Half Broken Things (17 page)

In what seemed no time at all Steph stopped being cold and warmed up. She moaned and rocked and pulled herself nearly upright when the pains got hold of her, in fact she got terribly hot. When the contractions came, her mouth stretched in an awful grin of effort; her lips cracked with the dryness and her cheeks grew bright red. It was terribly hard work. She was in a lot of pain and it was awful, just watching the pains gradually get longer and longer and the times between them grow shorter. She sweated until her hair was soaked. Michael dabbed her face with a cold cloth and did not once leave her side. She would tell him to rub her back, or she would take hold of his arm with both hands and squeeze tight, hissing and wearing that grin, and all I could do was stand there. I felt so helpless and ignorant. I had no idea how much worse it was going to get, and so I felt frightened too, but tried to hide it. I brought down more bedding, and some towels, thinking we'd be bound to need them at some point. I made more tea, but Steph sicked hers up a short time later. After about an hour and a half I couldn't bear it any more and got very upset myself. Even though I knew it was out of the question, I said we should get her to a hospital. I was too distressed by the pain she was in to think straight, of course. Because bringing an ambulance or a doctor down here (Michael was in no fit state to drive) and letting strangers in might have risked everything that was important. Who knows where meddling by the authorities might have ended up. There would have been all the business of addresses and names and it would have all got back to the agency and the owners somehow. Not that I had thought all this out at the time. I just wanted the best for her, I wanted something to be done about the shrieking. I wasn't thinking straight, so thank goodness Michael was. It was Michael who said it was too late for that, and then Steph herself got even more upset and yelled and swore she would not move from here. So on it went, for another two and a half hours. By this time she was writhing, and bawling for somebody to help her, and very soon after that she screamed that it was coming.

But it still seemed to take an age. She half sat, half lay, panting, and got Michael to hold her from behind. She pushed and pushed. I don't think I have ever seen such effort. Then she shouted at me, as if she really were angry, to see if it was coming yet, and I had no choice but to look, and there it was, this veiny, foreign-looking dome growing and swelling out from between her legs with a long slick of slime and blood. Also, I'm afraid, foul, gingery, wet rags trailed out from somewhere behind her—I'd had no idea that could happen. I cleaned her up. Steph won't mind my going into such detail; she'll never know. I'm putting it all down because it was so extraordinary. It's such an ordinary-sounding thing, ‘having a baby,' and I had not realised until that night how very
extra
ordinary it is. It crossed my mind that the only other birth I'd ever had anything to do with must have been my own, and it struck me that birth is simply the most puzzling, immense duet between human beings; nothing ever again in the life of mother or child will demand such struggle and mutuality, and possibly forgiveness. So when one witnesses another birth, one is changed. The ferocity of my feelings for that child and for her parents began then, with the sight of her bald blue head as her mother pushed her out of her own body into my arms, and it has never abated.

———

Jean stepped out of the kitchen into a freezing pink dawn and closed the door quietly behind her, leaving Steph and Michael holding each other and their daughter, squatting on piles of gore-soaked bedding on the kitchen floor. Outside, the night had been a cold and windless one, and now a frost lay over the walls of the garden and across the bare arms of the trees. Sunlight was slicing through branches and slanting across the grass. Jean took a few steps towards the walled garden, wrapping her arms round herself, breathing in the cold water smell of the almost-spring earth and listening to the rasping of rooks in the tops of trees. Despite the cold she would stay out here a while; she needed a little time to herself. She needed a moment to recover from the terror of it, from the baby's eventual rushed, slippery emergence with limbs jerking and its frowning face squeezed tight, and its appalling silence. God, the silence. And then, as she had been trying to wrap a towel round the wet torso and lolling head, there had come the splutter and the sucking yell, then Steph's answering cry. Between them she and Michael had managed the tying of a length of string round the cord, both taking instruction from Steph, who now lay exhausted, but in charge. It was Michael who had claimed, holding up the length of string, that that was what the hot water was for, and had insisted on boiling it first. Steph had lain waiting with the baby resting on her stomach while he tied it; but it was Jean who had finally taken the scissors from his shaking hands and cut the cord. Then she had suggested quietly that the baby might like to suck, and although the idea seemed a novel one to Steph, she had nestled the child at her breast. Jean had been unprepared for the lumps of liver that had slipped out of Steph soon after, but Steph herself had peered over between her legs and watched it without surprise. Presumably it was just the afterbirth, and all quite natural. Jean stopped on the path and looked back towards the house. There would be more to do presently. She had reached the wide crater at the end of the garden from which she had torn the four buddleias out by their roots, and she now recalled something she had heard or read somewhere about burying the afterbirth. Was it Indians, a tribe of Red Indians, she wondered, who buried it in the ground at the base of a tree, or planted a tree in that place? It was, she remembered, supposed to represent the claim of the new child to that very spot on the earth, which was thereafter the place to which it and all its descendents would belong. It seemed to Jean suddenly apt, marvellous, poetic. She hoped Steph and Michael would think it so as well and, turning, hurried to go and tell them.

