The day after his return, he went out to visit Florence in the company of his mother and Miss Sarah Webb, and attended Alicia’s christening. He noted uneasily that Florence was uncommonly stout, but he dared not comment on it.
To Florence’s mystification, Humphrey and Uncle Harold and his wife, Vera, did not attend the christening; they had urgent business to attend to in London that day. Elizabeth bought the customary silver christening mug and had it engraved, To Alicia Beatrix Mary, from her loving parents, July 1886.
Elizabeth had written to Andrew and his wife, inviting them to the christening. She received no reply and, after the christening tea, she had retired to Florence’s privy and wept at the snub. She wondered if Mrs Crossing had even been shown the invitation.
As the long summer holiday progressed, Charles began to feel bored. He inquired of his mother when they would be taking their holiday in Wales. He was taken aback when Elizabeth snapped at him sharply that Papa was far too busy this year to think about holidays.
Feeling contrite about her peevishness, Elizabeth asked him if he would like to spend a few days with his Aunt Clara at West Kirby.
‘Not really, Mama,’ he replied. Though Aunt Clara lived by the sea, her many ailments did not make her appealing to him.
He began to accompany Polly when she wheeled Alicia in her pram through Princes Park. He liked Polly; she had never seen either shells or seaweed or even sand and had shown a most respectful interest when he had explained what they were.
In the park, she always paused for a little chat with a young gardener weeding the flower beds; he regularly managed to be working somewhere along the usual route of their walk, and Charles teased Polly about him.
In the course of one of their walks, Charles discovered that Polly could not read. He stopped in the middle of the sandy carriageway, and stared up at the handsome young woman. ‘Really?’
She smiled down at him mischievously. ‘Aye. I don’t know nothin’, ’cept lookin’ after Miss Alicia and a few things like that.’
He began walking again, kicking a stone along in front of him. ‘I’d have thought you would be able to read easily. Servants always know so much.’
‘I suppose they do – folks like Mrs Tibbs. But me? I only scrubbed doorsteps and cleaned brasses and helped me Mam sell fents in the market sometimes, afore I were married.’
‘What are fents?’
‘Bits of old or damaged cloth – for dusters, like.’
‘I see. I didn’t know you were married.’
‘I’m not no more …’ Her voice faltered. In the weeks since she had been with the Woodmans, she had wept fairly constantly, alone in her windowless garret. Her only comfort had been the delicious sensation of Alicia’s contented sucking at her breast. ‘Me oosband,’ she picked up again, ‘he were killed in the docks.’
‘How dreadful!’ Charles was genuinely shocked. He understood that to be a widow was very hard; even the Bible said that you had to look after the widowed and the fatherless.
‘It were proper awful,’ Polly confided to him. ‘And me baby died – so I come to look after Miss Alicia.’ She smiled sadly down at the sleeping child in the old basketware pram in which Charles himself had been wheeled as an infant.
‘Well, I’m glad you did come. These hols are boring enough. Say, would you like to learn to read? It’s easy, once you know how. I’ve still got my first books up in my bedroom – and I bet there are some girls’ books in Flo’s old bedroom. I could teach you in the evenings.’
So that summer Polly learned to read and discovered a wonderful dream world.
She also learned to sew better than she had previously done. Elizabeth sent up to the nursery loads of sheets and other household linens, demanding that they be neatly darned or patched; servants should be kept busy, according to Elizabeth.
At first, Polly had been appalled at the huge pile of mending, but Elizabeth had told Rosie to instruct her, particularly on how to patch and how to turn a sheet sides to middle, and they both spent long evening hours by Polly’s single candle carefully weaving their needles in and out of the heavy linen cloth.
When Alicia had acquired a pattern of sleep and it was fairly certain that she would continue to sleep for an hour or two, Polly took a piece of sewing down to the big basement kitchen and sat for a little while with Rosie and Mrs Tibbs round the roaring fire in the kitchen range. ‘I’ll go crackers if I don’t have a bit of a jangle with somebody,’ she told Mrs Tibbs, and Mrs Tibbs had agreed that a little gossip was necessary to one’s sanity. Except for minor squabbles, they got along together fairly well and they would talk about the neighbours and their servants, about the Woodman family and their own families, while Fanny toiled through the washing-up and the scouring of the big, soot-covered iron saucepans.
