FIFTY-EIGHT

Telegram

Arlette STOP Godfrey’s baby born STOP A girl STOP Clara Tatiana STOP Healthy and well STOP That was as much as they would tell me STOP

Minu

Arlette folded the telegram and smiled. Thank God, she thought, thank God. A small chink of light had forced its way through the darkness. The baby was safe. Her mother was safe. A small part of Godfrey remained.

She thought of the baby constantly over the course of the next few days. She tried to picture her, wondered if she would have the tight dark curls of her father or the smooth brown locks of her mother. She wondered how dark she would be, what color her eyes were. She passed the children’s clothes shop in St. Peter Port every day and eyed the booties and the mittens, the tiny hats and hand-knitted layettes.

She stared into perambulators and gasped at the tininess and preciousness of new infants. She thought about the baby so much that she ached with it. And she knew that tied in irrevocably with her obsession with the idea of Godfrey’s baby girl across the Channel were her own unformed feelings about the baby she had carried and lost nine months ago. The tiny blue scrap whom she hadn’t been allowed so much as to glance upon. She had been glad at the time, glad to be spared the fate of a loveless, sexless marriage to a man she despised. Although her head had made sense of it all, her heart still yearned for the thing she’d been expecting that had not materialized: the baby in her arms.

Her obsession grew as the days passed. She caught the eye of a black-faced sailor in a St. Peter Port alleyway one evening at dusk and was tempted to take him from the street into a room and make with him a baby just like Clara Tatiana, a baby like Godfrey’s, a beautiful brown baby. The thought passed in and out of her consciousness like a bullet, gone before she’d acknowledged it. But she feared herself growing mad with it, with this need to be involved, to be a part of Clara Tatiana.

A week after Clara’s birth, she walked into a bookshop and said to the man behind the desk wearing a threadbare suit and broken spectacles, “Excuse me, but do you have any stories for children about a little black girl?”

The man looked at her, aghast, and removed his broken spectacles. “About what, Mademoiselle?”

“About a little black girl,” she repeated. “A storybook.”

He replaced his spectacles and huffed and puffed and said, “What an odd request. No. I’m sure we don’t. Although, if you’re not fussed about gender, I could offer you this . . .” He pulled a book from a shelf and passed it to her. The book was called The Story of Little Black Sambo and featured on its cover an illustration of a coal-black boy with a mop of matching hair and legs like string, holding a green umbrella and beaming with vivid yellow teeth. Arlette recoiled. The image was alarming and unsettling. “No,” she said, “no, that’s not right at all. I was hoping for something a little more . . . realistic.”

The bookseller put his hands into the pockets of his old suit jacket and rocked back on his heels. “What on earth do you mean?”

“I mean, I mean . . .” she faltered. She didn’t know what she meant. What she wanted, she supposed, was a book about a little girl who looked exactly like the fantasy girl she’d spent all week creating inside her own head. “Oh, nothing,” she said eventually. “I just want a book for a little girl. A book she could grow to love as she grew up. A book she would like to keep forever and read to her own daughters.”

“Well, then,” said the bookseller, “you couldn’t go too far wrong with this. It’s one of our best sellers. Has been for years.” He put another book into her hands. Pollyanna. The character on the front of the jacket was far from black, but she was lovely to behold, a joyful girl clutching a basket of flowers, swinging through a sun-dappled meadow. It was bright and uplifting, just what a girl born into a grimy Soho almshouse, to a father she would never meet, might like to own.

“What is the story about?” she asked, turning it over in her hands.

“It is about,” he said, “a very glad girl.”

Arlette paid for the book and watched as the dusty man wrapped it and tied it with ribbon. When she got home, she wrote carefully on the inside cover, and then, before she rewrapped it, a thought occurred to her. She pulled out the drawer on her dressing table and put her fingers to the very back. From there she pulled out a tiny square of muslin. She put it to her nose and breathed in deeply, taking in the smell of Godfrey Pickle one last time, before sliding it in between the pages of the book, wrapping it and sending it, to the house on St. Anne’s Court.

Dear Miss De La Mare,

I thank you for this gift. I cannot aksept it. Sandy is gonn and his dorter is now sum one elsis. We won’t tork of him agin in our hows. Please do not bother us agin. You are not welcum.

Yorse,

Esther Jones