Acacia - Secrets of an African Painting

Prologue

  The 1960’s

  The birth wasn’t easy. She felt her waters break late in the afternoon of the eleventh and she called for the midwife immediately. The baby wasn’t quite ready though and by 1am the following morning she was asleep again and the house was quiet. The midwife returned the next day, midmorning, and after a cursory examination pronounced that nothing was going to happen until later that day or even that night. It wasn’t so much an estimate of the newborn’s arrival as an instruction and the girl felt more powerless than ever. The woman left again leaving the expectant mother alone and afraid.

  This wasn’t normal she was sure; her baby should be on its way by now shouldn’t it?

  She lay still on her bed in the downstairs room the whole day, too tired and too scared to move other than to use the ornate pan by her bedside, one of the only items providing a link to her family - of whom she could remember nothing. She could feel the movement inside her and was at least comforted by that, although each time it stopped the panic started to rise, thick inside her until the next kick or wriggle. The minutes stretched into hours that seemed like days as she lay there, nerves stretched by the ordeal that had started so wonderfully and with so much promise just over nine months ago.

  As she stared at the stained ceiling, alternately she picked out patterns, countries and faces in the grime and then fretted on the twin uncertain futures she and her baby would face. Her isolation could end at least, the make-believe illness she had suffered, keeping her indoors and hidden for the last few weeks of the pregnancy, could be ‘cured’. She wondered how many people had been fooled by the charade. In a village like this there would not be many who wouldn’t have guessed the truth and then gossiped about it to others. The trick was to maintain the pretence though wasn’t it? To never publicly give in to the speculation and endless questions and to always stay resolute. It was her bad luck to have got into this mess in a small Hampshire village that maintained its Victorian morals whilst the rest of the world seemed to have embraced sexual liberation and a more liberal outlook on life in general. How she wished she lived in London, where this sort of thing happened all the time, or in one of those communes where the miracle of new life was celebrated rather than denigrated and reduced to a sordid act far from the sight of God.

  The future for her child was even less certain than her own. She was scared for the baby, for the unknown to come, but more scared that she may not be able to cope with the not knowing. After the birth the child would be taken from her and she would never see it again, or even know what had happened to it. In her head she knew it was the best solution, but her heart ached already for a loss yet to come, and she had shed rivers of tears for the child she would never hold but that she knew better than anyone else alive.

  At around five o’clock the midwife returned once more. A large bluff woman, the wife of a local farmer, she was torn between her love of God and the Church and her natural compassion for this vulnerable young girl who was suffering the double pains of childbirth and isolation. To resolve her internal conflict she chose to remain neutral, doing what she could to ease the birth as kindly as she could manage without becoming too involved or too close to the mother to be; or not to be as the case was.

  To the pregnant girl though this attitude was cold and unfeeling: that a woman so close to God would treat her with such disdain was a kind of proof that she had wronged, that she was damned in whatever way God chose. She resolved that the rest of her life would be blameless, that never again would the village have cause to treat her badly. She already knew that no man would come close to reaching her heart as had the father of this child, but she also knew that he was unobtainable, off limits for now and forever. Her life from this point on would be sacrificed to her love of him, her unknown baby and God.

  For now though the ordeal continued. The next few hours slowed more than she could have believed and became a flowing nightmare of terse orders and instructions from the midwife, pain, sweat, tears and unimagined indignities, mingled with her own cries for release. When the midwife told her she would have to cut her, she thought she would scream, that nothing in the world could be this bad, but she endured as she knew she must.

  The child finally arrived early the next morning; the thirteenth. All she saw of her baby was a blurred vision of blood and thick dark hair before it was wrapped in a large towel and taken from the room. She heard it cry once and then came the silence.

  She felt completely numb now, from the exertions of birth and from the emotions of loss. She lay with her head to one side staring at the blackness outside the window. As she stared she saw something move out there; a shadow that was gone as soon as she tried to focus on it. She thought no more of it though as the midwife finished cleaning her up and wiped her brow with a cool, damp cloth. If she had looked at that moment she would have seen the older woman smile down, just briefly but with compassion, before she left the room and all was still again.

  The basket lay on the kitchen table. Inside, the baby swathed in towels was still, unnaturally so for a newborn. As the midwife came in to the room she sensed rather than saw the shadow cross the space. There was a pause, as if time had taken a breath, while something, nothing, passed over the basket. She shook her head, unsure that she had seen anything at all. When she looked again there was nothing there, but when she picked the basket up she could swear she smelt a faint odour of damp wood.