The World is a Wedding (19 page)

‘It's on the house,' the woman said, dismissing the note. ‘Keep it. You're going to need it.'

Grace took the bread and nodded silently.

‘Stay if you want. We are open all day and all night,' the woman stated.

‘All night?'

‘Yes. Those are neon lights and they are always burning. We bake through the night. There is always hunger, and people who want to buy bread.'

Through an arch beyond the counter Grace could see three men kneading huge balls of dough. She felt her stomach cramp. She closed her eyes and felt something inside her open up.

‘Sit down. Make yourself at home.' The woman indicated the many benches at the front of the bakery—all of them empty. Grace moved along a small, warm bench, easing herself in and resting her feet.

‘You on your own?' the woman asked.

Grace nodded. ‘Yes,' she said. ‘Yes—I am on my own.' She sighed.

The woman held another beigel on its side and within a moment it was in two halves. She placed the two halves up on the counter, their pale insides exposed.

‘No one?'

‘No one I can think of.'

‘Like my grandmother. She came to London in 1850 alone, but she knew how to bake, then she married and had children.'

Grace took a bite of the bread, her teeth cutting, her body rising to meet the food, welcoming it into her body.

The woman took a handful of eggs and put them in a pan of boiling water.

‘She walked from Poland,' she said. ‘Took her three months. She was an orphan, her country was overrun by the Cossacks and her home was burned down.'

Grace put her hand across her eyes, still listening to the woman.

‘People's lives were harder then,' the woman stated, turning back to the pan of rattling eggs. She put another huge pan of water on the hob and began lifting trays of eggs to boil from under the counter. Grace sat at the bench, waves of tension coming and going over her, while the woman worked.

Grace looked at the half-eaten beigel on the plate in front of her. Instantaneously, she remembered Wilfred eating dinner in her parents' house many months ago now, and him saying to her father, ‘Please could you pass the salt? Salt for the meat.' She recalled the phrase, the power of it, how strong Wilfred had seemed as—because—he was released from their marriage, free to embark on a new life. And how friendless she felt without him. She had often wondered what had happened to him—he'd told her he was in love with another woman—and what he'd done.

A man walked in and placed his ruddy-faced baby on the glass counter. The baby's mouth was stained with food and his eyes and his hands were searching. The man stood holding the baby, balancing him on the glass edge.

The woman took a basket of beigels from the shelf behind her.

‘Sir?' she called.

Grace watched the woman serve several eager customers who were arriving and standing alertly in the line, waiting not without slight agitation. A baker in a white apron came through carrying a box of gherkins. There was a shout from the bakery at the back. A wave of pain washed over Grace, then receded. She felt she was going to be subsumed by some form of drowning: Grace stood.

‘Is it time?' the woman said to Grace, her back still to her. Grace nodded, her hand pressed hard to the space between her eyebrows.

‘You got anywhere to go to do this?' the woman asked.

‘No.'

‘Down the back, to the storeroom,' the woman stated. She spoke in a matter-of-fact way and took Grace by the arm. Grace was floundering now, and vulnerable. She was led through the kitchen with its sounds of clashing, a flour-covered tabletop and a stack of wooden trays filled with unfinished circles of bread. A baker with a tray of sliced red meat lifted it above his head, stood and let Grace pass.

‘Comfortable there?' another baker asked her and smiled. ‘Not really,' he said, answering his own question. ‘Women's business.'

Suddenly from outside in the darkness came a great shout—a call rising up—indecipherable, sounding like a sea shanty, the voice of a reveller spiralling with strength and full of yearning. Grace felt the sound go through her, and heard a voice within her say,
I am strong enough to do this
, and the words echo around the chambers of her body.

Grace let the storeroom around her recede. At first she saw the door, the flour-patted walls, the tools of a bakery, heard voices demanding . . . but then the sights, the colours, the objects in front of her became blurs and the room lost its form, became a coloured mist, then disappeared, and the sounds became silence. The feel against her flank of tea towels warm from a stove faded, along with her sense of time, as all of her went within herself, deeper still, until she was nothing but a heartbeat and consciousness, and what was around her was nothing to what was within her. This is beyond pain, Grace thought to herself.