From these agreeable sessions, Polly began to learn how such a fine house was run, how you could acquire a few perks to take home, like a half-used tablet of soap, nearly finished bottles of wine or perfume, odds and ends like buttons, discarded in the wastepaper basket. In addition Mr Bittle, the gardener, according to Fanny, would sometimes provide a few windfall apples or pears or even a seedling geranium in a pot. ‘Me auntie were made up when I bring ’er a little geranium,’ she confided to Polly, as she sat down on a nursery chair to rest, after bringing up a hod of coal. ‘Mrs Tibbs makes quite a bit on the side, Rosie says. She’ll take a slice or two off a joint or a little bitty butter or cheese – not much, but it adds up to a meal or two by the time ’er day off come around. She takes it to ’er sister.’
Another time, she remarked, ‘Ould Woodie is a mingy master, a proper pinchpenny, so he’s askin’ for theft. I suppose the Missus is used to ’im being mean and pokin’ his nose into the housekeepin’ book. And him payin’ out for his fancy woman; the poor Missus must lose out because of her,’ she giggled knowingly.
Polly laughed. Then she said more soberly, ‘It’s hard when you’ve no man interested in yez.’
As Polly’s grief over Patrick diminished, she had begun to look for someone to replace him; she was young and strong and could not imagine life without a man in it. But she lived in a world of women domestics, and the valet of the Colonel who lived next door was, she soon found, not interested in females. ‘And he a fine lookin’ man,’ she tut-tutted to Fanny. Fanny’s reply was ribald in the extreme.
Every time Polly went home to see her parents, however, she was reminded how lucky she was. The stench of sewage and the lack of even a decent cup of tea had not bothered her in earlier days – she had taken hardship for granted; but not any longer.
The overcrowding had been lessened by the removal of her paternal aunt and her five children to another cellar, but she was grieved to see her struggling mother grow progressively wearier and her unemployed father more despairing. She gave them most of the two shillings a week she earned, and, after her few hours of freedom, she would return thankfully to the nursery, to have only the smell of the baby round her and to know that tea might not be a very large meal but it would certainly arrive.
Though not given to pondering on what the future held, she began to consider how she could continue working for the Woodmans after Alicia was weaned. As a possible alternative, she dreamed occasionally of the gardener in Princes Park. He had never asked her out but he always seemed glad to see her. If he were promoted, he might be given a tied cottage in the park; they were sometimes provided for more senior gardeners. There he might be able to keep a pig and grow some vegetables – and keep a wife.
Unlike Rosie, she did not meet the tradesmen who came to the house and lingered round the back door until they were sent packing by Mrs Tibbs or, in the case of the grocer, invited into her private bed-sitting room to discuss the week’s groceries.
In the darkness of the early morning, Rosie, the house-parlourmaid, used to scurry down the path in the back garden, to get a kiss and a quick fondle from the milkman, who was courting her. Then, trembling with desire, she would rush back into the
house and tear upstairs to wash out the great bath with its mahogany surround, before Humphrey Woodman got up. She would lay out his cut-throat razor, his moustache scissors and his shaving cup on the bathroom dressing-table and wipe down his leather razor strop which hung on the wall beside the sink.
‘He used to tan ’is sons’ hides with his razor strop,’ Rosie told Polly. ‘I remember Master Edward gettin’ it so hard once, he fainted. And even then he never lifted a finger against ’is Pa. Loovely young man, Master Edward is; always says “thank you”.’
Rocking the baby in her arms as she paused at the doorway of the bathroom she was not allowed to use, Polly remembered the dreadful state of Elizabeth’s back after she had been beaten and she wondered if he had used the strop on her. No one, she thought passionately, should use a strop on such a pretty lady, no matter what she had done. Since that day, she had more than once found her Mistress with tears on her face. She wondered what else he had done to her, and she shivered.
