Born of Woman (36 page)

‘Yeah. Crummy name, isn't it? Plain Jane. Priggish Jane. Quiet little sit-in-a-corner Jane. My mother knew she'd made a mistake as soon as she heard me open my fat red mouth and bawl. So then she switched to Susie.'

Fat red mouth. He laid his brushes down. He'd been working on some lettering, but she would keep interrupting, barging into the study—something Jennifer never did. He had been using quiet Madonna colours—gold and azure—but now scarlet had intruded, bleeding from her mouth on to the page. ‘Why Susie?'

‘That was my second name. Jane Susan Grant. Boring, isn't it? I'd like to have been called something exotic like Camilla or Ariadne.'

‘Grant?' he had repeated. He must have known her surname. Someone must have told him, introduced her in the first place, asked for her on the phone. But somehow he never remembered hearing it. She had never been more than Susie—the sort of girl who didn't own a surname, didn't need a background. She was like a dog, a pet, a child—Flossy, Topsy, Susie.

‘Grant?' he checked again. Impossible. Susannah's name had been Grant before she married—Susannah Jane Grant. Jane. Another Jane. Doubly impossible. Jane Susannah Grant. Susie Susannah Grant. How could they be so different, yet the same? Both fair, young, flaunting,
wanting
it, yet Susannah so refined—never chewing gum or swearing or doing handstands on the carpet. Christ! That had turned him on, though, seeing Susie's skirt fall around her face and her skimpy see-through briefs outlining her crotch with its shock of pubic hair.

‘Go away!' he'd shouted. ‘I'm working. Can't you see I'm working?' She had slammed the door and he picked up his brush and dipped it in the scarlet. He was trembling so much, fat red droplets spattered on the page. He smeared them with his finger, drew an ‘S', then sat and stared at it. Of all the letters in the alphabet, S was the most provocative—a taunting serpent letter, curving out above and below, facing both ways at once, half a labyrinth, a plump, young, unsagging, swaggering letter. H was different. H was older, upright, towering, like his mother, standing with two firm legs upon the ground instead of wobbling and giggling back and forth. H was all straight lines, not entrapping coils and curves. J was somewhere in between them. Started off straight and honourable, then curved away at the base where it should have been most steady. That was Jennifer.

He opened his eyes. There was half a J in front of him—the top part—lying on its side. A road-sign. He was meant to be driving as fast as he could make it, and he and his car were slumped shivering in a cul-de-sac. He glanced at his watch. It wasn't there. Susie had removed it on the picnic, giggling as she snatched it off and hid it in her handbag.

‘Now we've got forever,' she had whispered. ‘There isn't any time. And if we stay out here till dark, we can …'

He had left her and the house
before
dark and had been driving through the night. It must be the early hours now, but the blackness seemed to be deepening rather than fraying into dawn. He wound down the window, listened to the night—drippings, rustlings, the sudden start of a screech-owl ripping through the muffled rumble of the road. The traffic was thinning, anyway. The only cars still out were isolates and fugitives, plunging into darkness. He, too, was escaping—running away from Susie, from Susannah Jane Grant who had just screamed at him and bolted all the doors. Before that, she had kissed him—just his hand at first, a
joke
at first—tickling between the fingers, teasing her lips against the pale bracelet of flesh where she had taken off his watch-strap. Her mouth moved up to his arm, lingered across his shoulders, then up, up, until it met his own lips …

He switched the engine on, swung out into the road. The Morris rattled and protested, spat against the rain, headlights dazzling puddles, tinselling black trees. All the weeks and months he hadn't screwed were screaming between his legs, but sex was dangerous, far too close to violence. A kiss could explode to rape, a caress create a kid. Sex always led on to kids—that terrible bloody mess Jennifer had aborted and then christened as their child. He had sold the diaries for the sake of that non-existent child, sold Hester's life like a pound of butter or a can of beans, seen his mother advertised on television, mixed up with dogfood and detergents, her cold glittering principles reduced to cash and sales. He had only done it because he feared that speck of a cell in Jennifer, growing every minute until it split her open and burst out like an angry, greedy fledgling—beak gaping and insatiable—sending him back and forth, back and forth, to hunt for worms, grubs, insects, cash, cash. He didn't have the cash. Alone with Jennifer, he could manage with a battered car and a room or two in someone else's house. But a child would jeer at him, expect a rich, successful father who could toss him the whole world like a beach-ball.

