day, as she was well aware—when suddenly she sprang alert and put a hand fearfully on my wrist. I had heard nothing, but now I did. There were voices on the ridge above us. I thought at once of Billy and me up there that day when he had pointed out to me Cotter’s mossy roof camouflaged among the treetops. Could this be him again, come to show the place to someone else? We strained to hear, breathing at the shallowest tops of our lungs. Mrs Gray was looking at me sideways, the whites of her eyes flashing in terror. The voices coming down through the trees made a hollow, ringing sound, like the sound of steel mallets striking musically on wood—or of Fate, more like, amusedly tapping at his finger-drum. Were they the voices of children or of adults or of both? We could not tell. All kinds of wild fancies darted through my mind. If it was not Billy it was workmen coming with sledgehammers and crowbars to demolish what remained of the house; it was a search-party looking for a missing person; it was the Guards, dispatched by Mr Gray to arrest his wanton wife and her precocious inamorato.
Mrs Gray’s lower lip had begun to tremble. ‘Oh, holy God,’ she whispered gulpingly. ‘Oh, dear Jesus.’
In a short while, however, the voices faded and there was silence again up on the ridge. Still we dared not stir, still Mrs Gray’s fingers were digging like talons into my wrist. Then abruptly she scrambled up and began to put on her clothes in clumsy haste. I watched her with a mounting sense of alarm, no longer fearful of discovery but of something much worse, namely, that the shock she had got would cause her to take fright finally and flee the place and never come back to me. I demanded to know, my voice cracking, what she thought she was doing, but she did not answer. I could see by her eyes that she was elsewhere already, on her knees, probably, clinging to her husband’s trouser legs and desperately begging his forgiveness. I thought of making some large pronouncement, of delivering some solemn admonition—
I began to cry, startling even myself. It was the real thing, a child’s raw, helpless blurting. Mrs Gray stopped what she was doing and turned and stared at me, appalled. She had seen me weep before, but that was in rage or to try to get her to bend to my will, not like this, abjectly, defencelessly, and I suppose it was borne in on her afresh how young I was, after all, and how far out of my depth she had led me. She knelt down on the mattress again and embraced me. It was a shivery sensation to be in her arms naked when she was dressed, and even as I leaned into her and bawled for sorrow I found to my pleased surprise that I was becoming aroused again, and I lay back down and drew her with me and, despite her squirms of protest, got my hands under her clothes, and so we were off again, my sobs of childish fear and anguish now become the familiar, hoarse panting that would rise and rise along its arc to the final, familiar whoop of triumph and wild relief.
I think that was the day I told her of my intention to make her pregnant. I recall a drowsy noontide and the two of us lying quietly together in a tangle of sweat-smeared limbs, a wasp buzzing at the corner of a broken pane and a smoking blade of sunlight from one of the holes in the roof plunged at an angle in the floor beside us. I had been brooding as so often on the painful and unavoidable fact that was Mr Gray, her inexpungible husband, working myself the while into a fine state of suppressed wrath, and the thought of wreaking what would surely be the ultimate revenge upon him had hardly formed in my mind before I had heard myself announce it aloud and quite as if it were a thing in need only of being accomplished. At first it seemed Mrs Gray did not understand, could not take in what I had said, and small wonder—it was hardly the kind of thing a woman in the midst of a more than usually perilous affair would expect to hear from the mouth of her under-age lover. When she was taken off-guard or had been told something that she could not absorb at once she had a way, I have noticed it in other women, too, of going very still and quiet on the spot, as if she had found herself suddenly under threat and were lying low until the danger had passed. So she remained for some moments motionless, with her back and her warm behind against my front and one of my arms gone to sleep underneath her. Then she heaved herself over violently on to her other side so that she was facing me. First she stared at me disbelievingly, then she gave me a tremendous, two-handed push in the chest that sent me sliding backwards across the mattress so that my shoulder-blades clattered against the wall. ‘That’s a disgusting thing to say, Alex Cleave,’ she said, in a low and terrible voice. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, so you should.’
