The Hours Before Dawn (18 page)

‘I’ll make some tea,’ was all she said; adding: ‘Was Michael all right coming home?’

‘I’ve made some,’ said Mark proudly, with a flourish of the hand in the direction of the kitchen. ‘I just about needed a pot of tea, I can tell you! I expect it’s still warm,’ he added, rather deflatingly, as Louise turned towards the kitchen. Then, suddenly, the last half of her speech seemed to register:

‘Michael? What do you mean?’ he exclaimed. ‘He was with you. You had him!’

Husband and wife stared at each other in absolute silence. Sensing disaster, though she had not listened to a word her parents were saying, Harriet burst into noisy sobs, and Margery into non-stop enquiry: ‘What, Mummy? What’s happened, Mummy? Who, Mummy? What is it, Mummy?’ – over and over again.

‘We must phone the police at once,’ exclaimed Mark, when he had heard the essentials of Louise’s story. He moved towards the telephone. Stopped. Looked at Louise. It was as if he had said, in so many words: ‘How can we? It’s less than forty-eight hours since you went to them with a cock-and-bull story about a lost baby. They’ll merely think you’re crazy. And, really—’

Aloud he said, gently: ‘You stay here and get the girls to bed. I’ll go back to the fair and make enquiries. Don’t worry, I’ll find him.’ And giving her a pat on the shoulder meant to be reassuring, but conveying, somehow, nothing but pity, he strode out of the house.

It was barely half an hour later when he telephoned to say that he had found Michael straight away, in the Lost Children tent. No, the man didn’t know when he’d been brought in – nor by whom – since he had only just come on duty. Yes, the baby was perfectly well, a bit hungry and fretful, that was all; and they were both coming home immediately.

I
t was exactly as if they had been giving a party that evening. All the world seemed to have heard of this
second
mislaying of the Henderson baby, and one after another they came ringing on the bell to make anxious enquiries. Mark’s mother; Mrs Hooper and Magda; Miss Larkins and Edna; Miss Brandon; one after another they had to be invited into the sitting-room, assured that the baby had been found, and offered cups of tea to atone for this anti-climax. And then they had to be told, over and over again, the same bald, inexcusable story. Louise felt that she could have repeated it in her sleep: ‘I left him in the push-chair for a minute while I took the children on the Caterpillar. I thought I’d be able to keep an eye on him, but it went too fast…. When I got off, he wasn’t there….’ At intervals, Mark would intervene obstinately with: ‘You must have left him by the whelk stall’; and at intervals, too, Margery and Harriet, still not effectively in bed, would say: ‘Who did, Mummy?’ or ‘Which Caterpillar?’

‘Well, all’s well that ends well,’ remarked Miss Larkins brightly. ‘Isn’t it, dear?’ She appealed to her niece, who was frowning dreadfully over the spacing of the buttonholes in the front ribbing.

‘What?’ said Edna; and it was all Louise could do not to say, ‘Go to bed, dear,’ to her, likewise.

‘Psychologically, of course,’ pronounced Magda, stretching out her rather dirty toes with their chipped scarlet nails, ‘
psychologically
, it’s been proved that nothing is
ever
lost by accident. It’s always because, subconsciously, the loser
wants
to lose it.’

She stared challengingly at Louise, and Mrs Hooper looked on admiringly. Both waited, with tongues poised to counter the expected protests with a few well-chosen poly-syllables. But Louise was silent. For one thing, she knew the rules of this
onesided
game too well to play into their hands by protesting; and for another, her attention had at that moment been distracted. Glancing across the room, she had intercepted a look from Miss Brandon – a look meant not for her, but for Mark. A long, meaning look. ‘What did I tell you?’ it seemed to say. ‘
Now
do you believe me …?’

For a second Louise felt a little sick. But Magda was speaking again, reduced by Louise’s silence to supplying the indignant protests for herself:

‘Of course,’ she was saying, ‘most mothers are terribly shocked when you show them that subconsciously they hate their children and long to get rid of them. They won’t believe it. They just won’t face up to their subconscious dislike and resentment.’

