Born of Woman (51 page)

‘Told yer about me, has she?'

‘Er … yes. She … did mention …'

‘She wrote to me—gave me her address. That's why I called. Out at the moment, is she?'

‘Well, n … no, she's … er … Look, you'd better come in.'

‘Ta.'

He followed her down the passage. His footsteps echoed through the house like hammer-blows. He seemed to fill and swamp their room. He had already noticed Susie's clothes, lying dishevelled on the floor. Jennifer picked them up, stuffed them in a drawer. Susie had disappeared.

‘D … do sit down.' Even the broad-shouldered chintz armchair looked too small and frail to hold him. ‘I'll just go and find her for you.'

Jennifer raced along the passage in the opposite direction now, out into the back yard. She hammered on the lavatory door. Susie pushed it open. She was sitting on the toilet seat, swaddled in the counterpane.

‘It's … it's Sparrow, Susie.'

‘
Sparrow
! You're joking.'

‘No. I'm not. He's here. He says you wrote to him. You never told me, Susie, you …'

‘Sparrow! I can't believe it. Hey, he is
waiting
, isn't he? You didn't send him away or …?

‘No. He's in our room. He's …'

Susie charged across the yard into the house, trailing her counterpane. Jennifer could hear her pounding feet, her shouts of welcome. She stood leaning against the lavatory door, rain soaking into her blouse. Surely she wasn't jealous? How could she be, when she had just been hoping and praying it was Lyn? She forced herself to smile. She and Susie were both desperate for their men, denouncing them in theory in the Women's Group, yet wooing them in private. Susie had actually written to her man, kept the letter secret. She felt betrayed by that. She had never liked the sound of Sparrow, anyway. Even without the Women's Group, she disapproved of men who made their girlfriends pregnant, yet refused to take any responsibility. Sparrow had offered neither money nor support. How dare he just show up like this, expect a quick pint, or even a quick screw, and then piss off again—as Susie would have put it—leaving
her
to work and worry for the baby. Yet if he stayed with Susie, that would be worse still. She had to admit there
was
a twinge of jealousy. Lyn and her and Susie was fine, but not her and Susie and Sparrow.

She walked slowly back to the basement, coughed outside the door. They were probably in a clinch by now. She knocked, walked in. Susie was half dressed—the bottom half—dragging on a pair of voluminous dungarees. She could see Sparrow gawping at her breasts, lewdly, not paternally. Both of them were smoking Sparrow's Marlboroughs.

‘We're just going out—OK?' Susie rooted round for her high-heeled scarlet sandals, found them under the bed. ‘Want to come with us? You don't mind, do you, Sparrow?' Susie was leaning against him while she buckled up her sandal.

He frowned, clamped her arm with his own huge hairy hand. ‘Well … er … I did want to talk to you private like. Anyway, I'm on my bike and there's not room for three.'

‘Susie, you're not to go on a motorbike! Not now. It's absolutely crazy. Supposing …'

‘OK, OK, we'll walk. Keep your hair on.' Susie grinned. ‘Tell you what, we'll bring you back a pizza—a jumbo one with half the shop on it. All right?'

‘All right, Jennifer forced herself to smile. Mustn't be unfair. Susie needed a change of scene. If she felt confined and irritable herself, that only proved how selfish she had become. She had kidded herself if she thought she could find contentment cowering in a basement, her only company the embattled Women's Group who opposed all the things she cherished.

Susie was struggling into a jacket, trying to make the buttons meet. She kissed Jennifer briefly, almost in apology, then teetered through the door arm in arm with Sparrow. Jennifer peered up through the window bars, watched their two pairs of legs pass along the pavement, side by side.

When they had disappeared, the silence seemed to choke her. It was still thirteen weeks till the baby was due. How could she stay in Southwark for another thirteen weeks, living this rootless Lyn-less life, lying to Anne and Matthew, losing touch with everyone she knew? The baby grew so slowly, dawdling into life, cell by cell, pore by pore, while her husband roamed the country in impatience and despair. She realised now how desperately she missed him. She had always tried to deny it, forced herself to block him out, put the baby first. But now all her fears and longings had flooded through the dam. It was Sparrow who had breached it. She had seen how avidly Susie had leapt on him, how much she craved her man.
She
would have been the same. She and Susie had been using each other simply as substitutes. It was Lyn she truly wanted—in bed and out of it.

