The Private Parts of Women (24 page)

I took a few moments dressing, a moment or two for prayer, not long. I was not prepared to find Ivy as I found her, sitting bolt upright against the bed-head with her knees open and up under her – my – long nightdress. Her hands were twisted in her hair and her face gleamed with sweat.

‘It's coming,' she gasped.

‘Not yet,' I said, ‘Mary said it'd be hours.'

‘I tell you, it's bleeding coming.'

On the sheet was a streaky wetness. She gasped and gritted her teeth, I could hear the faint grinding along with her moan. ‘Oh Christ,' she groaned, ‘Oh Christ get this bastard out of me …' Then her face darkened as she bore down.

I did not know what to do.

‘Mary will be back soon with the midwife,' I said.

‘Aaaah …' I thought she would tear the hair from her head. She slid down further on to her back, I tried to get her hands out of her hair, but in the process some of it came out and was left tangled around her fingers. I hovered uselessly by the bed. ‘What shall I do?' I asked.

She pulled her nightdress right up and I saw that her private parts were stretched open. I put a hand on one knee. I was surprised by its coldness. She was trembling violently. I picked up a blanket to cover her but she fought it off.

‘Aah … aaah … aaaah!' her voice rose from a moan to a scream and she grasped my hand and squeezed with her bony fingers until I wanted to cry out myself. Then she began to push, her face swollen and dark. I was awed by her strength. Her eyes were closed and veins in her neck and forehead bulged.

She stopped and looked at me for a moment, then she laughed. ‘You've gone white as a bleeding sheet,' she said. ‘You're no more use than a chocolate tea pot. Oh Christ …' and then it started again.

‘Jesus, Jesus, let it be all right …' I muttered, I couldn't think of a coherent prayer. I kept one hand on her shuddering knee, the other gripped in hers as she pushed down, her belly like a boulder, squeezing and contorting with the force of the contraction.

‘Water …' she whispered and I gave her a sip, helping to support her small head. Her hair was damp. I kept looking at the door, hoping that Mary would come with the midwife.

Then she grasped my hand again and began to push, making a low deep growl. One hand went down between her legs and I saw her stretching wider open like a slow grin spreading, and heard little sticky ripping sounds and then, crammed against the lips of her opening was something crumpled, soft and blue. I saw a wisp of colourless hair and realised it was the baby's head.

‘It's coming!' I said.

‘You don't say.' She paused, panting, before the next contraction was upon her. I was excited now, as if somehow
I
was achieving this, helping to achieve it. At the next push more of the head came out and I thought Ivy would split in half, with the great blue upside-down head jammed half in, half out. But then, at the next push it seemed to swivel and the head was born. Ivy was making little animal cries and gasps.

‘What do I do?' I said. ‘Water? Is there anything …?' but she did not answer. She squeezed her eyes shut and with a wet gush the shoulders, then the rest of the little blue wax-caked body came slithering out. The room filled with a hot, wet, bloody, womanish smell. The cord seemed a terrible twisted thing, pulsing and snakeish. I was trying to lift up the steamy, slithery baby just as Mary came in, followed by the midwife.

‘Beat us to it, Angel,' the midwife said. ‘Hot water, towels … I could murder a cup of tea.'

‘Trixie, oh Trixie, I'm sorry.' Mary put her arm round my shoulders. ‘I never dreamed it would be so quick.'

‘It was fine,' I said, ‘perfectly fine.'

‘You've done well.' She kissed me on the cheek.

I went downstairs feeling almost as if I had been blessed, feeling light-hearted, quite silly with joy and relief, with a ridiculous sense of achievement. My hands were greasy from the stuff that had coated the baby's skin. As I boiled water and gathered towels, I could hear the high mew of his new voice and alongside it, Ivy's complaint.

For two days there was an atmosphere of celebration in the house. I thanked God for answering my prayer. Sharing the experience of birth with Ivy had brought us closer, I thought. I felt that I understood her and though that is not the same as
liking
, my dislike was not so strong. She was quieter, exhausted by the birth, softer somehow. She'd decided to call the baby Harold, after Mary's Harold, when he brought her a parcel of clothes for her son.

