Afterimage by Helen Humphreys

Author:Helen Humphreys [Humphreys, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780312420642
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2000-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

Member of the Expedition

As Christmas approaches it becomes obvious that Tess is pregnant. In their attic bedroom she removes her dress and Annie can see the flesh pulled tight across her belly, the circle of baby under the skin.

“I could pray for you,” says Annie, from her bed. “I could pray for you and the bastard child.”

“Oh, shut up.” Tess pulls on her nightshirt and plunks down angrily on the edge of her bed. Being pregnant hasn’t improved her mood any. “You’re not allowed to have God in this house. Don’t you listen to rules?”

“But it’s helpful,” says Annie, meaning, really, that she is trying to be helpful.

Tess just snorts with contempt. “Where was your God in the beginning?” she says. “Before this happened. When he could have been helpful.” She gets into bed and kicks under the covers for a few minutes to warm up the sheets. “Don’t be praying for me in your head,” she says, which is just what Annie is doing. “I don’t want none of it.”

It is chilly in their bedroom. They lie on their backs in their beds and their breath smokes in the cold air. The sheets are damp, and although Annie has piled extra bedclothes on, to the extent that the weight of them actually bends her toes, it is still impossible to feel warm. There is no fire in their attic. In the mornings the windows are laced with frost.

There has been a lot of work in the Dashell house to prepare for winter. All fall Annie has helped Cook pit fruit for jam, the juice of damsons inking her fingers, the smell of gooseberries sweet in the kitchen. Now the jars are carefully lined up in the larder, plush with fruit. The kitchen garden has been harvested, vegetables lumped in burlap sacks into the root cellar so that in the middle of January there will still be carrots, potatoes, the hard, bitter truth of an onion. They have prepared for winter as though it is an expedition, as though they must have enough supplies to cross the cold, barren stretch of it before arriving on the warm shore of another year.

Annie yearns for spring already, lying in her damp bed with the suffocating bedclothes heavy on her body. Tess’s baby is to be born in the early spring. It seems that it was no surprise to the rest of the house, that only Annie didn’t know of it before now. She feels foolish in her ignorance, foolish when Cook says, I guessed, didn’t I; foolish when Isabelle dismisses it so easily—it was to be expected, really. No one says what is to happen after the baby is born. Will it be sent away? Will it stay here with them in the house? Tess herself seems only angry at her pregnancy, ignores it as much as possible, even though, physically at least, this is becoming more and more difficult to do.

Annie wants to know what Tess really feels about the baby.

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