The Hours Before Dawn (13 page)

I
t was several seconds before Louise was sure that the redness before her eyes was only the redness of the dying fire; longer still before she was sure that this feeling in the small of her back was only the ache and stiffness that comes from falling asleep in an armchair. But there was no mistake about the screaming. Louder and louder it sounded from the floor above, and still half-dazed Louise looked at the sitting-room clock. Two o’clock, of course. She struggled to her feet and stumbled upstairs to Michael’s room.

He did not seem to have woken anyone yet. Mechanically, as if she had pressed some button to set this maternal robot of a self in motion, Louise scooped him out of the cot and carried him downstairs to the scullery.

While she fed him he was quiet, eyeing her impassively over the curve of her breast, and he sucked down the milk in great satisfied gulps. And then, when he had finished, he began to cry again.

How he cried tonight! Worse, it seemed to Louise, than he had ever been before. Struggling, kicking, threshing about on her lap; pulling himself up, as if with desperate purpose, into a standing position against her shoulder, and then, once there, crying more desperately than ever. He did not seem to
be exactly angry – nor frightened – nor in pain. His crying had that senseless, timeless quality that she remembered from the occasional bad nights of Margery and Harriet’s babyhood. If only they could
tell
me what’s the matter! she remembered thinking, and now, at eight and six, they
were
able to tell her what was the matter. Able, and indeed willing, to tell her for hours on end and with scarcely a pause for breath. And how blessedly comprehensible it all was. How utterly different from this senseless, soulless noise which seemed to destroy all possibility of human contact. When a baby was like this, nothing could be got across to him, nothing at all, not even the warm primitive contact of hugging him to her breast….

Louise became aware of a sharp, insistent knocking on the wall. It must have been going on for a minute or more, but she had at first drowsily supposed it to be the dripping tap; now, with sickening certainty, she knew what it was. It was Mrs Philips. Mrs Philips, who was having a new hot-water system put in upstairs, and who would therefore be sleeping in the downstairs back room – the one that adjoined Louise’s kitchen. Now, for whatever length of time that leisurely, chain-smoking plumber chose to spend on the hot water system, for so long would Louise’s kitchen and scullery cease to be a refuge at night.

The knocking grew more insistent; and, with no plan in her head other than to get out of range of Mrs Philips, Louise
blundered
with her baby through the kitchen and into the hall. The sitting-room? But that was directly below hers and Mark’s bedroom; within five minutes he would be down, distracted and irritable, to bombard her with that mixture of ill-timed criticism and impractical advice which was the last straw on these weary nights. And Miss Brandon’s door would be heard, opening and shutting reproachfully….

Louise looked this way and that, like a cornered rat, and her eye fell on the pram.

Well, why not? An outing in the pram always soothed Michael by day – why not by night too? And here she was, already dressed after falling asleep in the armchair. Only her coat to put on, and in two minutes she could be out of hearing of Mrs Philips – of Mark – of Miss Brandon – of all the censorious lot of them!

The night air was cold and exhilarating. Louise felt suddenly awake – vividly, poignantly awake, as she had not felt for weeks. Michael was quiet now; he stared wide-eyed at the wonder of the street lamps as they passed above his face. How wise he looked, how ageless under the ageless night! Louise could scarcely keep from running, so light, so strong had she grown through sleeplessness. The pram was no burden to her; it seemed endowed with a half-life of its own as it raced along before her. She could have imagined that she wasn’t pushing it at all; that instead it was pulling her along the sleeping streets. But that, of course, couldn’t be happening; it would be against the laws of nature.

Yet the laws of nature seem different at night, when there is nothing – nothing at all – between you and the Milky Way. At such times the laws that rule the movements of the stars come very close; and yet their very closeness may make them unrecognisable – as a much-photographed celebrity might be if he suddenly walked into your kitchen. For a moment it seemed to Louise ridiculous to doubt the existence of miracles; how could any sane person imagine that a power that could set the nebulae in motion should be unable to push a pram along a suburban road without Louise’s help …?