‘I don’t see what’s subconscious about it,’ put in Mark’s mother cheerfully, ‘particularly during the holidays, or on Sunday evenings. And as for a baby like that, who keeps
everyone
awake all night – well, if I was Louise I’d curse the day I had him.’

‘Mummy found him under a gooseberry bush,’ put in Harriet brightly, feeling that she had been left out of the conversation long enough, and knowing very well how best to shock the
modern adult. ‘She did. She found him under a gooseberry bush!’ She was rewarded by a gasp of horror from both Mrs Hooper and Magda.

‘Do you mean to say you haven’t
told
her?’ they both breathed in unison to Louise. ‘You mean to say you’ve kept the Facts of Life from her—?’

‘Not kept them,’ explained Louise patiently. ‘I’ve told her the truth any number of times, but she won’t believe it. She just says it doesn’t sound a bit likely. What can you do?’

‘And how right she is!’ exclaimed Harriet’s grandmother. ‘That’s what I’ve always said myself – that there’s not a single one of the Victorian nursery myths that doesn’t sound a lot more probable than the truth. Even after I’d had my own babies, it still seemed terribly unlikely. Don’t you agree?’ She appealed to her rather unresponsive audience – unresponsive, that is, except for Harriet who, enchanted by this easy way to notoriety, began pirouetting round the room, chanting:

Her voice trailed away, and she came to a standstill. It was so rare for Harriet to be embarrassed about anything that for a moment Louise thought she must have stubbed her toe on a chair leg. Then she, too, became aware of the dark, almost maniacal excitement with which Miss Brandon was staring at the child.

‘How’s that for subconscious insight?’ she cried, in a shrill voice quite unlike her usual measured, scholarly tones. Then, suddenly, she recovered her usual manner, and turning to Magda began talking quietly, competently, about the works of Jung.

Quietly. Competently. And with evident acquaintance with her subject. And yet Louise knew, with a certainty that she could neither explain nor reason away, that Vera Brandon was talking at random. Talking mechanically, barely conscious of the apt and well-turned sentences which her training enabled her to pour forth so fluently and with such an appearance of interest. Talking to gain time; talking to cover up some gross and disastrous slip….

Frances Palmer’s words yesterday afternoon echoed suddenly, peremptorily, in Louise’s brain: ‘I had the feeling she was waiting for something.’

Yes, she’s waiting for something. Ever since she came here she’s been waiting for something, and now the waiting is nearly over. How do I know it is nearly over? How do I know that there is an excitement rising inside her that she can barely control? Is it the brilliance of her eyes tonight? Is it that glance of triumph that she throws at my husband every now and then? She glanced at him like that last night, too, as they stood above me on the stairs. What was it she was saying then? Something about the Medea again – she seems obsessed with the play; is it just because her fifth form are doing it for their exam? What is the wretched play about, anyway? Medea. Was she the woman with snakes in her hair – no, that was Medusa. Anyway, Jason comes into it somehow; what can I remember about Jason? Jason-and-the-golden-fleece. That’s all I know. Eleven years spent at school, and all I can remember about Jason is
Jason-and
-the-golden-fleece….

‘I
must
get these children to bed!’ she burst out suddenly, unceremoniously. ‘Come along Margery – Harriet….’

She hurried from the room. Hurried without a glance behind to see if the children had taken any notice of her (which they hadn’t) – upstairs and into the bedroom. Mark’s Dictionary of Myth and Legend would tell her the story of Medea …

So Medea had murdered her two children in a fit of insane jealousy against their father. That was the sense of those last two paragraphs of blindingly small print at which Louise was staring.

But she was no longer seeing the tiny, long-winded
sentences
. She was seeing instead a pram mysteriously wheeled away from her as she lolled asleep on a bench. She was seeing a push-chair whisked out of sight amid the heat and crowds of a Bank Holiday fair. She was seeing a woman sitting in silent hatred staring down at the children in a sunlit garden
throughout
a whole long afternoon. She saw again a dozen hints and glances which she had barely noticed at the time.

Not that it made any sense; for where was the faithless lover? Where the jealousy that could drive a woman to murderous madness? Where was there any clue at all as to what it could all mean?

