Despite lengthy struggles with poor health, in the decades that followed the war Josephine Baker continued to perform and became a prominent activist in the civil rights movement. Desperate for a family, but unable to have children due to her health problems, she adopted twelve children from a wide range of ethnicities and backgrounds, whom she nicknamed her ‘Rainbow Tribe’。
Ms Baker died in Paris on 12th April, 1975, aged 68. She had performed on stage just four days earlier, to glowing reviews, at a gala to celebrate her 50 years in showbusiness.
Josie passes it back to me with a smile. ‘She really was something special. Just being in her company made you feel as if your life had been sprinkled with a little stardust. I’m so glad I have her autograph in my keeping again.’
She falls quiet then and the room is filled with her unspoken question as she waits. The silence is loud in my ears. It’s my turn to talk. But I can’t find the words, knowing that once I begin there will be no going back.
At last I say, ‘There’s something I want to show you. Would you come upstairs? To the room that used to be yours?’
‘Help me up.’ I take her hand and help her get to her feet and then together we climb the stairs to the attic.
She hesitates for a moment at the door. ‘So many years.’ She smiles at me. ‘And yet it feels like yesterday.’
I push open the door and she steps over the threshold into her old bedroom.
Grace’s room.
She stands in silence, taking it all in – the toys and books, the jack-in-the-box and the pink rabbit, the mobile with its silver moon and stars, the bed with my handmade quilt spread out on it, the baby sling hanging from the back of a chair: everything any parents would want to give their baby girl.
But here’s the truth, and it’s time for me to face it at last: Tom and I no longer have a baby girl.
This empty room, filled with the things I’ve bought, has been my way of coping with the impossibility of carrying on, pretending that the unbearable hasn’t happened in order to be able to bear it. I’ve been living two lives: the real one in which I am a lonely expat wife trying to establish a new home in Casablanca and struggling with a failing marriage; and the one in my head, in which Grace is still with me and I spend my days by her side, caring for her.
Josie sits down on the bed in the empty room and picks up a corner of the quilt. ‘This is beautiful,’ she says. She runs her fingers over the triangles cut from Grace’s dresses and romper suits, set in their border of intricate Berber crewel work. The thirteen on-point blocks, each one depicting its own Tree of Life, represent the thirteen precious months that she was with us: there’s one made from scraps of her tiny, newborn Babygros and the brushed cotton blanket I wrapped her in to bring her home from the hospital on the day she was born; there are trees made from the colourful, cheerfully printed clothes she wore at three months, then six months – the little smocked dresses and cosy pyjamas printed with flowers and animals and sailing boats; there are triangles cut from the onesie she was wearing the day she began to crawl; and there’s a whole tree made from the dress she wore for her first birthday party, embroidered with buttercups and bumblebees.
These are the trees of Grace’s life. Just enough to make a quilt for a baby’s bed.
‘Would you like to tell me about it?’ Josie asks softly.
And so I sit beside her and I explain how our baby girl died, coming up for a year ago. I tell her how perfect Grace was, how happy Tom and I were. I tell her how much I loved my daughter, how hard I tried to be the perfect mother to her. But then she caught a cold, nothing much, just a sniffle. I noticed she was running a bit of a temperature, so I called the doctor’s surgery and they said to give her Calpol and fluids and call back in the morning if she was still not right. I thought she’d settled for the night, but just as I was getting into bed she began to scream, not just the cry of a hungry baby who was feeling a bit under the weather but full-on, agonised screaming. I snatched her out of her cot. She was burning up with fever, screwing up her eyes in distress when I turned on the light. And on her cheeks and her chest was a livid rash of dark spots.
We drove to the hospital in a blur of panic and I clutched Grace to me, willing her to fight the sickness that was raging in her tiny body, consuming her before my eyes. She fell silent then and the feverish weight of her became as limp as a rag doll in my arms. Her silence was almost worse than her screams. We ran into the Accident and Emergency Department and she was taken from me, whisked away behind a swinging door. A kindly nurse sat with me and told me I’d be able to see her very soon, they were just running some tests and trying to get her temperature down as it was dangerously high.