Paid Servant

by E. R. Braithwaite

  Soon the drinks were ready and we toasted each other’s health. Mrs Bentham sat opposite me, but her husband stood leaning against the wall near the pram, evidently somewhat ill at ease. The rum was very potent stuff and seemed to be locating every corner of my stomach with its probing, fiery fingers. I looked from Mr Bentham to his wife, hoping that one of them would start the ball rolling.

  “It’s about the baby here,” he suddenly blurted out, pushing himself off the wall and standing with his legs apart, one hand resting on the edge of the pram. There was something rather defiant about him now. “The mother won’t have it, so it’s got to go into a home.”

  He seemed about to say more, but controlled himself with an effort and returned to his position leaning against the wall, and looked at his wife. She sat with her hands clasped in her lap, unruffled.

  “Why don’t you want your baby, Mrs Bentham?” I asked, puzzled by his outburst and her evident calm. Whatever the matter was I wished they’d hurry up and get to the point. If they thought that they could produce children and then calmly ask the authorities to rear them while they enjoyed themselves, free of responsibility, then I had news for them. Nothing doing!

  “Oh, it’s not my child,” she replied, “and he says it’s his,” this last with a careless flick of her head in his direction.

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand. Perhaps one of you would like to explain.” I was too tired to play ducks and drakes.

  He started to speak, but she interrupted: “Okay, I’ll tell it, and if you want to know anything more you can ask him.” Her voice carried an odd note of amusement, as if she found the situation, whatever it was, rather funny, in contrast to her husband’s grim and somewhat determined expression.

  “He got in from work before me last night,” she began. “When I got here I saw him with the baby and the pram. He said the baby’s mother just brought it and left it with him and told him she couldn’t look after it and it was up to him. I told him to take the child back to the mother but he wouldn’t. He says she has nowhere to keep it. She only came out of the hospital last week and was staying with friends, now she is going back to her relatives somewhere up North until she feels strong enough to work, or so he says. So now it’s up to him.” She paused and turned to look at him with that same half-mocking expression on her face.

  “But why should the woman bring the child to Mr Bentham?” Even as I asked the question it occurred to me that somehow or other he must be involved with the woman. It was not unusual for babies to be abandoned on doorsteps or churches or railway stations. But I had not heard of anyone dumping a new baby on a stranger with the injunction that he ‘get on with it’. Once again he was about to reply, but she beat him to it.

  “He says he is the father.” Something happened to her face as she said this. Her lips were drawn away from her strong white teeth in a snarl of scorn and her voice took on a hoarse, caustic edge. “That’s what he says, but I know it’s a lie. Everybody knows it’s a lie, except him.”

  “Shut up, woman,” he exclaimed, advancing to stand threateningly beside her, his large fists doubled up by his side. The feeling of pleasant comfort had disappeared from the room. I became conscious of the discomfort of the paraffin heater’s warmth and fumes, and noticed for the first time that the only window was tightly closed.

  “The child is mine,” he continued with controlled vehemence, glancing quickly towards the sleeping infant as if concerned lest our voices disturb it into wakefulness. “I don’t give a damn what anyone says, I know it’s mine.” Then turning to me, “I hear that there are places where a child can be looked after. I am willing to pay for it until the mother comes back. All I want from you is to know where I can take it, just for a few months maybe. I can pay.”

  He now looked at his wife as if daring her to say otherwise. I thought that the situation was getting rather out of hand, and I did not quite grasp it, nor would grasp it if they kept on yelling at each other and at me.

  “Please, Mr Bentham,” I said, “your wife asked me to come here because she hoped I would be able to either advise or help you both. She did not tell me anything about the problem and I still don’t know just what it is. Now I would like to suggest that you sit down and let us start all over again without exciting ourselves, and if there is any way in which I can be of help to you, you may depend on me. But, as you have invited me here, you might as well tell me the whole story, all of it. I could not advise either of you without knowing all the facts, so please, let’s discuss this on as friendly a basis as possible.”

  He looked at me for a moment, then went to sit on the bed beside the pram, his whole attitude still fiercely protective of the sleeping child.

  “Well, it’s like this,” he began, “I came to England two years ago from Jamaica. I’m a bricklayer, learned my trade at home and before coming here had been working for eight years as a journeyman in Trinidad. Marv, there, was with me in Trinidad, but when I decided to come to England she stayed behind in Jamaica until I found a job and somewhere to live over here—then she would join me. I got a job with a building firm, no trouble at all because I know my trade. I got this room and thought I’d fix it up a bit, you know, get in a few things to brighten it up before Marv came over. Didn’t go out much, you know. Got a TV and the record-player, and sort of kept myself to myself.”

  He paused and rubbed a hand over his head. “Janice, that’s the baby’s mother, used to come around here to her sister. She lives downstairs.”

