Sarah Thornhill (24 page)

Ah, now I understood. All those nights gone away into the
Gazette,
giving me no answers when I asked about the money. I'd thought it was shame of me, his ignorant wife. When all the time it was his own shame. The fact was, John David Daunt didn't have a feather to fly with.

Any fool could of seen it, but I'd been so wrapped up in thinking about myself and my sad lost love that I hadn't seen what was under my nose.

I laid aside the sewing, come round behind him, my hands on his shoulders.

Well, John, I said.

The word was a little stiff in my mouth, it was the first time I'd called him by his name.

What a lucky thing you don't have to, I said.

He put a hand on mine and we stayed like that a long time. I watched the fire and thought, how easy it is to get the wrong end of the stick. A man won't talk to you, won't share his thoughts, you jump to the idea he's got no regard for you. When all the time it might be the very opposite.

I sat down and leaned over towards him. John, it's when you won't talk to me, that's what I mind, I said. More than glass in the windows I'd value a bit of talk. Ireland, say. What's the place like, where you're from? Wish you was back there?

Oh no, he said.

Come along now, I said. Have to say more than that to make me happy!

The words light, but I heard the tone of a real plea in my voice and he must of caught it too.

Well, he said, shifted his chair round so he was more facing me. It's a narrow place. You know at home, we're in that valley at Glenmire. Only ever two ways to go. Ahead, or behind. But I was forever wanting something else. Not what I could see ahead and not what I could see behind.

I knew what he meant. Those cliffs at home, closing in.

Mind you, he said, it's a sweet place. Fields so green, hedgerows green enough to eat, the woods on the hills bursting out of themselves with leaves. A place you might say of vegetable excess.

Vegetable excess, I said.

Then I saw he meant to amuse.

You do have the gift of the gab, I said. Go on.

A smaller sky, he said, but snorted, scorning himself. How can that be, a smaller sky. Yet it's so. A fierce low sky the greater part of the time. And rain, day in day out. Might wake with the sun but turn to scratch yourself and the rain will be coming down again.

Wasn't sure if he was having a lend of me. That much rain?

A lot of brightness in the sky, he said. But not a lot of the sun shining. The air so wet to start with, the rain nothing more than the air dropping on you.

Staring into the fire, back in that other place.

Maeve was crying that night, I said. When Paddy got out his fiddle. Even you. Tears in your eyes.

We're a sentimental lot, us Irish, he said. Those tunes, they pluck at you. But this place does get under your skin. A fine country, not a finer in the world.

But your family, I said. You'd have to miss your ma and pa? You'd have brothers and sisters?

Ashamed that I'd never thought to ask.

To be frank, the Daunts aren't a great one for family, he said. Not like you Thornhills, what a solid family there.

Only if you didn't know it from the inside
, I thought.

My brothers and I sent away to school at five years old, Daunt said. They thought that was the proper way of doing things.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
They
must be his Ma and Pa and it did shock me, a lad so young sent away.

Five years old, he said. Can you imagine. Soon as I could write home I did, every week it was the same, take me away, come and fetch me away.

Gave me a sour smile.

Reading and writing not such a grand thing, you see, he said. Did me not a damn bit of good, they never came for me.

One thing I'd wanted to ask since that first night, and now I took the risk.

Was there someone, I said. You know. Back in Ireland?

He was silent and I'd taken the breath to say, None of my business, John, forget I asked.

There was, he said. Janey Davis was her name. The ringlets and the blue eyes, and the charm and the wit, and money with it. The princess of Glenmire. We all panted after her. She took a shine to me. You know, I had my hair then, was not such a bad-looking feller.

I thought how it might be, watching your hair fall out, week by week, and nothing to be done about it. It might make you mistrust yourself.

Janey had not come down in the last shower, he said. Knew what she wanted, and how to teach a lad. Lost my heart completely, green as I was. But when I went to propose, oh, that was the best joke she'd ever heard. There I was, a lad with no means and few prospects, wanting to make an honest woman of her!

Like Lucy Coulter, I thought, all tinkling charm and witty ways, but cold at her heart.

I was crushed, I can tell you, he said. But it made me ask what I wanted in life. What sort of a person I might choose to make it with me.

He put out his hand and cupped it over my knee. I could feel the warmth of it through my skirt.

I wouldn't go back to any of it, he said. Not the place, not the people. Everything and everyone I want, I've found here.

I watched the coals glow and sparkle. If wool was a pound a pound and the windows stopped with the best glass in the colony, I'd still be sitting here with a silent husband, stitching up all my disappointment into a smock instead of counting the lucky hand life had dealt me.

And you yourself, he said. I wonder now. If you think about what's gone, at all.

I do, I said. You know that. Heard me turn a conversation to say his name.

Jack Langland
. I tried it over to myself, but felt nothing.

He was a good man, such as you are yourself, I said. No Janey Davis, toying with a person's life. But long gone, and me a lucky woman. Janey Davis was a fool, John. Not to know the best of men when she saw one.

He leaned over, touched the hair back from my forehead.

We had but a weak beginning, Sarah dear, he said. But might be happy enough yet.

I was wiser than I knew, I said. Saying yes that day.

That night, the first time since we'd been husband and wife, we lay together. Not just our bodies, but our spirits too, trusting each other at last.

