Her Victory (42 page)

The green river lapped at its banks. An old man on the other side pottered at some job on a boathouse roof, but then came down his ladder to take shelter, squeezing his hands together as if to get the wet out of them. She called, and asked if he had seen a woman walking alone.

He laughed. ‘No, I ain't. Not even a dog, come to that.'

She felt an ache in her chest as if someone had punched her. Chimney smoke and mist hung over the houses. The wind had dropped and rain came directly down. Crossing Sun Street, she was nearly struck by a horse-and-cart, the driver too surprised to shout back when she called him a fool for not looking where he was going.

She went up and down every street, then crossed each at right angles, imagining Emma as quite close in front, but always turning a corner before she could be seen. She considered walking across Parkers Piece to the railway station, then stood by the kerb wondering whether she shouldn't get into the comfort of the house and stop allowing Emma to make both their lives miserable. It was impossible to be still. From the edge of the space she saw someone a few hundred yards away, where the walks intersected at the middle.

The never-ending distance passed by putting one foot in front of the other, and keeping on with head down and eyes fixed at the soaking turf, as if afraid that should she look up the figure would vanish. The rain made no difference. If she had to live the rest of her life under water, so be it. To exist in such a way attached her to the earth and could only be good for her. Every step forward put on another year of life, but Emma had to be reached and taken home because each minute out there might take a year
off
her life.

She looked up every dozen paces to make sure there was still some object to aim for. She laughed at herself. There was no one to hear. Raindrops distorted what she saw. The figure was probably a poor old tramp with nowhere to go. She wanted to turn back, for fear he should jump on her. Girls had been raped on Parkers Piece at night. But it was Emma. There was no mistaking the way she hunched her shoulders. Clara called, and hurried breathlessly on. Emma stood with head bowed, unable to hear.

Clara held her arm. ‘What
ever
are you doing? You'll get pneumonia – at least!'

She looked. Her skin was like clay, glazed so that the rain poured off. ‘I'm trying to find out what it's like to be alone.'

Clara drew her close. She smelled of rain and sweat. ‘I've been looking all over. You might at least have told me where you were going, then you could have been alone for as long as you liked. But just to go off like this for your own crackbrained reason is too much. You've no consideration for anybody except yourself. Don't you think it's time you pulled yourself together and behaved a bit more reasonably? Perhaps it doesn't matter what happens to you, but you ought at least to think about the baby you're going to have.' She gripped her arm. ‘So let's go back to the house before you really get ill. You're going to need a hot bath and something to drink if you aren't to get a bad cold. Now come on, and stop all this bloody stupid nonsense.'

She was putting it on, but the severe tone was right, under the circumstances, she thought. We are all Death's prisoners, she had heard a preacher say from his pulpit on the edge of the market one morning. Life was a battlefield from which there could be no survivors. Once the fight begins, losses continually occur, even in the most favoured conditions, till you become one of them. She made her observations and, with so many dreadful events all of a sudden to endure, thought it her duty to record the fact that no family was free of tragic times.

Emma allowed herself to be taken by the hand and led back to the midday autumnal gloom of the buildings.

10

Her bedroom looked over the squalid backyards. ‘I'm sorry we couldn't have got a better place,' she said, but Emma reminded her that the inside of the house was clean and comfortable, and they were lucky not to be in China or Russia or Germany, for they had coal, food and clothes, and didn't have to live in the rain with no shelter. They had each other. Life was good when you weren't standing alone in the rain. If she could go on living, she would be happy and have no complaints. She wanted her baby to have a long life, without war, want or inner misery. Her life had been fortunate, she said when Clara sat on the bed and held her hand, and yet on the eve of the greatest acquisition she had a fear of losing everything. A senseless anxiety troubled her day and night. There was no sleep, and no peace. Did Clara think that only a woman could have such feelings?

Clara didn't know. If a question was asked with too much intensity she was always lost for an answer, and Emma never wanted to know anything that would be satisfied by a casual response. Emma didn't wait for answers she knew would never come, or for answers that would never convince her if they did. She then asked if she weren't trying to live out all possible anxiety and hopelessness so that there would be so much less for her child to inherit. Heaven only knows, Clara said, hardly able to endure the torment settling on to her from Emma's disturbed state. She suffered with her, and did not know whether or not Emma noticed. But Emma was aware of everything, and what diference could it make that Clara was equally tormented? The suffering was doubled, but not thereby diminished. Clara had no say in the matter, and went through equal anguish with her sister, a process over which she did not wish to have any control in the hope that by taking some of the burden, Emma would sooner or later feel its intolerable weight shifting away from herself.

Clara thought that if she spent another moment with her she would descend into a madness from which recovery would be impossible. She felt herself saturated with resentment at having to bear so much, but her objections were not directed at Emma, who in her misery seemed either unaware or unconcerned that it was passing with ever-increasing intensity to her sister. The mechanism had been there since childhood, for Clara recollected that Emma's infantile despair had in its own way been equally desolate for her. She, on the other hand, had never in either adult or childish misery witnessed any similar effect on Emma when she – Clara – was depressed, for Emma at such times kept her temperament intact against all influences, not out of callousness but because she was set too firmly into her own sphere to know what was happening. Any sympathy Emma might express was mere casual condolence. She certainly wouldn't waste time on sharing half-imagined woes.

When Emma's mood lifted for no apparent reason Clara, with pain still searing her heart, went to the barometer in the hall to see if the pressure had altered, to find out whether the needle was now set fair when it had previously indicated stormy. She was disappointed to see that it denied her idea, having hoped to find some system to Emma's moods that would help her to counter them. She stayed baffled, because while Emma's upsets undoubtedly served to get her through another few days of reasonable life, they left Clara mentally crippled, and even more so when she tried to hide her anguish from Emma in case it caused another of her fits. She contained herself in the hope that the residue of her own misery would go away and leave them both in peace at last.

