Marjorie, Grace and me.
Marjorie is well acquainted with death. Her sad brown eyes seem created for its contemplation, her sturdy feet for the stirring of a dead body on the floor. Patrick Bates once said she smelt of death, and that is why of all the women in the world, having slept with her once he never would again. Her skin was dry even in adolescence – it flaked away as if it was dying, not growing.
As a child Marjorie would bravely pick up dead birds and bury them – maggots and all. The rest of us looked the other way.
Being so accustomed to death, it seems that she has trouble facing life. She prefers the world on the page, or pictures flickering on the screen. The media world is full of such refugees from reality.
Marjority tried once. Yes she did. Living with her Ben, carrying his six months’ child. Two days after Ben died Marjorie started to bleed, just gently, and feel generally uncomfortable, so she called the doctor. He came at once, to her surprise, and she lay on the bed while he talked and chatted and kept her cheerful. Not that she was uncheerful.
‘If I keep it, that’s good,’ she says. ‘If I lose it, that’s good too.’
He was a small fine-boned man, like an elf. She liked him. He’d seen many people die.
He told her what her chances were of keeping the baby and not miscarrying. Fifty-fifty, don’t despair, he said, and she didn’t.
But through the evening the chances worsened, the odds shortened.
A pain. Yes a contraction. Gone again, but forty-sixty, I’m afraid. But you never know! Think happy thoughts, girl. He calls the ambulance, nonetheless.
A sudden flow of blood, stopping soon. Thirty-seventy. Pregnancy suits her. Her skin stops flaking, her complexion clears, she feels placid and content. Even her hair grows silky and falls in waves about her face. She hasn’t told her mother. She didn’t want her mother, for once, to turn up and change everything.
A pain, this time the face distorting. Marjorie lies more flatly on the bed. Twenty-eighty, he thinks. Poor little baby, breaking free; or else cast out by a host too shocked to shelter it, who’s to say? Too small, at any rate, to survive. No ambulance, as yet. It has lost its way.
More blood, more groans, the legs parting.
Ten-ninety.
Five-ninety five.
One-ninety nine.
Nil-one hundred.
Good-bye baby. Here you come.
Life does not continue.
Grace gets in first, of course. Grace murders. Grace has abortions. Like having a tooth out, she says. She looks forward to it. All that drama, she says, and distracted men, and the anaesthetics are lovely, and you wake up with no sense of time passed. What luxury! Marjorie says that if Grace had done what her father wanted her to, and looked after the infant Stephen, her baby brother, she might not afterwards have disposed of foetuses with such abandon. I, Chloe, think it is due more to the way Christie battered the maternal instinct out of her, than anything else. For Grace did have such an instinct once – she wailed like an animal for her stolen children.
I heard her. It is the reason I look after Stanhope for her, and the reason Oliver allows me to. We understand why poor Grace can’t. We witnessed it.
I have never seen a dead person, only coffins, but I have imagined the body within and taken responsibility for it. I would have a dozen children if I could; if Oliver and commonsense allowed. The answer to death is life, and more life, which is why the world is getting so overcrowded. Or so they say.
Leave Oliver, Marjorie says. Divorce him, Grace says. Save yourself, they both say. If only they seemed more saved themselves.