Sweet William

by Beryl Bainbridge

  ‘No,’ said Ann. ‘She’s got a friend.’

  ‘I see,’ said her mother, tight-lipped.

  ‘She has been married,’ Ann ventured. ‘Twice in fact.’

  ‘Oh,’ said her mother, amazed. ‘She’s not backward in coming forward, then?’

  It was to her credit that she kept her temper in check, held back the bitter words. It was very difficult for her, under the circumstances. All those years of duty and conformity gone for nothing. Of no value. Twenty years later the old standards swept away as if they had never been. There was Ann, pregnant, unmarried, money in the bank, neither ostracised nor selling heather in the gutter. Unrepentant. One might say, unaware that there was anything to be repentant about. It was terribly unfair. She brooded, tossed and turned peevishly in the pink bedroom. She came through into the sitting room and sat on the side of the divan. She switched on the lamp, blinked in the harsh light, nudged her daughter awake.

  ‘Ann dear, I’m worried about you.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Ann, moving restlessly on the cramped divan.

  ‘Where did we go wrong?’ puzzled Mrs Walton. ‘We always taught you the difference between right and wrong.’

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Ann said. She sat upright, feeling the baby kicking and stretching.

  ‘You were top in Scripture at school. Several times.’

  ‘Once,’ said Ann.

  Mrs Walton went back to her bed and lay down, unable to sleep. She propped herself up on the pillows. She heard a door open downstairs, the hoot of an owl, footsteps coming up the stairs. After a moment there was a faint swishing sound outside on the landing, like a cat rubbing itself along the carpet. Scratchings at the door. Fingernails on the glass. Mrs Walton listened, petrified. A low moaning began. ‘Let me in … let me in.’ The voice was weary, filled with pain.

  Mrs Walton got out of bed and stood behind the door with accelerated heart. She thought she could make out the shape of a man beyond the panel of the glass. Something at any rate. She went on all fours in her nylon nightdress across the sitting room. ‘Ann’, she whispered urgently. ‘Ann.’

  Ann opened her eyes. She couldn’t understand what her mother was doing paddling about the room like a dog. She heard William calling: ‘Ann … Ann …’

  ‘It’s him,’ she said. ‘It’s William.’ She wanted to jump up and let him in, but she didn’t dare with her mother here. She knew William. He wouldn’t be curtailed by the presence of her mother. The moaning went on.

  ‘What’s wrong with the fool?’ hissed Mrs Walton. ‘Does he think he’s Heathcliff?’ She had never known anything like it. Not even during the war when things were more casual.

  She got in beside Ann on the divan. She kept tumbling out onto the carpet. They both began to giggle. Her mother smelt of powder and perspiration. The rings on her fingers snagged the blankets. It was like hiding from the enemy; outside in no-man’s-land the wounded groaned, caught on the barbed wire.

  In the morning, Ann refused to look on the landing.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ snapped her mother. ‘Go and see if he’s still there.’

  ‘He won’t be,’ Ann said mournfully.

  Mrs Walton was irritable with lack of sleep. She dressed and flounced into the kitchen to make breakfast.

  ‘I can’t stay much longer,’ she announced. ‘I must go home to Daddy. It’s too noisy here.’

  Ann didn’t want her mother to leave. After all it was too late now. William would never return. He had probably gone straight off to seek comfort from Sheila or Edna or Pamela. He had let go of the branch for ever. ‘Please stay,’ she begged. ‘Don’t go yet.’

  ‘I don’t know how you got involved with that person in the first place. He sounds absolutely insane. He needs putting away.’ Mrs Walton slammed cups and saucers and marmalade jar onto the table. ‘Have you no pride?’ she asked. It was torture to her, the thought of a weak indulgent man like that reducing her daughter to such straits. ‘No,’ said Ann. ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘What does his wife say about his behaviour?’

  ‘She says he’s a beautiful person.’

  ‘Poor thing,’ said Mrs. Walton. ‘She needs her head examining: If a man treated me like that, going off with women, carrying on outside the door in the middle of the night, I wouldn’t put up with it. I’d have him restrained.’ It was as if she was talking about a horse or a mad dog. Her chins quivered. ‘You talk about modern life and things being different now. You haven’t learnt anything at all. All this permissiveness has led you young girls into slavery. I wouldn’t give him house room.’