When she got back to the kitchen Steph and the baby were installed in the large Windsor chair wrapped in a duvet, both almost asleep. Michael, sitting at the table waiting for the kettle to boil, had laid his head on his arms. Steph looked up.

‘I thought,' Jean began, pointing to the mess on the floor, ‘I thought . . .' But she found it was impossible even to say the word ‘afterbirth', never mind explain about burying it. Steph was staring bashfully where she was pointing. They both had been struck by a sudden, immobilising shyness; hardly surprising, Jean thought, since they had after all met for the first time only a few hours before. The enforced intimacy of Steph's labour and Jean's reluctant midwifery was now receding, leaving each regarding the other with a slight wariness. Jean felt suddenly foolish, anticipating how it would sound in the bright stillness of the kitchen; something about a little ceremony with the afterbirth, a thing Red Indians did, exactly what she was not sure. How mad and, worse, meaningless the words would seem; while those that were not meaningless, that the ceremony would bind them all to one another and to this place, were presumptuous and unsayable.

‘Yeah, sorry,' Steph said, trying to ride out her embarrassment. ‘Should have got some old newspapers or something down first, shouldn't we? Didn't think. I'm covered in it and all, underneath. I need a bath. So does this one here.' She smiled, dipping her head towards the baby's. ‘And I'm dead sore.'

Jean beamed with sympathy and also with relief at finding her role again, as if Steph had just handed her the script. Grandma, mother-in-law, indispensable, here to help. ‘Oh, of course! You must be tired out, you poor thing. You're such a clever girl. Now,' she said comfortably, ‘would you like a bath straightaway, or a sleep first? Michael will take you both up, won't you, Michael? I'll deal with that,' she added, nodding back towards the floor, ‘and then with breakfast. You must be hungry as well. And then we'll just have a nice quiet day. Nothing but rest for you, young lady.'

She rather amazed herself, discovering not just the right tone to take but also what her job would be from now on. Here she was, already talking as if she had never been anything else but the gentle arranger of all domestic comfort; it seemed like a little triumph to add to the day's great one. Jean sighed with the happiness of knowing what she ought to do next.

‘She's a great cook,' Michael told Steph, as he helped her to her feet. They were both almost mournful with tiredness. Jean watched the three of them go, and then went to find rubber gloves and a bucket. How easy and clear everything had become. Michael and Steph's bathroom overlooked the other side of the house. So while Michael bathed his daughter and the new mother in soft warm water and found clean and beautiful things to dress them in afterwards, she would have plenty of time to slip the lot into the hole in the garden. It would be a more private and prosaic committal than she had had in mind: just her and the bloody contents of a blue plastic bucket. But there would be enough time, before she had to return to cook breakfast, to linger over the dug earth and whisper a few words (the right ones would come to her) and to watch the bright entrails of her grandchild's birthing soak into the soil of the place that would be ever afterwards charmed.