  “Is she the blonde young woman who opened the door to me?” I asked.

  “That would be her,” he replied. “She’s the only white woman living downstairs. There’s another one on this floor, Mrs Sobers, married to a man from British Guiana.” He got up and retrieved his glass from where he had put it on the radiogram and sipped slowly from it.

  “You know how it is,” he continued, “we got talking, and sometimes she’d come up and watch TV here, or we’d go to the pictures together. Sometimes her sister would come along with us, you see she lives on her own downstairs, her fellow is in the Forces overseas.

  “Janice told me when she knew she was pregnant. Well after all, I knew it was me and I couldn’t let her down. So I told her I’d see her through her confinement and afterwards support the child. She knew about Marv and that Marv was coming to join me, and I figured I’d tell Marv about it when she got here, but what with one thing and another it slipped my mind.”

  “Ha!”

  The single explosive sound cannoned out of Mrs Bentham, and the infant began to wail. Before the surprised father could move, his wife had rushed over to the pram and was gently rocking it on its springs. Soon the wailing subsided and she calmly resumed her seat. Her husband went to the table and picked up the bottle of rum to replenish my glass, but I declined; he offered some to his wife but she merely placed her hand over her glass, and he replaced the bottle without adding any to his own drink.

  “Where is the child’s mother now?” I asked.

  “She’s gone up North, left yesterday,” he replied. “I think she said she has some family in Burnley. She promised to write and let me know where she is.”

  “You’ll wait long for that, I can tell you,” his wife intervened. “I’ve been in England now nearly five months, and the first thing I knew about any baby was when I came home last night to find it here. That woman has dumped the child here and that’s the last he’ll see of her, even her sister says so. Burnley, indeed!” She sniffed very audibly to emphasize her remark.

  “I don’t care what her sister says,” he replied.

  “You should care, Mr Man,” his wife exclaimed. Where now was the soft musical voice I had admired when I first heard her? Now she was brutally tough, and yet, how about that little incident with the crying child? I was keenly interested now, though still perplexed.

  “You should care,” she repeated, “being landed with some oth
er man’s child. I was asking around today and everybody says how she’s been sleeping with every Tom, Dick and Harry she could find. They know her well. I hear she used to hang around those places in Cable Street, and everybody knows what they’re like. Clubs! Ha! I’ve seen better in a pack of cards!”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, woman.” His tone was slightly conciliatory, as if his confidence was deserting him and he wanted to steer her away from this line of impugning Janice’s character. “You’ve never even been near Cable Street, so what do you know about it?”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Mr Man,” she exclaimed. “I wasted my lunch-hour today to walk through there just to see it, with all those good-for-nothing layabouts jamming up the pavements. God, somebody should set a match to that stinking hole. You’re lucky she didn’t give you something else besides somebody’s bastard.”

  Her anger was a deep, heavy thing, throbbing inside her, and reflected in the savage look on her face. I wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of this one, I thought. When worked up she could be really mean.

  “Even her sister says she’s bad. I talked with her on my way in tonight. Even she says the woman’s been sleeping with any black man she could find. Why didn’t one of them say it was his? Who do you think you are? What are you trying to prove?”

  “Oh, shut up!” he said. “You don’t know the girl, you’ve never laid eyes on her, yet you’re in a hurry to believe the worst about her. So what’s wrong with Cable Street? And what’s so wonderful about Randall Street that makes you look down on other people? I know the child is mine, I even know when it happened. I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. I know. It’s my child and nothing you can say will change that.” Then to me, “Well, Mister, what do you advise me to do?”

  Before I could reply she turned to me: “We’ve been together for eighteen years; if he’s so good at making children why hasn’t he made one with me, eh, why?”

  Then she leaned towards him, enraged.

  “There’s nothing wrong with me, so what about all those years? And where do you think you suddenly got all this fire in your guts to start making children all over the place? I been back with you five months, and still nothing. And you open your big mouth to say you give a white woman a child? Don’t talk rass, man.” And she swung away from him in apparent disgust.

  I thought the issue was quite clear. After years of a childless marriage, a little more than casual association had given Mr Bentham the child he had long wanted, and no amount of argument, scorn or abuse would budge him. The child represented something much more than just an offspring; it was proof of his manhood, and if his wife persisted in her attitude, there was every chance of their marriage being wrecked. They seemed such nice people, admirably suited, yet here they were screaming at each other. Maybe the thought that some other woman, and worst of all, a foreign woman, white woman, had provided what she had failed to give him after eighteen years of marriage, was too big a mouthful for her to swallow. What could I say to them that would be helpful? No matter what happened, this man was prepared to support the child and acknowledge it. Whoever this Janice was, her departure did not seem to worry him in the slightest. Nothing about her seemed to worry him, not her reputation, nothing. He said nothing unkind about her, but he did not attempt to defend her in more than a casual way. Evidently she was merely someone who had been useful in fulfilling a certain purpose and now no longer mattered. The child was important, his child. But what about the marriage? Eighteen years of married life should not so easily be swept away. There must be some way of keeping them together. First of all, I must try to make him realize that placing a child into a Home was not like posting a letter, not by a long chalk.

