Authors: Kate Taylor
Charles discreetly lifted a finger and, without a word on either side, the waiter was instantly at their table, ready to replenish Nelly's coffee cup. Even the breakfast room at Le Meurice was luxuriously quiet, with thick rugs, silk curtains and well-trained waiters muffling the sounds of a guest rustling a newspaper or a silver spoon knocking a chafing dish. Their daring stay in adjoining rooms had been superbly indulgent and far too short.
The glorious week in Paris was Charles's idea. They walked the new boulevards and dined at the Café Anglais and visited the dressmakers and even ventured one evening into a café in Montmartre. They could not stay in the apartment where Nelly had given birthâit, if not its painful memories, had been given up long sinceâso instead they basked in the rare luxury of a grand hotel. It was a last hurrah before they settled into their new, quiet life back in England. Well, quiet for Nelly at least.
She did not suppose Charles really wanted a quiet life; he just wanted a private one, at least as far as she was concerned. They had agreed she would let out the house in Mornington Crescent; Fanny, who had been using it during her absence, would find rooms in town and Nelly would move to Slough, a Buckinghamshire village but twenty miles from Paddington. It would be a kind of a cross between Wimereux and Paris, a place small enough they could live incognito but close enough to the train lines and the city that Charles could spend the day at his desk and still drop by for dinner before returning to Kent by bedtime. After all his big dreams of a defiant establishment in Mornington Crescent where Nelly would reign over a house full of children, servants and dogs, it was a compromise. Nelly was learning that life was full of compromises.
But Slough was yet to come and in Paris that week there were no compromises, just poached salmon and roast guinea fowl and chocolate éclairs washed down with champagne, and paintings and theatres and dress fittings and trips to the jeweller's. It was a week of pleasure and fantasy. It hovered, it glimmered, it enveloped and then it was over. And the truth was, of course, that no feather bed or French pastry could erase what had come before it.
The cramps that day in Wimereux had proved to be a false labourâthankfully, or so Nelly thought at the time. In the end perhaps it would have made no difference
where the baby was born. At any rate, by the time Charles arrived from London the next afternoon, Nelly was resting comfortably and seemed no longer to be in any danger of delivering a baby in a French seaside town with only her mother and the country doctor as attendants. Charles telegrammed to and fro with the Paris doctor, and after a week without any further pain, the men agreed that Nelly could proceed, in the company of a good nurse hired in Boulogne, by train to Paris. So, with strict instructions to the coachmen not to jostle his passengers, Nelly, Charles and her mother took a sedate ride into Boulogne, where they met the nurse at the train station in time to catch the smooth-running afternoon express.
Nelly still had, by the doctor's calculations, a good month before the baby would arrive, and now that the anxious day in Wimereux and the danger of travel were past, she was looking forward to some time in Paris with Charles no matter how little her condition would permit her to venture much beyond the apartment. At least there would be luscious food and amusing company. It would be a decided improvement over the winter in Wimereux, with the lonely beach and the servant girl's overcooked meat.
But that Paris sojourn was not to be. Perhaps hastened by the vibration of the train, she went into labour two days after their arrival, a few hours after Charles had departed for London, where he had a reading to deliver. The process proved shortâNelly's mother kept repeating enviously, perhaps in an attempt to cheer Nelly, that not
one of her three deliveries had lasted as little as six hoursâbut brutal. Nelly had never known such pain and, in that moment at least, hoped she never would again: hours of increasingly intense cramping developed into pains that felt as though she were being kicked in the middle from the inside out, which gave way to the feeling her innards were being ripped apart. She begged for chloroform but apparently the doctor had misled Charles with regards to his support for or familiarity with its use, for he simply cried, “Mais non, madame!” whenever she called out for it. As Charles was neither in the apartment nor in the city, there was no one who could argue with the man about the services he had agreed to provide. She began to feel the baby was some kind of monster inside her and desperately wanted it out, with not even a passing maternal care for the fate of the creature that would emerge.
