Born of Woman (5 page)

He could feel tears pricking against his eyelids. Impossible to snivel. He fumbled in his pocket for a handkerchief, felt the still uneaten fruit-drop sticky at the bottom. He had always hoarded sweets. Cash had been tight in his boyhood. Hester had trounced bankruptcy by selling off the farm, but the proceeds had to last. He had copied her economies. A roll of Polos or a twist of sherbet might be saved up for a month or more. She had almost spun herself out, refusing to die or retire because there was always too much to be done. She had made everything herself—sheets, quilts, cheeses, soaps, soups, herbal remedies, even his shirts and trousers. He had loathed it at the time—caged and chafed in prickly serge and fly buttons when other boys had Terylene and zips; or swallowing murky potions with brown bits at the bottom instead of pretty coloured pills. He had been born to death and bankruptcy, but Hester had turned them sides to middle like her thinning sheets and made life and service out of them. She had never added trimmings. Never fun or flowers or laughter. They were Jennifer's. Even now, Hester was smiling only with her mouth, a smile he couldn't remember and didn't like. His mother's frown had crumbled the stars like biscuits, made the world hang loose upon its hinge. Smiles were as rare as Polos. Or had he remembered her wrongly? She was so feeble now, he could have blown her out like a candle.

He stared at the eyes he shared with her. People had always marvelled at their eyes, so exactly reproduced it was as if Hester had ordered two identical pairs from the same mail-order catalogue and then sewn his on as a sort of tag or name-tape, so that he could never stray too far or deny her as his mother. Other times, when he looked into the mirror, he had the strange sensation that Hester had climbed into his skull and was staring out from his empty eye-sockets. No one else in the world had eyes that shade—eyes which mixed blue and grey and black in equal parts, then set light to all three and conjured a different colour from their ashes.

He only wished they didn't look so changed—not only dimmed and paled, but now defeated. Always before, they had chided and chivvied the world, flashed and frowned it into dumb submission. Perhaps Jennifer would make them flash again, the wife he shouldn't have.

He went to the door and called her. ‘Look, leave the tea,' he shouted. ‘Come and say hallo.'

A minute passed. Another. He tried to tame the silence by telling Hester about his Cobham garden, filling the room with fancy southern flowers. Only the hardier breeds survived at Hernhope, the braver birds.

Jennifer had reached the top of the stairs. He heard the staircase creak and grouse a little as she hesitated on the landing. There were five doors leading off, all half closed.

‘In here,' he called. ‘Last door on the right.' Hester was still smiling. She wouldn't when she saw his wife. Jennifer's sweater was too clingy and she hadn't combed her hair.

He could see the door was grudging, reluctant to admit her. A shaft of light from the passage fell across the lino. His wife was trapped in it—golden, shining, mockingly young and healthy. He wished he could tone her down a bit, shade Hester from her glare.

‘This is … Jennifer,' he told her.

Neither of them spoke. He felt angry, suddenly. Couldn't they make it easy for him, help him out, even shout or quarrel? Anything was better than this cold and gaping silence.

‘Can't you say ‘‘hallo'', Jennifer?'

‘H … hallo?'

‘Yes, of course, what's the matter? Introduce yourself.'

‘Lyn,
don't
, she's … I think she's …'

‘Could you manage the range?'

‘Well, yes … I …'

‘Good. Shall we have that tea, then? She likes it strong. No sugar. Give her the cup with roses on. That's her special one. You'll find it on the dresser. Well, don't just stand there. What's wrong, for heaven's sake?'

Jennifer clutched his arm so tight, her fingers hurt. ‘She's … y … your mother's …
dead
, Lyn.'

Dead? Hester couldn't die until he had explained things to her, paid his debts, made her understand.

‘D … don't be silly. She's just dozed off, that's all. She was awake a moment ago. I was telling her about …'

‘No, Lyn, she couldn't have been. She's …'

‘Ssh,' he said. ‘You'll wake her.' He smoothed the counterpane, picked up a crumpled Kleenex from the floor.

Jennifer was still fussing. ‘Look, go and lie down, my darling. I'll stay with your mother.'

