and pushed the door open. Isabel was lying on the day bed in the window, exactly as Bethan had left her an hour before. Her eyes were closed and her hands were hanging awkwardly at her sides as if she didn’t want to clasp them over her mounded stomach.
Bethan put the tray down on the table beside the day bed. ‘Mrs Jaspert? Isabel, love, are you asleep?’
Isabel’s eyes opened and stared, wildly, before they focused at last.
‘Not sleeping. Trying … trying to think.’
‘What have you got to be thinking about?’ Bethan tried to soothe her. ‘All you’ve got to do is rest, and not let yourself get worked up again. Here, now. Cook’s made some special soup for you. Try and eat it for me, will you?’
She put her arm behind Isabel’s shoulders and eased her upright.
‘Please eat some,’ Bethan whispered, trying to reach out to the Isabel she had always known, to the gentle child within the correct little girl, and the vulnerable adolescent who had sheltered in the self-possessed young woman. But all the familiar faces of Isabel had vanished in the last weeks, shrivelling away into this wild-faced stranger who seemed to have lost all touch with her own world. Bethan felt that there was a household conspiracy – Peter Jaspert, Lord and Lady Jaspert, the staff of Ebury Street, all of them seemed wilfully set on ignoring Isabel’s distress. Yet she ate almost nothing now, and sat all day in her room staring as if she was looking in fear into her own head. And yesterday, Bethan had found her crying. The tears came silently, unstoppably, and they had gone on for hours. Bethan had been on the point of telephoning Mr Hardwicke when Isabel fell into an exhausted sleep.
With an effort now, Isabel leaned forward and tasted the spoonful of soup that Bethan held out for her. It felt thick on her lips, like blood. She shivered and swallowed against the nausea. The thin triangle of bread was as dry as ash and her throat closed up against it.
Instead she made herself concentrate on Bethan’s arms around her and the soft, Welsh voice begging her just to talk a little.
Hopelessly Isabel shook her head. The warmth of Bethan’s shoulder, her innocent scent of soap and toilet water, brought back the very first time that Bethan had comforted her. A long, long way off, like a tableau spotlit at the end of a dark tunnel, Isabel saw the nursery at Chance and the bars of sunlight sloping over Airlie’s rugs. A weight was crushing her, squeezing the breath and life out of her.
‘I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘I’m so afraid.’
‘Oh, there.’ Bethan’s arms tightened. ‘There’s no need to be afraid. The doctors all say so. They won’t let you have a bad time. It isn’t like that nowadays, all the wonderful things they can do.’
But Isabel only shook her head again.
How could she explain to anyone that it wasn’t the birth that was frightening her? She wasn’t frightened for herself, for the physical pain or the risks that women whispered about and Mr Hardwicke soothingly never mentioned. She wasn’t afraid for the baby, either. The weight of it sat broodingly within her, sometimes like a cold, heavy stone that had nothing to do with her own flesh and blood. At other times it was turbulent, writhing inside her as though it had taken over her system and reduced her to a dry husk.
Just by looking at herself in the mirror, Isabel could see that was what really was happening. With her arms as thin as sticks and the bones knobbed at the base of her neck, and the huge, swollen pod in front of her, she knew that she was grotesque. The baby possessed her, branding her and reminding her of how it had come there.
She wasn’t afraid for herself, nor for the baby because it was a hundred times stronger, and a Jaspert.
It was everything else that frightened her. The bright, busy jigsaw of the world had shaken and the neat, familiar components of it had clicked out of place one by one and spiralled away. Isabel frowned, trying to recall what the pieces of it had been. She only dreamed about them nowadays, long vivid dreams of parties where she laughed as she danced and the men’s whitegloved hands correctly holding her never wandered or turned hot, pink and fleshy. She dreamed of walking with Amy at Chance, hiding in the hollow heart of the great box hedge in the formal gardens, and then of riding her mare at a canter up and over the long ridge that sheltered the estate.
The dreams were more vivid than life, now. Life had become fear, and watching, and waiting.
Am I ill? Isabel wondered.
There were nightmares, too. Peter came to her in them, and she felt the hot, stifling weight of the bedclothes, and the guilt of terrible secrets. There were other men in the nightmares, too. There was Mr Glass. Even, once, her own father. I must be ill.
‘Isabel, dear, couldn’t you talk to me? Or Amy? I’ll tell you what, I’ll ring Amy at her hospital and ask her to come to see you.’
‘No,’ Isabel said sharply. ‘Don’t do that.’ Amy shouldn’t be here in this place. Amy shouldn’t be contaminated by it. She was trapped herself, but it must never happen to Amy.
‘Or Lady Lovell, then.’
‘She’s abroad.’ The baby wasn’t due for another three weeks. Lady Lovell would fly back from Morocco in good time for the birth, of course. Isabel was wondering vaguely at the note of triumph in her voice. Did she want to be so isolated, then? How much of all this weight of despair was her own doing?
‘Where’s my husband?’ she asked, feeling briefly pleased with the normality of the question until she saw Bethan looking at her.
‘It’s Election Day. The twenty-seventh of October. Don’t you remember? Mr Jaspert’ll be in his constituency.’
‘Of course he will.’
She had forgotten. Peter’s was a solidly safe Conservative seat, but he had campaigned vigorously in the three weeks since the last Parliament had been dissolved. Isabel had been excused by her condition from sitting beside him on platforms, applauding his speeches and smiling, smiling. But she would be expected to do it next time. Peter had married a politician’s perfect wife, and he would see to it that she functioned as one. At the thought of it, at the very idea of after the birth and the demands that would be placed on her again, Isabel’s skin crawled. She turned and smiled a bright, tight, skeletal smile at Bethan’s worried face. ‘Leave the tray, Bethan. I feel quite hungry now. I won’t need anything else tonight, thank you.’ She felt suddenly cunning. Of course she could hide the disgusting food somewhere, and pretend that she had eaten it.
Reluctantly Bethan stood up. ‘Well, if you’re quite sure … you will ring for me, if you need me, won’t you?’
At last, Isabel thought, she was alone again. She was levering herself upright, intending to slop the soup and wine into her hand basin, when something that had been obscenely stretched inside her burst wide open. Water seeped and then splashed. Her dress was soaked, and the pale green watered-silk of the day bed showed a dark, spreading stain.
‘No,’ Isabel whispered. But even as she said it she felt the first low pull of pain, as definite and undeniable as gravity itself.
Peter Jaspert was comfortably pleased with the day. It had been a long, arduous one during which he had been driven from one makeshift street-corner hustings to the next to rally the last of the undecided into voting. It had hardly been a fight even from the beginning. There was no Liberal candidate, and the Labour man, a muddled MacDonaldite, had never stood
