The Child's Child
Page 8
Half an hour before his train was due he made his way to the station at St. David’s and sat on a seat on the platform. A good many more lies lay ahead of him. His parents would want to know why, if he must leave London, he couldn’t take a job in Bristol; his sisters would ask about the girls he knew. They would all enquire as to what he did at the weekends. His parents were Methodists, as he and his sisters were or had been. His mother would want to know if he went regularly to church, and to this question too he would lie as he would to all the others. He had never set foot in the little Methodist chapel round the corner from Orchardson Street.
The train came and he got an empty carriage, wondering why he had longed to see them all, to come home. Not just now but for always he would have no real relationship with any of them because what love for them he had, what companionship, would be distorted and made pointless by lying. He realised then, sitting in the train, that even when he became celibate, he would still be constrained to lie. The older he grew and the longer he remained single and unattached, the more his mother and the three girls would question him about women friends (or the absence of them) and the more hold out to him the pleasures of marriage, ending, probably every time they spoke of it, in asking him if he didn’t want children.
3
MAUD WANTED children one day, two at least, when she was married. At fifteen, attending a school where the pupils stayed till they were eighteen, she thought she was probably the only girl in the County High School who had had relations with a man. Those were the words she used to herself, relations with a man, because she knew no other except the act, but she hadn’t connected it with what her mother called offspring. In a daring, almost incredulous way, she was proud of what she had done. It made her grown-up, a woman, even though it was the deepest secret, and though she had surrounded what they did and its circumstances with romance, she had decided that once—well, twice—was enough. The preliminaries to it, cuddles and kisses, caresses like those in the silent films she saw, she much preferred. The culmination that he had insisted on and she hadn’t resisted for long had hurt, and she had bled nearly as much as when she had her monthlies. The second time there had been no pain but nothing much else either, a disappointment, though she hadn’t told him that.
Now two things were due in her life, the visitor that was her brother, John, and the visitor, as her mother called it, that she and her friends called the curse. John was coming on Friday evening, the curse should have come ten days ago, on the tenth of April. If she had been irregular like her friend Rosemary Clifford, who sometimes went five or even six weeks between visitors, she wouldn’t have given it another thought. She tried to remember if anything like this had happened before in the three years since the first visitor, but all she could recall was that once it had come two days late.
Ronnie was Rosemary’s brother. She hadn’t got to know him through Rosemary but because she was in her school choir and Ronnie was in the boys’ school choir. The choirs met when they were giving concerts together in St. Mary’s church hall, and after the performances or the rehearsals Ronnie walked her home. Her parents didn’t like her singing in a Church of England hall, but she calmed them down by reminding them that it wasn’t the church itself. Now she wished she had listened to them. They didn’t object to Ronnie. They thought he was a nice boy. As far as Maud was concerned, he wasn’t nice, he was gruff and he grinned too much, but he was by far the best-looking boy in the school. Besides, as far as Maud’s parents knew, Rosemary was with them. The Goodwins lived in the outskirts of Bristol, and Ronnie walked Maud home across the fields. On one of those walks home they went inside a barn doorway and he kissed her, but it was too cold to hang about. Two weeks later, when it happened, it was a lovely evening, exceptionally warm for early spring, and a slightly cooler evening the second time.
Until she tried it, Maud had only a vague idea of what relations with a man consisted of, but she knew all about pregnancy, which she called expecting, and quite a lot about childbirth. Her mother had had a fifth child three years before, but it had died when it was a day old. On the Friday morning of the day John was coming, she woke up in the morning in the room she shared with Ethel, and the first thing she thought of was not John’s arrival in the evening but that eleven days had passed since the curse was due to have come. It wouldn’t be a curse to her. She got up and went to the bathroom they all shared, praying for a trace of blood on the lavatory paper. But someone else was in there and had turned the key in the lock. She wasn’t desperate to go, only desperate for that blood. Now she was reaching a stage when she could no longer tell herself the delay was due to the cold she had had the week before last or that she had miscounted. It must be that she was going to have a baby. A little sound like a whimper escaped her, and a quiet sob followed it. The bathroom door opened and Sybil came out.
“Was that you making that noise?”
“What noise?”
“Like you were crying. You weren’t, were you?”
“You imagined it,” said Maud in a lofty tone.
Her sister went off to her bedroom, tall, slender Sybil, a dressing gown over her peach-coloured slip, her hair at this hour falling down her back like a brown silk cloak. Maud had used to speculate if Sybil, eleven years her senior at twenty-six, had ever done the act with a man and was sure she hadn’t. Maud went into the bathroom, sat down on the lavatory seat, and pushed her forefinger into what another girl at school, not Rosemary, had told her had the Latin name vagina. The finger came away damp but bloodless.
