Bread and Chocolate Read online

  We sat before the fire that evening, opened the box and took them out and wiped them clean together. There were some amazing pictures of deep tropical forest and a deep sepia brown river winding beneath tree trunks as high as the towers of a cathedral. There were a few shots of birds – rather disappointing, I thought. One was obviously dead, and one had flown before the exposure was completed. There were lots of photographs of the Indian villages from long distance, but very few people. The picture I had first seen, of the man with the spear and the bold stare, was the best. In one of the others the sitter had obviously lost his courage and fled before ten seconds.

  I printed them all as a record, and sent prints to George Cozens. There were two plates which were blank so I cleaned them and treated them for my own use. That would give me one in the camera and one to spare until I got some more glass.

  ‘It’ll drive you mad,’ Mark said with satisfaction. He knew how much film I liked to use before I had even one worthwhile shot. ‘You’ll never manage with only two shots at any picture.’

  ‘It’ll be good discipline for me,’ I said, smiling. The baby shifted inside me, and I took Mark’s hand and laid it on my rounded belly so he could feel the movement.

  ‘D’you feel her?’ I asked. ‘Can you feel her kick?’

  Mark nodded. ‘I need to make a phone call,’ he said. ‘You go on up to bed, you must be tired.’

  I went slowly upstairs. Behind me the sitting room door closed gently. I heard the click of the phone as he picked it up. I didn’t know who he was phoning. I held to the bannister and took a deep shuddering breath. The scars on my wrists tightened in remembered pain. I wondered if I had the courage to go back downstairs and open the door which he had shut so quietly. I wondered if I had the courage to say simply and honestly to him: ‘Mark, you made a decision. You came home to me, we moved house, I gave up my work and we are having a child. These are not decisions you can play with. I am not a hobby you can take up, or put down. You must not see her, or phone her, or even think of her again.’

  I waited on the stairs. I heard his voice say something, and then silence as the other person replied. I knew I could not find the courage to make demands of Mark. I was a hostage to fear. And besides, I said to myself, as I turned and went up the stairs, I might be lucky: it might not be Helen on the other end of that low-voiced conversation at all.

  The pains started that night as we slept. They woke me, like a nudge in the belly. For a little while I lay on my back and smiled at the moonlit ceiling, thinking of my baby, on her way to be born at last, after these long months of waiting. I felt myself to be blessed, blessed beyond and above anything I could ever have earned. Mark had come back to me, we now lived where the air was so sweet that you could taste it on your tongue, and my baby, who would make us a family, an indissoluble unit, was coming in this moonlit quiet night.

  I rolled over so I could see the clock. I watched the hands move and timed the uncontrollable clenching of my body. I breathed lightly, as I had learned to do, and then I woke Mark. He leaped out of bed in a panic, like a film version of an anxious father. He dragged on a track suit, he stumbled over my case at the door. He thrust clothes at me, imploring me to hurry. He slapped his forehead when he remembered that the car was low on petrol after our trip to the sale. I smiled. I felt as if I were floating, out to sea a long long way. As if I too, like my baby, was starting on a journey to an unknown country. By this time tomorrow night, I would hold my child in my arms.

  I was not afraid. Not at any time, though the labour lasted through the night and the baby was not born until half past ten in the morning. I was deeply tired then and I slept. The last thing I saw before I slept was Mark turning out his pockets for change for the telephone to tell people that our baby had been born, and that she was a perfect brown-headed blue-eyed girl. ‘Not Helen,’ I thought as I slid into sleep. I didn’t want to say it. I trusted him. He would not, I knew he would not, telephone Helen to tell her our child was born. Not right away.

  I hated the hospital. The cheerful insouciance of the nurses who changed my baby’s nappy with lightning skill, and wrapped her so she stopped crying, could not endear it to me. I came out after two days. My doctor said I was well; and anyway Maggie, my friend, had promised to come and stay and look after us all.

  She and Mark had a silent truce. He had not liked himself that night, when she had dragged him away from Helen. Now they were either side of my bed again and he remembered that she had rescued him from a fantasy of selfishness. He didn’t like looking bad in front of anyone. Especially not women. Maggie was matter-of-fact.

  ‘I bet you’re glad now, Mark,’ was all she ever said. She picked my little girl, Penelope, out of her hospital perspex cot and hugged her close. ‘I bet you’re happy now.’

  Mark looked happy. He could not do enough for me, for Penny. He took a fortnight off work and he got up through the night, and dozed in a chair during the day. He looked exhausted, but he glowed from inside. Maggie nodded at me and smiled with shared knowledge that she, and I, and even little Penelope, had won.

  As soon as I felt halfway back to normal I brought out the camera and showed it to Maggie. We waited until the baby was asleep. I didn’t want her face blurred by moving during the exposure. Maggie and I set up the camera while Mark was out shopping. It took a lot of doing. I used a modern tripod to get the angle right. I didn’t think that amounted to serious cheating. I plunged under the hood at the back and gazed at my baby through the thick glass window. Then I slid in the treated glass, took off the lens cap, pulled out the shielding slide and counted, slowly in my head, up to twenty-five.

  ‘Why twenty-five?’ Maggie asked.

  ‘It’s my age,’ I said. ‘It’s as good as any other figure. I haven’t a clue how long I should leave it.’

  We did two shots, with my two glass plates, and then I took them away to my darkroom and printed them up at once. I used sepia colours, a sentimental gesture to old Clive Cozens, the photographer who followed the fashion of his time and preferred sepia. Penny looked delicate, ethereal in the light brown. I loved the effect. I did two copies for me, one for George Cozens as I had promised, and one for Maggie.

  When Mark came home he brought steak for dinner – and a polaroid camera. ‘If we have to wait for photographs that satisfy you, we’ll be celebrating her wedding,’ he said, and kissed me on the top of my head.

  We drank a good bottle of wine between the three of us and then we went to bed. Penelope was asleep in the cradle at the bottom of our bed. I kissed her gently but she didn’t stir so I thought I would leave her to sleep.

  She did not wake me for feeding in the middle of the night.

  She did not wake at all.

  When I woke in the morning, to that dreadful silence, with a clutch of unknown terror like a cold fist grabbing my belly, I knew it had happened to her, to us. She was cold in her little crib. And the only thing I had left of her was the limp tiny body, and the pictures in the darkroom.

  Maggie stayed with us. Through the speechless agony of the next few days, Maggie took the phone calls, made the arrangements, ordered the flowers. Maggie chose the little white coffin and the white marble headstone. I could not bear to think of them. Mark and I fell into depths of complete silence and avoidance. He slept in another room while I tossed and turned in our bed. I kept starting up in the night, thinking I heard her crying for me. The ache in my wrists matched the raw gulf inside me.

  Maggie stayed. A full month. It was summer holiday at the school where she taught, and she cancelled her trip to America to stay with me until I could get through the day without weeping. She stayed until Mark was writing again, until we were eating ordinary meals and digging the garden, and talking about a conservatory. Then one day I came in from shopping, and the camera, the beautiful rosewood camera, was up on the tripod and Maggie was settling herself in front of it.

  ‘Take my picture,’ she said. ‘I fancy myself in a sepia print.’