  ‘I want a cup of tea,’ said Ann. She was tired and she felt bulky and uncomfortable.

  ‘There’s no milk,’ said Mrs Kershaw. ‘Go and see if there’s any on the step.’

  ‘I can’t,’ protested Ann.

  Her mother crossed her arms and stamped her foot in fury. ‘I’m not drinking tea without milk,’ she cried.

  Ann crept into the hall. No one. Not a sign. The wardrobe was still there, the waiting pram. She looked for a letter on the mat. There was no milk in the porch.

  As she crossed the hall to knock on Mrs Kershaw’s door, thinking she might borrow some, William leapt out of the wardrobe. He looked dreadful, dishevelled and white as chalk. His eyes glittered in his exhausted face. He seized her arm. He shook her brutally. ‘Why didn’t you let me in, then?’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ she said, trembling with shock. ‘I couldn’t.’

  ‘Has that bastard Gerald come back?’

  She hesitated. She didn’t want to mention her mother.

  ‘I told that bastard to keep away. I told him I was going to marry you.’

  He let go of her. He began to run up the stairs.

  ‘Wait,’ she cried, ‘Wait.’

  She caught up with him on the first landing. She hung onto his coat. ‘It’s Mummy. It’s my mother come to stay.’

  He sank onto the stairs. She sat beside him, stroking his hair.

  ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ he said. They clung to each other.

  ‘Come with me now,’ he said. ‘Come out with me. I want to take you away from here. It’s all spoilt here.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she whispered. ‘I can’t leave my mother.’ She could have bitten her tongue.

  William said, ‘I won’t make any more promises. I won’t say I’ll do this or that. Just let’s spend the day together.’

  She thought if she told her mother she was going to the hospital she could possibly stay out all morning. She might even say she fainted having her blood pressure taken and was put to bed for the afternoon.

  ‘You’ve got so big,’ he said. ‘You’re so full of baby.’ He spread his hands on her stomach.

  ‘I could meet you in about an hour,’ she said. ‘I could meet you somewhere.’

  ‘At the little station on Finchley Road,’ he said. ‘We’ll go to Hampstead Heath. We’ll have a picnic.’

  It was warm on the Heath. The grass smelled of summer. He laid his coat on the ground for her to lie on. He had bought Cornish pasties and fruit, a bottle of H.P. sauce. He wanted to know if he should buy her lemonade.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want any lemonade.’

  He didn’t make any promises. She was disappointed. But he wanted her to make him one.

  ‘What sort of a promise?’ she asked.

  ‘No matter what happens,’ he said. ‘No matter how I upset you, I have to be there when the baby’s born.’

  ‘Will the hospital let you?’ she asked. ‘Will they let you be there?’

  ‘You’re not to have it in the hospital,’ he said. ‘You’re to have it at home, in that pink room where we began. When it wasn’t spoilt. Do you understand?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I do understand.’

  She looked down at the grass so that he wouldn’t see the tears in her eyes. She tried to reach back to the time when it was lovely, when it wasn’t spoiled. She failed. He could do it, she knew. He wa
s bigger than she in every way. She was petty and cynical.

  ‘I don’t think you’re allowed to have your first child at home,’ she said. ‘In case there are complications.’

  ‘Rubbish. You’re healthy … you’re in the pink. They can’t make you go into hospital.’

  She wondered if all the right things would be available – the drugs, the gas and air. What about blood poisoning? Puerperal fever?

  ‘I promise,’ she said. ‘I’ll have it at home.’ Even if it killed her, she would do as he asked.

  There was little conversation between them. One topic would only lead to another. What have you been doing? Who with? It wasn’t worth the risk. They lay in the sunshine, William pale, Ann in the pink, thinking their own thoughts, munching apples.

  She slept for a while. When she awoke William was squatting beneath a tree, digging a hole with a stick.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m burying a lock of your hair.’

  ‘My hair?’ she said, startled. She hadn’t remembered ever giving him a piece of her hair.

