The Child's Child

by Barbara Vine

  The stomach complaint she wrote about to John had been morning sickness. The first few times it occurred, she tried to conceal it from everyone, but with only one bathroom to be shared by five people, all of whom had to get up at much the same time, this was impossible. When she threw up on the bedroom floor and refused to say anything, Ethel told their mother that Maud had food poisoning. The prospect of going to Dr. Collins, who, she was sure, would on sight know what was wrong with her, was terrifying. The doctor had a surgery in his own large and rather gloomy house in the next street. Maud and her mother sat in the waiting room, which was full of mahogany chests of drawers and tables and chairs with shabby green velvet seats. One of the two pictures, one on the wall opposite the window and the other on the wall opposite the door, was of a drooping maiden with a wreath on her long hair. She looked as ill as Maud had felt the week before but felt no longer. The other picture was of a single cow standing in long grass against a background of blue hills.

  Three weeks of vomiting had made her thin, for which she was glad. In her box-pleated school tunic no one would have dreamt she was expecting. Dr. Collins came into the waiting room, said good-morning, and ushered them into his surgery. He took her temperature, looked down her throat, and asked her about her bowel movements. Then he gave her mother a prescription, which she was to take to his dispensary, where it would be made up. Years later she often wondered about Dr. Collins. Had he known? Had he guessed but said nothing? She had no reason for thinking this way except for one small thing. As they were leaving the surgery, her mother going first, she had looked up at him to say thank-you as her mother said she should. The words were never said for Dr. Collins caught her eye and, giving a slight shake of his head, smiled at her a slight indeed, tiny half smile.

  The medicine was a clear liquid with a white sediment. Because, as Mary Goodwin said, Maud was “a big girl now, nearly grown-up,” she was left to give herself her twice-daily doses. If Dr. Collins had guessed the true nature of her “illness,” as she sometimes thought he had and sometimes was sure he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have given her anything that would harm her baby. But surely he hadn’t or he would have said something. To her mother if not to her. A strange thing was happening to Maud. Much as she dreaded her condition’s being detected, much as the idea of giving birth to an illegitimate child horrified her, she didn’t want to take anything that would hurt the baby. Though she thought of a woman someone at school had told her about, who had drunk Jeyes Fluid, and sometimes of doing the same thing herself, that would be the end of both of them but not of her alone or her baby alone. As to the medicine, she sometimes saw a man in the street who had a humped back and a woman half of whose face was blotched with a birthmark, and although she had never thought about it before, now she wondered if these disfigurements had been caused by their mothers’ taking medicine that poisoned their babies before they were born.

  July came in, it was four months since what had happened in those fields, and she noticed she had begun to lose her waist. Her skirt placket refused to do up. Her mother was already making Ethel’s wedding dress, and she and Sybil would make the dresses for the bridesmaids. Maud was in a sweat of fear. If her mother measured her for the dress, what she saw when Maud was in her slip would only add to the vague suspicions she already had. She had asked Maud why the towels she used at the time of her monthlies hadn’t been put to soak in the covered bucket of cold water that stood inside the cupboard under the scullery sink. Mrs. Goodwin knew to the day when her girls menstruated and expected to see the bloodstained squares of towelling floating in the reddening water.

  “I washed my own,” Maud said.

  “There was no need for you to do that. The maid always boils them to be sure they’re really clean.”

  “I got them clean enough.”

  “Well, I’d rather you didn’t do it again.”

  RONNIE SHE had never seen since that second time. She saw his sister, Rosemary, almost every day, and Rosemary had told her he had been working for his university entrance. The idea of telling Ronnie was horrible, but perhaps the time would come when she must. Or someone in her family must, and the only possible one was John. She longed for John’s homecoming at the end of the month. She would tell him and consult him. He knew what to do about so many things.