Chapter Six
I
Elizabeth had no idea whether her husband had expressed any feelings in public about the new arrival in the family, but she suspected that Maisie had done so and that the news of Alicia’s doubtful origins had reached some of her acquaintances. Certainly, the number of invitations she usually received had dropped off, and one or two ladies appeared not to have seen her when she met them while out walking.
Her conscience told her that, as Andrew and she moved through their usual group before the birth, mutual friends must have sensed the attachment between them – and her pregnancy, at so late an age, must have caused speculation behind delicately waving ball fans.
She decided that she did not care; she would brazen it out. And Humphrey could take himself to hell, as long as he kept her. Once she had recovered from the beating, she had done some urgent arithmetic, and had decided that she could not possibly live on her marriage settlement from her father; it provided pin money, but that was all.
In her despair, she had considered writing to her brother in Ceylon and asking if she could make a home with him; but he had always been a poor correspondent and lived up country on his tea plantation, sharing a house with his partner. Two bachelors together, she thought wryly, would not want to be saddled with a woman. And it was said that men sometimes, well, sometimes did intimate things together – and she could not face the possibility of that.
So she decided to use Humphrey to her own advantage. If he threatened to beat her again, she would say sharply that she would show the bruises to the wives of his business associates. Stiff-necked Presbyterians, most of them, they might feel she deserved it, but faced with it, they would freeze out Humphrey. They’d be a pack of Pontius Pilates, she thought maliciously.
The armed truce prevailed, with occasional tiresome arguments which never resolved anything.
II
Though Elizabeth’s friends might snub her, Humphrey found, to his embarrassment, that when he met business acquaintances accompanied by their wives, several of the ladies inquired after Elizabeth’s health and whether the baby had been a boy or a girl.
The same thing happened when he attended social events alone. Where was dear Elizabeth and how was the new baby?
He knew he must, to save unwanted conjecture, persuade Elizabeth to accompany him occasionally, and he must learn to reply civilly to polite inquiries. He could not ignore both mother and daughter indefinitely. His Manchester brother, Harold, and his wife, Vera, had been offended at not being asked to the christening, and he had told them that it had been very quiet because Elizabeth was still weak and Florence was in the family way herself. Though his brother accepted this, Vera felt that it confirmed her own suspicions.
At St Margaret’s Church, Humphrey and Elizabeth stood side by side each Sunday morning in frigid silence. He hoped that she had been privately Churched, attended a traditional service of thanksgiving; otherwise, the minister would ask awkward questions.
Elizabeth had, indeed, been Churched. One morning, she had kneeled alone before the priest, while he intoned over her Psalm 127, with its uncomfortable references to men with quivers full of arrows, and she wept quietly for Andrew Crossing, the darling of her youth, who had deserted her. In a worldly way, she knew he had been wise to slip quietly out of her life, by the simple process of handing over her legal work to one of his partners. She knew he should have done it long before. But it hurt.
It was common enough for women to cry after giving birth, so the priest ignored the tears stealing down Elizabeth’s cheeks. He was, however, kind enough to invite her into the vicarage, where he handed her over to his sister, who kept house for him. She was a fussy, plain woman who produced a strong cup of tea and ten minutes’ bracing conversation on the joys of having children. It gave Elizabeth time to blow her nose, before walking home.
III
Alicia’s first Boxing Day was a Sunday. Harold and Vera Woodman, accompanied by their three sons, came to spend the day with Elizabeth and Humphrey. At tea time, Alicia was brought down by Polly and laid in her mother’s arms; she behaved admirably and gurgled and smiled at the company.
Aunt Vera stroked the fine down of ash-blonde hair on the child’s head. ‘She’s as fair as a lily – and with such light grey eyes,’ she remarked, watching Elizabeth’s face.
