He stopped. After a little Eve said, “But the baby isn’t due for another month.”
“I know. That’s it.”
“Do you want me to come?”
“Could you?”
“Yes.” Her mind flew ahead, checking the contents of the deep freeze, cancelling small appointments, trying to work out how she could abandon Walter. “Yes, of course. I’ll catch the five-thirty train. I should be with you at about a quarter to eight.”
“I’ll meet you at the station. You’re an angel.”
“Is Jamie all right?”
“He’s all right. Nessie Cooper’s keeping an eye on him; she’ll look after him till you get here.”
“I’ll see you, then.”
“I’m sorry to spring this on you.”
“That’s all right. Give Jane my love. And, David…” She knew it was a ludicrous thing to say, even as she said it. “… try not to worry.”
* * *
Slowly, carefully, she replaced the receiver. She looked up at Mrs. Abney, who stood in the open doorway. Mrs. Abney’s cheerful expression had gone, to be replaced by one of anxious concern which Eve knew was mirrored by her own. There was no need for spoken word or explanation. They were old friends. Mrs. Abney had worked for Eve for more than twenty years. Mrs. Abney had watched Jane grow up, had come to Jane’s wedding wearing a turquoise two-piece and matching turban hat. When Jamie was born, Mrs. Abney had knitted him a blue blanket for his pram. She was, in every sort of way, one of the family.
She said, “Nothing’s gone wrong?”
“It’s just that they think the baby’s on the way. It’s a month early.”
“You’ll have to go.”
“Yes,” said Eve faintly.
She had been going to go anyway, had everything planned for next month. Walter’s sister was going to come up from the south to keep him company and do the cooking, but there could be no question of her coming now, at such short notice.
Mrs. Abney said, “Don’t you worry about Mr. Douglas. I’ll keep an eye on him.”
“But, Mrs. Abney, you’ve got enough to do—your own family…”
“If I can’t make it in the mornings, I’ll nip up in the afternoons.”
“He can make his own breakfast…” But somehow that only worsened the situation, as though poor Walter was capable of nothing more than boiling an egg. But it wasn’t that, and Mrs. Abney knew it. Walter had the farm to run; he was out working from six o’clock in the morning until sunset or later. He needed, got, and consumed meals of enormous proportions because he was a big man and a hard-working one. He took, in fact, a good deal of looking after.
“I—I don’t know how long I’ll be away.”
“All that matters,” said Mrs. Abney, “is that Jane’s all right and the baby too. That’s your place … that’s where you’ve got to be.”
“Oh, Mrs. Abney, what would I do without you?”
“Lots of things, I expect,” said Mrs. Abney, who was a true Northumbrian and didn’t believe in showing emotion. “And now, why don’t I make us a nice hot cup of tea?”
The tea was a good idea. While she drunk it, Eve made lists. When she had finished drinking it, she got out the car, drove the short distance to the local town, went into the supermarket and there stocked up on all the sort of food that Walter could, if necessary, cope with for himself. Tins of soup, quiches, frozen pies, frozen vegetables. She stocked up on bread, butter, pounds of cheese. Eggs and milk came from the farm, but the butcher wrapped chops and steaks and sausages, found scraps and bones for the dogs, agreed to send a van out to the farm should the need arise.
“Going away?” he asked, slicing a marrow bone in two with his cleaver.
“Yes. Just up to Scotland to stay with my daughter.” The shop was full and she did not say why she was going.
“That’ll be a nice change.”
“Yes,” said Eve faintly. “Yes, it will be very nice.”
* * *
She got home and found Walter, who had come in early, sitting at the kitchen table and eating his way through the stew, boiled potatoes, and cauliflower cheese which Mrs. Abney had left for him in the bottom oven of the Aga stove. He wore his old working clothes and looked like a ploughman. Once, and it seemed a long time ago, he had been in the Army; Eve had married him as a tall and dashing captain, and they had had a traditional wedding with herself in flowing white and an archway of swords awaiting them as they emerged from the church doorway. There had followed postings in Germany and Hong Kong and Warminster, always living in married quarters, never having a home of their own. And then Jane arrived, and soon after that Walter’s father, who had spent his life farming in Northumberland, announced that he had no intention of dying in harness, and what was Walter going to do about it?
