Beyond Black: A Novel by Hilary Mantel Read Free Book Online Page A

passes. It’s natural.” “Natural?” the girl said. “There was nothing natural about that fucker. If I hear any more about my bastard dad I’ll see you outside and sort you out.”
    The trade gasped, right across the hall. The manager was moving in, but anyone could see he didn’t fancy his chances. Al seemed quite cool. She started chatting, saying anything and nothing—now, after all, would have been a good time for a breakthrough ditty from Margaret Rose. It was the woman’s two friends who calmed her; they waved away the vague boy with the mike, dabbed at her cheeks with a screwed-up tissue, and persuaded her back into her seat, where she muttered and fumed.
    Now Alison’s attention crossed the hall and rested on another woman, not young, who had a husband with her: a heavy man, ill at ease. “Yes, this lady. You have a child in Spirit World.”
    The woman said politely, no, no children. She said it as if she had said it many times before; as if she were standing at a turnstile, buying admission tickets and refusing the half-price.
    “I can see there are none earthside, but I’m talking about the little boy you lost. Well, I say little boy. Of course, he’s a man now. He’s telling me we have to go back to … back a good few years, we’re talking here thirty years and more. And it was hard for you, I know, because you were very young, darling, and you cried and cried, didn’t you? Yes, of course you did.”
    In these situations, Al kept her nerve; she’d had practice. Even the people at the other side of the hall, craning for a view, knew something was up and fell quiet. The seconds stretched out. In time, the woman’s mouth moved.
    “On the mike, darling. Talk to the mike. Speak up, speak out, don’t be afraid. There isn’t anybody here who isn’t sharing your pain.”
    Am I, Colette asked herself. I’m not sure I am.
    “It was a miscarriage,” the woman said. “I never—I never saw—they didn’t say and so I didn’t—”
    “Didn’t know it was a little boy. But,” Al said softly, “you know now.” She turned her head to encompass the hall: “You see, we have to recognize that it wasn’t a very compassionate world back then. Times have changed, and for that we can all be thankful. I’m sure those nurses and doctors were doing their best, and they didn’t mean to hurt you, but the fact is, you weren’t given a chance to grieve.”
    The woman hunched forward. Tears sprang out of her eyes. The heavy husband moved forward, as if to catch them. The hall was rapt.
    “What I want you to know is this.” Al’s voice was calm, unhurried, without the touch of tenderness that would overwhelm the woman entirely; dignified and precise, she might have been querying a grocery bill. “That little boy of yours is a fine young man now. He knows you never held him. He knows that’s not your fault. He knows how your heart aches. He knows how you’ve thought of him”—Al dropped her voice—“always, always, without missing a day. He’s telling me this, from Spirit. He understands what happened. He’s opening his arms to you, and he’s holding you now.”
    Another woman, in the row behind, began to sob. Al had to be careful, at this point, to minimize the risk of mass hysteria.  Women , Colette thought: as if she weren’t one. But Alison knew just how far she could take it. She was on form tonight; experience tells. “And he doesn’t forget your husband,” she told the woman. “He says hello to his dad.” It was the right note, braced, unsentimental: “Hello, Dad.” The trade sighed, a low mass sigh. “And the point is, and he wants you to know this, that though you’ve never been there to look after him, and though of course there’s no substitute for a mother’s love, your little boy has been cared for and cherished, because you’ve got people in Spirit who’ve always been there for him—your own grandma? And there’s another lady, very dear to your family, who passed