The Undertow (7 page)

Her mouth is dry, and the words come out dry as husks: “All hands?”

“Five hundred lives lost.”

“So there are survivors?”

“They’ve fished out a couple of hundred, that’s what they’re saying.”

“Then it’s not certain—he could be—”

He takes her hand, squeezes it. “He was on duty.”

She knows what this means. That he was below, trapped in the boiler room. In the heat and dark and water.

“I’ll make you tea.”

She sits in the good chair in the cold parlour, holding onto the basket balanced on her knees. He goes into the kitchen. She listens to him clattering clumsily with the range, stoking up the fire. And then quiet, as he stops, as he muffles his sobs.

She rests her forehead on the arch of the basket’s handle, looks down at the clumsily rolled ribbon, the cotton reel with its thread wound untidily on. The tiny things, tinged grey from the street and the old man’s handling.

It is her fault.

She should never have asked Mr. Travis about the job, never have spoken or thought or planned for afterwards. She jinxed him: she has jinxed them all.

She picks out the thin yellow ribbon, scallop-edged, and unrolls it carefully, then twists the end round her fingertips, and begins to roll again. Then she does the same for the mauve. The basket tidied, she sets it on the floor. Then she lifts her picture book off the green baize of the card table. She turns the pages, touches the glazed surfaces of the postcards. These past months the cards have fallen through the letterbox like waymarkers, like pebbles dropped in the woods, marking off distance and time. A confirmation of his continuation in the world. A reminder of his love.

The track stops here. The final pages are empty. There is no way forward.

She has no photograph of him. This comes with a flash of sudden utter panic. It is too late now ever to have a photograph.

What if she forgets what he looks like?

Hand shaking, she turns back through the pages: blue-washed sky and mountains and women in native dress, a foreign street with camels clopping down it, a rowing boat drifting in a blue grotto. Trying somehow to put him together in her mind. She remembers the flash of his green eyes in the bioscope, the touch of his hands on her waist. The brush of his arm against hers as he leant across and opened the empty book, showed her the blank pages they would fill between them.

She could have had anyone, her mother always said. So why on God’s good earth did it have to be
him?

Because he was everything. He was necessary. He always will be.

She won’t forget. She won’t let herself, ever. She insists on remembering.

SHE LEANS DOWN IN HER CHAIR
to button her boot, and there is a sudden hot trickle of liquid between her legs. Oh Lord. She stands up and twists round to look at the seat of her blue shift-dress, and there is a dark wet blot there. Oh goodness. She flushes. Is this something that happens? Do women in her condition just wet themselves sometimes? She doesn’t know, but it always seems that other women manage the whole thing so much better than she does.

At least she is alone. At least there is no-one to see.

Flustered, she steps back out of her boots, and goes to climb the stairs. Her thighs chafe in the wet. She tries to hold it back, but can’t: the water oozes out of her in a steady seep.

She doesn’t know what’s happening. Has she damaged herself somehow? Has she harmed the baby?

She is halfway up the stairs when the first contraction hits, making her gasp, stop, and grab the banister; and with it a burst of wet that runs down the inside of her thighs.

Shaken, she climbs on up, and in the bedroom pulls off her dress, and her shift, which is wet through at the back. The smell is not ammonia, but warm and brackish. Not urine. Hands shaking, she pulls aside underwear to find the long-unused rags at the bottom of her drawer. Sort herself out, then she’ll go next door, and speak to Mrs. Clack, and try and bring herself to ask her if this is normal, if this is what is supposed to happen—and what she is supposed to do about it.

As she stands at the dresser lifting out her clothes, the child shifts itself around inside her. She feels the sudden urge to make water, and tugs the pot out from under the bed, and squats, naked, to urinate. The other water still seeps out of her too. She watches as the taut skin of
her belly shifts, a small angular bulge pressing out, riding along inside the skin, and then softening away.

And then another contraction hits. It knocks the breath out of her. Makes her grab the edge of the bed and hold there, squatted on the pot, looking down, so that she can see the way her belly squeezes tighter with the pain, and the way the steam from the urine rises from the pot, and then a sudden gush of liquid from her.