Susie had written to Sparrow, but she couldn't write to Lyn. She had no address. He should have written to her. She had told him where she was living, begged him to keep in touch. When he didn't, she hadn't been that concerned—not at first. His strange and frenzied calls to Putney had been something of a strain, and it had been almost a relief to be without a phone at Southwark. She needed a breathing space to adjust to her new surroundings, book Susie into a hospital, arrange her antenatal care, begin to prepare for the baby.

It was only when the first two weeks had passed that she began to fret again. She tried not to look for the postman—tried not to count the days. Lyn was busy—that was all—would contact her as soon as he had some news. The fortnight limped into a month, September darkened to October. Lyn had always loved the autumn. Other years, she had found coloured leaves pressed between the pages of his books, misshapen conkers shrivelling on his desk. He always saved the distorted ones, the runts with growths and lumps. He had made her a necklace once of spastic conkers. It was
stupid
things she kept remembering—the way he ate his fruit cake, crumbling the slice to pieces with his fingers, picking out the cherries and saving them till last. The careful ritual of his shaving, soaping his face, not once, but twice, screwing up his eyes in concentration, making strange shapes with his mouth, jutting out his chin, refusing to speak at all until the job was finished and the razor cleaned and put away. He never used an electric one. She saw him in the house, eyes closed, shoulders hunched, sitting totally still as if he were listening to some strange silent music inside his head, then suddenly charging out, as if he could bear the sound no longer, and flinging himself into some frenzied task like chopping wood. She could even smell his duffel coat—a smell of wood smoke and wet string.

All her efforts to shut him out had been so much autumn mist. She realised she had been thinking of him constantly—expecting him each day for fifty-two whole days now—listening for his footsteps, rushing to the post, hoping, praying, longing, but suppressing all her feelings, so that she hardly knew their force. The ring on the door had released them like a tidal wave, swamped her in disappointment and despair.

She glanced around the room. There was nothing of Lyn there—not even his photograph. She had deliberately excluded him in deference to Susie. Now he was lost to her and she hadn't even realised it. She picked up Susie's sneakers, flung them in the wardrobe. What in God's name was she doing—shacking up with a girl who might trade her in for Sparrow after the second gin, staking everything on a baby who would be swallowed up in adoption forms the minute it was born? She had always reassured herself that the arrangement was only temporary, somehow imagined that Lyn would change his mind, accept Susie and her pregnancy, so that they could all move in together and muddle along as best they could until Susie was delivered and they were free to lead their own life. But that was simply moonshine. Lyn had cut his ties, turned his back—might even have disappeared abroad, found another woman. He was her sacred wedded husband and she had no more notion where he was than if he had been a nomad wandering the dark side of the world.

She glanced at the tattered calendar pinned beside the wardrobe—the rows and rows of days and dates printed in red. Bleeding days because Lyn had been moving further and further away from her with every one that passed. Almost November now. The nights were getting colder, winter creeping up. Just last night, the clocks had gone back to mark the end of British Summer Time. Darkness was winning—dark and death.

She grabbed her keys and a raincoat. She had to get out, stop herself from panicking. It was raining harder, pavements wet and glassy in the sickly light of the lampposts. She plodded down the street, avoiding the puddles, turned right, left, right again. She hardly knew where she was going. Her mind had shut off and her legs had taken over—steering her automatically in the direction of the old St Saviour's—the hostel where Hester had had her baby. It had been bombed in the last war, all traces of it razed. A block of cheap and dingy post-war flats had been built in place of it. Last time she had been there, just a month ago, they had all been boarded up, the occupants rehoused. Now she stared in shock. The flats had vanished, too. All that was left was a gaping hole in the ground, a mound of rubble. She glanced around at the broken bricks, the twisted lengths of piping, the rusting sheets of corrugated iron, eerie in the shadows.

