Band of Angel (6 page)

After the scream there was a timid knock at the door. Eliza, white as a sheet, stood on the landing, Father sitting crumpled in a chair behind her.

With her arms folded, Ceris stood at the door and addressed them. “She’s bad, as I don’t have to tell you, with the puerperal sepsis, as you may not know.”

She closed her eyes for a moment while this sank in.

“All you can do is keep her nice and tidy with this.” She gave Catherine a vial of dark liquid, the same liquor of opium that Mother took for her headaches. “If she should by any chance start to come round”—the midwife’s look showed them how faint a possibility that was—“beef tea and some of this.”

She cast around again in her untidy portmanteau and brought out a small bag of sago and one of arrowroot. “I’ll have to make you, um, you know . . . for this—times being hard,” she said.

Father gazed stupidly at her outstretched hand, then reached into his pocket for money and paid her.

“Half a crown for the visit,” she said. “Extra for the sago.”
Let them pay,
thought Ceris,
they can afford it.
“Poor little mite,” she said lifting the cover from the baby’s face.

She pocketed the money and went downstairs, gazing curiously as she did so at Felicia’s pretty arrangement of pictures and at the one or two good pieces of furniture, fixing them in her mind so she could entertain her friends later to a full description of the house, and the look she had seen pass between the drover’s boy and Catherine.

When she’d left, they stood in the kitchen together, surrounded by the devastation of the day. The breakfast plates still unwashed, Father’s bags dumped by the door. Deio’s forgotten coat, which lay over the chair by the range. Eliza, taking Catherine in her arms, saw the look in her eyes of someone too young to have seen so
much. She smoothed back her sister’s wild hair and hugged her tight.

“Poor darling Catty,” she said, “poor love. You were so brave.”

“No.” Catherine looked straight ahead of her, her mouth struggling. “I was hopeless. I didn’t know what to do.”

The pain in her eyes was so terrible that Eliza, determined not to cry, said in her grown-up voice, “I’m sure you did, cheer up, we’ll get her better.”

She looked so forlorn that, in spite of themselves, they both gave strange grimacing laughs, and then hugged again. “How did people live without sisters?” Catherine thought, not for the first time.

“Are you hungry, Catherine?” Eliza was trying in a muddled way to clear the table.

“No,” said Catherine. “But I want to change my clothes. Leave that to Mair, she’ll tidy up.” Her shoulders were very cold, and her teeth were chattering.

Eliza led her upstairs into their bedroom, unhooked her dress and helped her into a clean nightdress; Catherine was still shivering. “We should go in and see her now,” said Eliza.

Hand in hand, they walked across the landing. Through the window the stars were coming out and, in the tall trees outside, rooks were settling in their nests. Inside her room, Mother was asleep, a lamp burning on the table beside her. The baby and the crib were gone.

Mother’s face was so pale now that her lips looked blue. When Catherine gently stroked her cheek, she butted against her hand like a kitten. And at that moment, it seemed to Catherine that she looked upon the most precious gift of her life, and that all the objects in the room: the bed, the tapestry chair, the sentimental picture above the bed of a lad and lass in an English garden, had become remarkable and touched with an extra light.

“Sit there.” Eliza settled Catherine into the blue chair beside Mother’s bed. The same armless chair Mother had fed them in as babies.

“I’ll bring some bread and cheese. It may be a long night,” she said, leaving the room. How grown-up she sounded, all within a day.

Eliza came back with some inexpertly hacked slices of bread and cheese. They ate ravenously for a moment before pushing their plates away. It made them feel sick to eat while Mother lay like that. Also, the smell, sick and sweet.

They sat in silence for a while, as though frightened that words, or even the sound of their own breathing in their ears, might disturb Mother or stop them from hearing something important. Then Eliza got up and busied herself, hanging up Mother’s dress, straightening the bed, and putting some primroses in a blue vase on the bedside table.

Watching her through half-asleep eyes, Catherine found these small observances comforting. Sweet Eliza playing dollies. She had a sense of everything being out of her hands now, as though she were a very small boat out on a far larger sea than she had ever imagined: she must wait now for the waves to take her where they would. From somewhere outside in the yard, she heard the honk of a goose. She closed her eyes and slept, dreaming of herself caught in a shop somewhere, wading through a stream of materials— organzas, silks, satins—certain she was urgently needed elsewhere, unable to stop herself twirling and beaming at her reflection in the glass in dress after dress after dress. When she awoke with a start and a stiff neck, the first thing she smelled was her mother dying, and grief flooded in like water in a sinking ship. Eliza stood at the door, a bowl of potpourri in her hands.

“Eliza.” Catherine stood up. “Leave the room for a while. I’m going to change Mother’s sheets and clean her up. I know what to do now.”

Eliza’s small white hands plucked at two drooping primroses, threw them into the wastepaper basket.

“Please don’t, Catherine, don’t touch her, I beg you. Ceris will be back later, or Mair. Let them do it.”

She looked so embarrassed that Catherine almost gave in.

“Let her go with dignity,” Eliza said.

“Dignity,” said Catherine, whispering furiously. “Damn dignity. I want her to live.”

They stood on either side of the bed glaring at each other like two strangers who had collided in a freak accident, then Eliza, with
a tearing sob, left the room, knocking over the vase of flowers as she went. Catherine, blundering around on the floor in a mess of water and broken pottery and petals, heard a faint cry from the bed and, jumping to her feet and rushing to the bedside, saw a thin line of what looked like black treacle coming from her mother’s mouth. She wiped it away with the back of her hand. Life was neither pretty nor fair, she knew that now, all at once: not the dainty little garden in the sampler Mother had embroidered in the picture above the bed, with hollyhocks and delphiniums and roses around the door; not pretty dresses and nice young men and darling babies, but hard and ugly and awkward; from now on, her only hope lay in facing up to this.