  “I must tell you, Mr Bentham,” I began, “that before you can get this baby accepted into a Home, every effort will be made to trace its mother, and it may be necessary to have the police take a hand in locating her.”

  At the mention of the word ‘police’, they both looked at each other. “Is that necessary?” she asked.

  “Yes, it is, if we cannot locate her by any other means. After all, you may have some doubt about who is the father of the child, but there can be no doubt about the mother.”

  “Oh, no,” he said, “I wouldn’t want them to do that, you know, searching for her like a criminal or something. But I’ve got to put the child somewhere, my wife won’t have it in the house.”

  “I never said that,” she flared at him, “I never said I wouldn’t have it here. After all, it’s not the poor thing’s fault, so don’t you start putting words into my mouth.”

  “But I thought … ”

  “You thought!” she continued. “You thought you made a child, so you’re liable to think anything else, but don’t you twist my words, Mr Man.”

  “I don’t quite understand all this,” I said, puzzled. “I thought you were objecting to the child altogether, Mrs Bentham. By the way, what is it, a boy or a girl?”

  “A girl,” she replied, and suddenly her face lost its stern look. “Some women ought to be shot. Fancy walking off and leaving a helpless little thing like that.”

  As if on cue, the pram shook on its springs, and the coverings became agitated as the infant vigorously thrust its arms and legs about. Mrs Bentham hurried over to the pram and bent solicitously over its occupant, making soft mother noises to it. Her husband stood up, looked over towards me and shrugged his shoulders, still apparently mystified by the eternally illogical behaviour of women, even after eighteen years of marriage.

  “Oh, she’s wet. Fetch me a napkin from the case, will you, Jim?” she said, without looking up. He went to the cases in the recess, but soon returned empty-handed.

  “There’s none there.” He hurried outside to see if there were any dry ones on the line.

  I watched the woman as she attended the infant, cooing to it in that pleasant jabberwocky women through the ages have used on such occasions. She presented so natural a picture of motherhood that I asked: “What do you expect me to do about this, Mrs Bentham?”

  She continued her ministrations for a few moments, then straightened up with the damp napkin in her hand. Dropping it on the floor near the pram she folded her arms across her breast and replied: “I don’t want you to do anything, really. I only want him to admit that it’s not his child. He knows it’s not his, and I want him to admit it.”

  “But he has said quite clearly that he was intimate with the girl. So even if she had other men, the chances are just as much in favour of him being the father as anyone else. Don’t you agree?” I asked.

  “That sounds fine,” she replied, “but I know what I’m talking about. You see … ” There was the sound of Mr Bentham’s approaching footsteps and she stopped speaking. I had the feeling that she was about to make some further disclosure and wished he had not returned so quickly. He entered the room with a pile of damp napkins in his hand.

  “They’re still wet,” he said, “but maybe I can dry them over the heater.”

  “Do you want to give the child pneumonia?” she asked him, with some trace of annoyance in her voice. “I think that chemist at Aldgate is open all night; maybe you could take the bus and get some there.”

  “Okay,” he replied, and took his coat from among several outer garments hanging from hooks on the door. He seemed eager to be gone, to have a few moments’ respite from this unfamiliar and complicated situation. She remained quite still until she heard the bang of the street door behind him, then, with a smile at me, she said:

  “Would you get up a moment, please?”

  I stood up, and she casually removed the fitted rubber cushion from the chair to disclose several neatly folded napkins which had been sandwiched between the fabric-covered seat platform and the cushion.

  “I put them there this morning, keeps them warm that way,” she said, and selecting one, she replaced the cushion.

>   It was now obvious she wanted to tell me something which he was not supposed to hear. She went again to the baby and applied its clean napkin to the accompaniment of cooing noises. Finished, she sat opposite me.

  “You know,” she said, “he’s a good man, but he’s stubborn. Somehow he’s got this idea into his head that it’s his child and he won’t let go.”

  “Now, please, Mrs Bentham,” I intervened, “let’s be fair about this. I’m not taking sides in this matter, but your husband has been away from you for about two years and he admits to having an affair with the woman. It is just his misfortune that she became pregnant. Nobody can expect you to be pleased about it, but whether the child stays here or not, if the girl says that he is the putative father and he admits it, he will be legally responsible for its maintenance.”

  “What was that you said?” she inquired. “What do you mean by putative?”

  “It means that he is supposed to be the father, or reputed to be the father.”