A
S MY TIME grew near I was frightened. Had no idea in the wide world what to expect, only that it would hurt. And that you could die of it. How exactly I didn't know. For the first time I could remember I wanted my mother. Why did you have to die and leave me, I thought, to meet this thing on my own?

Would of liked Mary to help me, but she was far gone with her second. Lucy Coulter might of helped, having got as far as Septimus she'd of had to know a few things. But she was in Sydney with the children, not expected back for another month.

I was lucky, it turned out Maeve had had a child, once upon a time. Perhaps more than one, she didn't want to say. Tried to get me ready for what was ahead of me.

It does pain, Mrs Daunt, she said. Oh, sad pain.

But that was all she could say, and when it started I knew why she couldn't be clearer. It was nothing like when you fell and hurt yourself, or had the toothache. A griping pain with no word for it that I knew. Closest I could come was, it was cousin to the worst pain from your monthly that you could ever imagine. Got into every particle of you, along your blood, every muscle and bone crying out. Great dreadful swells and surges of it.

In one of the clear moments I thought, men are the ones in charge of the words, that's why there isn't one for this pain that only a woman can feel.

I told myself, this is only my body. Not me myself. Stood at the foot of the bed gripping the iron rail. There was the crocheted bedcover, there was the hole in it I must darn, do it quick or it would get worse, and did I have the right colour of wool. But try as I might, the pain wouldn't let me have any other thoughts. It was too big a thing. It filled the air in the room. There was nothing to breathe but pain and nothing to think but pain.

Look Mrs Daunt, Maeve said. This way.

Took heaving breaths, ducked her head as if under a curtain. I breathed the way she was showing me, found I could in a manner of speaking become the pain, by diving into it.

That did the trick for a time. But the pain went on. It didn't need to rest, but I did.

The me that I knew got smaller every time the pain came back. I tried to tell myself who I was. Sarah Thornhill, I said over and over, crouching under the thing twisting in my belly. Sarah Thornhill, Sarah Thornhill. But I shrank smaller and weaker. In the end I forgot who I was. Forgot I was a person at all. There was no me-here and pain-over-there, there was nothing but the pain. I was nothing more than a pebble rolled around in the pouring of that terrible white tide.

Maeve got the hot cloths for my back, sponged my face with cold water. A rag to suck when I couldn't swallow. Walked me up and down the room. Talked to me, I suppose, but I was past hearing.

Daunt stood at the doorway once, I remember that. Stricken as if he'd made a terrible mistake. Twisted his hat in his hands, couldn't look at me straight. I had to laugh, the poor man, tried to tell him not to be so mournful, it was no more than the ewes did out in the paddock. But before I could work out the words the pain was roaring over me again, nothing with me but Maeve's hand squeezing mine.

After God only knows how long, the pain shifted into another kind of thing, smaller and more ordinary. Something you could put your hand to and say, the pain is here. My head cleared, I was myself again.

Push Mrs Daunt, Maeve kept saying. Push!

Never worked so hard in all my life as getting that baby out. Remember thinking, labour, this is why they call it labour.

I could not believe that this small person had been produced by me. Carrying her was one thing, feeling her foot through the wall of my belly, the way she shuffled and stretched in her nest. New and odd, but part of me. Now she was in the world she was completely herself. Like any other stranger, that you'd learn to know as time went on.

Daunt so proud and tender, standing by the bed with the babe in his arms.

You bring me all them gloves, remember, I said. Six pair of kid gloves. Still got them. In the drawer there.

Tell the truth, I hardly knew what I was saying, my head not quite my own and my body emptied like a bag.

Well, Sarah dear, he said, I must have thought you were worth every last one.

The morning after she was born the baby woke me up before dawn, just a little cry from her cradle beside our bed. Slept like a top, poor thing, after that last long effort we'd both made to bring her into the world. I took her out to the verandah, where Daunt had put the cut-down chair, to show her the place she'd come into.

As the sky grew paler the place grew larger. Darkness had made it seem small. A bird balanced on a branch, you could see its beak glint, then it threw its head back and warbled.

The baby looked round in a wise sort of way. Like she'd been here before and was glad to see it again but not in the least surprised. I could see Pa in her features, and Daunt as well, something about the eyes.

My mother would be there too. Having a daughter was the nearest I'd ever come to knowing her. I knew now the pain she'd been through to bring me into the world. The pain, and the joy too.

My mother's mother must be in there too. Her father. And Pa's mother and father. Never thought till this moment of Pa having his own pa and ma. Further back even, a pa and a ma beyond him again. All the people that had gone into her making were part of her. The dead ones and the live ones, all packed into this parcel of brand-new person.

Love made me skinless. She slept in my arms and I watched her blue-veined eyelids flickering with dreams. A swell of feeling rose up inside me, like a yawn or a sneeze. Something your body decided to do of its own accord.

Of its own accord, too, a thought floating up as the sun rose. About another mother and another daughter. Somewhere in that place I couldn't picture, New Zealand, a woman would of sat the same way I was doing now, feeling her daughter's sweet weight against her. Just the same way I was doing, she'd of called down every god she had, to keep her daughter from harm.

But that daughter was the child I'd known. That sad silent poor thing. Not kept from harm.

The baby woke and opened her eyes. Such wise old eyes. Put out her starfish fingers to my face and made a little wondering sound. A tear fell from my cheek and made its way down hers. I watched her taste it, that little mouth shaping its first surprise.