Hester's Story (40 page)

‘But she doesn’t think you should go,’ she added. ‘She thinks you’re not well enough.’

‘No! How can I? Stay away from my own baby’s funeral? I must see him buried,’ Hester cried. ‘How can they put his body in the ground if I’m not there? And the necklace. What about that? I want the necklace to be buried with him. My grandmother’s necklace. The other part of this.’ She pulled the gold chain out of the neckline of her nightdress to show Ruby. ‘It’s important. I promised her that my child would have it. Please say it will be buried with him. Promise me. Both of you must promise me.’ Hester was weeping so much that every word was nearly drowned by sobs and tears.

Just then, Madame Olga came into the room.

‘My darling, why are you distressing yourself?’ she asked.

‘I want to come to the funeral,’ Hester sobbed. ‘Please say I can come. Please. I can walk a little, just to the car. I’ll go straight back to bed afterwards. I promise.’

‘We will see tomorrow. I will ask Raymond. Maybe it will be possible.’

For a moment, Hester couldn’t think who ‘Raymond’ was and then remembered that it was Dr Crawford.

‘Oh, thank you, thank you,’ Hester said, and leaned back against the pillow. ‘Then I can make sure the necklace is buried with him.’

‘Where is it?’ Madame Olga said. ‘If you tell me, I will arrange this. I promise you, on my honour.’

‘I know where it is,’ Ruby said, and Hester closed her eyes, exhausted. It was enough. Maybe if I rest now, she thought, I really will be strong enough tomorrow. My son. He didn’t have so much as a name. Adam’s son. Hester couldn’t find a word anywhere in her head to call him. Ruby had told her that they put him into her arms for a few seconds just before she was sedated, but Hester had no memory of that. She had no memory whatsoever of her son’s face. She didn’t know who her baby was. Her baby. She imagined him as beautiful even though she had no idea what he looked like. That was the very worst thing; the unbearable thing. He didn’t exist for Hester except as an absence.

Next morning, Madame Olga helped her to dress. Hester was being allowed to say goodbye to her baby after all. She was silent as Madame Olga pulled the black dress over her head, and while she buttoned her coat. She was so weak she could hardly stand. How, she wondered, was she going to stay on her feet at the
grave? Her head swam with blackness when she thought of it. Hester knew where the cemetery was. She and Ruby had often walked past it, and though Hester had scarcely moved her head to look at it as they went by, there’s always something about a cemetery that makes you notice it. You can’t pass one and not think about death, even if those thoughts just trail through your mind and are gone. Hester had a sudden longing for her baby’s tiny grave to be next to
Grand-mère
’s and near her father’s, far away in Paris, in the graveyard that resembled a small town of streets and houses inhabited by the dead. That was impossible, she knew. He’d be forever in the ground here, in this windswept place where you could stand on the dunes and watch the sun rising over the grey sea to the east.

‘You are strong enough, darling?’ Madame Olga said, frowning as she adjusted the black hat on Hester’s head. ‘You are sure?’

Hester nodded because she still didn’t trust herself to speak. She stood up, shaking a little. Her legs! Her ballerina’s legs, as strong, she’d always thought, as steel rods, were about to let her down. She stumbled against the chair and Madame Olga caught her and steadied her.

‘You must drink. Take this. It will give you energy. Strength.’ She put a glass into Hester’s hand, and gave her a pill to take.

She took a couple of steps into the corridor. She was wearing black gloves. When had she put those on? She couldn’t bring it to mind. She began to walk downstairs to the front hall of The Laurels. There was a grandfather clock on the landing, and the hands stood at ten to eleven. Rain was falling. She could hear it beating against the windows, which were tall and set with panes of stained glass high up. She blinked. And
then she was in her bed again, waking as though from a deep sleep.

‘Why?’ she croaked. Her voice sounded rusty, unused. ‘What am I doing here? There’s the funeral. My baby …’ she couldn’t go on. Where was Madame Olga? Ruby? What was Mrs McCreevey doing leaning over her? She managed to say, ‘Where is Madame Olga? And where’s Ruby?’

‘Don’t worry yourself about them, dear,’ said Mrs McCreevey. ‘They’re taking care of everything. They told me to tell you they’ll be back as soon as …’ Her voice failed her, and Hester could see tears in her eyes. Mrs McCreevey collected herself and went on, ‘… as soon as the wee bairn’s buried. They told me to tell you they wouldn’t be long.’

