Buffet for Unwelcome Guests(100)

‘Oh, of course,’ said the girl. ‘We didn’t mean that at all. We were sleeping in the car.’

‘In the car?’ She stood at the top of the area steps peering at them in the light of the street lamp, shawled, also, against the rain. She said to the boy: ‘You can’t let her sleep in that thing. Not like she is.’

‘Well, I know,’ he said. ‘But what else? That’s why we came to this quiet part.’

‘We’ll move along of course,’ said the girl, ‘if you mind our being here.’

‘It’s a public street,’ she said illogically. But it was pitiful, poor young thing; and there was about them this—this something: so beautiful, so still and quiet, expressionless, almost colourless, like figures in some dim old church, candle-lit at—yes, at Christmas time. Like figures in a Christmas crêche. She said uncertainly: ‘If a few bob would help—’

But they disclaimed at once. ‘No, no, we’ve got money; well, enough, anyway. And he can get work in the morning, it’s nothing like that. It’s only… Well,’ said the girl, spreading slow, explanatory hands, ‘it’s like we told you. The baby’s coming and no one will take us in. They just say, sorry—no room.’

Was it then that she had known?—when she heard herself saying, almost without her own volition: ‘Out in the back garden—there’s a sort of shed…’

It was the strain, perhaps, the uncertainty, the long day’s search for accommodation, the fading hope; but the baby came that night. No time for doctor or midwife; but Mrs. Vaughan was experienced in such matters, delivered the child safely, dealt with the young mother—unexpectedly resilient despite her fragile look, calm, uncomplaining, apparently impervious to the pain—settled her comfortably at last on the old mattress in the shed, covered over with clean bedclothes. ‘When you’re fit to be moved—we’ll see.’ And to the boy she said sharply: ‘What you got there?’

He had employed the waiting time in knocking together a sort of cradle out of a wooden box; padded it round and fitted it with a couple of down-filled cushions from their car. Taken nothing of hers; all the things were their own. ‘Look, Marilyn—for the baby.’

‘Oh, Jo,’ she said, ‘you always were a bit of a carpenter! You always were good with your hands.’

Joseph. And Marilyn. And Joseph a bit of a carpenter, clever with his hands. And a boy child born in an out-house because there was no room elsewhere for his coming… She got down slowly on to her thick, arthritic knees beside the mattress and, with something like awe in her heart, gathered the baby from his mother’s arms. ‘I’ll lay him in the box. It’ll do for him lovely.’ And under her breath: ‘He won’t be the first,’ she said.

The boy left money with her next day for necessities and went out and duly returned that evening with news of a job on a building site; and carrying in one scarred hand a small, drooping bunch of flowers which he carefully divided between them, half for Marilyn, half for Mrs. Vaughan—‘till I can get you something better’—and one violet left over to place in the baby’s tiny mottled fist. ‘And till I can get you something better,’ he said.

They gave him no name… Other young couples, she thought, would have spent the idle hours trying to think up ‘something different’ or christened him after a pop-star, some loose-mouthed, longhaired little good-for-nothing shrieking out nonsense, thin legs kept jerking by drugs in an obscene capering. But no—it was ‘the baby’, ‘the little one’. Perhaps, she thought, they dared not name him: dared not acknowledge, even to themselves…

For the huge question in her mind was: how much do they know?

For that matter—how much did she herself know? And what?—what in fact did she know? The Holy Child had been born already, had been born long ago. Vague thoughts of a Second Coming wandered through her brain, but was that not to be a major, a clearly recognisable event, something terrible, presaging the end of all things? The End. And the other had been the Beginning. Perhaps, she thought, there could be a Beginning-Again? Perhaps with everything having gone wrong with the world, there was going to be a second chance…?

It was a long time since she had been to church. In the old days, yes; brought up the two girls to be good Catholics, washed and spruced-up for Mass every Sunday, convents, catechism, the lot. And much good it had done her!—married a couple of heathen G.I.s in the war and gone off to America for good—for good or ill, she did not know and could no longer care; for years had heard not a word from either of them. But now… She put on her crumpled old hat and, arthritically stumping, went off to St. Stephen’s.