Voices in the Dark (45 page)

‘Anselm!’ said my grandmother, appearing at a door. ‘We have been waiting nearly an hour. We didn’t know what to think – come on!’ She dragged us down a dark corridor and up a flight of stairs. Jasmine kept tripping on her long dress, so I picked her up and carried her as we ran.

‘Is Mother all right?’ I said.

‘She is holding out.’

‘But is she all right?’

My grandmother did not answer. As we passed a narrow window, I thought I saw fire along the horizon. ‘Come on,’ said my grandmother, and pulled me away before I could see properly. We hurried up more steps and along a room with curtains at the sides that were patterned in grimy leaves, then into another entrance hall. ‘We have to wait here,’ said my grandmother. ‘Father Dunstan has gone to check how things are going.’

We sat down on the nearest bench. We were all breathing fast now. Jasmine’s shawl had come unfastened and was trailing from one shoulder. My grandmother had lost her headscarf entirely. She looked younger and less certain without it.

‘Anselm?’ said someone then. ‘Mrs Andros?’ It was Father Dunstan; he had appeared again through a swinging door at the end of a corridor.

‘How is she?’ said my grandmother.

‘Doing as well as can be expected, I think. They say these two women are very good doctors.’

‘Father?’ said Jasmine. ‘Can we wait outside the door where Mama is?’

‘The nurse said no …’ began my grandmother.

‘I don’t think there would be any harm in it,’ said Father Dunstan. ‘That nurse has left now. Come with me.’

We got up and followed him. My mother was behind a door at the farthest end of the corridor, where a dingy staircase wound out of sight. There were two battered chairs outside. My grandmother sank onto one and Father Dunstan onto the other, beside her. Jasmine and I sat on the bottom step. She had her thumb in her mouth, and she would not let go of my sleeve. She kept clutching at it as though she was afraid I would leave her. We waited without speaking.

‘Is the baby going to be all right?’ said Jasmine after a long while had passed.

‘Yes,’ said my grandmother. ‘Of course.’

‘He has to be,’ murmured Jasmine.

We lapsed into silence again.

‘Father?’ said Jasmine. ‘Will you say a prayer?’

Father Dunstan nodded and took his prayer book from his pocket. It made me think suddenly of Aldebaran’s funeral. ‘“Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord,”’ he read, ‘“and in thy mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night …”’

Jasmine went and stood beside him, one hand on his arm. I remained where I was. I could not listen. He started the Lord’s Prayer, and my grandmother and Jasmine spoke the words with him, and then he read the psalm that begins,‘God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.’ He read very quietly, with the book open across his knees. We could hear the fighting in the city clearly over
his voice. Someone was shouting on the ground floor of the hospital, yelling something that we could not make out. Then after a while it went quiet. ‘“He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth,”’ Father Dunstan read. ‘“He breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the shields with fire.”’

I got up and walked once to the door, then back to the stairs again. It was better to walk than to stand still, and I went on. As I walked, I counted. When I had paced fifty-seven times to the door and back again, there was a cry inside the room. We all froze. Then someone opened the door. I caught sight of my mother, her face pale and covered in sweat, behind some kind of curtain.

‘What are you doing here?’ said the nurse, closing the door behind her.

‘This is the family of Maria Andros,’ said Father Dunstan. ‘They want to wait outside the room for any news.’ He said it so firmly that the nurse could not argue.

‘Mrs Andros is holding out well,’ she told us, and turned and marched away down the corridor.

‘What does that mean?’ said Jasmine.

‘It’s good news,’ said my grandmother, but it wasn’t. Father Dunstan forgot his prayers and sat there staring at the low barred window at the end of the corridor. ‘You are going to have a little brother or sister,’ said my grandmother. ‘You should be excited about it, not scared, Jasmine.’ Jasmine started to cry.

‘Shh,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’ But Leo was the one who knew how to calm her down. She was wailing loudly, her face pale and trembling.

‘Shh,’ said my grandmother. ‘They will send us away if you don’t stop crying.’