She
mustn't
call him ‘darling', not in front of Hester. And Hester wouldn't want her—only him. He should never have gone away from her, then she would still be well. Perhaps she had died the very day he married and had lain here three whole years, coldly smiling while he rutted with a wife. Maybe those crabbed and grieving Christmas letters had been written by a corpse, a corpse with open eyes.

He tried to fill the eyes with words. ‘Do you want
me
to make the tea? I could do with a cup myself. And how about a biscuit? Hester's probably hungry. We brought some with us, didn't we?'

‘Y … yes, but …'

‘Good, pick her out a plain one.' It was always plain biscuits with Hester, hunks of doorstep bread. Only in his dreams did mothers feed him fancy sugared sweetmeats, tiny crustless sandwiches, comfits in his satchel, kisses in his bed. He fumbled in his pocket and felt the fruit-drop hard and reassuring. He was glad it was a red one. Red. Dead. Funny when things rhymed. ‘Dead', Jennifer had told him. She wasn't often wrong.

‘Dead,' he muttered. He had to try the word out. It meant nothing much at all. Just a sound, four letters—two vowels, two consonants. He stared at his mother and saw the letters had spread all over her. Strange he hadn't noticed.

He prised the fruit-drop out, picked it clean of fluff, and put it in his mouth.

‘Dead,' he said again, and listened to the crunching in his head.

‘I am the resurrection and I am the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live …'

The words sounded wrong. Lyn had rarely been to church, but when he had, there had been fire and poetry in the prayers, not this new, flat, grating prose. He remembered now. The vicar had called (after the doctor and the undertaker) and discussed the funeral with them. Something about the Alternative Service Book and keeping up to date with modern trends. He had barely listened. He'd been choking on his mother, lying dead upstairs. Jennifer had entertained the Reverend, shown him the body, cut him walnut cake, chosen flowers and date and hymns. The vicar was using some new-fangled translation of the Bible which was an insult to Hester, who had probably never heard of it. He wasn't a vicar at all. His body was a footballer's, his voice a referee's. Funerals should slink and whisper, not boom and jar like this.

The church was still dressed for Easter. Narcissi and blue iris, the young, slim, still-closed buds of pointed beech leaves, flowering redcurrant, blossom sprays, fat and pricey white chrysanthemums. Easter flowers still blooming and triumphant, out-scenting the forced, cribbed, formal wreaths, which almost hid the coffin. Who had sent all those wreaths? The tiny church was packed as if for a wedding, the wedding he had never had up here, neighbours jostling and whispering in the pews, people he didn't know and didn't want, inviting themselves to share his grief, his wife. He glanced at Jennifer looking strange and strained in black. He hated her in black. His mother had worn it since his father died, which meant she had always worn it. His birth was a sort of mourning for that death. He couldn't think of death. Every time he tried, his mind glazed over or filled with stupid things like hot cross buns or wedding cakes. What was he doing here—dressed in someone else's suit at some empty social gathering arranged by Jennifer?

When he'd grown up in Mepperton, God had been out-of-bounds like so much else. Church was what other people did on Sunday mornings, in order to be first with the gossip in the pub. Pub and church stood almost cheek by jowl, so the faithful moved from chalice to tankard, unbuttoning coats and throats as fug and babble took over from cold stone. Hester had kept him strictly away from both. He had always felt that sense of not belonging. Church was part of the village, part of life. You knelt in your pew on Sundays to prove you still existed. Which meant he and Hester didn't.

He glanced uneasily around. People might be criticising him for having ignored church all his life and only now exploiting it when he had a body to dispose of. He hadn't had much choice. The nearest crematorium was Newcastle, and you couldn't burn a mother anyway. Hester loomed too large in life and death to end as a pinch of ashes on a mantelpiece. Besides, all his ancestors were buried in this churchyard.

He shut his eyes, tried to block Hester out. She, too, might be criticising. She had always been so solitary, she would hardly approve of all these nosy neighbours mumbling prayers and murdering hymns around her, before she was crammed into an over-crowded boneyard.

The congregation shuffled to its feet, cracked and wavering voices upsetting Hester's peace as
The Lord's My Shepherd
rasped from sixty throats. There were shepherds just behind him, gnarled and ruddy men looking stiff and strange in jackets and black ties. Two o'clock on a weekday they should have been in their work-clothes on the hills, tugging new-born lambs from ewes. Why should they risk their flock and waste their time putting Hester in the earth? Was it respect, curiosity, or the hope of a free meal? Jennifer had cooked the meal. He had tried to tell her not to. Custom and tradition ruled up here. Whisky and ham sandwiches was the usual simple fare. Jennifer had been fiddling about with vol-au-vents and trifles, pastries and meringues. He didn't want his mother swamped in mushroom sauce and egg whites, her kitchen taken over, her body embalmed in cooking smells.

