The Children's Book

Olive said “You won’t leave me? You will stay, now? You are the only one.”

Dorothy gave a desperate little shrug, and closed her body in on itself. She said stiffly

“I can’t stay. I must go back to my work. You know that.” Silence.

“It isn’t true that I am the only one. There is Papa, and Aunt Violet, and Phyllis, who is much kinder than I am, and Hedda, who wants to help. They all care for you. I care for you, but you know I must do my work.”

A long silence. Then Olive said “Close the curtains before you go.”

Dorothy closed them. She kissed her mother, who did not respond. She went out, and closed the door. Olive lay in the dark, surrounded by a forest of sempiternal boys. They did not exactly see her, that was her hope. She tried to remember the woman with the package, walking… She had asked for the stone with a hole, and had it under her pillow.

46

There were births, also. Tom Underground opened on New Year’s Day 1909. Tom Wellwood was buried three weeks later. Imogen Cain’s labour began on the same day. It was long, and difficult. Nurses came, and a specialist obstetrician. A day of pain went past. The doctors brought chloroform, and Imogen struggled briefly under the mask. The small, pale girlchild was helped into the world with forceps, in a flood of blood, which was hard to staunch. She was a small child, frighteningly inert. The midwife cleaned, and slapped and shook her, and in the end she mewed and breathed. Imogen lay in her blood, white as alabaster. Prosper Cain, who had seen blood on the battlefield, who had been called because of unnamed fears on the part of the specialist, turned white himself, and swallowed, and took a deep breath, and took her hand. Her fingers fluttered in his.

Mother and child lay in a no man’s land between life and death. Imogen’s head was full of shadowy, greedy, threatening things. They showed her her tiny daughter, swaddled in a shawl, and she smiled, but was not strong enough to take her. Her hair was wet with sweat on her pillow. The nurse fed her water with a spoon.

They had agreed to call the child Cordelia.

Imogen was still in danger when Prosper should have set out for Ascona, to offer support to his lost daughter. He could not leave his wife. He asked Julian, who was at home, in order to work in the British Museum, if he would go out to Italy. He was a just man in great moral distress. Julian, having taken a distant look at his new sister, thought he would be hopeless and useless where birth and babies were concerned. He was writing an essay on the scarcely known painter Samuel Palmer, who had painted golden, English, paradisal pictures of apple trees, sheep and ripened corn under a harvest moon. It was a long way from all this mess and medical odours. He said, of course he would go. For the first time in his life he patted his father’s shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “You must stay, of course. And I can do almost anything you could do, in Ascona.”

•  •  •

He arrived in Ascona to find Florence huge-bellied and somehow shining with complacency, which he had not expected. He said “I can’t kiss you, I can’t reach.” They laughed. It was sunny on the mountainside, even in February. They sat together in the shelter of the terrace, and Julian started to describe Imogen’s state, realised this was tactless, and cut himself off. Florence smiled. “Don’t mind me,” she said. “Talk to me like a grown-up person. No one here really does that, except Gabriel.”

“I don’t understand, about this Gabriel.”

“He’s a good man. In an odd way.”

Julian supposed odd meant queer, in a Cambridge sense, but when Gabriel came to eat with them, he saw no sign of it. He was both monkishly detached from the world, and observant, for the sake of kindness. Too good to be true, Julian tried to think, but couldn’t keep it up, as they talked about socialism, about psychoanalysis, about literature. They were learnedly discussing Heinrich von Ofterdingen when Florence gave a low cry. Then she gave a gasp. Gabriel was immediately out of his chair.

“It begins? May I?”

Cautiously, without deranging her dress, he felt the rippling muscles. Julian was both repelled and moved. He wanted to go a long way away and he wanted his sister—his dear sister—not to hurt.

“Ah!” she said in another gasp and cry.

“Mr. Julian,” said Gabriel. “Two doors down is a pony-trap. Knock and ask the owner to come.”

“Quickly,” said Florence, red with pressure.

“Do not worry,” said Gabriel Goldwasser. “A first child is always slow. You may find it easier to walk up and down. Have you things packed?”

She had not. They called Amalia, who packed a bag with nightdress and toilet things. Florence walked up and down. She said, between contractions, “How do you know what to do, Gabriel?”

“I am a trained doctor. From a good hospital. I have the sense to observe the—midwives, is it? I have seen all this before.”

Florence gave a muffled scream. “I hope it is slow.”

“If it is very slow, you will hope the opposite.”

Julian returned with the trap. They all three got in, behind the driver. The horse set off up the mountain, straining its muscles. Florence’s muscles conducted their own purposeful, involuntary dance.

•  •  •

It was not slow. The child was not born in the pony-trap, nor yet in the wheelchair in the clinic corridor. But she arrived, on a great crest of pain, with a loud, defiant wail, barely an hour later. Julian was not there, but Gabriel was. There was a nurse, whose observations he translated, and commented on.

“She says you have good muscles.”

“I—have not—thought about—these muscles.”