CONNIE YAWNED, THEN WINCED. Every morning the same robin trilled her awake from the tree outside her window, which might be all right if it wasn’t usually ten minutes after she’d finally got the baby off. Her breasts were like barrage balloons again, but cement ones, hard and lumpy. The baby had wailed half the night, jerking his head away every time she heaved him on to an aching nipple, his face scrunched up whatever she’d tried to do. Had the milk in them curdled because the baby wouldn’t take it? He was a week old – shouldn’t he know how to do this by now? And shouldn’t she? Honest to God, next time he cried she was going to join in, she was sure of it, and then she’d never stop.
She sagged against the pillow.
Mam would know.
As clearly as if it had happened, she saw Mam on the train down here, her best hat hastily shoved over that ruffled dark hair. She had tried so hard not to think of Mam, but only Mam could help.
It took a minute to get the tears under control.
‘Come on, then.’ Lying around in bed wasn’t helping anything, and however early it was, if the robin was shouting then Amos would be out dealing with the sheep.
Amos. You’d go a thousand years and never meet someone like Amos. When she thought how he’d pushed that barrow through the shadows of the oaks the night the baby was born, Bess up ahead as if guiding the way and her bundled inside in a pile of blankets, clutching at the baby in case Amos tipped them out. But Amos was silent and steady and got them home without either fuss or jibe, had made no mentioned of it since. Sometimes she wondered if she’d dreamed the whole thing, but there was no way she’d walked home and when she’d held the blanket to her face, it smelled of old wood and sheep’s wool.
Connie padded downstairs and creaked open the door into the parlour. The blackouts stayed up in here all the time and the room was thick and musty. She fumbled her way to the heavy bureau in the corner and pulled down its slanty top. Right at the back, behind an ancient bottle of God only knows what, she found it – a pencil and a wodge of paper and envelopes. Years of dust swirled up and caught in her throat as she pulled them out, and the noise of her coughing barked back at her in the gloom. Connie shivered and hotfooted it back up the stairs to the still-warm bed where she pulled the pencil and paper to her.
She hurtled to the end of her letter and stuffed the paper into the envelope before second thoughts crept up on her like those Messerschmitts. No point in reading it back. Her breasts were killing her now, really killing her, and the baby’s grunts had turned into proper squawks. She really ought to give him a name; she knew the looks Amos and Joyce shot her when she called him ‘the babba’ were code for ‘name your child, you useless baggage’, and she didn’t blame them. But she wasn’t going to call him after his own father, nor hers, and she was so wiped out all the time and so close to tears that it just felt too overwhelming.
Fierce little tyke, the babba was; got to like him for that. Just as well, too, given that he was a boy, not a girl after all, and likely to end up fighting for his life in some foreign country the way this war was going. Connie scooched forward on the bed and got hold of the baby under both armpits, hauling him out of the cot. He stopped screeching for a minute to scowl at her and she stuffed her swollen breast towards his mouth. For once it worked and he chomped down, pain splintering her nipple even as the throbbing eased off a bit. She looked down at him, attached like that, just as the babba lost his grip on her. A jet of milk squirted out and by the time he snuffled back into place her hand was drenched.
‘Oh, baby!’ After a few minutes she plonked him back in the cot and got out of bed. On the chair beside her bed, crisp and useless, her dungarees reeked of starch and carbolic where Joyce had pinched them to wash. They should smell like the outside, of sawdust and sweat.
The baby caught a fist on the wooden slats and yowled, then arched, heels and head on the mattress, his body twisting like he was trying out the jitterbug. What was going on? Was he choking? In the dead of night – and Lord knows she was greeting the dead of night often enough – she knew it was all her fault, that he knew she hadn’t meant to keep him and was punishing her for it. She hadn’t been out of the house yet, let alone made it back up to that church with him to put him there safely and scarper. And lately, tell the truth, she felt like crying (again! What had happened to her?) if she thought of leaving him, just as much as she did if she thought of being stuck here with him forever. Her plan was in tatters and there was nobody, nobody at all, she could talk it through with because they’d all think she was round the bend to want to leave the forest in the first place. Even Seppe, steadfast and understanding, but the gentlest person she knew would turn against her if he knew the plans for survival that went through her head. She was on her own with this one and she was scared something rotten.