  The Goodwin household was in a fever of activity about the forthcoming wedding. Maud told her mother there was no need to measure her as she was the same size as she had been for the last dress Mary Goodwin had made her: she still had a thirty-six-inch bust, a twenty-four-inch waist, and thirty-eight-inch hips. That was what she said, but it wasn’t true. Her bust—none of the family, indeed no woman they knew, spoke about breasts—had increased by two inches and her waist by three. Her stomach had been flat, but now it had grown into a little dome. A week before John was due to come home, Maud told Ethel she couldn’t be her bridesmaid.

  “What do you mean? Why not?”

  “Don’t ask me. I just can’t.” Maud could think of no excuse. Why couldn’t she? The true reason was impossible to say. “You’ll have Sybil and you’ve got Wendy.” Wendy was a cousin, their father’s sister’s daughter. “I don’t see why you want three. Everyone only has two.”

  “What’s Mother going to say?”

  “I don’t see it matters what she says. It’s your wedding.”

  Ethel, of course, told her mother.

  “I don’t understand you,” Mary Goodwin said to Maud. “I don’t know what’s come over you. Your father says it’s a dreadful unkindness to poor Ethel. He’s very disappointed in you.”

  What would he say then when he knew she was expecting an illegitimate child?

  She always walked to school, and now when she was out in the street, she seemed to see pregnant women everywhere. Of course they did their best to conceal it, wearing loose smocks over their dresses, wearing baggy skirts and double-breasted jackets far too big for them. But Maud could tell. Her condition had made her ultrasensitive. It was high summer so no one wore gloves. She also looked at these women’s left hands. They all wore wedding rings. Was she going to have to wear one, maybe a curtain ring?

  She was in minor disgrace at home. Her father didn’t ask her why she wouldn’t be a bridesmaid, he told her to forget “all this nonsense” and accept that it was her duty to perform this service for her sister that most girls enjoyed. Mary Goodwin took her cue from her husband, and Sybil joined in. What was wrong with her? She had never been a stubborn girl. Why was she taking this ridiculous attitude? Rosemary told Maud she was getting fat—well, not exactly fat, but a good bit bigger than she used to be. Plump was the word Sybil used, studying her critically but too innocent to come to the true conclusion.

  Maud had decided that she would tell John. She was teaching herself to walk slightly bent over, pulling her increasing stomach as nearly as she could towards her spine. On the eve of Ethel’s wedding she told her mother she was feeling ill, she thought she was sickening for something. It wasn’t entirely a lie. The sickness of the early weeks was long past, but her nervousness and fear had affected her stomach so that she suffered continual sharp pains and diarrhoea. A cousin of theirs—a married woman, of course—had had a miscarriage at three months. Maud didn’t know what her symptoms had been, no one would tell her, that wouldn’t be right, but she guessed there would be pains and perhaps bleeding. To her misery, she never bled, but the pains might mean she was losing the baby.

  Her mother in pink with a cloche hat and Sybil and their cousin Wendy in their blue, frilly bridesmaid’s dresses went off to the church in one hired car, Maud’s father and Ethel in another, Ethel in calf-length, cream lace and a veil tied round her forehead just above her eyebrows with white ribbon sewn with roses. John refused transport and walked to the church. It wasn’t far. Maud, uncaring about her disgrace, oblivious to everything except her looming fate, sat at home on the lavatory in pain, hoping and praying for the blood to come. It never came, and when the others came back, minus Ethel
, she had to go downstairs. One good thing, one tiny ray in all this gloom, was that she would now have her bedroom to herself.

  She had meant to tell John but she didn’t. Suppose it made him despise her as a loose woman? He was going next day and she hardly spoke to him. Wondering what was wrong, he went back to London to pack up and move out.

