Sail Upon the Land (17 page)

That evening they sat again in the little room where they had had their first picnic, drinking P&Q’s house champagne.

‘We could see each other a bit, don’t you think?’ he said.

‘I’d like that very much.’

She hugged to herself the secret sense that she had needed rescuing from the dragon of boredom. She glanced sideways at her prince on the shabby old sofa. Fair and pale he looked just right to her. She leant over and kissed him.

Melissa had poached the small purple plums she had found in the old orchard. She was pressing them through a sieve when the first dull twinge invaded her. She stopped and looked out of the window as the sensation swelled inside her before dying away. Bit like the curse. The huge old kitchen, warm with heat from the Aga, had become her preferred sanctuary as the year rolled away from the sun’s warmth. There she cooked and stored, day after day, against an unimaginable future: jam, whole meals for the freezer, chutney and pickles.

Munty always knew where to find her when he came home from London, rushing in to sit at the table, drink tea and talk to her. He was always so pleased to see what she was making. His mother had never made jam or cakes for him, she’d been too busy working.

Pearl and Reg had sold the family business. Having read the trade papers like runes to see the future, they had cannily decided that the new supermarket in the High Street was a severe threat to the traditional grocer. The average age of their customers rose sharply. The younger ones deserted them for snatching TV dinners from huge freezers and ready-bagged sugar from open shelves and chucking them into those trolleys imported from America. They had no desire to allow their customers to help themselves as if they were in some of kind of uncouth cash and carry. It seemed so perfunctory and unhelpful. Retirement to the warmth of Malta beckoned as Reg had service family there so off they went for a new life.

Munty kept in touch by letter but there was still an awkwardness between mother and son. His mother had been fine with Bert but Munty was another matter, growing away from her, particularly after her new marriage and the deaths of his grandparents. Add Melissa and the house and it was just all too difficult. The invitation to visit was always there of course but they could barely afford to mend the Castle Hey roof let alone fly to Malta.

The unexpected pregnancy following so quickly after their quiet wedding had delayed their plans for the house. Munty told Melissa that she must rest, they could have exciting business ideas after the baby was born. To begin with she was disappointed and frustrated. She’d hoped to get going, like her mother did with her father, with all the loving and helping she had dreamt about. Even those ideas began to shimmer like mirages.

The pregnancy had changed her. She was finding it more and more difficult to remember what had been so lovely about the idea of marriage and Munty. She was so tired sometimes she just wanted to cry and the dreaded glooms came over her more frequently and refused to shift. It was this ridiculous bump swelling her apron like a sail before the wind. When her waist had returned she would be better. She just had to grit her teeth and stick it out.

As the pregnancy had advanced she was plagued once again by a fear of failure and foreboding. Failing as a deb, a nurse and now failing as a wife. Would she fail as a mother too?

She hadn’t wanted to be pregnant within months of the wedding but after a bit of fumbling around with French letters it had seemed less embarrassing to do it without. That was when everything stopped being pleasant and started being frightening. Strangeness crept up on her with the developing pregnancy. She woke often in the night and stared into the dark worrying and worrying about the huge house that loomed and boiled up all around her.

It was so big and shabby and there seemed to be no end to the money it would suck up before anyone would want to pay to be there. She put the sieve down and straightened herself, leaning a hand against the base of her spine in an ancient, unconscious gesture.

Real married life would begin, she told herself, and she would surely be a proper, grown-up Lady Munty once the baby was born. Not the sad creature dragging itself about when no one was looking. She heard her own voice aggressive inside her head.

‘Pull yourself together,’ it said. ‘You’re a lucky girl. Stop being so hopeless and useless and feeble.’

She would cry. Then she would make sure she had washed her face and powdered it thoroughly and plastered on some kind of smile-shaped expression for Munty when he came home.

