Wideacre (Wideacre Trilogy) (35 page)

‘However much I would wish it, my wishes come secondary for once!’ I wrote with a sweet little jest. ‘For Celia cannot travel, and the argument against her making the attempt is the only one that could stop me coming to you.’ Sufficiently winsome for anyone this, I thought, well aware that Harry might read it aloud to Mama, or Lady Havering. ‘I am deeply happy to be able to tell you that Celia is with child.’

I paused again. Celia’s health had to be sufficiently difficult as to prevent her travelling entirely, and yet not so frail that Harry felt her needs more pressing than Mama’s. I thought I could trust to Mama to keep Harry safe at home, but you never knew with my mama. She might be overwhelmed with tenderness for Celia and her unborn grandson and send Harry post-haste back to France in a spirit of inconvenient selflessness.

‘She is extremely well,’ I wrote, ‘happy in her mind and fit. However, she finds any motion of carriage or boat brings on severe nausea. The local
accoucheuse —
who speaks excellent English and is most attentive and helpful — advises us that Celia should not attempt any journey until she is past the third month of her time, when she anticipates the symptoms will have abated and we can come home.’

I filled another page with assurances that I was caring for Celia and that Harry need have no concern whatsoever, and that we would be setting out on our journey home within two months. I threw in a caution that he should not think of coming to meet us or coming back to France without writing to me first: ‘How unfortunate if our ships were to cross at sea, us coming home, you coming out!’ I wrote, and thought that should keep him fixed at home.

I envisaged that at the end of the time I had allotted Celia’s symptoms of nausea might improve, but then there would be the trouble of getting a ship. Then there would be the winter storms, and then we would be too near her time for us to consider a bumpy land journey or a slow sea voyage. I thought that if every letter sounded as if we were just about to set off, Harry would be happy to wait for us, and attract no blame from any friends and neighbours for lying snug at Wideacre while his wife and sister were in France. I knew I should have to do some clever lying in the letters — but I knew also that I could do it.

And all the time my body grew rounder and rounder until I scarce could believe the shape of it, as fat as a tulip on a slender stem. We had left the hotel as soon as Harry was safely away and had taken furnished rooms on the outskirts of Bordeaux, south of the Gironde river. Every day I woke to the sight of reflected ripples dancing on my ceiling and the noise of fishermen and boatmen calling across the water.

The widow who owned the house believed me to be a young married Englishwoman and Celia my sister-in-law. So any later gossip might be confused by the nearness to the truth of the lies we told.

The rhythm of the early winter days exactly suited my lazy mood in the middle of my pregnancy. And when I got heavier and tired, I was glad to draw up the sofa to a good wood fire and sit with my feet up, while Celia sewed and sewed an exquisite layette complete for a prince, for the heir to Wideacre.

Her face lit up when I said graciously, one day, ‘He’s kicking. You may feel him if you want.’

‘Oh! May I?’ she said eagerly, and rested her gentle hand on the curve of my belly and tensed with anticipation. Then a tender smile passed over her face as she felt the hard knobbly movements.

‘Oh,’ she sighed in delight, ‘what a strong child she will be.’ A shadow crossed her face. Silly fool that she was, she had taken this long to think of Wideacre. ‘What if it is a boy?’ she asked. ‘An heir?’

My face was clear, my smile assured. I was ready for her. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I may have said “he” but I know it is a girl.’ I was utterly certain in my lie, as I was utterly certain in my private
conviction that I carried the heir to Wideacre in my belly. ‘It is a girl,’ I said again. ‘I promise you, Celia, a mother always knows what her child will be.’

The cold wind that had blown all winter so strongly off the sea died down, and there was an easy, early spring. I pined for Wideacre like an exiled convict and could barely acknowledge the beauty of this warm French season. It seemed too hot too suddenly; there were no long days of anticipation. But then my heart leaped when I looked at the calendar and realized that, all being well and the new heir being prompt, I might yet get to home in time to see our wild daffodils still blooming under the trees in the wood.