  5

  LEAVING THE great barracks of a school in the hinterland of the Marylebone Road was no hardship to John. His pupils had not been the half-starved, wretched little creatures of London’s East End, but they were deprived indeed, and he seldom came across one who showed the least interest in what he tried to teach them. The staff were mostly women, all but two of them unmarried, and the single ones desperate to be married. For most of his four years there one after the other of them had made clumsy flirtatious advances to him, one of them either leaving when he did or lying in wait for him in the playground to ask if she could walk a little way with him. He was never rude, so he couldn’t bring himself to say no. Then she would suggest a cup of tea in the nearest café. He could refuse that, though, on the grounds that he had to be home in five minutes. Only one of them ever touched him. That was no more than an attempt to put her arm into his, but his reaction, instinctive though it was, the homosexual’s reflex, so distressed her that she ran away from him with a whimper.

  Now he had left for good. He had already paid his last rent to Mrs. Petworth, his two suitcases were packed with everything he possessed in this world apart from the books he had left in Bristol. Clearing out his life to start a new one, the room bare but for his bedclothes and an empty teacup, he sat down to write to Maud. It puzzled him that she had only once replied to his letters. He tried to think—“puzzled his brains,” as Bertie had once put it—what could be wrong with her and could only come up with the idea he had had before, that some boy had made her unhappy. He wrote that he was looking forward to being at home again in a few days’ time, to seeing them all but especially her. He would see her and find out, he wrote, but wrote gently, what was wrong with her. It upset him very much that she had hardly spoken to him on his last day at home. His letter was interrupted by a tap at his door. It could only be Mrs. Petworth. It was Bertie.

  John was so aghast to see him and so overjoyed that he almost fell. He took an unsteady step backwards.

  Bertie came in, turned the key in the lock, and took John in his arms. “I couldn’t keep away, not when I knew you was going the day after tomorrow.”

  “You shouldn’t have come. You know what I said, that I wouldn’t do it anymore.”

  “I never believed you.”

  John looked at him in despair. “I love you. I don’t know what to do.”

  “I do.”

  Bertie stayed the night, John’s last night at Mrs. Petworth’s. If she had known, she would have objected only because if John wanted a friend there overnight, he should have paid the extra rent. Two young men lying close beside each other in a single bed caused her no qualms on grounds of morality. John slept for a while, then lay wakeful, reproaching himself for his weakness of character, for the speed with which he had given in to Bertie’s persuasions. John had resolved that the sin of having relations with a man was in his past and he must atone for it by the manner of his future life. That life must be celibate, and his friendship with Bertie, if it was to continue with so many miles between them, must be chaste. Bertie turned over in the narrow bed and laid his arm over John’s waist. With a sigh that was halfway to a whimper, John got up and spent the rest of the hot, stuffy night in the armchair.

  WHATEVER HAPPENED to her in the whole course of her life, Maud thought, she would always remember this day, the date of this day, the sixteenth of August 1929, three days after John came home to stay. She was fifteen years old, due to be sixteen on December the thirtieth. On Friday the sixteenth of August at half past eight in the morning, her mother walked into the bedroom that was now Maud’s alone and saw her standing in front of the cheval glass in only her petticoat.

  “Oh, Maud,” she cried out. “Oh, Maud, oh, Maud, oh, good heavens.”

  Maud said nothing.

  “Maud, do you know you are expecting a child?”

  “Of course I do. I’m not an idiot.”

  Maud stepped into a skirt, the waistband of which could no longer fasten, and pulled over her head an overblouse Mary Goodwin had never before seen. Maud turned on her mother a face of the deepest woe, of utter tragedy. “Aren’t you sorry for me, Mother? Don’t you pity me?”

  “Pity you? I don’t know. I’m in a state of absolute shock. I must think. What is your father going to say?”

  Maud opened her mouth to scream, but laughter came out, hiccupping peals of it. Her mother smacked Maud’s face, not hard, a token smack, because that was what you did to hysterical girls. It made Maud cry. She sank down weeping on the bed, scrubbing at her face with a corner of the sheet. Mary Goodwin stood there, shaking her head, just shaking it back and forth like an automaton.

  “Don’t you care for me at all? What will become of me? Don’t you care?”