He tried to join in the singing, stumbled on the words.
‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …'

Death. His mother cold and bloodless in a box. Jennifer had ordered a coffin as casually as she might have bought a coat. He stared at it squatting brashly in the aisle—a mean and ugly thing knocked together by some Philistine who saw coffins as his bread-and-butter. It couldn't be his mother's—she had never been that small. She had towered above his childhood, her head had touched the sky. There had been only Hester in the whole of England (him always in parentheses—safer in parentheses—safe and overlooked). He wished they'd stop the singing. It was such a sluggish, doleful sound. The colours from the stained glass windows leapt across the altar and fell like petals on the grey stone floor of the nave, shimmering in the sunlight. The sun hadn't been invited, yet it gatecrashed, interrupted, couldn't even sit still. The vicar bowed and strutted in the glare.

‘Hear my prayer O Lord … for I am but a stranger with you, a passing guest as all my fathers were.'
That was more like it. A stranger, yes, and he had never had a father. Never a brother, either. Only Matthew who boasted a different (dead) younger, tragic mother. Everything came through Matthew, even Hester. Hester arrived at Hernhope to replace the mother Matthew had killed in being born. Hester had been the housekeeper. (Impressive heritage—his mother a servant and his father a bankrupt.) Only years later had she married his father and become Mrs Thomas Winterton instead of Hester Ainsley. She was punished for the marriage because Thomas died within the year, before he, Lyn, was even born.

He and Matthew had both killed off a parent—he a father and Matthew a mother—the young and beautiful Susannah, Thomas's first wife who had died at just eighteen. Their headstones stood together in the churchyard, leaning towards each other as if hungry to embrace. Susannah's was the larger and more elaborate, since all the widower's love and loss and passion (and a large chunk of his cash) had gone into the stone, whereas when Hester buried Thomas, love and money were both more strictly rationed. Time and weather had lashed against the sandstone, leaving it storm-shocked, moss-encrusted, streaked with tears of rain.

As a boy, he had often sat beside the grave, mourning not so much his father, as Matthew's romantic mother who had become a fairy-tale. He would trace the crumbling inscription with a finger.
Susannah Jane, adored and beloved wife of …
The adored and beloved roused him, as if he had come across Susannah with her clothes off. His own mother had never been adored, never naked, never even young. Hester was gaunt, lined, buttoned-to-the-neck, and regarded love as an insubstantial extravagance like sherbet. He had never had a sister. Susannah became sister, beloved, adored and—soon—obsession. He had heard she was fair, so he made her lily-white; he knew she was young, so he turned her into a child-bride who was somehow also his mother (which was irrational and impossible since she had died fourteen years before his own conception). But Susannah stood for youth and hope and beauty, allowed him to do the things Hester considered wicked or disgusting, embroidered multicoloured mystery and romance on the drab worsted of his life. Other times, he
feared
her as a mother, guessed she would be too flighty or too dangerous, neglect him for her lovers. Then he craved for Hester—the moat and drawbridge of her scratchy skirts and enveloping overalls, the way she could pluck a chicken, lance a boil, lance his terrors and squeeze the pus from them, put boundaries round things. In the end he fused them, joining Matthew's shimmering mirage of a mother to his own stern and solid one, so that although he had only the one parent, there were always two of her—a wild girl gowned in scarlet and a warden garbed in black.

‘We brought nothing into the world,'
intoned the vicar,
‘And we take nothing out.'
Birth and death again. Birth always sprang from death. He had seen it in the churchyard. New spring flowers twining round the almost eroded ‘S' of Susannah Jane. New born lambs huddled behind the larger older graves. Daffodils in flower along a path made of old uprooted tombstones. He had trodden on a skull and crossbones carved in stone.
‘Sacred to the memory of …'
Except it wasn't sacred. Someone had pulled it down to make a path. Would Hester be a path? People trampling on her? Impossible.