Born of Woman (7 page)

They didn't go till evening. Lyn lay on the high, narrow bed—Susannah's bed—the one she had died in. Both his mothers dead now. He tried to make some sense of it—poke a finger in his grief and feel it smart and bleed. It didn't. Death was still a party dragging on downstairs.

He pressed his aching head against the pillow. Susannah must have lain here, exhausted from such company. How had she ever borne it—so young and dazzling a creature amongst all these country bumpkins with their coarse complexions and their baggy clothes? Susannah's skin was Dresden, her body cut from silk. He knew because he had seen her. Just a glimpse of her, hidden in a locket, one curl of her hair. He had found the locket when he was still a stripling in short pants, rifling through the huge mahogany roll-top which belonged to his dead father. The desk was locked and the room was out-of-bounds, but Hester had gone shopping and a boy at school had taught him to pick locks.

He had held the booty in his hands—a heavy heart-shaped locket on a golden chain. He'd forced it with his dirty fingernails. One side opened to reveal a lock of hair, faded but still fair, curling gently like a smile. The other side was jammed. He put a penknife to it, sliced his finger, bled through two large handkerchiefs before he won. The prize was worth the blood. The young girl gazing at him was a different species from the rugged village women who creaked and clacked in Mepperton or the spindly schoolgirls he avoided at his school. Her face was prouder, finer, with high, preening cheekbones contradicted by the wanton tumble of hair which cascaded to her shoulders, one daring curl falling across the cleavage which the locket-frame cut off. Her eyes were huge, wooing, shameless; long lashes almost fluttering him towards her; moist lips slightly parted as if to proposition him.

‘
Susannah
,' he whispered. He knew who she was, because he had already drawn her in his dreams. Now he made his sketches fit the truth, until Susannah rose huge and three-dimensional in every surface of his life. For eleven days he owned and worshipped her (
adored, beloved
), sleeping with her locket every night, staring at it, touching it cool against his heated body—touching himself.

When he came, Susannah held him stiff, reassured him afterwards when he felt shamed and sticky; kissed his lips apart when he had bitten them to stop himself from crying out.

The eleventh night he was lying awake with her, pyjama cord undone, locket against his groin. They were making noise together, forgetting the other, second, older mother whose bedroom door was opposite and who didn't have a groin. Suddenly Hester was looming up above them, white shadow shaming the darkness, frown stretching to the ceiling.

He dragged his pyjamas back again, hauled the blankets over him. There was a tiny thud as the locket fell off the bed and glinted on the floorboards. Hester pounced.

He never saw the golden heart again. Nothing was ever said. The night was locked away, the desk was sold, and Hester kept her bedroom door ajar. For a month he slept with his hands outside the blankets.

His mind was less obedient. When he tried again, he found Susannah as unabashed and eager as before. He no longer had her photograph, but he had transferred the negative deep inside his soul and printed and reprinted it so that her features smiled from each room and shelf and mantel, as they had done once when Thomas was alive. It was only Hester who had removed her rival's likeness from the house, after she'd married the widower. Matthew had told him that, much later on—one of the reasons Matthew had left for London. Lyn often wondered where those photos were—burnt or smashed or …

He leapt off the bed. He could hear voices in the hallway, the front door slamming, opening, slamming. The guests must be leaving now. He had gone upstairs to rest and be alone, not tangle with Susannah. If he was well enough for her, then he should be down there with the others, dragging out his duty, sharing the farewells. He stared in the small scratched mirror on the dressing table. His eyes looked like singe-holes in a sheet, too dark and fierce for his pallid washed-out face.

He smoothed his crumpled jacket, stood listening at the door. Goodbyes and thank-yous echoing up the staircase, offers of help, bounty, comfort, patronage; Jennifer netted down in Village Aid; sucked into coffee mornings, shopping rotas, sewing circles, church bazaars. Nothing of her left.

The door closed on the last of them. Silence tiptoed out from corners and stretched itself like a cat which had been shooed away by too much noise. Lyn walked warily downstairs, glanced into the sitting-room. Yes—everyone had gone now, but the place was littered with their droppings. Ashtrays belching on to tables, cake crumbs trodden into rugs. They had even left their
smell
behind—the faint and lingering odour of feet and sweat and bodies, cigarettes and scent. He shut the door on it, went through into the kitchen. Jennifer was swaddling pies in greaseproof, packing cakes away, all the surfaces around her piled high with dirty dishes. She came towards him.