Elizabeth bent her own dark head over the baby and kissed it. ‘My brother is quite fair,’ she lied; at least he was not likely to come home for years; with luck, his black hair would have turned white before he returned to England.
Humphrey chewed his moustache and turned to look out of the lace-draped window. His brother and nephews joined him – babies were not very interesting, particularly when they were girls.
Vera pursed her lips and made no further comment. She brought out from her reticule an ivory ring with two silver bells attached to it. ‘Here, Alicia,’ she said. ‘Here is a pretty present from Father Christmas for you.’
Alicia clutched at the ring, and Elizabeth sighed with relief.
When, the following year, the Queen’s Jubilee was being celebrated in Liverpool, Elizabeth’s sister, Clara, came to stay and to join in the festivities. She was older than Elizabeth and lived in a small house left her by their father, in the village of West Kirby on the Wirral Peninsula. She had been ill with bronchitis at the time of Alicia’s birth and this had left her with a painful cough, making travelling too arduous for her. Thanks to the patient ministrations of her companion-help, she was now feeling better, and had come to see her new niece.
She was a spinster and sometimes quite lonely. When she saw the little girl in Polly’s arms, she said impulsively to Elizabeth, ‘You must bring her to stay with me. The sea air will put some colour into those pale, little cheeks.’
When Elizabeth demurred that the presence of a young child might put too much strain on her delicate health, the older woman replied, ‘Let Polly come as well.’
So Alicia’s early childhood was enlivened by visits to the seaside, occasionally accompanied by Elizabeth, more often by Polly. Though frail and slow-moving, Aunt Clara taught her niece how to build sandcastles and took her to collect shells and to paddle in the shallow pools left by the tide.
Polly had never seen the sea before and was, at first, terrified of its bouncing waves. She soon discovered with Alicia the joys of paddling and she, too, looked forward to these little holidays.
Humphrey had invested money in a railway line to link West Kirby with Liverpool. Because it failed to draw enough passengers and part of it had to run in a tunnel under the Mersey, which was more expensive than expected, he suffered a resounding financial loss. When, finally, it did go through, it was a joyous occasion for Alicia, because dear delicate Aunt Clara could then so easily visit the house in Upper Canning Street. Humphrey was consoled by the fact that a piece of land that he had, years before, bought in West Kirby suddenly became immensely valuable because it lay close to the new station. He sold it for housing development, at a handsome profit.<
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IV
‘Wot you goin’ to do when our Allie goes to school?’ Fanny asked Polly, as, one night, she snatched a moment in the nursery to rest her aching feet. She had asked a similar question when, at eighteen months of age, Alicia had finally been weaned.
At that time, Polly had been very troubled. The under-gardener in the park, of whom she had had hopes, had failed to appear during two successive walks. According to a surly park-keeper, he had been dismissed for impudence. Polly’s dream of presiding over a tied cottage with a small pigsty vanished with him. A brief encounter with a regular soldier, also met in the park, had come to an abrupt end when his regiment was sent to India. Statistics were against Polly’s ever marrying again; the district had far more women than it had men.
The longer Polly continued to live in the comfort of the nursery attic, the less she wanted to return to the teeming slum in which she had been raised. A high standard of living, she found, was very easy to get used to. She had been thankful when Elizabeth had used her, in part, to replace Maisie.
Fanny was now a small, pinched seventeen-year-old and had replaced Rosie as a housemaid. Rosie had married the milkman as soon as he was satisfied that she was pregnant; a working man had to be certain that his wife could have children to maintain him in his old age.
A tweenie was no longer employed to care for fires, empty slops and carry water. Instead, Humphrey ordered Elizabeth to employ a charwoman, who came early in the morning to clean out the fireplaces and remake the fires. She also filled all the coal scuttles. To cut down on the carrying of water, more use was made of the bathroom taps, though the servants were still not allowed to wash themselves or use the lavatory in the bathroom. Elizabeth ended a custom of centuries, abandoned the chamber-pot under her bed and trailed along to the bathroom; she felt it was a real hardship.
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