Our Picnics in the Sun (36 page)

I begin to cry. I want—what do I want? I want women, even though the ones I know wouldn’t be much use. I want my mother, incapable of mentioning bodily functions and crippled with arthritis in her rainy town in the north, I want childless Auntie Joan who wears white gloves to meet her friends for lunch and plays bridge three times a week. I even want Fee, who believes in the power of crystals to ease labor pains. I try to get to my feet but Howard pushes me gently back. You couldn’t get down the hill now, he says. You’re much better staying here. It’s going to be fine.

Time passes. Howard is wonderfully kind and encouraging, and I get myself into the rhythm of breathing between the contractions, which become ever more intense. From time to time the wind eases and I hear birdsong and the bleating of sheep, and I watch the clouds pass. Part of me remains incredulous that this is happening at all, never mind like this. Part of me continues to plead with Howard to get me home before the babies come. But he ignores this, and keeps the fire fed. He peels some strips of bark off a birch tree, which he also burns. They make a dry, aromatic smoke that he says is traditionally used for purification during labor. It becomes almost exciting; perhaps for a short burst of time, I even feel glad it’s happening this way.

But then the pain gets vicious. I roar through the contractions, each one of which feels like another turn of a rack. I’ve become a tunnel, stopped with an immovable, swelling obstacle; there will be no outcome that does not involve breaking. Howard is white and drawn, and glances anxiously away to the distance, as if gauging how far I might make it if we set off down the hill now. I arch and push, and with every push I tear. With the fourth push, the last I will be able to stand, I scream, and the thing bursts from me. Howard, sobbing, tugs it out. The baby is small, but he wriggles and cries.
Howard places him on my chest and wraps the rug around us; he leans over and embraces us both, stroking the baby’s head again and again. I cannot speak. The contractions stop. Howard takes his knife and I give him instructions on how to cut the baby’s cord—I’ve seen it all on a video at antenatal class—and he ties it off with some twine from his pocket. When the contractions start again it takes only two pushes before the second baby slithers easily into Howard’s hands. It’s a boy, another boy! Howard cries. This baby is so very small, and he’s quiet. When he is first laid on my chest I think he raises a hand and flexes it once. Howard takes him from me to cut the cord, and when he is returned to my arms I brush my lips over the top of his head. His scalp is much cooler than his brother’s. I wrap him up closer, but his skin is changing color and his eyes are stuck shut. I manage to get myself almost to a sitting position and I call out for Howard, who is cleaning his knife on the grass.

There’s something wrong! He’s not right. Feel him, he’s cold! Take him, take him! Take him down and get an ambulance! You’ve got to get him to hospital! Oh, God, he’s not moving! Hurry up, Howard, hurry!

I’m hysterical. Howard doesn’t hesitate. He strips off his T-shirt and wraps the baby up. After running everything his way, suddenly he’s helpless and asking me what to do. What? What am I … what about … what will … what should I …?

My mind’s working much faster than his. This time I scream. Hurry, Howard! Take him and
get an ambulance
. Go! Go! I’ll be all right, leave me here. Come back for me later. Just take him, hurry! Go!

I hold the first baby close in my arms against my bare skin while Howard stumbles away down the hill, carrying the sick one. I watch him go. Shaking with sobs, I pull at my clothes and offer my breast to the baby, who’s squirming and yelling and warm. After some trouble he latches on to the nipple and sucks.

I have no idea how much time passes. The baby sucks and sleeps, and I go on lying there with my mind flowing with a mixture of rapture and dread, a mess of dark and light—after what’s happened today, perhaps there never will again be single, explicable feelings for anything. The sun slips low and I manage to get to my feet and put
more wood on the fire. I’m shaking with cold and also with fear; by and by I’ll venture down the hill on my own, but I have to gather my strength first. I’ve recovered, I think, from the shock of the afterbirth sliding out of me but I think I’m still bleeding, and I’m split and sore and parched with thirst, and I’m afraid of starting out and not being able to make it all the way, and if I get stuck on the moor somewhere, there will be no fire and I will not be able to keep the baby warm enough. And it would get dark and Howard wouldn’t be able to find us. I shiver, and face the fact. It has all come down to fire and warmth, and I do not have the courage to move.

I settle to wait for Howard, and my mind drifts; an insistent dream of the other baby’s face, his curled hand and the feel of his damp, downy head, pushes against the sensation of this one filling my arms. Thoughts of the absent baby tear at my mind while the one present absorbs it; it’s like being split in two by terror and delight, but it’s one single, compulsive fascination that already they exert: strange yet familiar, indivisible, unarguable. I know myself enslaved, to both of them, without condition. Today I am learning, all in a rush, that becoming a mother exposes me to fear and love of a magnitude I did not know existed.

Dusk is coming. The firelight glows bright against the receding land and illuminates the edge of the rug around the baby’s head and the contours of his closed eyes. I hear the dog before I see anything. I try to call out, but my voice is too feeble. I haven’t the strength to get up and look farther across the hill. My eyes are sore and bleary from crying and from wood smoke, and the hillside has darkened, but soon from where I lie I can make out a walking figure. The dog runs at his heels, barking; the man is shouting and angry. It’s Digger. I call back softly; I do not want to raise my voice, even if I could, because it would wake the baby.

He’s still shouting as he reaches me. Get that fire out! Get it out
now
—are you out of your bloody mind? You’ll have the whole of bloody Exmoor alight!

He strides into the circle of light and starts kicking earth into the fire. He’s concentrating so hard that he doesn’t look at me until it’s almost stamped out.

