Born of Woman (2 page)

Creation. Cameras swooping now on her fair, plumpish, unfashionable, almost pretty face, eyes dilated with fear. What in God's name was that roaring noise exploding through the studio? She glanced around in panic, wincing at the din. (‘Never look at the cameras,
never
at the audience. Keep your attention fixed always on the interviewer.' Matthew's Ten Commandments—a hundred thousand commandments.) Jennifer dared to break one of them, tried to focus on the abyss beyond the lights. Pale bun-faces ghostly in the gloom, eyes and spectacles glinting through the shadows. Hands on hands. Applause,
Applause
! That's all it was, the roar—people clapping Jennifer Winterton. Stop! she almost shouted. She didn't deserve applause. She was only a tiny photo on the inside flap of a book jacket. You couldn't coop Lyn's mother in a couple of hundred pages or a clutch of pretty pictures.

Applause dying down now. Silence still more frightening than the roar. Vita Sampson leaning threateningly towards her, cameras creeping up behind.

‘Jennifer, hallo and welcome.'

‘H … hallo.' Voice skidding across her throat, words disintegrating. Vita Sampson rushing ahead too fast. Sales, statistics, figures, facts. The Book cradled in Vita's arms. Red-taloned finger pointing to the text.

Her own mouth muttering things she didn't know it knew. Her mind cut off from its moorings, zooming in and out of cul-de-sacs while her lips stuck and stumbled and fell over their own smile. Lights glaring, cameras swarming. Impossible to think, plan, speak, stop, STOP.

‘Jennifer, I think you said …'

‘Jennifer, I know you feel …'

‘Jennifer, how can you justify …?'

‘Jennifer, what makes you assume …?'

I don't, I didn't, I can't, I'm not. Wait … What did Matthew say? If you're flummoxed, gain time by repeating the question. What
was
the question? Do I believe in ghosts? Matthew told me not to mention ghosts—not as such—just keep on stressing Hester's continuing presence. They'll never understand, though. They'll label me a crack-pot, say I'm inventing things.

Vita speaking again. Must have read my thoughts. ‘You say you're aware of Hester's influence, even after her death. I wonder, Jennifer, do you sense her as a type of
spirit
, then?'

No, no. Hester is rock and bone and vigour, not a spirit. Yet Matthew keeps on urging me to bring in the supernatural. How can I, when there aren't the words for it and people think I'm …?

Questions flying faster now. Can't speak. Can't think. Stop! Cut! Let me out! Face cracking up like crazy-paving, traitorous things happening to my voice. Haven't got a face or voice, only a mask which is breaking into bits. It's not me under there. I'm at home with Lyn, planting out begonias. Smile at the begonias, hold Lyn's hand, pull yourself together. Smile. SMILE. I'm
crying
. Impossible! Blink the tears away. Quick—cough, sneeze, clear your throat—anything but tears. Vita's as worried as I am. Asking easy questions. Treating me like a child.

No. The sobbing's louder now. The cameras can't resist it. No one's cried on ‘In Town'—not a real good howl. There have been tears before, but only stifled ones, and from people with a reason for them—saints and zealots weeping for man's messes, choked and dazzled footballers, defeated presidents, Miss Worlds paying back their crowns.

Cameras cock-a-hoop now, highlighting the tears, presenting them in full colour close-up to tonight's ten million viewers, trying every angle, cutting between Jennifer's streaming eyes and all the saddest pictures on the caption-stand—lance corporal shot in the stomach, dole queues shivering on Tyneside, rotting harvests, starving lambs. Vita solicitous and skilful, trying to weave the crisis into the interview, explain it to the viewers.

‘Perhaps you could try and tell us, Jennifer, what aspect of Hester's life upsets you most?'

No answer.

‘You're obviously very distressed by certain memories. Hester's life was certainly a hard one and her book has maybe touched some nerve …'

‘I … I …' More sobs.

‘This was, of course, a harsh and terrible century. So many young and talented men cut down in their prime, so many private tragedies in two massive global wars. Hester's own three brothers were all killed in the trenches. It seems to me that you identify with Hester. I mean, does your awareness of her … her presence mean you share her actual grief?'

Jennifer gulped. ‘Yes, that's … r … right. That's …' Words almost indecipherable. Untruthful words, in any case. She is crying for herself, not for Hester's brothers—for her exhaustion and her problems, her stupidity and fear. Crying because she can't smile and doesn't know the answers. Because she's a stupid stuttering pathetic waste of money—waste of
Matthew
‘s money. She's failed him, let him down. Crying because her husband doesn't desire her and she lies awake at night wondering if he ever will again. Crying because she's tired and tense and …

‘CUT!'