Under the roof, of course. Under the roof, where Tony, Margery and Harriet had crawled with such unflagging purpose, and with so sadly unintelligible results. Under the roof, where now, if ever, it would be safe to explore, while the party,
including
Miss Brandon, were settled drinking tea in the sitting-room, their voices comfortably rising and falling, continually, like gusts of day-long rain with no stir of change.

T
he fading light of the spring evening still shone through Tony’s gap in the slates, and after the choking, dusty darkness through which she had crawled, it seemed to Louise quite brilliant. The stout little notebook was within easy reach among the shadows, and beside it gaped the dark, jagged hole in the plaster which led into the top of Miss Brandon’s cupboard.

The book was grey with dust, but of course that didn’t mean it hadn’t been handled recently. Dust was thick everywhere; it scattered down in little pattering showers every time you moved. Louise’s heart beat quicker, just as the hearts of her three small predecessors must have beaten quicker as they reached their enchanting spider-haunted goal. Her thoughts, too, followed that same thrice-beaten track: first, the impulse to take the book away and read it elsewhere in physical comfort; second, the realisation that if she did so then there would be no way of putting it back in a hurry should Miss Brandon be heard coming upstairs. The only difference was that the children, telling themselves that they were in deadly earnest, had known in their hearts that they were only playing a silly game; whereas Louise, telling herself that she was only playing a silly game, knew in her heart that she was in deadly earnest.

Hurriedly, under her absurd little skylight, Louise opened the book and began to read. At first the dust in her throat and the ache of her cramped limbs seemed more important than that slashing, sloping writing before her; but before she had reached the bottom of the second page her discomforts were forgotten. She was no longer aware of the dust pricking and scraping in her throat, nor of the cobwebby darkness that moved in ever closer as the line of evening light grew fainter. She was aware only of a winter wood, the dead leaves thick and silent on the ground, and the snow not yet come.

‘
Jan.
13th
’
she read. ‘Today I am certain. How can I be
certain
so soon? I am not a young woman. No, that is no longer true. In the last week I have been growing younger, and that is why I am so sure. That, and this strange new feeling in my breasts, and this new, springing strength in my legs as I stride uphill, and neither mud nor brambles nor the treacherous ditches can slow me down. Hermes skimming over the sea at the bidding of Zeus must have felt like this. No,
was
like this, for now I too am a messenger of the Gods, a bearer of great meanings.

‘But what will Edgar say? I wish I could tell Edgar now, today, while I sit on the damp leaves inches thick, and the sun grows red and low and the mist comes up from the ground. If I told him now I could make him understand; I could; I could! and he and I, a pair of staid middle-aged schoolteachers, would dance for joy among the tree-trunks, hand in hand, leaping and
laughing
, while the red light fails and the twigs grow sharp and black against the sky.

‘Don’t be silly. It’s
Edgar
you’re talking about; remember?
He
will only see the problems, the difficulties, just as he has always seen them during these twelve long years. Twelve years of
living
in sin so cautiously, so respectably, that respectability itself must surely blush! He has a microscope, has Edgar, through
which he examines life most minutely, and analyses all its tiny problems. Of course, it’s only the tiny ones which will go on to a microscope slide.

‘“It’s impossible!” he’s always said when I’ve told him I want a child. “It’s absurd!” he’s always said; and “It’s not as if we could get married,” he’s said. And: “What about your career?” he goes on; and “You’d be ruined” and “You could never keep it dark.” “Mad.” “Ridiculous.” “Out of the question.”

‘Poor Edgar. Poor, quaking Edgar. I will tell him on Saturday.

‘
Jan.
1
6th
.
Edgar horrified. Edgar terrified. Stumbling over problems left and right, as he always does, like a man with hobbled feet, when one good stride would clear the lot.

‘Why can’t I make him see the wonder of what he has done?

‘He is like a child I had in my class once, years ago, who could draw such birds and animals as I’ve never forgotten. Enchanting, brilliant little creatures, that seemed almost to spring out of the paper with their life and movement. And always she would crumple them up, tearful and frustrated. ‘But it’s not
like
a camel!’ she would wail, thrusting some little
masterpiece
into the wastepaper basket; or: ‘I haven’t got the legs right’; or ‘I can’t do the ears.’ She wanted to get things
right,
that child; and so does Edgar. Neither of them will ever know the wonders they created.

