Half Broken Things by Morag Joss Read Free Book Online

shelves; peering through acrylic fur fringes, a menagerie of toy bears, ducks, cats, tigers, elephants and pelicans stared out, glassy and despairing.
    In the chest of drawers Jean found volumes of unworn baby clothes, many still in their wrappings, and unopened bottles of every imaginable unguent for the washing, scenting and soothing of baby skin. A baby alarm, still in its box, stood on a small antique nursing chair along with a breast pump, also new and unpacked. Jean saw at once how it all fitted together. Mrs Standish-Cave must be pregnant, which accounted for the quantity of temporarily redundant, non-maternity clothes in the wardrobe, and she and her husband must have gone abroad for the obvious reason. She was going to spend her pregnancy abroad and have the baby there. Perhaps she was even foreign herself and had gone to be with her mother, or perhaps she just had views about the standards of English hospitals. She could, in either of these cases, afford options. No doubt they planned to return with the baby when it was a few months old, where the perfect nursery would be waiting. Jean picked a white bear with maroon velvet paws off the shelf and stroked it, allowing her jealousy of the woman’s wealth and, a more familiar envy, her motherhood, to wash through and leave her. It was perhaps a little more understandable now, the peremptory, selfish list, if only marginally less exasperating. Even the locking of the rooms might be thought almost forgivable. Didn’t women get fussy and obsessional about their homes when a baby was due? Nest building, fixing, sorting and controlling and having everything just so? Jean fingered the sleeve of her raspberry cashmere jersey and smiled. She could imagine it, the sweet anticipation of preparing for a baby—she had imagined it often enough, though long ago now. But for a reason she did not examine she could imagine it now quite painlessly, rather than with a vague though sapping sense of regret.

    Was it loneliness? A matter of not having enough to do? The beds in all the other bedrooms (I mean not counting the two they’d locked) except the one I was meant to have (which, I did note, was the smallest) were stripped bare when I arrived. It doesn’t do much for a bedroom, a bare mattress. It looks as if someone has died or at least left forever, whereas a bed newly made up tells you that someone is expected. The bare mattresses were sad, but it was on the same afternoon that I discovered my new bedroom that I began to mind about them very much indeed.
    It was the baby’s room, perhaps. All that expectation. Such a cheerful thing, a room waiting for a new person. Or maybe it was my new clothes and my new room that were already making me feel so different, so that the idea of a child of my own seemed just another thing that I’d almost managed to forget about wanting very badly, but could now have.
    Please don’t think I lost my marbles or anything like that, because certain realities never quite left me. Not even I thought for a moment that I could produce a child at sixty-four. But that evening I took my supper into the drawing room and ate in front of the fire. (’Do not take food out of the kitchen’. Of course the list had said that, but I didn’t even think of the list that evening and it would have made no difference if I had.) Afterwards I sat thinking.
    I have always liked the sound owls make and that evening the owls were the only thing I could hear apart from the fire. I think they nest in the barn or the eaves of the pool pavilion. As I listened, the thought came to me that this house has stood for over four hundred years; even the teapot made it through a couple of centuries before I turned up. All the bits and pieces I’d seen that afternoon—the candlesticks, the clothes, the white bear with velvet paws, even the typewriter—they had all been chosen by somebody at some time, acquired somehow and put here, for