I was fascinated by little Harold's newness. His cloudy-blue eyes, when they squinted open, seemed filled with impossible knowledge and wisdom. When I held him in my arms and sniffed the soft skin of his scalp, the smell made me ache, I don't know what the smell was, only skin and hair but it was more like new-baked bread … no, more than that, it was almost a spiritual smell as if something was permeating from him along with his warmth, something like the smell of Heaven.

And then. Oh this is the worst thing. Why do I torture myself with this memory?

Many of the Salvationists from our Corps visited the new baby and gave him gifts. He was like a little prince, surrounded by admirers. Mary, Harold and I sat round the bedside on the second evening and sang. Ivy's children, all freshly bathed with their white dandelion-seed hair standing up like haloes round their heads, sang with us the verse Mary had taught them. Ivy looked almost beautiful in the soft light, with the baby, wrapped in a white shawl, in her arms.
Jesus bids us shine with a clear, pure light, like a little candle burning in the night
. Harold's voice was so tender and low, and Mary's so sweet – but mine was reluctant. I don't know why, as if I was choked, too full of emotion to sing. Harold and I had hardly looked at each other since his proposal but on that night, our hands touched as I passed him a cup of tea and our eyes met for a stinging second.

And then a wickedness came upon me, just for a moment, only a thought, come from Satan, but I thought I would have him, I would snatch him out from under Mary's nose. Have him, how I do not know, whether to keep or just to use, I really do not know. It was only a second's evil thought that intruded into the song, but I was so ashamed.
In the world of darkness, so we must shine, you in your small corner, and I in mine
.

Ivy didn't like to have the baby sleeping in the same room, she could not sleep she said, hearing him snuffling, waiting for him to wake up and cry. So on that night, after she'd fed him, we tucked him up in the pram in the hall where he'd wake Ivy only when he was properly crying. I stayed for a moment after Mary had gone upstairs rocking the pram to make sure he was settled. I bent over and kissed the top of his downy head, breathed in that heavenly smell. And then I went upstairs to bed.

I cannot bear to think this, I cannot bear to remember. Move Trixie shift your bones, do something.

Our Father, who art in heaven.

Oh no no no.

What is it that is wrong, dear Jesus what is it?

The next day, the baby was gone. Just gone. I woke in the early morning to the sound of a scream downstairs. I stumbled from my bed and hurried down. Ivy was in the hall in her outside clothes and the pram was empty. She stood by it, pointing and wailing. The little blankets were flat as if there had never been a baby and when I put my hand in, the sheets were cold.

All was confusion. The police were called. We were all questioned over and over. That was a terrible day for we all feared for the life of little Harold.

Who would take a baby, a newborn baby? Who would steal him from his mother?

The house and the garden were searched. And on the evening of that day, while the police and the Salvation Army were still searching, questioning, trawling the river, Ivy made her accusation. We were sitting round the fire, Ivy wrapped in a blanket was staring into the flames. She had not spoken for an hour. Mary, Harold and I had been talking in low voices and praying.

‘We must eat,' Mary said, for we had not touched a morsel all day in our fright and confusion. Nobody answered but she got up and went out to the kitchen. When the door had shut, Ivy turned her head slowly and looked at me.

‘You took him,' she said. ‘You took my baby.'

‘Ivy!' Harold stood up. ‘We are all with you in your suffering but you cannot make wild …'

‘She took him.' Her voice was calm. She gave me a still, cold, narrow look.

‘You simply cannot say such a thing!'

Mary came back into the room with a tray of bread and cheese and tea.

‘What is it?' she asked, feeling at once the atmosphere, seeing the way looks travelled like blades across the room.

‘She took my baby,' Ivy said again. She lifted her bony index finger and pointed.

‘Ivy,' Mary put down the tray and went across to her. ‘I think it's time for bed. I've got the drops the doctor brought to help you sleep.'

‘She must apologise,' Harold said.

‘It's all right,' I said. ‘She's not in her right mind … Ivy, it's all right.' For that moment I was filled with love and compassion, not hurt by her accusation. I walked across and took her pointing hand in my own. ‘It's all right,' I said.

