Something is happening.
She finds she is in a great deal of pain. ‘Urgh,’ she says again, and gets out of bed. Her legs will not do as she tells them; her belly is gripped by something. She drops to her knees and vomits into the chamber pot, not much.
‘Urgh,’ she heaves from her diaphragm. She kneels there for a moment or two, palms pressed flat to the floor, spitting saliva that glides in gobbets down threads suspended between her lips and the pot, which stretch and dangle but will not break. She waits to see if she will vomit again. No. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and shunts the chamber pot back under the bed where her hair will not trail in it, but she cannot get up. She kneels, her body folded tightly, with her feet under her buttocks and her knees under her breasts, as if she were trying to parcel herself up, hold herself together. The pain in her belly is phenomenal.
‘I know what this is,’ she says out loud. She is almost exasperated; it is not the first time in her life. She raises herself off the floor a little, one hand pressed to her stomach, and puts the other in between her legs. It comes away bloodier than she had expected; it gleams like a beetle-back as she holds it in front of her face, splaying her fingers out. The blood stretches in mucous webs.
‘Oh, dear Jesus.’ There is a sob swelling in her throat. When she rolls her eyes heavenwards she catches the sheets on the bed, smeared and blotched. ‘Oh, Jesus.’ What a mess. What a state. That will not wash out.
She crouches there for a long while, hunched over her pain, as if her body only exists to contain it. Her ankles are trembling and she lets her head hang, so that all she can see is a wall of her own hair. After a while she drags the sheet off the bed and jams it between her legs. She rolls over onto her side and curls there, knees to her chest, pressing her hands to her face. The creases in her palms are sticky and smell of her own emissions.
She does not weep, though. All other things being equal she would be bawling like a hungry lamb, for she has little tolerance for pain and has rarely felt so sorry for herself, but something prevents her. She knows what is happening. And she feels a terrible sadness.
‘Stay with me,’ she whispers, and the tears run over the bridge of her nose, spread over her cheek, and pool on the floorboards. ‘Stay with me. Oh, what will I do without you?’
There is no stopping it, of course. The only thing she can think to do is what she has been taught before, on other occasions after the usual ritual of hot baths, strenuous walks, patented tonics. ‘Breathe. No, breathe. You’ll be better for it. In. Out. In. Out. Blow it all out,’ she was told. ‘Blow it all out.’ And she would blow, long and even, until all her breath was gone and it felt as if the two walls of her lungs might stick together. On those occasions there were other women around her, rubbing her back and shushing in her ears: she howled on those occasions but only with the pain. Afterwards there would be sweet wine, and a clean bed, and eventually laughter.
Now, she is alone on the floor of her marital chamber. She blows all the air out of her lungs in a long and steady stream, and in this way she is able to manage her pain, more or less, at least enough to bear witness to the passing of this thing.
Sukie must have heard her from her bedroom, for she pokes her head around the door and sees her legs knotted in the stained sheet, little bloodied fingerprints on her face.
‘Mrs Hancock!’
Angelica does not uncurl herself; she does not get up from the floor. ‘I think it is done,’ she says. ‘I think it is too late.’
‘Let me help you.’
‘No, no. I can’t get up. Don’t touch me.’
‘Come on.’ She hoicks her up by the armpits, carefully unlooping the sheet from her legs. Angelica cries as it falls away from her. ‘Now, then. It’s all right. Don’t look, don’t look; I’ll see to that.’ Somewhere in the streaked folds of the sheet might be found – if it is large enough to be seen, if it can be recognised, if it even exists in one piece – the tiny clotted froglet that Angelica carried. ‘Come, into bed. I’ll get things to bathe you.’
‘It’s too late,’ Angelica repeats.
‘There is nothing as could have been done. This is just what happens sometimes.’
‘Oh, how would you know?’
‘How would you?’ snaps Sukie.
Angelica dissolves into tears. ‘Your uncle …’ she says. How pleased he would have been to have a living child. How delighted. And how he would have loved her for it. She cannot have it – her two-months family prised apart like an oyster shell. ‘You must not tell him,’ she says.
‘But what shall I—’
‘If he comes home this morning, tell him I am unwell. Tell Bridget so, too. There is no need for him to know anything yet. I shall sleep it off. I shall be all right. I do not wish him to see me lose my composure.’
‘And if he sends for you? He will want to show you the mermaid.’
‘There is no point even considering that possibility,’ says Angelica, climbing into her bloodied bed. ‘There is no mermaid. I do not believe there ever was one.’
ELEVEN
‘Well, what is she like?’ Angelica asks her husband at dinner that evening. He has stumbled in late and peculiar flat around the eyes, but she is in no state to mark this, she being only an hour out of bed herself, and less than an hour rinsed of the last traces of her loss. She feels those smears and fingerprints of blood as a mark of guilt: standing over the tub in the kitchen she scrubbed at them and clenched her teeth with sorrow. And so it is a peculiar meal, not their usual happy troughing, although she has put on her prettiest chintz and had Bridget puff the powder into her hair.
‘Hmm?’ he says.
‘Your mermaid.’
‘Oh!’ He toys his fork across his plate. ‘’Tis hard to explain.’ In truth he does not know what to make of it. He had wanted to dash back to her bed, to tell her about this thing he can make no sense of, but something had rooted him quite to the spot. Instead he found himself standing over that vat for minutes that stretched into hours, searching the water for the shifting creature within.
She does not press him. Indeed she hardly hears him; her thoughts have crept somewhere deep inside her, a little fist of pain at the centre of her body. She returns again and again to her own disbelief: that no sooner has this small thing been given to her, than it is taken away again. And could she have done differently? Has she walked too often in the evening chill? Has she been too active, or not active enough? Or was it her own thoughts that poisoned the child; did it taste her lack of fitness; did it starve for the love she had been slow to extend to it? Oh, God, or is this a judgement on my past deeds?
The food is ashes in her mouth; she pushes her plate away.
Her husband hardly looks at her. Perhaps he knows, and is angry. She tries to catch his eye, but he sees nothing in the room at all. He is thinking, in fact, of how to keep his new-found mermaid, for it is clear she cannot stay at the whaling dock for ever. What is required for her is a good-sized pool, but this answer of course breeds more questions. How long do mermaids live? This one seems hardly to be alive in the usual sense, so perhaps she cannot be presumed to die. And must the water be saline? She is, after all, from the sea.