Виктория Холт - On the Night of the Seventh Moon

I could not endure the terrible fear. I must know the truth.

“Where is my child?” I cried.

“The child,” said Dr. Kleine, ‘wbs born dead. “

No! “

“Yes, dear,” said Ilse tenderly.

“All the horror .. all the anxiety it was inevitable.”

“But I wanted my child. I wanted my little a’s . was it a boy?”

“It was a girl,” said Ilse.

I saw her so clearly my little daughter. I could see her in a little silk dress aged one, aged two . and then growing up and going to school. I felt the tears on my cheeks.

“She was alive,” I said.

“I used to smile because she was so lively. I used to feel her there. Oh no, there is some mistake.”

Dr. Carlsberg bent over me.

“The shock of everything,” he said, ‘was too much for you. We expected this. Please, do not fret. Remember that you are free now to live a happy life. “

A happy life! I wanted to scream at them. My lover you tell me never existed. I dreamed of my marriage. But the child was there a living thing and now you tell me she is dead.

Ilse said: “We will take care of you, Helena . , .”

I wanted to cry out: “I don’t need taking care of. I want my child.

How dare you experiment with me! How dare you give me dreams that are without reality! If I have been abused I want to know it. There is nothing worse than uncertainty. Oh yes, there is. There is this terrible loss. The baby who was to have been my consolation has been taken from me. “

I lay there limply. I had not known such desolation since they had told me that Maximilian, whom I had believed to be my husband, was a myth.

I was very weak, they told me. I must not leave my bed. I did not feel physically weak, only mentally exhausted and in deep despair.

All these months I had lived for my child. I had made a dream in which Maximilian came back to me and proudly I showed him the child. I had believed that . just as I had always really believed in those three days of perfect happiness. It was only when Ilse smothered me with her goodness that I wavered. But I was never convinced. I could not be convinced.

“I must see my child,” I said.

Dr. Kleine was horrified.

“It would increase your distress.”

I insisted that I wanted to see my baby.

“We were burying her today,” said Dr. Kleine.

“I should be there!”

“It is a simple ceremony, and you must not leave your bed. You have to concentrate on getting well now.”

I repeated that I wanted to see my child.

Ilse came to see me.

“Helena, dear,” she said, ‘it is all over. What you have to do now is forget. You can go back to your home. You can forget all this . nightmare. In a little while it will be as though it never happened. You are so young . “

I said stonily: “It will never be as though it has not happened. Nothing that can possibly happen to me will ever be so real, so important to me, as this. Do you think I can ever forget?”

“That is not what Dr. Carlsberg wants. His object has been achieved.

Now he would like you to go back to normality. “

“Dr. Carlsberg is too glib with his dream-producing drugs. I want to see my baby.”

“My dear Helena, it would be better not.”

“Are you trying to tell me that I have given birth to some monster?”

“Certainly not. A little girl who was born dead.”

I was so much aware of her alive.”

“It was a difficult birth. All that you had suffered and you suffered far more than you realized has taken its toll. That is what the doctors feared. In such circumstances it is much better so.”

I said: “They are going to bury my baby today. I must see her before they do so.”

It would be better . “

I raised myself on my elbow. I cried: “I will not be told any more what I must do. I will not be the victim of your experiments.”

Ilse looked frightened.

“I will speak to the doctors,” she said.

They put me in a wheelchair because the doctor would not allow me to walk. I was taken into a room in which stood a tiny coffin on trestles; the Venetian blinds had been arranged so that a little light came through the slats. And there she lay -my little baby-a small pinched face framed by a little white bonnet. I wanted to pick her up, to hold her to me, to breathe life into that limp little body. Hot tears were in my eyes and bitter despair in my heart. They wheeled me silently back to my room. The put me to bed; they smoothed my pillows and tucked in the bedclothes; they did everything they could to comfort me; but there was no comfort.

I lay in my bed; I could hear the voices of the women on the lawn.

