The Kindness of Women (16 page)

“He doesn't want me to fly. He needs me to go to Shanghai with him, walk the streets where we played hide-and-seek. Sometimes I think he's still playing there by himself. He's like those old Shanghai hands he hates so much.”

Miriam knew that I had no intention of going, but held my arm reassuringly. “Dear, forget about it—you've put all that behind you.”

“One day I might write about the war—it would help to have been there.”

“It won't. If you don't go back anything you write will be far more true. When I visit Mother and Dad in Cambridge I look around the house and can't believe I was ever a child there. It's like a film set with these two old actors … even they can't remember the script.”

*   *   *

Later, in bed, when the children were asleep and the old retriever had barked at the moon for the last time, I massaged Miriam's tired shoulders. Strange scents hovered over her ears and armpits, quickening odours of hormones rising and falling, overrunning each other's cycles. I touched her tender nipples, damp with some secretion I remembered from her earlier confinements.

“Tasty?” Miriam asked, finishing the glass of wine that helped her to sleep.

I touched my fingers to my lips, savouring the racy flavours, closer to the taste of her vulva than to the milk massing within her breasts.

“Colostrum … in fact, men don't like the taste of their wives' milk.”

“Good news for baby. Nature's way of making sure he gets his share. Have you tried anyone else's milk?”

“No…” I thought of the pregnant whore at Moose Jaw who had wanted to meet the queen. “Ask your friends at the clinic for a sample.”

“Midwife Bell would love that.”

“Tell her we're going into the dairy business. Mother's Pride Milk Products. Slogan: ‘Putting Shepperton's breasts to work.'”

“‘Butter freshly churned from mother's milk.' Oh my God, yoghurts and milk shakes. Jim, think…”

“We'd have a range of cheeses, flavoured by cigarette brand, lipstick, and toothpaste…”

“Policemen's wives would give a sturdy goat-like cheese.” Miriam loved her flights of fantasy and had a healthy interest in the more wayward possibilities of human anatomy and physiology; she had always seen the mischief and humour in the Surrealists. Shepperton bored her a little, and she liked to provoke its domestic norms. As the secretion from her nipples moistened my hands she extemporised happily: “Vegetarians would make bland and mimsy cheeses, West End actresses overripe Camembert, queens and princesses a high royal Stilton…”

“We'll stage a cheese-tasting for all our friends…”

“I can just see Peggy Gardner!” Miriam sat up, smothering her laughter in her pillow, abdomen heaving, the baby riding a roller-coaster of snorts and guffaws.

Fifteen minutes later her labour began.

*   *   *

“We'll make you tidy, dear. We want baby to find a nice bedroom.”

Midwife Bell moved expertly around the room, stirring up the dust and old talc as she ran a damp towel over the dressing table. She hung Miriam's maternity smocks in the wardrobe like a theatrical dresser stowing away unwanted costumes at the end of a season. Beneath the bed she found a one-legged teddy bear and a child's potty, ancient contents fossilised in place, and handed them to me with a refined grimace. She had arrived after midnight, soon after Miriam had finished her bath, but insisted on shaving and bed-washing her again. She changed the sheets as Miriam lay on the bed, employing a series of complex folds like a conjuror demonstrating a trick of large-scale origami.

Now that mother and bedroom met with Midwife Bell's satisfaction, the child could be born. On the bedside table were her instrument case, gloves, and gas cylinder, everything except the legendary hot water, not a drop of which had I ever been asked to boil.

Disturbed by the noise, Alice had begun to cry in her sleep. Henry woke and shouted at her, rocking his cot against the wall. Miriam lay quietly, her large eyes on Mrs. Bell's composed face, waiting for her next contraction. I went off to settle the children, played a short word game with Alice that she enjoyed, and then handed Henry his comforter, an ancient baby blanket that was a universe of friendly smells.

By the time I returned to the bedroom Miriam's contractions were coming every other minute. Nightdress rolled back to her breasts, she filled her lungs with deep, measured breaths as Mrs. Bell sat beside her, listening to the child's heartbeat with her stethoscope.