But fear and exhaustion had got the better of Jasmine. She lay on the floor and wailed. My grandmother glanced at me, and I picked Jasmine up and carried her back along the corridor to the entrance hall. She was struggling so hard that I had to set her down there. ‘Stop it, Jasmine,’ I said. ‘Stop crying.’ But she would not stop. So I let her lie there and cry. There was no one about anyway. I sat down on the nearest bench and rested my arms on my knees. I could hear all the church bells chiming. I wondered if they were ringing for Christmas Mass or if it was the invasion warning. I wondered how long we would be shut away here, cut to pieces in this uncertain world between hope and despair. Two nurses with a stretcher ran past us, throwing disapproving frowns at Jasmine as they vanished down another corridor.

‘Come on, Jas,’ I said, trying to pull her to her feet. ‘They will throw us out if you don’t stop that crying.’

‘No.’

‘Stop it. Come on. Mama is being brave – why can’t you?’

Jasmine turned over and murmured something into her hair.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Mama is going to die, isn’t she?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It is probably going well. It was just like this when you were born.’

But it hadn’t been like this. My mother and Leo had been together. I had waited out on the apartment steps, and every few minutes, Leo had come out and told me that things were going well, with a strange glitter in his eyes. Everyone had known then that it would be all right; no one had doubted it. I wondered if the best times lay behind us
already. That thought made me feel old and tired, and I didn’t want to consider it any longer. ‘Hush,’ I said. ‘Stop crying now. Come on, Jas. You’re making my head hurt.’

‘I’m not just crying because of Mama,’ she said.

‘Then what?’

‘Anselm, all our things have burned up, haven’t they?’

I did not know what to say. I hardly believed that we had seen what we had seen. I began to doubt that we had really witnessed it. ‘It might still be all right,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Jasmine. ‘No, Anselm. I was the one who did it.’

‘What?’

‘I made the house burn down.’

I knelt down and looked into her face. It was streaked with tears and red blotches, and her hair lay plastered over it. I pushed it away. ‘Listen to me, Jasmine,’ I said. ‘It was not you.’

There were footsteps behind us, and we both looked up. Father Dunstan was hurrying down the corridor towards us.

‘What is it?’ I said.

‘The midwife came out and told us things are going better.’

‘Is she out of danger? And what about the baby?’

‘I don’t know. But that’s what the midwife said.’

Jasmine tried to brush the tears off her face with the ends of her shawl.

‘How much longer?’ I asked.

‘A while,’ said Father Dunstan. ‘A good while.’

I did not know what time it was. The night seemed to have stopped altogether.

‘I’ve got a pain in my stomach,’ said Jasmine, sniffing. No
one answered her. We went back to the door and waited. From behind it came urgent voices, and my mother’s cries pierced the silence. I fixed my eyes on the cracked tiles on the wall in front of us. The cracks made a chart like roads or a branching river. I tried to follow the lines from the top of the wall to the ground, rather than have to think. Jasmine was turning her christening bracelet around in her hand, whispering, ‘Please come back, Papa. Please come back, Papa.’ I remembered dimly, from somewhere beyond my fear, where she had got that from. It was what Leo used to do after his own parents went away.

Time passed, and nothing changed. And eventually the night drew out so long that I slept, with my head against the hard tiles and Leo’s old jacket pulled up over me, because there was nothing else to do.

When I woke, Father Dunstan was standing at the window. My grandmother was sitting with her shawl in her lap, twisting it fiercely, first one way and then the other.

‘What was that sound?’ Jasmine was asking, shaking me by the shoulder.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

A burst of gunfire came from somewhere nearby. I got to my feet without knowing what I was doing. Then my mother screamed in the room across the corridor, and I came back to the real world. I sat down again and glanced about the corridor, trying to stop my heart from beating so fast.

‘I wish Papa was here,’ said Jasmine.

‘Listen to the city,’ said my grandmother. ‘It sounds like a real war.’

People were shouting out there, the way they might
shout in a play, and I could hear gunshots and footsteps running up and down in the alleys. I did not go to the window. I did not want to see. None of that seemed real; our world was these two chairs and the cracked tiles and the door behind which my mother screamed again. We stared at each other, and the horror held us and would not let us go. And then there was a weak and strange cry, very feeble, and we all started to our feet.

The nurse pushed open the door and said, ‘The priest? She wants the priest.’