‘I hoped you'd be asleep, darling. Do you feel a little better? Is there anything you want?'

‘No,' he said to both. ‘Look, let me help with that.'

She shook her head. ‘You go back to bed. You look quite washed out.'

He rubbed at a lipstick stain on a gold-rimmed Dresden cup, smeared it, made it worse. ‘I'd have thought
Molly
might have …'

‘She offered—more than once—but I wouldn't let her help. She's done enough already. Anyway, I'm quite enjoying it. It went so well today, I …'

‘
Well
?'

‘Yes. Everyone was so wonderfully kind and helpful and really interested in us. I'm amazed so many came, Lyn. There must have been over sixty at the service. They just turned up, some of them from miles away. I think that's … marvellous. I mean in Cobham you only go to a funeral if you're a close friend or relation with your own private invitation. The church was full today without
any
invitations. Do you know what Molly said …'

‘Quite a lot, I imagine.'

‘Oh, Lyn, don't. She's been such a comfort. She said it's like a
family
up here. That's why all those people were at the service. It's a sort of loyalty. You see, even if your mother was … well … a bit of a private person, she was still one of the family.
You
are, too, she said.'

Lyn slooshed tea-leaves down the sink, dregs clammy and still warm. So Molly Bertram was his mother now—sister, cousin, keeper. Jennifer was forging all those friendly pressed-steel handcuffs his mother had spent a lifetime snapping out of.

‘Molly told me how talented you were. She said her mother knew you as a boy and even then …'

‘
No
one knew us, Jennifer. We hardly went anywhere. We were never like the rest. We stayed shut up like …' He hated the self-pity in his voice. People with unhappy childhoods should be banned.

‘Darling …' She kissed him. ‘It's over now. Things will be better—you'll see. I mean, there's nothing to … keep you here now. You could even sell the house if you …'

‘Don't be stupid.' He pounced on the wreckage of a cheese-and-onion quiche. If Hernhope went, he wouldn't exist at all. Matthew had taken over his head and hands, and Jennifer owned the body in between. He might snuff out his boyhood, but he didn ‘t want the whole place razed, Hernhope Tipp-Exed off the map like some gigantic error. Hernhope was like God. You might not believe in Him, but you couldn't do without Him. Even if you yawned through services or shivered in the cold vaults of the church, you still preferred to keep the temple standing.

‘Look, I'm sorry I shouted. I …'

‘Don't worry, darling. Look, why don't you go back upstairs and try and sleep?'

He couldn't sleep, but he trailed upstairs again, simply because it was tidier and his wife wasn't there to make him feel a brute. He stopped outside Susannah's bedroom door. He and Jennifer were sleeping in that room, not only because his own was dark and cramped, but because he had always longed to infiltrate it. In his boyhood it had been permanently shut up, as if the doomed young hussy were a dangerous presence still. He had often tried the door, peered in through the keyhole, imagined Susannah, flushed and voluptuous, lying on the bed. All he had seen was a tiny patch of floorboard.

He had been stunned to find the room so
ordinary
. The bare essentials—bare. Bed and wardrobe, washstand, hard cane chair. The whole of Hester's house was sparsely furnished. She had sold the larger and more expensive items, and disapproved of frilly and frivolous extras like cushions, pictures, pets. In Jennifer's home they'd had velvet rocking chairs, cocker spaniels, silken tassels on the curtains, and little embroidered tray cloths under plates of langues de chat. He envied Jennifer's fat upholstered childhood with its plumped-up bolsters and its solemn photographs in silver frames. (Susannah had silver frames and velvet fingers. Susannah had a lap-dog.)