Eve and Walter made the great decision together. Walter said goodbye to the Army, spent two years at an Agricultural College, and then took over the farm. It was a decision neither of them regretted, but the hard physical work had left its mark on Walter. He was now fifty-five, his thick hair quite grey, his brown face seamed with lines, his hands permanently engrained with engine oil.
He looked up as she appeared, borne down with laden baskets. “Hello, darling.”
She sat down at the other end of the table without even taking off her coat. “Did you see Mrs. Abney?”
“No, she’d gone before I came in.”
“I have to go to Scotland.”
Across the table their eyes met. “Jane?” said Walter.
“Yes.”
The sudden shock of anxiety seemed, visibly, to drain him, to diminish him in some horrible way. Every instinct was to comfort him. She said quickly, “You mustn’t worry. It’s just that the baby’s going to arrive a little early.”
“Is she all right?”
Matter-of-factly, Eve explained what David had told her. “These things happen. And she’s in hospital. I’m sure she’s getting the best of attention.”
Walter said what Eve had been trying not to tell herself ever since David’s telephone call. “She was so ill when Jamie was born.”
“Oh, Walter, don’t…”
“In the old days she’d have been told never to have another child.”
“It’s different now. Things are so different. The doctors are so clever—” she went on, vaguely, trying to reassure not only her husband, but herself. “You know … scans and things…” He looked unconvinced. “Besides, she wanted another child.”
“We wanted another child, too, but we only had Jane.”
“Yes, I know.” She got up and went to kiss him, putting her arms around his neck, burying her face in his hair. She said, “You smell of silage.” And then, “Mrs. Abney will take care of you.”
He said, “I should be coming with you.”
“Darling, you can’t. David knows that, he’s a farmer himself. Jane knows it. Don’t think about it.”
“I hate you having to go alone.”
“I shan’t be alone. I’m never alone as long as I know that you’re around somewhere, even if it’s a hundred miles away.” She drew away from him, and smiled down at his upturned face.
“Would she be so special,” Walter asked, “if she hadn’t been an only child?”
“Just as special. No person could ever be as special as Jane.”
* * *
When Walter had taken himself off, Eve busied herself, putting the shopping away, making a list for Mrs. Abney, stacking up the deep freeze, washing the dishes. She went upstairs to pack a suitcase, but when all this was accomplished, it was still only half-past two. She went downstairs and pulled on her coat and her boots and whistled up the dogs, then set off across the fields towards the cold North Sea and the little sickle of beach which they had always thought of as their own.
It was October now, still and cool. The first frosts had turned the trees to amber and gold, the sky was overcast, and the sea grey as steel. The tide was out, the sand lay smooth and clean as a ne
wly laundered sheet. The dogs bounded ahead, leaving trails of paw-marks in the pristine sand. Eve followed, the wind blowing her hair across her face, humming in her ears.
She thought of Jane. Not now, lying in some anonymous hospital bed waiting for God knew what was going to happen. But Jane as a little girl, Jane growing up, Jane grown up. Jane with her tangle of brown hair and her blue eyes and her laughter. The small, industrious Jane, sewing dolls’ clothes on her mother’s old machine, mucking out her little pony, making rock buns in the kitchen on wet winter afternoons. She remembered Jane as a leggy teenager, the house filled with her friends, the telephone endlessly ringing. Jane had done all the maddening, harum-scarum things that all teenagers do, and yet had never herself become maddening. She had never been plain, never sulky, and her natural friendliness and vitality ensured that there had never been a time when she had not had some adoring male in attendance.
“You’ll be getting married next,” Mrs. Abney used to tease her, but Jane had ideas of her own.