Was it then that she told me about the child she had lost? A little girl, it was, her last-born after Billy and his sister. The babe was sickly, and died after a day or two of flickering life. The death itself when it came was sudden, however, and it was a torment to Mrs Gray that the mite had not been baptised and that therefore her soul was in Limbo. It made me uneasy to hear of this creature, who for her mother was a vividly lingering presence, idealised and adored. When Mrs Gray spoke of her, crooning and lovingly sighing, I thought of the little gilt figurine of the Infant of Prague, with its crown and cape, its sceptre and orb, which reigned in impassive, miniature splendour behind the fanlight over the front door of my mother’s house and which I had been afraid of when I was little and found uncanny still. Mrs Gray’s grasp on the finer points of Christian eschatology was not strong, and in her view of it Limbo was not a place of permanent sequester for the souls of the unchristened but a sort of painless Purgatory, a halfway house between earthly life and the rewards and joys of the beatific transcendent, where her babe even now was biding in patient expectation of being one day, perhaps the Last Day, raised up to the presence of her Heavenly Father, where the two of them, mother and child, would be joyfully reunited. ‘I hadn’t even chosen a name for her,’ Mrs Gray told me, with a sorrowful gulp, and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Small wonder my threat of impregnation alarmed and angered her.
Yet I might have suggested to her, that day, that if she and I were indeed to have a little one of our own it would be a replacement down here for the embryonic angel impatiently waiting her turn in line at the Limbic gate. By now, however, what with this talk of dead babies, my enthusiasm for precocious fatherhood had cooled considerably—had turned, in fact, to ashes.
It struck me afterwards that what was remarkable about her response when I stated my intention of putting her in the family way was that she did not seem entirely surprised by it; shocked, naturally, outraged, yes, but not surprised. Perhaps women are never surprised by the prospect of being pregnant, perhaps they live in a constant state of preparedness for just that eventuality; I might consult Lydia on this matter, Lydia, my Lydia, my encyclopydia. Mrs Gray that day did not even ask why I should want her to have a child, as if she accepted that it would be the most natural and obvious thing that I should want. If she had asked, I would not have known quite how to answer. Should she get pregnant by me it would hurt her husband, yes, and that would be pleasing, but it would hurt us, too, her and me, and grievously. Did I really know what I was saying, and if I did, did I mean it? I am sure I did not—I was hardly more than a child myself, after all—and had said it I am sure only to shock her and attract all her attention on to myself, exclusively, a task to which I devoted much effort and ingenuity. Yet I find myself contemplating now, with a pang of what feels like genuine regret, the possibility that between us we might have produced a fine, bright boy, say, with her eyes and my limbs, or a glowing girl, a miniature version of her, complete with shapely ankles and slender toes and an unruly curl behind her ear. Absurd, absurd. Think of it, my meeting up with him or her now, a son or daughter nearly as old as I am, the two of us tongue-tied with embarrassment before the grotesque and comic predicament into which an accident of love and a boy’s spitefulness had thrown us, and from which nothing could extricate us except my death, and even that would not wipe the laughable stain from the record. And yet, and yet. My mind turns in confusion, my heart shrinks and swells. Absurd. Look at me, blundering here on the brink of old age and still wistfully dreaming of generation, of a son who might comfort me, of a daughter whom I could love, and on whom I might one day lean an infirm arm and be led down the last road at the end of which awaits what the Psalmist in his solemn fashion calls my long home.
Of course, I would have preferred a daughter. Yes, definitely a daughter.
It is a wonder, in fact, that Mrs Gray did not become pregnant, as frequently and as energetically as we went at the business that would have made her so. How did she avoid it? In this land, in those days, there was no available legal means to prevent conception, other than celibacy, and even if there had been she would not have consented to it, out of devotion to her faith. For she did believe in God, not the God of love, I think, but certainly the
