(A girl in love is a frightening sight.)
The house was quiet too, more than usual, for Donald had recently subsided into a ghastly kind of darkness where pain was the only thing that seemed to get through to his mind. His doctor, making a more sophisticated diagnosis this time, declared it to be cancer of the stomach and prescribed morphine. I think he was hoping that Mabel would quietly overdose her husband and hasten his inevitable end, but Mabel didn’t believe in taking life – unless it was to end up on the kitchen table and be eaten – and thought that God should be left to do His business in His own good time. For she still believed in God, even though He no longer believed in her.
There was a kettle still hot on the range when I came into the kitchen and I made tea with it and sat at the kitchen table to drink it and plan my future with the farmer’s son. Would he wait four years while I did my degree? What would our children look like? What would it be like to be kissed by him?
‘You hadn’t kissed him?’ (How hard it seems to be to get a kiss off the man of one’s dreams. Has Nora ever been kissed?)
~ No, she says regretfully – as you would if you were thirty-eight and had never been kissed, but then I am nearly twenty-one and have been kissed many times and all of them put together aren’t worth an imaginary kiss with Ferdinand.
The weather is getting worse if that is possible. The welkin rings with the wind, the sky is cleft by fissures of lightning, the wind threatens to set the little island to sail on the wild waters. Outside, the Siamese cats are slinking along the walls of the house for shelter. We’re afraid that if we let them in they might eat us but eventually we cannot bear their noise any more and relent. They prowl around the house suspiciously as if we might have set traps for them.
‘Go on.’
~ Then, finally, I went upstairs. First I looked in on Donald – usually if you couldn’t hear him moaning with pain you could hear him snoring but tonight he was very quiet. It struck me that despite her objections Mabel might have put him out of his misery. The moon was shining through a high windowpane, illuminating Donald – as still as any corpse – in his bed. The covers didn’t rise and fall with a breath and his arms were crossed over his chest as if he had gone to sleep expecting never to wake. I called out, ‘Father,’ and pinched his hand; his flesh was still warm but he was gone. I picked up the bottle that contained his morphine tablets from the bedside table and could feel its emptiness without looking inside. I felt nothing for the passing of Donald, except perhaps relief.
I hurried to Mabel’s room and as I neared I heard a fretful mewling sound. I thought it was a cat – I’d never heard a newborn baby cry before. I knocked on her door and opened it.
(Our own cats – although we hardly own them – are wandering around our feet, crying like banshees, not babies.)
Mabel was propped up in bed, a bed on which the sheets were in mangled and bloody disorder. She looked so dreadful that for a moment I thought she must have had some terrible accident – she had black shadows under her eyes, her hair was plastered to her head with sweat and the terrible look on her face suggested she had stared into the maw of hell. She was holding a baby in her arms – a red, prune-skinned infant. The baby was dressed in a great assortment of the clothes that she had been knitting all winter – leggings and a little coat, bootees, mittens and a beribboned hat. It looked like a baby that was ready to go on a long journey.
Mabel held the baby out to me without a word. It was sleeping and bore no resemblance to anyone. The question of its paternity wasn’t answered by its looks. It half opened its eyes and I took it over to the window and showed it the moon and, not knowing what else to do in these strange circumstances, I began speaking the kind of nonsense to it that you speak to babies.
Then the quiet night was disturbed by the noise of an approaching car engine. I heard the car turn into the drive and recognized Effie’s brutal driving. I looked to Mabel to warn her of Effie’s imminent arrival and saw her stirring a white powder into a glass of milk on her bedside table. I thought it must be a Beecham’s Powder – although that seemed a strange antidote to childbirth – but then I smelled the faint almond-smell of it and recognized the little paper packet that had held the poison for the wasps last summer.
I cried out and put the baby down on a chair and rushed over to Mabel and grabbed the paper packet off her, but it was too late, she had already swallowed the cyanide-flavoured milk. She wore a surprised expression on her face as if she couldn’t believe what was happening and then—