them?” They shout at the news on the television, she thought, and call politicians fools—that’s a release for them. They lose their temper and hit people, and are admired for doing it. They sit on committees, or enforce laws. Whatever is wrong inside them they project to the outside, they find somebody out there to stick the blame on. But women—women turn inward. “Men make decisions,” she said, “and women fall ill.”
“That seems a gross simplification.”
“Of course it is,” Emma said. “Of course it is. But you can help your wife now, can’t you? Why do you want precision reasoning? I’ve given you something, Ralph—won’t it do?”
“Thank you, Emma,” he said. “You may have saved her life.”
“Oh, she wouldn’t die of it—” Emma began; but then she stopped because she saw the extent of his fear. Impenetrable, delicate, dry-eyed Anna: she had been near that cutting edge? “Oh, Ralph,” his sister said. “I didn’t know. I’d have come up with something before. Doesn’t she want to
“It is the one we don’t have that dominates our life,” Ralph said. “It’s what is missing that shapes everything we do. Sometimes she smiles, but have you noticed, Emma, she never laughs. She is crippled inside. She has no joy.”
“Joy,” Emma said. She smiled her twisted smile. “A word to be kept for Christmas carols, don’t you think, Ralph? Don’t expect joy. Survival, that’s all—survival should be the ambition.”
There was some surprise when—after Kit, Julian, Robin—Anna Eldred became pregnant for a fourth time. People said, Anna, I thought you’d stopped; three is enough in this day and age, and I heard you had heart trouble. Yes, I’ve got heart trouble, Anna said. Yes, I’ve stopped now. The world had moved on by the time
Rebecca was born. There were people who knew nothing of what had happened to them in Bechuanaland, and people who had known but had contrived to forget. There came a time when she didn’t think, every minute, about her stolen child.
But the grief waited in the thickets of daily life, in unoccupied hours, ready to bludgeon her again, to drag her down: drag her under like a woman drowned, a woman sewn in a sack.
One day Dorcas had a fall in the kitchen, broke her wrist. They took her in to hospital, to casualty, but it was a Friday night, and they had to wait, and the wait and the pain and the other clients distressed Dorcas beyond bearing. There were young men with springing scalp wounds, blood leaking and pumping out of them as if blood were as cheap as water; there was a woman brought in after a road accident, dumped in a wheelchair waiting for attention. One eyelid was cut, puffing and oozing; she had lost one high-heeled shoe, and in the twenty minutes she waited for attention she never stopped sobbing and asking for her husband.
In time Dorcas was led away, curtained off, her arm manipulated; she was wheeled through cold corridors to X-ray. The hospital offered a bed. “No,” Anna said, “this place has frightened her, I’ll take her home.” The doctor seemed relieved. “Call your GP in the morning,” he said.
“Keep her wrapped up,” their GP advised, “keep her in bed, don’t let her get worked up about things.” When Emma came to see her late that afternoon she was dismayed by the old woman’s low spirits; she seemed in pain, could not rest, would not eat. “You know what I think?” Emma said. “I think she’s had enough.”
When a chest infection developed their GP arranged for Dorcas to go back into hospital. But because she fretted, and still would not eat, the hospital sent her home. She insisted that Ralph stay by her, then; she began to hold his hand tightly with her good hand, and to talk to him, talk with a grim fluency, about her girlhood, her courtship, her marriage, her husband. It was as if, on what she acknowledged to be her deathbed, she was giving birth to a new version of her life.
“You thought he didn’t believe in science, didn’t you, Ralph?” Her face was very small against the pillows. “But he broke my spirit, scientifically. I wasn’t always the carpet under his feet, I wasn’t born like that. No, I had a life, when I was a young girl—my family weren’t so strict. I used to go to dances.”
“Mum, don’t cry,” Ralph said.
“Let her,” Emma said. “Crying does no harm. It might ease her chest.”
“That Palmer boy, young Felix—that friend of yours, Emma—I knew his father. He was a good dancer, very light on his feet. And a gentleman. He’d buy me ginger beer.”
Emma sat on the bed. She lifted her mother’s hand and rubbed it between her own. “Was he sweet on you, Mum?”
“Oh yes.” Dorcas smiled, painfully. She seemed to sleep for a moment. But then she continued quite smoothly, just where she had left off. “The thing was though, your father came along, and I thought he was more of a man, really. His father was a lay preacher,” she said, as if they hadn’t known it, “and he had a fine voice.”
“Ah,” Emma said. “So you gave up Mr. Palmer?”
“Yes,” Dorcas said, “I did, I did give him up, I told him he should look elsewhere. He was a snappy dresser, you know, I’ll say that much for him—and oh, could he make you laugh! Still, that’s not life, is it … laughing, that’s not life. He married a bottle-blond from Cromer, went into the building trade, he did well I always heard, that’s how little Felix got his airs and graces. Your father was a serious man. We never went to a dance.”
“Mum, you’re tired,” Ralph said. “Why don’t you have a sleep now?”
“Don’t try to shut her up, or I’ll never forgive you,” Emma said mildly. “This is my mother, and—” she turned to him, and whispered—“and I’ve got to my present age without ever hearing her say anything of interest. So don’t you try to stop her now.”
Dorcas looked up. “You see, I always had to please him, Ralph. I was a good girl and went to church, but six months after I was married I gave up fearing God and started fearing your father. I mean that, you know. I don’t mean it as a blasphemy. He always seemed to me like a person from another age. Abraham. A patriarch. He wasn’t fair to you, Ralph, and the worst thing, you know—he made me take part in it. Oh, you hated me then. That night when I came into your room and said to you, you have to fall in with him, Ralph, or you’ll see your sister suffer for it.” She closed her eyes. “He knew you loved your sister.”
Emma said, “What does she mean?”
“Nothing,” Ralph said.
“What is it? Come on, Ralph! If you won’t tell me, she will.”