Madame had arranged for a midwife well known to her who had a good record of successful births and was called often to attend ladies of Quality. We also had the name of a surgeon in case of complications. To my surprise, I found I had a secret longing for the cool, straightforward competence of Dr MacAndrew, and smiled at the thought of what his response would be if he knew that the lovely Miss Lacey was preparing for her confinement in France. But when the old midwife rubbed oils into my swelling belly, and Celia hung dried flowers and herbs over the door, and tossed special dust on the fire, I found myself heartily impatient with these superstitions. I would much have preferred Dr MacAndrew to look at me in that clear, honest way and tell me if it was to be an easy labour or not. In his absence, I had to rest on the belief that the stupidest women I know have packs of brats, so surely I could manage just one.

When the time came, it was surprisingly easy — a tribute, the midwife said, to my early hoydenish galloping about on horses — so unlike a good French girl. I woke in the night all wet and said drowsily, ‘Good heavens, he’s coming.’ No more, but Celia had heard me even through the bedroom wall and was awake and with me in a second. She sent Madame for the midwife and got the little cradle and the swaddling bands ready, a pot boiling on the hearth and then sat calmly and helpfully at my head.

It was like heaving bales of hay, or pushing a great cart-horse round a stable. Hard work, and you know you are working, but
for me there was no great pain. I screamed a few times, I think, but some part of my alert mind reminded me to keep any name off my lips.

Celia clung to my hand with a face as white as the baby’s layette as I sat up in the bed, curved over my belly where the muscles stood up as square as a box. I could actually see the outline of my son, my darling son, the heir to Wideacre, pushing his way bravely and rightly down the long journey of my body, ready to be born.

‘Poussez, madame!’ yelled the midwife.

‘Poussez!’ shouted the widow.

‘They say “push”,’ breathed Celia, overcome by all this noise and healthy physical activity. I choked on a laugh, then forgot the comedy of it as a great driving wave of feeling swept my body and the darling boy another inch downwards.

‘Arrêtez! Arrêtez!’ shouted the midwife, and she bent down with a corner of a dirty apron and wiped something that was no longer me. Celia’s eyes filled with tears as we heard a tiny gurgling cry. My son, my heir, greeted the world with a yelp as with one last push and a wriggle and even a scrabble with his tiny feet, he swam free, and the midwife landed him like a beached fish on the bank of my suddenly flaccid belly.

I gazed at his eyes, so deep blue that even the whites of them were as blue as the early morning skies over Wideacre. I touched his wet head, dark but perhaps already with signs of a chestnut gleam from me. I looked at his tiny fingers, each one crowned with a perfect minute shell of a fingernail.

‘Vous avez une jolie fille,’ the midwife said approvingly, and busied herself with the sheets.

I gazed blankly from my tiny son to Celia’s concerned face.

‘She is a girl,’ said Celia gently, in awe.

I could hear the words neither in English nor in French. The baby that I had carried so carefully and so long, this baby, for whom I had laboured all night, was my son, was Wideacre’s heir. He was the end and triumph of my sinning and striving. This was my child, who would inherit by unquestioned right. This was my son, my son, my son.

‘A lovely girl,’ repeated Celia.

I turned on my side so roughly that the baby nearly fell but
Celia’s hands were quick to catch her and hold her safe. The child set up a shriek as I jerked away and cried and cried in Celia’s arms.

‘Take the little brat away,’ I said with hatred, and cared not who heard me. ‘Take it away and keep it. You agreed. You wanted a girl all through. Now you have got one. Take her away.’

I did not repent all night, though I heard an insistent wail and the sound of Celia’s footsteps as she walked the hungry baby backwards and forwards across the floor of her room. I heard her hushing it with little songs in a voice that grew more and more thin as the night went on. I dozed at the sound, and then woke to anger and bitter disappointment. All my life I had been denied my rights at Wideacre. I, who loved the land best of all of us, who served it better than any of us, who had schemed and plotted and crippled for it, was disappointed again. One stroke of luck could have placed me for life as the mother of the heir of Wideacre. Whether I had kept the secret in my heart for my own comfort and pleasure, whether I had used it, or whether I whispered it one day to my growing son, only time would have shown. But now I had a paltry insignificant girl who would be supplanted by Celia’s first boy baby and who would be married away from Wideacre when grown, just as they still planned to marry me.

She was the death of my plans and I could not yet learn to bear the disappointment. The long, long wait for the birth and the struggle of labour to produce a miserable girl were too bitter a pill to swallow. In my vague, dozing dreams I grieved also with a strange sense of loss for the child that never was. The son I had made in my mind with pride and tenderness. And in my half-waking, confused thoughts I turned in need — not to the image of Harry, but to Ralph — and said indistinctly in my mind, ‘I have lost something too now. You are not the only one who has suffered for Wideacre. You lost your legs, but I have lost a son.’ There was comfort in this dream of telling Ralph of my pain, which only he would understand.