She could picture herself as a tiny ant-like creature scuttling about preparing meals and vegetables for the huge chest freezer she had been given as a wedding present by Pearl. It sat half empty, demanding offerings like some malevolent icy god. It should be such fun to have so much space and her own home but when she was alone the space closed in on her. In her dreams she was trying to shore up this toppling pile with something small and useless like a teaspoon or a flower. Maybe the dreams would leave her when she was free of the baby. Maybe she would be able to love Munty again.

She was upset that she didn’t want him to touch her at the moment, but she was so fragile like tissue paper that would tear in his hands. Her skin crawled at the memory of his fingers on her body. She was rapidly forgetting why she had liked it before.

One night a few weeks into the pregnancy he had pushed up her nightie and put his hand on her belly, wandering a little lower and delving gently between her soft folds. Previously a delicious sensation would begin to creep over her like a warm breeze and her thighs would fall apart as she sighed and smiled in the dark. This time she sat up, slapping at his hand and sobbing as if in pain.

‘What’s the matter?’

She could see how much she had upset him. They were both virgins when they married and he was quite shy and reserved about sex. She knew Munty had bought a book and read it carefully in order not to let her down. Why was she frigid all of a sudden?

‘I don’t know. I just don’t want you to do that.’ She twisted her legs together and put her hands over her face. ‘I don’t think we should. Not while I’m pregnant.’

He dropped back on to the pillows beside her.

Soon afterwards she’d moved out of the master bedroom and into a smaller room down the passage with a dressing room off to one side. She felt frantic with guilt, leaving him marooned alone in the great Gothick bed where they had spent their first chaste night more than two years ago. It was so high you had to run up to it and jump and she used this as an excuse. She could quite easily have asked him to bring the library steps upstairs.

She was less panicky in the new room. She didn’t have to be close to Munty at night, and feel his disappointment like a cold draft as their warmth crumbled to ashes. Sarah came over to stay, and helped her make curtains for the windows and dressing table of her new room. Her mother didn’t say anything, but she could tell that she disapproved of her leaving the marriage bed. So she had twittered on about making it nice for guests after she had recovered from the baby. She was ashamed in front of her mother just as she had been when she had left nursing.

She scooped the thick damson puree into the jam pan and wearily stirred in the sugar she had warmed in the Aga, stopping each time the waves of sensation poured through her body. Half an hour later, she potted up the damson cheese, added waxed discs and secured the cellophane lids with elastic bands before licking and sticking on the labels she had written earlier. The warm jars gleamed like garnets on the shelves.

It was time to give in to the pains, to accept what was coming and allow her pregnancy to end. Beyond that, there was a landscape hard to imagine. There must be a baby in the picture somewhere, but it eluded her. The wriggling mound that had disturbed her sleep for the last few months seemed to have no human form. When she lay awake in the dark, heart pounding, she was frightened by the separate life that dwelt inside her like a parasite – a cuckoo or a worm.

She left the kitchen and walked up the brick passage relieved that her mother had chosen and paid for a midwife and maternity nurse to look after her at home. She’d dreaded the idea of going to a hospital.

‘Miss Smith?’ she called. ‘I think it may have started.’ As she stood there, she felt a warm, wet gush between her legs and something splashed on to the stone flags of the hall. She looked down terrified and ashamed at her loss of control to see water gleaming on the floor.

‘Miss Smith? Something’s happened.’ She was frozen to the spot. The liquid dripped uncomfortably down the insides of her legs, making her shiver as it cooled in the draught. Maybe the baby would just fall out. She began to cry as the waves of sensation built to crests that she had not experienced before.

Miss Smith came down the stairs in dignified haste.

‘Don’t worry, your ladyship, it’s just your waters have broken, we’ll soon get you cleaned up and into bed. With any luck it won’t take too long, that’s a very good sign. Now don’t cry, it’ll soon be over.’

She took Melissa’s arm and helped her to step over the puddle, supporting her up the stairs. Melissa was vaguely comforted, but then was gripped by another pain coming much more quickly after the one before. She stopped, and grabbed the banister, squeezing her eyes and gasping for breath.

‘Just try to breathe steadily, dear. Come on, we’re nearly there. You can have some gas and air for the pain as soon as we’ve got you into bed.’

