Birmingham Rose (12 page)

Gladys saw Dora’s eyes fill with tears, and she made sympathetic noises. ‘And Sid . . . ?’ Gladys looked the picture of concern. She was a tiny woman, made even smaller by the bent bones in her legs.

Dora shrugged in reply to the question. ‘I stick by my own,’ she said. ‘He can moan and mither as much as he likes, but Rose is staying home and we’ve got to make the best of it. But I’ve hardly had a decent night since it happened, I can tell you.’

Gladys tut-tutted, saying, ‘As if there ain’t enough to worry about. I saw you was looking anyhow lately, but I thought it was just the babby.’

‘Babbies,’ Dora corrected her.

Gladys gasped. ‘No! You sure?’

‘Sure as I’ve ever been,’ Dora said. ‘And I can feel them both now. But I always know, and I’m just as sure our Rose is carrying a lad.’

When Old Lady Gooch heard the news from Gladys she said, ‘Well I never. That’ll take the little madam down a peg. Strutting about here with her airs and graces. Now she’ll find out a thing or two. I should send her off to the Church Army. She’d soon find out what happens to girls who ain’t careful with themselves.’

*

On the afternoon of the coronation, Rose lay on her back in the bedroom, seeing little white clouds move across the pale blue sky outside the window. She could hear the excited hubbub from the street as the party got into full swing. All the kids would be sitting along the tables with the grown-ups standing round, everyone in little hats and all enjoying the food and the rare day’s holiday. She knew this was a day of all days for Grace, who would be almost counting the minutes until the evening paper came out carrying the pictures. And then tuppence for the
Weekly Illustrated
on Saturday. A breeze blew through the open window and she heard snatches of a band playing somewhere.

Wish I was like you, Grace, she thought. Grace, who could live off other people’s exciting lives and not expect to have much excitement in her own.

Rose lay, not wanting to sleep but feeling tired and muzzy. The further the pregnancy progressed the more remote she felt from her life as it had been. Even her sense of despair, which had been most acute when she first knew she was to have a child, had dulled. She felt she was living in a kind of trance which would only end with the birth.

How could she have had dreams of becoming a teacher, of being a friend, let alone equal to someone like Diana? How could she keep in contact with her now? She wasn’t even equal to Geraldine who had, after all, held down her job. And when she thought of Michael Gillespie, sometimes she wept with shame. What would he say if he knew what state she was in?

She put her hand on her belly and felt the light twitching of the child inside her. She had no bad feelings towards it. It just seemed unreal and, as she’d told Grace, not part of Mr Lazenby at all. But its presence, its inexorable growth in there, and the certainty that one day she must experience what her mother had gone through, frightened her. She felt so helpless.

‘You were a stupid little fool,’ she said to herself. ‘Thought you could do great things with your life, didn’t you? Do better than your mom?’

She listened bitterly as a loud cheer rose from the street, and another and another.

There was a moment of complete silence as the three women waited. Then a snuffle and a cough, and finally the baby let out its first anxious cry.

‘He’s all right!’ Gladys cried. She was tying the cord as the baby lay between Rose’s legs. ‘You may’ve got here a bit too soon, my lad, but you’re going to be all right!’

Dora was sitting next to the head of the bed, suckling one of the twins. The other lay asleep in a drawer on the floor. They had been born only three weeks earlier and Dora’s face sagged with exhaustion.

‘Well – you’ve done it,’ she said to her daughter, suddenly feeling choked with emotion. ‘So now you know.’

Rose lay back, hot and worn out. The labour had come on early and had been painful but not too prolonged.

‘Reckon you didn’t have it too bad,’ Gladys said. ‘Specially for a first. No need to’ve had old Joan in after all, was there?’

Despite Dora’s pleas, Rose had flatly refused to have ‘that old cow’ anywhere near her.

She lay looking at her tiny son lying curled in her arms. His hair was very pale, even though still damp from the dunking Gladys had given him. He turned his wrinkled little face and began to snuffle at Rose’s body.

‘He knows what he wants, anyroad,’ Dora said. ‘Give him a bit of titty, Rose.’

Rose was startled by the force with which the tiny baby sucked at her, and the pain which gripped her innards as he did so.