‘Fantastic, Jennifer! That really was a scoop. Genuine emotion always makes the news. The Press Office are on to it already. They want a few shots to splash around tomorrow's dailies. This way, please. They're waiting in the Green Room—panting to see you, in fact!'

Different cameras in the Green Room. Smaller bolder ones, jumping out at her before she has arranged her face or forced a smile. They don't
want
a smile—not any longer. Tears are far more profitable. Tears sell newspapers and newspapers sell books. Tears swell ratings, tears mean cash.

Cry, cry, cry.

‘Don't cry.'

Lyn Winterton watched his wife's tears glaze the cold, buttered surface of her toast. He hated her to cry. He had eaten nothing, just mangled his hot cross bun into shreds and pickings. ‘You can't cry for someone you've never even met, Jennifer.' It sounded harsh, when he had intended it as loving.

‘But she's your
mother
, Lyn.'

Which meant he should be crying. He couldn't cry. His mother had taught him not to. Even with his stupid fancy girl's name, he wasn't allowed to blab.

‘Anyway, I feel … as if I know … her.' Jennifer's voice was frayed and pulled apart. ‘I mean, you t … talk about her so much.'

Lyn made a pellet from a scrap of bun. So she noticed, did she, the way Hester seeped and trickled into everything? Even with three hundred miles between them and a wife who loved him more than his mother did. He forced the pellet down. Jennifer had saved him the last, staling, home-baked hot cross bun, left over from their breakfast. He had never really cared for hot cross buns, but they were precious like the love. She made them every year with such devotion, chopping peel and kneading dough, the whole kitchen warm and spiced. He leaned across and touched her hand, hand that had shaped the buns. ‘It's
you
who are obsessed with her.'

‘Only because you've never let me meet her.'

‘It's not that … simple.' He picked up Jennifer's toast and bit into it, hard. What was wrong with it? Had she made the jam with salt instead of sugar? No, it wasn't salt, but tears. He was swallowing Jennifer's tears. He liked that. To be part of her, made of her. She was special, blessed, serene. That's why he'd married her. Shouldn't have married her. Hester wouldn't be ill now, if he hadn't. He swamped the tears with jam—Jennifer's strawberry in a Branston Pickle jar. He'd grown the strawberries himself—large, fat, shouting scarlet ones. Now they were only shrunk and faded pulp. That's what cooking did—took living, breathing things and turned them into corpses. All good cooks were murderers. Jennifer had won prizes for her cooking. He glanced at her small, strong, sticky, lethal hands. ‘My mother's always preferred to keep herself to herself.'

‘But she's
dying
, darling. It's different if she's dying. I can't bear the thought of never having seen her.'

Lyn split a currant with a fingernail. Hester wasn't dying—couldn't be. She had always told him that she lived for him. Thirty years she'd done that, kept him for herself. More than thirty, actually. Other men got married at eighteen. ‘Look, all she needs is a day or two in bed. Some decent food, someone to …'

‘But I could
cook
the food. Look after her. I'd like to. Please. If anything … happens, then I'll feel we …'

‘It won't.' Can't.

‘But she's eighty-two.'

‘Her mother lived till
ninety
-two. And her mother's mother till two days off a hundred.' That's why he'd had to marry. Couldn't wait until Hester was gone and he was middle-aged and past it. She had had him far too late. Other mothers didn't have babies in their late forties. There had been kids at his school with grandmas younger than his mother was. ‘You don't understand, she's
always
been old. It makes no difference what her birthday says.'

‘Don't be silly, darling—of course it does. Hester can't defy all natural laws, just because she's your mother.'

Why was his wife so literal? He meant old like the hills were old, or like himself. He had lived twelve years longer than Jennifer, which hardly counted when it was a matter of birth certificates or candles on his cake. But in terms of drought and rusting, winters, terrors, cold, he was a hundred thousand years older. She was a child still—child bride—pink and eager and easy. He loved her for it, married her because she had all the things his mother never had. Long, soft, messy hair which sprawled on her shoulders instead of being coiled in contours with a barbed-wire fence of hairpins; legs which opened and closed where his mother was only a clothes peg beneath a starched apron. Breasts. He suddenly longed to hold the breasts, anchor himself to her body.

