Shadow Baby (22 page)

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by her mother. Leah was exasperated at his failure to grasp the depth of her desire to separate her child from herself completely. ‘It is not natural,’ Henry kept muttering. ‘No,’ agreed Leah, ‘it is not.’

She had asked Henry not to tell his mother the true reason why Evie was to remain in Wetheral with Mary. It should be sufficient, argued Leah, to say the child was settled there and it would be wrong to uproot her. Mrs Arnesen accepted this quite happily. She wanted, in any case, to pretend her beloved son’s bride was everything she had hoped for - a virgin, a modest, sensible good girl

- and not a woman with a past containing a child and an unknown man. She was not at all sure she would be able to take to Leah, pleasing to look at though she was and by all accounts a hard worker. She saw her son Henry as already under Leah’s thumb - he, who had been independent and nobody’s fool for so long. And she saw clearly that Henry was far more in love with Leah than she with him. It was apparent the moment she saw them together. Leah, she correctly deduced, was making the best of things and in accepting Henry she was thinking of her future, allowing her head to rule her heart.

There were only six people at the wedding breakfast, all Arnesens. It was a subdued affair, though meat and drink were plentiful. It was over within an hour and the newly wed couple set off in Henry’s trap for Silloth, bundled up in thick coats and with a blanket across their knees. Henry worried that it would be too cold - he had not reckoned on September weather turning so cold - but Leah enjoyed the ride and did not suffer at all. She had never been to the seaside and was excited at the thought of visiting Silloth, the little town on the Solway coast where Carlisle folk took their holidays. They came towards it along the sea wall, from the Skinburness end, and she felt exhilarated at the sight of the great waves crashing on the shingle. There were fishing boats far out in the firth and she marvelled at the courage of the men in them as she watched the boats all but disappear in the heaving water.

They stayed at the Queen’s. Henry had spared no expense. They had a room overlooking the green with the sea just visible through gaps in the trees. There was a roaring fire and supper laid out in front of it - Solway shrimps, and hot buttered toast and Cumberland ham and roast potatoes, and apple pie to follow. They ate heartily and then it was time. The food was taken away, the maid came to turn down the bed, and finally they were left alone. Leah

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saw Henry put his glasses away and open his arms, and she knew she must respond and walk into his embrace, however much she dreaded it. This was what marriage was about, it was all part of the bargain. It was no good remembering Hugo, no good at all. She tried to act as though she had never known the lust that had overcome her with Hugo nor the exquisite pleasure which had followed, and indeed it was not too difficult. She felt like a shy, untutored bride, nervous and hesitant, a young woman who would need tenderness and care to be brought to respond to any caresses, let alone to a full consummation. And Henry treated her as this woman, touching her gently, pressing her to him gently, kissing her so gently at first that she hardly felt his lips and was tickled by his moustache. Yet his caution and respect were irritating to her - she would rather he had been passionate and quick and the whole thing over and done with. It was harder to hide her distaste the longer he tried to rouse her and it was she who broke away and, going over to the bed, swiftly took off her clothes and climbed between the sheets, as a signal that he should hurry and follow. She saw well enough that he was unhappy with this abruptness of hers but eager too and unable to stop himself following her lead. He came to bed and she turned towards him and he immediately clutched her to him and penetrated her, and it was over. She felt nothing at all.

Henry never grew any more skilled as a lover and Leah did not try to teach him, holding that it was not her business. She did not want to have to tell him where she liked to be touched or positioned

- that was unnatural; it filled her with revulsion to think that the passion she had instinctively felt with Hugo was now something to re-create artificially. Sometimes Henry, after he had finished, asked her if she was either ‘happy’ or ‘comfortable’ but she never replied, only squeezed his hand, which seemed to suffice and reassure him. He was triumphant when she became pregnant immediately and, without any prompting on her part, left off sleeping with her for the sake of the baby. His grief when she miscarried in the fourth month was terrible to witness - if ever she loved Henry, she knew it was then, loved him for his distress and his compassion for her. He nursed her himself, doing all manner of intimate services which no man should have had to do, recoiling not at all from the mess and blood. She was weak afterwards for several months and he never once tried to resume normal relations. It was she who, seeing him plagued with longing as he bid her goodnight, held out her arms to

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him and assured him she was restored enough to be his wife again. Once more she became pregnant and Henry’s joy was tempered with such fear that she felt sorry for him.