‘
No
,' he had said to Matthew, when Jennifer started bleeding and his brother came wheedling for the diaries. He was furious she had told him about the pregnancy. Matthew had exploited it, listed all the expenses of being a father, the worries and the ties, hinted that he would never cope with them. According to Matthew, he had never coped with anything without his elder brother's help. Matthew undermined him, made him doubt his powers. Perhaps he hadn't any powers.

‘No,' he said again, when Jennifer went on bleeding and he brought her tea and towels, sat on her bed feeling his terror clammy on his hands. He peered into her chamber-pots before he emptied them. Little clots of blood.

The fledgling didn't budge. ‘If she rests, she'll save it,' said the doctor.

He almost killed the doctor. The chamber-pots were clear now.

‘The lambs are born so easily,' Jennifer had said when they were still at Hernhope and had just returned from Molly's. ‘They seem to slither out with almost no fuss at all, and they're up and suckling within a matter of minutes.'

He had been less than five when he watched a local shepherd tug two decomposing lambs from their heaving mother. The festering limbs had crumbled in the shepherd's hands. The ewe had had twin-lamb disease. They had saved her life, but both her lambs had putrified inside her. All that day, he had carried the smell around with him. He had been punished for leaving his dinner, but mince and semolina had turned into fetid flesh. He remembered another ewe which had died in labour, collapsing in the snow with half a lamb protruding from her hindquarters, its bulging tongue lolling from the stuck and swollen head. The huntsman's van had carted her away, tossed her bloated carcass on a pile of bloodstained newborns with their dead and stinking mothers—the casualties of birth. As a boy, he had often seen that van, doing its round of the local farms and villages—peered inside with fascinated horror—calves with glassy eyes and twisted limbs flung like rubbish on top of rotting lambs. The huntsman would be whistling as he made room for one last ewe, swollen sac of waters ballooning from her rear. The corpses would all be skinned and fleeced, then hacked into pieces and stewed up in a saucepan, or dumped in a deepfreeze as dinner for the hounds.

Once, he had had a nightmare—saw Susannah, dead in childbirth, tossed into that van—blood on her belly, unformed foetus trailing from her thighs. The image stayed around, curdling all his dinners, laying fear down in his body instead of fat or flesh. If Jennifer died in childbirth, then he would be the murderer, since he had made her pregnant. He didn't trust that slick and smarmy doctor. He ought to get a specialist, the finest obstetrician in the county. Except specialists cost money—the sort of money only Matthew had.

‘All
right
,' he stormed at Matthew. ‘Publish your bloody book.'

Everything was bloody—the bed, the carpet, the bathroom. Jennifer had phoned him at the office before she phoned the ambulance. When he reached the house, she wasn't there—only the traces of the baby he had sold his pride and mother for. He found her note, followed her to the hospital. Everything was white there. White wife on a white sheet with a foaming wake of white and sodden Kleenex scattered all around her on the bedspread. He had tried to comfort her, but the words came out still-born. He knew she knew he had never wanted a baby. Perhaps it wasn't a baby at all, but a nightmare or a haemorrhage—even a plot engineered by Matthew. After all, he had never seen the money Matthew promised—or only a fraction of it. (‘There are more efficient ways of paying you than straight money on the table.' Who were
they
to argue?)

After a week in hospital, where they scraped out any remnant of a child, the doctor called again and while admiring the campanulas, advised no sex for a month. Lyn spun it into two. Didn't want to hurt his wife, make her bleed again. The campanulas began to fade and shrivel.

‘It's all right, now, darling, really it is.' Jennifer was wearing her most transparent nightie, leaning over him so that he could see the plunge between her breasts. ‘There's nothing wrong with me.'

Something wrong with him, though. He escaped into the bathroom. He wasn't impotent—not physically—but all the fears had blown up in his head like dead and bloated lambs.
New
fears, now, about the book they were preparing, the book which kept reminding him of babies and defeat, which was a betrayal of his mother, a distortion of her life.

Soon, his wife was trapped in the book as well, fused with his mother, when they were completely unalike. Both had been distorted and the resultant dual female was a danger and a sham—a woman far too powerful, yet who somehow wasn't there. In publication month, his wife literally wasn't there. She was too busy becoming famous, leaving him behind—every male in England gawping at her, while the only one who loved her sat alone at home without her. He was simply Jennifer Winterton's husband, Hester Winterton's son, the little lad at Hernhope, cowering in the shadows.

