Born of Woman Read Free

last, staling, home-baked hot cross bun, left over from their breakfast. He had never really cared for hot cross buns, but they were precious like the love. She made them every year with such devotion, chopping peel and kneading dough, the whole kitchen warm and spiced. He leaned across and touched her hand, hand that had shaped the buns. ‘It’s you who are obsessed with her.’
    â€˜Only because you’ve never let me meet her.’
    â€˜It’s not that … simple.’ He picked up Jennifer’s toast and bit into it, hard. What was wrong with it? Had she made the jam with salt instead of sugar? No, it wasn’t salt, but tears. He was swallowing Jennifer’s tears. He liked that. To be part of her, made of her. She was special, blessed, serene. That’s why he’d married her. Shouldn’t have married her. Hester wouldn’t be ill now, if he hadn’t. He swamped the tears with jam—Jennifer’s strawberry in a Branston Pickle jar. He’d grown the strawberries himself—large, fat, shouting scarlet ones. Now they were only shrunk and faded pulp. That’s what cooking did—took living, breathing things and turned them into corpses. All good cooks were murderers. Jennifer had won prizes for her cooking. He glanced at her small, strong, sticky, lethal hands. ‘My mother’s always preferred to keep herself to herself.’
    â€˜But she’s dying , darling. It’s different if she’s dying. I can’t bear the thought of never having seen her.’
    Lyn split a currant with a fingernail. Hester wasn’t dying—couldn’t be. She had always told him that she lived for him. Thirty years she’d done that, kept him for herself. More than thirty, actually. Other men got married at eighteen. ‘Look, all she needs is a day or two in bed. Some decent food, someone to …’
    â€˜But I could cook the food. Look after her. I’d like to. Please. If anything … happens, then I’ll feel we …’
    â€˜It won’t.’ Can’t.
    â€˜But she’s eighty-two.’
    â€˜Her mother lived till ninety -two. And her mother’s mother till two days off a hundred.’ That’s why he’d had to marry. Couldn’t wait until Hester was gone and he was middle-aged and past it. She had had him far too late. Other mothers didn’t have babies in their late forties. There had been kids at his school with grandmas younger than his mother was. ‘You don’t understand, she’s always been old. It makes no difference what her birthday says.’
    â€˜Don’t be silly, darling—of course it does. Hester can’t defy all natural laws, just because she’s your mother.’
    Why was his wife so literal? He meant old like the hills were old, or like himself. He had lived twelve years longer than Jennifer, which hardly counted when it was a matter of birth certificates or candles on his cake. But in terms of drought and rusting, winters, terrors, cold, he was a hundred thousand years older. She was a child still—child bride—pink and eager and easy. He loved her for it, married her because she had all the things his mother never had. Long, soft, messy hair which sprawled on her shoulders instead of being coiled in contours with a barbed-wire fence of hairpins; legs which opened and closed where his mother was only a clothes peg beneath a starched apron. Breasts. He suddenly longed to hold the breasts, anchor himself to her body.
    â€˜You haven’t touched your tea,’ he said, instead.
    â€˜No.’ She was stabbing at stray crumbs spilt on the tablecloth in the same nervous, distracted way she kept picking at his mother. ‘Look, she must be bad, or Mrs Bertram wouldn’t have got in touch with you. Didn’t you say she went out specially?’
    â€˜Mm. Her own phone was out of order.’
    â€˜Well, then … And today’s a public