“You can hold your wife's hand—I know she'd like that…”

I pressed Miriam's fingers. She smiled briefly, but I could see that she had already withdrawn from me. Only the midwife and the child were properly in the room with her. She moistened her lips, staring at the shadowy ceiling and the frayed lampshade on the headboard, as if this were the only delivery that had ever taken place, the primeval birth from which all life had sprung. As Miriam released my hand I felt that she and Midwife Bell had returned to a more primitive world, where men never intruded and even their role in conception was unknown. Here the chain of life was mother to daughter, daughter to mother. Fathers and sons belonged in the shadows with the dogs and livestock, like the retriever growling at Midwife Bell's unfamiliar car from the window of my neighbours' living room.

Nonetheless, I was glad that Miriam had overruled Mrs. Bell and insisted that I be with her during the delivery. Richard Sutherland, for all his sense of the modish, had squeamishly declined to be present when Miriam half-jokingly invited him to watch the birth. He claimed that the ordeal of a woman in the
extremis
of labour, exposing her genitalia and gasping with pain, unconsciously mimicked the act of rape and diminished the wife in her husband's eyes, as if he had witnessed her assault by an invisible stranger. Not for nothing did the world's oldest cultures segregate women during confinement, preserving the mystery of the wife's body.

By contrast, I felt my closest to Miriam during these last minutes. Everything bonded me to her: the sweat on her thighs, the mole above her navel, her freckles and pearly stretchmarks, the shaved skin of her pubis and the bright petals of her labia, her engorged clitoris with its endearing leftward tilt, the childhood riding scars on her knees and the spots on her bottom, the damp talc gleaming on her breasts and shoulders.

She farted lustily and reached up to grip the headboard. Midwife Bell averted her nose, but the air was heavy with the smell of anaesthetic gas.

“We'll be waking the whole street if we go on like that. Push again now, dear. Baby's ready. Push harder…”

Miriam frowned at the headboard, concentrating as she waited for the next contraction. Panting, she clenched her fists.

“God Jesus! My piles are killing me…!”

I knelt down and placed my hand between her buttocks, pressing my fingers against her swollen anus. The bloated lining of her rectum ballooned outwards, and I pushed the spongy cushion into her anus, then held it there as the last contractions came.

“One last push, it's coming now, another push for the head…”

Miriam's vulva had expanded and the crown of a minute head had appeared between her legs. The black hairs were moist and neatly parted, as if a thoughtful nature had groomed the child for its first appearance in this world.

“Push now, we're almost there…”

The whole face had emerged, a high forehead, miniature nose and mouth, and closed eyes, streamlined as if by time, by the aeons that had preceded this child down the biological kingdom. Waking into the deep dream of life, it seemed not young but infinitely old, millions of years entrained in the pharaoh-like smoothness of its cheeks and its ancient eyelids and nostrils. Its lips were composed, as if it had patiently endured the immense journey across the universe to this modest house with its waiting mother.

Suddenly it was young again; in a last rush of fluid a pink and hairless puppy bundled itself into Midwife Bell's arms. As the tears wept from my eyes I felt Miriam's fingers grip my hands. The dawn light was filling the spaces between my neighbours' roofs. After a few hours away from me, Miriam had returned and was a wife again.

*   *   *

Miriam slept during the morning, the baby girl in the wickerwork cot beside her. At noon Midwife Bell called, bathed the baby, and pronounced herself satisfied, as if willing to accept the formal entry of our child into the mundane world of time and space. Before leaving, she handed Miriam her makeup case, hairbrush, and mirror. Midwives sat close to the fire, busy with their washings and breaking of the waters, drawing life into the light. By contrast, Miriam's local physician, Dr. Rogers, with his jovial humour and misplaced advice, resembled a light-headed tour guide searching none too confidently for the sacred spring.

Alice and Henry crept into the bedroom and inspected the baby, curious but faintly disapproving.

“Will she stay with us?” Alice asked.

Miriam laughed at this. “Don't you want her to stay?”

“I might…”

Henry was more interested in the remnants of the midwife's equipment, the foil caps, spare swabs, and mouthpiece. Miriam sat up and hugged them tightly. Later I drove them to spend the afternoon with local friends of Miriam, and they were already planning games and initiation ceremonies for their new sister. Seen through my sleepless eyes, Shepperton had changed. The air was more vivid, as if the town were being lit for some large-budget production at the film studios. The women sitting under the driers at the hairdressers, the cashiers behind the counter at the bank, resembled extras recruited to play the roles of ordinary suburbanites. At any moment the action would begin, and I would find that I had a walk-on part and lines of dialogue I had forgotten to learn.