The peak of pain is gone, but it leaves a dull ache behind, like a monthly pain, like a warning.

She drags herself up, clinging to the side of the bed. It hurts more. She can’t quite stand upright. She crawls into her dress, wads her drawers with rags. With her foot she pushes the pot under the bed. She makes her slow way down the stairs.

The pain comes again in the street. She crumples in on herself, a hand on the gritty downpipe of the guttering. It takes her a couple of minutes just standing there, breathing, assuring herself that it is safe to move, and that she won’t just fall into a heap, before she can take the three more steps to the Clacks’ front door.

Mrs. Clack answers with little Francie on her hip.

Amelia can feel how strange she must look—hunched, sweating, shivering, her walk a painful waddle.

“I think something’s wrong,” Amelia says. “I don’t feel quite well.”

Mrs. Clack just looks at her. “You’re all right, ducky,” she says.

“You’re going to have the baby.”

Then Mrs. Clack reaches out for Amelia’s hand, and helps her up into the house.

Mrs. Clack has four children of her own. She explains what’s happening carefully, not wanting to scare the girl. Still, Amelia blanches and shivers.

“I would have told you sooner,” Mrs. Clack says. “Only, I thought your ma would’ve said something.”

Amelia nods. When she’d first got her monthlies, her mother had told her she must have injured herself playing out with her friends. So she wasn’t allowed to play out any more. It’s not the kind of thing she could speak about to her mother, even when her mother was still speaking to her.

“Don’t worry,” Mrs. Clack says. “It’s just like shelling peas.”

They drink tea, and then more tea. Amelia makes her painful waddling way to the lavatory at the end of the yard. When she sits there, nothing will come but the slow seep of water—the water, Mrs. Clack said, that the baby has been sleeping in all this time. She looks down at the tight aching drum of her belly. It must be like a frog, cold and slippery, to have lived in water all this time: she hadn’t known. She thinks of what Mrs. Clack said, about it being just like shelling peas. The baby is the pea, and she is the pod, and the pod gets split in half and thrown on the midden. The pea is what it’s all about: you don’t care what happens to the pod.

When the Clack boys get home Amelia goes back to her own house, which will be empty till the old man gets back from work. She doesn’t want to see anyone. Her unsettled, leaking, waddling state seems shameful. She climbs up to her room, and tries to lie down, but the pains make her heave herself back up from her bed, and lean over it, clenched, gasping.

At six, the old man taps softly at the door. Mrs. Clack must have waylaid him in the street, because he already knows.

“Do you need anything?” he asks.

“No.”

“Shall I go for Mrs. Bradley?”

“I don’t know.”

Mrs. Clack comes by at nine, after the children are in bed. By this time, the pains have subsided, and the midwife is not fetched, and Amelia sleeps.

She presses her forehead down onto the top rail of the bedstead. The iron is cool and hard. Mrs. Bradley tells her to breathe. Mrs. Clack rubs her back and says keep breathing through it, honey, keep breathing. Amelia wants to punch her. All she can do is clamp down with the pain, squeeze her eyes shut, feel and think about only the pain. The pain is everything. While it happens, there is nothing else. When it fades, she flings herself up and away from the bed, and crosses to the wall. Four steps between the bedstead and the wall. She is in just her shift. She is sweating. The fire is lit. She comes to the wall and stops. Four steps between the bedstead and the wall. Four steps between the pains.

She has no idea of time.

She rests her forearm on the wallpaper, rests her head on her arm. Closes her eyes. The pain builds. She braces herself, stiffening. Behind her Mrs. Clack and Mrs. Bradley talk, too quiet for her to hear. Mrs. Bradley costs money. The pain screams, roars, and then it softens, aches and fades. She pushes away from the wall. Four steps back to the bedstead.

“What is it?” Amelia demands. “What are you saying?”

Their faces turn to her. But then the next pain hits, and she grabs the bedstead with both hands, and cries out. When she opens her eyes again, there is blood on the floor.

“Sorry,” she says to the doctor. The doctor costs more money. His shining things are laid out on a cloth on the bedside table.