The creature that did finally emerge was small. Too small, the doctor said, shaking his head and washing his hands. He departed soon after, leaving Nelly in the care of a nurse, who, try as she might to instruct the mother and coax the child, could not get the baby to suckle at the breast. Two days later, the nurse was desperately feeding the poor thing by means of smearing goat's milk on her finger when the doctor returned and called in a wet nurse. The girl, a buxom peasant from Brittany who spoke nothing that could be recognized as French, had a lot more luck teaching the baby to suck and, by the time Charles arrived the same afternoon, the immediate crisis
was past and Nelly could sit up in bed in a pretty lace nightdress to present him with his eighth son, a tiny thing wrapped in a white cambric cloth.
Once the baby was stable enough to travel, they removed themselves to the second village. With dredging of the harbour at Dover and improvements to the schedules of the ferries, Charles was increasingly using the DoverâCalais route rather than the slightly longer crossing between Boulogne and the naturally deep harbour at Folkestone. He had chosen for them a small town called Audruicq, just inland to the southeast of Calais, calculating it was far enough north of Wimereux that locals from the two places were unlikely to be comparing notes about the young English lady living in their midst. He helped Mrs. Ternan settle Nelly, the baby and a second wet nurse in a cozy farmhouse on the edge of the town, larger and less draughty than their little seaside villa in Wimereux, and departed for London.
At first things went well: the wet nurse's milk seemed to agree with the baby, who ate hungrily and began to grow; Nelly, her own milk now dry, slowly felt her body return to its former shape and became comfortable changing and dressing her son. She was happy to go for little walks down the country lanes carrying him in her arms until a proper perambulator could be shipped over from London. The wet nurse showed her how to make a sling out of a shawl so she could strap the child to her like a peasant woman while Mrs. Ternan followed beside her
with Foxie. At six weeks, the baby appeared to be a healthy if undersized specimen and, as the weather grew warmer, Nelly would sit out with him on a blanket in a meadow behind the house, laying him on his back and dangling ribbons or rattles above his head to amuse him. After the anxiety of her pregnancy and pain of her delivery, she began to relax and as she relaxed she began to love her baby with his tiny little fingers and light grey eyes.
At eight weeks, as April gave way to May and the weather grew warmer, he caught an unseasonable cold. Nelly and the wet nurse were up all night with him two nights in a row, trying to clear his nose with warm compresses and quiet his crying. The third night he slept better; the fourth, they put him down as usual in the bassinet across the hall from Nelly with the wet nurse on a cot at his side. Nelly was finally able to enjoy an uninterrupted night's sleep but was roused at dawn by the nurse's cries.
“I can't wake him, madame. I can't wake him,” she called as she came across the hall carrying his limp little body to an uncomprehending Nelly.
“But he needs his rest, nurse,” she said fuzzily, pulling herself up to sitting. “More important to rest than to feed, don't you think?”
“No, madame, no⦔ the nurse replied, sobbing now as she handed Nelly the baby. Nelly took the lifeless child in her arms, looking down at him in disbelief.
The dead baby's father arrived in Audruicq that evening, fell at Nelly's feet and wept. She knew he had
suffered such losses before. She had heard others speak of his sister-in-law Mary, dead from a mysterious attack at seventeen; once, he had mentioned baby Dora, his ninth child, a creature too good for this life, lost to the other at eight months. Rather than inuring him to the world's sorrows, it seemed to her that those deaths must have taught him how to cry. She, on the other hand, found herself tearless and numb.
Ever since Charles had courted her at Conisbrough, her whole life seemed to be unfolding as though it were happening to someone else. The day a gold bracelet had been delivered to Park Cottage, the time they had first walked alone on the heath, the lunch where he had proposed the purchase of Mornington Crescent, the busy weeks preparing the new house, each was full of excitement, nerves and elation, the kind of sensation that makes you feel you should pinch yourself to check this is actually happening. Occasionally, during her years settled in Mornington Crescent or the previous weeks in the meadow with the baby, she did experience the calmer but pleasant sensation that she was herself, a rather ordinary person leading a rather nice but quite real life, instead of playing a character in a melodrama. And then something would happen to sever the connection and she would return to her play-acting. Charles, with his relentless drive and his ready charm, seemed to demand it, propelling her life forward from one glorious role to another. At first the times between, when he wasn't there, were her other life,
the life he had lifted her from, empty days in the cramped quarters at Park Cottage or disappointing nights backstage at the Haymarket waiting to make her entrance and say her few lines. More recently, however, she had to recognize that the hard winter in Wimereux was the direct result of the bedroom in Mornington Crescent. She had always loved pretending: dressing up to go on stage and donning the role of the mysterious mistress or the inspirational muse had mainly seemed fun. Now, play-acting the mourning mother was a lot easier than actually feeling the pain, and the baby's death became misty. She would have babies someday, many babies, just not today.
