Free Spilt Milk by Amanda Hodgkinson Page B

fed.
    ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll come with you. Just for a few days.’

Five
     
    Vivian had no idea how the child would be born, but she loved it already. Some days she lay on her bed for hours, a hand on her belly, feeling the movements it made. How would it find its way out of her? Her ignorance shamed her. She’d heard Nellie talk of lambing. Of the afterbirth and the importance of it not being left in the ewes. She supposed a human birth would be similar. She’d read all their housekeeping books and found only passing references to childbirth. Water needed to be boiled and a layette should be prepared. She should have seen a dentist, one book said. Pregnancy loosened women’s teeth. Another book recommended that after the birth the mother should stay in bed for three weeks without moving. Then she could get up and wash herself. But how could she do that alone?
    Vivian looked at the clothes she had sewn, the small nighties and cotton caps, and hoped they would do. Everything was prepared as best it could be. She’d told the vicar’s wife she could not wash their linen any more, blaming the cold of winter, saying her fingers were rheumatic. She still wore a girdle tightly bound to hide her swelling shape, but in the cottage she risked undoing it, relieved to be able to breathe a little easier. She never took it off completely, thinking that if anybody came to visit her she’d have time to pull the girdle’s restricting laces tight again before opening the door.
    Without any income now, she had to rely on her own stores to eat. She had stocked up on tinned foods before her money had run out. She’d bought flour, lard, sugar and salt, raisins and tea. All through the summer months she preserved fruit and made jams and pickles with this moment in mind. Jars of beans and tomatoes and cases of apples filled a shelf in the pantry. By beingcareful she’d had plenty to eat over the winter and enough to last to springtime.
    She gathered sticks and branches and made a log pile taller than herself. In the orchard, clumps of waxy snowdrops bloomed and Vivian picked bunches of them, filling the cottage. Jars and old tin cans filled with white flowers lined the stairs, the shelves and windowsills. They gleamed like hundreds of tiny candles. Dressed in the red robe the vicar’s wife had given her, Vivian prepared her home for the child.
    When her time came, she screamed because she thought someone might hear her and come to help. When nobody came, she fell silent. Nellie’s hagstone hung from a string over the mantelpiece, a charm to protect her. She had piled wood by the fire and brought in the last of the coal. Vivian laid out Rose’s old newspapers on the floor and fed the stove until the kitchen was so heated, sweat ran down her face. The windows steamed as though a hundred faces were pressed against them, watching her solitary endeavours.
    ‘That baby was cold as winter,’ Anna was saying, sitting by the fire in her cottage, holding court, regaling Nellie with her tales of birthing local women. ‘I can assure you, the child’s mother saw it was gone from us. She was crying like a cat stuck down a well. I cannot tell you what wholly occurred that day, but I rubbed the little thing with my hands, standing over the fire with it, massaging it till it coughed and spat and took a breath. I put it to its mother’s breast and it sucked so hard the mother fainted.’
    ‘Is that really true?’ asked Nellie. She was stirring a pot of soup on the cooking range. Anna was full of stories and Nellie doubted most of them, but they drew her in nevertheless.
    ‘Do I look like a liar?’ said Anna. ‘I en’t got no tall-tale blisters on my tongue. I only speak the truth, and if I don’t like the truth then I don’t speak it. So there.’
    Nellie nodded. She’d heard Anna say that many times. She had been living with Anna and her daughter Louisa for a month now.Several times she’d walked up to her old home, thinking