‘
Jan.
20th.
So Edgar wants me to get rid of it! The only sensible thing, he says. He’s heard of a man, he says….

‘Get rid of it!’ Get rid of the sun because it could fade the carpet. Wipe away the sea because it might wet your feet. Blast all the vegetation from the face of the earth because a twig might scratch your face. Blot out the stars because it gives you a crick in the neck to look at them. Wipe out
everything
; destroy everything; trample down everything, and then you’ll be safe. That’s Edgar. Why did I suffer it for twelve long years?

‘But why am I bothering about him? Already I have gone a long way beyond Edgar. I can go further; and I can go alone. I have the strength; I have the skill. Strength and skills are
coming
to me across ten thousand years, they are foregathering inside me now, I can feel them, every day and every night.

‘
Jan.
22nd.
Term has begun. I can walk with pride among the girls at last, no longer the withered, barren schoolmarm. If only they knew! If only everyone knew! I would have liked to shout it aloud in the staff-room, on the hockey-field, but I must bide my time. It will be many months yet before anyone notices. When they do, of course, I will be dismissed. Dismissed into paradise; condemned to life! It will be my day of triumph, and even while they pretend to be shocked and pitying, my colleagues will know it.’

Conscious now that the light was fading fast, Louise skimmed through a number of pages until she came to the entry for June 19th:

‘Half term here already!’ she read, ‘and still no one has noticed anything. Or, at least, no one has said anything. Silly to be disappointed – the longer it remains a secret the longer I can go on earning, and that is very important from a practical point of view. But how can I look at it from a practical point of view? Does an explorer, as he nears the top of Everest, start looking up the trains to Victoria ready for when he lands back in England?

‘Yes, it
is
like exploring. Millions of women have been here before, and yet their reports are so vague, so false. Why did none of them – not one – ever tell me of the mighty strength that comes with pregnancy? This sense of being immortal – invulnerable – of being irrevocably on the winning side?

‘And yet, somehow, I have always known it would feel like this. In the past I have heard the sickly, puny women of my acquaintance moaning and complaining about their
pregnancies
: “We feel sick,” they whine: “We can’t sleep…. We get
cramp in our thighs…. You don’t know what it’s like!” they whimper.

‘Well, now I
do
know what it’s like, and I shall be able to tell them. I shall no longer have to listen to their complaints in the abject silence of the barren; I shall be able to turn upon them; to unleash the glorious truth like a tiger among that whimpering throng.

‘
July
7th.
At last someone has noticed. Gladys has noticed. Maybe because she’s P.T. mistress, or maybe because she shared a flat with me once and knows me better than the rest. Anyway, she’s noticed, but she assures me that no one else has.
Assures,
if you please, as if I didn’t
want
them to notice! They just think I’m putting on weight, she says, and they congratulate
themselves
on their own diets and exercises. It’s because I’m big-boned, she says, it never shows so much then. Are these bits of information part of the P.T. training?

‘She is full of sympathy and broad-mindedness and what am I going to
do
?
And what is Miss Warwick going to say? And what are the Board of Governors going to say?

‘I mustn’t snub her, she is kind; but why should she think I need her sympathy and broad-mindedness when my whole body pulses in unison with a Mind broader than she has ever dreamed? Why should I give a single thought to the ant-like squeaks of the Board of Governors when the whole of Evolution prances behind me, laughing and triumphing?

‘
July
22nd.
Term finishes today. “My secret is still safe,” as Gladys insists on putting it. Really, she is growing tiresome with her concern for my future. Where will I go? What will I do? I have ruined my hopes of a post as headmistress. And what about that University job I was applying for?

‘Well, what about it? Hopes, indeed! She doesn’t know what the word means! I tell her I will get a housekeeping job, there are plenty such, and she throws up her hands in horror. A
wicked waste of my powerful brain, she cries. Has she never thought to notice the wicked waste of my powerful body all these years?

‘Well, in two–three months’ time I will come back and see them all. On some late September day, I will walk into the staff-room without notice, with my baby in my arms. I will watch their mouths fall open and their eyes grow round with envy while the red ink dries on their pens.

