Chapter Ten 1893 #4
Revitalised, Ralph distributed their calling card, and they were duly invited to various teas and dinners.
Theo met the neighbours with the same formulaic good manners she’d learned at Hallewell, and in turn their hosts seemed to find her dull, or else the wrong kind of interesting.
She felt an affinity for just one person she met: Hermione Abbott, who lived a few houses further down Tout Hill.
Hermione was not much older than Theo but had three young children already, whom she openly adored and rarely disciplined.
She quickly guessed about the pregnancy.
‘You look a little green about the gills, Mrs Anscombe,’ she whispered, as their husbands talked about the Boers and Theo tried to eat a piece of cake though her hand was shaking and she was fairly sure she wouldn’t be able to put it in her mouth even if she succeeded in getting it on to the fork.
‘Are you ill?’ Hermione asked. ‘Are you . . . in a happy condition?’
Theo nodded, teeth clamped too tightly against the onslaught of nausea to reply.
‘Oh, how wonderful! And you poor, poor thing – I know exactly how you feel.’ She collared a passing servant.
‘Myrtle, have we any ginger? Do see if you can dig some out, and bring a hot infusion for Mrs Anscombe. It’s quite the best thing for it,’ she said, returning to Theo.
‘I drank nothing else the whole nine months with my first.’
‘Thank you. You’re very kind.’
‘Nonsense. We women must look after one another.’
Hermione was plump and lively; her face was dominated by big brown eyes and an expression of curiosity and general good humour.
She befriended Theo quickly and deliberately, and Theo didn’t mind at all.
She sensed no scrutiny from Hermione; no judgement or hidden opinions.
She also seemed to belong to an inordinate number of clubs and committees, and immediately set about recruiting Theo on to them.
‘What about politics?’ she asked, at a subsequent luncheon. ‘Are you at all interested? I’ve been trying to get up a women’s reform group, but it’s been all uphill so far.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’ Theo really didn’t.
‘Well, you must come this Friday – we’re having a bring-and-buy. Alms for veterans of the African wars. Then we can talk without our menfolk,’ she said, sotto voce, as though Theo must be brimming with secrets to tell.
Ralph got along well with Hermione’s husband, Frederick, who was an actuary and sports enthusiast, and so the two couples met often.
‘Which crusade has Mrs Abbott volunteered you for this week?’ Ralph said at the breakfast table one day. ‘The Ladies’ Society for the Protection of Newts?’
‘Don’t tease,’ Theo said. ‘I like her. She has so many ideas. She says that, as women, we mustn’t allow ourselves to be looked upon as little more than brood mares and the sewers-on of buttons.’
Ralph pulled a face. ‘Doesn’t she enjoy being a mother?’
‘Of course she does. That wasn’t—’
‘And you will too, my darling.’ He kissed her hand.
‘I already do.’
‘There, then. It doesn’t do to overreach oneself.’
By June, Theo’s middle had started to fill out; there was no abrupt bump as yet, just a subtle outward curve. They guessed her to be about four months along, close to halfway.
‘Like a snake that’s eaten a frog,’ Ralph said, running his hand the length of her in bed.
‘Dr Anscombe, please tell me this is not a frog I’m incubating?’
‘In my professional, medical opinion . . .’ He put his ear to her naked skin. ‘Time will tell.’
They shared a laugh, but the moment was slightly spoiled by him then counting her pulse and listening to her heart, though it had been only an hour since he’d last done so.
‘It’s a little fast. You must rest tomorrow.’
They also dined regularly with Ralph’s partner at the hospital, Dr Fortescue, and his wife, Margaret. Theo remembered him vaguely, from the morass of lost time around Kit’s trial and execution. The man who’d sedated her, and quashed any possibility of her going to Dorchester to speak.
Fortescue was a generation older; he had washed-out sandy hair and dry, mottled skin.
His face was gaunt, with wattles beneath his chin and flinty grey eyes.
He was the senior physician, pharmacist and pathologist at the Westminster Memorial, where Ralph was junior physician and in-house surgeon – in such a small institution, combined roles were necessary.
When he looked at Theo, she felt naked. There was nothing sexual in his gaze – nothing admiring whatsoever – but it penetrated her, coldly, dismissively.
As though she were a painting he didn’t care for, or a tedious child.
His wife, Margaret, barely spoke at all.
She took tiny bites of food, her back never less than brutally straight.
‘Our neighbour, Mrs Abbott, plans to establish a branch of the English Ladies’ Cycling Association in Shaftesbury,’ Theo announced, into an especially large hole in the conversation. ‘I have always wondered about trying it.’
‘In your condition?’ Fortescue was indignant.
‘No, but . . . perhaps one day.’