He dragged his clothes off, shivering in the cold. The sun had stayed behind in the churchyard. Even when it shone, it never really warmed you. Just a bright veneer of enamel over the iron core of the countryside, dazzle without heart. He touched his face. The skin felt dry and smooth. He hadn't cried yet. People must have noticed. Unnatural, they'd be saying—callous and hard-hearted. He could feel the tears dammed somewhere in his gut, underneath that one small sausage roll which was all he had eaten since the day before, but which had swollen like a boulder. When
Jennifer
‘s mother had died just eighteen months ago, she had sobbed for three whole days. Real tears which soaked the sheets. He kicked the skirting. Self-pitying again. He had a wife, for heaven's sake—a bloody saint, in fact, who put up with his moods—a job, a house, a …

He lingered by the window, dusk floundering into darkness, hills keeping endless watch around the house. The sheep grazed further down now, banished by the forest which overshadowed them. He could hear the bleating of the lambs. The place was like a labour ward in April. He remembered a schoolfriend's father who had built extensive lambing sheds to increase his yield. He had often stood there as a lad, watching scores of panting ewes jammed together in the pens, their straw sour and stained with dung, bloody mucous trails or bulging sacs of waters hanging from their backsides. He had breathed in the stench, the mess, the clamour, seen lambs born wet and slimy, some not born at all. Shepherds tugging malformed limbs from wombs, deaths mourned only as loss of cash.

He drew the curtains, turned his back. Birth and death were both so cruel up here, so casual. Nature simply shrugged. He wished Jennifer would hurry. He'd feel better with her there. He could hear her closing cupboards, locking doors, then coming up the stairs, fiddling in the bathroom, flushing toilet, running taps.

‘Snookie,' he shouted. No—mustn't call her Snookie. She might think that he wanted it.

She stood at the door, too plump and flushed to be in mourning, hair falling round her shoulders. She was dressed in white now, not in black, wearing some long, trailing thing he didn't recognise. He could see her nipples pushing through the stuff. Wrong to notice nipples when his mother was a headstone.

‘Hurry up and get undressed. I'm whacked.'

‘I
am
undressed. This is my nightie.'

Nightie? It looked more like a shroud. ‘I've never seen it before. It's not Hester's, is it? You're not wearing her clothes?'

‘Lyn, you're crazy. I've had it months. Your mother wouldn't wear a thing like this. I've seen her nightgowns—real old-fashioned flannel with ruffles round the sleeves.'

He tried to imagine Hester wearing ruffles. Impossible. She had always snipped the frills off things, wrapped life in plain brown paper.

Jennifer turned the covers back.

‘Come to bed, darling, and let's try and get some sleep. Gosh! You're freezing. Snuggle close and I'll warm you up a bit.'

She flopped towards him, warm and heavy. He had already switched the light off, so he could no longer see the shadow of her nipples, the faint bloom of down above her upper lip. Lips were the most dangerous things of all. Unzip a mouth and it unlatched things lower down. She was so close now, he could feel her almost breathing for him, the edges of her body unravelling into his. He pulled away, rolled over to face the wall. You didn't grab your wife when the flowers on your mother's grave were still alive.

‘Turn round, Linnet. Just let me hold you a moment.'

Linnet. Baby name he had never had with Hester. Name his wife was forbidden ever (
ever
) to say in public. Stupid, sissy, girly, beloved name. He turned.

She kissed him. He was stiff in seconds. How could he not be, when this was Susannah's bed and he still had that locket cold against his heat? Now he was older, Susannah could do more for him—deep-throat him, swallow him, have him forbidden ways. He kicked the blankets off. Hester was barely cold. Trouble was, he hadn't had it for six days. Not since the death, of course—only brutes did that—but even
before
, the news of Hester's illness had put him off his stroke. They had tried it on the Easter Saturday night, but Matthew had somehow ruined it. It was
Matthew
‘s face he'd seen frowning up from the pillow, nagging about his job. His thing had curled up and died. Now it was rampant when it was blasphemy to own a cock at all. Trust him to stiffen when his duty was to sob. It had been the other way round on his wedding night—lying limp and almost blabbing with a real live woman panting there beside him, naked with her legs open. He had almost botched that night. Hester had taught him it must be forced and furtive, that women didn't fancy it. Jennifer did. She was too loving and assiduous, the bed too damned co-operative. He had often dreamed of
forcing
girls—sometimes forced Susannah in his fantasies, flung her on her front and rammed in the forbidden way. He never dared with Jennifer—wanted to, but feared to. A wife might be offended.