‘You haven't touched your tea,' he said, instead.

‘No.' She was stabbing at stray crumbs spilt on the tablecloth in the same nervous, distracted way she kept picking at his mother. ‘Look, she
must
be bad, or Mrs Bertram wouldn't have got in touch with you. Didn't you say she went out specially?'

‘Mm. Her own phone was out of order.'

‘Well, then … And today's a public holiday and …'

Lyn shrugged. Good Friday. Christ on a cross and traffic jams on all the roads. The nearest public phone box to the Bertram farm was three whole miles away. Molly Bertram's mother had been only a few years younger than his own and had known him as a baby, as a boy. He hated that. He had cancelled his whole boyhood by moving south to Jennifer, by marrying. He wiped strawberry from his mouth.

‘All right, she's ill, but it's probably nothing much. The Bertrams love to stir things up. The whole village thrives on drama. Why d'you think I left there?' A thousand reasons, and Jennifer the main one, although it had been Matthew's money and Matthew's influence which brought him down to London in the first place. Matthew had even found him Jennifer. He sometimes felt he had never done a thing except through his brother (
half
-brother). Matthew had introduced him to Jennifer in the same smug, efficient, all-controlling way he'd offered help, cash, art-school, housing, job. Jennifer meant more than all of them. She had blushed when he first asked her out. Girls didn't blush in the hard-boiled 1980s. She had cooked for him the second time he saw her—not hot cross buns, but chicken breasts in wine. He had hardly touched a mouthful—he was looking at her own breasts. Soft blue angora following him round the room, bending over the oven, wobbling when she laughed.

After dinner, they sat on two stiff chairs and talked about safe permitted things like television (which he hardly ever watched) and Art which she awarded a capital A, then kept respectfully away from. He knew he would have to choose between her and Hester, her and Hernhope. He no longer needed that cold creaking house footprinted with his fear, blabbing tales of his lonely barbed-wire boyhood. He wanted to shake free of it, move south of it. Jennifer
was
south. She came from a small, good-tempered Sussex townlet where the hills were only swellings and the wind ruffled rather than uprooted. She had south in her face and figure. A gentle, temperate girl who wasn't exactly beautiful, but had something of summer in her—something warm, ripe, plumpish, mellow, ready, when he and Hester were rough, bitter, bowed. Her hair was the faded, sun-streaked colour of shredded wheat, too long to be tidy and too wavy to be chic; her eyes a frail, fragile blue which in some lights paled to wood-smoke and were barely defined by her fine fair brows. All her lines were soft—breasts, profile, features—nothing sharp or angular. A girl you could sink into.

They had married in a dark church on a pale grey morning with a few frail spokes of sunshine nudging the narcissi on the altar. Three years ago. Three hundred years ago. His mother hadn't attended. Hester had treated the wedding as if it were somebody else's letter delivered to the wrong address. He sent her photos, money, endless reparation. He couldn't phone. Hester didn't believe in easy, instant communication. She preferred struggle and crossed lines.

Since the wedding, he had never returned to see her. Every week he planned to; every month he pencilled it in his diary, underneath the guilt. Jennifer coaxed him, urged him, suggested dates, made plans. He always agreed until the date came round. He hardly understood his own reluctance. Perhaps he feared to return in case he became Hester's child again. There should never have been a Mrs Winterton Junior in the first place. He cleared his throat, tried to sound decisive.

‘You'll only make her worse if you try to interfere, Jennifer. She'll say you're … spying on her. My mother never cared for company and now she's almost a … recluse.' He shut his eyes. Their tiny rickety table was lengthening into twelve foot of Spanish oak—the overweening table which had stood stern and massive in his childhood home, solid as a ship. It
had
been a ship, hammered from the decking of an eighteenth-century frigate wrecked off the north-east coast. He and Hester had sat marooned at one small corner of it, dwarfed by its proportions, the row of empty chairs mocking their aloneness. Often, as a boy, he had filled those chairs with instant family—sisters with bare arms, all beautiful, all saving him the best bits, cushioned grandmas, cuddly aunts. Later he invited guests, figures from his school-books, Mohammed and Copernicus, artists—especially artists—people he could confide in, show his drawings to. Leonardo da Vinci, El Greco, Pieter Brueghel. Nice to have a name like Leonardo, instead of sissy Lyn. (‘Lyn's a
girl
!' they had chanted at his school.)