Born of Woman by Wendy Perriam Page B

spoon.
    â€˜Yes, it … er … was a shock, Mrs Wise.’ Yellow custard plopping onto her lilac Crimplene bodice, sliding down her cleavage. ‘No, the doctor wasn’t there. I’m afraid he …’
    He lurched away, collided with someone else, a tall tweedy woman who smelt of dogs. She grabbed his arm, bony fingers digging in his flesh. ‘We’re all so very sorry, Mr Winterton.’ Face thrust close to his. Purple gauze of thread-veins, mole with a coarse black hair in it sprouting from her cheek. ‘I understand it happened very suddenly?’
    He nodded, pulled his arm free. Impossible to escape. People all around him—mouths, mouths, mouths. Everybody guzzling—swilling tea, gorging cakes, gulping down his mother. He was bleeding like those cherries in the trifle, red stain into white. His head was a meringue—hollow, full of air. The smallest guest could have crunched him up to nothing, crumbled him away. Clack-clack-clacking. Empty words.
    â€˜No, thanks, Mrs Dixon, I’ve still got half a cup left. No, we weren’t there when it …’ He picked up a cupcake, put it down again. Pink sugared petals sprinkled on white icing. Flowers on a winding-sheet. ‘We couldn’t leave before, you see. We didn’t realise quite how bad she … b … bad … she …’
    Go away !
    They didn’t go till evening. Lyn lay on the high, narrow bed—Susannah’s bed—the one she had died in. Both his mothers dead now. He tried to make some sense of it—poke a finger in his grief and feel it smart and bleed. It didn’t. Death was still a party dragging on downstairs.
    He pressed his aching head against the pillow. Susannah must have lain here, exhausted from such company. How had she ever borne it—so young and dazzling a creature amongst all these country bumpkins with their coarse complexions and their baggy clothes? Susannah’s skin was Dresden, her body cut from silk. He knew because he had seen her. Just a glimpse of her, hidden in a locket, one curl of her hair. He had found the locket when he was still a stripling in short pants, rifling through the huge mahogany roll-top which belonged to his dead father. The desk was locked and the room was out-of-bounds, but Hester had gone shopping and a boy at school had taught him to pick locks.
    He had held the booty in his hands—a heavy heart-shaped locket on a golden chain. He’d forced it with his dirty fingernails. One side opened to reveal a lock of hair, faded but still fair, curling gently like a smile. The other side was jammed. He put a penknife to it, sliced his finger, bled through two large handkerchiefs before he won. The prize was worth the blood. The young girl gazing at him was a different species from the rugged village women who creaked and clacked in Mepperton or the spindly schoolgirls he avoided at his school. Her face was prouder, finer, with high, preening cheekbones contradicted by the wanton tumble of hair which cascaded to her shoulders, one daring curl falling across the cleavage which the locket-frame cut off. Her eyes were huge, wooing, shameless; long lashes almost fluttering him towards her; moist lips slightly parted as if to proposition him.
    â€˜ Susannah ,’ he whispered. He knew who she was, because he had already drawn her in his dreams. Now he made his sketches fit the truth, until Susannah rose huge and three-dimensional in every surface of his life. For eleven days he owned and worshipped her ( adored, beloved ), sleeping with her locket every night, staring at it, touching it cool against his heated body—touching himself.
    When he came, Susannah held him stiff, reassured him afterwards when he felt shamed and sticky; kissed his lips apart when he had bitten them to stop himself from crying out.
    The eleventh night he was lying awake with her, pyjama cord undone, locket against his groin. They were making noise