‘Yes you have. So that you don’t have to carry it around all by yourself.’ I’m thinking of Penny, of what she told me when I found her squatting in my property with Jack or Zac – that sex with Derek was worse than she’d expected.
‘Well, I was supposed to use my hands and sometimes my mouth. It took a long time, longer than the boy behind the barn, a lot longer than the horse, and quite often nothing happened and he’d give up or fall asleep.’
‘And what if you didn’t? What if you refused?’
‘He never forced me. He never hit me or anything. Not for that. But I always did it as thoroughly as I could, and Sarah as well, to keep Maud from having to. Sarah and I could laugh about it. He wasn’t bad, Caleb. Just an old man who wanted to feel big and strong when he wasn’t any more. But it was difficult for Maud. She never got used to it.’
‘And that’s why she doesn’t talk?’
‘I do was the last thing I ever heard her say. Are you disgusted with me now?’
‘Why should I be?’
‘I was always half afraid of you.’
‘Why?
‘Because you were the bad seed.’
‘And Penny was the good?’
‘Until she ran away. Then it was a wicked streak you’d both inherited.’
‘Not from mum?’
‘No, he loved your mum. We all did. Your mother was a living saint. It was your father, with his fleshly appetites and worldly desires, who’d kept her from the path of righteousness until God cast him down from a high place and raised up Caleb to seek Hebron.’
‘He fell off a ladder. He wasn’t cast down by God. He had a heart attack. I don’t know anything about his fleshly appetites. It was Derek who liked Korean tarts. And the extent of my dad’s worldly desires was to have mum cook him steak and chips for tea on a Friday night and watch a bit of telly.’
‘You miss him.’
‘He would have known how to take care of this house.’
‘You loved him.’
‘Did you believe those stories – about my dad, about me being the bad seed?’
‘I never believed anything bad about you.’
I take her hand and she shivers.
‘Do you want to go back inside?’ she says.
‘No. Do you?
‘No. And you’re not disappointed?’
‘About what?’
‘That I’m not a virgin.’
‘Abigail – you might be the first grown-up virgin I’ve ever met.’
‘You’re teasing me.’
‘It’s hard not to.’ I look her in the face. ‘I’ve had sex with other women you know. I was in London for years before I met Caroline. And Caroline wasn’t a virgin when I met her.’
‘You can tell me that another day. You should stop talking about Caroline now.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s time.’
She kisses me. I realise I didn’t expect her to be passionate. She’s so practical always and so self-contained. And modest, of course, with the headscarf and the heavy skirts – always careful to close the curtain when she washes at the spring. I’ve never seen her flustered before. There’s garlic on her breath. She puts her hand up to my face and I kiss her fingers. The nails are darkened at the rim with soil, and the palms of her hands are rough and calloused. There’s a memory of the milking shed overlaid by vegetable smells – roots and rank weeds and the sweeter scent of sage. Unbuttoning her blouse, I see a fine silver chain and a star of David at the end of it.
‘It was my mother’s.’ she says quickly, as though she has to justify this secret ornament. ‘She gave it me when Grandma Cheryl took me on the Jesus Bus. So I’d remember who I was, she said.’
‘You’re Jewish?’
‘That I was her daughter – she didn’t want me to forget. What do you mean, Jewish?’
‘If Cheryl was Jewish what was she doing on the Jesus bus?’
‘Stop asking questions.’
As I free her from her clothes, I find I can trace her day’s work across her body, tasting the salt on her skin and the sharper tang of sweat clinging to the intimate crevices, and then sweeter flavours that are only hers and owe nothing to the field or the kitchen. After a while her breath is warm on my face and the sounds she makes in her throat are louder to my ear than the woodland noises and then drown them altogether.
Agnes
It feels strange to write in this book after so long. I’m not who I was when I last opened its covers. Having a baby of my own makes me think again about my mother. She knew what it was to have a baby die. She had suffered imprisonment in the red room. I see how fear might have grown in her, all her fears for herself swelling into one monstrous fear that her second child would come to harm. I’m sad to think that I will never say this to her. That I know why she slapped me when I paddled too deep, why she hissed at me when I spoke up too loud or played too wildly. And I’m sad that she will never know her grandchild. I have called him Walt, after my father. I think of the village now as a river that flowed through me, and my life just part of its flowing. I can’t bear to think that it will never flow through my child, that I have stopped it here, in me, and fear that little Walt’s life will be like a dried up river bed without it.
It was hard having him. Dell helped, and Madge, an old woman who comes to the O sometimes with pigeons. Madge has a knack for snaring, but no teeth, so she brings the birds but only slurps at Dell’s gravy and gets drunk on Trevor’s brew. The cramps came on at tea time and came faster and sharper into the evening, but it was the dead of night before little Walt appeared. Madge said this was quick but it seemed long enough to me.
I thought at times that the pain would tear me open. At times my mind went somewhere else and I seemed to be in a river and the pain was like water rushing through me, wave after wave, and I must either fight it or drown in it, and drowning was better.
So lovely it was at last to hold him damp and blooded from my belly and so tiny in my arms. I’ve never known a sweeter thing. For such a time I’d known him, but never yet seen him face to face. All winter he’d called to me, kicking and turning, nagging me to eat the wild berries Trevor pickles in gin. But when I took his tiny wrinkled fingers and his little eyes blinked open and looked into mine, I came at last to his calling. And I understood Sarah’s grief at losing Dell to the scroungers, never to see her again.
Madge took a kitchen knife to the binding, and Walt became his own person.
‘Oh, Agnes,’ Dell said, ‘Look at his tiny noggin, all red and furrowed. Who’d have thought he’d be so lovely.’
Madge took him from me to wrap him from draughts. When it was Dell’s turn to hold him, she hugged him and hugged him, saying, ‘Look at the little tablet.’
Loving Walt as I do, I find I must try to forgive Brendan. I know I will catch glimpses of him in Walt’s face as Walt grows older, and I would be sorry to mind. Even so, I think what Brendan did to me was wrong. I see that now clearer than ever. Wrong to give me this baby, then to punish me for it. To do it to me when I was far from home and afraid of him. And I was always afraid of him, though I called it love. And it was wrong of him to tell lies about my mother. If I killed him I’m sorry, but not too much. I can’t wish Brendan safe at the Hall and me locked away to save him from shame.
I have seen more pictures, but never with such innocent wonder as that first time. I guard myself against their power. I prefer to sit at the back with Trevor, where the light spills from his machine, and help him work. I love to see the long dark ribbon curling off its wheel to wrap itself round another, the pictures so tiny and so delicately made, and so many of them, each one hardly different from the last. I cry to think of the skill of those who made them, all long dead and forgotten.