Dark Dance (26 page)

She could even see it in this thing, the pallor of it, the fine dust of jet black fur. The eyes were dark already, not yet focused, but questing. No teeth yet. Not yet.

Rachaela glanced about her. The ward was full of fulfilled and cow-like women waiting to give their udders to their young. In the wings waited the proud husbands, boyfriends and parents. The nurses on the ward were strict but applauding.

The room rocked with the howls of babies now being put to the breast, stilled. Rachaela had seen. The small mouths avid, the hands punching and grabbing. Tiny vampires, all of them. But this one, this monster, would have to make do with a bottle.

‘You don’t like it, do you?’ she said to the monster as it sucked. ‘Bottle or go without.’

She hated it. When it cried she stared on it remotely. She who had been its suitcase.

The room had altered. There was a cot. She could put the baby into this miniature prison and it crawled there in the trap.

Sometimes she had to lift it out, feed it, and change its nappies, thick with excrement.

The room stank. She kept the window open and the fire on. As the weather eased she left the fire off.

Emma came in and out. She arranged the feeds, trying the temperature of the milk. She took the baby out of the pen, and played with it. She had bought it blue and pink fluffy toys. The baby watched the toys with increasingly beady eyes.

‘Isn’t she pretty?’ said Emma, perhaps to encourage.

The baby was not pretty. It was a baby. Primeval and unfinished, crawling about like a busy white slug.

All night the baby cried.

Rachaela got up and fed the baby. She rocked it roughly, loathing it, and the baby grew hysterical. It was strong. With every day its voice got louder, its punches and kicks more hefty.

Rachaela touched it as little as possible.

In the end she left it to cry.

It screamed for hours, probably waking the entire house. Near morning it burned itself out.

Rachaela got up and looked at it. Its bluish-black eyes seemed to focus on her for the first time. It had learnt something.

They took the baby for rides in the pram, to the shops, and up to the tiny park with its three or four flowerbeds and margin of trees. Cold winds knifed at them but the baby was snug in its portable bed, the blue and pink rabbits bobbling between its face and the real world.

‘Lucky she wasn’t born on Christmas day,’ said Emma. ‘She’ll still miss out on presents, poor little sweetheart.’

The baby now had a name. It was called ‘Ruth’.

‘Rachaela and Ruth,’ said Emma, and to the baby, ‘Whither though goest, I will go.’

Emma had actually named the baby, reeling off name after name, pausing to assess their merits, recommending, persuading, until at last to stop her, Rachaela assented.

It sounded like a Scarabae name. It was unavoidable, Biblical. Ruth, daughter of Adamus.

‘You must be getting awful cabin-fever stuck in all day,’ said Emma, as they pushed through the lancing wind. ‘I know what it’s like. My oldest nearly went mad with Richard. She used to ring me up, just to hear an adult voice that could talk.’

Rachaela thrust the pram between the bare trees.

‘So if you want to go off on your own for a bit, and you’ll trust me,’ said Emma, ‘I can look after Ruth.’

‘Thank you,’ said Rachaela. ‘But what I really need is to get a job. The money’s run out fast.’

‘But you can get assistance, Rachaela, and you must.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s foolish to try and manage on your own.’

Rachaela had not repaid Emma for the plethora of pink clothes, the blankets and toys, the pram and cot.

Emma had told her several times she did not wish to be repaid. Ruth was payment enough. Her ‘share’ of Ruth. They connived together: Emma taking a little more of Ruth at intervals; Rachaela gladly giving a little more.

‘I need space to think,’ said Rachaela.

‘Let me have her, then. As I say, if you can trust me... I’ll look after her if you want to go back to work. Only if you’re sure...’

‘Yes. I’m no good with—her. You’re marvellous,’ she added stonily, a meaningless accolade.

But Emma flowered in the winter park.

‘Well, I’ve had three. And I did see a little of Pauline, when she was small, just enough to remind me. She’s lovely, Rachaela. You know I’ll take care of her.’

She had already seen the new bookshop. It had opened in the high street. ‘Isis Books’. Feminist tracts and slim novels lined the windows. It already had a tatty, dusty look that reminded her of Mr Gerard on Lizard Street.

She went in and bought a novel set in India, whose prose appealed to her, and the heat and dust and cinnamon smells of somewhere else.

A soft fuzzy girl was at the till.

‘I’m looking for work. I used to work in a bookshop before I had my baby.’

