Four Streets Over

"There is a difference between watching a thing done and doing it with your own hands. I learned the size of that difference on a doorstep on Eel Row."

I did not put my shoes on.

She said it — put your shoes on — and I heard her say it, and my hands went toward the peg by the door where my laces hung, and then she made a sound. Not a word. Not a scream. Something between the two, something that came from low in her body, from the place where the baby was pressing, and the sound went through me the way cold water goes through you when you step into the harbour without expecting it and my hands left the peg and found the door and I was outside before I had decided to be outside.

The cobblestones hit my feet like a slap.

March in Portsmouth — not frozen, not warm, but raw, the damp cold that came off the harbour and settled into everything it could reach. The stones were wet. I felt every edge through the wool of my stockings, every gap where the mortar had crumbled, every place where the rain had pooled in hollows worn by years of boots and cart wheels and the feet of women who had the sense to wear shoes when they left their houses.

I ran.

Behind me, the cottage. My mother gripping the table. Martha asleep in the loft, trusting the world to be the same when she opened her eyes as it had been when she closed them. Henry and James and Robert in the yard, the back door ajar, Henry responsible because I had made him responsible three minutes ago without explaining why and without giving him the authority he would need if anything went wrong before I got back.

I had not told Henry. I had not said the baby is coming or watch your brothers or if Martha wakes up, keep her downstairs, do not let her go to Mother. I had said take James and Robert outside and Henry had done it because Henry did what I told him and did not ask questions, and this quality which I had relied on every day for years was now the thing that frightened me, because Henry would sit in the yard and wait and he would not know that waiting was no longer what the morning required.

Left out of Dock Lane. The turn was sharp and the cobblestones were slick at the corner where the gutter backed up after rain, and my right foot slid on the wet stone and I caught myself with a hand against the wall of the Henshaws' cottage, the brick rough and cold under my palm. The dog heard me and erupted — barking, hurling itself at the inside of the door with a fury that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the fact that the Henshaws' dog existed in a permanent state of outrage and any stimulus would do.

Broad Street. Wider, busier, the morning traffic of a dockside neighbourhood that had discharged its men and was settling into the work that women and children conducted in their absence. Two women at the pump, filling buckets, their conversation pausing as I passed — not because a girl running through the street was unusual but because a girl running through the street in stockinged feet and a shift with no coat in March was a particular kind of unusual that carried information they could read as easily as my mother read fevers.

I did not stop. I could feel them watching, could feel the questions forming behind their eyes — whose girl is that, which house, is it the Brown girl, is it Mary's time — but the questions belonged to a pace of life that I had already left behind, the pace at which neighbours exchanged news and assessed situations and offered help according to the protocols that governed the street's social machinery. I was moving faster than protocol. I was moving at the speed of the sound my mother had made, the sound that was still in my ears, still vibrating in the bones of my chest, still telling me things about what was happening in the cottage on Dock Lane that my mind had not yet translated into thoughts I could examine.

Right onto Butcher Row. The gutter here ran thick even in March — the butchers' leavings, fat and blood and the grey water they sloshed across the cobblestones at the end of each working day, a residue that the rain diluted but never fully cleared. The smell hit me as it always did, the sweet rot that lived in this street like a tenant who could not be evicted. My feet found something soft in the gutter and I did not look down to see what it was because looking down meant slowing and slowing was not something my body was prepared to do.

My breathing had found its own rhythm, faster than I would have chosen, each inhalation pulling cold air across the back of my throat where it burned with a sharpness that tasted of salt and the harbour and the particular rawness of a March morning that had not yet decided whether it belonged to winter or to spring. I could feel my heart in my temples, in my wrists, in the place behind my breastbone where fear was assembling itself into something I would have to look at eventually but not yet, not while I was still running, not while the running was still carrying me toward a solution.

Mrs Graham lived on Eel Row. Four streets from ours. I had walked this route a hundred times — with my mother, carrying the basket of herbs and linen, following the path that healing took through these streets. I knew every doorstep, every broken paving stone, every place where the buildings leaned close enough to touch across the lane. I knew the green door with the rosemary on the step, the plant Mrs Graham tended because rosemary was part of her work, its sprigs tucked into the linen she used at births, its scent the smell that Portsmouth's women associated with the arrival of children.

Oyster Street to Eel Row. The lane narrowed. The buildings closed in overhead, the upper storeys projecting over the street until the sky was a strip of grey between the rooflines. The light dropped. My feet — I could feel them properly now, the numbness of the first minutes replaced by a sharper awareness, the wool soaked through, the cobblestones' cold pressing into the soles with a specificity that told me the right stocking had worn through on the ball of the foot, that the skin beneath was meeting the stone directly, that pain was accumulating there in a way that would matter later and did not matter now.

The green door. The rosemary on the step. I hammered with my fist, the sound too loud for the narrow street, bouncing off the buildings opposite and returning to me like an accusation. I hammered again. The shutter next door opened and a woman looked out at me with the expression of a person disturbed at an inconvenient hour, and I did not care about her convenience because my mother was on Dock Lane gripping a table and my sister Martha was asleep ten feet above her and the morning was moving in a direction that could not be stopped or slowed or reasoned with.

