Stone Cradle (27 page)

So, what with one thing and another, I put up with the digestive problems for a good few years and got quite thin for the first time in my life, before I finally went along to Doctor Dodds and let him lie me down and press at my stomach with a frown upon his face. These things have a way of taking their course, so I doubt it would have made much difference if I’d gone before.

T
he world shrinks. That is what it is like, being ill. As getting out and about becomes more difficult, you lose the edges of the world, and then the things you are losing get nearer and nearer, closer to home. First you can no longer go on long journeys – then you can’t go down the market square to Elijah’s stall carrying his sandwiches wrapped in brown paper. Sooner or later, you can’t even go to the end of your road for fresh bread to make the sandwiches with – Elijah has to do that himself. Then, getting out of bed gets more and more difficult so you lose the downstairs of the house – garden, hallway, kitchen, parlour – and then, when you are bed-bound, you lose even your own bedroom, for you can see it from beneath your eider but it is like you are looking at it through a glass.

The glass is made of pain. Sometimes the pain thickens, becomes opaque. Then you can’t see anything. At others, it is there, but almost see-through – you get so used to it you forget what it was like to see the world properly, not through the glass of pain.

People arrive, from the rest of the world. Mostly, they were just visitors from my own home, one of the family, but once in a while it was someone from a far-flung land, like the vicar from the local church. He didn’t stay long. He was a young fella, embarrassed by old people and death and dying, I could tell. He went bright red when I asked him about the afterlife. I felt so sorry for him I pretended I was tired, so he had an excuse to leave.

It was not long after his visit that some odd things started to make their way into my room, Lijah struggled all the way up our narrow stairs with a old washstand, God knows why. He must have got it from one of the general stores he visited, or the marketplace. I heard him huffing and puffing and clunking up the staircase, as if he was trying to lug a camel. The door banged back, and in he came, all on his own, and without a word, started edging this thing across the carpet. It had a marble top, and shelves beneath, so it must have weighed a ton. When it was in place, flush against he wall, he went out and came back in with a cloth and some bleach and set to scrubbing the marble.

All he said was, ‘The only thing that brings marble back to itself is a bit of bleach, you know. Bleach and elbow grease.’

I thought,
he
should
be
wearing
gloves
for
that
job,
but it was one of those days when talking was bit tricky.

Other items of furniture followed, with a day or so interval in between; a mahogony chiffonier, a walnutwood whatnot with a plate glass back. The following week, engravings and chromos started going up on the wall. Lijah’s hammering the nails was so loud it felt like he was knocking them into my forehead. A cane seat with a velvet cushion materialised next to the wardrobe one afternoon, while I was asleep. I believe the final item was a Brussels-pile bordered carpet, but I might have started to lose track by then. The room was so full I felt I was floating on a sea of furniture. My visitors could hardly get in the door.

The girls did most of the looking-after of me, the girls and Clementina. Daniel visited, of course, but neither he nor Elijah were comfortable sitting with me for too long. The girls always had things to do; move me over to slip a sheet from under me, or coax me to eat something. The men had no such function and without those things to do for me, they didn’t really know what to do with themselves.

Elijah only sat down once. I think he thought I was asleep. I was, sort of, but woke with the weight of him sitting down on the edge of my bed, and the feel of his hand resting on mine.

I opened my eyes, and he moved his hand away.

‘Shall I tell one of the girls to come up?’ he said.

I nodded slowly. I was thirsty. ‘Are they both here?’ I asked. My voice was getting hoarse, whispery.

Fenella and Scarlet were taking it in turns to come round to look after me. Fenella had her own family now, and Scarlet was still working, but somehow they were managing it between them. There was always one of them there, however early I woke each morning, so I suppose they must have been sleeping on the sofa. Elijah was either in the spare room, or sometimes sleeping at Clementina’s house which was just round the corner from ours.

‘Aye,’ he replied.

There was a pause.

‘They’re good girls,’ I said quietly.

‘They all are,’ he said, quietly back.

