Morag Joss - Half Broken Things

Steph and Michael resumed their search through the desk drawers and filing cabinets. Jean’s footsteps were crossing the hall again, and then they stopped. They listened to the silence. Jean must have paused in the hall, perhaps to consider the tall vase of daffodils on the carved chest opposite the stairs. She might have been drawing out the stems that were yellowing now and proffered flowers too crumpled and papery to deserve their places any longer, adjusting the fresher ones to fill the gaps they left. She would be humming to herself. Now came the faint creak and the sound of her climbing the stairs, another pause while she rested for a moment at the top. She might turn left to go to her room to change her shoes (sometimes she put on her slippers before tea) or, as they could hear her doing now, she might turn right along the broad landing. She did not, nor did they expect it, come into the study, but walked past the closed door towards the nursery. Michael and Steph smiled at each other. In a moment they would hear her talking softly to Miranda as she changed her, and then she would call them on her way past and they would all go down to tea. But the sound they next heard and which froze them where they stood was a rising, disbelieving scream.

It might have helped to be drunk. In a way I felt as if I were, in the sense that I still have no clear memory of the days following that one when I came upon Miranda dead. Glimpses, that’s all I have, and although I can’t be sure how many days it took, I know that Steph kept Miranda by her for too long, and that by the time Michael could persuade her to give her up so that we could bury her, some terrible things were happening.

I want it understood that the child was not neglected, whatever she might have died of. I hope that’s clear. Don’t think it hasn’t worried me, not getting a doctor. There must have been something wrong with her, perhaps her heart. I think now of the slight frown she sometimes wore when she was lying awake quietly; it seems to me now that she might have been listening to her little heart. I think it must have been her heart. It is hard to accept, but if that was the case then perhaps it was better to let her slip peacefully away, undisturbed by strangers. In the end, what do doctors know?

I prepared her with my own hands. There is no pain like it, the washing and dressing of the dead, because it is unbearable that one should be doing such things to a body that is so dear yet so changed, and equally unbearable that these necessities should be left undone or trusted to other hands. I used a strongly scented soap which I thought might do the trick at least for a while, but her skin began to wrinkle and slough, gentle though I was, and I feared that I was hurting her. I whispered that I was sorry, isn’t that silly? People sometimes say that dead people don’t look dead, they look as if they are sleeping. Miranda did not look asleep. Miranda was dead in my arms, gone. How else could I have contemplated placing her in the ground? I dusted her with talcum powder until I realised that it made me think of quicklime. I wrapped her in two white silk handkerchiefs. They covered her, tiny thing she was. She had hardly grown at all. I fancied that she looked even smaller than she had on the day she was born, though sometimes that happens when people die, they look emptied of something. I remember thinking that the silk would be soft against her skin, another silly thought, but it’s the kind of thing that comes to you in those circumstances.

Next I wrapped her white shawl round her tightly so that her mother would not feel the stick limbs. I had meant to dress her properly, in bonnet and bootees and everything, but I could not do it, not for the want of caring. Her hands and feet were too far gone. Then I slipped her into a pillowcase. Then I had a good idea; there were lots of lavender-filled pillows in the bedrooms, so I gathered them all up, ripped them open and poured all the dried lavender flowers in the pillowcase with her so that she would be buried with sweet flowers surrounding her. So that we might be distracted a little by the lavender scent and not have to notice the state she had got into. Then I bound her round and round with white ribbon, covering her completely.

Because by now Michael had managed to get through to Steph and almost bring her out of a kind of blindness that the death had plunged her into, and I did not want her to see (I do not think she really had seen it yet) the colour that her baby’s face had turned to.

So it wasn’t a tree, after all, that the space in the garden had been waiting for. We put Miranda there, in the same spot where her afterbirth lay buried. I hardly remember what was said. Michael had found volumes of poetry in the library, and he seemed to know what to say. I’m sure it was all beautiful, I remember parts of it, but of course it was not enough. A funeral is supposed to explain the whole thing, is it not? But not even my sweet Michael could find an acceptable way to say that this little one was dead and that she should be left in the dirty cold ground while we went back into the warm house without her. Steph could not be persuaded to come with us. So Michael buttoned her into her coat, and let her be. She stayed out until well after dark.

There followed several days when we could neither be together, nor bear not to know one another’s precise whereabouts. We could not rest in one spot, or seek out places of refuge. I roamed somewhat, trying to go about the jobs that needed doing, as did Michael, and even Steph. But we tired so easily, and would go to lie down and not manage to settle, and then we would come across one another wandering through the house again, or going about the garden. We could neither talk about Miranda, nor silence the clamour of her in our heads. I am speaking for myself, of course, and in truth there were times when I scarcely noticed what the other two were doing- but from what I did manage to take in, it was much the same for us all.

If there were any comfort to be had, it was in the knowledge that at least our child had not been taken away. She was dead, but nobody had been allowed to interfere. So we were all still together, all of us, including Miranda. Although she was dead and buried and gone from us, at least she lay not far away, and at home.

Steph’s days wasted one into the other, a cruel mirror of the time just after Miranda’s birth. Daylight lapped somewhere at the sides of the things she noticed, while Michael pushed and pulled her through the everyday and surely pointless practicalities of getting dressed, eating, bathing. In between times her brain swam, her empty arms stiffened and ached, her legs felt heavy and too weak to carry her far. She could not say whether it was through her body or her mind that she hurt more. It was as if loss jellified her. She felt boneless, a floating, absorbent thing that existed only to soak up pain. Then when her breasts began to ache with Miranda’s milk, she knew she had become some kind of efficiently functioning system for suffering. Night and day she processed raw material in the form of waves of perfect grief, which lapped and receded in her body, pricking, breaking, stabbing. Her breasts lifted, hardened and filled through countless incoming and ebbing tides of milk.

In the daytime she took long baths, as if she hoped to soak away her pain. She changed her clothes three and four times a day, swapping one anonymous, spotless shirt for another, yet her unhappiness clung; it lay beneath her pink skin and gleaming hair and beyond the reach of soap and water, or got itself caught up and buttoned in tight under her immaculate clothes. She walked about, ignoring the weight of her legs until she failed to notice the heaviness. Michael gave her little jobs to do, putting away a garden rake or carrying kindling, taking clothes to and from their bedroom to the laundry room; sometimes she would accomplish these tasks and sometimes stop them halfway through, forgetting. One day on the windowsill halfway down the stairs she came across two shirts, some socks and an empty tumbler that she had simply wandered away from, having paused at the window earlier on her way down. She spent a lot of time outside neither far from Michael nor yet with him, while he did what he could in the vegetable garden, but she was insensible to the sunshine which at times punched its way out through clouds and raised the smell of warm, dug soil into the air. She paced the paths and yards, the pool pavilion and outbuildings. She would stop and look at things for no apparent reason, and it was hard to know if she saw anything.