The Undertow by Jo Baker Page A

duty.”
    She knows what this means. That he was below, trapped in the boiler room. In the heat and dark and water.
    “I’ll make you tea.”
    She sits in the good chair in the cold parlour, holding onto the basket balanced on her knees. He goes into the kitchen. She listens to him clattering clumsily with the range, stoking up the fire. And then quiet, as he stops, as he muffles his sobs.
    She rests her forehead on the arch of the basket’s handle, looks down at the clumsily rolled ribbon, the cotton reel with its thread wound untidily on. The tiny things, tinged grey from the street and the old man’s handling.
    It is her fault.
    She should never have asked Mr. Travis about the job, never have spoken or thought or planned for afterwards. She jinxed him: she has jinxed them all.
    She picks out the thin yellow ribbon, scallop-edged, and unrolls it carefully, then twists the end round her fingertips, and begins to roll again. Then she does the same for the mauve. The basket tidied, she sets it on the floor. Then she lifts her picture book off the green baize of the card table. She turns the pages, touches the glazed surfaces of the postcards. These past months the cards have fallen through the letterbox like waymarkers, like pebbles dropped in the woods, marking off distance and time. A confirmation of his continuation in the world. A reminder of his love.
    The track stops here. The final pages are empty. There is no way forward.
    She has no photograph of him. This comes with a flash of sudden utter panic. It is too late now ever to have a photograph.
    What if she forgets what he looks like?
    Hand shaking, she turns back through the pages: blue-washed sky and mountains and women in native dress, a foreign street with camels clopping down it, a rowing boat drifting in a blue grotto. Trying somehow to put him together in her mind. She remembers the flash of his green eyes in the bioscope, the touch of his hands on her waist. The brush of his arm against hers as he leant across and opened the empty book, showed her the blank pages they would fill between them.
    She could have had anyone, her mother always said. So why on God’s good earth did it have to be
him?
    Because he was everything. He was necessary. He always will be.
    She won’t forget. She won’t let herself, ever. She insists on remembering.

Knox Road, Battersea
May 27, 1915
    SHE LEANS DOWN IN HER CHAIR to button her boot, and there is a sudden hot trickle of liquid between her legs. Oh Lord. She stands up and twists round to look at the seat of her blue shift-dress, and there is a dark wet blot there. Oh goodness. She flushes. Is this something that happens? Do women in her condition just wet themselves sometimes? She doesn’t know, but it always seems that other women manage the whole thing so much better than she does.
    At least she is alone. At least there is no-one to see.
    Flustered, she steps back out of her boots, and goes to climb the stairs. Her thighs chafe in the wet. She tries to hold it back, but can’t: the water oozes out of her in a steady seep.
    She doesn’t know what’s happening. Has she damaged herself somehow? Has she harmed the baby?
    She is halfway up the stairs when the first contraction hits, making her gasp, stop, and grab the banister; and with it a burst of wet that runs down the inside of her thighs.
    Shaken, she climbs on up, and in the bedroom pulls off her dress, and her shift, which is wet through at the back. The smell is not ammonia, but warm and brackish. Not urine. Hands shaking, she pulls aside underwear to find the long-unused rags at the bottom of her drawer. Sort herself out, then she’ll go next door, and speak to Mrs. Clack, and try and bring herself to ask her if this is normal, if this is what is supposed to happen—and what she is supposed to do about it.
    As she stands at the dresser lifting out her clothes, the child shifts itself around inside her. She feels the sudden urge to make water, and tugs the pot