The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [319]
She allowed herself to think of him, briefly. And suddenly the room was full of every Tom that had ever been, the blond baby, the infant taking his first, hesitant steps, the little boy clutching her skirt, the besotted reader in too low a light, his brows pulled into a frown, the adolescent with his skin broken out, the young man walking, always walking or about to walk. They were all equally present because they were all gone.
She remembered the tale she had told to herself of the young woman carrying the packet containing the deaths of Pete and Petey, the young woman walking endlessly in grim weather across the moors, with the unopened packet. There was no room in that packet, for this.
She thought of the forest of coeval boys, all eternally present, crowding her room, and the old Olive thought idly, this is a story, there is a story in this.
And then she saw that there was not. There would be no more stories, she thought, dramatically, uncertain whether this too was a story, or a full stop.
She gave a great howl, and Dorothy came quickly. She gave her calming medicine that the doctor had left. She smoothed the pillows.
Olive said “You won’t leave me? You will stay, now? You are the only one.”
Dorothy gave a desperate little shrug, and closed her body in on itself. She said stiffly
“I can’t stay. I must go back to my work. You know that.” Silence.
“It isn’t true that I am the only one. There is Papa, and Aunt Violet, and Phyllis, who is much kinder than I am, and Hedda, who wants to help. They all care for you. I care for you, but you know I must do my work.”
A long silence. Then Olive said “Close the curtains before you go.”
Dorothy closed them. She kissed her mother, who did not respond. She went out, and closed the door. Olive lay in the dark, surrounded by a forest of sempiternal boys. They did not exactly see her, that was her hope. She tried to remember the woman with the package, walking… She had asked for the stone with a hole, and had it under her pillow.
46
There were births, also. Tom Underground opened on New Year’s Day 1909. Tom Wellwood was buried three weeks later. Imogen Cain’s labour began on the same day. It was long, and difficult. Nurses came, and a specialist obstetrician. A day of pain went past. The doctors brought chloroform, and Imogen struggled briefly under the mask. The small, pale girlchild was helped into the world with forceps, in a flood of blood, which was hard to staunch. She was a small child, frighteningly inert. The midwife cleaned, and slapped and shook her, and in the end she mewed and breathed. Imogen lay in her blood, white as alabaster. Prosper Cain, who had seen blood on the battlefield, who had been called because of unnamed fears on the part of the specialist, turned white himself, and swallowed, and took a deep breath, and took her hand. Her fingers fluttered in his.
Mother and child lay in a no man’s land between life and death. Imogen’s head was full of shadowy, greedy, threatening things. They showed her her tiny daughter, swaddled in a shawl, and she smiled, but was not strong enough to take her. Her hair was wet with sweat on her pillow. The nurse fed her water with a spoon.
They had agreed to call the child Cordelia.
Imogen was still in danger when Prosper should have set out for Ascona, to offer support to his lost daughter. He could not leave his wife. He asked Julian, who was at home, in order to work in the British Museum, if he would go out to Italy. He was a just man in great moral distress. Julian, having taken a distant look at his new sister, thought he would be hopeless and useless where birth and babies were concerned. He was writing an essay on the scarcely known painter Samuel Palmer, who had painted golden, English, paradisal pictures of apple trees, sheep and ripened corn under a harvest moon. It was a long way from all this mess and medical odours. He said, of course he would go. For the first time in his life he patted his father’s shoulder.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You must stay, of course. And