Suddenly, she started. She could see a woman standing by the fence—a woman from another age, pale and almost ghostly—long black skirt trailing in the debris, long brown hair scraped severely up and back, young face thin and pinched. She held a baby in her arms, a bald plump baby swaddled in a shawl. The child was crying—a jagged sound which lacerated like barbed wire dragged across the eyes. The woman herself was silent, motionless, head held high and proud, staring towards the North.

Jennifer lurched forward. ‘
Hester
!' she whispered—sprang towards her, tripped on a length of guttering, lost her balance, fell.

When she got up, the figure had disappeared. There were no footprints in the mud except her own, no sound except the muffled roar of a train on the bridge beyond. Perhaps she had only dreamed it, imagined a woman's shape in the stack of upended planks. Yet the sense of Hester's presence was still almost overwhelming, as if Hester had caught her shadow in the barbed-wire fence and left it flapping there and staring. There was a sense of menace, of foreboding.

Jennifer sank down on a broken crate, tried to stop her legs trembling. Was she really in touch with Hester, or beginning to lose her grip? She glanced around the wasteland. The yawning hole in the ground seemed to have deepened and darkened in the few minutes she had been there, threatening to suck her down. Abandoned water tanks stood on their sides like cages. Shadows dripped from the naked bones of scaffolding on an adjoining building-site. She shivered. She must get out of this place before she imagined something worse. But where could she go, what could she do? Susie was out, might not be back till late or even morning. She had lost touch with her few friends.

There was always Anne and Matthew. She had phoned them only yesterday, but she could phone again, invite herself to dinner. Even with all the lies and Matthew's lecturings, it would still be better than wandering here alone. She suddenly longed to be in a whole big house again, with space and stairs and soaring unbarred windows, to sit down at a proper table with decent food, with children and a family, normal conversation. Putney had seemed a prison when she first decamped to Southwark. Now it seemed a sanctuary. It had light and space and air, generous leafy gardens, old and spreading conifers, horse-chestnut trees, Lyn's precious lumpy conkers.

She had last seen Lyn at Putney, lain in bed beside him, sat at the table opposite. There were still traces of him there, a stray button from his jacket reproaching her on the sideboard, his blue pyjamas crumpled in a drawer, a shirt or two hanging limp and pale in the wardrobe—all she had left of him now.

She eased up from the crate, stared around again. No sign of any woman. The blitzed and ravaged wasteland seemed to stretch for ever, the unscathed streets beyond it collapsing into rubble in the flickering rain and shadow. There was nothing of any permanence—no range of massy Cheviots shouting their defiance to the sky. She longed to return to Hernhope, to Hester's house and centre. Southwark was only exile for them both, shutting them out from field and hill and green. Even the patch of weeds at her feet was sooty and half-trampled. She plucked a dripping fistful. Nothing was weed to Hester. All plants were magical. Even this tattered ragwort and lowly chickweed had featured in her diaries—ragwort for menstrual troubles, chickweed leaves crushed to a paste with cooking lard to make a salve for Matthew's childhood burns. She slipped a sprig of chickweed in her buttonhole. She would go to Matthew's now, salve her
self
. She needed a change as much as Susie did, a quiet, normal, solid, chatty evening to banish all the spectres.

Her coat was wet and muddy from her fall. She brushed it down, stumbled back to the pavement, walked briskly up the street and round the corner, searching for a call-box. The first one didn't work. The second had been smashed by vandals despite the strong iron bars set round the glass. She trudged towards the third, hair soaked, feet aching.

It was Anne who answered, sounding tired.

‘Jennifer here. How are you? I'm … er … fine.' She switched on the lies again. Yes, she was in London—had come down unexpectedly from Bedfordshire just that morning. Yes, dinner would be
lovely
. Steak, she hoped, or a decent joint of beef. She was sick of the cheaper cuts, the endless economies.

‘No, Lyn … er … won't be with me, Anne. He … couldn't come, unfortunately. He's … ill again. One of his colds. What? What did you say?
Charles
did? When? He can't have done. Impossible. I mean, why would Lyn …?' She tried to keep her voice down, stop herself from shouting. The receiver felt damp and sticky in her hand. She switched it to the other side, tried to breathe more calmly. ‘Did Charles say where it was, Anne? Oh, I see. How strange. No, I can't understand it at all. Mind you, I was out last night, so that may explain how …'