I hoped that Edward would begin to flourish once we were installed in the barracks at Chatham, but he remained a sickly child, undersized, gaunt, whimpering in my arms. Anne and I came to know each other in the long nights and days of taking turn and turn about trying to comfort him. We tried sitting him up and lying him down, nursing him and burping him, swaddling him tight and leaving him unwrapped. In the end Anne made a kind of hammock for him from a shawl, tying him tight against me, and her clever contrivance gave us all some respite.
Dear Anne, she did not despair as I did, was not ready to give up on the child. Came upon me more than once, limp in the armchair with Edward crying on my lap while I sat and leaked endless tired tears. Led me to the bed, pulled the covers up gently as if she were the mother and I the child, and took Edward away until, waking from a dense sleep, I was ready again to put my shoulder to the wheel of this business of being a mother.
He lived a week, a month, two months, and I thanked the God I did not believe in that this child was not, as I had dearly wanted a year earlier, dead.
He was not yet three months old when Mr Macarthur came upon me nursing him in the big armchair by the fire. Edward and I were joined as if the one creature, my body relaxed against the cushions and his warm weight folded tightly in against me, his starfish fingers caressing the source of bliss and his little feet twining together in ecstasy.
When Mr Macarthur filled the doorway I did not have time to rearrange the tableau. A mother can hardly feel guilt for nursing her own infant, yet it was with a sense of being caught out that I had the impulse to cover myself. Edward on the instant felt the change in my mood, the smooth rhythm of his sucking faltered, he spluttered, choked, let out his thin bird-call of distress.
I saw Mr Macarthur’s expression change as he stared at something he had never seen before: his wife lost in the delight of a loving embrace. What was that naked look? Shock, surprise: they were part of it. But something else too: loss, longing, loneliness, grief.
– A thousand pardons, Mrs Macarthur, he said, and the moment hardened into the courteous apology of a gentleman disturbing his lady wife. Forgive my intrusion, if you please.
Then he was turning and quietly closing the door.
Seeing that grief, no matter how quickly hidden, I understood that Mr Macarthur was a bully, a boaster, a charmer—a tweaker of every human string—not because he was simply made in a bad mould. Like me, he knew himself to be alone in the great spinning universe, a speck of nothing girded around by all the robust cleverness he took comfort behind. But where I had met that speck and greeted it as a companion, he only knew himself prey, as we all were, to doubt. Uncertain of his welcome, as we all were. He was, in short, a fellow soul, but too fearful to recognise another, or to trust her.