After what felt like—perhaps was—hours, she heard someone say, ‘It's a boy.'

 

When Grace opened her eyes, the woman was sitting by her, watching over her. Grace lifted her head from the sacks that had been folded into a pillow.

‘Rest a while longer,' the woman said, looking down at the child in her arms.

Grace got onto all fours and made to stand up. ‘I must go,' she said.

‘You've just had a baby.'

‘No, I'm fine. I am.'

The woman put her hands on her ample hips, blocking the light from the bakery behind. Grace stood, like a weakened cow, her legs akimbo, wobbly, new, raw.

‘You can't go.' The woman put her hand on Grace's arm and Grace almost collapsed next to a sack of flour. ‘You have a mind of your own, don't you? The child needs to be fed and in the warm; you need some tea and food. You can't labour, then walk.'

Grace knew this wasn't true. In the past, the poor women in the farms around Narberth, burdened by pregnancy, had worked in the fields even in winter, hacking out vegetables, clawing into the frozen earth with picks, bundled against the cold in their shawls and woollen skirts. They gave birth in the fields, lying on their backs or down on all fours. And then they picked the baby up from the earth and swaddled it in a shawl tied to their fronts, rested, drank from a flask of brandy, ate a hunk of cheese and a piece of black bread. A couple of hours later, they would stand on stout limbs and labour again, at the hard winter soil. It was ever thus.

Grace took a step.

‘You need a bath.'

Grace had to admit she needed a bath. There was a butchery to birth, as if the inside ruptured onto the outside, and she must wash herself.

Soon the woman had placed a tin bath in the corner of the room and was filling it, pitcher by pitcher, with hot, steaming water. Grace sat leaning against hard bags of flour. The child was wrapped in a clean warm cloth at her side.

‘Don't you want to hold your child?' the woman asked. She picked up the child and put him into Grace's arms. Grace took him but then placed him on the floor beside her, stood up, removed the remains of her splattered clothing and stepped carefully into the bath.

The woman began mopping the floor in the middle of the room.

‘That was over mercifully quickly. And quietly,' she said, putting her hand to her brow in relief. Then: ‘You're a queer one.'

Grace sat on her haunches in the bath.

‘Are you going to keep the child?'

Grace turned around in the bath and faced the other way—in the opposite direction to the child. The woman rested the bloated mop against a table piled high with empty wooden trays. ‘Hmm,' she said, and picked up the child.

Grace looked down at her body in the bathtub; she had not properly looked at herself naked for months. Her nipples were a freckled coffee brown. Her tummy button was blackened. But it was her body again. It had been used and returned. She wiped clots of blood from her ankle, then her forearms, and felt purged, expunged, lightened, as if a burden of sin had been removed, a memory and an experience razed and forgotten. She rested her head on her knees. She was herself again. It had been a long time.

‘So do you have somewhere to go?'

‘Yes.'

‘Where?'

Grace rubbed at her legs.

The woman put her finger in the baby's mouth and the baby sucked toothlessly.

‘Do you want your child?'

Grace stood up suddenly in the bath. She took a clean tea towel from a pile on the table and briskly rubbed herself dry. The child mewled: a small, pathetic sound.

‘He's hungry. He'll need milk soon,' the woman said.

Grace dressed silently. Would she be cold and sharp as broken cut glass? And leave her child to the world? Not care? She shocked herself by the hardness she felt, but it was familiar to her too; she felt as if something of her own mother came upon her. She had watched her mother's cruelty all her life, seen its mannerisms and its sighs, its gestures and its phrases. And she could ape it, adopt it and feel it ripple into herself. So Grace took the corset and wrapped it round herself, tightening the xylophone of straps. She was thinner. At last. Grace buttoned her dress; all the while the woman watching, holding the child.

‘You can't leave the child with me.' The woman leaned on her mop. Grace straightened her clothes and reached for her coat.

‘Before you go,' the woman said, changing her tack and sitting down on the dusty floor in the corner of the storeroom. ‘Before you go—you can leave him, but feed him first. It is late; it will be hours before I could find him milk. Feed him and he will sleep,' she argued. ‘Then I will take him and find him a home. But feed him once before you go.'