Melissa, with the idea of pain relief ahead, sped up a bit, but had to stop every time a pain started welling up. Quite soon Miss Smith had installed her in a clean, fresh bed, with a waterproof pad underneath her bottom. She was examined which was always a bit embarrassing but her mother had warned her, ‘You have to throw yourself open to the public when you have a baby.’

The reward was a red rubber mask through which she could suck blessed dizzying relief until she nearly blacked out. Miss Smith hurried out of the room to telephone the doctor and report progress. First she told Munty what was happening. While she was gone, he sidled into the room.

‘Are you all right, darling?’ His anxious face made her want to laugh, but it might have been the gas and air.

‘No.’ She turned her head away from him. ‘Go away.’ She heard him leave.

Dr Murphy called a couple of times to check her progress during the ten-hour labour, asking to be summoned for the birth itself as it only took him a few minutes to get there. He listened to the baby’s strong and steady heartbeat and said he was perfectly satisfied that all was as it should be, and he could leave the management of the labour to Miss Smith. The birth itself surprised Melissa very much by reminding her intensely of going to the lavatory. An overwhelming sensation that she could not deny, as her body took over from her anxious mind and everything else, determined as it was to expel the presence inside.

She bellowed like a bull, an animal noise that was as disconcerting as the sensation. Her baby emerged very quickly after that, Miss Smith gently steadying its progress into the world. As soon as the baby was out, Melissa lay still, deafened with the absence of her own sounds.

‘It’s a little girl,’ said Miss Smith, wrapping the baby quickly to keep her warm, and dealing efficiently with the cord. Melissa didn’t sit up to look. She just lay back flat on the pillowless bed. Then she noticed dimly that Miss Smith had moved to stand beside her, offering her something, and she craned round weakly to look. A ridiculously small face, roughly the same colour as the damson puree and clenched into folds, lay within a white cotton blanket.

Meanwhile, Dr Murphy, who’d come back for the birth, was delivering and checking the afterbirth. He examined her thoroughly before saying, ‘I’ll be off then, Lady Mount-Hey. Call me if you need anything else, Miss Smith, but I think she’ll do. Good, easy birth for a first timer, well done.’

Melissa nodded and tried to smile.

Within a few minutes, Munty was in there too and Melissa heard Miss Smith say, ‘A little girl. Eight pounds, my lord. You must be so proud.’

‘Eight pounds of what?’ she heard him answer. A flash of irritation made her shudder.

Miss Smith was clearly disconcerted. ‘The baby weighed eight pounds, sir.’

‘Oh, I see.’

Melissa focused on her husband and she could see he looked uncomfortable. He crept up to the crib and looked down at the tiny roseate face with mole-like paws up near its chin.

‘What do you want to call her?’ he asked his wife.

Melissa groped around in her mind. What do you call a baby? Did it matter? She remembered the satisfying garnet pots she had labelled in the kitchen. ‘Damson,’ she said, her eyes closed.

‘That’s fine,’ he answered. ‘We can give her my mother’s name Pearl as a second one. If it had been a boy we would have called him Baillie. Never mind, next time!’

The false cheerfulness of his voice grated across her mind. Next time? What did he think she was? A brood mare? She supposed he wanted a male heir and a baby girl wasn’t good enough for him. She hated him.

She vowed silently that no child of hers would be called an awful common name like Pearl and planned to summon up the strength to register the baby herself. Her mother-in-law was a distant figure to her, appearing at the wedding in a globular hat made of pale blue nylon and then vanishing off abroad. What did she matter to any of them? But then there did seem to be a lot of liquid still seeping out into the pad that Miss Smith had pressed to her bottom. Would she ever want to stand again let alone walk?

Miss Smith moved around the room and told Munty that he must leave Mummy and Baby to rest now. Melissa could see from his face that he was only too delighted to go back to his safe male world. She was so tired.

Melissa snapped awake. Instantly her heart began to hop in her chest. Voices in the passage. Miss Smith and Munty. She crept out of bed to lean against the door and listen.