‘
Sept.
1st.
It is coming. Nearly a month early, but I suppose he is grown too strong, too impatient to wait any longer. My suitcase is already packed – has been for some days, and labelled, too, in block capitals. I suppose I was hoping that someone coming into the room would notice it, but no one did. And if they had, I suppose they would only have tried to sympathise with me, like poor Gladys.

‘And yet, now, I wish I had never booked up at that hospital at all. I don’t need them, I would know what to do. I feel so strong, so wise, and these mountainous surges of feeling – I can’t call them pains – are making me wiser. No, more than that; they
are
wisdom, and I am their High Priestess. They come every few minutes now, they seem to suck away my strength like a wave sucking back over the beaches, leaving my limbs helpless as a starfish on the sand. And then, suddenly, the strength is there again, and twenty times as great, mounted in exact perfection….

‘
Evening.
My son is born; but why did they whisk him away so fast, before I could even see him? A flash of shining flesh, streaked with black like a little seal, and he was gone, and they still haven’t brought him back.

‘I think they are angry, because I would not do what they told me. I would not lie this way and that way and breathe in their footling anaesthetic. ‘Let me enjoy it!’ I cried; ‘I know what to do!’ They are used to women who cringe, and cling,
and call for help. Help, indeed, at a moment when you possess in your own body more strength and skill than the whole staff of them rolled into one.

‘But they look at me so queerly. They are annoyed, I think, because I won’t call myself Mrs. They’ve got dozens of unmarried mothers here, of course, but they like them to call themselves Mrs. But I won’t. Why should I? Why should I pretend to be ashamed when I am half swooning with pride?

‘I shall call him Michael.

‘
Sept.
2nd.
Still they won’t bring Michael. They say there won’t be any milk yet. They say I need rest! Rest, when I’m bursting with energy and joy! I shall go along to the nursery for myself. I shall speak to the doctor. I shall knock some sense into them!’

Louise did not want to turn the next page, to the evening of September 2nd. She knew what she would see, for she had seen it once already, in Harriet’s clumsy capitals. She did not want to see it again, in the naked agony of the original:

‘M Is Dead.’

She moved to close the book. This would be the end. No one could continue such a record beyond this.

And yet there was some more. Pages and pages more. The light was so dim that Louise had to move her face to within a few inches of the page to decipher the next words, blackly and boldly though they were written:

‘They have tricked me!’ she read – and the date, she could just see, was Sept. 5th. ‘They have tricked me! Somehow I feel that I must have known this all along, or I would not have gone on living. That puny, limp little dead baby that they so grudgingly let me see – that was not
my
baby. My baby is alive and well, and somewhere in this hospital. One of those smug, self-satisfied mothers is feeding him at this moment –
my
baby!

‘I know they have tricked me, and I know why they have
tricked me. “Unmarried mother,” those officious, pigheaded nurses must have said to themselves. “Unmarried mother, she’d be thankful to have a stillborn baby, so let’s do the poor thing a good turn and give
her
the dead baby, and give the live one to that nice, respectable married woman who would really be very upset to learn that she had lost
her
baby.”

‘That’s the way they think. Haven’t I seen it, haven’t I heard it, in all their half-hearted condolences?

‘“
Is
n’t
this a piece of luck for you!” they all but say aloud; and that’s how I first began to guess that they were tricking me.

‘Useless, of course, to accuse them. They just shake their heads pityingly and give me a sedative, and if that doesn’t work they give me an injection. They have the answer to everything, these competent fools, with their bottles and their syringes.

‘Sister tells me that my baby had a defective heart, and would never have grown up normal even if he had survived the birth. She doesn’t know that her story only makes me the more certain that the baby they showed me wasn’t – couldn’t have – been mine. I –
I
in such strength and triumph to have borne a defective child? No. No. Only perfection could have come from such power as I was aware of then. I know it. I know it. My baby must have been big and strong, not wizened and undersized like the poor little wretch they showed me. Premature, they said. Defective, they said. And, in addition to everything else, it had ginger hair! Ginger – when I am dark, when Edgar is dark! How can they think I am such a fool?