The Complete Short Stories (60 page)

While
not wishing to make excessive claims … many prayers answered and requests
granted to the Faithful in an exceptional way … two remarkable cures
effected, but medical evidence is, of course, still in reserve, a certain lapse
of time being necessary to ascertain permanency of cure. The first of these
cases was a child of twelve suffering from leukaemia … The second … While
not desiring to create a
cultus
where none is due, we must remember it is
always our duty to honour Our Blessed Lady, the dispenser of all graces, to
whom we owe …

Another aspect of the information received by the
Father Rector concerning our ‘Black Madonna’ is one pertaining to childless
couples of which three cases have come to his notice. In each case the couple
claim to have offered constant devotion to the ‘Black Madonna’, and in two of
the cases specific requests were made for the favour of a child. In
all
cases
the prayers were answered. The proud parents … It should be the loving duty
of every parishioner to make a special thanksgiving … The Father Rector will
be grateful for any further information …

‘Look, Raymond,’ said
Lou. ‘Read this.’

They decided to put in
for a baby to the Black Madonna.

The following Saturday,
when they drove to the church for Benediction Lou jangled her rosary. Raymond
pulled up outside the church. ‘Look here, Lou,’ he said, ‘do you want a baby in
any case?’ — for he partly thought she was only putting the Black Madonna to
the test — ‘Do you want a child, after all these years?’

This was a new thought
to Lou. She considered her neat flat and tidy routine, the entertaining with
her good coffee cups, the weekly papers and the library books, the tastes which
they would not have been able to cultivate had they had a family of children.
She thought of her nice young looks which everyone envied, and her freedom of
movement.

‘Perhaps we should try,’
she said. ‘God won’t give us a child if we aren’t meant to have one.’

‘We have to make some
decisions for ourselves,’ he said. ‘And to tell you the truth if you don’t want
a child,
I
don’t.’

‘There’s no harm in
praying for one,’ she said.

‘You have to be careful
what you pray for,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t tempt Providence.’

She thought of her
relatives, and Raymond’s, all married with children. She thought of her sister
Elizabeth with her eight, and remembered that one who cheeked up to the
teachers, so pretty and sulky and shabby, and she remembered the fat baby
Francis sucking his dummy and clutching Elizabeth’s bony neck.

‘I don’t see why I
shouldn’t have a baby,’ said Lou.

Oxford St John departed at the end of the
month. He promised to write, but they were not surprised when weeks passed and
they had no word. ‘I don’t suppose we shall ever hear from him again,’ said
Lou. Raymond thought he detected satisfaction in her voice, and would have
thought she was getting snobbish as women do as they get older, losing sight of
their ideals, had she not gone on to speak of Henry Pierce. Henry had written
to say he was nearly cured, but had been advised to return to the West Indies.

‘We must go and see him,’
said Lou. ‘We promised. What about the Sunday after next?’

‘OK,’ said Raymond.

It was the Saturday
before that Sunday when Lou had her first sick turn. She struggled out of bed
to attend Benediction, but had to leave suddenly during the service and was
sick behind the church in the presbytery yard. Raymond took her home, though
she protested against cutting out her rosary to the Black Madonna.

‘After only six weeks!’
she said, and she could hardly tell whether her sickness was due to excitement
or nature. ‘Only six weeks ago,’ she said — and her voice had a touch of its
old Liverpool — ‘did we go to that Black Madonna and the prayer’s answered,
see.’

Raymond looked at her in
awe as he held the bowl for her sickness. ‘Are you sure?’ he said.

She was well enough next
day to go to visit Henry in the sanatorium. He was fatter and, she thought, a
little coarser: and tough in his manner, as if once having been nearly
disembodied he was not going to let it happen again. He was leaving the country
very soon. He promised to come and see them before he left. Lou barely skimmed
through his next letter before handing it over to Raymond.

Their visitors, now,
were ordinary white ones. ‘Not so colourful,’ Raymond said, ‘as Henry and
Oxford were.’ Then he looked embarrassed lest he should seem to be making a
joke about the word coloured.

‘Do you miss the
niggers?’ said Tina Farrell, and Lou forgot to correct her.

