top of her.

Anger exploded into shock. He had entered her without a Durex, not the back way, but the normal, fertile dangerous way. He had never done that before, not in all three years of their marriage, not even when it was comparatively safe, just before or after her period. This was the most dangerous time of all, the middle of her cycle, the prime time for conceiving. She was so astonished, she just lay there like a sack. He was thrusting very slowly. He must be keeping it slow on purpose, so he wouldn't lose control. He would come out again in a moment—surely. Lyn would never risk a child.

‘L … Lyn, hadn't you better …?'

‘I love you,' he whispered, in answer. ‘I
love
you, Snookie. You don't understand, but …'

She lay back, silent now. She didn't understand. Why was he so ardent when she herself felt distanced from him, her resentment barring him off from her as if it were a Durex stretched taut across her soul? She had longed for him to enter her like this, but now it was actually happening, all she was aware of was the turmoil in her head. Her body seemed to have shrivelled or cut off. Yet she had to admit there was something changed about him. Although he had forced her in the first place, he seemed a different person now from the one who had pushed her to her knees those last few days.

The words of the marriage service chimed a moment in her head.
‘With my body, I thee worship.'
Lyn was worshipping, hands hymning down her breasts, lips whispering across her eyelids like the feathers on Susannah's birds. Those shy, swift birds had somehow tamed and softened him, made this moment sacred. Anger seeped away like dirty water. Lyn was still inside her. She understood it now. It wasn't just a mistake or aberration, some reckless impulse he would all too soon regret; it was a deliberate gift to her, offered tenderly and freely, some lasting transformation in himself.

She lay completely still. If, by some miracle, this was to be their child, then he must never say that she had forced it on him. There was no need for her own pleasure. It was enough that it was happening, slow and solemn like a sacrament. She had been fretting about the cold, the dust, the hard, unyielding floor, but all around her were dead and watching Wintertons murmuring from the Game Books, imploring from the letters, waiting for their heir. The torch had gone out, so she had lost her own outlines now, her edges blurring with Lyn's and all his ancestors'. Somewhere in the shadows, she heard Hester confiding to her diary, ‘Today my son was born'.

Lyn was breathing faster now. She could feel the long, slow, urgent piston-shots gathering pace and speed. He was coming … coming slowly, very slowly, but unmistakably. Coming right inside her.
No
. Impossible. Prohibited. It couldn't happen. Wouldn't. She had been romanticising, dreaming—kidding herself he wanted a child instead of just excitement. Any second now, he would wrench away and out of her, realise the risk he was taking and withdraw before that final clinching moment which could change their lives.

He went on thrusting. She recognised that rhythm, that force he couldn't stop. He wasn't going to withdraw. Suddenly she rocked and twisted underneath him, arched her whole body, drew up her knees, held him so tightly, they were one blurred shape, one body in the darkness. She must be part of this moment, this climax, this night, this child—this
child
. She heard him gasp with pleasure as she circled with her thighs. He was panting now, stabbing out ‘I love you' between his wilder fiercer thrusts.

Shock and love and thrill were all mixed up now. Her body had come clamouring back, demanding to join in. In those few astounding seconds, she was responding more wildly than she had done in three whole years of marriage. She shut her eyes to concentrate, fused her mouth with Lyn's, as he flooded in, in, into her, and four hundred million spermatozoa leapt towards her womb.

‘Matthew, you're not even facing the problems. If Lyn doesn't want to publish, then …'

‘He's
got
to want to. For heaven's sake, Anne, this is the most exciting collection of material I've seen in years. It's got everything—two world wars, nostalgia, heartbreak, below-stairs romances, letters from the Front, country high-life, London low-life … We could really make something of it. The drawings alone merit a whole book to themselves. Thank God you prised it from them before they messed it up.'

‘They're hardly likely to do that.' Anne unlocked her own small office in Matthew's building and pulled the blinds up. The July sun streamed in, dazzling her a moment. She turned back to her husband, who had already commandeered her desk and was sitting at it, sorting through the mail. ‘Jennifer treats that stuff like Holy Writ. She only let you borrow it on condition you returned it to her this evening. You won't forget that, will you, Matthew? I'll take it down myself, if you like. I ought to see how she is.'

Matthew frowned. ‘Can't you leave it for a day or two? I've only had half a weekend to look through a pile of stuff that would take a trained historian half a lifetime.'

‘No, I promised, darling. Lyn was annoyed enough about my taking it at all, and Jennifer wants to go on copying out the recipes.'

‘I thought you said she was ill.'

‘She is. But she's been doing it in bed.'

Matthew flung a wad of circulars into the waste-bin. ‘I can't understand why she didn't tell us earlier.
Weeks
ago, I mean, when she first discovered it. Some of that stuff could be really valuable.'

‘How could she, when they were so many miles away and without a phone? Anyway, I expect Lyn told her not to. You know what he's like about his mother—anything connected with her and he just clams up. That's why I don't think you ought to publish.'

‘Look here, Anne, a lot of that material is connected with my own family. I'm the elder son, remember. All right, I admit that Hester's diaries are the star attraction as far as publication's concerned, but Hester married my father, for heaven's sake. If I've agreed to open up my family to the public, I can't see why Lyn should object. In fact, you could say it's much more delicate for me—as publisher. Winterton promoting Winterton. It could make for very unpleasant gossip. At least Lyn can stay out of the limelight.'

Anne had joined Matthew at her desk, standing beside him and checking those letters which needed her attention. ‘But this whole thing's almost remote for you. You only lived at Hernhope as a boy and you've never been back since. You haven't even seen the place for thirty years—more than thirty. Lyn spent most of his life there.'

‘Yes, but Hester's dead now. That makes a difference, surely. The house is empty, the whole tradition finished. We're talking about a way of life that's nothing to do with me or Lyn any longer.'

‘You're wrong, Matthew. Jennifer told me they wouldn't have come back to Cobham at all, if she hadn't been unwell. She's absolutely obsessed with Hernhope—talked about nothing else—all the friends she's made up there, what she's done to the house, how she's joined the Mepperton Young Wives and even been asked to …'

‘Yes, and who was
paying
for them to kick their heels in the country? Do you realise, Anne, they were away almost eleven weeks? I wrote to Lyn at least four times—told him there wouldn't
be
a job if he didn't show up soon.'

‘Well, I wouldn't bank on him returning. From what I could gather from Jennifer, she's hoping to persuade him to go up north again—as soon as she's better, that is.'

‘Out of the question! The idea's total moonshine. What's wrong with her, in any case?'

‘I'm not quite sure. I tried to probe, but they both seemed very vague about it. Apparently, Lyn insisted she see her own doctor down in Cobham, but she was obviously bitterly disappointed at being back at all.'

‘She probably caught a chill camping out like that in the back of beyond. Hernhope was always perishing cold and it's probably half derelict by now.'

‘No, it's basically quite sound, so Jennifer said, and they've made a lot of improvements already. She told me even Lyn got quite enthusiastic, once he'd recovered from the shock of the funeral. I must admit he certainly seems better for the break.'