They moved house before the baby was born. For a long time Henry had wanted to live somewhere a great deal more salubrious than Globe Lane. He would have liked, in fact, to live at Wetheral, but with Mary and Evie there it was impossible. He searched everywhere for a house near enough to the city for him to get to his place of work, but far enough out of it to be countrified; and eventually he hit on Rockcliffe, a village on the Eden estuary only four miles away. Leah liked the house and the village. It felt quite separate from the city, cut off from it, more so than Wetheral. It was smaller, far less prosperous, and she was not known there. They moved when she was in the sixth month of her pregnancy and she settled in well. It was a long drive for Henry each day but he swore he did not mind and was delighted at how Leah thrived in the bracing air of the estuary His mother, whom they had been obliged to take with them, hated Rockcliffe and soon moved back to Carlisle, to her sister’s home. Leah had the house to herself and was happy.

She experimented with saying this each day as she walked slowly on the marsh, watching the seagulls wheel off above the river-mouth to the open sea. ‘I am happy,’ she said aloud, and paused. It was, she thought, perhaps her state of pregnancy which made her feel so content and dreamy, and she did not know if it would continue once the child was born. She had an easy life suddenly after years of hardship and was constantly charmed by her luck. She had a husband who adored her and was kind and generous, and a little house all her own, a house it was a pleasure to clean and care for. She was a woman who was indulged and she never stopped marvelling at this unexpected upturn in her fortunes. Thoughts of Hugo were dim and distant and only occasionally troubled her Sometimes, she fantasised his appearance on her doorstep and could not be sure she would greet him with rapture any longer Perhaps, perhaps not. She would have a great deal to sacrifice now if Hugo arose and said follow me. The misery of not knowing where he was, the fever of wanting him, no longer burned within her and she supposed this meant that time had done what it was bound to do and healed her wounds.

But one still festered. Mary and Evie were in Carlisle now, in St Cuthbert’s Lane. Henry paid the rent and an allowance. Leah had

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wanted Mary to be kept in Wetheral when at last the long-rumoured eviction (though not the demolition) took place, but Henry said Mary herself had insisted on coming into the city for the sake of the child. This struck Leah as nonsense - children were far safer and healthier out of the city and she did not know what Mary could be thinking of. ‘Go and talk to her,’ said Henry, but of course she refused. She knew how bitterly old Mary thought of her, and with justice, and was not brave enough. Nor did she wish to set eyes on Evie. Henry had done so. For a long time he kept it secret but she always had suspicions, though she never confronted him with them. In the end he could stand his own deceit no longer and blurted out that he had felt he must see Mary and Evie settled in their new home, it was his duty. She never asked him about them and when she saw he was on the edge of volunteering information she turned away and put her hands over her ears. Once he tried to talk to her about Evie’s future, about what would happen if Mary died, as she was bound to soon. She would not discuss this eventuality, but he warned her that he could not stand by and see his stepdaughter sent to the workhouse, or a charity home.

Leah hoped that when Henry had his own children he would worry about Evie less. This time she carried the baby to full term, but when labour began she knew almost at once something was wrong. The pains stopped and started and were sluggish, and she began to bleed heavily and to feel the baby as a lead weight within her, without movement. The midwife sent for the doctor at once, saying the afterbirth was coming first and was causing the bleeding. Long before he had come out from Carlisle, Leah had lost consciousness and when she revived she hardly needed to be told her baby was stillborn and that she herself had been on the edge of death. More of Henry’s tears, more weary months recovering, far less heart now for trying again, and when she did and a son was born it was only to end in another tragedy. At three months, he contracted whooping-cough and did not survive.

But Leah was still young and, even if a couple of years of unsuccessful child-bearing had sapped her former robust health, she still had every hope of raising a family. The doctor said so, she said so herself, but Henry was pessimistic and despondent. She knew, after they had buried their little son, what he was going to say, long before he managed to dare her fury by putting it into words.