Father Dunstan was there in a moment. My mother was lying very still in the bed; the doctor was holding something bloodstained that moved feebly.

‘Is that the baby?’ said Jasmine, crying. ‘And what’s wrong with Mama?’

‘Does anyone have a cup?’ said Father Dunstan quietly. ‘Does anyone have something—’

‘Here,’ said Jasmine, and held out the alms cup from her costume.

Father Dunstan took it, and filled it with water from the metal sink in the corner. ‘What name?’ he said.

‘Is it a boy?’ said my grandmother.

The doctor nodded.

‘Leo,’ said my grandmother. ‘Name him for Leo.’

‘Leo,’ said Father Dunstan. ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’

As soon as that sentence was over, the doctor carried the baby behind a curtain. The nurse pushed us back towards the door and closed it firmly. We stood there and listened to the silence. My grandmother was grey-faced and shaking, her perfect make-up smudged and her hair dishevelled and tears tracking courses down her face. ‘I was always too
hard on Maria,’ she said suddenly. ‘I was always too strict with her. I wish … Anselm, I only wish …’ She trailed off.

People were shouting in the hospital, I realized suddenly, and running to and fro below us. With a strange kind of calm, I went at last to the window. There were soldiers in blue in the streets, marching and shouting. At the door of the hospital, a line of stretchers was moving slowly in. Some of the people on them twisted and cried out; others lay there in silence. Some of the casualties walked in of their own accord, clutching a bleeding arm or a bandaged head.

A nurse came past briskly and glanced at us. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said. ‘There’s a war on out there – we need the space. Give me those chairs. And you.’ She was looking at me. ‘Shouldn’t you be fighting?’

My grandmother and Father Dunstan stood up, and she whisked the chairs away along the corridor and vanished. Dimly, I realized I should be. Weeks ago, I had registered my willingness. But what did that signify now?

We waited through what felt like a year more of silence and darkness. I did not know how we stood it from one minute to the next. Then, after the dawn had risen, a nurse opened the door. ‘You can come in now,’ she said.

My grandmother was the bravest of us. She stepped over the threshold. Then she was running across the room to my mother’s bed, and we ran after her. My mother was very pale, her beautiful hair clinging to her face in wet strands. The baby lay in the nurse’s arms, clenching its fists feebly. Jasmine stopped in front of the bed and would not go any closer.

‘I’m all right,’ said my mother weakly. ‘Why are you crying? We are both all right.’ But she was crying too. Then the
doctor was telling us that they were out of danger, and my grandmother and Jasmine made such a clamour that the baby woke and raised his thin voice and cried as well. Anyone watching that scene from outside would have thought it a sad occasion. And if tears signified anything, my brother was baptized a thousand times.

When my brother was five days old, the Imperial Order put up posters calling for the arrest of Aldebaran’s last descendant. When he was eight days old, we decided to set out west. We would cross the city under cover of darkness, with the baby wrapped in all our extra clothes. We had a few belongings now, purchased hastily from the one shop in the district that had stayed open. It flew an Imperial Order flag over its door, but we were past caring about that.

Father Dunstan brought us a box with food, soap, matches, a coat for Jasmine, and other things the remaining members of the congregation had collected between them. He was leaving the city too, but not yet, he said. Not until his work here was done. ‘Go to Holy Island,’ he told us. ‘Ask at the munitions factory for Leo. It is on Harbour Street, in Valacia. They will be able to tell you where he is living, if he is there.’

He wrote all this down, and the name of the priest, on a scrap of paper for my mother. He had sent word to people he knew there to get the information for us. Holy Island was across the border, unoccupied territory. If Leo was not there, at least we could find out where he was.

‘Will you be all right, Father?’ my mother asked as the priest left.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘God go with you on the journey. And for ever, Maria, I hope.’

* * *

After he had gone, when we had all lain down to sleep for a few hours, Jasmine asked, ‘Will we see Father Dunstan again?’

‘I don’t know,’ said my mother. ‘I hope so.’

The baby let out a faint murmur. ‘Shh, baby,’ said Jasmine, and got up and went to the side of the cot. Under his hospital blanket, his face was pink and untroubled, as though he had been born in the greatest palace.