When I returned home Miriam called to me from the bedroom. She had put on a fresh nightdress, combed her hair, and rouged and powdered her face. The slash of lipstick on her mouth was a pennant flying proudly above the debris of this quiet room.

I looked down at the baby. She had changed yet again, more puckered and more alive, her lips moving while she slept, as if she were trying to remember a message entrusted to her by the unseen powers of creation. Within a few hours she had recapitulated her roles, from archaic messenger to slippery water sprite baptised in her mother's caul, and then a dreamy swaddling whose skin flinched at the light and air.

“Lucy?” I suggested.

“Yes … Lucy.” Miriam beckoned me to the bed. “You must be exhausted. Come and lie down for an hour.”

I undressed and lay beside her, my hand against her shoulder. The faint, smothering odour of anaesthetic gas clung to the pillows, and I felt myself drifting back into the heady night from which Lucy had emerged.

“Hold me…” Miriam pressed my hands to her waist. She lowered the neck of her nightdress and exposed her breasts, their swollen nipples already quickened by the baby's lips. She pushed back the sheet and drew the nightdress to her hips, reached down and held my penis in her hand. Knees in the air, she smiled as I massaged her feet and calves and caressed her thighs.

“Come into me…”

Lying on my side, I gently entered her vagina. Already its walls had contracted, and it held me in a firm embrace.

Lucy stirred, her larynx clicking. Miriam smiled at her, her hands on my chest as I moved softly within her. Life-magic breathed over us, over the sleeping child, over everything in the sunlit town.

7

THE ISLAND

I was swimming strongly, four hundred yards from the beach at Santa Margarita, when I saw the Estartit ferry steering towards me. Loaded with holidaymakers on their way to Cadaqués and the Dalí mansion at Port Lligat, it cut through the dark water where the Bay of Rosas met the open sea. Bolts of foam jumped from its bows and swept the passenger rail, cooling the legs of the German and Scandinavian girls gazing through their sunglasses at the lizard-backed hills.

A yacht passed me, its mainsail only inches from the water. A middle-aged French couple sat on the side decking in their yellow life jackets, watching me in a sceptical way. A pedalo driven by two teenage boys was as far from the beach, but I was well beyond the limit of most holiday swimmers. I had set out to swim across the bay from Santa Margarita, little more than a mile in all, but the French pair clearly took for granted that I was not going to make it.

Ignoring them, I swam on through the black, sunlit water, now and then glancing at the balcony of our apartment. After breakfast I had announced my decision to challenge the bay, and the children had been seized by the vastness of the project.

“Daddy, that's at least … seventeen lengths!” Alice cried, thinking of the public swimming pool near Shepperton.

“More like a hundred,” I told her. “Or two hundred, if I swim back.”

“Two hundred! Daddy, you're making up fibs again…”

An impromptu arithmetic lesson followed, one of the few in which they had ever taken an interest. They watched me walk into the water, convinced that their father would never return. I could see them on the beach below the apartment, sitting in a row on the rubber inflatable, arguing over my exact position. I waved to them, and saw Miriam, in sun hat and black bikini, wave back, then a semaphore of little arms. My heroic status was guaranteed at least until teatime.

I pressed on towards the cape, carried to the west by the strong counterclockwise current that circled the bay. The Estartit ferry was less than a hundred yards away, turning towards the quay at Rosas, where it would collect its last batch of sightseers. The helmsman stood behind the open windows of the bridgehouse, surveying the pedalo-filled waters like a hunter at a turkey shoot. He noticed me trailing my small wake, and then altered course straight towards me.

Was he drunk? I waited for him to spin his wheel, but the bars of his moustache were fixed on me like the arms of a range finder. The ferry captains of the Costa Brava had been deranged by the endless tourists, like the waiters and taxi drivers, hovering all summer on the edge of a mental explosion. An isolated swimmer impaled on his bows would be no more than a butterfly on a windshield. The ferry sped towards me, the dull murmur of its propeller carried through the water. Switching to my fastest crawl, I swam at right angles to the vessel's path. Passengers were leaning on the forward rail, waving to me as if I were determined to kill myself.