The Lily Hand and Other Stories (17 page)

The look which he had never understood melted into a helpless sorrow on her face. She held out her arms to him, and he stumbled into them and hid his face in her breast, muttering and crying to her for what she could not give him:

‘
Matko ma
, I want to go home!
Maminko moje
, take me home!'

The Cradle

The cradle was carved in limewood, on polished rockers with the heads of horses at either end. The round face and arched wings of a cherub sheltered the pillow, and there were flowers and birds all round the rim. Shut away from the sun in the attic, kept dusted and immaculate by Cousin Sybil's meticulous housekeeping, the wood had never darkened; it looked as if it had been carved only yesterday. The christening robe of lace and lawn in its silver box had yellowed at the folds, the painted toy horse had lost the brightness of his original red saddle and blue bridle, and the hair of his mane had dried and grown brittle with the atmospheric changes of twenty years; but the cradle was always new.

The Rector could never pass by the door without opening it and looking at the hoarded remains of his arrested life. He had never intended that the things he and Gillian had amassed for their eagerly awaited son should be stored up here and turned into the furnishings of a shrine; that was something that had happened of itself. The toys, clothes, the little wooden things he had carved, like the cradle, with his own young and skilful hands, had been left here untouched in deference to his silence and stillness, ever since that moist green December evening twenty years ago, when Gillian had died in childbirth.

People had thought he wanted everything left as it was; in truth he had wanted nothing, except simply not to be, not to bear the responsibility of his own life, not to feel or remember. On that desire, feeling and memory feed and grow strong beyond bearing.

It was worst at Christmas, but still he could not pass by the closed door. Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. And the child had been born, and it had indeed been a son; but in the moment of birth he had turned back, frightened, into the darkness and snatched Gillian away with him. And the Rector had been left alone.

The disaster had been too complete and absolute for him, he had shrunk away from human sympathy into the sealed world of his own pain, withdrawing to bury the shrivelled remnants of his life among the relics of his brief fatherhood. The round of his parochial duties the shell of a man faithfully fulfilled, making superficial contacts daily with his fellow men; his mind compiled sermons, his tongue delivered them. But all that was real of him lay shut in here with the symbols of his loss. Out of his inability to act he had left them all in their places, the fragile, intractable things bought and made for his beloved son; and others had respected what they took to be his wish. Dusted and preserved, polished with the caresses of his hands and heavy with the weight of his withdrawal, the cradle stood in the centre of the attic like an altar. Or like a coffin on its catafalque, part of a burial arrested for ever.

Why had he not taken it under his arm that very Christmas Day, and given it to the first expectant mother whose name came to his mind among his parishioners? It would not have been difficult, there were always plenty of births early in the year, the first fruits of last spring's weddings. But he had missed his opportunity, and the small, commanding thing, permanent in its place and for ever barren, defied him to touch it now. If it was a coffin, the body it held was the mummified remains of his effective life, self-buried here. The limewood walls, crested with flowers and birds, were higher and more impassable than the walls of a prison. Humanity moved and breathed in daylight on the outer side of them, but he was within, in the narrow darkness to which he had withdrawn voluntarily, and from which long disuse had sealed every way of escape.

The cracked mirror banished from the guest room showed him his own face, long and pale among the shadows, soon to be old; even age would have no meaning for him. It was too late now to wish to return to life and his own kind; the effort was beyond him, he had been self-buried too long.

And yet it was Christmas again, and the living world was all around him, within touch of his impotent hands. The house was full of the smell of baking, fragrant with the vanilla sugar without which his new housekeeper could not conceive of celebrating the feast. She was down there in the kitchen now, her sleeves turned up to her elbows, wrapping her biscuit animals and angels and flowers in silver foil for the tree; and beside her, cutting out lacy paper decorations according to old tradition, a pink tongue protruding at the corner of her earnest mouth, was the child. The strange child, the girl with the outlandish name, Katrena Iwasckiewicz. They spoke English, mother and daughter both; he could have talked to them if there had not been an invisible barrier between.