Hester turned her head to the wall and closed her eyes. The funeral was taking place without her. She’d failed her son. He’s in his coffin, she thought. They’re covering his coffin with black earth. The necklace …

‘Mrs McCreevey, could you see if there’s a box, there, in the left-hand drawer of the chest of drawers? A small, tortoiseshell box. Thank you.’

The woman looked relieved to have something to do. She opened the drawer and began looking through Hester’s possessions.

‘No, there’s no box here, I’m afraid. Are you quite sure you put it in this drawer?’

‘Yes, that’s fine,’ Hester answered. ‘They must have taken it. Thank you. Madame Olga and Ruby. They’ve taken it to the funeral.’

She closed her eyes. She waited till she heard Mrs McCreevey tiptoe from the room and then she sat up. Her head felt as though someone had taken an axe and buried it in her skull. There was a mist in front of her eyes and anything she looked at seemed to have soft, wavering outlines. She lay down again and turned over
so that her face was hidden in the pillows. At least her baby would have the necklace with him, something from his mother to comfort him down there in the earth. As the minutes passed, Hester’s shame at lying there, not attending her own child’s funeral, changed into another feeling altogether – one that she didn’t want to acknowledge because she was so ashamed of it, but which felt to her like relief. She realised that she was being spared. If she never saw where her baby was buried, she could pretend that he wasn’t there, turning into something that was no longer a person. That’s what it came down to: his small bones, his soft skin, his new eyes and tiny fingers were rotting away under the earth and she didn’t want to have to see the place where he lay hidden. I won’t ask to visit the cemetery, she thought. I don’t care how heartless Madame Olga and Ruby think I am. If I never see his grave, I don’t have to admit that he’s dead.

Hester and Ruby returned to the cottage on New Year’s Eve. Everyone else in Scotland, Hester knew, was celebrating Hogmanay, but not them. Not this year, and maybe never again. Madame Olga came with them, and they were there to pack everything away, ready to travel back to Wychwood. The air in each room seemed stale to Hester, as though nobody had lived there for some time, and of course they hadn’t. Ruby had spent every day at the nursing home with Hester, only returning to sleep in the cottage at night.

The suitcases were nearly packed when Hester saw it – a Christmas stocking made of felt, lying on top of the chest of drawers in her bedroom. ‘What’s this, Madame?’ she asked.

‘Oh, my God! I forgot to take it away. It is a Christmas stocking.’ Madame Olga’s lips trembled and she wrung her hands. ‘It was for the baby.’

Hester threw herself on to the bed and burst into a
paroxysm of grief, weeping, and beating her fists on the pillow. Dimly, she was aware of Madame Olga hurrying down the stairs and saying something to Ruby. How was she going to face the everyday things of the world when every single thing reminded her of her loss? How was her life to be borne? Hester wished she believed in life after death, but she didn’t. She never had, but maybe she could start believing now, this minute. Maybe her baby really
was
with the angels now, and smiling down at her. She was not consoled, however. There was no life after death, she was convinced of it and she would be forever in mourning for her son. Hers and Adam’s.

1 January 1987

Hester woke up on New Year’s Day and got out of bed with some reluctance. Perhaps it hadn’t been such a good idea to drink so much wine last night, but the New Year’s Eve dinner was one of the highlights of the rehearsal period and she’d joined in the partying and enjoyed herself more than she’d expected to.

She washed and changed into her leotard. Then she went into the dressing room and took her place at the
barre
. A small tape recorder stood on a table just inside the door and sometimes she turned on the music to accompany her morning routine, but today she felt the need for silence. The sequence wouldn’t suffer. She had the order and the rhythm of the steps she went through each day so deeply in her mind that she didn’t need to think consciously about them. Her body obeyed instructions it had received years ago and although she knew she was older now, that didn’t prevent her from stretching and bending and doing all the things she’d been doing every day for almost half a century.

She smiled. Who am I kidding, she thought. It might feel as if I’m doing the same things, but the elasticity isn’t there in the same way and I used to be able to raise my leg so high and straight that I could touch my ear, which I certainly can’t do now.

