Bibliofemme: Extras

I am trying to imagine what Peter will do when he gets the news about our daughter.

For weeks I have had him in my dreams, moving through the rooms of this house he has never known, picking up the small things which make up my life now. He lifts an empty glass and fills it with cold water; he stands in doorways and watches me while I work; he disappears around corners and hides in parts of the house which are new to me, cupboards and rooms which suddenly open up. Once he is inside, they go again. And I wake trying to release him.

I am working with greens and blues today, piecing together the sharp little shards, pushing them into the putty, its softness like wet sand, each broken piece of glass as close to the next as possible. May from the village brought me a plain round mirror after Easter, and asked me to put a pattern of the sea around it.

"No fish. No boats, no sails," she said, and I saw that the skin of her face had grown harder over the winter. "And no bloody mermaids. All I want is the colours of the water."

It was a full week before I got to work on May's mirror. When I did, I took to it a very steely shade of blue. This blue was almost silver, almost a reflection like the glass it was to surround, and once I began to work it in I saw how cruel it was, how it flashed. Around it, the other shades began to weaken; beside it, they were only crayon colours. I had to tear them all out and start over.

Our daughter Maura has been sitting on the cliffs outside this house for three days now. I know that she comes in here at night to sleep, long after I have gone to my bed, and that she leaves again with her blanket and a flask of tea. And when I sit at my window after breakfast, I can tell that she is there again by the strands of hair whipped high above the rock which she has made her own. And by the edge of the crimson wool blanket in which she hugs herself tight.

Three days out here. Three days since, gazing past the reflection in May's mirror as I wove in ribbons of buttery yellows and burnt oranges, I caught in the pool of glass a frantic move, a spasm; something too sudden to be the beat of my own blink, the twitch of my lips, the slow, picking motion of my fingers as I built up the mosaic. I caught a flash of that crimson, her crimson, and suddenly the image of her gasping face had flickered in the glass, and I had looked up from it to see her at the window, and to know that it was real. That my daughter was white and petrified on the other side, that sea spray clung to her long, dark fringe and to the locks straggled around her shoulders, to the flecks of auburn in her lashes, to the dry skin of her lips. They moved, her lips, with the knowledge of something awful. Though the noises she made were not words, they told me for sure that for her, the moment which would mark her life for the rest of its time had happened. There was an instant of silence, like drawing breath, when we looked at each other in simple fear of what was going to be revealed. And when that instant had collapsed, she was calling my name, and I had scattered broken nuggets all over the floor, and moved to the door, in long, seemingly liquid steps. Coloured dust underfoot, all the bits ground into nothing. I took her frozen cheeks in my hands, turned her face upwards and found her eyes, staring somewhere else. And I thought that, inside them, I could see sea spray too, and though it could have been anything, what had happened to her, I knew what it was.

"David." There was only one thing to say. "David. Maura, where is David?"
And the next thing to say. "Where have you lost him? Where have you let him go?"

Though she heard the words come they did nothing to shake her alive. She sobbed again, and the sound of her voice was a plea to me, to find something, to get the boy back, and I knew that her loss was as deep as any ever could be.

Our daughter has lost a child, Peter, and that it was not her own child matters nothing. I wonder could you ever imagine that our daughter could grow into this woman, who talks better to small children than to people of her own age and of the age we have both come to now; that she would spend her days walking on the cliffs by our home with the little brown-haired son of a neighbour. That she has brought into this house a stream of small, clear-eyed people who do nothing so much as remind me of when she was that age herself. You must wonder about her. You might see her, somehow, watch her walks from some place up on the higher cliffs. If you have found us. But the chances of that are slim. Of seeing her, and knowing her. Because she does not have my face, she has yours. And your own face is always the hardest one to see.

Her hair was blonde when you knew her; the strawberry blonde of a child still a baby. It would darken to brown within the year. It was already turning when we left you. But to you, she must always have stayed that blonde little girl. Mustn't she?

*

In the weeks before breaking away I had wanted to confide in her, and her just a toddler; I had wanted to ready her for what was happening by talking her through it, by promising her that we would manage alone. But I could not, because I knew that she would give me away, lay bare my plans as she chattered to him in the mornings, him shaving at the cold basin, or her trailing him in the yard outside, giddy with questions in her red rubber boots.