She spat at me. So quickly that I hardly understood the puckering of her lips, the jerk, until I saw the little ball of white spittle on my sleeve.

‘Ivy!' Harold was outraged. I stepped back, wiped my sleeve on my skirt.

‘First she stole my Jim's things,' Ivy said, subsiding, tears coming to her eyes, ‘his gold watch, his money, his good boots …'

‘There was nothing,' soothed Mary. ‘And Trixie would never …'

‘Then she even took me bleeding baby …'

‘Let's get you to bed,' Mary said. Together, Mary and I coaxed Ivy up the stairs, gave her her sleeping draught and stayed with her until her eyes closed.

Of course it was a lie, or a sick fantasy, but Ivy did continue to accuse me. Of course it was not true. That doesn't need to be said. But one thing shocks and shames me. A coincidence only. On the night of baby Harold's disappearance, before being woken by Ivy's cry, I'd been dreaming. I'd put on my dressing-gown and stumbled downstairs into the chaotic intolerable day and all thoughts of my dream had been driven from my head. But it had hung over me like a bad taste, the flavour of dread. It was only later that night, after Ivy had fallen asleep and Harold had gone home, only as I knelt on the gravelly floor by my bed to pray for the baby's recovery, that it came back to me, with a swift, sick shock the dream I'd had the night before. I had dreamt about Benjamin Charles. It was the dream I'd had since early childhood, the hot, cramped, slithery struggle in which I killed Benjamin Charles who was not separate at all but was a part of me.

It was coincidence only, that that dream had come to me on the night of baby Harold's disappearance, coincidence, or the Devil's work, but it hurt me. It made a terrible, secret wound in my mind, my memory, I don't know, in some hidden, fragile part of me. Maybe my soul.

Ivy left. Baby Harold was never found, and one morning she was gone and her children with her. She stole a few items – silverware, a clock, Mary's purse. She left her Bible behind and I don't suppose she missed it. She fled before the truth could be discovered. The scale of her evil. She was fully dressed that morning, the morning of the baby's disappearance, dressed and in her boots as if she was going out. Or had been out. Why was she dressed so early in the morning? The house was quiet after her departure. And though she was searched for, she was never found. She never went to another Salvation Army Corps for help or we would have heard. What she did and where she went remained a mystery.

And after her departure, the weather changed. Not the weather so much, it remained fine, but the atmosphere. The sky was as blue, the leaves as green, but in the air, scarcely detectable, was a faint tang of decay. The sensation of something nearing its end. Not only summer. They changed towards me, everyone, even my friends, especially my friends.

Nobody said they believed Ivy's accusations because they were preposterous. The woman was a liar and a fraud. She had never set eyes on the poor dead drunkard, of that I am certain. There never was a watch and chain, there never was a good pair of boots with money in their soles. Every claim she made was a lie, every accusation. A woman like that could sell her child. Why was she dressed, why was she fully dressed so early, if that was not the case? Where did she get enough money to spirit herself and her children away? Can anyone tell me?

That was my reasoning. The only explanation I can think of. The only rational thing. And others agreed, the police even, agreed that it was an explanation. And nobody suggested anything else, not to my face. But
what if Ivy didn't sell her baby, what if the woman was telling the truth for once in her life? What if Trixie Bell stole the baby? What if
… Nobody said it, nobody even thought it, of that I am quite convinced. And yet … and yet the weather changed.

Mary was even more formal with me after Ivy's departure than before. There was no spontaneity, no warmth. She spent most of her free time with Harold. They talked endlessly about their wedding, and Mary about the children she would have, almost as if they existed and sometimes I felt they did, in spirit, they were there already clinging to her skirt, trailing up the stairs behind her, awaiting only the bodies she would give them.

One afternoon. A coal fire in the grate, the curtains half drawn against the lashing rain, the lamp lit. The three of us harmoniously together for once, drinking tea and making toast on the fire.

‘It's like winter,' I said.

‘In the winter we will be married.' Mary smiled at Harold with her eyes. ‘In our own little house.' They had found a small place in Islington that would be free in December. ‘Trixie, you must come and look at it. We like to walk past don't we Harold? If it stops raining we could go this evening.'