‘You are overwrought, Laura,’ said Mr Bonner.
His wife smiled bitterly.
‘I am excited,’ Laura agreed, ‘by my great hopes.’
‘I do not see,’ began Mr Bonner, who would tire of things temporarily, and was now, in fact, thinking of his glass of rum and water, ‘I do not see how we can help but allow this misguided wretch to give birth to her child under our roof, unless we break the precepts that our religious faith teaches us. As it is too late to effect an arrangement combining the practical with the humane, let us hope that in time the Supreme Being will lead us out of our predicament. I do not doubt we shall find some honest woman who will see the advantage of accepting the child, especially if accompanied by a small consideration. The unhappy mother will be more difficult to dispose of, although, in this also, I am confident we shall be guided to act in a right way.’
Laura Trevelyan lowered her eyes.
‘I do not know what to say,’ admitted Mrs Bonner, uncertain whether to feel offended at her own husband’s defection, or chastened by his magnanimity.
The poor woman was racked by hartshorn and dampened by emotion. Those little curls, which she still affected from a former fashion, and which rain or sea air always compelled her to revive, had by now lost their necessary frizz, and were hanging upon her forehead like the tails of dead mice.
‘I am at a loss,’ she said.
‘Dear Aunt Emmy,’ the younger woman consoled, ‘you will recover. And discover.’
As her collapsed aunt continued to sit with the smelling-bottle in her lap, the niece added:
‘I must ask you to replace the stopper in the little bottle, otherwise its virtue will be exhausted.’
So Laura Trevelyan left the presence of these relations, who were again her good parents. She did truly love them.
In her condition, she could have loved all men, as, indeed, she would love the baby. She walked through the house protecting her achievement, in her sensuous, full dress of grey watered silk. Of singing silk. Her heart was full. Sitting in the same room with her dull and heavy maid, the mistress did not lose her buoyancy. She was cutting out flannel, making garments for the baby they would have. Her steely scissors flew, and she would gather up snippets of ribbon and braid, and fasten together little, bright bundles of trivial conversation. The maid would listen, but dully. The latter became leaden as her time approached, and she would perhaps have sunk, if it had not been for the trust she put in her mistress.
‘Now that the wind has died, let us take our walk in the garden, Rose,’ decided the mistress.
And the maid followed, trustingly.
They would walk in the garden, in the dusk, by mysterious, involved paths that the mistress chose. In the wilder, scrubbier parts of the garden, the skirts of the two women would catch upon the fallen bark and twigs. Sometimes Laura Trevelyan would tear the bark in scrolls from the native trees, and attempt to unroll them before they broke, or she would tear the leaves, and crush them, and smell them, in her hands smelling of ants.
Then, in the mysterious garden, obsessed by its harsh scents, she would be closest to the unborn child, and to the love of her husband. Darkness and leaves screened the most intimate forms, the most secret thoughts. Soon he will write, she told herself. As if words were necessary. Long before pen had been put to paper, and paper settled on the grass in its final metamorphosis, she had entered the state of implicit trust. In the evening garden, their trusting bodies glimmered together, always altering their shape, as the light inspired, then devoured. Or they would sit, and again it could have been the forms of two women, looking at each other, as the one tried to remember the eyes of her husband. If she could have looked deeper, deeper, deep enough.
Once she had felt the child kick inside her, and she bit her lip for the certainty, the shape her love had taken.
‘Oh, it is cold,’ Rose Portion was moaning. ‘It is cold.’
Fear compelled her to drag her mistress back.
‘On the contrary,’ murmured Laura, ‘it is warm tonight. Far too warm, in fact.’
But she was returned to her actual body.
Then the young woman took the stiff, cold hand of her maid, and led her indoors.
One evening, as Rose Portion was seated by the lamp, picking over some work that she had taken into her lap to pacify her mistress, she looked up quite suddenly. A savage hand had carved the lines deeper in her grey face, which, under light, was more than ever that of a dumb animal.
‘Oh, miss, I cannot bear it,’ breathed Rose.
‘You shall,’ said Laura, getting up.
The woman clenched her teeth, until the grey sweat ran in the channels of her face. It was as if the breath were being torn out of her.
‘It is time,’ said Laura.
‘I do not know,’ Rose replied. ‘At least, it is the pains. I would die if I could.’
Then Laura sent Jim Prentice with the brougham to fetch the midwife, who arrived shortly, with an infallible knowledge of the world and a leather bag.
Mrs Child was a small woman with eyes so sharp and black they could have strayed down from amongst the other jet ornaments accumulated on her bonnet. For reasons of policy, she began by ignoring the patient, while enumerating to Miss Trevelyan those articles she would need in the course of operations. And all the time, the midwife was glancing here and there, as if she had been in the furniture trade, instead of belonging to her own particular branch of the conjuring profession. For Mrs Child knew: however discreet the eyes, and modest the behaviour, solid mahogany and figured brocade must be taken into account. So she reckoned up, accordingly.
Now, when she had removed her bonnet and disposed of her pelisse, the midwife deigned to notice the patient. She ran at Rose, with all her curls a-jingle, and gave her what could have been a pinch.
‘You, Mrs Portion,’ shouted this jolly soul, ‘your trouble is a little one, that you will be calling a blessing by tomorrow night.’
The pregnant woman, who was holding her arms rigid across her belly, gave a long, terrible moan.
So that Mrs Bonner shuddered, in the little, far parlour, which they seldom used, and where she had hoped not to hear.
The midwife sucked her teeth.
‘There, dear. You must not fight against receiving such a wonderful gift. Woman truly vindicated, as a reverend gentleman once put it. But I do not reckon your time is come, unless I do not know my business, and nobody can accuse me of that. I would say, at a guess, in another two, or three, even, or it could be four hours. Now, miss, would it be possible for me to take some light refreshment? I always dine early, to be ready to give service, seeing as the night air seems to work upon the poor things.’
While Mrs Child was demolishing a nice mutton chop, together with a liberal portion of baked custard, and describing for the benefit of Cassie the details of the more spectacular cases to which she had been called, Laura Trevelyan made the necessary preparations. She was exalted now.
‘On the good carpet!’ wailed Mrs Bonner in her distant parlour.
‘I have put newspaper,’ replied her niece. ‘At least four layers of the Herald.’
But the aunt was not consoled. In her isolation, for her husband had remembered a message he had failed to deliver to a friend, and kind Mrs Pringle had carried off their daughter Belle for as long as circumstances required, Mrs Bonner had been reading a sermon, and just now was offering a prayer, for the poor sufferer, which signified: herself. So she passed the evening, in the green-backed mirror, in her stuffy room.