  “You have shocked me beyond belief, Maud. Care for you? You have ruined all possible caring for you. You have done a wicked thing.” Mary Goodwin began to pace the room, stopping to stare blankly out the window, turning to come back and turn again. “You had better stay in this room. I’ll bring you something to eat later. I thank God Ethel is away from here, I thank God she’s married. As for poor Sybil—it’s better if she doesn’t see you, if you keep away from her.” Mary paused, struck by a sudden thought, a possibility. “Tell me the truth, did he force you?”

  Maud knew the word if her mother didn’t. “You mean, did he rape me?”

  Mary Goodwin went white.

  “No, he didn’t. It was just as much me.”

  Her mother might have shown some satisfaction at that, some sort of relief, but perhaps she felt neither satisfaction nor relief. Perhaps rape would have been preferable. “When is it due?”

  “I don’t know. December, I think.”

  “I shall go and tell your father now before he goes to the office. I don’t suppose he will go now. No doubt he will want to talk to you and tell you what we have decided.”

  Maud sat up. “What do you mean, you’ve decided?” She shouted it. She had never before been rude to her mother. “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll be told when I’ve talked to your father.” Mary moved towards the door. “Of course you can’t stay here. He will agree with me there. He’ll say we can’t keep you here.”

  Maud was paralysed by her mother’s words, transfixed by a mixture of panic, ignorance, and fear. The closed door trapped her like a wild animal shut in a cage. She had never known of anyone in her position before, never read a book or a story in which an unmarried girl found herself pregnant, never been told of such a girl as a warning, though now she remembered Sybil’s pointing out to her a poor, badly dressed woman in the street. She pointed her out and said she had a little boy at home she told people was her brother, her mother’s youngest child, but he wasn’t, he was hers, “born out of wedlock.” What had her mother meant by “you can’t stay here”? Where could she go? For the first time in her life she felt utterly alone. Would they put her out into the street and lock and bolt the doors against her? That thought made her brace herself, tell herself not to be stupid. They couldn’t do that, they wouldn’t. They were her parents.

  Then she thought about John. He was at home, in his bedroom, perhaps still in bed. Would they stop him seeing her? Would they make her go away so that he couldn’t see her? Why hadn’t she told him already? Had she been too afraid? Hysterics came back, making her scream and sob and beat at the wall with her fists. The door flew open and her father came in. It was the first time he had ever come into her bedroom without knocking, and she knew without knowing how she knew that she had forfeited all his respect. She sank down on the bed crying.

  “Sit up,” he said, “and be quiet. Making a noise won’t help.” She
lifted her head, her face red and distorted, wet with tears. “A fine sight you are. I don’t want to talk to you about how you got in this condition. The man can’t marry you, you’re too young to marry, and by the time you’re old enough, it will be too late for legitimacy.”

  The possibility of marriage hadn’t crossed her mind. Only one thing her father was saying struck her, and that was his failure to mention the child she carried. He was purposely avoiding that as if the child were some sort of unmentionable disease, and in so doing he did her some good. He made her angry.

  “You can’t stay here,” he said. “It wouldn’t be fair on your sister to risk her being contaminated by you. There is a home I know of where women such as you can be sent to live and work. In fact, it is a charity of mine, I contribute along with several other members of the chapel to its upkeep. It goes against the grain with me that a daughter of mine should be sent there, it’s a shameful thing, but we have no choice.”

  Maud shouted, “I could stay here. This is my home. Why shouldn’t I stay here?”

  “In my house where your innocent sister lives? Stay here where everybody we know would see your disgrace? I think not. You will have to go to Wesley House and think yourself very lucky you’ve not been turned out into the street.”

  By some instinct or prevision, making a leap of years into the future, Maud knew that whatever he might desire or her mother wish for, this was the last time she would ever speak to her father. If she had to be sent to this home, so be it, but she was speaking to him now for the last time. Adrenaline poured into her blood.

  “What did you mean by ‘too late for legitimacy’?”