Born of Woman (3 page)

He opened his eyes, stared down at the tablecloth. He and Hester had eaten off bare wood. Jennifer had made an ‘H' out of the crumbs, his mother's initial facing them both ways, legs firmly planted, arms folded tight across her middle.

‘Are you all right, darling?' Jennifer had got up from her chair and was hovering there beside him.

‘Y … yes. Yes, of course I am.' He tugged at the cloth. The ‘H' shivered and collapsed. Jennifer's hand was stroking down his neck. He seized it, trapped it between his own, pulled her down to him. He had all her hair spread out across his lap when the phone shrilled. He pushed her off, as if his mother had come in. He knew it was Northumberland before he even answered—let her answer.

‘Hallo? Oh, Mrs Bertram. Yes, Lyn did explain. You won't know me. I'm his wife, Jennifer. I …'

Of course Molly Bertram knew her. Everyone knew everyone up there, gossiped about him and the wife he had never presented for their inspection. (Probably thought she was odd or cracked or crippled because he had hidden her.) How he had run away and left his mother to rot; how he was arty, selfish, never really fitted, couldn't farm, fence, marry, couple, sow …

‘How
is
my mother-in-law?'

He winced. Jennifer mustn't call her that. Mother-in-law meant marriage and Hester hadn't sanctioned any marriage.

‘What, the doctor? Oh, I see.' She didn't see. She had never lived there. Hernhope for her was merely a quaint and pretty name on an Ordnance Survey map, not a house which had lost its farm, its fields, its sons, abandoned in one of the remotest parts of England. England stopped at Newcastle for most people. It was easy to forget the country north of it, which butted against the Border and lost itself in the lonely Cheviots where your nearest neighbour (bar the sheep and crows) could be several miles away. He remembered looking at the map when he was just a boy at school and seeing his home in the scrawniest bit of England, as if someone had grabbed it by the neck and squeezed and squeezed until all the life and flesh and flowers had bulged above it or below it, leaving it bare and bruised, the hills still marked with purple-swollen thumb-prints. Northumberland had always been a strange uneasy county. Even at the time of the
Domesday Book
, it hadn't been included—too lawless and remote.

Jennifer was frowning as she replaced the receiver. ‘I'm afraid your mother's … worse, Lyn. Mrs Bertram says she shouldn't be left alone. She's been sitting with her herself, but they're so busy with the lambing, she can't tear herself in two. And her eldest daughter's gone to Glasgow for the week so she can't help. Hester ‘s refused the doctor
and
the hospital. Mrs Bertram says she'd never forgive herself if anything happened when she wasn't there. We'll
have
to go up now. In fact, we ought to leave immediately.'

‘We … c … can't. I've got things to finish, w … work to …'

‘But you said you wouldn't work. You said we'd go to Matthew's all day tomorrow. Can't we cancel that and go up North instead?'

Christ! His family both sides of him. One threatening from Northumberland, one holding court in Putney, both insisting on his presence. Yet he would have liked to please them all—be son, brother, husband, not just self. Self was always bullying, though—bullying and scared.

‘We can't let Matthew down, Jennifer. You know what he's like. He'll have killed the fatted calf by now.'

‘Matthew ought to go himself. I mean, considering Hester brought him up, surely he …'

‘Oh, don't start that again.' Lyn hated ‘oughts'. There were enough sticking in his own flesh. ‘Matthew's done a lot for me. That's his way of squaring things.'

‘Sunday, then. Let's go first thing Sunday morning.'

‘That's Easter. We can't travel Easter Sunday.'

‘Why not?'

‘Well … traffic, holidays, everyone on the roads.'

‘They'll all be gone by then. It's a very good day to travel, actually. The crush will be today and Monday. OK? If that's all right, I'll go and sort the cases out.'

‘Look, you'd better let me drive now, Jennifer.' Lyn laid his hand on the steering wheel, next to his wife's. Their hands looked strange together, as if they were two unrelated species—his lean, sallow, bony; hers plump and pink and warm.

‘Oh no, Lyn, I'm enjoying it.'

‘But we're getting nearer.' He couldn't arrive at Hester's being driven by a wife. ‘You won't be able to manage. The roads get really rough soon.'

‘You said that half an hour ago.'