She must be careful not to make a sound. She wanted to scream or howl like an animal in pain but she couldn’t. And she couldn’t have a baby. That would be appalling, outrageous, impossible to contemplate. A girl down the road had had an illegitimate child; “born out of wedlock” was how Maud’s mother put it. Everybody in the neighbourhood knew, and if any friend called who didn’t know, this girl was pointed out and her story told. The Goodwins’ charwoman’s sister-in-law had a niece who was expecting without being married, but she never had the baby. She drowned herself in the Bristol Channel. Maud thought of drowning herself or putting her head in the gas oven, but not yet, not yet. It could still be all right, God would make it all right. Why did she go to chapel every Sunday morning, why had she gone to Sunday school every Sunday afternoon and sung hymns in the choir and prayed and prayed if God wouldn’t show mercy unto her? He couldn’t punish her like this for something she had done in those sunset fields, in the long grass among the coltsfoot and the celandine, and hadn’t even enjoyed—could He?
THE GOODWINS were far from rich but they were “comfortable.” John Goodwin had inherited a bookbinding business from his father, and it had always done fairly, if not spectacularly, well. He had married a woman he met at chapel, the only child of Jonathan Halliwell, who kept a draper’s shop in the High Street. On his daughter’s marriage he gave her and her husband a thousand pounds, a huge sum. John and Mary Goodwin used it to buy a house up the street from the chapel because both of them were deeply devout. Jonathan died shortly after this purchase had been made, leaving his widow rich. She furnished the young couple’s new home for them with some valuable and beautiful pieces and several paintings, including a Burne-Jones and a Holman Hunt, though these were not much valued at the time.
Was it a happy marriage? They never asked themselves or each other that question. They were together, they were used to each other, they had four children, none of whom had given them much trouble. John had a BSc in biology and a teaching job, Sybil was a typist, Ethel worked for her uncle who now managed the draper’s, and Maud was still at school. It looked as if she might be doing well enough at her schoolwork to go to a university, unheard of among the Goodwin females and her mother’s family, the Halliwells, but the University of Reading’s school of art was a possibility and she might get a scholarship.
Goodwins and Halliwells seldom if ever thought about anything deeply. Young John was the exception. Life had made him think. In politic
s his parents were Conservatives, and if Mary was triumphant or joyous at having just got the vote for herself and her two older daughters the previous year along with all the other women of Britain over twenty-one, she gave no sign that she was even aware of it. Their religion was laid down for them, no thinking necessary there. The same went for their moral values. They had absolute faith in their children’s holding the same views as they did. With their parents’ example before them, why should they stray?
If not exactly worried about it, Mary was uneasy about Sybil’s failure to find a young man since a previous boy had jilted her, but Mary dealt with her mild anxiety by thinking as little about it as possible. Ethel was engaged to a man seven years older than herself who worked for His Majesty’s Customs and Excise, a highly suitable connection. Ethel and Herbert Burrows had met through a cousin of Mary’s whose husband’s nephew he was. If, as Mary put it, it was “high time” Ethel at twenty-two and especially Sybil at twenty-six were married, in his father’s estimation, John at twenty-five was “far too young.”
That Friday evening when John told his parents about the interview and the panel’s enquiry into his matrimonial prospects, his mother said, “Well, they’ve got a point there, John.”
He sighed to himself, thinking, It’s begun.
They had just had high tea, for although the Goodwins had graduated to a live-in servant, always known as “the maid,” they had never progressed as far as eating dinner at seven thirty. The maid, Clara Gadd, served cold ham, tongue, a salad of lettuce and tomatoes, beetroot in malt vinegar, and bread and butter, followed by tinned peaches and tinned milk. Mary had her snobbish side and would have liked to call the maid by her surname, simply Gadd, but she didn’t quite dare. When it seemed that John was about to talk of salaries and accommodation, Mary shook her head at him and put a finger to her lips. If Mary had known any French, Maud said to him later, she would have said, “Pas devant les domestiques.”
Herbert Burrows called in the evening. He and John had met just once before. John thought he was a bit of a stuffed shirt but could see that his parents would approve of him. It was Friday, not Sunday, when Maud knew anything of the sort she proposed would be out of the question, but when she suggested putting a record on the gramophone and Ethel and Herbert and she and John dancing to it, their parents too if they liked, she was surprised when her father shook his head and, using a favourite Goodwin phrase, said it “wouldn’t be suitable.” Herbert too supported him and said, “Not a good idea,” in ingratiating tones. Maud had only suggested it for something energetic to do, something to take her mind off what was always on it, however much she tried not to think. Her grandmother Halliwell, a fit and vigorous old woman, who had come round for the evening, said young people ought to have a good time while they were young, but her opinion was ignored in spite of her wealth.
The parents were the first to go to bed, departing soon after Herbert left. Ethel hadn’t come back into the living-room after saying good-bye to him with kisses on the doorstep, and sharp at ten Sybil too went to bed. Grandma, as even her daughter and son-in-law called her, left soon after in her motorcar, driven by her “man,” the husband of her housekeeper. John and Maud were left. More than ten years were between them, but they had always been the closest of the siblings since Maud was a toddler and John the big brother who carried her or pushed her pram.
“I’m sorry they wouldn’t let us dance,” he said. “I’d like to dance with you, Maud, but perhaps it can never be in this house.”