  ‘When we’re old,’ he said. ‘We’ll come back here together, and look for it.’

  He was so romantic … so beautiful.

  The twig snapped in half. He laid a matchbox on the ground. He felt in the grass for something else to poke out the earth. He stood up and wandered a little distance off, searching among the bushes and the stones.

  She rolled over onto her large stomach and looked at the matchbox. An ant ran over her fingers. She shook it away and reached for the little carton with the coloured label. William turned and smiled at her. She smiled back. Birds sang. She opened the matchbox and looked at the lock of dark hair bound with white cotton.

  She banged her face on the ground. She threw the twist of glossy hair at the tree. She ripped the matchbox into shreds with her teeth. Clumsily she rose to her feet, whirling round and round, crying out on a single piercing note.

  William thought she had been stung by a wasp. He ran to her, trying to fasten her within his arms. She wrenched away from him and, continuing to scream, fled across the grass toward the pond. She thought if she ran fast enough she would dip down under the surface and be drowned instantly. The sunlight leapt upon the water; the quiet ducks, swimming in formation, squawked in alarm. By the time she was ankle-deep in the pond she had changed her mind. It was too wet, too cold. She swerved sideways, stumbled up the bank, ran along the tree-lined path to the road. William caught her. She hit him in the face. He got her by a skein of hair and dragged her head backwards.

  ‘Jesus,’ he cried. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  She stared at him with hatred. She spat full into his face. She tore away from him with such violence that he was left with a hank of hair twined about his fist. He shook his fingers as if they were burnt, the yellow strands drifted downwards through the air and blew away among the grass.

  ‘Bury that in a bloody matchbox,’ she screamed, running again, leaving him standing there in the sunshine.

  7

  Mrs Walton went home after two weeks. Before she left, she told Ann the most searing stories about her own experience of childbirth: the pain, the torture in the bed, the doctor summoned three days early; the breaking of the waters, the labour, consultation downstairs between the doctor and Captain Walton.

  ‘But what sort of pain?’ persisted Ann, wanting to be prepared.

  ‘Indescribable,’ said her mother. ‘The doctor said to my husband, “Choose between your wife and child. We can’t save them both. Choose, man.’”

  ‘But why?’ asked Ann. ‘What was wrong?’

  ‘One of those things,’ Mrs Walton said, spreading her hands out in ignorance. In the end only Mrs Walton’s teeth were lost. The baby was slapped hard on the buttocks and cried. The mother recovered.

  ‘How awful,’ said Ann. It had certainly been an uncomfortable experience for both of them.

  ‘But it won’t be like that for you,’ explained Mrs Walton, a little late in the day.

  She said she would knit something for the baby and send it through the post. She’d had a word with Mrs Kershaw and as soon as Ann went into hospital, Mrs Kershaw had promised to let her know. She hugged Ann.

  ‘If that person comes again,’ she advised. ‘You call Roddy and tell him to phone the police.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ann obediently. ‘I’ll do that.’ She made her mouth tremble, her eyes glisten with tears. For her mother’s sake.

  ‘Cheer up,’ said Mrs Walton, her own eyes filling.

  Ann almost wished she might stay, but they both knew it would never last. Sooner or later one of them would say something to be regretted.

  Down the stairs went the straw hat with the roses, out onto the path. A last wave of white glove as she stepped into the taxi.

  She wrote a few days later, expressing disgust that Ann had landed her in such a predicament. She had told Mrs Munro and Aimée Hughes that Ann had been married secretly for several months to a well-known writer. After all, Ann couldn’t stay away indefinitely from Brighton. Captain Walton would be bound to ask questions, and some explanation had to be given for the baby. ‘Imagine my horror,’ she wrote, ‘when Mrs Munro showed me the enclosed cutting. I don’t know how I’m going to show my face at the Bridge Club.’

  There was a photograph of William and Edna seated together. The article said William McClusky’s play The Truth is a Lie was to open at Wyndham’s on August 3rd. It was to be adapted into a film and he had been commissioned to write the screen play. Mr and Mrs McClusky were due to sail to the States on the Queen Elizabeth, later in the year. Mrs McClusky said she was delighted. She had always wanted to travel.

