Because by now Michael had managed to get through to Steph and almost bring her out of a kind of blindness that the death had plunged her into, and I did not want her to see (I do not think she really had seen it yet) the colour that her baby’s face had turned to.
So it wasn’t a tree, after all, that the space in the garden had been waiting for. We put Miranda there, in the same spot where her afterbirth lay buried. I hardly remember what was said. Michael had found volumes of poetry in the library, and he seemed to know what to say. I’m sure it was all beautiful, I remember parts of it, but of course it was not enough. A funeral is supposed to explain the whole thing, is it not? But not even my sweet Michael could find an acceptable way to say that this little one was dead and that she should be left in the dirty cold ground while we went back into the warm house without her. Steph could not be persuaded to come with us. So Michael buttoned her into her coat, and let her be. She stayed out until well after dark.
There followed several days when we could neither be together, nor bear not to know one another’s precise whereabouts. We could not rest in one spot, or seek out places of refuge. I roamed somewhat, trying to go about the jobs that needed doing, as did Michael, and even Steph. But we tired so easily, and would go to lie down and not manage to settle, and then we would come across one another wandering through the house again, or going about the garden. We could neither talk about Miranda, nor silence the clamour of her in our heads. I am speaking for myself, of course, and in truth there were times when I scarcely noticed what the other two were doing- but from what I did manage to take in, it was much the same for us all.
If there were any comfort to be had, it was in the knowledge that at least our child had not been taken away. She was dead, but nobody had been allowed to interfere. So we were all still together, all of us, including Miranda. Although she was dead and buried and gone from us, at least she lay not far away, and at home.
Steph’s days wasted one into the other, a cruel mirror of the time just after Miranda’s birth. Daylight lapped somewhere at the sides of the things she noticed, while Michael pushed and pulled her through the everyday and surely pointless practicalities of getting dressed, eating, bathing. In between times her brain swam, her empty arms stiffened and ached, her legs felt heavy and too weak to carry her far. She could not say whether it was through her body or her mind that she hurt more. It was as if loss jellified her. She felt boneless, a floating, absorbent thing that existed only to soak up pain. Then when her breasts began to ache with Miranda’s milk, she knew she had become some kind of efficiently functioning system for suffering. Night and day she processed raw material in the form of waves of perfect grief, which lapped and receded in her body, pricking, breaking, stabbing. Her breasts lifted, hardened and filled through countless incoming and ebbing tides of milk.
In the daytime she took long baths, as if she hoped to soak away her pain. She changed her clothes three and four times a day, swapping one anonymous, spotless shirt for another, yet her unhappiness clung; it lay beneath her pink skin and gleaming hair and beyond the reach of soap and water, or got itself caught up and buttoned in tight under her immaculate clothes. She walked about, ignoring the weight of her legs until she failed to notice the heaviness. Michael gave her little jobs to do, putting away a garden rake or carrying kindling, taking clothes to and from their bedroom to the laundry room; sometimes she would accomplish these tasks and sometimes stop them halfway through, forgetting. One day on the windowsill halfway down the stairs she came across two shirts, some socks and an empty tumbler that she had simply wandered away from, having paused at the window earlier on her way down. She spent a lot of time outside neither far from Michael nor yet with him, while he did what he could in the vegetable garden, but she was insensible to the sunshine which at times punched its way out through clouds and raised the smell of warm, dug soil into the air. She paced the paths and yards, the pool pavilion and outbuildings. She would stop and look at things for no apparent reason, and it was hard to know if she saw anything.
One day as she stood by the covered swimming pool, Jean, trudging back from the walled garden with a few sticks of rhubarb, stopped and watched her contemplating the turquoise rectangle. Had the pool been uncovered, would she try to drown herself, or was she imagining a summer day when Miranda might have been making her first splashes in the water? Steph roused herself, walked on towards the gate in the fence at the edge of the lawn, and stepped through it into the paddock. Jean turned towards the house, frowning at the bundle in her hand. Supper was going to have to be the last of the potatoes and an onion, and more rhubarb. It hardly seemed to matter; the walk to the garden and back had exhausted her so completely that she thought she might go back to bed anyway. Whilst thinking this Jean did not notice that Steph had already crossed the paddock and was now walking quite fast, making her way down the drive towards the road.
As she went further from the house, Steph wished she could stop thinking. It would have been a relief to be free of thought, free of the thousands of quarrelling and contradictory memories of the past few months: Jean’s house and how she had arrived that night, the birth of Miranda and before that, Michael and the flat, then Miranda, the awful first weeks. The miracle of waking up slowly, over several days, to the idea that her daughter would not be taken away, that she now lived in this amazing place with her, and with Michael and Michael’s mother. Even as she had been lulled by her new and gentle circumstances, there had still been space in her mind for Jace and at an unreal and distant point there had been Stacey, college, her pictures, her Nan. But as these thoughts tramped softly through her memory, now she wondered if, even as she had been learning to feel safe from that old life, she had been aware of a shade of disbelief. For how could she appear first in one life and then leave it for another, like the same small detail in two pictures- a jug, a scrap of lace, a tulip- that an artist might have arranged and painted twice on different canvases, for some sentimental reason or just through laziness or accident? In that sense she was, in a manner of speaking, simply the jug or flower or trinket that had come to someone’s hand. Perhaps it was her fault. Perhaps this happened to her because she continually consented to be picked up and placed in surroundings which might turn out to please or displease her, but over which she had no power in either case. She could even, as she had this time, grow convinced of her happiness, but her inability to change anything did not alter. She had been determined that Miranda should not be taken away, and had been shown her powerlessness over that.
As she walked, this idea too got left behind, along with other thoughts of the past. They took their leave tightly, like tentative visitors who had come just to remind her that once they might have been important but would not be staying. She walked on in some expectation that now something else would have to happen to her. New things would have to come along; the things, whatever they were, that were to be important next, the things she was to be placed among, in whose canvas she was to occupy a space. She opened her mind, inviting new thoughts to come and fill it. She walked, but none came.
She was wearing trousers and boots and began to notice that both were too big, while the white shirt (whose, for God’s sake?) was a little tight over her chest. Her clothes had an indoor, bready smell, or was that the smell of her milk? And the clothes felt no more hers than any of the sensations they created, the trouser stitching chafing a little on her hipbones, the pressing of the shirt over her breasts, but suddenly nor did they, or she, seem to belong to anything she could remember of the past three months. She liked the feeling of neutrality. She carried on walking.