A white glare builds behind my eyelids. I let it swell and loom. Metallic, scouring the retina. My daughter’s body I cannot think of, her name I cannot say. Her ashes lie in the little wooden chest on my bookshelf, unknown to everyone, even to Tom. I smuggle her through my life.

The flash recedes. Behind my eyelids, the shadows of spring leaves dance across the sunlit trunks of the beeches.

TWELVE

Yvette

16 May 1964

I will always remember Alver Shore for the kindness of the women.

In the weeks after we lost Catherine neighbors called on me, tied on their aprons, and did the dishes. Helped me with my weekly wash. “You’re not up to it,” they said firmly, whipping the handle of the mangle around with their stringy forearms. They were right. It would have taken me hours and hours.

“I feel useless,” I said to James one evening when we were sitting in our tiny parlor. I wasn’t lamenting. It was a simple fact.

He looked tired; he stared out of the window, lost in thought. “How long’s it been?” he said at last.

“Four weeks and two days.”

“Is that all? Good grief.”

I was glad he was aghast at the unendingness of it. But I knew how long it had been instinctively, and he had needed to ask.

The phone rang and he went to answer. “Yes, a stillbirth,” I heard him say in the low voice he used for this subject. “Quite shattering. Yvette’s doing as well as you’d expect. It’s very early days.”

It was extraordinary how he could even say it.

He came back and sat down again. “That was Mrs. Goodwin from the parish council. She was visiting her sister and she’s only just heard the news.”

“It was kind of her to ring. Would you like an omelet tonight?”

That was the sort of thing I could manage. Omelets.

“Yes, darling. That would be delicious.”

I was good with powdered egg, I added mustard and chives, but of all the things the omelet might turn out to be, delicious was surely not one of them. I stared at him where he sat, almost lay, in the armchair, one foot crossed over the other, arms folded too. Keeping himself covered: I didn’t blame him for that. Delicious was just another thing he felt he had to say, obviously. He had to go out and face people all day long. He’d been getting good at it, day after day. Moving through the gears.

Thinking, that, I got up from my chair.

—

We had a Hillman, small and very old. We thought about selling it, we used it so seldom. Some weeks all we did was turn the engine over. But petrol was off the ration now.

“I’m going for a drive,” I called to James, taking the keys out of the kitchen drawer.