The World is a Wedding (26 page)

 

When Flora came back from her mother's she went to check on Grace, and stood outside the closed door to her room. She could hear small sounds coming from within: the baby was awake but Grace must be asleep. Flora paused, clean bedlinen in hand, listening. Perhaps the baby needed attention.

Flora waited a moment outside the door, gathering her thoughts. Grace was not getting better, the medicine was not working. For four days she had mostly slept, whispering fragments, moving her mouth in soundless words, talking, almost angry—trying to wrestle with something bigger than her, which made her arms and legs twist and turn with heavy effort. She was lost in a netherland, where the way is decided.

Grace was trying to make her peace with something; Flora had seen it in her blinking, closed eyes, the white saliva at the corners of her mouth, her lips that were dry and cracked. Flora heard the odd fragment of sentence: ‘
No
,' and the name Madoc, and she heard her say, ‘
Mother
,' then, ‘
Daddy
.' And once, ‘
the beds are made
. . .' Then the words faded, lost in oblivion.

Flora came in every hour to check on Grace. She knew Grace's life was in the balance, that Grace, in her dark dream, was weighing her life against death. When she woke—if she woke—then she would be a different woman, one who had walked through a dark night of the soul.

Flora put her hand on the door handle. If Grace died? Perhaps Flora and Wilfred could have the baby for their own, and bring up the child. If Grace died? Wilfred would have to tell Dr. and Mrs. Reece and there would be uproar and intrigue and consequences, perhaps legal consequences too complex for Flora to contemplate. They were hiding a very sick woman, a doctor's daughter who hadn't seen a doctor.

Flora pushed open the door. Grace lay oblivious. The baby was on its back, kicking its little legs. Flora walked tentatively around the small iron bed and picked up the child, cradling its loose head. She carefully carried the baby from the room, past the now-discarded bedlinen and into her bedroom. She lifted up his shift and saw that his nappy needed changing so she fetched a clean piece of towel and began to change him. Once downstairs, she put the baby on the clean kitchen table. She poured boiling water from the copper kettle into an old baby's bottle she had found under a dirty frying pan at the back of the crockery cupboard, when she'd been cleaning everything. She'd remembered about it yesterday. It was an old-fashioned baby's bottle; perhaps it had been Wilfred's.

Once the warmed milk was poured into the sterilised bottle, she fed the baby, who seemed to prefer the spoon to the teat, small silver teaspoons of milk tipped from the bottle. Flora had not cared for a baby before but it came easily to her. She had played and helped on the farm around White Hook as a girl, and a baby was much like a lamb or a calf or a foal. They all inspired gentleness, they all demanded milk and they all needed a mother.

Milk dribbled down the baby's chin and Flora dabbed it with her hanky. The baby drank easily and with contentment, as if he wanted for no more than milk, then blinked slowly, rubbed his nose and, mid-sip, fell asleep, the small neat hole of his mouth open. Flora looked at him as if there was nothing more beautiful than this child, as if the child was a great magnet from which she couldn't pull herself.

Wilfred was right; they could have kept this child. If Wilfred hadn't gone to find Grace. If she hadn't told him to find Grace before she left Narberth, before Grace broke the first bonds and ties of her motherhood. In a perfect world, they could have kept this child. Yet, in a perfect world their own child wouldn't have died. She knew it took great generosity of herself to care for the child and not possess him, not wish to own him, but to relinquish him. She had welcomed the child with reverence, was caring for him with love and she would, if Grace lived, relinquish him with freedom.

And if she was to relinquish the baby back to Grace, she realised, in a light, bright moment of hope, then she would like another child, another child with Wilfred. And so when he next came to her, she thought with warmth, she would be ready now, to make love again.

The sunlight caught the lens of her camera on the sideboard. Flora carried the sleeping child through the sitting room and laid him on the armchair, where he flopped contentedly and looked full, congested almost, with milk. He was sleeping deeply. Flora, walking on tiptoes so her shoes didn't clack on the slate floor, went to the kitchen and took her camera. She smoothed the dust from it. It had been a long time since she last took a photograph. She held the Box Brownie in her hands and a sense of expansion blossomed through her. Her camera; her way of seeing. Hope and excitement surged through her when she held the square leather box.

