Beryl Fletcher

15

 

When Hannalore awoke, her bladder was full to bursting. She crept out of the windowless room and into the lean-to at the back of the building.

 

The long night appeared to be over. She opened the back door as quietly as she could. A watery sun shrouded in fog struggled to illuminate the denuded arms of fruit trees standing to attention in the long grass at the back of the property.

 

She walked quickly to the outhouse and relieved herself, thankful that it was too early in the day for the flies to be out and about. There was no lid on the wooden seat. She scooped up a measure of lime from the kerosene tin and threw it down the stinking hole. 

 

Back inside the lean-to she rinsed her hands in cold water over the sink. Someone shuffled in behind her. It was Lena, wearing a bedraggled satin dressing gown and pink slippers decorated with silken pompoms.  

 

Lena mumbled something about hot water. She led Hannalore inside to the kitchen. The firebox in the range glowed with heat. Lena filled a kettle with hot water from the tap at the side of the range. She poured the water into an enamel basin and handed Hannalore a sliver of soap.

 

‘Where is your towel?’

‘Still in my room.’

‘Oh.’

‘Shall I get it?’

‘No, let Juno sleep.’

 

Hannalore rubbed the soap into her frozen hands and soaked them in the hot water. Her skin turned the colour of beetroot.  

 

Lena removed the lid from a large iron saucepan at the back of the stove.

‘Soaking,’ she said. ‘Can you cook oats?’

‘Yes.’ 

‘Bread? Scones? Mutton stew? Pork bones?’

‘Yes.’

 

Lena stirred the oats and then sat down at the table. She took a tin of tobacco from the pocket of her dressing gown and rolled a smoke.

 

Hannalore was surprised to see a woman smoking but said nothing.

 

‘Well,’ said Lena, ‘if you’ve told the truth, you could easily get a job. How many did you cook for back in that place?’

 

‘About twenty.’

‘That’s good.’

‘Sarah and Augusta did most if it. I just helped.’

‘And Juno? Is she able to work in a kitchen?’

 

Hannalore hesitated.

 

‘I get the picture,’ said Lena. She stubbed out her cigarette and returned to the stove to stir the oatmeal. ‘But take heart, you won’t have to bear that burden for much longer.’

 

Hannalore removed her scalded hands from the enamel bowl. She thanked Lena for providing the hot water. But now she must go to see to Juno’s needs. She can become quite anxious in a strange place.

 

Lena laughed. ‘You’re your mother’s daughter that’s for sure.’

 

Hannalore kept her voice light. ‘Do you know Eleanor?’

 

Lena sat at the table facing Hannalore and rolled another cigarette. ‘If your father finds out I’ve even mentioned her name, I’m finished.’

 

‘Just tell me one thing. Is my mother still alive?’

 

‘Let’s do an exchange. You want information from me and I want something from you,’

 

‘I have nothing to give you.’

 

‘Yes you have. I want to read your hand.’

 

Hannalore asked her what she meant.

 

‘I keep forgetting how ignorant you are,’ said Lena. ‘Mind you, it’s not your fault that you were locked away from the world for years with a pack of god-forsaken loonies.’

 

Hannalore kept her silence but with it came a growing conviction that she was betraying Sarah and the others by not challenging Lena’s foul words about them. It was becoming more difficult by the minute to sit here meekly in this estranged place of fragmented memory and listen to this satin and silk-slippered woman mouthing falsehoods.

 

But Hannalore knew that Lena was her one vital link to Eleanor. She had to keep the peace no matter what she said or did. 

 

‘Give me your left hand,’ said Lena. ‘But before we start, you must promise not to repeat anything that comes out of this reading. Especially to your father.’

 

Hannalore nodded.

 

Lena said that she did not want to give Hannalore the impression that she was just a housekeeper, she was somewhat more than that. Quite a bit more in fact. And if she had not been foolish in her youth and married a man who loved his beer more than her, well, she could at this very moment be Hannalore’s step-mother. Alas, that drunken pig would not give her a divorce. It almost broke Mr Cooper’s heart that she was not free to marry.

 

Hannalore tasted the question on her tongue, but she did not speak the words aloud. Neither is he, not while my mother lives.

 

Lena took hold of Hannalore’s left hand and turned it palm up. Hannalore endured the probing of Lena’s index finger. 

 

‘This is the heart line,’ said Lena, ‘the best place to start. Yours is immature but already there are clues to your essential nature, a bonus in one so young. It starts beneath the middle finger. This means that you are selfish in love. This explains your possessive attitude towards Juno. Look at the stress lines crossing the heart line. Again caused by Juno. Her situation is impossible. The sooner she is taken away to be delivered of the child the better. Then you will be free.’

 

‘What child?’

 

Lena started to say something about men having one track minds, especially those men Hannalore had escaped from, sad twisted souls the lot of them. 

 

‘Stop,’ said Hannalore. ‘This is impossible. Juno would never let a man touch her.’

 

Lena said she must have. Unless her name is Mary and she has come back to earth to give birth to the next messiah. ‘Look, jokes aside, I had no idea that you didn’t know.’

 

Hannalore stood up. Her legs were shaking uncontrollably.

 

Lena said that she was sorry to have to be the one to tell her about Juno. Hannalore must discuss it with her father. He already knows. Why do you think he paid good money to Wilfred to get you both out? ‘But don’t tell him how you found out about it. He’ll go off his head if he knows that I still dabble in palmistry.’  

 

Hannalore fled the warmth of the kitchen for the chill windowless room where Juno lay sleeping. She looked flushed. Hannalore touched Juno’s forehead. It was damp.

 

She pulled back the eiderdown gently and touched Juno’s abdomen. It was a little swollen. For a brief second she wondered if Lena was mistaken but then she felt an unmistaken flutter, a slight ripple ending in a decisive movement of a foot or a tiny hand.  

 

So it was true then. This child, barely fourteen years old, had tasted the sin of fornication. 

 

Hannalore had always known that she would never be free of her sister’s needs but this unexpected complication plunged her into a state of despair. Juno could not look after herself let alone a baby. What if the baby became cursed with the same affliction that Juno had been born with? Was this a punishment from God, an act of revenge against her for running away from his sacred domain?

 

Since they had run away from the community she had understood more clearly than ever before their utter vulnerability. Once, all had been provided for them both and she had sealed the bargain with her contribution of years of laborious labour. Now she must find work outside the protection of the community, somewhere where Juno could be at her side at all times.

 

She uttered words of comfort to the sleeping Juno, words of forgiveness. The baby stirred within Juno’s abdomen and Hannalore imagined a faint ethereal whisper of thanks, a ruffle of sound like the dive of a kingfisher on a warm spring day into the river.

 

Her river.  The place she would never see again. She imagines herself floating on her back with her long plaited hair splayed out behind her in a net of glistening wet ropes. She imagines Mr Cattermole swimming towards her, smiling, his head barely above water. He cries out that he is almost half way along his journey, his quest to discover musica humana, the link between the inner harmony of the body and the outer expression of perfect order. He shakes his head like a wet dog and she sees one blue eye and one brown, and Mr Cattermole barks to the music of the body, and all sense is lost.