Neither of us needed to say any more. Mehitable had not visited me since I became bed-ridden, not once. She sent a card.
Get
Well
Soon.
It had a line drawing of sweet peas on the front, filled in with coloured pencil. I had accepted that I was going to die without seeing Bartholomew again, he had been lost to us many years before, but Mehitable lived less than three miles away, over at Dogsthorpe.

‘Ask Scarlet if I can have some fresh water,’ I said to Elijah, and he nodded, then rose.

While he was gone, a strange thought came to me – and I don’t know why I should have thought it then, after all those years. The pig. Toby, the Sapient Pig. It came to me how it was done. I had thought that Elijah must’ve somehow told the man my name, so that he could make the pig spell it. But he hadn’t, of course, no more than he had paid for the church bells to be rung on the day we was wed. All Elijah had done was spoke my name, just before, and the woman next to us had heard and somehow signalled to the fella who had owned the pig.

Why did I want to believe, at the time, that it was him? What did it matter?

Then I began to think about Mehitable. I thought of all the times she and I had fallen out, when she was a child, and I thought of the sly look in her eyes and how close I had come to beating that child and how I had congratulated myself on not doing it. Considering what I had put up from Elijah, I thought how I had really done quite a good job – five children raised on nothing? I had worked my fingers to the bone for years and years.

I never hit that child – well, they all got a smack on the bottom when they were naughty, of course, and I used the spoon on their arms in the kitchen, once in a while. But I never, ever beat her properly, not like I got beaten by my stepfather. I pushed her around a bit a few times, but she was so wilful and difficult – I don’t think anyone has the right to judge me unless they’ve had a child as wilful and difficult as she was.

A dark feeling that I cannot describe came over me.

I thought of the fantasies I used to have, as a child, of the kind of wedding I would have: the man who would be my husband; the home I would live in – somehow they never went away, not even when I married Elijah in front of his drinking pals, in a pawned hat.
Even when we crept like thieves down Paradise Street, sneaking off because we couldn’t pay the rent, a part of me was still thinking how I would make the house all nice once I had all the things I coveted.

Being ill gives you plenty of time to think, so I thought some more. I thought about how strange it is that you can walk around knowing life is one way but still holding on to your belief that it is really, somehow, else. I suppose the trick is never to put the two pictures of your life together, never try to make them fit. It is not wise to think about how things really are, for there is always this yawning chasm between how our lives are and how we want them to be, a great, big black hole, big enough to fall into and disappear for ever.

All my life, I have congratulated myself on being a good person. And in comparison with some around me, mentioning no names but a certain son and his mother come to mind, I have been. But I saw, as I lay there thinking about Mehitable, that I have only been good in comparison to the bad that was done to me – my mother dying on me when I was young and my stepfather’s unkindness to me, Elijah and his drinking. How wrong I had got it, all those years. That badness around me may have made me look good, in my own eyes, but it didn’t mean I
was
good. It gave me excuses, that was all, when I passed on a little of the badness to others. When I was unkind to Mehitable, I was thinking in the back of my head, that my unkindness to her was as nothing compared to the big unkindness my mother did to me by dying on me.

All this time, I thought, I have walked around and thought of myself as a nice person, and I haven’t been, at all.

Scarlet came up with a glass of water and my pills. She sat by my bed for a bit, in silence, then she said, ‘Dad’s gone round the corner to see Gran.’

I didn’t reply. She looked at me. ‘How was Dad?’

‘Oh well, you know your Dad.’

She moved as if to leave, and without intending to, I found myself reaching out a hand and grasping her arm. She looked a little surprised and then sat down again, looking at me expectantly. Scarlet, such an uncomplicated child: broad, beaming face, solid and straightforward. I saw a lot of me in her, or how I would have liked to have been, if I’m honest.

She wasn’t a child, of course, she was of age, that year. I had a feeling she might be married soon. Daniel had a friend he was thinking of going into business with. He had been to tea round at ours a little more than was necessary if he was nothing but a friend of Daniel’s. I had seen looks between him and Scarlet.

She sat on the bed, just looking at me, saying nothing, just waiting. She always knew the right thing to do, that one.