Lou gave up most of her
church work in order to sew and knit for the baby. Raymond gave up the
Reader’s
Digest.
He applied for promotion and got it; he became a departmental
manager. The flat was now a waiting-room for next summer, after the baby was
born, when they would put down the money for a house. They hoped for one of the
new houses on a building site on the outskirts of the town.

‘We shall need a garden,’
Lou explained to her friends. ‘I’ll join the Mothers’ Union,’ she thought.
Meantime the spare bedroom was turned into a nursery. Raymond made a cot,
regardless that some of the neighbours complained of the hammering. Lou
prepared a cradle, trimmed it with frills. She wrote to her relatives; she
wrote to Elizabeth, sent her five pounds, and gave notice that there would be
no further weekly payments, seeing that they would now need every penny.

‘She doesn’t require it,
anyway,’ said Raymond. ‘The Welfare State looks after people like Elizabeth.’
And he told Lou about the contraceptives he thought he had seen on the table
by the double bed. Lou became very excited about this. ‘How did you know they
were contraceptives? What did they look like? Why didn’t you tell me before?
What a cheek, calling herself a Catholic, do you think she has a man, then?’

Raymond was sorry he had
mentioned the subject.

‘Don’t worry, dear, don’t
upset yourself, dear.’

‘And she told me she
goes to Mass every Sunday, and all the kids go excepting James. No wonder he’s
got into trouble with an example like that. I might have known, with her
peroxide hair. A pound a week I’ve been sending up to now, that’s fifty-two
pounds a year. I would never have done it, calling herself a Catholic with
birth control by her bedside.’

‘Don’t upset yourself;
dear.’

Lou prayed to the Black
Madonna three times a week for a safe delivery and a healthy child. She gave
her story to the Father Rector who announced it in the next parish magazine. ‘Another
case has come to light of the kindly favour of our “Black Madonna” towards a
childless couple …’ Lou recited her rosary before the statue until it was
difficult for her to kneel, and, when she stood, could not see her feet. The
Mother of God with her black bog-oaken drapery, her high black cheekbones and
square hands looked more virginal than ever to Lou as she stood counting her
beads in front of her stomach.

She said to Raymond, ‘If
it’s a girl we must have Mary as one of the names. But not the first name, it’s
too ordinary.

‘Please yourself, dear,’
said Raymond. The doctor had told him it might be a difficult birth.

‘Thomas, if it’s a boy,’
she said, ‘after my uncle. But if it’s a girl I’d like something fancy for a
first name.’

He thought, Lou’s
slipping, she didn’t used to say that word, fancy.

‘What about Dawn?’ she
said. ‘I like the sound of Dawn. Then Mary for a second name. Dawn Mary Parker,
it sounds sweet.’

‘Dawn! That’s not a
Christian name,’ he said. Then he told her, ‘Just as you please, dear.’

‘Or Thomas Parker,’ she
said.

She had decided to go
into the maternity wing of the hospital like everyone else. But near the time
she let Raymond change her mind, since he kept saying, ‘At your age, dear, it
might be more difficult than for the younger women. Better book a private ward,
we’ll manage the expense.

In fact, it was a very
easy birth, a girl. Raymond was allowed in to see Lou in the late afternoon.
She was half asleep. ‘The nurse will take you to see the baby in the nursery
ward,’ she told him. ‘She’s lovely, but terribly red.’

‘They’re always red at
birth,’ said Raymond.

He met the nurse in the
corridor. ‘Any chance of seeing the baby? My wife said…’

She looked flustered. ‘I’ll
get the Sister,’ she said.

‘Oh, I don’t want to
give any trouble, only my wife said —’

‘That’s all right. Wait
here, Mr Parker.’

The Sister appeared, a tall
grave woman. Raymond thought her to be short-sighted for she seemed to look at
him fairly closely before she bade him follow her.

The baby was round and
very red, with dark curly hair.

‘Fancy her having hair.
I thought they were born bald,’ said Raymond.

‘They sometimes have
hair at birth,’ said the Sister.

‘She’s very red in
colour.’ Raymond began comparing his child with those in the other cots. ‘Far
more so than the others.’

‘Oh, that will wear off.’

Next day he found Lou in
a half-stupor. She had been given a strong sedative following an attack of
screaming hysteria. He sat by her bed, bewildered. Presently a nurse beckoned
him from the door. ‘Will you have a word with Matron?’