In the sitting room Flora knelt down in front of the child to arrange the blanket around him so the fabric was like a scalloped shell. She looked through the lens at the baby, who filled the viewfinder. But in the comer of the frame was the side of the armchair and the antimacassar, its frill hanging down. She stood up and took it off the chair. The picture was clearer now—a sleeping child in a white blanket, an oval of innocence and purity.

Flora clicked the shutter; there was the certain sound of a moment captured in form. She clicked again and again. The purification of the image demanded to be multiplied. She would relinquish this child, but she would keep a photograph. That was what a photograph was, a smithereen of someone's soul that could be kept forever.

 

Wilfred and Flora were kneeling on the floor of the wallpaper shop, untying the two large boxes that had arrived in the post. The cardboard creaked loudly as Wilfred pulled up the lid. Inside the first box were twelve pots of paint.

‘I ordered them from Arthur Sanderson & Sons months ago, thinking I would surely be needing to replace the first tins of paint by now,' Wilfred explained to Flora Myffanwy. ‘But I doubt there will be much room for them on the shelf, I have sold so few.'

Flora took out the tins and read the labels: Old Gold, Pear Green, Isabella Yellow, Great White
. ‘
Paint has such lovely names,' she said.

‘It hasn't been the busiest shop in Narberth,' Wilfred sighed, sitting back and looking round the somewhat stark shop. ‘Times are hard. People can't afford to buy paint.' He had hoped his paint and wallpaper shop would be like Mrs. Annie Evans's Conduit Stores, bustling with customers and open till midnight serving them. Apart from Mrs. Newton-Lewis, he'd had very few customers.

‘Are we in need?' Flora asked.

‘No, my dear,' Wilfred reassured her, taken aback by her question and aware that they hadn't spoken about the matter of their finances before. ‘I opened the shop because I thought it would help bolster our savings.' He leaned towards her and confided, ‘I keep our savings in an empty coffin in the workshop. No one would dare open and look inside a coffin in a chapel of rest.' They both laughed, then Wilfred added, ‘I thought if I opened a wallpaper shop and read
The Last Days of Socrates
, I would be prepared for fatherhood.' He hoped he hadn't upset her by mentioning the baby. She was much calmer now, and cleaned so much less. If only she would start taking photographs again.

‘I understand.'

‘But it wasn't to be,' Wilfred said with a sad smile, stacking the tins on the shelf one by one. ‘Perhaps it's not a wallpaper shop and a philosophy book that makes a good father,' he reflected. He took the last tin from the box, a pot of Old Gold. ‘I don't know what makes a good father,' he remarked, thinking aloud. He looked around at the empty shop. ‘It had better not be having a busy wallpaper shop.'

Flora smiled.

It was kindness, he realised. That's what made a good father. And husband. And friend.

Wilfred began removing the string from the second box, opening it to reveal twelve tight rolls of dark pink Arthur Sanderson & Sons wallpaper, jammed hard into the box.

‘Wilfred . . .?'

He recognised the distinct tone of voice Flora used when she was going to ask something. ‘Yes, dear?'

‘Are you very worried about Grace?'

Wilfred nodded.

‘So am I.'

Wilfred could not bear to think about the risk he was taking.

‘Will you tell me something?' she asked.

Wilfred looked at this wise young woman who was his wife. ‘Do you want to wait until we next go for our drive?' he suggested, sensing what Flora was intending to ask and uncertain of how he would explain. ‘But,' he pulled a roll of wallpaper from the box, ‘if there is something you want to know . . .'

Flora put a small tin on the back shelf and asked, ‘Why has Grace not gone home?'

Wilfred smoothed back his hair. ‘If she went home, her mother wouldn't want to know her because she is unmarried and has had a baby. Mrs. Reece would choke on the shame. She would throw Grace out of house and home. And that would be a dreadful thing for anybody from Narberth, to know that your own mother doesn't want you. I don't think Grace could bear that.'

‘And why did she leave the baby with you?'

‘Because she has no family—no family to speak of—and I am her friend.'

‘But everyone would think . . .'

‘I know.'

‘Do you know who the father is?'

Wilfred nodded.