There were shadows across the road, flickering lights and signals, lorries roaring past him, wheels spinning in his head. He was really making speed now, the car gulping down the miles, its staring yellow eyes never wavering from the tarmac. He was amazed his ancient Morris could go so well. He rarely drove it over forty for fear it would stall or sulk. But now it seemed to understand his urgency, be as keen as he was to reach Northumberland. It was only the row with Susie which had forced him to act at all. Mustn't think of Susie. Shouldn't have touched her breasts. He had craved those breasts for months. Lain in bed saying ‘no' to Jennifer and ‘yes' to Susie, fondling Susie's nipples, screaming out in nightmares, waking up and finding Jennifer there, waking her, wanting her, refusing her again. Dared not risk it—not even through a Durex. Stupid comic things. No man used a Durex. Only fumbling schoolboys or henpecked timid husbands. He wasn't timid—wasn't impotent. Better if he were. If only he could stop thinking about it, feeling it rise hard and gross between his legs, nudging him in the morning, reproaching him at night, urging ‘grab her, make her, force her'.

He didn't know which her. Susie and his wife had become fused in all his fantasies, Susie and Susannah. It was Susie who had tempted him—truly, not in fantasy—pressing against his body with those shameless breasts of hers, bringing back all his childish lusts and longings, choosing a day when it was so stifling hot and muggy he was almost off his guard, damp shirt sticking to his chest, her shirt with a button off and a gap between the …

‘PISS OFF!'

He swerved, almost hit a lorry, winced as the driver opened fire with a fusillade of curses on his horn. Susie had cursed him, too. ‘Piss off' was just the start of it. She was furious because he couldn't (wouldn't?) help her. She should never have confided in him. He'd wanted kisses, not a crisis. All that agonising had ruined everything.

He stared at the compass needle. Whichever way it pointed, some woman was looming up in front of him. South was Jennifer and her cosy Sussex background showing up his own; north was Hester, filling the whole horizon; east was Susie whose family had settled in Great Yarmouth, a huge, messy, feckless family who were all the things he dreaded—violent, squalid, stupid and in trouble; west was Somerset, where Susannah's ancestors had come from before they moved up north in 1850. Should he turn off west? No, he had no choice. He had to go to Hernhope and had to get there swiftly, before light and morning spied on him. He didn't want snooping Molly Bertrams bidding him good-day, or crafty solicitors lying there in wait for him.

He pressed his foot down hard, envying that needle its total lack of doubt. Jennifer would be flying south from Newcastle as he raced north to Hernhope. Or was she travelling in the morning? He didn't even know. It was Susie she told her plans to now, Susie she confided in. Jennifer had soaked up her crass women's lib ideas like a piece of pink spongy blotting-paper. They were printed on his wife now, but all the letters were the wrong way round. They didn't suit her and she didn't understand them. All they did was confuse and cheapen her, make her Susie's chattel and her mouthpiece. That's why he had to leave. Susie was polluting all of them. Too many problems at Putney, anyway. He didn't belong in a family, with its squalls and taunts and babble, its three phones shrilling—one on every floor, breaking apart his meals, his sleep, his work. Too many hands grabbing at the table, too many eyes staring at his untouched food. Even if he escaped to the office, he still had all the grime and grind of London. He didn't fit in with the men he had to work with—jokes and nudges and coarse talk with the secretaries, beer and fake bravado in the pub. Then back to a wife divided into six, he left only with the scraps and gristle of her, the fat and flesh already gone to Susie. Even when he dragged her away from Susie and lay next to her in bed, he still couldn't make her his. It wasn't just the old fears. How could he relax with four inquisitive and sharp-eared boys sleeping just across the corridor? It had been even worse with Matthew there—he and Anne lying one thin wall away, judging him, sneering at his efforts, listening to how short or long or ludicrous it was. He had rarely heard a sound from their side. A cough, perhaps, a muttered word, a shuffle. They must have done it at least four times to produce those four huge sons. How could Matthew be increased by four? Or did he mean diminished? Sons grew taller than you did, cleverer. They giggled at you in corners, whispered behind their hands, asked you riddles which didn't have an answer, demanded money all the time. He didn't begrudge the money, if only he could be certain they weren't jeering at him the minute he had parted with it, mouthing ‘Stupid isn't he? Sissy Uncle Lyn.'