‘Women should not ride bicycles,’ the doctor declared. ‘Their physiology is wholly unsuited to the pressures and exertion of the pedalling action.’
‘Oh, but Mrs Abbott says she enjoys almost nothing so much as cycling,’ Theo said. ‘She says women aren’t quite the gossamer creatures poets have made us out to be, and that the exercise is thoroughly invigorating.’
Ralph frowned slightly, and Margaret looked up in slow outrage. Fortescue fixed Theo with his frigid stare.
‘Mrs Abbott would do well to heed expert opinion, rather than persisting in such deleterious behaviour. A woman has no need of invigoration. Quite the opposite. They tend far too easily toward hysteria.’
Theo took this to heart, and felt tarnished. But some inner part of her also bridled at being chastised at her own table.
‘I don’t believe—’
‘My dear,’ Ralph interrupted her stiffly. ‘That will do.’
Theo flushed, and said no more.
Her husband was different around Dr Fortescue; deferential, as though, despite their being equal partners, his position were in the older man’s gift. She wondered whether, having lost his parents, Ralph looked upon Fortescue as a father figure, and sought his approval.
‘Fortescue? As a father?’ Ralph laughed, when she asked him later on. He shuddered comically. ‘Heavens, no. I can’t imagine anything more terrible for a child.’
He took her hands, still smiling. ‘No, my love. It was just rather ill-mannered of you to disagree with him like that.’
Theo didn’t even notice the date until afterwards.
She was out in the garden helping Seth train a rose up the side of the house.
Her role was very minor: she held a basket containing scissors, twine and vine eyes, and passed him whichever he asked for.
It was a beautiful day, with a warm breeze out of the south and the air full of birds, and Theo’s mind had been gathering wool when a sudden pain and a wash of cold made her gasp. Like she’d fallen into icy water.
She dropped the basket and sank to her knees. Audrey and Mrs Meredith came running, and took her up to bed, and Ralph was there within the hour.
‘What’s happening?’ Theo demanded, the second she saw him.
‘Hush, Theo,’ he said, as he examined her. ‘Try to be calm.’
‘I cannot be calm!’
A midwife arrived, one that Ralph knew and trusted, and he left the room with his face rigid. Theo thought he looked afraid, but couldn’t tell. She was too frightened herself. Audrey held her hand and didn’t let go.
‘Make it stop,’ Theo ordered the midwife, as pain beat through her and she knew, without being told, what it meant. ‘It is far too soon.’
The midwife looked grave. She put her hands on Theo’s middle, and felt the ripples getting stronger.
‘A bit of grit is what’s needed now,’ she said, with a nod and a not-quite smile. ‘Nowt to be done about it, and you’ve plenty of time to make more.’
‘But I want this one!’ Theo panted through clenched teeth. ‘Audrey, tell her! You must do something . . . please!’
‘Best just get it over with,’ the midwife said. ‘This one weren’t meant to be.’
‘No . . . Call my husband back . . . He is a doctor, he’ll do something – he’ll make it stop!’
‘Oh, miss . . .’ Audrey said, distraught.
‘Now then,’ the midwife said. ‘That’s enough of that pother. What do a man know, be he doctor or not? This babber’s lost to you. I’ve seen it a thousand times.’
She wasn’t trying to be cruel, but Theo had never heard such terrible words. The woman washed her hands, and parted Theo’s knees.
‘Soon be over,’ she said.
Theo never saw the child. She drifted away towards the end of the labour, and by the time she surfaced the bed was clean and the room had been aired, and a fire lit despite the summer.
She herself had been washed and put into a clean nightdress – there was a vague memory of Audrey combing her hair.
It stayed light until late in the evening, and Ralph came up to lie behind her, wrapping his arms around her.
‘Where’s the baby?’ Theo asked. ‘Where have you taken him?’
‘Theo, my darling . . . The foetus has been removed. Try not to think of it.’
A sob shuddered through her. ‘He was dead? But . . . where have they taken him?’
‘It . . . was a girl.’
‘You saw her?’
‘Shh, now. Yes, I saw her. It . . . she was never meant to live, my darling.’
Misery clamped its teeth into Theo. Her tears ran constantly, unnoticed.
‘What shall we call her?’
‘Call her?’ Ralph echoed. ‘My love . . . at so early a stage, the child cannot be said to have truly lived. Try to think of that – we have lost the possibility of a child, this time, not a substantive one. A foetus—’
‘Please, don’t say that word.’
‘It is the proper word, my darling.’
‘But I hate it. I cannot hear it.’
‘Hush now. I will give you something to help you sleep.’
‘I don’t want to sleep. I want my baby. And if you will not name her then I will – Amelia, after my sister.’