‘I don't,' Flora said. ‘The baby looks so much like Grace and Dr. Reece, it makes it hard to see a resemblance to anyone else.'

Wilfred nodded again and leaned back on his hands. ‘If there is anything you want to know, ask, my dear. We cannot have secrets between us.' Wilfred watched while Flora arranged the tins on the shelf, and gathered her thoughts. He knew the shallows of this woman, but not yet the depths; he doubted he would ever fully know her, but he would spend his life trying.

‘Why do you feel guilty about Grace?'

He sighed: she had seen him, and what he struggled with. He rubbed the stubble on his cheeks: it was hard to put what he felt into words. ‘I am sorry to have to talk to you about such personal matters from my past, only I do not want to hurt you.'

Wilfred heard himself talk with the formality of an undertaker. He began again.

‘Those weeks when I was married to her, I was not kind. I lay in bed, I am ashamed to say, hating her and certain I was right. Yet she was alone and suffering more than I knew or understood.' He put his palms on his thighs. ‘I understand more now. I thought I was right, but I was wrong, and these things have bothered me. I have been wrestling with them in my mind.'

‘Can you forgive yourself?'

‘I can if I can make it up to her.'

There was a pause. Flora went over to the two miniature pink roses in terracotta flowerpots sitting in the bay window. She gently pressed down the earth around them with her fingertips.

‘Wilfred?'

‘Yes, my dear.'

‘With all this paint,' she said with a hint of flirtation, ‘you could decorate our bedroom.'

‘Anything for you.'

 

Fear began to rise in Grace like a wave. The candle was too bright and the room was too dark. Her head was heavy and hot on the pillow. She felt light-headed. Everything and its opposite were true. Her thoughts were both mushy and vivid, flipping around her mind as if they themselves were alarmed by their contents.

She felt unhinged, loosened from the earth, held only by a tether that could break or strengthen, and she would fly or sink, die or live. The only constant was the fear coiling up within her. She tried to focus; she was worried for her life. She hadn't known it mattered to her.

The candle flickered and a bee—one of her own, in her sickness she was certain it was one from her own hive—landed on the handle of a teaspoon dunked in the lurid pink medicine. Even when she had wanted to end her life, when she had found out she was pregnant, she had felt alive. Now she had a weak grasp on life, as if her knuckles and fingers were too frail to hold on. She feared her weakness. So this was death: resolution, an answer, arriving of its own accord. Unchosen. When she was suicidal, death was a thought and a choice. Death unbidden was something to fight, for death made life show its value.

The bee flew to the curtains. Grace thought of the curtains in her recent lodgings in London, the small dark room on a busy road, and how the black grit on the windowsill settled only half an hour after she had wiped it.

Heat flowed over her in a great wave and she opened her eyes and pushed away the quilt with what strength she had left in her limbs; she was fighting for her life yet she was barely strong enough to move a quilt.

She thought of Madoc and his mad, war-created arrogance. Then of Wilfred: the pain she had caused him through not stopping their marriage, the generosity he had shown her when she told him the truth. And how safe she had felt when he held her. She thought of her father, whom she missed. Then London, the food she'd eaten there, the lumps of stale bread, and porridge from old oats. And her small piles of notes in her suitcase, how she had counted them: there was the £10 note, with its cottony paper slightly torn in the corner by the King's head. How precious it was, representing safety. She'd dared not break into it, turn it into change and fragment it into coins.

The bee hovered around the room. Grace's mind hovered aimlessly and she remembered the Ritz, and Hilda, who knew how to survive, and the hopeful, battling Suffragettes and their desire to vote. Grace couldn't vote, yet the Suffragettes had touched her and inspired her, although to what, she didn't know. She could return to London, perhaps approach Lady Lytton and find a new way in life, perhaps leave the child here. But first she would have to make her peace with what had happened to her—and that she couldn't do.

Grace watched the bee walk delicately down the spoon into the pink liquid. Its feet were touching it. She must rescue the bee; she didn't want it to drown. She reached out, but her hand was heavy and she knocked the glass. The spoon, the medicine and the bee fell off the bedside table and onto the floor, the glass smashing, the bee entrapped within the sticky liquid, trying to free itself from the goo that was clogging the frantic movement of its legs and wings.