‘Oh a baby,’ said the assistant. Women were the mothers, protected of Isis.

‘I’m wondering if you need an extra person.’

There had been three girls and a woman at first, now there was only this one.

‘What, part-time?’

‘No, full-time.’

‘Well, with your baby.’

‘A friend looks after her.’

‘Oh is it a girl? How nice.’ The fuzzy one gave Rachaela her change, correctly. The till was not computerized. ‘You need to see Jonquil. She’s not in today. She’ll be here tomorrow morning. Why don’t you drop by and have a word with her.’

In the morning Rachaela returned, leaving Ruth in her pen in Emma’s crowded flat.

Jonquil came from the back. She was about thirty-seven, tall and spare, with spiky grey-streaked hair. She wore jeans and a large jumper, cowboy boots, one stainless steel earring.

‘OK, I can certainly give you a job. Denise is here to all hours. We don’t pay top rates, can’t afford to.’ Her eyes were a pale, thin grey, her face weather-beaten. ‘This is about women. If it helps, then that’s good. We don’t employ men.’

The wages were indeed low. But it was money. And Emma would take care of the child. The child would spend all day with Emma. Emma was already expertly weaning the child. At night the child would sleep in the same room as Rachaela, that was all. Some nights Emma would keep the child.

Jonquil showed Rachaela round the bookshop.

Every book was by a woman.

‘And you’ve got a baby? Swine left you, I suppose. Never mind. She’s a girl. She might have a chance, things are changing.’

Sometimes men in mackintoshes stared in at the bookshop windows as if building up to a flash. Usually nobody came in.

Rachaela sat by the counter and read, making herself coffee. At lunch-time she closed the shop for an hour or longer, and shut up at five-thirty.

Jonquil came in every few days.

On Thursday and Saturday, Denise joined Rachaela, Denise was fallen. She had a live-in boyfriend to whom she devoted most of her time and energy. She confessed she could not wear red as Keith did not like it on her.

‘You want to tell Keith to take a running jump,’ said Jonquil.

Both thought they knew Rachaela’s life and so did not ask many questions.

When Rachaela was late in the mornings to open up, no one was there to see. One morning Jonquil had got there first. ‘Baby hung you up,’ said Jonquil. ‘No sweat.’

‘She can walk,’ said Emma, rosy as if tight. ‘She really did it. I know you’ve only just got in, but come and see. I’ll make some tea. It ought to be champagne.’

Emma’s flat was chaos.

To the fat chinz chairs and divan, the second divan which changed into a bed, the clocks and ornaments, old dolls, and skeins of photographs, fresh flowers and coloured-glass paperweights, was added now the parked pram and the pen, the fluffy toys scattered, a great teddy-bear, the baby, The baby would not walk for Rachaela.

She flatly refused.

Her smooth black eyes were vague and innocent. She sat on the floor.

‘Oh, you naughty thing.’ Emma picked her up and dandled her. ‘You bad sausage. Not to show Mummy.’ And Ruth laughed, as with Emma she often did. ‘I’m sorry. It really happened. I didn’t imagine it.’

‘Well, I suppose she will eventually. Walk, I mean. And say words.’

‘She should be saying things now. Oh, I don’t mean anything’s wrong. Pauline was slow. It’s just how their temperament goes.’

‘She doesn’t speak because she doesn’t need to,’ said Rachaela. ‘Telepathically you anticipate all her demands.’

‘Do I? Do I, sausage?’ Emma asked the chortling baby.

When its face screwed up with laughter it looked very old. Scarabae-old.

Rachaela put on the kettle and made tea for Emma and coffee for herself. She was used to Emma’s flat by now.

‘You ought,’ said Emma softly, ‘to spend more time with her. Oh, Rachaela. You’re missing all the best parts.’

‘Is she a nuisance? Do you want me to take her off your hands?’

‘Rachaela, you
know
she isn’t. I love her.’ Emma held Ruth close, protectively, possessively. ‘I only meant—’

‘It doesn’t interest me.’

‘Oh Rachaela—you don’t know. You haven’t tried.’

‘I had to carry her. I had to birth her. That was enough.’

‘If only I could make you see how wonderful it is.’

Rachaela said, ‘If I could see that, Emma, I’d cling on to her the way you do. You wouldn’t get a look in. We wouldn’t be here now.’

Emma went white. Her face crumpled, straightened itself out with difficulty. She swallowed.