It was over. The dream and the nightmare. I was not yet nineteen years old and I felt I had had a greater experience than many people encountered in a lifetime.

Use was with me every day. She constantly stressed the fact that I was free now. I could take up my life again as it had been before the Night of the Seventh Moon. She would take me back to England: and there I would find everything was as it had been. It was the best thing for me.

I thought about it a good deal and I could see that it was what I should have to do.

I had to grow away from this mad adventure. I had to forget. I would have to start again.

I stayed in Dr. Kleine’s nursing home for two weeks and it was almost when I was on the point of leaving so immersed in my own tragedy had I been-that I remembered Gretchen Swartz.

I told Ilse how I had found her sobbing in her room and Ilse said she would ask the doctor or Mrs. Kleine about the girl.

It was the doctor who mentioned her to me.

“You were asking about Gretchen Swartz. So you had a word with her?

Did she tell you her story? “

“Yes, poor girl. She was very unhappy.”

“She didn’`t come through. She died but the child was all right. A fine boy.”

“And what happened to the boy?”

“Her family took him. The old grandmother will look after him and then he will go to an uncle.”

“Poor Gretchen! I was so sorry for her.”

“Now you are going to stop being sorry. You are going to get well and Frau Gleiberg tells me that in a few weeks’ time she will be taking you back to your home.”

He seemed almost gleeful. I had an impression that he had ticked my name off a list. A difficult case which has been satisfactorily settled.

And then I felt the tears prickling my eyelids-they had come very easily in the last few days-and I was weeping for the loss of my dream and my child.

A month after I had looked on that little dead face Ilse took me back to England.

How normal everything seemed. If ever I could grow to believe that I had imagined, the whole incredible adventure, I could do it there. On the journey Ilse had talked to me of the future and the theme of her discourse was: Forget. The sooner I did this the sooner I should begin to lead a new life. She did not see it as I had seen it. To her it was a horrible misadventure with a climax she could only regard as fortunate. Death, she would say, had solved my problems. She did not know that the ecstatic memory of three days with Maximilian lived on; she did not understand that while a child lives within its mother, love is born.

But I could see that she was right about putting it all behind me. I had to go on living. I had to pick up the threads of my life.

Ilse stayed with us only a few days; then she said goodbye. I fancied there was a certain relief in her attitude. Perhaps she was regretting that she had asked me to accompany her and Ernst on that day some ten months ago, but when I saw her off at the station she made me promise to write to her and tell her how I was getting on and she seemed as concerned as ever.

Everyone agreed that I had changed. I knew that they were right. Gone was the gay, effervescent girl; in her place was a rather withdrawn woman. I looked older too-older than my nineteen years, whereas before I had looked younger than my age.

There were changes at home. Aunt Caroline was slightly different. She had always been critical of society; now she was angry with it. No one seemed right to her; Aunt Matilda came in for a good deal of castigation but I very soon became the butt for it. What I had thought I was doing gallivanting about in outlandish places for nearly a year, she did not know. Improving my German! English was good enough for her and should have been for anyone. I’d come back bone idle, as far as she could see. Had I any new recipes to tell her? Not that she would want a lot of foreign ways of cooking in her kitchen. I developed a talent for appearing to listen to her and not hearing a thing she said.

As for Aunt Matilda, she had changed. Bodily ailments still supplied her main excitement but she had become very friendly with the Clees in the bookshop.

“What I wonder,” said Aunt Caroline sarcastically, ‘is why you don’t go and live there. “

“You know, Helena,” Aunt Matilda confided in me, ‘when you think of all there is to do in the shop they don’t get much time for seeing to things about the rooms above it. Amelia’s chest isn’t what it should be and when you consider Mr. Clees’s one kidney trying to do the work of two, it makes you think. “

She was happier than she had been when I left and I grew quite fond of her. She was always smuggling in mending from the dees’ house so that Aunt Caroline wouldn’`t see it. She would sit in her room secretly doing it. It was what Aunt Caroline would call ‘making yourself cheap’.