Band of Angel (5 page)

“She’s not here.”

Mother, remembering, started to moan about the market and a green dress before she doubled up with pain.

“Oh Mama!” Catherine was crying with fear. “What shall I do?”

“Catherine,” Mama’s hands were wet to hold as she sat up and tried to smile. “Don’t be frightened, darling, but a silly and awkward thing has happened: the baby has come early. You must”—Mother’s calm voice turned into a sharp yelp of pain—“help me!”

Her hand pulled back the sheet. Her dress, her drawers, the sheet were part of a widening circle of crimson.

Weak and giddy with panic, the girl ran at first from one window to another. She could see her father, a stick figure in the yard, feeding calves, with their two laborers, Alun and Twm. She struggled with the window, but the frame was soft and old and the catch sunk into the wood.

“Wait for me,” she gasped. She ran downstairs and through the yard until she found him. He was standing near to Juno, half-harnessed for the ride to Sarn. Alun was polishing the governess cart and telling Father they didn’t make them like that anymore.

“Well, good oh, Alun,” Father was saying, “and now I’d better get my women to the fair else I won’t be very popular will I. Not a bit popular eh?” Father’s shyness often took the form of an awkward heartiness, particularly when he talked to other men about his women.

“Father,” Catherine started to say, “we can’t go anywhere.”

He took her arm suddenly and pulled her roughly away from Alun and into a nearby feed room.

“Don’t talk about it in front of him,” he hissed. “It’s our business.”

“Father,” she said, her mouth so stiff with fear it was difficult
to make words. “The baby is coming and I don’t know what to do. Help me for God’s sake.”

“I can’t help her,” he said. All the red had gone out of his face and he looked shrunken and papery. “Do as I say and listen. I can’t help her, it would kill her.”

“Shall I put the cart on now, sir?” Alun was asking through the crack in the door.

“Not for now thank you, Alun,” said Father in a flat calm voice, “go home and have your breakfast until I send for you.”

“Right, sir.” Alun sounded surprised.

His footsteps receded. Father thought for a moment and then said to Catherine, with some echo of his old authority, “I’ll go into Sarn and find Ceris Davies. You stay here and try not to worry. There are often false alarms. That’s why it is better the men stay out of it, I’ll not be long.” He tried to take her hand. “You’re a good girl. It’s better I go and get help.”

She looked at him in appalled disbelief. He was a coward, and he seemed to be pleading with her to understand.

“It’s better I go.” He repeated stubbornly.

“Why is it better?” For the first time in her life she was shouting at him. “You have done lambing.”

“Don’t you shout at me, else you will weep for it,” he’d shouted back, turning red again. “You go back into that house. Boil some water, tear up some sheets. I’ll get Ceris Davies.”

Catherine grabbed him by both sleeves of his smock and shook him. “But I don’t know what to do. Even Alun would know more,” she cried, still shouting.

He’d raised his hand to smack her face then thumped her on the arm. “Stop that and get inside,” he shouted back. “You’ll soon understand.”

Catherine stood outside the front door and watched her father leave. Fear made her feel numb and slow, as though she were wading against a strong tide, and it seemed a great effort to turn and go back into the house, which, with her father gone, seemed charged with menace. In the kitchen, the clock ticked, the breakfast things lay where they had been left. Mother or Mair would have had them cleared away by now and the floor would have been swept clean.

Unwilling to go upstairs, Catherine ate the half-rasher of cold bacon Father had left on his plate and immediately felt sick. She thought about Mair, who could be brisk and short-tempered but who was kind to her when she felt sick.

“Come home soon, Mair,” she prayed. “Help us.” She prayed that Ceris, the midwife, the small bossy woman she normally disliked, would be in when Father called. “It’s not fair,” she thought, for her prayers had made her feel weak and tearful, “I shouldn’t have to do this on my own.”

Filling a cup of water, she went upstairs. The sky through the landing window looked blue and empty. The door to Mother’s room was closed. She hesitated outside then put her cup of water down and pushed hard, for the door was inclined to stick.

“Mother,” she said. “Mama?”

Inside the bedroom, the curtains were closed and the room, normally fragrant with mother’s lavenders and rosewater, smelled bad. She opened the curtains, and turned to the bed where Mother lay, quite still and very pale, her eyes fixed and open.

“Mother . . . oh please!”

As she flew toward the bed, she stumbled over something soft: Mother’s dress—her favorite dove-gray silk—stood up on its own, supported by its hoop petticoats as if it led a separate life, its violet trim now saturated with blood. She lifted the dress and threw it into the corner of the room. Mother cleared her throat.

Catherine wanted to cry. She knelt beside the bed and took her mother’s hand, covering it in kisses.

“It’s all right, darling,” she whispered with more confidence than she felt. “Dada will be back soon. You can tell me what you want.”

Her mother tried to speak, but a spasm of pain flung the peach satin of her quilt from her. Catherine put it back, trying not to look.

“Mama,” she yelped, “what am I to do?” For the first time in her life she hated herself: her dithering gestures, her cry of weakness and self-pity.

The pain seemed to come in waves that took Mother to terrible peaks of suffering, then to recede into a false calm that left her tousled and apologetic on the pillow and saying “what a to do,” and trying to tell her that having
her
had been one of the best days of her life. During a quiet phase, she told Catherine that babies arrived on a cord from down here. She waved vaguely toward the middle of the quilt. If her baby came, Catherine was to take the big sewing scissors, not the little ones, from the green sewing bag with the pink geraniums in the chest near the window, and be very brave and cut the cord. It wouldn’t hurt Mama, it would help her.