In those days I sewed for a living, mended torn linings and let out tight-fitting blouses. I took up hanging hems, fixed in new zippers. Sometimes I put together new pieces to my own designs, and in the weeks coming up to that Christmas I was finishing one of those, a wedding dress in white crepe for a young woman from the shop I had worked in before we had Maura. Before Maura was born.

It was a hard winter. There was a fashion for plainness, and it made things easier for me. I had worked with hundreds of dress patterns before made sense of their flimsy paper shapes, and the modest demands of this one - the simple cut, the staid white lines - meant that I scarcely needed to think on what I was doing. And so, as the dress came on in my hands, I was already, in my mind, in the house up by the cliff edge, already leading Maura around the small rooms. Already telling her that I had grown up here, that I had slept in this bed when I was her age. That her uncle Donal had slept in that room, and that her grandparents had wanted for us two to live here, too. After we were finished living with her Daddy.

I was on the little puff sleeves of the dress before I decided to use that story. To let her think that this was a home belonging to us on some way. But while I had sewn together the delicate white bodice I had phoned Donal. I had told him as briefly as possible that I was going to leave Peter and raise Maura alone; that I knew the reasons for doing this and that they were good enough for me. That I needed somewhere to take my child and to live with her. And that it had to be far from home.

"He's beating you?" Donal said. It was the obvious question. It was the wrong one.
"He's not beating me," I said. "He's not doing anything like that."
"Then what's he doing?"
"There's no way of telling it."
"What? What are you talking about?"

He had been so quiet as I laid out my plans that I knew it was going to be difficult, convincing him of this. This time, I stayed quiet for a moment before he pushed again. "What are you talking about, leaving him? What has he done?" It was nearly pointless to try and explain to him, but I wanted to make an attempt at it. He had always been good to me, Donal, when we were growing up. He had defended me when our father had turned against me, seemingly for no audacity greater than my growing towards adulthood, and he had talked me through the wrenching guilt that had followed our father's passing, quick in the night, before either of us had thought to stop hating him. Now, though, he had dropped the thread that held us together through all that. He thought I had pulled it from him, and so he was not willing to seek it. I could hear something more than confusion in his voice. I could hear abandonment.

"Everything is over with Peter," I said, as evenly as I could. "It's been coming this past year. I tried to save it, but it's gone. I want to get Maura away from here."
"But you're surely not just going to take her from him?"
I swallowed. "I am. I want her to have a clean break."
"You want to destroy her?"
"I want her to have a different childhood to this. She's still young enough to know another way."
"But what has he done to her?" He was almost pleading now. Always for the underdog,

I thought. I thought of lying. I thought of spinning him a story of fear, of violence. Interference, even. I thought of it. But I knew that if I did that, he would believe me, and put his hands around Peter's neck. And what I wanted was not that. "It's nothing so simple as doing something to her, or to either of us," I told him. "It's the way my relationship with Peter is now, and the way I can see him being with her. It's not the right way to go on."
"This is because he wouldn't marry you." It came suddenly. He thought he had it.
Though he had pretended not to be bothered by the arrangement I had with Peter, I knew Donal would have preferred to see us settled. Not this half-way of being together, this child across the middle like rope on a broken gate. "This is some way of getting him to give in," he said, and there was no question, only certainty, in his voice. "Surely to Jesus there's an easier way?"
"I don't want marriage," I said simply. Peter would soon be home from the garage where he worked. Maura would soon be waking. The white bodice lay neglected in my lap now, and I was anxious to get it done. "If you'll help me," I said, sensing his bewilderment, "just help me. And if you don't want to, I'll manage. I have to go now." I hung up.

Two days later he phoned and offered me this cottage. The rent was low enough for me, he said, and if I still had trouble with it he would help me out. I thanked him. This time he hung up on me. I looked out the window and saw Maura in her red boots, with her blonde curls up in a knot. Peter was hunched down over something, knocking a length of piping into shape or something, and she held a thin branch in her hand, broken in the middle so that half of it hung down like a snapped toy arm. She was swinging it slowly, and from the slow way her lips were moving, I knew she was singing, probably that song she had been singing since this morning when I had lifted her from the cot she had long since outgrown. In her new house, I thought then, she would have a bed to herself. And when she outgrew that, she would have another.