He could see she didn't believe him any longer. The sun had dogged and dazzled the hedgerows all the way from London when he had promised cold. The countryside was gentle, when he had shaped it cruel. A hundred times she had slowed and gazed, exclaiming. ‘But, Lyn, it's
beautiful
'—almost accusing him of fraud. ‘It's not remotely bleak at all.'

She had no real right to judge, yet. These were still the lowlands—lush, green, self-indulgent meadows loping towards the smudged and hazy brush-stroke of the horizon. But the Cheviots were waiting just beyond, drawn up in battle-lines, ready to jump out on him, each phalanx higher than the lowering one below it.

He tried to see the country through her eyes. Rooks flapped idly over new-combed fields; gaunt and gappy hawthorn hedges were breaking into leaf so fiercely green it hurt. Lambs, skippy white against their stained and stolid mothers, piston-shot away from the rumble of the wheels. The sky—blue, serene, unbounded— admired itself in the bright mirror of a burn. Things had let him down. Daffodils in full deceitful flower, blowing garish yellow trumpets in front of squat grey houses.

‘They won't even have had a spring yet,' he had told her late last night, tugging a dead daffodil from the arrangement on the dressing-table. ‘Look, ours are almost over, while theirs won't be in bud. Everything's much later than down south.'

‘Nice,' she'd said, tissuing a blouse. ‘We'll get two springs that way. Ours we've had, and theirs to come. Anyway, it can't be that cold. A woman on the radio said she'd heard a cuckoo in Morpeth.'

Child again. Romanticising. She had never been further north than Birmingham. Sussex was fat flowery toytown land (thatch and honey-suckle), its feet dangling in the warm piddling waters of the Channel.
He
had grown up in battle country where the scarred hills bled towards the borders. Hills frowning with castles, raided by the Scots. Some years, they didn't hear the cuckoo till early June.

He jumped as the car lurched over a rabbit already flattened on the tarmac. A cortege of little corpses left behind them on the road—a decapitated pigeon, a hedgehog with its front paws clasped together as if praying for revival. There was blood even on the windscreen, tiny orangey splodges splattered on the glass where hordes of little insects had suicided into it. In the country, death stared you in the face. A row of shrivelled moles strung by their lips on the spikes of a barbed-wire fence. The knell of gunfire echoing from corpses. It was death he had run away from in the first place. The men up here all shot and trapped and murdered, won status with their guns. Mick Bertram's rough-cut father had called him chicken-livered because he preferred a pencil to a rifle, or chose to sketch the muscles of a fox rather than paralyse them.

‘Look, I said I wanted to drive, darling.' His voice sounded rougher than he had meant it to. He rarely called her darling. That was Jennifer's word, one which had embarrassed him at first. He wasn't used to darlings—Hester never used them—almost feared his wife was mocking him. But soon he had accepted them, grown fat on them.

‘Aren't you too tired to drive?'

‘No,' he lied. He had hardly slept last night. They'd had lamb for lunch at Matthew's, followed by sherry syllabub and acid indigestion which lasted through the highest of high teas and on through Jennifer's over-rich and quite superfluous supper. He had gulped down Alka Seltzer and gone to bed—spent three hours steering their low-slung double bed through a tangled motorway of blankets. At 3 am there'd been a pile-up in the overtaking lane. He had burrowed through the wreckage for his wife.

‘It's all right, Lyn. I'm here. It was only a nightmare.'

Only. The headlamps faded into their beaming bedside lights. His heart was still thumping like a ten-ton lorry hurtling over shale. He lay restless till the dawn, listening to Jennifer's relaxed and heavy breathing. Almost resented her sometimes because she could return to sleep so easily. He glanced at her now, humming to herself, some cheerful schmaltzy tune he didn't know. A pilgrimage to Hernhope was just a drive to her, a spree.

She drew into a lay-by, got out and stretched her legs. ‘It's hot, Lyn. Beautiful. Just look at that sun! It's almost like July.'

He narrowed his eyes against it—‘Freakish'—slipped into her seat. It was warm beneath his bottom. His wife was always warm. She was clambering in beside him, the curve of her breast blocking out the sky. He kept his hands firmly on the wheel. Mustn't think about the breasts. His mother could probably see him now. Hester could scan the whole of England, just lying on her bed. He pressed his foot down, swerved to avoid a pheasant dazzling across the road.

‘Oh, Lyn, it's
gorgeous
. See those colours on its neck?'

‘They're two a penny up here. They fatten them up deliberately, so there's more of them to shoot.'