Catherine turned away almost sick at the thought. “Please God, please Ceris, come,” and, turning back, smiled as if Mother’s request was the most natural one in the world. A shrill song started up inside her head: “The big scissors not the little ones, I see. I see.” She got down on her knees and put her head next to her mother’s. Her forehead was waxy now and white and she was breathing through her mouth. She put her hand gently on her mother’s face. She wanted more than anything in the world to save her from pain and ugliness. Mama, groaning and panting, began grimacing and pushing her away.

Mother started to scream. “Help me, Catherine, help me.” Her mouth was square and purple, her face unrecognizable. “Help me!”

This cry would stay with Catherine forever. She dashed toward the windows and then back toward the bed, shouting, “Tell me what to do!”

Mother was grabbing violently at the quilt again. When she drew it back, Catherine saw her legs were bloody and that the thing lay at the end of a quivering cord. It was hideously ugly, its skin red and flopping, its skull soft and dented like a bad plum.

Catherine took the big scissors from the sewing bag and, shuddering with revulsion, cut the cord and put the baby in the oak cradle at the foot of the bed where it lay without moving. She spewed in the potty underneath the bed and stayed there for a while, hunched and listening with painful concentration for her mother’s breath. When she sprang up she hit her head so hard on the iron bed she almost knocked herself out.

Pulling herself together, she put her head on her mother’s breast and their red hairs mingled. At last she heard it, the faintest gasp from a face so pale the lips looked like glass. She took a brush and did her mother’s hair, hearing her own voice making mad sounds. She got up and ran to the window again. The sky looked thicker and darker than before with rain clouds gathering over Port Iago, and the hills blanked out. “I feel like a pie in the sky,” a silly voice inside her sang. She took a cloth and tried to rub some of the mud and blood from her hands and her pretty white dress. “It’s no good,” she thought. “It will never come out.”

Toward the end of the afternoon, it rained suddenly for half an hour and then the sun came out again, a brilliant, unreliable sort of sun, streaming through the windows and lighting up a huge cobweb Mother had missed. Catherine pushed her fingers through the cobweb, feeling just as weightless and insubstantial. When Mother groaned she held her head up and gave her a sip of water. When a line of grayish dribble fell from her mouth, she wiped it away, past grief, past disgust, locked now into a small world of action and reaction.

“They’ll be home soon,” she whispered, without much hope. “Home soon: Daddy and Eliza and Mair. Home for Mama.”

Mother licked her lips and stared blankly ahead of her.

Catherine lit a candle, and got into bed on the other side of her mother, nearly suffocating now from the bad, sweet smell in the room, and fell into an uneasy sleep. Later, when the sky was black above the line of trees, she heard the rumble of a cart in the yard outside. She flew downstairs and, standing there like another kind of dream, was Deio. There was rain on his hair, and his sleeves were rolled up and the muscles and skin of his arms gleamed. Before she had time to think, she flung her arms around him. He felt so strong, so alive. She clung to him, sobbing and trying to explain all that had happened. They had never touched each other like this before, but she was too far gone to feel the strangeness of it.

He took both her shoulders between his hands and stroked them, murmuring, “Ty Du. Ty Du . . . It’s all right. It’s all right.” He smoothed her hair and held it in a bunch as he gently explained
that he’d found her father by the roadside, fallen from his horse but all right; he would be in shortly with Ceris the midwife.

When her father walked into the kitchen, Deio and Catherine sprang apart. Father had torn his clothes and looked ashen with fatigue. She was shocked at the wave of pure dislike she felt at the sight of him. Behind Father, at the kitchen door, was Ceris, carrying a scuffed portmanteau in her hand. She looked curiously at the handsome young couple—she’d heard the gossip, too. Father, sensitive even in these circumstances to that look, bundled Deio out the back door, forgetting to thank him.

When Catherine led them into Mother’s room, the stench was overpowering and Father, smelling it and understanding, groaned and put his head in his hands. Ceris threw off her shawl and went straight to the window, forcing it open, tut-tutting, and working her mouth significantly as she did so.

Ceris, the Lleyn’s only midwife for fifteen years, had delivered babies in damp sheds behind haystacks, in bedrooms occupied by five people, in the poorhouse sanitoria, and, once, to a screaming girl with snow on her lips on the Bardsey to Aberdaron ferry. She took out of her bag a jar that contained a mixture of goose fat, fresh butter, and hen’s fat.

“Right now, Mr. Carreg,” she said, walking toward the bed, “I must take a closer look-see . . . so if you don’t mind.”

When Father had closed the door behind him, she lined up her pair of scissors, her dirty towel, a dark jar, and a vial of laudanum on the bedside table, then drew back the sheets. Felicia made feeble movements with her hands to push Ceris away.

“Come on now, there there.” Ceris told Catherine to hold her mother’s hands on either side of her. “Come on,” she said sharply, “I don’t like doing this either, but I must you know.”

Catherine watched the midwife lubricate her two fingers with the gray-colored lard from the jar. When her Mother screamed, she joined in. “Leave her alone now, it’s no good, I know it isn’t.”

Ceris looked at her quietly, her two glistening fingers in the air, sad for this pretty girl in her stained white dress, but detached. She saw women every day in a parlous state: some with their pelvises distorted by rickets; others prematurely aged by desperate poverty
or heavy physical work; most robbed of any sexual attraction by repeated childbirth. She was as gentle to Felicia as her skill and training allowed, but in her heart she resented her. This Englishwoman, with her pretty pearl earrings, lying under her satin quilt had had a better life than most of them. Far better.