‘Yes. You’re absolutely right, of course.’

‘If I loved babies.’

‘If you loved Ruth I wouldn’t have been able to—I wouldn’t have looked after Ruth as I have.’

‘And you do love her.’

‘Yes I do.’

‘So it’s lucky,’ Rachaela ended pitilessly. ‘Lucky for me, and lucky for you.’

‘Yes,’ said Emma.

She sat down and put Ruth on to the floor with her toys and the soft blanket.

Emma sat looking at Ruth.

Rachaela drank her coffee, and presently left Emma and Ruth alone together, for Emma to give Ruth her revolting gooey tea.

On Sunday they went up to the common, a performance; lifting the pram, Emma still insisted on for the sake of Ruth’s spine, into and off the tube, the escalators.

Rachaela did not know why she had participated.

The trees were umbrellas of leaves and brilliant poppies dotted the grass. Where had the year gone? It was as if she had spent it underground, the hibernatory flat, dusty Isis Books.

‘She’s enjoying it,’ said Emma. ‘Look, Ruth. Tree. Doggy. Say ‘doggy’, Ruth.’

Ruth stared from her eldritch eyes, Anna-eyes and Uncle-Camillo-eyes. Not the eyes of Adamus. Too old.

They wheeled the pram up the paths. The sun was hot and the common flooded by people. Dogs charged about grinning, plunging into the green pond, emerging to shake off volleys of water.

At the café on the common they had coffee. There were red horses in a field. ‘Look, Ruth. Horsey.’

‘I don’t think she cares,’ said Rachaela.

‘Of course she does. It’s all bewildering and new.’

Rachaela thought they must look a very normal family group: Emma the fond grandmother; Rachaela the mother with her black-haired baby. She wondered how many of the other normal-looking groups were also fakes: that man perhaps with the glasses, a wife-and-child-beater; the two lovers with their shared ice cream, brother and sister. But it was crazy to expect oddness from the day to match her own. Her child should wear a notice round its neck:
Conceived from my father while he drank my blood, suspected of being a demon.

Obviously Ruth was not a demon.

Emma did not think so.

There was no need to trouble about it anyway. Emma had taken charge.

They wheeled the pram over the golf course.

When Rachaela had control of it, the child’s black eyes went to Emma for reassurance. Who was this stranger moving her along?

Emma encouraged Rachaela with little inanities.

‘She knows it’s you.’

‘She doesn’t like me,’ said Rachaela. ‘Why should she? I was just an envelope.’

An intense golden light blared from the sky. It was five o’clock and they began the trek homeward. The tube was full of tanned and excitable travellers going home or
en route
to inner London. A sort of pollinated bloom was on them of dust and sun. The air smelled of deodorant and skin. A man in a bowler hat helped Emma with the pram.

When they returned to the house, they went into Emma’s flat.

Emma took the baby out.

‘My goodness, aren’t you hot, you poor little thing. You shall have a nice cool bath.’

While Emma bathed Ruth, Rachaela sat on the chintz sofa looking at the Chinese statuettes and blue glass animals. In pride of place above the electric fire was a paperweight of a giraffe on which inappropriate snow fell when you shook it. Pauline had sent this last Christmas.

The splashing from the bath ended.

‘She really is very hot,’ said Emma. ‘I think she’s a bit feverish. They get these little things. It’s nothing to worry about.’

‘Better not move her, then,’ said Rachaela.

‘No, I’ll keep her down with me for the night.’

The child kicked off her sheet fractiously. Her usually pale face was red. Perhaps she had caught the sun.

Upstairs Rachaela put on a tape of Brahms and laid out some leaves of lettuce and slices of tomato, a cold chicken leg from the deli. She ate without hunger, absorbing instead the music.

Later she sat and watched the golden sky turn to ruby over the roofs, the distant trees of the park blacken and fade.

This is my life then
. It amused her. She did not let herself think of the Scarabae. She had become adept at avoiding them. Avoiding him. She would pick up the thought and put it outside her mind. When it came back, she removed it again.

She turned on the radio and listened to a Greek play which she did not understand but liked.

At about ten-thirty when she was running a long bath, Emma knocked on the door.

‘Please don’t be worried,’ she said at once, ‘but I think I’d better phone the doctor. He won’t be there, of course, but they’ll have someone. She’s terrifically hot and she keeps crying. You know she never cries. I’m sure it’s nothing, but I want to be sure.’