‘I wasn’t a bad mother, was I?’ I said to her, simply, looking intently at her face.

Her look of surprise was instant, and unforced. ‘Oh no, of course you weren’t, Mum, what a silly thing to say. The way you looked after us … You were the best mum in the world.’

I held on to her hand and squeezed it. ‘Thank you, love.’

She frowned, glanced round all the stuff jammed into the room, looked back at me and said, ‘What was Dad saying to you?’

‘Nothing, oh nothing, I just, sometimes I wonder, you know. Sometimes I feel bad. When I think of how I was. I meant well, but sometimes it didn’t always come out like that with you children. Always telling you off, and such, I feel bad about it.’

‘Dad has no right to come in here making you feel bad.’ Her face was agitated. She snapped at her father a lot, did that one, took his devotion to her quite for granted.

‘Scarlet, I want to see Mehitable.’ The sentence came out of nowhere. I was almost surprised to hear it myself – I hadn’t been planning to say it.

Her indignation faltered. Her face closed. She hesitated.

I knew it was up to me to insist. Suddenly, I wondered if I had the energy for it. ‘Scarlet, there’s things Mehitable and I need to discuss. Before.’

‘I won’t have you talking like that.’ The indignation was forced, this time.

‘Please, will you speak to her for me. I know it’s not an easy thing.’

She rose from her chair and began tucking the candlewick bedspread firmly underneath the mattress. ‘I’ll speak to her. I can’t promise.’

‘Thank you, love.’

I think Scarlet did more than speak to her – I think she insisted, for Mehitable came to me a few days later but so unwillingly it must have taken a prod with a red-hot poker to do it. The door to my room opened and in she came, sidling around the door but staying close to it, the way a cat does – ready to bolt at any moment.

She managed a thin smile. I tried to heave myself up, winced and fell back. She came over to help me, so we touched each other before we said so much as a word. As she lifted me and propped a pillow up behind my head, I felt what I always felt with her, that she was bracing herself for any closeness to me, in the same way she might brace herself against a cold wind in her face.

She smoothed my bedspread, then fetched the upright chair that was in the corner next to the wardrobe, the one the doctor used.

She placed the chair carefully at an angle, so she could sit facing me, then undid the top three buttons of her cardigan and pulled off her neckscarf. I daresay she found the room hot. I was keeping the windows closed as I felt cold so much of the time, even though the sun streamed through and in normal times I would have had every window in the house flung open on such warm days.

We did not speak, and the moment passed when we could have started off with a bit of small talk.
How’s
that
boy
of
yours?
I could
have said, or,
What’s
the
news
over
in
Dogsthorpe,
then?
But the moment for that slid away from us, like a ball rolling downhill, and the silence became so long there was no pretending this would be a normal little chat.

I watched her in the upright chair. There she sat, my difficult grown-up daughter, fiddling with the scarf she had just removed, passing the fine fabric through a hole she had made with her thumb and forefinger. She reminded me of my mother, suddenly, with her sleek dark hair and her thin manner. Odd that she should be growing like my mother when I was never like her myself – that was a likeness that had skipped a generation entirely.

Mehitable – in her thirties now, older than my mother was when she died.

I let the silence go on too long, I suppose. I could feel her not wanting to be there, a feeling as solid as the oak wardrobe in the corner of the room. The not wanting grew with each passing second. I wondered if Scarlet had begged her to come. Maybe Scarlet and Fenella had done it together, like a pair of pincers.

‘Just go and see her, will you?’

‘She’s dying.’

‘You’ll be sorry later, if you don’t.’

I could imagine the whole scene.

It came to me that as I had summonsed her, it was up to me to speak first.

‘Do you know why I wanted to see you?’ I said, eventually, and saw her wince. She glanced away, then sighed.

‘I’ve an idea.’ she said eventually. Her voice was cold.

I thought back to when I used to smack her sometimes, when she was little, and how it wasn’t that I wanted to hurt her, but the anger inside me used to build up, and she would just crouch down and take it and never even cry