Haweswater Read Free Page A

pain in his missing left. The appendage had been lost to just below the shoulder joint during a shelling in the Great War, and he wore the sleeve of his coat flat, tucked into the pocket like a petal into a stem. He had finally abandoned the Excelsior in a drift four miles from Mardale. He bound up his fingers with a birch twig and some twine, using his teeth as best he could to tighten the splint. He began walking the next six miles on foot along the road round Naddle forest, for he dared not take the short cut up over the Swindale pass inthis weather, when the snow could cling in cornices to the top of the fells and form unstable bridges suspended over nothing but air. A foot anticipating the path might go straight through, pulling the body down with it in a freefall to the crags below. He trudged along beside the lake and finally took to the trees, the entire front of him white with driven snow. The coverage of evergreen would provide him with some shelter during the trek, but Teddy would not return to Whelter Farm until the next morning with the doctor.
    There was little activity in the household while he was gone. Just small episodes, a man leaving, a woman arriving with towels, a chair pulled out so that someone might sit, water boiled for more tea or to sterilize Joyce Carruthers’s sewing scissors, the gathering of sweat and blood on the bed upstairs. The muffled contraction of cries.
    Finally, Ella’s screams stopped. A close husky silence like that found in a forest’s centre settled about the house. Samuel threw his cigarette into the snow outside and strode from the kitchen doorway up the stairs. There had been so many people to help his wife, it had been a lengthy, fraught vigil. But it was Ella herself who made the last contribution to the day’s efforts. The child had almost travelled through her body when she suddenly sat up on the bed and became quiet and determined, her beetroot face contorted a last time. It seemed that her eyes were filled with an unholy scorn. She reached down and pushed the baby free of herself with her palm, as if ridding herself of a heavy stone that had been placed in her lap. The women of the village drew breath and kept to themselves that they suspected from this moment on a bitter and difficult relationship between mother and child. Neither did they speak later of Ella’s final whispered profanity against the Lord.
    The tiny girl was blue and yellow from the cord wrapped tightly around her neck, but she needed no hand on her buttocks to start her new lungs. Blood colour quickly flooded through her, lighting the minute network of veins against herskin. Her cries were fierce, like the mews of a hungry cat. Samuel came into the room and folded down on to the bed. His wife was faint against the pillows. He took the slippery child in his one giant hand and the straw turned redder in his face. A girl. A tiny, angry, malcontent girl. He turned to the women in the room and thanked them all for his daughter, overcome, and suddenly exhausted with relief. They looked away embarrassed by his sudden and unusual display of emotion, a man exhibiting such meekness, such altruism. Then Samuel turned to his wife and thanked her and he bent and kissed her wet brown hair.
    But Ella was crying gently, which her husband had never before witnessed, and she was getting up from the mess of the bed, her arms lifting, tipping, to try to find her balance. She was crying for cursing Jesus, whom she loved above all, and she wanted to get away from the blood, and the baby, the scene of her crimes against Him. She wanted to limp to the church and pray for forgiveness. In those moments of guilt and regret she imagined that she felt that eternal freefall into nothingness, into isolation, and a keen desperation to be reunited with God overwhelmed her. She stood.
    – No, Ella, lie back, there’s more.
    Joyce’s words were paid no heed.
    She was weak and pale and unstable as she opened the drawer of the dresser