We were tender, frightened, serious as we stood side by side and made our vows. Utterly possessed by the day and each other, although the meaning of what we had done was still mysterious to us. Oh animal life! Oh human ritual, striving to point our passions upwards. But it had a point, for we were also two souls, asking for a sign from the universe.
Barbara made the perfect photo as we half-ran, laughing, from the registry office. She asked John to throw a shower of confetti; it floated like blossom past the ugly brick, it stays there for ever in the eye of the camera, a canopy of stars over our frail bodies.
From the square modern building we fled back to nature. Our ‘reception’ (for four) was at a wooden picnic table in the summer-green Botanical Gardens. There must have been other people passing by, but they were pale silhouettes, invisible, silent. In the photographs, we four are alone. Nick and I have left the table and wander through the trees, or stand gazing at each other, amazed, a tiny couple in a lost savannah of sunlit grass and big sheltering trees. We are deaf and dumb; we are the first humans; life stretches all round us and will go on for ever.
Our wedding day
1 From a poem by Christopher Reid.
What is a soul?
each living instance
Rosa was only five when they died, Grandpa and Grandma, in the same year. 1992 cast a little shadow across her life that is perhaps still there today; the ghost of a shadow, the knowledge of death. In the ‘Autobiography’ her secondary school encouraged her to write, aged thirteen, she wrote a chapter called ‘The Year of Tragedies’.
Of course you have to say goodbye to the past. But that year, we also said goodbye to the future.
The year began with a lost child. No funeral, no body, just a burying of dreams. I miscarried on my father’s birthday, February 14, a Saturday, at nine or ten weeks. Not my last miscarriage, my second. I was almost used to it, knew it from before, a gathering dread that things weren’t going right—the sickness lessening (for sickness is a good sign), the dull return of normality, my breasts no longer throbbing: the failure to transform. Another D and C. Forcing the anaesthetist to acknowledge my grief, for he had been laughing with me (in kindness) on the way to the ward, as the needle slipped into a vein on my wrist I said to him clearly and urgently, feeling it must be recorded or whoever had been precariously alive would twice die, ‘I want you to know that I wanted this baby.’
The first time it happened is the clearest in my mind. Long hoped for, already much loved; the silver and black ghostliness of the scan we thought would be routine, but which showed no life, nothing, no heartbeat, no more hope. 1989. Poor Nick, who was late after parking the car, or else they sent me in early, knocking harder and harder on the door of the ultrasound room at the hospital to get in; that was worse than the pain for myself, having to tell him, strangled with tears, ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, ‘so sorry.’ Knowing how blindly and deeply it would hurt him.
It hurt Rosa too. She was only three; people said, ‘too young to understand’, but they were wrong. She both understood, and misunderstood in ways that might have poisoned our whole relationship insidiously had she not had the genius to enact what was in her mind.
At first she felt, or showed, only sorrow, and pity for me. I still have the thing she made to console me. Unbelievably, she drew a baby on kitchen paper, about the size a newborn baby would be, but with short arms that made the whole thing like a cross with a heavy head, came through and laid it in my arms as I lay in bed in our bedroom with its windows opening over the grass, the greenness, the pointless blank and the blue: ‘Here’s a baby for you, Mummy.’ And then as the days went on she became strange and evasive and did not want to be near me. When Nick went out she ran after him, clinging and crying. It was almost as if she was afraid of me, but that could not be so. Could it?
Then she showed me what was tormenting her by taking her toys, one after another, and hanging them from her upper bunk with scarves. I took them down and asked her why she was doing it. ‘I just wanted to see what it was like,’ she said, but she still wouldn’t look me in the eye. ‘What was it like?’
She thought I was killing the babies who died. Oddly, art helped, or symbolism did, at this bleakest of junctures, where nothing, you would think, could help. By a kindness of fate, or the pity of God, for surely only God could have such perfect pity—or because my longing was so deep and raw that it called forth what was needed from the universe, in which case the universe itself is God, which is what I mostly, most deeply, believe—the book opened, that evening, at bedtime, at a story we had never read, ‘What Happened to the Unicorn?’ by Jenny Koralek. I read it to Rosa, not knowing where it would take us, in much the same way as the child in the story, who has lost something and needs solace, wanders into a green wood. I cannot remember the details now, but I do remember there was a unicorn among the trees—that the child talked to it, and loved it—but the unicorn, magical as it was, was only here on a visit, could not stay. I think Rosa and I both knew, without words for the thing we knew, that the unicorn was a soul. The soul we longed for which had slipped away. The soul, the well-spring of loss and sorrow. And we were both crying as the story ended, tears which mended things; because Rosa was learning afresh that I mourned what might have been. I think from then on she was no longer afraid.