She looked down at his face. His eyes were tightly closed and he was already completely absorbed in feeding. ‘I’m going to call him Joseph,’ she said. ‘He looks like a Joseph.’

It took several days before she began to feel much for the child. He was very small, with the tiniest limbs Dora said she’d ever seen on a baby. Rose gradually understood just how much her life was tied to him, so that his slightest sound would set her heart pounding and wake her from sleep or make her leave whatever she was doing to attend to him. It was his fair hair and skin that at first had made him seem such a stranger. She had never seen a baby with such fair hair in the family, and it took some getting used to. But by the end of the first week she could look at him and find tears running down her cheeks at the realization of how beautiful he was, how small and helpless.

‘Let me nurse him,’ Grace would say, when she was home. ‘He’s a lovely babby, Rose.’ And sometimes Rose felt reluctant to hand him over, but Grace would take him and cuddle him close, singing softly to him until he cried to go back to his mother.

With three babies in the house, Dora and Rose were both sleeping downstairs on makeshift beds on the floor. One night as they were getting settled down, Sid came in and lurched awkwardly over to Rose. She looked up warily at him.

‘It’s all right, I’m not going to bite you,’ he said roughly. And then out of his pocket he pulled a small wooden object. ‘I made this for the kid,’ he said. ‘Here. Come on – take it.’

Rose found she was holding a little wooden horse, rather rough and misshapen, but still obviously a horse, with a little spot of black paint on each side for its eyes.

‘Here Joseph, this is for you,’ she said to him. His blue eyes were open, staring over at the gaslight on the wall. ‘Your grandad’s made you a little horse. Are you going to say ta?’ It was a relief having Joseph between her and Sid, to use the child as a way of communicating with him. Since Joseph was born he had been gentler with her, as if he could cope with her now she was doing what a woman was intended to do.

‘Thanks Dad,’ Rose said, feeling unexpected tears fill her eyes.

‘No need to make a fuss,’ Sid said awkwardly, going to the stairs.

Mother and daughter spent most of the night up and down feeding the babies. If it wasn’t one it was another.

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ Dora said one night. It was well into the small hours and she was sick with fatigue. ‘These two babbies are going to have to do everything at the same time or they’re going to finish me.’

The boy, Billy, was yelling loudly for food. Dora woke the little girl, Susan, and latched the two of them on, stuffing a couple of pillows under her arms for support.

‘Pour me a drop of milk, will you Rose?’ she said. ‘I could do with something on my stomach.’

Joseph was asleep, so Rose got up and handed her mother a cup of milk in the candlelight. ‘I hope he’s all right,’ Rose said, frowning down at Joseph where he lay tucked up on the floor. One of his hands was clenched in a tiny fist next to his cheek. ‘He’s not feeding as well as he was.’

‘Can’t say the same of these two,’ Dora said wearily.

‘Here,’ Rose went over to her. ‘Give one over here. Joseph’s not interested yet and I’ve got enough spare.’

She took Susan off her mother and held the unfamiliar body of the little girl. Even being a twin she felt rounder and heavier than Joseph. Having been able to rest more than she had during any other pregnancy, Dora had carried the two of them almost to term. They were good-sized babies. Rose sighed and looked over at her little son.

‘Be right as rain in the morning,’ Dora said. ‘He’s just tired I s’pect.’

By the end of the night they managed to get some sleep. Rose lay down next to Joseph with her nose against his soft scalp, hearing his quick little breaths. Now her life before him seemed even more like a dream. The days and nights felt almost indistinguishable with the round of feeding and changing his napkins and waiting for him to sleep. Joseph had happened to her, and he was not just a part of her life – everything she did was connected inextricably with this tiny person next to her.

Rose was dreaming. Dreams came rarely with all the broken nights, but this one burst in on her, vivid and clear.

She was with Diana on the tram which ran south along the Bristol Road out as far as the Lickey Hills. They had done that ride together a few times, Diana treating her at weekends. The tram lurched along the tracks down the middle of the road with the hedges separating them from the traffic on either side. When they had travelled that way in reality the tram had been crowded full of people, but in her dream it was empty. She and Diana had seats right at the back, looking down the deserted carriage. When they swayed through Bourn-brook the tram passed the red bricks of the university, its pointed clock tower standing tall and elegant above the buildings around it.