He had thought it might shatter when the child entered the house, but she walked gravely on her own side of it, and watched him through the bars with wary brown eyes, and made no attempt to reach him. Perhaps, like all the rest, she had no inkling that he was shut away from her. They exchanged words sometimes; why should she suspect that it was only an automatic physical reaction that provided the responses to her respectful greetings and polite questions? She thought a man had answered her.

The Polish woman had been engaged by Cousin Sybil, before she left on her year's visit to her sister in America.

‘In your position,' she had said firmly, ‘I think you should set an example, with International Refugee Year only just over, and everything. Mrs Iwasckiewicz has very good references. She came from a Jewish family, and was smuggled into Sweden as a child during the war, and afterwards she married a survivor from a concentration camp, who died a few years later from his experiences, and left her penniless with this baby.'

She had been hurrying on past this supposed danger point, but he had turned from his desk to look at her with widening eyes. ‘A baby?'

Of what had she been afraid? That he would object to having a child in the house? She had rushed to diminish the promise at once.

‘Oh, she's not a baby now, of course, they've been in a camp for some years. Katrena will be eight years old now, and a very quiet, well-behaved child. I've seen her. I can assure you she won't be the least trouble, and I've impressed upon her mother that she mustn't disturb you or make a noise in the house.'

All the same, he had hoped for he hardly knew what, for a golden shout to bring down the limewood walls, for a tremor of warmth in his atrophied heart, for a breach carelessly trampled in the frontiers of his exile. He, too, was a displaced person; this dispossessed little girl might find her way to him as by right of kinship.

But they came, he spoke to them, he was even moved by them to the depths of that part of him which had communication with the ordinary business of living; but no miracle happened. The mother was silent, gentle, a loving housewife, absorbed in a new and distrustful happiness now that she had that shining, well-equipped kitchen as her kingdom. Sometimes he saw in her dark eyes the fear she had that it would again be taken away from her, but he did not know how to assuage it.

The child was small for her eight years, but sturdy and square, and not timid, as he had thought she might be, but bold and even aggressive, perhaps in reaction against the insecurity of her circumstances. A funny little thing she was, plain of face, brown-eyed and dark-skinned, with two short, stiff little brooms of hair that jutted one on either side of her round head. The gap in her front teeth still further complicated her laborious but determined English. She was full of energy and duty. A born organizer, so her Sunday-school teacher said; bossy, so her fellow scholars said. Yet they played with her willingly, which argued no dislike, and mutinously but good-humouredly fought out with her the clashes of will which she usually won. When she was defeated she was astonished but not resentful, and accepted her diminished role thoughtfully until she could resume her leadership. Outside she had a voice of brass and a shrill laugh; but indoors, mindful of her instructions and no doubt afraid, like her mother, of banishment, she walked delicately and spoke in a whisper.

Just as he reached the foot of the stairs, she came out of the kitchen fresh from her tea, with her baby doll in her arms. She had only two dolls, a blonde creature with washable hair which Cousin Sybil had given to her before she left, and this battered but cherished infant, with its painted blue eyes staring and a chip missing from its burnished nose. She clutched it tightly to her chest, and raised to the Rector a face powdered round the mouth with vanilla sugar.

‘If you please …' said Katrena in her subdued indoor voice, hissing through the gap in her front teeth. The brown eyes looked up at him with a clear but remote stare. She was not personally in awe of him; she kept her distance and walked warily because she had always had to placate circumstances and people, but as long as she observed all the regulations and performed every duty zealously she felt herself to be safe with him.

‘Yes, my dear?'

He always felt constrained to offer her some conciliatory endearment, and yet he never addressed her in such terms without feeling ashamed, as though he had stooped to an unworthy falsity in feeling his way towards her. She was neither his nor truly dear to him; he only wished she could be, but she existed in another dimension from him, and they had no real relationship at all.

‘If you please, may we gather some holly and ivy from the garden? We have to make our Bethlehem for the Children's Corner.'