She changed the bedclothes, drawing back in horror in spite of herself from the steady stream of green and black lochia that flowed from her mother. There would be no turning back now to the life of beautiful lies. Gently, Catherine touched the tips of her two fingers against her mother’s face.

“Don’t struggle anymore,” she said clearly, without knowing where the voice came from. “Go now.”

Once again Mother pushed her cheek against her fingers, like a kitten hungry for affection. Her lips moved slowly and painfully, without making any sound.

“And I love you,” burst out of Catherine. “I love you.”

A collection of terrible and painful thoughts seemed to be massing behind Mother’s skin, exhausting, inexpressible thoughts.

“Don’t talk,” Catherine begged, “get better.”

But there was no getting better, she knew. The dark wave was gaining in speed, poised against the black sky, ready at any moment to roll over all of them. Outside, the sound of animals being fed: the clank of a pail, a pig shrieking with joy. Dawn was breaking in a breathless pink outside the window.

Eliza and Father came in, came to the bed.

“Can she talk to me?” he asked Catherine in a loud boom that made her wince. She shook her head.

He sat down so heavily on the bed Catherine wanted to cry out, “Watch her, you fool. Be more careful.”

Father took Mother’s hand into his red paw and said in the soft
crooning voice he usually reserved for horses, “Don’t worry, my darling, we’ll soon have you right. You’re a good old girl.” He raised her hand to his lips. “A very good girl.”

It was the closest he’d ever come to saying love words. Felicia seemed to nod, her eyes to flicker.

“Is all well between us?” he struggled on. “Is all well? Squeeze my hand if you say yes.”

Whether she squeezed or not, Catherine never knew. She turned away, unable to bear the sight of them slumped on the bed together, head to head, like broken dolls.

A few moments later, the color of Mother’s face changed from white to mottled mauve. Her breathing came in several hoarse rattles, and then stopped. As Father plunged down to listen to her breathing, Catherine saw that his breeches were torn, and that she could see straight through to his combinations. She hated him at that moment: hated him, blamed him, pitied him. Herself and him.

On the day of Mother’s funeral, the body was moved out of the front parlor, then carried by a black plumed horse to the top of a lonely hill at Clynnog Fawr, to St. Beunos Church, the only local church that performed English-language ceremonies.

When the door creaked open, the candles flickered and a fresh blast of chill air swept up the aisle. The vicar, Reverend Norman, a thin, high-shouldered man working out his last year before retirement, shuffled up the aisle. Behind him Father and Alun, Twm and Mr. Pitkeathly, the church warden, carried the coffin.

“I am the resurrection and the life,” the vicar said in his thin wheezy voice. He cleared his throat and started again.

“I am the resurrection and the life. He that believeth in me, though he were dead, still shall he live.”

Catherine, looking through her fingers at the coffin, felt such a wave of anger and despair that she wondered if it would be possible to go on living in such pain. Before, all her griefs had been such little ones—a trifling punishment, the death of a dog, a row with Eliza. She had existed in a bubble of happiness and protectedness, and now the bubble was burst and she was left shivering and defenseless. All at once she felt the desperate loneliness, the unlivedness of her mother’s life. She had never fitted in here, never properly been known or loved or understood for herself. Only two people had even come to see her during the three days she’d lain in the front room: Father, of course, and Aunt Gwynneth, his widowed sister, a woman Mother never liked. She’d stood there gazing down at her, reading from a
stone-colored book called
The Strength of My Life.
Mother would have hated it.

Catherine cast a wild look in the direction of her father, who stood next to Eliza at the end of the pew. He looked distinguished in the smart frock coat inherited from his own father and worn only once before, at his wedding. Mother from time to time had begged him to dress up and take them out. Such a small thing to ask, but he’d always been so busy with the animals, a deliberate busyness that was part of his determination to throw off his privileged past, to be a proper Welsh farmer who spoke Welsh and had dirt under his fingernails. Determined for himself but not for them, not for his girls. For his girls it was always “be dainty . . . eat like a lady . . . watch your complexion.” And for God’s sake never have fun. He was a hypocrite, an impostor, and in the end nobody, nobody had been fooled.

“Catherine! Catherine . . .” Her aunt, seeing her look so strangely at her father, touched her sleeve and inclined her head in a significant way toward the vicar.

From the end of the church, the vicar’s voice, competing poorly with the wind and the boom of the waves outside, recited in indistinct gasps. “Man born woman . . . hath but a short time to live and is full of misery . . . cometh up.” A large wave, rising, falling, crashing on the rocks below washed the words away. “And is cut down like a flower . . . fleet . . . shadow . . . and never continueth in one stay.”

And it was there, standing in that dark church, that Catherine prayed the most fervent prayer of her life: “Help me live my life.”

When it was over, she followed the coffin down the aisle toward the patch of blue sky outside. At the door, Mr. Pitkeathly was smiling apologetically. “Forgive me, Miss Carreg,” he murmured, “but men only to the grave.”

She carried on walking, not understanding.

“Ladies stay inside,” he stammered, putting his hand up to her arm.

Men only to the grave.
She’d stood in the half-dark of the church porch, bewildered, stranded, and then, when she understood, wanted to scream with rage.

“It’s a
ridiculous convention, isn’t it? I’ve always wanted to know what part of the Bible God said it in.”

There was a murmur from inside the church and several people in the rows turned around to see who had spoken. Catherine saw that it was Eleri Holdsworth, a tall woman with wild white hair, an artist who lived on the headland and whom Mother had admired from a shy distance. Now Eleri held out a hand to Catherine in the dark and squeezed her hand with surprising warmth.

Catherine looked at her without speaking.

“Please come and see me, please do, when you are ready,” said Eleri quickly. “I have something for you.”