Laura Elliot - On Your Doorstep - Perfect for those who loved Close to Home

I wrapped my daughter in a soft white towel and rocked her in my arms. I rested my back against the wall. It grew dark outside. I felt hot then cold, my thoughts lucid then drifting. Why fight any longer? Someone would find us eventually.

I ignored the phone when it rang. The caller was insistent. The sound made me quiver but I stayed where I was. The silence, when it stopped, pressed against my ears. I became conscious of other sounds: the creak of old wood, the hiss and gurgle of pipes, the intrusive sighs of a house that has belonged to many generations. The bathroom blind clanged against the window frame and demanded my attention. I wanted to rise and close the window, keep out the scent of the night scented stock I had planted in the spring. It wafted in waves through the stifling atmosphere: sweet and cloying, demanding my attention.

The phone rang again. I became afraid. If it was Miriam, she would drive over to see why I was not answering. Earlier, I had left her working late in her studio. She was probably still there burning the midnight oil, as she usually did when she had an exhibition coming up. If it was David calling from the oil rig, he would ring his mother and the result would be the same. She would drive over immediately to check that all was well. The back door was open. She would enter unannounced and then it would be too late.

I stumbled to my feet and laid my baby, my still and silent little bundle, on the floor. I opened the door of the living room. My hip knocked against the sideboard. Yellow roses drooped in a vase. Some petals had already fallen and more followed, spilling silently onto the polished wood, as if my laden breath had disturbed their fragile link to the stem. How long had I been drifting? Minutes, hours? Somewhere, in my mind, I was still bending over the blood-red poppies and the rooks were swirling.

My suspicions were correct. Miriam’s anxiety was carefully controlled yet it stretched, taut as a membrane, between us. She asked how I was and I told her I was fine…fine. My voice was steady. That surprised me. Steady and calm while inside I was howling.

This was the second time she had called, she said, and she waited for an explanation.

I told her I’d been walking – such a fine, balmy evening. She warned me that the lane could be dangerous, easy to trip on a broken branch, to slip on mulching leaves; she knows every step of the lane, as David does, but I am a city woman, transplanted.

‘I’ll drop in and see you on the way home,’ she said. ‘I want to show you the new sketches.’

I almost blurted out the truth. But I thought about the last time, and the time before, and before…and the well-worn, well-meaning platitudes that stretched thinner and thinner each time she uttered them. Tomorrow, when I was stronger, more able to handle my grief, then I would break the news.

‘I’m on my way to bed,’ I said. ‘I’ll look at them tomorrow. Talk to you then.’

I walked to the front door and folded my arms, pressed them against my breast. Light spilled around me but, beyond the porch, an impenetrable darkness stretched across the Burren. It seemed, as I stood there, that the night was whispering, that even the wind breathed my pain. In the rustle of leaves against the wall I heard the whispers and I heard them rise above a howl that lunged from the darkness. Phyllis Lyons’s dog barking at the moon, the sound silenced as suddenly as it started. But still the whispering continued. I felt myself sinking into the powerful refrain, my lips moving, framing the words, making them audible – No more…no more…no more…

What does premeditated mean? Is it a conceived plan – or a thought unborn until the moment of delivery? I wrapped my baby in a white blanket and sealed her in a plastic shroud. I carried her gently to the old cottage in the lane. It hulked in the half-light, a crumbling ruin, shouldering briars and ivy, the ground covered in dense banks of nettles. Children once played within these crumbling walls and slept beneath a thatch that hugged them tight. Long gone now, both the children and the thatch. I stumbled through the weeds and the high purple thistles that pushed their heads through the cracks in the stone floor. I laid her down on white bindweed bells and dug her grave outside the walls.

The garden has long lost its form. A low drystone wall marks its boundaries. In the summer the whitethorn and lilac grows wild, and the ripe fruit drops silently from a long forgotten plum tree during the autumn months. I wanted to name her. Everyone needs a name to stamp their identity on this world, no matter how brief their stay. Joy, I whispered. You would have brought us such joy. My body ached, bled, wept for what I had lost; but when I left that place, my mind was a cold, determined force with no room for grief or doubt.

In the hallway, I paused before a mirror. The weight I had gained during my brief pregnancy seemed to have fallen from my cheeks. My eyes had steel in the blue, a stranger’s eyes staring back at me through swollen eyelids, defying me to question or condemn. My hair looked dark, the blonde strands lank with sweat and mud. I was unrecognisable from the woman who had earlier walked the lane; yet, it seemed effortless, this casting aside of an old skin and stepping into the new.

I slept and awakened, slept again. I had no memory of dreams. Dawn was leaching the stars from the sky when I arose and showered dirt from my body, burned my clothes, the towels, the bathroom mat. I washed the floor and walls. I threw out the yellow roses. A bird sang outside the kitchen window, a shrill, repetitive solo, until others took up the song. Their chorus throbbed through the morning.

I rang Miriam and told her I would work from home for a few days. Too many interruptions in the office and I had spreadsheets to prepare, catch-up phone calls to make. Later, David rang from the rig.

‘Our baby moved,’ I told him. ‘Like a butterfly, fluttering wings beneath my heart.’

The words turned to ash in my mouth but they had been spoken and I heard him sigh, as if he had placed his hands upon my belly and felt his child respond. And all around me, in the cracks and crevices of these walls, in the nooks and crannies of this old house, in the chinks of all that had passed since I moved here, the voices whispered – No more…no more…no more.

Carla Kelly is everywhere. The public face of Anticipation. I see her on billboards and bus shelters, in glossy advertisements. Her white teeth, her full pink lips, her long blonde hair, and that look in her brown eyes, that amber shimmer of contentment; earth mother-to-be, with attitude and glamour.

These days, she’s the first celebrity to be interviewed in the media whenever the subject of pregnancy is aired. She writes a column in Weekend Flair. ‘My Pregnancy Diary’ she calls it. How to retain one’s sexuality and sense of fashion during those long nine months. Promoting Anticipation all the time. One thing about her, she always was professional.

The Anticipation maternity collection, Dee Ambrose told me when I called into the Stork Club boutique this afternoon, is the most popular label she’s ever carried. Lorraine Gardner is an excellent designer and she’s touched gold with Anticipation. I was so impressed, I bought a pair of fine wool trousers and a silk twist top.

Perfect for the final trimester, said Dee, and wrapped them in tissue paper before placing them in a carrier bag. Anticipation was written in gold lettering against a black background. An elegant bag for an elegant collection. On the way out of the boutique, I almost collided with a lifesize cutout of Carla Kelly. Dee laughed, noticing how my mouth opened with an apology in the same instant that I realised it was part of the promotion.