Band of Angel (4 page)

At other times, after tea, she would make them laugh by dragging out what she called her Road to Hell box, a small carved box full of spools of cotton and tangled skeins of silk and her pile of unfinished projects: a tray cloth that only needed a handful of stitches to be finished; the tapestry for a footstool that had waited three years to be mounted. Sometimes she would hold up these items and attempt a serious lecture on the importance of finishing things, but her nature was too fluid and subtle for sermons and she often ended up making them hoot with laughter. It was something about the disparaging way her long fingers held up the trolley cloth and the beaded tray, the way her voice tailed off as she tried to work up enthusiasm for the idea that God was up there, waiting impatiently for the beaded tray.

What they most looked forward to was the moment when Mother’s needle dithered over the canvas and she began to tell stories. One afternoon when it was pelting with rain and the mountains just a gray blur in the distance, she told them, Catherine was never to forget it, in a voice steely with self-control, about her own mother who had died of tuberculosis. She was seven years old. She’d been in trouble the day before, she’d torn her dress and been whipped severely, three times on each hand. Mother held out both her hands, and such was her power as a storyteller that both Eliza and Catherine leaned forward, mingling their red and fair hairs in the lamplight, sure the marks would still be there. Mother had been naughty, she’d been attempting to fly with an umbrella over the henhouse and she was sure it was her fault when, a few days later, the sanatoria’s gray cabriole arrived at their door. She remembered everything: the coachman’s umbrella swooping down like a terrible bird. The sound of rain on the tarpaulin. The flutter of her mother’s hand as she drove away. The look on Mother’s face as she told this story, pierced Catherine to the heart. Normally, Mother tried
so hard to make her stories have happy endings and to tell them only about nice things. Sometimes, when they were young, this had ludicrous consequences. “Don’t look, my loves,” Mother would say if they passed a squashed squirrel or a rabbit on the road. “It’s sleeping, it was going to a party and it is having a sleep.” And Mair, if she was with them, would look at her in astonishment and say, “That ain’t asleep, Mrs. Carreg, that’s dead as mutton.”

Silly as these attempts were, her determination not to inflict her own sufferings on her children was heroic. For her spirits were either very high or unfathomably low. She swung on a seesaw that seemed to get higher and lower as the years progressed, and later she was quite unreachable in her sadness, sometimes for months on end. There were one or two terrible “cures,” many afternoons in darkened rooms, and yet Catherine, when young, had had very little understanding of her mother’s nerves, which, to say the least, were permanently strained.

Later, Catherine wished she had known more about the bad things. About pain and loss and sorrow. If she had, she would have been more prepared for what happened next.

The night when her world started to unravel was innocently beautiful. The spring sky glowed with stars and, outside in the fields, ten new lambs born that day were suckling on their mothers. It was two days before her eighteenth birthday. Earlier in the day she and Eliza had walked along the cliff path to watch the fishing boats setting out for their evening’s work. As they walked back arm-in-arm, sunset turned their faces and the sea behind them into liquid gold.

There wasn’t enough to do to fill an evening, so she’d gone to bed early, but had woken a few hours later with a feeling of intense foreboding. Hearing a faint scrabbling sound on the landing outside, she’d gone, half asleep, to see what it was, and found Mother on the floor. She was on her knees beside an oak trunk carved with acorns, sifting in a wild, muddled way through what Catherine, moving closer, could see were heaps of baby clothes: tams, woolen boots, jackets smelling of damp and camphor. Clothes she had been saving for her grandchildren.

“Mama?” The candle in Mother’s hand was close to a flannel nightshirt. “What are you doing?”

“Can’t you see?” There were huge circles beneath her mother’s eyes.

“Mama!” Catherine snatched the candle. “Be careful with that. Can’t I help you tomorrow?”

“I have no time,” Mother said. She looked utterly bewildered.

“Why not?”

“The wretched thing is coming in August.”

“What thing?”

“A baby.”

“What?”

“A baby.”

“A baby! No!”

And then, Mother had bared her teeth and let out a howl, an awful sound in which fury and pain and supplication were all mixed up.

Pregnant. Expecting. With child. In the Lleyn in those days, it was considered a little bit “you know . . . not nice,” even to say these words in polite company. You could say, “I hear Ceris Davies (she was the local midwife) has been up to see the so and so’s,” or “the whatevers will have another mouth to feed,” or “someone should pass the box on to Mrs. X soon.” The box belonged to the parish, and was full of old baby clothes that were passed from house to house. But the Carregs weren’t box people. They lived outside of the village and were considered practically gentry, or had been once. So how was Catherine supposed to find out about how such a thing could have happened to Mother? You could never ask Father. Although he was a farmer, he hated any hint of indelicacy in his women, and besides, he was up now night and day with the lambing and looking almost as wild-eyed as she.

She’d asked Mair, who’d said, “Good Lord, what a thing to ask me,” and her little curranty eyes had rolled back and she’d smirked and said something about Father and long winter nights. Eliza was worse than useless, prattling on gaily about taking the little pet for rides in the pram and giving it bottles, until Catherine had felt a strong impulse to slap her.

“Eliza,” she said, “it is not like playing dollies. Mother is too old for this, and she is so unhappy.”

“Well, Ceris Davies,” Eliza had replied, turning pink and coming as close as she ever did toward being cross, “says that sometimes these late babies—she called them ‘the last of the golden chicks’—well, I thought it was sweet anyway, can be a great and unexpected blessing, and that God does not send us anything we can’t manage.
She said that once Mother’s confinement is on her she will feel as proud as a dog with her puppies.”

“Chickens! Puppies! Oh don’t be such a fool,” Catherine had shouted, finally losing her patience. “What does Ceris Davies know about a woman like Mother?”