‘I’m going to go there,’ Rose said. And then suddenly she was chanting,

Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?

I’ve been up to London to visit the Queen . . .

And Diana sat beside her, her pink cheeks streaming with tears. ‘I don’t want you to go, Rose,’ she begged. ‘Stay and be my friend, Rose. Please stay.’

And then they were both crying and holding on to each other and the tram rolled downhill, down and down, and they didn’t know or care where it was going any more.

Rose woke, tears wet on her cheeks. Diana had felt so close to her again, and she knew with a physical ache how much she missed her and how ashamed she felt. All the letters Diana had sent, full of hurt, begging Rose to write and not to forget her, were upstairs, lying unanswered in a cardboard box beside the little wooden elephant which had put the seal on their friendship. How could she reply to those letters now?

As she lay wretched in the grey dawn light, one of the twins started stirring and began to cry. She saw Dora pull herself up off the floor, still stunned by tiredness.

Perhaps Joseph would eat a little better this morning? During his first week he had thrived, but over the last fortnight he had sucked at her breast for a time and then given up to lie listlessly, as if the effort was too much.

She turned to him to enjoy lying with him while he was still asleep, trying to forget the memory of Diana’s distraught face in her dream. Very gently she stroked Joseph’s soft baby head with one of her dark fingers. His skin was so much paler than hers! He felt cold and anxiously she searched out his hands. They were chilled.

‘Come here,’ she whispered, and turned him to cuddle and warm him.

His tiny body was stiff. Looking at his face, she saw his lips were still and blue.

Rose jumped up as if she’d been bitten, her lungs constricting so she could hardly breathe. ‘Mom!’ she gasped. ‘Something’s wrong with him. Quick – come here!’

Dora hastily put Billy down and rushed over. She picked Joseph up and Rose saw her face tighten. She listened to his chest and rubbed him vigorously. Then she put her mouth over his tiny one, breathing into him again and again to rouse him. Finally, with her head down, she laid him on Rose’s bed, instinctively drawing the covers over him. Very slowly she turned to her daughter, who was standing still as a rock beside her.

‘There’s nothing else I can do, Rose,’ she told her. ‘He’s gone.’

A man had died in a neighbouring court and Dora arranged for Joseph to be carried on the hearse the next day. When the horse clattered to a standstill outside, Rose was still holding the little body to her as if her arms would be fixed forever in that position, even after he was taken away from her.

‘For God’s sake get him off her,’ Sid said to Dora upstairs as they readied themselves for the funeral. ‘I can’t stand to see it any longer.’

‘D’you think I’m enjoying it?’ Dora snapped. ‘She’s just parting with the child in her own time.’ She remembered how her own dead children – the twins, Violet – had been snatched speedily away from her by everyone around, who thought it for the best.

Downstairs, Marj had arrived from Sparkbrook, dolled up in a smart black dress with a full skirt and a hat with a wide sloping brim. ‘Make us a cuppa tea, Grace,’ she said, sitting herself down with exaggerated relief. ‘I’m worn out already after carting all the way over here.’

Sam turned his head in surprise as Grace replied, ‘There might be a drop left in the pot, and if there is you can get it yourself.’

Marj pulled herself to her feet, murmuring huffily about what a welcome she got in her own home nowadays.

‘You’ve not been so keen to look on us as your family when it didn’t suit you,’ Grace replied.

‘Now, now,’ Sam said. ‘That’s enough of that.’ He looked at Rose. She didn’t seem to be listening to the conversation at all. She sat with her eyes fixed on her little son, as if she was intensely afraid that she would forget what he looked like.

Grace went up to her timidly. ‘They’re here, Rose,’ she said. ‘The undertaker wants to know if he can take him.’

For the last time Rose slowly kissed the boy’s cold cheek. She ran her finger along the line of the tiny nose and soft lips.

‘I’ll take him,’ she said, and the others moved back to let her through.

She walked outside and handed him over to be laid in a small box that Sam had nailed together for him. The undertaker placed it on the step of the hearse, close by his feet.

A crowd was gathering in the street. The coffin lying on the hearse was draped with a Union Jack; the dead man had served in the war. As the horse began to move off, Sid solemnly saluted it, standing as straight and upright as he could manage.