But into this dozing vision came the nightmare picture of a man on a big black horse and I sat bolt upright in my bed and shrieked myself into wakefulness.

It was daylight. Through the closed door I could hear the noise of breakfast being prepared and felt a sudden keen hunger for the hot croissants and strong black coffee Madame or Celia would bring to me. My body was sore: I felt as if I had been kicked in the groin by a stallion, and I was as tired as after a day’s hunting. But my belly was as flat as a milk pudding — disagreeably wobbly but I should soon cure that. I pulled up my shift to enjoy the sight of my thighs and knees, which had disappeared from sight around the moon of my belly months ago. And then I thanked the gods in genuine gratitude that my navel had retreated to be a perfect little dimple again, instead of the little molehill that had formed as the baby grew.

Enwrapped in my mood of self-congratulation, I smiled with good humour as the door opened and Celia came in carrying my breakfast tray for me. Someone had gone to the garden and picked me white violets, and their cool, wet smell reminded me with piercing longing of the woods of Wideacre where the white and blue violets grow like pools at the roots of the trees. There also came the good smell of Madame’s deadly strong coffee, and the sight of the flaky skins of golden croissants and the bland, unsalted butter. I felt as hungry as if I had been fasting for a year.

‘Lovely,’ I said, and took the tray on my knees and poured a deep black cup of bitter coffee and fell on the croissants. Only when I had polished the plate with a licked forefinger to get every trace of the flaky crumbs did I notice that Celia looked pale and tired.

‘Are you unwell, Celia?’ I asked in surprise.

‘I am tired,’ said Celia, her voice low but with some strength behind her tone that. I did not yet understand. ‘All night the baby cried. She is hungry but she will take neither pap nor goat’s milk. The wet-nurse we were promised has gone dry and Madame is trying to find another this morning. I am afraid the child is hungry.’

I lay back on my pillows and watched Celia under my long eyelashes. My face was inscrutable.

‘I think you should feed her yourself,’ said Celia evenly. ‘You will have to until we can find another wet-nurse. I am afraid you have no alternative.’

‘I had hoped not to do so,’ I said, affecting hesitation, and testing the strength of this strange, purposeful Celia. ‘I wanted, for her sake and for all of us, to see as little as possible of her, especially in these early days when naturally I am rather distressed.’ I let my voice quaver a little, and watched like a hawk for Celia’s response.

‘Oh, Beatrice, I am so sorry,’ she said. ‘I was thinking, wrongly, only of her. Of course I understand you will not wish to see her until you are more accustomed to the idea. I let my concern for her overcome my deeper concern for you. Do forgive me, my dear.’

I nodded my head and smiled at her kindly, and waved for her to remove the tray. She did so and I snuggled down into the pillows with a sigh of blissful contentment, which she took for tiredness.

‘I will leave you to rest,’ she said. ‘Never fear about the little one. I shall find some way to feed her.’ I nodded. I dare say she would. Had it been a boy — my son, my longed for son — I would never have let some poor French peasant near him with her milk and her dirt. But a girl baby could shift for herself. Hundreds of babies thrive on flour and water; this wrong-sex brat could do so too. Hundreds more die on the diet, and in many ways this would be the easiest solution to the problem of this crying girl. To force Celia to keep a life-long secret would take all my ability, and cost all my goodwill with her. That effort and struggle would have been a small enough price to pay to see my son as heir of Wideacre, but to do it to place a miserable girl in a poor secondary position was a high price to pay for no benefit at all. The girl was no good to me; girls are never any good to anyone. I shut my eyes on the disappointment and dozed again.

When I woke my pillow was wet with tears, which had slid down my cheeks in dreamless sleep. When I felt the wet linen against my cheek the tears sprung again to my eyes. Wideacre was so far away from this little overheated room in this strange town. There were long seas of grey waves between me and home. Wideacre was far from me, and my undisputed ownership as distant as ever. The place haunted me and my sleep like a Holy Grail that I could seek, and wear out my life in the seeking, but never attain. I turned my head on the pillow and said one sad
word, the name of the man who would have won Wideacre for me, ‘Ralph.’