He shakes his head, dismisses this with a tut. Mrs. Clack has gone. Mrs. Bradley stands ready, arms and hands bare and scrubbed. The doctor wets a wad of lint with chloroform.

She wants to ask him, Am I worse at this than other women? Do I make more fuss, have I made more mess than everybody else? Are there other women who don’t work properly too? Do other women fail so miserably at the first hurdle?

He screws the lid back onto the chloroform bottle, drops the lint into the apparatus. He slides a hand under her neck, steadying her. His hands are clean and cold.

“Now,” he says, “breathe deep.”

The apparatus over her mouth and nose, she heaves in a spirituous, strange breath. And the world collapses into darkness.

When she surfaces again, she can’t think what has happened.

A light has been left burning. There’s an oily, mineral taste in her mouth. She thinks for a moment that she has had some kind of accident—that she’s been hit by a bus—she feels sore all over. But then it returns to her—the hours compacted down to an eternity of pain, the failure, and then nothing.

She turns her head and sees the baby in the crib.

For a long time she just looks at the baby. Its skin is a reddish-pink colour, and there’s a sticky tuft of dark hair on its scalp. It looks raw, underdone. Its head is squashed into a strange shape, like it’s wearing a
skullcap made of its own skin. It’s not pretty. It is very far from pretty. But it is there, and it is real, and it lives. It sleeps there with a kind of quiet prepossession, as if entirely sure of its place in the world.

She reaches out to touch it, to smoothe down its sticky hair. The movement makes the bedsprings creak, stabs her belly, sends a flicker of pain down between her legs. She sucks in a breath. Breathes it out. The pain fades. She reaches out again. Her back and shoulders ache.

She touches the child. It is warm. Its skin is dry.

I have to love you, Amelia thinks. Whatever else happens, it is my job to love you now.

The old man must have been listening out for her, because she hears him come into the room now, tentatively, but without knocking. She doesn’t look round.

“Are you all right?”

She nods; the movement hurts. Even her neck is sore.

He comes round the bed, and sits down beside her. He reaches out and touches the clean new cheek with his blackened hand.

“What’ll we call him?” His voice is choked.

She didn’t know that it was a boy.

“Don’t bother him. Let him sleep.”

The old man hesitates, lifts his hand away.

“He’ll be William,” she says. “After his father. William Arthur Hastings. His son.”

A LADDER DESCENDS
into the dark. He pulls himself down, hand over hand, deep into the water. He flips round into a flooded corridor. The corridor leads on and on, sloping downwards. He swims deeper and deeper. He reaches a door, and heaves it open. Beyond, the space opens out into a cavern. In his dreams he is not afraid of water. In his dreams he can swim.

He sees him, where he always is. A dark shape hanging in the water, the water clouded with soot.

And this is the moment when it could all happen. This is the moment when change is possible. He could just grab him and swim hard. The two of them. If he can get him back to the surface, he will have a father, and his mother will be happy. And he will have saved him, the man who matters most in the whole world.

He reaches out to take the arm—in his dream he can see his own hand reach out, pale in the darkness, and he knows what is coming next. He sees his fingers sink into the flesh as it gives like moss, cold and sodden. The corpse turns slowly in the water, turns to face him. Its eyes are black, empty sockets.

Billy

And then he can’t swim. The skill’s gone. Legs twisted in the water and then the thing reaches out for him. Its hand is white and spongy. Its touch will kill him. The hand lays itself on his chest, over his heart.

Son

He jumps awake, tangled in the sheets. She’s there, looking down at him, her hand resting on his chest. Mother. Billy struggles up from under her hand. She sits on the edge of his bed, her hair tied up in soft rags. He rubs the dream out of his eyes. He knows better than to mention
it to her. His father is a hero, that’s what she says. He died protecting them from bullies. Billy’s dreams of him should not be like this.

“Good morning, Billy,” she says.

“Morning.” The word comes out gluey with sleep.

“Come on then, time to get up. Special day.”

When she’s gone, he dresses in the dark, shivering, pulling on his drawers, shorts and shirt, and his sweater. Yesterday’s socks hold a glossy imprint of his toes. His boots are waiting downstairs in the scullery.