Music in the Dark by Sally Magnusson

Author:Sally Magnusson [Magnusson, Sally]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical, General, Thrillers
ISBN: 9781529345964
Google: IBaWEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: jo
Published: 2023-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

17

She clambers over him and back to her side of the bed. She can go a whole night if she gets to sleep at a decent hour, but not when she has been awake like this for hours on end. A wee mouthful of something would have put her over nicely. ‘Medicinal purposes only,’ he had the cheek to tut-tut at her after they were wed. ‘I am here now to help you get to sleep.’ Nobody as glib as a man who has never lost what he loved.

She should have let him know it had helped with more than the sleeping. But she has never brought herself to go there, never told him that without it she might have screamed the night away, because Archie is in her mind every minute of every day and there were nights when she lay in this bed by herself and thought of the shape her boy used to make in it, small for the age he was, tousle-headed on the pillow, that she gave vent to her pain and her loneliness where nobody could hear.

‘Would you tell me about your son,’ he said to her once, ‘the one who used to sleep in the kitchen bed?’

‘There is nothing to say,’ she said. How do you describe to a man with a neat life behind him the thing that lies unspoken beneath the hard faces of all the women he will ever meet who have watched their children die?

When your bairn dies, the air leaves you. Is that what she was supposed to tell him? You forget what you have to do to get the air in. You have to tell yourself, Breathe. Which is not the same as telling yourself to place this foot in front of that foot and you will move, or direct this square of bread to your mouth if you want to eat, which are also things you have to will yourself to do. Breathing is different. Your own seems to go with the bairn’s breath, flying out the window hand in hand with the bairn’s soul. You would die yourself, gladly, gladly. But you can’t die because your breath does come at last, enough of it anyway to keep your heart going. Only, the air keeps getting stuck. It’s getting stuck now just thinking about it. And everything inside you goes dry.

The first two bairns she had with Willie Bain went within weeks of each other, aged one and nearly three. Consumption went round the Calton tenements so fast there was nothing you could do. There were too many buildings built too close, too many folk squashed into them to escape the diseases. And it was not just consumption, though that’s what took her own children, but scarlet fever, measles, cholera and plenty more illnesses she never knew the names for. When she first arrived in the Calton, she thought she would die herself if she had to stay there. She was sure she would not be

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