This volume of Clara's journal ended with:
‘Not beyond here. No point going on
.' But a pocket diary contained occasional remarks and pencilled comments on occurrences she later thought worth noting, and entries in a jotting pad dealt with the coming and going of their mother, the doctor's visits, days when the weather was fine and sunny, and walks into town to go shopping or to the pictures. In an unposted letter she described how Rachel came one day and, finding Emma in one of her ‘moods', dismissed it with such astonishing ease and panache that the raucous half-hour quarrel which ensued stung Emma finally to speechlessness and weeping. After a while she became girlish, laughed and behaved normally till Rachel left for the railway station. Clara felt gratitude at her mother's courage and ability. Rachel wasn't afraid to shout, and was in no sense willing to stifle helplessly under Emma's injurious silence or frivolous accusations. She marvelled at her mother, but did not regret that she herself was unable to use the same methods.

11

The night was created from a snowstorm of the previous day, making it easy to imagine wolves howling in the spacious Fens and searching for the blood of infants and the warmth of mothers in the city. No one could avoid meeting them in their dreams, or cease to imagine them in the snowy daylight of dark outside their tight-shut windows. The wolf in Emma was trying to get out by gnawing at her backbone, and her screams kept the street awake. Eventually the wolf would streak away, having drunk all her blood, join its lupine brothers still howling to enter whatever house they could find unguarded. Time had reached a stop, while Clara, Rachel and the midwife kept watch, and waited for either the night or the world to end. Each sound was muffled by snow and bleached by pale gas light as the agony that none of them could reach came and went and came again with an intensity towards dawn that they thought could not possibly increase.

Rachel and the midwife made a show of giving practical advice, but nothing mattered to Emma except that she must reach the end of the tunnel or be torn to fragments by the wolf that had her in its teeth. ‘What do you say?' Rachel asked when she tried to speak.

Out of the sweat, and the state for which she knew no word, came: ‘Get it away from me.'

Clara waited in the parlour, hoping to die if her sister's ordeal did not stop, wondering why they didn't help her, or put her out of her misery like a dog or a horse – for if I were in the same state, she thought, vowing that she never would be, I'd surely ask them to do a kindness and end it by a single shot, as I would if I'd been left to die on a battlefield. Had John gone through similar agony? she wondered, torn half to pieces, yet not dead, and pleading with one of his men to kill him?

Every baby was born the same way, the mother as if mortally wounded yet recovering. A better system's not yet been invented, the midwife said, in effect doing nothing. Clara made tea. She toasted bread and boiled eggs to see them through the night. They ate, as if to sustain Emma by it.

At ten minutes past eight, when Clara was dozing in the rocking chair, the midwife shook her and said it was a boy. Did she want to come and look at the eight-pound wonder? I bloody do not, she thought, opening the curtains. The snowing had stopped but lay thick along the street. Children were going to school. A postman struggled through drifts with his heavy bag. How could the world go on at such a time? She walked upstairs, knowing that like the wave the world was permanent – as the song said – and she began to laugh but remembered to stop when opening the door.

The wolf had gone, and left a blanket of snow behind. Emma was asleep, equally whitened by the night, the baby by her side. ‘She'll call him Thomas,' the midwife said. ‘That's nice, isn't it?'

‘It's got to be called something,' Clara answered.

Rachel laid a finger on Emma's forehead. ‘I thought her time would never end.' Clara waited for her to say more, but she leaned across the bed and put the palm of her hand under Emma's nightdress, holding it on her left breast till she thought to take the golden Star of David from her own neck and lay it on the table as a present for the baby. ‘Please God they'll both be well.'

‘We shall have to make sure it's the end of her troubles,' Clara said.

‘Nothing ever ends,' Rachel told her, before leaving for London a fortnight later. ‘Our lives only go on so that Death can get its reckoning.'

Clara laughed, and so did Emma, who put her arms around her mother and said after a kiss: ‘Where did you hear such sombre old twaddle?'

Rachel pushed her away, but Clara noted that it was a playful action. There was an air of affection before their parting.

‘It certainly isn't twaddle. Eternal truths need stressing again and again. They always have – especially to one's children. And you're still children, don't forget, till I die, whatever you may think.'

‘Eternal truths!' Emma exclaimed. ‘Really, they only enslave us, mother.'

‘They do if you want them to,' Rachel said. ‘But they needn't at all. Eternal truths keep people like
us
civilized. We'd be badly off without them. And they're more than necessary for the rest of the world.'

Emma smiled, and helped her on with her coat. ‘I hope not.'

‘Hope!' Rachel said. ‘You won't get very far on that – though I should hope, I suppose, that you'll both find good husbands before very long.'

But Clara had made up her mind never to marry, and never to have children. Any such process would certainly stop with her. A magazine article said that all women should have children, even if only one, for what woman, the wise man asked, wanted to be ‘the end of the line'? It was bad for the woman, bad for society, and bad for the country. Clara threw the magazine across the parlour. If she were destined to be lonely at the end of the line, so be it, she snorted. And what damned line did the fool mean? A clothes line? Let the idiot have children himself, if he could. And if
she
didn't, there were millions around her who most certainly would, so as far as the country went there was nothing to fear. Let the people breed. It would give them something to do in their otherwise empty lives. Nature had organized things very well, except that the country had too many inhabitants for comfort, judging by the queues for buses, trains and picture-houses which hadn't been there before the war. But as for her – no children, she told herself, ever.

12

When the train arrived at Liverpool Street station they said that Rachel had been robbed, and then died from a heart attack, but a farmer found her purse by the railway line and gave it to the police. Nothing was missing. Her lost Star of David, Clara explained to her father when he asked, had been given to the new baby.