I bundled away the crepe, the needles and threads, and packed the sewing machine into its plastic case before calling to Maura. Peter came with her because we had agreed to walk into the shops that evening. She needed a warm coat, I had told him, if she was going to spend all of her days shadowing his movements outdoors, and he had said that he would buy it for her, that she could pick the one she wanted herself. Among the coloured bundles and spilling shelves of Mrs Hegarty's shop we found a duffle, bright red with checked flannel in the hood and three little buttons like tiny bulls' horns. She had loved it so much that she had worn it out of that shop and into the next one. There, someone had pressed a fifty-pence piece into her cold little hand.

That was October, and the dark air and the wind were beginning to fold in on us. If I had not been working so hard to get the wedding gown finished, I would have sewn Maura's coat together myself and saved us the money. But in those months I was working out our move at a dizzy pace in my mind. If I worked well, I would have the dress finished by the first of November, when the cottage would be growing warmer, waiting for us, fires burning in the front room and bedrooms in the weeks up to our arrival. I could take smaller jobs to bring us through the month, to keep me from looking like I had something else on my mind. And I could go into the shops, talking of Christmas presents for Maura, and buy instead some bits and pieces for when we would be by the sea. Peter would think nothing of it. He would know nothing at all. And only for the snow I would have been gone by the middle of December. Only for the snow, that night, with his arms around me, would never have happened.

A Saturday. She was asleep in our bedroom. He had come to me, curious to know if I had found a present for myself for Christmas; his breath hot on my ear as I drove rough stitches through a hem.

"And Madam found nothing to her liking?" He was playful, nuzzling stubble into the curve of my neck. "Was she fussy as ever, frightening the life out of Cassidy's shopgirls?"

The easiest thing would have been to yield, to stick needle and thread into the cushion, to give up for the night and fall in with his need, dance out to the short steps of his longing and let him sleep through the night, contented. This night that I had hoped would be my last here. But there was snow, falling freely, and I was rattled. I could not bear the tickle of his lips. I could not bear him talking to me, saying my name, sliding wet, open-mouthed kisses on my skin until it shuddered, and when he murmured that the snow outside was beautiful, I pushed hard against him, so suddenly that I must have bruised his lips against his front teeth.

"Looking at the snow makes me feel cold," was all I gave him, as I shrugged and stood, throwing the sewing things from me. "I think I'll take a bath. Goodnight." I walked towards the bathroom, but stopped at the door to look back at him. He stood slumped against the windowsill. "There's nothing in the shops that I need so badly. I'd prefer to keep the money and look out for something in the sales." And something close to hatred was finally settling into his gaze. It would not make things easier, I knew. But it would help him to believe that what he would see happening was real, and no trick of his own ragged mind.

*

Peter will be fifty in the New Year, I realise, as I slide my letter to him under the glass in the tiny shop that serves as a post office here. This place was to close a month ago, but it stays on; the woman takes the envelope from me, looks at the Dublin address and skims it back out to me with a stamp floating on its skin. If I met her eyes, I know that they would be full of that brown-haired child, and of the figure of my daughter, still huddled up there on the clifftop. I know they would ask the questions that the whole place must be asking. But I keep my gaze on the envelope, and when I peel away the stamp's adhesive strip and rub it onto the top right-hand corner of the envelope, I hesitate for only a moment before dropping it into the fat sack on the floor. I leave without a word.

I know that it will shock Peter, hearing from me now. I know that I am sending him pain. The first letter, after twenty years; he will think there was been a death. And there has. It is not that I can forget that. But it is not a death that Peter will mourn. It happened on an island, that is how he will see it; children have been taken into water all down the years. But our daughter is grieving, Peter; our daughter is torn…the sea plastered across her face that morning three days ago, like the phlegm of something wild, her lips almost blue and her eyes like yours…and that single, jealous tremor that went through me, and wondered where you were, and what you would do with her if she had appeared like this before you, if she had needed you instead. I gave you the facts, only, and an address jutting out over the ocean, and maybe you will never get this letter. Maybe you are gone.

In the dream the water you fill the tumbler with is clear, like cut glass itself, and you offer it to me, and always, I take it without speaking. And always, I wake spluttering in the same way, gasping for the night air. The agony of saltwater searing blisters into my throat's walls. Around me, the mirrors shattering, like puddles of thin white ice.

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