The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [320]
• • •
He arrived in Ascona to find Florence huge-bellied and somehow shining with complacency, which he had not expected. He said “I can’t kiss you, I can’t reach.” They laughed. It was sunny on the mountainside, even in February. They sat together in the shelter of the terrace, and Julian started to describe Imogen’s state, realised this was tactless, and cut himself off. Florence smiled. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “Talk to me like a grown-up person. No one here really does that, except Gabriel.”
“I don’t understand, about this Gabriel.”
“He’s a good man. In an odd way.”
Julian supposed odd meant queer, in a Cambridge sense, but when Gabriel came to eat with them, he saw no sign of it. He was both monkishly detached from the world, and observant, for the sake of kindness. Too good to be true, Julian tried to think, but couldn’t keep it up, as they talked about socialism, about psychoanalysis, about literature. They were learnedly discussing Heinrich von Ofterdingen when Florence gave a low cry. Then she gave a gasp. Gabriel was immediately out of his chair.
“It begins? May I?”
Cautiously, without deranging her dress, he felt the rippling muscles. Julian was both repelled and moved. He wanted to go a long way away and he wanted his sister—his dear sister—not to hurt.
“Ah!” she said in another gasp and cry.
“Mr. Julian,” said Gabriel. “Two doors down is a pony-trap. Knock and ask the owner to come.”
“Quickly,” said Florence, red with pressure.
“Do not worry,” said Gabriel Goldwasser. “A first child is always slow. You may find it easier to walk up and down. Have you things packed?”
She had not. They called Amalia, who packed a bag with nightdress and toilet things. Florence walked up and down. She said, between contractions, “How do you know what to do, Gabriel?”
“I am a trained doctor. From a good hospital. I have the sense to observe the—midwives, is it? I have seen all this before.”
Florence gave a muffled scream. “I hope it is slow.”
“If it is very slow, you will hope the opposite.”
Julian returned with the trap. They all three got in, behind the driver. The horse set off up the mountain, straining its muscles. Florence’s muscles conducted their own purposeful, involuntary dance.
• • •
It was not slow. The child was not born in the pony-trap, nor yet in the wheelchair in the clinic corridor. But she arrived, on a great crest of pain, with a loud, defiant wail, barely an hour later. Julian was not there, but Gabriel was. There was a nurse, whose observations he translated, and commented on.
“She says you have good muscles.”
“I—have not—thought about—these muscles.”
Florence had lived with the fear that “the child,” when it arrived, would resemble Herbert Methley, and she would hate it. The nurse cleaned it, and Gabriel gave it to its mother.
“A daughter,” he said, waiting to see if she was pleased. The child had a shock of dark hair—like Florence’s own, like Julian’s Italian hair. It had large dark eyes which it appeared to fix on Florence. And a character. There she was, all shocked with rushing into the world, and she pushed with her head, impatient for something. Years later, thinking it all over, Florence admitted to herself that she had recognised in the daughter a kind of excessive primitive energy she had responded to in the father. And responded to in the daughter. She took her, triumphant, into her arms, and kissed her hair. Julian came into the room.
“Meet Julia Perdita Goldwasser,” said Florence, laughing a little wildly. Julian bent courteously and kissed the small new hand as it clutched its shawl.
“I do not know,” said Florence to Gabriel, “what I should have done without you. In every way.”
“It was destiny,” said Gabriel Goldwasser.
He said later, to Julian, over a glass of apple juice, “She was not afraid. Most women are afraid. Or become afraid.”
“She was lucky?”
“Oh yes. She will think of it as virtue, but mostly it is luck. Salut!”
“Salut!”
In June 1909 King Edward VII opened Sir Aston Webb’s new buildings for the Victoria