All at once, the disembodied lightness, the sense of vision, were gone, and Louise looked about her, shivering and a little scared. She had not come so very far after all – that skimming,
birdlike swiftness of movement must have been mostly
imagination
– but she was approaching the main road already. Any moment now she might meet somebody – a policeman maybe – who would ask her what she was doing, taking a baby out at this hour of the night, and then what would she say? That the baby wouldn’t sleep – that he was disturbing the neighbours? But that sounded ridiculous – people just don’t take babies out in the middle of the night for such a reason. Yet it had seemed at the time a sufficient reason – it still seemed so. How could she have ignored Mrs Philips’ knocking? How could she have allowed her own household to be kept awake all night? Taking the baby out in the pram had been the only possible thing to do. She had been driven to it. She had had no alternative.

In that case, why did she fear having to explain it to a
policeman
? If her action was really sensible and necessary, why should it sound so silly? More than silly; mad. Perhaps it
was
mad. Perhaps this was just the way mad people did feel – that they were being logically and inevitably driven to their crazy actions; that they had no alternative.

Louise stood still, and with her hand resting lightly on the handle of the pram she gazed up at the night sky, which held no faintest glimmer of dawn. Wasn’t it during the hours before dawn that sick people were most likely to die? Perhaps it was during those same hours, too, that sane people slipped over into madness …?

She was roused by a fretful wail. Michael had no intention of putting up with a motionless pram any more than a motionless cot; and Louise obediently jerked herself into movement once more. She was deadly sleepy again now, and she did not notice in which direction she was going. She knew only that she must keep walking about, walking about, until Michael should fall asleep….

But what was the matter? Why was he that ghastly colour? With a little moan of sheer terror, Louise lunged forward – and then began to laugh, weakly, and without amusement. For he was all right. It was only the lights. Those ghastly, bloodless lights of the main road that sucked all the colour from
everything
. Even after she had realised this, Louise could still scarcely bear to look at the grey, corpselike pallor of the child’s face. She hurried him along, in absurd distress, until she came to a side turning. And it was as she plunged up this turning, heedless and unseeing, that she first became aware that she was falling asleep. Falling asleep even as she walked, and that it was beyond her control.

It was tiring, pushing this heavy pram. What miles she must have walked through these mean streets, for hours and hours, with never a break in the small dull houses, and with never a soul passing by. Her back was aching with the weight of the pram. No – not aching – what was this feeling …?

Just as in her dream, Louise dared not run. Neither did she dare to stand still. Nor to turn round.

‘It’s a dream!’ she told herself wildly. ‘Just a dream. The same dream all over again, and in a moment I shall wake up. In a moment the pram will become too heavy; I shall see that red light before my eyes, and it will be the sitting-room fire dying down. Or am I asleep in the scullery, my feet on the mangle, my head leaning against the draining-board? In that case, I shall wake up and see that barred window. It will look like teeth at first, but I must remember it’s not teeth, only bars. Nothing to be frightened of. Not teeth, only bars…. Not teeth, only bars….’

The bars were in front of her now, black and clear. ‘Not teeth,’ she repeated triumphantly. ‘Not teeth’ … and waited for that sweat of relief that breaks out at the moment of waking from a nightmare.

But there was no sweat of relief. Neither were those the bars of the scullery window. They were railings, iron railings, fencing off a patch of shadowy waste ground where the newest of the discarded sardine tins gleamed faintly in the light of the street lamp.

And yet Louise felt that she
had
woken up from a dream. That feeling of hostile eyes boring into the small of her back was gone now. Her knees were weak, as if she had been just roused from sleep. And now, for the first time, she realised that she did not know where she was, nor in which direction lay her home. And she was tired; so tired that she no longer had any fear of the darkened street; so tired that for a moment she thought of sitting down, here on the pavement, with her back against the railings, and falling asleep.

Was that a footstep? No, it couldn’t have been, there wasn’t a soul in sight, up or down the street. But the sound, whatever it was, had roused Louise to a sense of absurdity. If anybody
should
come, what would she look like, pram in hand, lolling against the railings, aimlessly, in the middle of the night?