Digger, I try to say, Howard built the fire. It was quite safe. It was to keep us warm. But my voice is shaking. Digger, the baby … look, my baby. My baby’s born. He came early. Look!

Digger peers at me through the gloom but can’t make sense of the bundle in my arms. Then the baby stirs and utters a small cry.

What the—? Digger comes forward and drops to his knees. I draw the rug away from the baby’s face and show him; I’m smiling so hard I can’t speak. Digger gasps, and to my astonishment, tears fill his eyes and start to roll down his face. My God, the babby! His voice drops to a whisper. My God, so he’s come, you’ve got your babby now, oh, would you look at him? My God, look at him, isn’t he fine, that’s fine work you’ve done there. Up here all on your own? My God.

He laughs and wipes his eyes fiercely, but he doesn’t stop smiling, either. For the first time I believe everything will be all right.

Howard was with me. He went down to get an ambulance, I tell him. Please, I’ve got to get down to the house.

Digger’s working out what to do. I’ve given myself up to whatever he decides that is to be; I’m ready to be told. Aye, aye right enough, aye now, let’s see. Can’t have you lying there. Getting dark now.

There are few words said after that. He holds out his arms for the baby with such perfect, natural tenderness that I barely hesitate to hand him over. Digger places him inside his jacket and then helps me to my feet, averting his eyes from my body. It’s almost too dark to see the bloodstains on my clothes, anyway. He hands me back my baby, still wrapped up, then rearranges the rug to give both of us some cover. Then he removes his jacket and places that around my shoulders, too. My face is burning hot but I’m beginning to shiver, and I cannot stand upright; a weighty, empty ache in my belly makes me stoop and bend.

Rightoh, m’lady, he says, drawing his arm over my shoulder. Steady now. Let’s be getting the both of you safe down. Take it gentle.

I’m aware—and it’s both funny and comforting—that this will be exactly the voice and language he uses to a newly delivered cow.

And he takes me, with infinite care and gentleness, across the
darkening moor, holding me up when I stumble, never once letting go, keeping his arm around me even when I have to stop to rest. If he could carry us both, he would. My legs will hardly hold me up, but I don’t complain about the pain or exhaustion; I don’t need to. He understands it all. I’m a clumsy, bewildered, tender-fleshed, torn animal, and he leads me softly and kindly all the way, as he would a beast from one of his flocks or herds. Sometimes, silently, he takes the baby from me and cradles him himself, and also silently, when I have rested my arms, he hands him back.

We’re within half an hour of the house when I see torchlight dancing on the ground a couple of fields below us. Digger shouts and sends his dog ahead, and soon three paramedics, carrying a stretcher, find us in the dark. Their urgency makes me suddenly feel shocked and frightened, and it’s only then I collapse. The baby is taken from me; I’m strapped on to the stretcher and we are borne away down the hill to an ambulance before I have time to notice that Digger has melted away.

All the way to the hospital my questions go unanswered. I am told only that Howard and the second baby went ahead and are being looked after there already; they sidetrack me by asking about this baby and have I thought of a name, and I tell them, without really thinking, that he’s going to be called Adam. It’s only after we arrive and I’ve been medically stabilized and soothed and he is warm, fed, and asleep in a cot at my bedside that they—different people—come to tell me what Howard already knows, that Adam’s twin brother is dead. They are incredibly kind. They think I should hold the dead baby and name him, that this will make it easier to bear. They leave us alone.

Howard begins to plead. It was not meant to be. He was so tiny. It couldn’t be helped. He didn’t suffer. It’s Nature’s way.

He’s struggling to speak with certainty. All that Pentecostal, transformative faith—it’s vanished. His voice trembles as he tells me that at least we have one child, a son, a beautiful son.

So I see now that Howard thinks death comes in different sizes, and the death of this baby—only a very little baby, after all—is to be regarded as one of the smaller ones. The baby’s gone, but he was
never really with us, was he? Without quite saying so, Howard reveals his determination that grief for a child no sooner born than lost will not cut as deep as that for a child I might have had time to know. Especially as I’ve got another one. I’m overwhelmed by the impossibility of explaining—and by dismay that I should have to explain—that it’s not like that at all.

For a long time I cannot speak a word, and I can see that frightens him. It frightens me, too; I do not know where this boulder of silence about my dead son comes from, only that it is unutterably heavy and at the same time hollow, that it rolled in and crushed flat all the words inside me and lodged somehow, and is in me now, and is immovable.

Howard starts on again, in the same vein; it’s unbearable. Howard, stop, I say. Shut up. Stop talking. He looks at me stricken, awaiting judgment. Am I going to strip away his version of the truth, and destroy his suddenly frail charisma? Am I about to say what we both know: that if he’d helped me get to the hospital this baby would not be dead? Will I allow our life together to continue, or will I throw away all my belief in it, and denounce him? As I look at him I wonder if it matters either way. Everything is changed forever, anyway.

In my head I shall name the lost child. Alone in my head I’ll open his closed eyes, I’ll study his face and wonder whose smile he has. I’ll talk to him; I’ll explain the world as if he were in it and must heed its dangers, even as my own world is turning inward. Maybe I’ll hear his voice, and learn what he feels, what delights and what frightens him. That way, I’ll keep him by me while his brother, no less adored, grows, and grows eventually, as he will, away. Howard takes my hand and draws in a long, careful breath. One look from me prevents him from saying whatever he was about to say.

We will never, ever speak of this again, I tell him.