Never mind, she told herself, as she pulled a sweater and boots and a hat on over her exercise clothes. I’ll go
for a walk and that will blow away the last trace of hangover. Hester tiptoed downstairs and made her way quietly out of the house and down the drive. The snow had fallen for a while again last night, but a thaw must have set in early in the morning. Here and there on the lawn, large patches of white showed up in the pearly morning light. The clouds were massing over the furthest moors but it was too warm for any more snow to fall, at least for the moment.

It wasn’t as cold as she expected. The wind that had blown a little during the night had dropped and the only sound in the whole landscape was the crunching of her feet on the gravel of the drive.

*

Alison watched Ruby pulling down the ladder that led up to the attic. It took her a little while because the catch was stiff but soon the silver steps were there, ready to take them up. Ruby went first, because she knew where the light switch was. Alison wasn’t quite sure what to expect. In her experience, which was entirely from books, attics were almost magical places, filled with things that couldn’t be found anywhere else – secret documents or old photographs, or else something terrifying that someone had wanted to hide away. The room she saw as she climbed in after Ruby was full of shadows, but it was much neater than she expected it to be and someone had obviously been keeping it very clean and tidy. Four skips were lined up under the overhang of the roof, one beside the other, and each had a luggage label tied to it.
Costumes. Props and headdresses. Programmes and cuttings. Miscellaneous
.

‘Right,’ Ruby said. ‘There’s a lot here that’s going to come in handy, shawls, and jewels and headdresses that we can put together with the things we got in
Leeds. We’ll do the props this morning and then the costumes. We haven’t much time before the technical dress rehearsal. I’m going to start you off on crêpe-paper roses. We’re going to need rather a lot of those.’

Alison leaned into the skip Ruby had just opened and pulled out a bunch of red flowers, slightly squashed by years of lying under other things.

‘Like these?’

Ruby smiled. ‘Yes, just like those. They’re from
Sleeping Beauty
. Do you know the Rose Adagio from that ballet?’

Alison nodded. She’d seen Claudia as Aurora, and now that she thought about it, there were an awful lot of roses about in that scene. She remembered her mother objecting to the colour of most of them and the set designer almost walking out of the production. Claudia had gone on and on about it:
I’m the one that’s got to be up there dancing the bloody thing. The least the designer can do is see to it that the flowers don’t actually clash with my hair
.

‘Then I’ll just take some of these bits from down here,’ (she scooped up an armful of assorted garments and pushed them into a pillow case she’d brought with her) ‘and we can go over to Wardrobe and get started.’

As they climbed down the ladder again, Alison found herself wondering about the contents of all the other skips. I wouldn’t have minded getting a look inside them, she thought, and wondered if she’d get to go up to the attic again while she was here. Probably not. There wouldn’t be any need for it.

*

‘We’re always at sixes and sevens after New Year’s Eve dinner,’ said Ruby. She and Alison were sitting on either side of the table in Wardrobe at one o’clock,
which was after lunch for them, but after breakfast for the rest of the company. Everyone else had slept late and eaten at about half past eleven, and rehearsals weren’t due to start till two. Siggy had followed them to the Arcadia and was now sitting on top of a small skip.

‘He looks as though he’s making sure we’re getting on with our work and not slacking,’ said Ruby.

Alison smiled. Siggy reminded her of another of her dad’s verses, the one about the kitten, in the lullaby book:

Here is a kitten

with four white paws

who dreams of creeping

through the grass
.

She thinks of butterflies she has seen

who tickle her white nose

as they pass
.

The postman wasn’t going to come today. Maybe tomorrow there’d be a letter from him. It was getting harder and harder to believe that Dad would write to her while she was here, but she’d been very careful to put the Wychwood Hall address on the back of the envelope she’d sent her card in. She concentrated on twisting the strip of scarlet crêpe-paper she was holding into something she hoped resembled the perfect rose lying in front of her. Ruby had shown her how to make these flowers and they needed loads of them for the show, so she was going to be safe here for a bit, away from her mother and Nick and the rest of the company. Sometimes she wished she could just live on an island all by herself, like Robinson Crusoe. It would be restful, she thought, to have to worry about practical things like where your next meal was coming
from, and not have the inside of your head taken up with sorting out what you felt about everything.