“I’m not getting married until I’m at least thirty. I’m not getting married until I’m too old to do anything else.”
But when she was twenty-one, she had gone to spend a weekend in Scotland, and had met David Murchison and fallen instantly in love, and the next thing Eve was in the thick of wedding plans, trying to work out how the marquee was going to fit onto the front lawn and searching the shops of Newcastle for a suitable wedding dress.
“Marrying a farmer!” Mrs. Abney marvelled. “You’d have thought, being brought up on a farm, you’d have had enough of that sort of life.”
“Not me,” said Jane. “I’m jumping out of one dungheap into another!”
* * *
She had never been ill in her life, but she was very ill when Jamie was born four years ago, and the baby had been kept in intensive care for two months before he was allowed home. Eve had gone to Scotland at that time, to take care of the little household, and Jane had taken so long to recover and get back her strength that privately Eve prayed that she would never have another child. But Jane thought differently.
“I don’t want Jamie to be an only child. It isn’t that I didn’t adore being one, but it must be more fun to be one of a family. Besides, David wants another.”
“But, darling…”
“Oh, it’ll be all right. Don’t fuss, Mumma. I’m as strong as a horse, it’s just that my insides don’t seem to be very cooperative. It only goes on for a few months, anyway, and then you’ve got something marvellous for the rest of your life.”
The rest of your life. The rest of Jane’s life. All at once Eve was gripped in a freezing panic. Two lines of a poem she had once read rose from her subconscious and rang through her head like a roll of drumbeats:
Unstoppable blossom
above my rotting daughter …
She shivered, chilled to the bone, overwhelmed by every sort of cold. She was now out in the middle of the beach, where an outcrop of rock, invisible at flood tide, was revealed, abandoned like a wrecked hulk by the sea. It was crusted with limpets, fringed with green weed, and on it sat a pair of herring gulls, beady-eyed, screaming defiance at the wind.
She stood and watched them. White birds. For some reason white birds had always been an important, even symbolic, part of her life. She had loved the gulls of childhood, sailing against the blue skies of seaside summer holidays, and their cry never failed to evoke those endless, aimless sunlit days.
And then there were the wild geese which, in winter, flew over David and Jane’s farm in Scotland. Morning and evening the great formations crossed the skies, skimming down to settle on the reedy mudflats by the shores of the great tidal estuary that bordered David’s land.
And fantail pigeons. She and Walter had spent their honeymoon in a small hotel in Provence. Their bedroom window had faced out over a cobbled courtyard with a dovecote in the centre of it, and the fantails had woken them each morning with their cooing and fluttering and sudden idyllic bursts of flight. On the last day of their honeymoon, they had gone shopping, and Walter had bought her pair of white porcelain fantails, and they lived still at either end of her sitting-room mantelpiece. They were two of her most precious possessions.
White birds. She remembered being a child during the war, with an older brother reported missing. Fear and anxiety, like a sort of canker, had filled the house, destroying security. Until that morning when she had looked from her bedroom window and seen the gull poised on the roof of the house opposite. It was winter, and the early sun, a scarlet fireball, had just crept up into the sky, and as the gull suddenly launched itself into flight, she saw the underside of its wings stained with rosy pink. The delighted shock of such marvellous and surprising beauty filled her with comfort. She knew then that her brother was alive, and when, a week later, her parents heard officially that he was safe and well although a prisoner-of-war, they could not understand why Eve took the news so calmly. But she never told them about the gull.
* * *
And these gulls…? But these were giving nothing away, no reassurances for Eve. They turned their heads, searching the empty sands, spied some distant gobbet of edible rubbish, screamed, stood tiptoe, spread their massive snowy wings and were away, wheeling and floating on the arms of the wind.
She sighed, looked at her watch. It was time to return. She whistled for the dogs, and started the long walk home.
* * *
It was nearly dark when the train drew into the station, but she saw her tall son-in-law waiting for her on the platform, standing beneath one of the lights, huddled into his old working jacket, with the collar turned up against the wind. Eve got herself out of the warm interior of the train and felt that wind, which on this particular station always seemed to blow with piercing chill, even in the middle of summer.