She set off again, and she never knew whether it was a long time or a short time before she came to the little park. No, not exactly a park; it was just a paddling pool really, surrounded by grass and gravel paths, and a few flowering shrubs. And seats. Blessed, miraculous seats! Seats with
backs!
Louise bumped her pram across the soaking grass, across the gravel path, and sank gratefully on to the nearest seat. She would rest here, for just a few minutes, and collect her thoughts. A little quiet consideration would soon show her which direction to turn for home, and then she must set off at once. Why, Michael was almost asleep at last, there was not the slightest reason for staying out any longer.

The light from a street lamp shone faintly on the dark
bushes, whitening here and there the great pale clusters of blossom. Beyond the bushes the pool gleamed silently,
without
a ripple, still as the blade of a knife. It was quiet. Too quiet. The bushes, particularly, were too quiet. It would have been a relief to hear the faint stir or chirrup of some small night creature, or even the disembodied rustle of the night breeze.

And yet, when there
was
a rustle, faint as a breath, from a dark overhanging shrub on her right, it was not relief that Louise felt. Instead, her heart began to pound, and she stared, straining her eyes into the darkness until spots and lines began to whirl in front of them, and she was obliged to look away towards the glinting water, towards the pale blossoms, to get the darkness out of them.

How sweet the scent was from the flowering shrubs. What kind were they, those flickering dim blooms? Lilac? Too early for that – at least, the lilac in her own garden was scarcely in bud yet. She could not tell the colour of the flowers before her; they gleamed so whitely against the dark background of the leaves, but then any colour would do that – any of the soft, pastel colours of spring-time, that is to say. The scent seemed to grow stronger, and it was strangely out of place in the bleak darkness of the night. It was the scent of sunshine; of sunshine on that first day of summer when you put on a cotton dress and walk down to shops, dizzily conscious of the warmth on your bare arms. It was the scent of childhood, when you set off for school half drunk with happiness because tennis was beginning this term. And farther back still, back and back to those regions where the waking memory can never reach, it was the scent of a narrow woodland path, where the cowparsley and the great teasels almost met above your head. It was quiet in that path, and yet not quiet at all, for round your ankles, even as far as your knees, there
hummed and twittered and rustled the real owners of the earth in unnamed, uncounted millions. It was good that there was a large grown-up hand to hold your own, and that a pair of heavy booted feet were clearing the way, subduing for a few moments the owners of the earth so that your own bare legs and sandalled feet could follow safely. The sun was hot, hot as it had always been on those golden, endless afternoons of childhood; hot, surely, as it could never be again. The path seemed endless, too, winding in and out among the trees, twisting into sudden clearings of parched grass and the purple glory of willow-herb….

‘Watch out for that child. There may be snakes.’

The sick terror of that moment was undimmed, and the words snapped like a pistol shot across the years. Louise
struggled
to open her eyes, to move her body on the hard damp seat. One movement would be enough to wake her; one tiny movement. Even her little finger. If she could just move one joint of one little finger….

But everyone knows that a snake’s eyes are hypnotic eyes. Once a snake is staring at you, you can never move again. You may hear it slithering up behind you, but if its eyes are fixed on you, you cannot move. You will feel its malignant stare boring through your spine, and from your spine travelling up the great nerves that feed the brain; and you will sit still, and wait for your brain to grow numb and senseless even as your body is numb and senseless now….

It was the rattle of a passing lorry that woke Louise, and for a moment she stared blankly, stupidly at the lightening sky. Her coat – her shoes – her hair were drenched with dew, and she was so cold that at first she did not even wonder how she got here. Then slowly, slowly, like a hibernating creature roused from its winter sleep, her mind began to work again. Michael. She had taken Michael out because he was crying. She had lost
her way. She had sat down on a seat, and must have dropped off, and now it was morning. She must get him home quickly; in that uncovered pram he must be almost as wet and chilled as she was herself.