Fit to be Seen

"There is a particular loneliness in being well attended by people who never knew you as a girl—and it cannot be remedied by kindness, only borne with such grace as one can manage."

The pains had begun in the darkest part of the night, and by the time the window turned from black to grey I had abandoned any attempt to count them.

Mrs Mullane came up the stairs a little before six. I heard her before I saw her, and what I heard was an unhurried tread—the step of a woman climbing towards work she had done many times before and expected to do many times again. I do not believe I have ever been so grateful for a sound. My mother had been attended in Portsmouth by a physician possessed of a Scottish degree and a leather case he scarcely troubled to open. I had a woman from between Granton and New Norfolk, whose competence I had accepted entirely upon the word of a neighbour with whom I had twice conversed after church, and then only concerning the price of wool, and who had come to this colony in irons.

I had known that last particular since August and had determined not to think about it, and I have found that a thing one has determined not to think about will present itself for consideration at the least convenient hour available to it. It presented itself at half past five in the morning. I examined it, and observed that there was no other woman within reach of the house who had delivered above a dozen children, and set it down again.

She laid her hand flat upon me without asking leave, and I permitted it, and something within me came loose at being handled by a person who understood what she was touching.

"How long have they been coming close together?"

"Since three o'clock. I did not wake anybody."

"You ought to have woken somebody." She was already turning back her cuffs as she said it, and there was no reproach in the words whatever—merely the noting of a circumstance she must now work around. "Never mind. We have the whole day, should we require it. I doubt very much that we shall."

The room by then held the mingled scents of lavender and woodsmoke and, beneath both, of myself. Somebody had built the fire high in the small hours and nobody had thought to let it down, and I lay in the heat of it with my hair adhering to my forehead and my nightgown soaked through at the small of my back, unable to determine whether I was burning or perishing of cold. The light came up over the water and travelled slowly along the wall, and I watched it travel, and it was the only thing in that room conducting its business at an ordinary pace.

I had told myself for months that I was not frightened. I had told it also to William, who believed me because it suited him to believe me, and to Elizabeth Whitehall, who did not. What I had never permitted myself to examine was the precise shape of the thing: that there was not one soul within nine months' sailing who had known me as a girl. My mother had wept upon the quay at Portsmouth because she understood perfectly well that we were parting for good. I had thought her theatrical. Lying in that bed, with the Derwent turning silver beyond the glass and a woman I scarcely knew attending to me, I understood at last that she had simply been able to count.

Somewhere after the light reached the washstand, the pains ceased to be pains. I have no better word for what they became. They arrived and possessed the whole of me and set me down again, and each time they set me down I found myself a little further removed from my own person, until my hands upon the sheets appeared to me as something observed from the gallery of a theatre.

"You are doing wonderfully, Mrs Jeffries," she said, and passed a cloth across my face that had already gone warm. "Not long now, I would say. This one is in a hurry."

"You said as much at eight o'clock."

"I did." She wrung the cloth out above the basin and did not apologise for it. "And I shall very likely say it again."

Sarah came and went with the water, her eyes fixed steadfastly upon the basin she carried and never once upon my face. Twice I heard William in the passage. He has a particular tread when his mind is engaged upon something other than the direction of his feet, and I knew it through two inches of oak, and I recall being fiercely glad that he was upon the other side of it. It was not modesty. I did not wish him to see this. I did not wish him to possess it afterwards, to take it out and consider it whenever he looked at me.

Then Mrs Mullane ceased speaking altogether, and the alteration in her was a good deal worse than anything she might have said.

"Now," she said. "Now, Mrs Jeffries."

I do not remember determining to do what I did next. I remember taking hold of the sheets and finding them useless to me, and taking hold of her forearm instead, and her permitting it; and I remember the extraordinary discovery that at the end of all things there was nobody to whom the work might be handed. Not William. Not my father, who had passed his entire life arranging for other people to carry what he did not wish to carry himself. I had been raised to be married, and to be pleasant, and to know the value of a cargo without ever appearing to know it, and not one particle of it was of the slightest use to me. There is only myself, and it must be done. I bore down, and the pain went past what I had believed to be the furthest limit of pain, and continued.

"Again."

"I cannot."

"You can. You are." Her voice had dropped almost to nothing. "Once more and you are done with me entirely."

It was the tenth hour, or near enough. The sun had come round to the front of the house and lay in a hot bar across the counterpane. I found my breath and did as she asked, and something within me gave way in a manner for which I possessed no vocabulary, and there followed a great deal of movement at the foot of the bed, and she said something to Sarah that I did not catch.

And then he cried.

It is a foolish admission, but I had never entirely believed there was a person in it. Nine months of being congratulated upon carrying an heir, of William making mention of him at dinner much as he made mention of a shipment expected in the spring, and none of it had rendered him real to me. The cry accomplished what nine months had not. It was furious. It was the sound of a creature who had been very ill used and intended that somebody should hear of it.

"A boy," said Mrs Mullane. "A great strong boy, Mrs Jeffries, and exceedingly cross about it."

