Born of Woman Read Free Page A

holiday and …’
    Lyn shrugged. Good Friday. Christ on a cross and traffic jams on all the roads. The nearest public phone box to the Bertram farm was three whole miles away. Molly Bertram’s mother had been only a few years younger than his own and had known him as a baby, as a boy. He hated that. He had cancelled his whole boyhood by moving south to Jennifer, by marrying. He wiped strawberry from his mouth.
    â€˜All right, she’s ill, but it’s probably nothing much. The Bertrams love to stir things up. The whole village thrives on drama. Why d’you think I left there?’ A thousand reasons, and Jennifer the main one, although it had been Matthew’s money and Matthew’s influence which brought him down to London in the first place. Matthew had even found him Jennifer. He sometimes felt he had never done a thing except through his brother ( half -brother). Matthew had introduced him to Jennifer in the same smug, efficient, all-controlling way he’d offered help, cash, art-school, housing, job. Jennifer meant more than all of them. She had blushed when he first asked her out. Girls didn’t blush in the hard-boiled 1980s. She had cooked for him the second time he saw her—not hot cross buns, but chicken breasts in wine. He had hardly touched a mouthful—he was looking at her own breasts. Soft blue angora following him round the room, bending over the oven, wobbling when she laughed.
    After dinner, they sat on two stiff chairs and talked about safe permitted things like television (which he hardly ever watched) and Art which she awarded a capital A, then kept respectfully away from. He knew he would have to choose between her and Hester, her and Hernhope. He no longer needed that cold creaking house footprinted with his fear, blabbing tales of his lonely barbed-wire boyhood. He wanted to shake free of it, move south of it. Jennifer was south. She came from a small, good-tempered Sussex townlet where the hills were only swellings and the wind ruffled rather than uprooted. She had south in her face and figure. A gentle, temperate girl who wasn’t exactly beautiful, but had something of summer in her—something warm, ripe, plumpish, mellow, ready, when he and Hester were rough, bitter, bowed. Her hair was the faded, sun-streaked colour of shredded wheat, too long to be tidy and too wavy to be chic; her eyes a frail, fragile blue which in some lights paled to wood-smoke and were barely defined by her fine fair brows. All her lines were soft—breasts, profile, features—nothing sharp or angular. A girl you could sink into.
    They had married in a dark church on a pale grey morning with a few frail spokes of sunshine nudging the narcissi on the altar. Three years ago. Three hundred years ago. His mother hadn’t attended. Hester had treated the wedding as if it were somebody else’s letter delivered to the wrong address. He sent her photos, money, endless reparation. He couldn’t phone. Hester didn’t believe in easy, instant communication. She preferred struggle and crossed lines.
    Since the wedding, he had never returned to see her. Every week he planned to; every month he pencilled it in his diary, underneath the guilt. Jennifer coaxed him, urged him, suggested dates, made plans. He always agreed until the date came round. He hardly understood his own reluctance. Perhaps he feared to return in case he became Hester’s child again. There should never have been a Mrs Winterton Junior in the first place. He cleared his throat, tried to sound decisive.
    â€˜You’ll only make her worse if you try to interfere, Jennifer. She’ll say you’re … spying on her. My mother never cared for company and now she’s almost a … recluse.’ He shut his eyes. Their tiny rickety table was lengthening into twelve foot of Spanish oak—the overweening table which had stood stern and massive in his childhood home, solid as a ship. It