Grace put on her coat.

‘Sit.' The woman patted the ground beside her.

Grace sat down beside the door but not beside the woman. The room was bright, over-illuminated and painful to her eyes.

‘Here.' The woman crawled over, cradling the baby. Grace sighed. Weakness came over her and the woman placed the child, which she had wrapped in linen, in Grace's lap. Grace sat like a cloth doll as the woman said, ‘like this,' and, ‘like this,' arranging the child in Grace's arm. The child searched as if by instinct for the source of food. He was floppy and inert and Grace felt floppy too, and inert like a jelly. The child would do as it would with Grace's body, as her brother had done, and then Grace—separate, alone, herself again—would leave. Grace would belong to herself again. She sat there and the child searched and found, and lost and found where the food came from, wiggling in frustration.

‘Help the child,' the woman urged, but Grace ignored her so that the woman took the bap of Grace's breast as if it were uncooked dough that she was moulding, until it was in the child's open mouth. Grace stared ahead, dispossessed. The woman said nothing, kneeling in front of Grace; one hand holding the child's head up, the other hand holding Grace's breast in the child's mouth. And there the three of them huddled, the child sucking, Grace exhausted and the woman at the outer realm of her skill and knowledge of what it took to make another woman give birth to herself as a mother.

 

Grace got off the tram at Piccadilly, by Eros, who was poised lightly on his pedestal, positioned to shoot an arrow at an unsuspecting mortal. She stopped in a dank doorway near the new Swan & Edgar department store, and rewrapped the swaddled baby so no one could see its face—so
she
could not see its face.

Grace felt weak. She leaned against the cold brick wall of the doorway. That morning, she had left the bakery then collected her suitcase from the Caledonian Lodging House, knowing she would no longer be welcome there. The landlady had made that clear. All afternoon she had wandered around the streets, finally catching a tram and sitting slumped on it until it terminated at Piccadilly Circus, the conductor shouting, ‘The Angel of Christian Charity,' when they reached the statue which Grace had thought was called Eros. She should be hungry but she wasn't; her appetite had fallen away, and she needed to rest.

‘Are you in trouble, miss?' a young man with an amputated arm asked, looking into the doorway where Grace was half-hidden.

‘No.'

‘You are unwell?'

‘No. I am well.'

‘Only asking, ma'am.' The man had spoken to her as an equal and not as a maid who tidied other people's mess. He walked away, turning round briefly to check on her. He smiled, and doffed his cap. All I need to know, Grace thought, all any woman needs to know about any man, is that he is kind. That's all.

It was late afternoon; the daylight was beginning to fade. She must find a convent and a cardboard box. She stepped from the doorway facing the new electric billboards on the front of the London Pavilion, their lights incandescent in the fog, and slowly trudged across Piccadilly. Her father said if a man stood long enough in Piccadilly Circus he would see the whole world go by, and meet everyone he knew. But Grace didn't want to meet anyone she knew and traipsed onwards, through the formal garden in Leicester Square then towards Trafalgar Square, to an imposing church with six pillars in its portico and a tall, sharp spire. Pulling her shabby coat around her, she stopped and read the black and gold sign:
Saint Martin in the Fields.
Church of the Ever Open Door.
But she hadn't yet found a box, and if she left it here, there were people all around who would see her walk away, perhaps call her back. A huddle of unemployed men were camped on the stone steps, like a tatty, listless pack of dogs. One lay curled on newspapers, one with his back to the many pedestrians, the sun-missed skin above his trousers revealed. Their homelessness frightened her. The baby began to mewl and the men turned.

‘Come here, love,' one of them called, but Grace walked quickly away.

She kept walking, passing the National Gallery where people were spilling out onto the pavement. They chatted, buttoned up dress coats and pulled on leather gloves before dispersing onto omnibuses. Grace stumbled down a lane behind the Gallery and through quiet, cobbled side-streets until she found a discarded cardboard box outside a closed butcher's shop. It was battered but clean. She waited a moment, looked around surreptitiously, took it and walked on. It was a large box and she struggled to carry it along with the baby.