Born of Woman Read Online Free PDF

breeds which could cope with months of snow, but whose bleating sounded thinner and more desolate. The light was fading, colour draining out of everything, as if the whole land had suffered a shock. Hills, car, earth, road, sky—all cut from the same coarse and fading fabric. It was a struggle to steer the car straight. Shale and boulders had fallen from the hillside and were littered on the track. He stopped in a sneeze of stones.
    â€˜Are we there?’ Jennifer eager, trusting, too pink and bland for this pinched and pitiless landscape.
    â€˜Not quite.’
    â€˜So why have we stopped? Is the road too rough?’
    â€˜Oh, no. It’s often worse than this.’
    â€˜Why, then?’
    â€˜I … think we ought to go … back.’ The hills closed around his words like ripples, pebbles sucked into a pond.
    â€˜Back?’
    He nodded.
    â€˜But we’ve been driving all day , darling. Your mother’ll be expecting us. Mrs Bertram told her we were coming.’
    The gentle, rational arguing again. If only she’d curse him, force him on.
    â€˜Look, I, I … don’t want to disturb her. She may have gone to bed.’
    â€˜But it’s only just past seven. Anway, we don’t have to wake her up. We can wait a while, if you like, until she’s rested.’
    â€˜No—I’d … rather turn round.’ Once the engine died, he could hear the silence moving in on them, seeping from the hills, stuffing all the gaps between them like the crumpled tissue paper she had folded between her dresses in the case. He didn’t want any gaps. He longed to be fused with Jennifer, be one with her, have her strength, her easy, blinkered power. He pulled her over to him, joined them with her hair.
    â€˜Snookie …’ Silly secret name he used in bed. His mother must never hear it. If only they were in bed now, three hundred miles down south … She kissed him, more as child than man, got out of the car and coaxed him into her seat.
    â€˜Let me drive, darling. You’re tired, that’s all. You should never have taken over in the first place.’
    He didn’t argue, though the road tried every trick on her. Looped, twisted, doubled back, rumbled her with cattle grids, defied her with five-bar gates. She survived them all. Three gates more and they turned on to a cart track. The Morris groaned and juddered. He shut his eyes. At least he wouldn’t see when they turned the corner and the hills turned into forest. He felt the last wooden bridge sway and mutter as the car bumped over it.
    Jennifer was slowing now. ‘Oh, Lyn,’ she cried. ‘Just look!’
    He didn’t look. He feared to. That forest had killed the farmlands, as the farm had killed his father. There would never have been a forest without his father’s bankruptcy. His father was only a photo on the mantelpiece, a five by ten sepia-tinted half-plate who had married his housekeeper when he had nothing else left, then doubled his shame by dying on her. The funeral baked meats were barely cold when the Forestry Commission came to woo the widow. Hester had succumbed. She was tired of labour and they were short of land. He had been just a hump beneath a pram-rug. Those trees had lived nearly as long as he had, feeding off his father, off his fields.
    He opened his eyes and glimpsed the dark stain on the landscape, grim and straight-spined conifers gobbling up the light. They were mainly sitka spruce, one of the hardiest trees in the world which had evolved in the age of the reptiles and still kept the thin scaly bark which proved they were coldblooded. They had been wrenched from the snows of northern Canada to withstand stony soils and slapping winds, where other, sissier trees would droop or die.
    His wife was rhapsodising. He watched her watch the trees. The marriage service talked about one flesh, but he knew it was different forests they were seeing.
    There had been sheep