The door opened.

Anne. Mrs Graham's daughter. A woman my mother's age, flour on her hands, flour on her apron, the warmth of baking escaping through the doorway behind her. She looked at me and her face went through three expressions in the space of a breath — recognition, then assessment, then the particular settling that happened when a woman who had grown up in a midwife's household understood what a girl in stockinged feet on her doorstep at this hour meant.

"She's on Havant Street," Anne said. "The Cartwright birth. Since last night."

I stared at her. The words arrived in the correct order and I understood what each of them meant individually and I could not make them into a sentence that applied to my situation, because my situation required Mrs Graham to be here, behind this green door, reaching for her bag, following me back through the streets I had just run. My situation did not accommodate Havant Street or the Cartwright birth or the word since last night, which meant hours already gone and hours still to come.

"How long?" My voice did not sound like my voice.

Anne's mouth tightened. She knew what I was asking and she knew the answer was not the one I needed. "It's a breech. Mam won't leave until it's done. It could be—"

"How long."

"I don't know. Hours. She said the baby hadn't turned by midnight and she was going to try—"

I stopped hearing her. The information had entered my body and was doing something to my legs, something that made the muscles in my thighs feel heavy and loose, as though the running had used up whatever fuel they carried and the fuel had not been replaced and would not be replaced by standing on a doorstep on Eel Row being told that the person I had been sent to fetch was on the far side of Portsmouth doing the thing my mother needed her to be doing in our cottage and could not do in two places at once.

Anne was talking. Her hand was on my arm, warm from the baking, leaving prints of flour on my sleeve that I could see without looking at because my eyes had stopped cooperating with the rest of my face and were fixed on a point somewhere behind Anne's shoulder, somewhere in the warm kitchen where bread sat half-shaped on a table and the morning was proceeding normally for everyone who lived in this house.

"I can come," Anne was saying. "I've helped Mam at births, I know—"

"Can you deliver a baby?"

The question stopped her. Her hand stayed on my arm but her fingers stilled, and in the pause I could see the answer before she gave it — see it in the way her eyes shifted, in the way her mouth opened and closed around a word she chose not to say and replaced with a different one.

"I've seen it done. Many times. I can—"

"Have you done it? With your own hands?"

She had not. I could see it. The knowledge of how was not the same as the doing of it, and I understood this distinction with a clarity that should not have been available to a fourteen-year-old girl standing in wet stockings on a stranger's doorstep but that was available to me because my mother had taught me this — had taught me that watching was preparation and not performance, that knowing what should happen and making it happen with your own hands in a room where things were going wrong were separated by a distance that could not be crossed by wanting to cross it.

Anne had watched. I had watched. Neither of us had done.

"Tell Mrs Graham," I said. "When she's back. Tell her Mary Brown on Dock Lane. Tell her to come."

"Let me come with you. Even if I can't — I can help, I can fetch water, I can—"

"Tell Mrs Graham."

I turned from the door. The cobblestones received my feet with the same cold indifference they had offered on the way here, and the street was the same street and the buildings were the same buildings and the strip of grey sky between the rooflines was the same sky and none of it — not one thing in the geography between Eel Row and Dock Lane — had changed in the five minutes since I had run through it in the other direction.

Everything had changed.

Mrs Graham was not coming. Not in time. Not before the baby arrived or the bleeding started or whatever was going to happen in the cottage on Dock Lane happened in the way that births happened — on their own schedule, at their own pace, with an indifference to human preparation that my mother had described to me once as the single most important thing she had learned in thirty years of attending other women's labours. The baby does not care what you have arranged, she had said. The baby comes when the baby comes, and your job is to be there when it does.

I was going to be there. Not Mrs Graham. Not Anne with her flour-covered hands and her half-shaped bread. Me. Constance Brown, fourteen years old, no shoes, no training beyond six years of watching from the edges of rooms where other women's babies were born, no qualification beyond the fact that I was the person who was going to walk through the door of the cottage on Dock Lane and find my mother in labour and be the only pair of hands in the room.

I started running. Back along Eel Row. Back through the narrow lane where the buildings pressed close and the light fell thin. Back toward Oyster Street and Butcher Row and Broad Street and the corner where the gutter backed up and the Henshaw dog would bark again as I passed. Back toward the cottage where my mother was waiting for help that was not coming in the form she expected, where Martha was sleeping, where Henry was sitting in the yard with James and Robert and did not know that the morning had broken open and that the pieces were falling in a pattern that no one in the household had planned for.

My feet hurt. The right stocking had torn through completely now and the ball of my foot was meeting the cobblestones directly, skin on stone, each impact sending a line of heat up through my ankle that I registered and dismissed and registered and dismissed because the pain was a fact and facts could be acknowledged without being obeyed.

I ran faster.