  When Ann showed the cutting to Mrs Kershaw she said Roddy had already pointed it out to her. She said, ‘I hoped you wouldn’t see it.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Ann. ‘I don’t really mind.’

  She thought she was possibly anaesthetised by the coming of the baby. Or punch drunk. Nothing seemed to bother her any more. Not love, certainly. Only an insatiable curiosity to find out why, and how, and with whom William lived his life. She didn’t want him to live with her at all. But she did need to know who did. She telephoned Edna several times but there was never a reply.

  William wrote her a letter, a week before the baby was due. Did she remember her promise to him? That day on the Heath when the grass was warm and golden. Green, she thought, pedantically. Grass was never golden, only corn. It was typical of him to recall the sunshine.

  I must hold you to your promise, he said. It may be, that my love for you, so destroyed by my liking for compartments, will become whole and beautiful again, when our child is born. If you will let me come to you now, you will perhaps recognise, in my care for you and our child, that I am indeed your Sweet William, and not the monster you have made of me. Let me come. Let me bathe your face and hold your hand when the pain comes.

  My play opens on Thursday. How I wish you could be there. Later there will be a film. We will go to America, you and I and our baby, and live in a house in California with oranges growing in the garden.

  The only thing he omitted was his address.

  ‘Leave it,’ said Mrs Kershaw. ‘Don’t have any more to do with him.’

  ‘Would there really be oranges in the garden?’ asked Ann.

  ‘Small ones,’ said Mrs Kershaw. ‘Don’t take any notice of him.’

  Ann had remembered her promise to William, even before he wrote the letter – even after that nightmare day on the Heath. She had told the hospital she wanted to have the baby at home – they had advised against it – but she was adamant. When the pains began she was to ring the Nurses’ Home. She would have gas and air and pethadene. She must have a supply of newspapers ready and the room thoroughly cleaned. Any surplus furniture, apart from the bed, must be moved into another room.

  A cradle had arrived, either from William or from Edna, made of wood. It was Swedish. Mrs Kershaw gave her the newspapers. The
bedroom looked bare and simple.

  ‘Brace yourself,’ said Mrs Kershaw, ‘to be shaved. That’s the humiliating part.’

  Ann phoned Edna again. The baby was due on August 1st. She was vast and distorted, belly swinging, skin stretched tight. She had heartburn for which she nibbled charcoal biscuits. Freckles appeared across the bridge of her nose.

  ‘I’ve been away,’ said Edna. ‘Staying with my son.’

  ‘Will you tell William the baby is coming soon?’

  ‘When?’ asked Edna selflessly.

  ‘Any day,’ said Ann. ‘He wants to be here to see it.’

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ promised Edna.

  ‘I never meant to upset you,’ Ann said. ‘At any rate you’ll be going to the States with William. For his film.’

  Edna said, ‘My dear child, who can tell.’

  Ann got her first stab of pain when she was getting out of bed in the morning. It took her breath away.

  ‘Aaahh,’ she cried. ‘Mummy.’

  When it had passed she went downstairs and knocked at Mrs Kershaw’s door. No reply. She went back upstairs to get the phone number of the nurse. She looked in her booklet supplied by the hospital. She watched the clock, waiting with beating heart for the next spasm to possess her. It was quite exciting. She looked at her teeth in the bathroom mirror, felt them one by one; they were firm and unblemished. She started down the stairs again, wondering if she should telephone her mother. On the second landing she was cut in half it seemed, by the vicious swipe of a knife. She began to pant, as they had taught her at the hospital. If only she could reach the phone.

  When she opened her eyes, it was to see William coming through the hall door. He lifted her up in his arms and carried her laboriously back upstairs. He laid her on the bed. He phoned the nurse.

  ‘Guess what,’ he said. ‘Her name is Borman. Like Martin Bormann.’

  She didn’t understand. ‘I want the gas and air,’ she said. ‘I want it now.’

  He laid his hand over her nose and mouth. He told her to breathe in deeply. In … out … in … out … On his palm was the odour of cinnamon and French fern soap.