They buried this one in the local churchyard with only his given name, Thomas, the same as her father's, on the little headstone. His middle name was Nelly's middle name, Lawless; Charles had registered his birth in Paris and Nelly had never asked what surname he had decided to give the child.
She recognized that her baby, whether a Dickens or not, would have bonded his parents together irrevocably, making her yet more dependent on Charles but also giving him a lasting reason to provide for her, whatever the vagaries of love. A living child would have made her life more secure, yet closed off any other life. She had thought that, for better or worse, she had walked through a door, and yet here she found herself standing on a threshold once again. She paused there but for a moment. The truth was, her renewed childlessness did not make
her feel any more independent; she might hesitate to move forward but she was certain she could not move back. She felt adrift and there was only one anchor close at hand. In a fog of pain and confusion, she clung to him desperately when, three weeks later, he returned to Audruicq for a final time. They packed up their belongings, she gratefully costumed herself once more for the role of his companion and they headed for Le Meurice.
“You aren't wearing that, are you?” asked Mrs. Ternan as she joined them at the breakfast table that final morning and caught sight of Nelly in the beautiful pale blue silk day dress purchased at Worth's that week and hurriedly adjusted to perfectly fit Nelly's newly slim figure. “You'll spoil it, darling. Trains are so dirty.” She spread her napkin across her lap and smiled at the waiter now offering her the pot of well-steeped English tea that she always preferred to the French habit of coffee in the morning. “Goodness, it will be pleasant to be in London again.”
B
efore I had children, life was about finding a cab if I was running late, or making sure there was always a bottle of champagne in the house, just in case. Or keeping my calves, shins and ankles in a permanent state of such smooth hairlessness that I could go bare-legged at the first sign of warm weather.
Of course, life was not about that. Life was about my career, my relationship with Al, my friends and family, Becky, David, my mother back in Halifax. Those were the important things, the things I would have listed for you if you had asked.
But the fabric of life is really the little things, the trivial tasks, annoyances and pleasures running about in one's head. If we could hear other people's thoughts the street would surely be a cacophony of the insignificant. “There is that woman from yoga who always wears purple.” “God, this light is slow.” “I should never have taken the extra hot sauce.” When I am in the early stages of writing
a book, that kind of chorus is sometimes replaced by thoughts about characters: “Would Gwen really steal Amanda's paper for the Austen conference? Why not just vote against her presidency?” At a certain point the characters' dilemmas would seem realer than the world around me and I would find myself asking Al to repeat himself because I had not heard what he said. “Next Saturday? Are we free next Saturday? What if Jack finds Amanda's laptop but thinks it must be Gwen's?” But once the girls were born life was about pink mittens and bits of rejected food wrapped in tissue, sitting at the bottom of my purse, and remembering the pediatrician's appointment was on Wednesday. And I liked that better. The girls seemed real to me, realer than my characters, realer than Al and me, more pressing in their needs and so more important in the scheme of things. How could one worry about the plot of Chapter 2 or the professional complaints of a work-weary husband when the girls needed to bake cookies for school or the wrench that would remove a set of training wheels had gone missing? Finding socks, applying bandages, reading storiesâlife now was supposed to be trivial, whether joyously or annoyingly so. Cooking meals for tired and hungry children or playing a board game in which there can only be one gleeful winner were all-consuming tasks but might easily end in tears. I loved buying their clothes, rubber boots, sun hats, warm leggings, pink in size 2 for Goli, orange in size 4 for Anahita, because it was done for them but without them, their absence making the
heart fonder, allowing me to triumphantly parade my selfless motherhood through the mall without fear of contradiction from a complaining child. Yet still, the best days were the ones when the craft project worked, nobody whined on the bike ride or everybody agreed the new library book was a really good story. Life was about these things, and the joyous chorus in my head moved sweetly from “I need to remember to buy some plasticine” to “I bet if I added spinach they would never notice” while glancing down at my legs on the way to the daycare, I would see that stray hairs were growing on my kneecaps.