He came towards her. “Eve.” They kissed. His cheek felt icy beneath her lips, and she thought he looked terrible, thinner than ever, and with no colour to his face. He stooped and picked up her suitcase. “Is this all you’ve got?”
“That’s all.”
Not speaking, they walked together down the platform, up the steps, out into the yard where his car waited. He opened the boot and slung her case in, then went around to unlock her door. It was not until they were away from the station and on the road that led out into the country that she steeled herself to ask, “How is Jane?”
“I don’t know. Nobody will say for certain one way or the other. Her blood pressure soared, that’s what really started it all.”
“Can I see her?”
“I asked, but not this evening, Sister said. Maybe tomorrow morning.”
There was nothing much else to be said. “And how’s Jamie?”
“He’s fine. I told you, Nessie Cooper’s been marvellously kind, she’s been looking after him, along with her own brood.” Nessie was married to Tom Cooper, who was David’s foreman. “He’s excited at the thought of you coming to look after him.”
“Dear little boy.” In the darkness of the car, she made herself smile. Her face felt as though it had not smiled for years, but it was important, for Jamie’s sake, to arrive looking cheerful and calm, whatever horrors were going on in the inside of her head.
When they arrived at last, Jamie and Mrs. Cooper were watching television together in the sitting room. Jamie was in his dressing gown and drinking a mug of cocoa, but when he heard his father’s voice, he set this down and came to meet them in the hall, partly because he was fond of Eve and looking forward to seeing her again, and partly because he had a very good idea that she might have brought him a present.
“Hello, Jamie.” She stooped and they kissed. He smelled of soap.
“Granny, I had lunch today with Charlie Cooper and he’s six and he’s got a pair of football boots.”
“Heavens above! With proper studs?”
“Yes, just like real, and he’s got a football and he lets me play with him, and I can nearly do a drop kick.”
“More than I ca
n,” Eve told him.
She pulled off her hat and began to unbutton her coat, and as she did this, Mrs. Cooper emerged through the open sitting-room door and took her own coat off the hall chair.
“Nice to see you again, Mrs. Douglas.”
She was a neat, slim woman, and looked far too young to be the mother of four—or was it five?—children. Eve had lost count.
“And you too, Mrs. Cooper. You’ve been so kind. Who’s looking after your lot?”
“Tom. But the baby’s teething, so I must get back.”
“I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done.”
“Oh, it’s nothing. I … I just hope everything goes all right.”
“I’m sure it will.”
“It doesn’t seem fair, does it? I have babies, no trouble. One after the other, easy as a cat, Tom always says. And there’s Mrs. Murchison … well, I don’t know. It doesn’t seem fair.” She pulled on her coat and did up the buttons. “I’ll come along tomorrow to give you a hand, if you like, if you don’t mind me bringing the baby. He can sit in his pram in the kitchen.”
“I’d love you to come.”
“Makes it easier, waiting,” said Mrs. Cooper. “Helps if you’ve got a body to talk to.”
When she had gone, Eve and Jamie went up to her bedroom and she opened her suitcase, and found his present, which was a model John Deere tractor and which he insisted politely was exactly what he had been wanting, and how had she known? With the tractor safely in his possession, he was happy to go to bed. He kissed her goodnight, and went with his father to have his teeth cleaned and be tucked into bed. Eve unpacked and washed her hands, changed her shoes and did her hair; then she went downstairs, and she and David had a drink together. She went into the kitchen and assembled a little supper for them both, which they ate off a tray by the fire. After supper, David got into the car and went back to the hospital, and Eve washed up. When this was done, she telephoned Walter, and they talked for a little, but somehow there didn’t seem to be very much to say. She waited up until David returned, but still he had no news.
“They said they’d ring if anything started,” he told her. “I want to be with her. I was with her when Jamie was born.”