She was desperate for someone to tell. It was too early to know, she knew that, but just to have someone to talk to about her fears would help her, someone to share her terror. Soon it would be time to go to bed, and in the night-time the worst of it would return to her, feeling the swelling of her body, the terror of someone’s noticing. Before that happened she might be sick in the mornings. When she thought like that, lying in the dark, panic rose into her mouth and she had to stop herself from screaming. She could remember her mother when she was carrying the little girl they called Beryl, though she had lived only a day. If she had a baby and it lived only a day, that would be wonderful, a relief and a release. Better still if it came away first from her in a miscarriage, for then there would be no disgrace and no shame. She could bear the pain and maybe blood and pain, anything to be back where and who she was before this horror came upon her.
“You’re very quiet tonight, Maud.”
“I wasn’t quiet when I asked if we could have a dance.”
“That’s true. Afterwards when you hardly said any more, I thought you might be sulking, but you don’t sulk, do you? You’re usually a cheerful soul.”
“John. John, do you believe in God?”
He raised his eyebrows. “That’s quite a question in this house.”
“I know, but do you?”
“I don’t know, Maud. I used to think I did. I think the trouble is, if it’s a trouble, that I know too much science now to believe in a creator. There’s no need for a creator, it could all have happened without God.”
She said as if she were near to tears, her voice hoarse, “I don’t know about any of that. It’s just that I’m afraid it’s all lies. God isn’t love, He doesn’t answer prayers, He isn’t merciful.”
“Oh, Maud. What’s wrong? Come here.” John took her hands. In that household they didn’t hug or kiss. “There’s something very wrong. Won’t you tell me about it? You can tell me.”
She was sobbing by then. “No, I can’t. I can’t tell anyone.”
He handed her the clean, white handkerchief Mrs. Petworth had washed and ironed for him. Maud scrubbed at her eyes, but he took the handkerchief back and dried her tears tenderly. Even with her face crumpled and red from crying, she was the prettiest of his sisters, her eyes large and a clear greenish blue, her skin pale yet flushed and quite unblemished. Of the family, through some throwback, she alone had long, elegant hands with tapering fingers. While he held her, gently patting her back, he thought she must have been rejected by a boy, some fool without taste or discernment. Or a bunch of schoolgirls, bitter with jealousy, had insulted and abused her.
“Don’t tell me I’ll feel better in the morning,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to. You’ll feel better one day, though. We all do that.” And we feel worse again, he said to himself, it’s the way life is.
She was sitting up straight now, her swollen eyes meeting his directly. “When will you come back here?”
“If I get the job, and I think I will, I’ll leave at the end of the term, that’s late July. I’ll have to come back here and live here until I can start at my new school in September and find a place to live nearby.”
Suddenly her face took on a look of deep seriousness. “If things aren’t better by then, if this thing that’s worrying me hasn’t gone away, I’ll tell you.” She got up quickly after that and ran away up the stairs to bed.
4
HE STARTED to do what he had never before done. He began writing to Maud. Letters to his mother he had always written, but never to any of his sisters till now. In the first letter he told Maud that he had got the job. She need not tell his parents because he was writing to them too. He was still at Mrs. Petworth’s but would leave in the last week of July. How was she? He had been worried about her. She had seemed so sad and anxious. Would she write back, please? He needed to know how she was and if she was better. She didn’t reply. The true cause of her trouble, that she was in trouble, as people said, never occurred to him. Such things never happened in families like his. He wrote again in the middle of May, telling her that he would be teaching at the Grammar School in a town in Devon called Ashburton, south of Dartmoor. The countryside was so beautiful he longed for her to see it.
The next time he wrote she meant to answer his letter. She knew what he said already because her parents had told all three girls. He would like to come home on Saturday the twenty-seventh of July, be in Bristol for Ethel’s wedding, go back to Londo
n to pack up and fetch his things, then return to Bristol until September the second. By then he hoped he would have found himself a cottage to rent in one of the villages near Ashburton. His father and mother were immensely proud of him. At only twenty-five he had succeeded spectacularly, his was an intellectual triumph. They boasted about him in a modest kind of way to the chapel congregation.
“Fancy asking if he could come home,” Mary said to her husband. “As if we wouldn’t be happy to have him, our only son!”
Maud wrote him a noncommittal letter. It took her a long time. At first she meant to tell him what had happened to her because to write it seemed easier than to confess it to him face-to-face, but after trying, she found she couldn’t put the words on paper. So she wrote that she had been ill with a stomach complaint—that, she thought bitterly, was literally true—but was better now. It would be good having him here for the wedding in the middle of August. She didn’t much want to be a bridesmaid, she told him, but couldn’t say no. Her letter occupied only half of a sheet of paper.
She said nothing about her thoughts of drowning herself. One evening, when it was dark, she could jump into the Bristol Channel like the charwoman’s niece. She couldn’t swim, none of them could, so she wouldn’t be tempted to save herself. She would sink and die, first seeing her whole life pass before her closed eyes, as they said it did. The baby would die with her, and for the first time she felt a pang at that, at her unborn child dying, instead of looking forward to its possible death with joy. One evening at twilight, before it got dark that summer night, she stood looking down at the water and was too afraid to jump. She found that she was more afraid of death than of pregnancy and disgrace.