“Are you a snob, Catherine?”

“Yes,” she’d said, breathing heavily, “I expect I am—as well as everything else.”

Afterward, Catherine had brooded on the word “confinement” and looked it up in the dictionary.
Confinement: imprisonment, restrictions, limitation, to keep indoors or in bed.
She thought of the way Mother had begun now to walk in the afternoons with a kind of painful energy in a circle in the garden.
My God, who in their right mind would be born a woman?

And then, because she was eighteen and the most pressing thing on her mind was herself, and because everybody else seemed so keen to forget about it, she put it to the back of her mind, hoping that August would never come. But it had, earlier than expected.

On the day her Mother died, she woke early feeling cheerful. It was dark outside. Under her eiderdown, patterned with red and green cabbage roses, she lay flexing her limbs and listening for the slap and swish of the threshing machine outside and for her father, who lay with her mother in the next room, to stand on the creaking floorboard and yawn, or sometimes, yawn and break wind simultaneously. (Her modest ear only allowed one of these sounds.)

She was excited. Today was market day, held once a month at Sarn, and she had faint, though unacknowledged, hopes of seeing Deio there. He’d been away again and come back. Mair told her all the girls were in love with him now. He had grown so handsome with his remarkable wide-set green eyes and long, slightly bandy legs. The calves of his boots were always blackened and dented with the sweat and shape of horses. She still had dreams about him. Silly dreams. Herself, wind-and rain-swept on the back of his horse, galloping off into the mist and over the mountains to somewhere far from here.

The house that morning felt satisfyingly empty. Mair, who normally slept in a small room under the eaves in the top of the house, had been given her weekly wage of five shillings and left early to walk to market. Eliza was in Caernarfon visiting their grandmother. Two others had made a brief appearance in the house: one born dead, the other dead of diphtheria before his fourth birthday. In one month’s time there would be another. Catherine, twisting in bed, could not bear to think of this. Today was Mother’s last trip to market before the baby came. A gift from God of course, but also horrible and wrong: a door slamming shut on her mother at a time when she seemed so much better. Now Mother rose heavily from the table after breakfast, walked slowly upstairs, and opened the oak trunk carved with acorns. Nightgowns, woolen boots, jackets, tams. That for the wash, that to throw away, that for a stitch, that for when the sewing lady came. She tried to sing sometimes to show she was all right, but her voice sounded cracked and funny.

Catherine got up quickly. This was supposed to be a happy day. Mother had persuaded Father to give them some money to go to Sarn and buy taffeta or silk for her first grown-up ball in Caernarfon. Father, grumbling but only a bit, had given in to his wife’s entreaties that the girls must begin a social life before it was too late. He thrust his big red hand into a leather pouch hidden behind the flour jar on the dresser, drew out five shillings, and said to Mother with a shy look, “You girls bleed me dry.” Or maybe he gave in because Mother had sighed and flapped the air as though she had limited breath for an argument.

Walking barefoot toward her wardrobe, Catherine was half at the ball already and half walking across the square at Sarn with Deio’s eyes on her. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her: the little girl he’d reenacted Llewellyn’s last stand with—she’d been good at that, swiping with her sword and making gurgling cries as she galloped off—or the child who had loved playing hospitals with him, bandaging their obliging cat and putting it to bed, and telling him it may not last the night. She hoped he might forget that now and see her as she was: a woman, or very nearly one.

She selected the smartest of the three dresses she owned (white cambric with a
broderie anglaise
trim and a bodice pintucked into
thirty narrow pleats). She hung the dress on the front of the cupboard then poured water into a pretty china basin with a lily-of-the-valley motif and a faint crack down the center. As she washed under her nightgown what Mair, who could be coarse, referred to as “nooks and crannies,” a sudden burst of sun sent patterns of light over her skin and made her shiver with pleasure.

She went down to the kitchen, a narrow room on the northern side of the house and always dark. She took a taper to the kitchen fire and lit an oil lamp over the table. It cast a warm glow on familiar objects: the dresser with its green-and-white china, the hearth with its hooks and pans, and beside it the still shocking thing: a baby-chair covered in green velvet, its carved footrest scuffed from generations of kicking babies.

Since it was Mair’s day off and they had no other help now, Catherine went into the creamery behind the kitchen to draw off a pint of milk from one of four blue basins. Stepping into a patch of sunlight outside the creamery door, a yellowhammer sang its little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese song, and she stood for a moment, jug in hand, listening and smiling. A pretty young woman to whom nothing really bad had ever happened. Then, turning, she saw her father standing at the kitchen window looking agitated. He beckoned her inside, his mouth was moving. She thought she must have done something wrong: worn her best dress outside; left her candle lit; not got his breakfast quickly enough.

“Catherine,” he said, when she stood before him dry-mouthed, “go upstairs straight away to your mother, something’s happening to her.”

“What is it, Father?”

His tone frightened her, reminding her of the blank spots in her childhood: the slammed doors, Mother’s long rests in the afternoon. But now, Father was waving his hands in jerky circles, and telling her to take a chamber pot with her and seemed incapable of naming the thing.

She dashed down the path to the necessary, the shed where potties were stacked in a cupboard to the left of the privy. She ran back into the house and up the stairs, frightened to open the door that led into Mother’s room. When she did, she saw her mother,
half undressed in her bed, her hair undone. Her skin gleamed with sweat. Her favorite gray dress was all undone like a burst doll’s. Her bosom and corsets were showing. Whatever was happening?

“Mother,” said Catherine, cold with horror. “What is it?”

Mother gave her a distant wave as though saying good-bye to an acquaintance.

“Go away, please,” she said. “I want Mair.”