‘You mean they're only bred to be killed?'

‘Yes. Like the lambs. That nice little joint we had at Matthew's yesterday probably hailed from here.' He wanted her to see it how it was. Lambs were only cuddly toys in London, or plastic packages in Sainsbury's Fresh Meat section. You could avoid death in the town.

He tried to picture Hester pale and silent. Almost worse than her reproaches. He turned a groan into a yawn. He
was
tired. Not just from the drive, the miles, the constant fear and fretting about his mother, but from all the painful memories that lengthened with the road. Jennifer couldn't feel them. Even now, she was fairy-taling the map, squeezing romance and fantasy into the place-names which had hemmed him in from childhood, turning them into poetry, when for him they were obituaries or bad school reports, etched deep into his soul.

‘‘‘Lord's Seat''. Isn't that nice? And ‘‘Nagshead Knowe''. And ‘‘Angryhaugh'' and ‘‘Bleakhope''. There's a tremendous lot of ‘‘hopes'' around—‘‘Milkhope'', ‘‘Wholehope'', ‘‘Nettlehope'', ‘‘Hernhope''. What does ‘‘hope''
mean
exactly?'

‘Not what you think it does.' Hope had been in short supply up here.

‘Well, what then?'

‘It means a sort of valley.' A blind valley. Hernhope had seemed blind—windows dark and shuttered, light filched by the forest, cloud-banks closing in.

‘But I thought you said your house was in the
hills
?'

He nodded. Jennifer unwrapped two fruit drops, passed him the red one. ‘Is the ‘‘Hern'' bit short for heron?'

‘Mmm.' He hated all her questions. For three sweet years he had let this landscape dwindle, shut out all the memories, built new ones with his wife. He slipped the sweet into his pocket, frowned against the sun.

‘
Are
there heron there?'

‘Oh yes.' He had watched them as a boy, one-footed in the water, heads hunched between their shoulders, their amber eyes half closed, but missing nothing. Skilled and lethal killers. Stab, stab, stab—spearing a squirming fish and tearing the flesh from white and screaming bones, wolfing the small ones whole in a single gulp. Damned aggressive birds. Even their mating displays were like a wrestling match.

Jennifer's fruit-drop sucked and scrunched at the silence. She folded the map into more manageable size. ‘Mepperton's your village, isn't it? I've found it now. It looks quite a way from Hernhope, though.'

‘Everything's quite a way from Hernhope.'

‘Yes—there's your house—just a little dot among the contour lines, sitting on its own. I can't imagine living somewhere that remote.'

‘It was even worse in the old days. The road was only a track, then. It had thirteen fords across it and seven gates to open and shut. There's a story about a shepherd's wife who lived a mile or so from us when my father was a boy. The place is just a ruin now. Hester said that once that woman was installed there, she never went out again—not once in her whole life.'

‘I don't believe it. She must have needed shopping or …'

‘No, her husband brought supplies back when he went to the mart. We were cut off ourselves when the snow was bad. I've been a prisoner there for weeks.'

He shivered. It was colder suddenly. The sun had gone behind a cloud, fields rearing up on end, the horizon creeping closer as suddenly the Cheviots marched over it, curve after curve closing in on them, ringing them round. Not green, these hills, but brown, bare, grazed and bruised as if someone had laid violent hands on them. Greyish smudges underneath their eyes. Deep puckers on their foreheads.

He stopped the car so suddenly, she fell against the dashboard.

‘What's wrong, Lyn?'

They had been following the river. It had grown wider, steeper, gorging itself on tiny tributaries rushing from the hills. Lyn stumbled out, hearing the water suckle at the stones, sun breaking ripples into razzle-dazzle reflections, like a kaleidoscope. He stood trembling on the bank, legs unsteady, as if the whole force of the landscape had gathered itself together and punched him in the gut, the vast rolling sky crammed inside his head and splitting it apart. He had felt that force before, when he had learnt at school how ancient these rocks were and was dwarfed by such a time-scale, humbled by the
enormity
of things, the endless spaces stretching back and out. A puny lad who hadn't made a decade yet, was only a sneeze or a pinprick in a world which counted in millennia. Was that the reason he had started drawing—to make himself more permanent? He could see those sketches, reprinted on the landscape, distorted copies, but still witness to his power. There were more as he got older, sent secretly to Matthew, or slipped between his floorboards, or hidden in the cellar. They would be faded rubbish now.