They laid him upon my breast still marked from the journey, and I put my hand about the back of his head, and he was hot. That is the thing nobody had told me, in all the long years of women telling me things. He was so very hot. His face was creased shut and one fist stood up beside his ear and he weighed almost nothing at all, and I had done that, and my whole body rang with the knowledge of it.

"Hello," I said.

I had prepared a hundred things to say to him. I had composed them through the winter evenings with my feet upon the fender, and every one of them departed from my head and did not return. He turned his face towards my voice with his eyes still closed and rooted at nothing, and I laughed, and the laugh came apart into something else before it was finished, and Mrs Mullane had the great kindness to be occupied with the basin and to observe none of it.

What followed was less dignified and a good deal less spoken of, and she conducted it with the same unhurried competence she had brought up the stairs with her. They took him from me to be weighed and wrapped. They took the linen away. Sarah brought fresh water and a fresh gown of fine lawn that I had not asked for, and between them they raised me and washed me and dressed me and set me back against the pillows, and when Mrs Mullane had finished she stood at the foot of the bed and considered me for a moment with her head tilted, as one considers a room in which the furniture has been newly arranged.

I understood precisely what was being done. I was being made fit to be seen. My hair was combed and plaited and laid over one shoulder; the window was opened two inches; the fire was let down at last. Whatever had occurred in that room during the preceding seven hours was to be put out of sight before its master was admitted to it, and no one had needed to be instructed in this, and every woman present had gone about it as though it were the natural conclusion of the work itself.

I permitted it. I have thought since that I might have said something—that I might have declined the fresh gown, or asked that the linen be left where it lay, and let him see what the morning had actually cost. I did not. I lay back against the pillows and allowed myself to be arranged, and I understood, with a clarity I did not much care for, that I had begun the business of managing what my husband was permitted to know about me, and that I had begun it within an hour of giving him a son.

Mrs Mullane went out. I heard her voice in the passage, low and level, and then his, and the difference between them was instructive. Hers had the evenness of a woman reporting the outcome of a matter that had never truly been in doubt. His did not.

He came in without knocking, which he had never once done in the whole of our marriage, and stopped a full three paces from the bed.

I had expected him dishevelled and I was not disappointed—his cravat undone, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his hair standing where he had put his hands through it. What I had not expected was the stillness. William is a man who fills a room by moving about in it. He stood entirely motionless at the foot of my bed and looked at the two of us, and his hands hung at his sides and did nothing whatever, and I saw quite plainly that he was afraid.

Of what, I could not have said. Not of the child; nobody is afraid of a child. Something has come into the house with him and he does not know where to put it. The thought arrived complete and I set it aside at once, as one sets aside a letter that has come at an inconvenient hour.

"Madelyn," he said.

"You may come closer. He will not break, and neither shall I."

He crossed the three paces as though the floor were uncertain. When he sat upon the edge of the bed the whole frame shifted, and I put my hand flat upon the counterpane to steady myself, and he saw me do it and looked away.

"They would not let me in," he said.

"I know it. I heard you in the passage."

"Twice I very nearly—" He stopped. "It is a great deal of noise, from outside a door. One is left to construct what is happening from very little."

"Then we have that in common," I said, "for I could construct very little of it myself, and I was present throughout."

Something went across his face that I chose to receive as amusement. He put out one finger and touched the child's hand, and the child, who had been asleep, closed upon it with the whole of his fist, and I watched my husband's breath go out of him.

"Will you take him?"

"I do not know how it is done."

"Nor did I, three quarters of an hour ago. Put your arm here. And here. He is not a decanter, William."

He took him. He held him a good deal too carefully, at some distance from his own body, in the manner of a man carrying something across a room that he has been asked on no account to spill. Then he brought him in against his chest, and his shoulders came down, and he looked into that small creased face for a long while and said nothing at all.

"Hello, William," he said at last. "I am your father."

The name had been settled between us in the winter, though I am not certain it was ever truly a question. William Edward Jeffries. He had spoken of it as a matter of course, and I had agreed, because it seemed to me at the time a small thing to concede and because I had liked the look of it written out. Hearing it said aloud to the child himself was another matter entirely. It sounded to me less like a name than like an appointment to a position.

"William Jr, then," I said. "For we shall never manage two Williams in one house otherwise, and I refuse to spend the next twenty years specifying which of you I mean."

"Junior." He tried it. "Yes."

He did not look at me as he said it. He was looking at the boy, and then, past the boy, at the window and the long green fall of the grounds beyond it, and whatever he saw out there occupied him for rather longer than the view could account for.

There was a question standing quite ready in my mouth. I had only to open it.

I was four-and-twenty years of age, I had been in the colony fourteen months, and I had been awake since three o'clock in the morning. And I had come, over those fourteen months, to a private arrangement with myself concerning my husband's silences: that they were the price of everything else, that they were not mine to open, and that a wife who went looking for the bottom of them might not care for what she found lying there. It was, I told myself, a reasonable arrangement. It had served.

"He has your hair," I said.

"He has," said William, and turned back from the window, and smiled at me, and the room went ordinary again.