‘We have to make it!' That was partly a matter of literal translation from her native language, but partly also her sense of conformity speaking. She knew the proper ceremonies, and it was right to ask for what was needed for them.

‘Of course, Katrena,' he said. ‘Take whatever you want for the crib.'

She thanked him, a spark of ambitious speculation kindling in her eyes, and ran off into the kitchen to tell her mother. The battered baby doll would certainly be cast for the Child Jesus, but where would she find figures for the Virgin and Saint Joseph and the shepherds? The children of his Sunday school had never done more than decorate with evergreens, but if Katrena's sense of the appropriate dictated a crib, a crib there would be. She never neglected her duties.

But had not he been neglecting his? She was a child in his household at Christmas, and he had provided nothing to put under the tree for her this evening. There would be only her mother's present for her. He could at least add some sweets; perhaps it was not too late to find something else.

He watched her whisk away, the bustling back view all elbows and bouncing braids, before he went on towards his study, to the still unfinished Christmas morning sermon on his desk. The advent wreath in the hall, to which Mrs Iwasckiewicz had added a new pink candle every Sunday, had been changed for the new Christmas Eve one; the tree was fully dressed, with candles and lamps and frilled paper sconces, and coloured balls and crystals of glass. There were even some sparklers tied to the tips of the branches ready for lighting. He had forgotten how elaborate and loving the preparations for the Continental Christ can be. The child's father had been a Protestant of some austere sect, but the adornments of their festival were the traditional graces of a Catholic country. Katrena, with her following of local children, sceptical yet impressed, would see to it that the Children's Corner had its crib, even if cut-out figures drawn on cardboard had to do duty for Mary and Joseph.

He sat over the pages of his sermon for a long hour, sensible of his unfitness to lift up his voice in their festival. Christmas, like the people who kept it, belonged to the desirable outer world to which he longed to return, and he shared in its celebrations only as a shadow. He had not even thought to provide a present for the child, and there was nothing in the house he could offer to her.

He laid down his pen suddenly, and sat staring before him. There had been a child in that house once, for a few minutes, a living child on whose pleasure a wealth of toys had waited, though he had never played with any of them. Nothing to give to Katrena? There was the wooden horse. Was she too old for that? There was a big ball made of stitched segments of coloured leather. There was a little blue and white sailing boat. Surely that would be suitable for an eight-year-old?

He rose, and went slowly up the stairs, and hesitated with his hand upon the knob of the attic door. He was afraid; the palms of his hands were wet with fear. What would happen if he displaced one of the fixed trappings of that frozen shrine? To change the pattern of its mysterious power might be to shatter even the shell of life that was left to him, after twenty years he might well be afraid. How would he pass by the cradle and take the boat from its place? It would be like climbing out of his grave.

Nevertheless, he opened the door and stepped into the room.

On the worn haircord mat in the middle of the attic showed the marks of two rockers, flattened grey grooves in the dark brown pile. The cradle was gone.

He could not believe it. In twenty years it had never been disturbed from its place. Who would remove it now? Then he felt, with some inner sensitivity in him that still reacted to the instruments of his captivity, the aching emptiness where other things had been, and looked round the room to discover the sources of his wonder and unease.

The wooden horse was gone; the barrel-shaped indentations of its four tiny wheels showed where it had stood. The silver box that had held the christening robe lay open on the shelf, the layers of pink tissue paper turned back carefully from its emptiness. And whether because of the clearer floor space, or whether by reason of a brightness bursting within his dazzled eyes, there seemed to him to be more light within the room.

He stood gazing where the talisman had been, and he did not understand, he was not even concerned with understanding. He felt only that the wall of his prison had been breached, and there was light shining into his open grave. If he could lay down his dead son out of his arms he could surely arise and go. Both the living and the dead could go their appointed ways, each of them at peace. He felt himself struggling to release the child, but twenty years had bound them inextricably into each other, and to be born twice is too much of pain.