She was a miracle child. That is one of the many things Jack does not say. ‘You will not conceive,’ a doctor said regretfully, but Jasmine Jones smiled and told him she was already pregnant, thank you very much. ‘You will not survive,’ said a second doctor, but Jasmine gave birth, noisily, at the height of summer and lived to hear her baby cry. A third doctor warned her, ‘The child will not live long.’ But the child was a month old and unexpectedly healthy when the Reverend Robert Jones paused on the threshold of their tiny house in a suburb of Birmingham, beaming like the sunbeam Jesus had always wanted him for. In his arms was a Moses basket and in the basket was a baby girl.
‘You do know you’ll have to give in, don’t you?’ said his wife, her hand on the small of his back, as much to help her stand as to urge him forward.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I really do think so.’
‘Both names then? But mine first.’
Jasmine Jones snorted a laugh, shaking her head in mock dismay, spraying raindrops on the hallway’s old orange wallpaper. ‘You lovely, stubborn man.’
Jasmine had been raised to know her own mind and to get her own way. Papa had spent a lot of money making sure that was the case, sending her down from the mountain to the finest school in Kingston, probably the whole of Jamaica, where she had learned far more than he knew. When Jasmine and her friends walked out through the town in their starched white uniforms on sunlit evenings in the seventies they were well aware of being watched by men in cars and sidewalk bars. They kicked their heels, showed their legs, threw back their heads and laughed because they felt a hunger too, but theirs was different. Their lust, nurtured by their folks, was to Do Better. They were never meant to stay.
So Jasmine left the island and went away to Oxford, where she met a man. ‘His face told me to trust him,’ she wrote to her mother long after meeting Robert in a coffee shop on a corner near her college. The letter was written a good six months after they met, but it was all news to her mother. By then they had studied together for their finals, the serious young ordinand and herself, a different kind of believer, working as hard as him but always trying to make it look easy. Sharing the same library table in silence, divinity and law books spread out side by side. ‘Tell Papa not to worry,’ she wrote, but she knew that was in vain. With the letter, she sent a wedding invitation. It was fast, too fast maybe, but it was also too late for Papa to stop her then, if he wanted to. So of course, both men were nervous when they met for the first time at the college chapel, on the night of the wedding rehearsal.
‘Look after her,’ said Papa, pulling back his shoulders and pumping the hand of the groom. It was what he had to say. He had prepared the words. His face was stern and his stare was fierce. For a moment, he was every disapproving father in history. Then a twitch on his lips became a smile, as his worried daughter watched. ‘Don’t worry!’
Papa knew all about Robert Jones, she found out later. Papa had been to Oxford too, he still had friends from those days, only now those friends had influence and access. Questions had been asked, files checked, bishops consulted on the sly. This young priest was well thought of. He might not make a fortune, but he was a man of God.
‘I know you will look after my daughter, I can see that . . . my son.’
‘Done,’ said Jasmine to her husband, closing the door against the traffic that was swooshing its way through another miserable day. The child was home. Back in the sun, her aunts and uncles would be muttering over their tea cups about what a shame it all was, how bright little Jasmine would probably never return to the law now, after all that money had been spent on her education. But Papa would be coming soon, to see his grand-daughter. Jasmine would tell him this was her home now and he was welcome. She would not say how little time there was left for her to live in it. She had neither the strength nor the will for a fight on the day her daughter came home, but she was sure this child, this miracle, should have a name as big as the wonder she inspired.
‘Both names,’ said Robert Jones as he bent to kiss the forehead of the sleeping child, who wriggled in her snug of pale pink terry cotton. ‘Your mother is crazy, but she is almost as lovely as you.’
Jasmine, who was about to draw the curtains, paused at the sight of her porridge-pale man and his lovely daughter. Her lovely daughter too, caught in a bar of swirling sunshine. One precious column of light had found a way through the rain clouds and smog, through the smudged window pane and thick house nets and was spending itself on them both. Let them be like this, she thought. Remember this, Jasmine. Remember.
‘I love you,’ she said, moving close to him, but he did not take his eyes off the baby. They both looked down and surprised themselves by saying the first of her two given names together, softly. ‘Sarah . . .’
She knew none of that, of course. Her eyes had yet to open. She was not told the story for a very long time, because for years she did not want to hear anything about it or about her mother. But there was one thing Sarah could never easily put out of her mind: her earliest memory, the blinding white light. She saw it when she was three years old and holding the hand of her grandmother, as they turned from a hospital corridor into the room where her mother lay. There, surrounded by a dazzling haze of light, was Mummy on the bed, strangely yellow between the sweetie pink of her nightie and the bone white of the linen sheet.
‘What is in your nose, Mummy?’
Sarah pulled herself up onto the bed by the green blanket, nearly kicking over a vase of daffodils on the bedside cabinet with her shiny patent shoe. She felt the hands of the nurse, a grip strong enough to lift her off.
‘Oh darling.’ The nurse’s uniform was dark blue, she was in charge. ‘Mummy is a little poorly just now, best not climb on her.’
But Mummy spoke. She whispered. ‘Please. Let her.’
The voice did not seem to come from her body but from the air, floating down like a feather, startling Sarah and making her want to cry. ‘Come here, my angel.’ Mummy reached out, trailing the tube attached to the bruised back of her hand. Sarah knelt on the bed and cool palms cupped her face; she was pulled in tight towards her mother’s lips, mouth to mouth, feeling and tasting tears. The tickle of eyelashes. She was too young to see the wildness in her mother’s eyes: the look of a woman trying to inhale her daughter’s energy, her love, her life, trying to suck up something of Sarah to stay there with her, in that room, a little light to burn when the darkness came. Sarah just felt herself squeezed so tight she could hardly breathe, and heard her granny’s voice.
‘Come on, love. Let Mummy rest.’
Not fair, thought Sarah, you are hurting me, Mummy. She wanted to say that, but she could not speak. Then the arms around her relaxed and fell away, back down to the bed, like the arms of a puppet whose strings had been cut. The arms of her mother, bare and motionless on the bed. The skin was pale, powdery, dry.
‘Goodbye, my precious.’
Mummy hissed it, swallowing with great effort as if there was something dusty, spiky in her throat. She pursed her cracked lips in a dry kiss. ‘Be a good girl.’
Why was Mummy angry? Sarah saw light blaze from her eyes and the room was crowded with whirling angels flapping fiery wings, and she was scared. She did not know that Jasmine Jones was raging, raging hard, but not with her tiny, precious daughter. Not at all. Jasmine did her best to smile, to fight it. To reassure. ‘See. You.’ She said it so quietly that Sarah could only just hear her. ‘Later. Angel. When. I get. Home. Yeah?’
No.
No.
No.
She never did come home.