‘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—
Nora pauses, not for effect, for she is taking no delight in her storytelling.
— Have you ever seen anyone dying from poison?
‘Obviously not.’
— Well, I don’t want to describe it, thank you. I think we should leave a space and imagine it, if we have the stomach—
‘That’s called cheating. And then?’
— And then she was dead — what else? She’d had to wait until she’d delivered the baby before she could kill herself; it would have gone against everything she believed in to have killed the child inside her. She must have planned to do it all along. And I suppose she thought that, as she was going to hell anyway, she might as well release Donald from his suffering. She did speak before she died. She said, ‘God will talk to me again.’ She was in despair, which is a forsaken place to be, and I wish I had realized, for then I might have prevented what happened.
I was feeling for a pulse, thinking something might still be done to save her, when Effie came in. Naturally, she was stopped in her tracks at the sight of Mabel. Effie stank of alcohol and she had a bite-mark on her neck. She seemed quite deranged. Then she noticed the baby lying on the chair and pounced on it, saying it wasn’t going to end up with what was hers. I’ve never seen such hate on anyone’s face, not even Effie’s. I would have tried to wrest the baby off her but I knew she wouldn’t care if she hurt it. She was screaming, all kinds of filth and obscenities about Mabel and the baby, about money, about solicitors. I thought someone would hear and come and help me but there was no-one there to come.
Effie darted out of the room and ran downstairs with the baby. I chased after her, across the lawn, through the gate in the fence and down to the river. The river was swollen and icy with the snow that had melted on the hills, but Effie waded into it as far as she could go. For a moment I thought perhaps she was going to kill herself too — my head was still so full of Mabel — and it was only when she shouted to me, ‘What do they do with kittens on the farm, Eleanora?’ that I realized she meant to drown the baby. She was quite mad, of course.
I waded in after her. The water was unimaginably cold and the current much stronger than I’d thought. The stones on the riverbed were slippery so that I had difficulty keeping my footing. The green dress, heavy with water, was dragging me down. I tried to snatch the baby out of Effie’s arms, but as I lunged for it I slipped and fell towards her. I caught her off balance and we both fell into the water. I caught a glimpse of the baby being carried away by the river, like a basketless Moses.
Effie and I clung on to each other as we were swept downstream. We fetched up close to the river bank, entangled in the branches of a tree that had fallen in the water. And then suddenly, without even thinking about it, I clutched a handful of her long hair in my hand and pushed her head under the water. I wanted her to die. I wanted her dead. She fought her way back up, clawing at me like a cat from hell. I had the advantage, though, for she’d been drinking and I had been toughened by years on the playing fields of St Leonard’s, which is a better training than a marine gets. She could hardly speak from the cold but she managed to plead with me, stuttering out the words that I’d been waiting for her to say for a long time.
Silence.
‘The words, what words?’
~ ‘Don’t kill me,’ she begged, ‘I’m your mother.’ And then I pushed her head under the water and held it there. When I let her go, she didn’t come back up.
— On the whole, Nora says thoughtfully, I think I prefer your story.
‘Let me get this straight — Effie and Lachlan were your parents?’
— Of course. Surely you’d guessed? Effie had me when she was fourteen. She didn’t tell anyone until it was too late to do anything about it, I suppose she hoped it would just go away. That I would just go away. She was still running up and down St Leonard’s lacrosse field when she was eight months pregnant, probably keeping it hidden by willpower, knowing her.
She gave birth in her own bed at home during the summer holidays and the easiest way to conceal the truth was to say the baby was Marjorie’s, although God knows by that time Marjorie wasn’t fit to look after an infant. Effie wasn’t even late returning to school, leaving Marjorie and a completely disreputable nanny to bring me up. They thought I would be defective, being in-bred. They always treated me as if I was, even when I proved not to be. Lachlan was given a thrashing the next time he was home from Glenalmond and told not to do it again. That’s the ruling classes for you.