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‘There’s Evie,’ he said, tears in his eyes, ‘there’s a daughter readymade and waiting.’ ‘No!’ she said, and turned away from him.

They thought of moving to Newcastle, and Leah was all for it even though she loved Rockcliffe - the further away from Evie the better. There was a business opportunity for Henry which both attracted and yet alarmed him. He had expanded the Globe Lane premises and employed a workforce of five now. He saw that if he was to prosper further, as he knew he could, he needed a partner with capital. A partner presented himself, the friend of a customer, but he was a Newcastle man and wanted to stay there. Henry was tempted - the terms he was offered were good - and Leah was encouraging, but in the end his affection for Carlisle and his lack of any spirit of adventure led him to turn the proposition down. He would stay in his home-town and keep his business within his own grasp. A joint venture would not suit him, he said, he liked to be his own master. ‘You’re afraid,’ Leah said, ‘that’s what it is.’ Henry acknowledged perfectly cheerfully that this might indeed be so and he saw nothing wrong with it. He didn’t like taking risks, he never had done, and he didn’t like change. These folk who emigrated were beyond his comprehension, he added, to be reminded sarcastically by his wife that going to Newcastle, sixty miles away, was hardly the equivalent of emigrating. His last attempt at rationalising the decision was to say he couldn’t desert his mother and that she was far too old and frail to move with them.

His mother died soon after the suggested move that had never taken place. Henry’s mourning struck Leah as absurd and she upset him by coming as near as she could to saying so. ‘She was old,’ Leah pointed out, ‘and ill, Henry. She had a long life, seventy-two is a fine age to have lived to. What did you expect?’ ‘She was my mother,’ said Henry. Leah had no reply to this undoubted fact. True, Henry’s mother had died. But why did her having been his mother make her death in old age so unbearable to him? He had not even liked his mother particularly. He had always been dutiful but had complained under his breath of how tedious she was, how she exasperated him with her fussiness. Now, suddenly, he was distraught. She found it embarrassing, at the funeral, to see her husband’s face blotched with tears and see him sway as the coffin descended into its pit. It was ridiculous.

They cleared Mrs Arnesen’s things out from her sister’s home (this sister, Leah noticed, was gratified by Henry’s distress) and once

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more Henry broke down. He handled his mother’s few bits of tawdry jewellery with something like reverence and talked of passing them on to his daughters if he had any. It made Leah feel sick. But she had sufficient insight to realise that half her contempt might spring from the resentment and jealousy she felt because she had never known a mother. It was mysterious, this apparent bond between Henry and a woman to whom he had never been close, a woman sanctified by motherhood.

Soon after his mother’s death, Henry came home one day feverish and was ill for nearly a month with pneumonia. Leah was terrified she would lose him, seeing her new-found easy life and contentment disappearing at a stroke, and seeing too that her affection for her husband had grown into something not so far from real love. She nursed him devotedly and when he was out of danger was so overcome with relief she could hardly leave him alone. A weak Henry, hardly able to move, kindled a strange desire in her. It shocked her, that she should find herself wanting to fondle and rouse a man lying on his bed with barely the energy to move his hand to lift a cup, but she could not conceal her agitation. She told him, for the first time, how she loved him and wanted him, and he, too, was more alarmed than captivated by the urgency of her embrace. He convalesced slowly, fretting all the time about his business, worried it would collapse without him. But he was pleasantly surprised. His assistants had managed well, the orders had been dealt with efficiently and had kept coming in. Financially he was still quite secure and the profit margin had barely dropped. The only thing that had been overlooked was the payment of the regular allowance to old Mary - and that was because nobody knew of it except himself and Leah.

He had always paid it in person, on the first of every month. But he had been taken ill on the 29 March and his illness had lasted until mid-May, which meant that Mary had been almost two months without any money. It worried him terribly to think of the consternation and indeed real hardship his failure to pay the allowance would have caused, and he hurried round to St Cuthbert’s Lane as soon as he could. He still felt weak and light-headed and returning to work had tired him, but he could not return to Rockcliffe after that first day back in the city without taking money to Mary. He hoped to see Evie too, though Mary seemed to think, for some strange reason, that the child had to be kept hidden or she