‘Steph was thinking of Michael-ah,' Michael said shyly, from the chair by the window. He and Jean had brought breakfast up on trays to the bedroom which was now his and Steph's. From where she sat in a chair on the other side of the bed Jean considered this, drinking her coffee. Steph's head rested on several pillows and her eyes were closed. She was lying in the largest and most comfortable bed she had ever been in in her life, and Michael-ah, dressed in new baby clothes that Jean had directed Michael to find in the nursery, lay sleepily in her arms, feeding without urgency. Her hand was covered by a too-long sleeve, which had been folded back. They had picked out the smallest baby suit with a label that said ‘newborn', but it was much too large. Michael reached over and pulled the material back so that he could see the tiny fist stirring the air, as if its waving were a necessary part of her sucking. Three teddy bears and a white baby shawl lay on the bed next to the tray with Steph's empty plate.

‘Michael-ah. Or Michaela, perhaps?' Jean murmured. Michael looked embarrassed, so Jean went on quickly, ‘It's a lovely name. It reminds me of Miranda, it's got the same number of syllables. I think it means miracle.'

Into the warm silence came Steph's slow voice. ‘Miranda. I like that better. A miracle. Michael, would you mind if we called her Miranda?'

Michael smiled. ‘She is a bloody miracle,' he said. ‘Miranda, then. Miranda,' he yawned.

Jean tiptoed out and went to her own room, knowing that she was going to have to cry at the honour of choosing the baby's name. They all slept until the day was over, except that Miranda, stirring from time to time, would feel the skin of her mother against her face and with her soundless mouth she would seek and find a nipple, clasp it between her gums, and tug.

Of course it wasn't all plain sailing. You'd think, wouldn't you, that once we'd all found one another, and the baby having come safely into the world, that all we'd have to do then would be to settle down to life in our new house. And there could be no easier house to settle in, I knew that already; and they were so pleased to be here. I don't believe we ever did discuss it in the formal sense, it was just understood by us all that we would all be living here from now on. Everything we needed (or very nearly) was here, in a way that seemed quite magical to them. I think I had stopped being astonished at how the house somehow went on providing what we needed, starting with the time and the privacy just to be our best selves. Or perhaps I had begun to take a little credit for it myself, as if the house and I worked together, or at least had begun to reflect each other. It was close to the feeling I had first had when the two Dutch students turned up. It had become personal. The house and my life now were like things I could shape in my hands, like arranging flowers, or painting, something I was creating and of which I was also a part. Steph and Michael ended up feeling the same. But the important thing to start with was that they stayed. Any other arrangement would have been unnatural. I never did quite get to hear much about the place where they'd been living, but they were certainly not in any sort of hurry to get back to it. It was at least a week before Michael went off in the van and came back with the rest of their things, none of which quite suited the new way of life. I don't think we kept any of them except for some of Michael's books.

No, it was the baby who worried me from the start, in a niggling way that I told myself was due to my own inexperience. And thinking it was inexperience, of course I said nothing, not wanting to start up any doubts about my not actually having had any children. I mean I don't know what they thought of my story at that stage, but it seemed a courtesy not to challenge whatever they had decided to believe. I know new babies seem impossibly small, but Miranda was so tiny. I didn't like to say so and her size didn't seem to worry her parents, but I wondered all the same. On the day after she was born Steph was still in a bad way and I volunteered to change Miranda's nappy—there were plenty, thank goodness, in the nursery—and I slipped downstairs and popped her on the kitchen scales. It was difficult! I weighed the biggest mixing bowl first and then put her in it, which she did
not like. She wriggled so much I told myself that it couldn't be a completely accurate reading. But four pounds five ounces! Still, I said nothing. Steph was only slightly built herself, so maybe the baby would just take after her. And it seemed that Miranda had arrived on the early side, so you wouldn't expect her to be big. As
long as we kept her well fed and cared for there didn't seem anything to worry about. Babies grow, don't they? In fact it's all they do, really.