That was the worst thing about being sick. I felt divided against myself every moment of every day. Thoughts about the minutiae of illness, pain and mortality began to crowd out everything else. “My head is scratchy. My left armpit aches. Did I remember to take the pill for stomach acid? Oh, I feel queasy. I need some crackers. I am thirsty. I want to lie down. I can't sleep. My right armpit aches. Maybe I have a tumour in the other breast. Maybe it's growing inside me right now and I won't last till Christmas.”
“Mummy. Where's my hair bow? My purple hair bow. Mummy, I can't go to school without it. I can't find it. I looked. Mummy, are you crying?”
Yes, I was crying, and in truth I was not crying because I didn't have the energy to find a hair bow. I didn't
care about the hair bow. I was crying because my right armpit ached and I just wanted my child to go away. And that afternoon, I would be crying because that morning I wanted my child to go away.
Last autumn, after I finished chemo and was gradually regaining my strength, I took to walking in Mount Pleasant, in the cemetery. Sometimes, on the weekends these days, when I want to get the next instalment mapped out in my head and can't find any peace in the house, I leave the girls with Al and go up there again. Like so many big cities now, Toronto seems painfully short on the green space its burgeoning population craves, and the place where old Toronto buried its deadâall those McGregors, Pitfields and Llewelynsâis now mainly used as a bike route, running path and dog-walking park. On a sunny spring day, the place is bustling with activity.
God knows what it would cost to erect an actual monument here, and only a small number of people still do. Mainly, you see lots of little plaques marking the entombment of mere ashes, small, tidy and unobtrusive memorials to moms and dads who shuffled off politely in their eighties and nineties without making much show of it at all. But occasionally someone springs for a big new monument to mark a conventional grave, a memorial to some fresh tragedy, an untimely end or sometimes just a very wealthy one, a marker that draws attention to itself. Grave diggers come out when nobody is looking and dig their six-foot hole; relatives gather, a coffin
is lowered; fresh earth is piled on top and then, some months later, you'll be wandering through the cemetery and notice this new and startling addition, some mighty reminder that this is not just a park, not just a piece of forgotten history, but a place of death, current death, real and raw.
This Sunday, to plan something a bit new for the serial, get another voice well registered in my mind, I am walking what I think is my regular route through Mount Pleasant when I come across one of these new eruptions, a huge wall of polished red granite with a whole family of names freshly inscribed. I stop, caught halfway between horror and voyeurism. Can some entire family have been wiped out by a car accident or house fire? The first two names, a man and a woman, were born in the 1970s, almost middle-aged now, parents of the names below, born two years previously. Three names, all born on the same date, babies, triplets. I start doing the math. One died within a week of birth. A second died at two months, like some Victorian babe. They must have been premature. Multiple births are often dangerously early. I was lucky to carry Goli and Anahita right to term; even twins have the habit of arriving too soon.
I keep staring at the grave. What happened to the third triplet? There is the same birth date but no death. I puzzle over it briefly before I realize the obvious: the third triplet survived. So did the parents; their names don't carry death dates either. The parents of this little family,
with its one surviving child, have carved all their names on their dead babies' tombstone as though all they are doing is waiting for their turn. I am shocked by the bleakness of their grief, the irredeemable gesture of this grave. Will they spend their entire lives like this, all three of them, just waiting to join the pair they lost? Will the need to bake cookies or remove training wheels never take over, never fill the gap? Out buying one pair of rain boots in the mall, will the child's mother never, for a moment, forget that she should have been shopping for three pairs?
If I die, Al might marry his student. It's not like it hasn't occurred to me. I hate the thought of it, of her winning, taking over my house, sleeping in my bed, but I suppose better to have someone mothering my daughters, someone keeping their father happy. Better they should not always live with the shadow of the dear departed hanging over them, better their lives should move on.
I shake myself mentally and walk away from the monument, drawing deep breaths of cold spring air into my lungs. I feel healthy. I am full of life.