Patrick White - Voss

Fear compelled her to drag her mistress back.

‘On the contrary,’ murmured Laura, ‘it is warm tonight. Far too warm, in fact.’

But she was returned to her actual body.

Then the young woman took the stiff, cold hand of her maid, and led her indoors.

One evening, as Rose Portion was seated by the lamp, picking over some work that she had taken into her lap to pacify her mistress, she looked up quite suddenly. A savage hand had carved the lines deeper in her grey face, which, under light, was more than ever that of a dumb animal.

‘Oh, miss, I cannot bear it,’ breathed Rose.

‘You shall,’ said Laura, getting up.

The woman clenched her teeth, until the grey sweat ran in the channels of her face. It was as if the breath were being torn out of her.

‘It is time,’ said Laura.

‘I do not know,’ Rose replied. ‘At least, it is the pains. I would die if I could.’

Then Laura sent Jim Prentice with the brougham to fetch the midwife, who arrived shortly, with an infallible knowledge of the world and a leather bag.

Mrs Child was a small woman with eyes so sharp and black they could have strayed down from amongst the other jet ornaments accumulated on her bonnet. For reasons of policy, she began by ignoring the patient, while enumerating to Miss Trevelyan those articles she would need in the course of operations. And all the time, the midwife was glancing here and there, as if she had been in the furniture trade, instead of belonging to her own particular branch of the conjuring profession. For Mrs Child knew: however discreet the eyes, and modest the behaviour, solid mahogany and figured brocade must be taken into account. So she reckoned up, accordingly.

Now, when she had removed her bonnet and disposed of her pelisse, the midwife deigned to notice the patient. She ran at Rose, with all her curls a-jingle, and gave her what could have been a pinch.

‘You, Mrs Portion,’ shouted this jolly soul, ‘your trouble is a little one, that you will be calling a blessing by tomorrow night.’

The pregnant woman, who was holding her arms rigid across her belly, gave a long, terrible moan.

So that Mrs Bonner shuddered, in the little, far parlour, which they seldom used, and where she had hoped not to hear.

The midwife sucked her teeth.

‘There, dear. You must not fight against receiving such a wonderful gift. Woman truly vindicated, as a reverend gentleman once put it. But I do not reckon your time is come, unless I do not know my business, and nobody can accuse me of that. I would say, at a guess, in another two, or three, even, or it could be four hours. Now, miss, would it be possible for me to take some light refreshment? I always dine early, to be ready to give service, seeing as the night air seems to work upon the poor things.’

While Mrs Child was demolishing a nice mutton chop, together with a liberal portion of baked custard, and describing for the benefit of Cassie the details of the more spectacular cases to which she had been called, Laura Trevelyan made the necessary preparations. She was exalted now.

‘On the good carpet!’ wailed Mrs Bonner in her distant parlour.

‘I have put newspaper,’ replied her niece. ‘At least four layers of the Herald .’

But the aunt was not consoled. In her isolation, for her husband had remembered a message he had failed to deliver to a friend, and kind Mrs Pringle had carried off their daughter Belle for as long as circumstances required, Mrs Bonner had been reading a sermon, and just now was offering a prayer, for the poor sufferer, which signified: herself. So she passed the evening, in the green-backed mirror, in her stuffy room.

Then a great cry was shattering all the glass in the house. The walls were falling. Flesh subsided only gradually upon the ridge of the spine, to be shocked further at sound of the midwife bouncing up the stairs like an indiarubber ball. She was a very tough small woman, it seemed, who proceeded to wrestle with life itself for the remainder of the night.

In the spare room the kindly lamplight had grown inordinately hard. Nothing was any longer hid, nor would the Brussels carpet muffle. The midwife had the woman sitting on an upright chair, from which her solid gown hung in long, petrified folds. Now that the agony had begun, the girl who had willed it was herself stunned into stone. The knot of her hands was carved upon her waist, as she stood in her corner and listened to doom writing upon a slate.

Only the midwife continued to move, round and about, with the resilience of rubber.

‘Hands on the arms of the chair, dear,’ she advised. ‘You would bless me for it, if you only knew.’

But the woman in labour shrieked.

A flow of endless time began to fill the room. Laura Trevelyan would have prayed, but found that her mind was stuck to the roof of her mouth.

Even the lowing beast was, in the end, stilled.

‘It is the head that is giving the trouble,’ Mrs Child remarked, as, her face averted in considerable delicacy of curls, she fumbled and bungled under Rose Portion’s gown. ‘If you are not an obstropulous little wretch!’

The mother was beyond caring as she drowned in that sea.

In spite of her stone limbs, Laura Trevelyan could have screamed with pain. Her throat was bursting with it. They would all be strangled by the darkness, she suspected, when a curious transformation of their faces began at last to take place. Their livid, living stone was turning, by divine mercy, into flesh. The shutters were slashed with grey. Its thin stuff lay upon the newspapers with which the carpet was spread.

It is moving, we are moving, we are saved, Laura Trevelyan would have cried, if all sound had not continued frozen inside her throat. The supreme agony of joy was twisted, twisting, twisting.

Then the dawn was shrieking with jubilation. For it had begun to live. The cocks were shrilling. Doves began to soothe. Sleepers wrapped their dreams closer about them, and participated in great events. The red light was flowing out along the veins of the morning.

Laura Trevelyan bit the inside of her cheek, as the child came away from her body.

‘There,’ said the midwife. ‘Safe and sound.’

‘A little girl,’ she added with a yawn, as if the sex of the children she created was immaterial.

The actual mother fell back with little blubbering noises for her own poor flesh. She had just drunk the dregs of pain, and her mouth was still too full to answer the cries of her new-born child.

But Laura Trevelyan came forward, and took the red baby, and when she had immersed it in her waiting love, and cleaned it, and swaddled it in fresh flannel, the midwife had to laugh, and comment:

‘Well, you are that drawn, dear, about the face, anyone would think it was you had just been delivered of the bonny thing.’

Laura did not hear. All superficial sounds were swallowed up in her own songs.

Later, she carried the baby through the drowsy morning to that remote room in which her aunt had chosen to do penance. But Mrs Bonner’s cap had slipped. Day had caught her dozing in a chair. She woke up. She said:

‘I knew I would not be able to sleep for the terrible noise. So I sat in the chair, and waited.’

‘And here is the baby,’ said Laura, stooping.

‘Oh, dear,’ said Aunt Emmy. ‘What is it?’

‘It is a girl.’

‘Another girl!’

Mrs Bonner lamented the boys she did not have, and whom, she liked to think, she would have managed and understood.

‘We must do the best by her, then,’ she sighed. ‘Until her future has been settled.’

As for the baby, she had but exchanged one room for another, or so it seemed. She was still curled, with her instincts, in the transparent, pink cocoon of protective love, upon which a vague future could have no possible effect.