‘Your wife is upset
about her baby,’ said the matron. ‘You see, the colour. She’s a beautiful baby,
perfect. It’s a question of the colour.’

‘I noticed the baby was
red,’ said Raymond, ‘but the nurse said —’

‘Oh, the red will go. It
changes, you know. But the baby will certainly be brown, if not indeed black,
as indeed we think she will be. A beautiful healthy child.’

‘Black?’ said Raymond.

‘Yes, indeed we think
so, indeed I must say, certainly so,’ said the matron. ‘We did not expect your
wife to take it so badly when we told her. We’ve had plenty of dark babies
here, but most of the mothers expect it.’

‘There must be a mix-up.
You must have mixed up the babies,’ said Raymond.

‘There’s no question of
mix-up,’ said the matron sharply. ‘We’ll soon settle that. We’ve had some of
that
before.’

‘But neither of us are
dark,’ said Raymond. ‘You’ve seen my wife. You see me —’That’s something you
must work out for yourselves. I’d have a word with the doctor if I were you.
But whatever conclusion you come to, please don’t upset your wife at this
stage. She has already refused to feed the child, says it isn’t hers, which is
ridiculous.’

‘Was it Oxford St John?’ said Raymond.

‘Raymond, the doctor
told you not to come here upsetting me. I’m feeling terrible.’

‘Was it Oxford St John?’

‘Clear out of here, you
swine, saying things like that.’

He demanded to be taken
to see the baby, as he had done every day for a week. The nurses were gathered
round it, neglecting the squalling whites in the other cots for the sight of
their darling black. She was indeed quite black, with a woolly crop and tiny negroid
nostrils. She had been baptised that morning, though not in her parents’
presence. One of the nurses had stood as godmother.

The nurses dispersed in
a flurry as Raymond approached. He looked hard at the baby. It looked back with
its black button eyes. He saw the name-tab round its neck, ‘Dawn Mary Parker.’

He got hold of a nurse
in the corridor. ‘Look here, you just take that name Parker off that child’s
neck. The name’s not Parker, it isn’t my child.’

The nurse said, ‘Get
away, we’re busy.’

‘There’s just a
chance,’
said the doctor to Raymond, ‘that if there’s ever been black blood in your
family or your wife’s, it’s coming out now. It’s a very long chance. I’ve never
known it happen in my experience, but I’ve heard of cases, I could read them
up.’

‘There’s nothing like
that in my family,’ said Raymond. He thought of Lou, the obscure Liverpool
antecedents. The parents had died before he had met Lou.

‘It could be several
generations back,’ said the doctor.

Raymond went home,
avoiding the neighbours who would stop him to inquire after Lou. He rather
regretted smashing up the cot in his first fury. That was something low coming
out in him. But again, when he thought of the tiny black hands of the baby with
their pink fingernails he did not regret smashing the cot.

He was successful in
tracing the whereabouts of Oxford St John. Even before he heard the result of
Oxford’s blood test he said to Lou, ‘Write and ask your relations if there’s
been any black blood in the family.’

‘Write and ask
yours,’
she said.

She refused to look at
the black baby. The nurses fussed round it all day, and came to report its
progress to Lou.

‘Pull yourself together,
Mrs Parker, she’s a lovely child.’

‘You must care for your
infant,’ said the priest.

‘You don’t know what I’m
suffering,’ Lou said.

‘In the name of God,’
said the priest, ‘if you’re a Catholic Christian you’ve got to expect to
suffer.’

‘I can’t go against my
nature,’ said Lou. ‘I can’t be expected to —Raymond said to her one day in the
following week, ‘The blood tests are all right, the doctor says.

‘What do you mean, all
right?’

‘Oxford’s blood and the
baby’s don’t tally, and —’

‘Oh, shut up,’ she said.
‘The baby’s black and your blood tests can’t make it white.’

‘No,’ he said. He had
fallen out with his mother, through his inquiries whether there had been
coloured blood in his family. ‘The doctor says, he said, ‘that these black
mixtures sometimes occur in seaport towns. It might have been generations back.’

‘One thing,’ said Lou. ‘I’m
not going to take that child back to the flat.’