The Child's Child

by Barbara Vine

  If he had been a character in a book, he thought, sitting here in a country church on a summer afternoon, the incumbent of this parish would have come in, a vicar or rector, walked up to him, and asked if he needed help, and perhaps he would have poured out his heart to this kindly clergyman. But he wasn’t in that fictional church, he was here in All Saints, Dartcombe, and in future if he needed to confide or confess, it would have to be to Maud. He went back to No. 2 Bury Row, observing its neatness, the rather shabby but well-kept furnishings, the staircase covered, he supposed, in that fabric called drugget. He would give Maud the bigger bedroom with the double bed and the view of the village street and this church. His would be the smaller room at the back, where he could look out on the garden and the wooded hills beyond.

  Sensing that it would be a wiser move to order the local drink in the Red Cow instead of his usual pale ale, he asked for a half-pint of cider. It seemed a good choice, and Mr. Lillicrap extended a large, calloused hand across the bar when he introduced himself. The other men looked at John and looked away, but one or two of them nodded. John thought that perhaps he should have gone into the saloon bar, and that sitting in there at a table would have been more acceptable to these men, who were obviously farm labourers. None of them would have been in any doubt that he was a professional man. Nor would he be able to bring Maud in here. He doubted that any Dartcombe woman had ever set foot in the Red Cow or any other public house. Mrs. Lillicrap would be the only female to be seen here. A large woman, whose Devon English was almost unintelligible, she served him soup followed by ham and eggs in the small parlour, where he understood that the family usually ate.

  SOMETHING ABOUT his parents’ home made writing to Bertie impossible within its walls. Guilt and shame were only two among the many emotions even thinking of it made him feel. So he had brought paper, an envelope, and a stamp with him. His fountain pen was always clipped over his breast pocket. He had written once before since he’d come home, but had done so, feeling absurd and stared at, sitting on a bench in the park, the paper resting on a book on his knees. Now he was alone with no one to see, and as he sat down at Mrs. Tremlett’s ring-marked but well-polished dining table, he felt a fullness of the heart that is one of the feelings lovers have, of a joyful breathlessness, the whole body charged with longing.

  The long letter was the most passionate he had ever written. He told Bertie how terribly he missed him, how in saying he could give him up and never be with him again, he had written the worst of lies. Without as much inhibition as he had once had, he wrote of the things they had done together, sinful in most men’s eyes no doubt, thought of by John as wrong when he spoke of them to Bertie, but now clearly appearing as entirely right because they loved each other. The letter covered several pages, and when he reread it he expected to be ashamed of some of the things he had put down in ink on paper, but he felt no more shame than he would in reading a love poem of John Donne’s or a scene from Shakespeare.

  Upstairs, he was surprised to find the single bed in the back bedroom without sheets or pillow slips. Linen was inside a cupboard, but he was too tired to make up the bed, and stripping off his suit and shirt, he got under the eiderdown and onto the blanket-covered mattress without any other covering. It was only eight o’clock. He fell asleep at once and slept until he was awakened by the loudest and most tuneful choir of birds he had ever heard.

  JOHN HAD accomplished a lot, but he still had more decisions to make, and these perhaps were the hardest. How much to tell Maud? Something would have to be told to his parents, and then there were his sisters, but Maud’s opposition was what he had to expect and what he might have to overcome. When he returned home, he found her still up in her room, but now it was a voluntary incarceration. She had stuck to her resolution to never again speak to their father, she was cool to their mother, though she seldom saw her, and Sybil was spending most of her time before and after work up there with her sister. Ethel, the married woman, had chosen to join her parents in a disapproval of Maud that amounted to horror, made all the worse by Maud’s refusal to admit her shame.

  She was drinking the tea Clara Gadd had just brought her. John studied her appearance searchingly, and she, mistaking his motive, supposed he was noticing that her pregnancy was becoming apparent.

  “It shows, doesn’t it? If I went outside in the street, people would see.”

  “I wasn’t looking at you for that. I was hoping you’d pass for eighteen or nineteen. I think you would. We could pass you off for eighteen.”

  “What do you mean by ‘pass me off’?”

  He told her. He told her about the cottage and Mrs. Tremlett and the pretty village and how everyone would be told she was John’s wife, expecting their child.

  She blushed deeply. “Oh, John, I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. It will be easy once you get used to it.”

  “Won’t they find out?”

  “How? We’d be Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin, John Goodwin and Maud Goodwin, which is what we are now. I’ll get you a wedding ring. I’ve already told the woman next door that you’re my wife—she’s our landlady. You’ll like it there, Maud. The birds sing so loudly in the morning, you won’t believe it. I shall get myself a bicycle so I can ride to school, and you’ll buy our food in the village shop. People will notice your figure and they won’t be disgusted or angry, it will be just what they expect in a young married woman. They’ll congratulate you.”

  She listened in silence. To her it was as if he were telling her a fairy story, something that couldn’t be true, couldn’t happen. “They won’t let us. Mother and Father won’t let us.”

  “They will.” He didn’t say what was in his mind, that they would be glad to get her off their hands. In spite of the depths her relations with her parents had reached, she could still be hurt if she felt that they didn’t want her. “They will let us.” He had already hinted to them, and more than hinted, that he had found a place in Devon for Maud where she would be looked after and mentioned Mrs. Tremlett’s name as a reliable woman to care for her, and at last he had told Maud that he and she would be living under the same roof. “You mustn’t worry,” he said. “There’s nothing for you to worry about except keeping fit and well for the sake of the baby.”

  Her mind was travelling ahead. “After the baby is born, what shall I do? Where shall I go?”

  “Stay with me, of course. As far as other people are concerned, it will be our child, we shall be its mother and father. We shall live together and everyone will think we’re married.”

  “John, would you leave me alone now? It’s a lot to take in at once. I’d like to be alone for a while just to think about what you’ve said.”

  Next day, she approached the question he knew must be asked and which he dreaded. “There’s a teacher at my school who used to say to us that we’d got all our lives before us. It was because of women over twenty-one getting the vote last year. You can do great things now, she said, all your lives are before you. Well, I was thinking, all your life is before you, John. Mine may be over, we can’t tell what will happen when my baby is born, but you, John—you’ll want to get married, really married, you’ll want children of your own.”

  “I shall never marry.”

  “But you don’t know that. You’ll meet someone and fall in love and want to marry her. Why not? She won’t want me in the house with my baby.”

  “I shall never marry,” he said again.

  Now was the time to tell her. He sat there in silence, thinking of the words he would use. Whatever he said must sound hideously coarse to her, perverted, gross, scarcely believable. You know what happened between you and Ronnie, he would have to say, well, it’s like that in a sort of way, only we’re both men. He would explain that they loved each other, try to tell her that sexual intercourse could be beautiful between men just as it could between a man and a woman. Maybe talk about the Greeks—those damned Greeks, he swore to himself. The opprobrium in which most people, nearly all people, hel
d men like himself reared itself up in his consciousness like a monster, a hairy Caliban, crocodile-headed, an embodiment of all that was evil in mankind. It might be that she too from what she had picked up at school or heard whispered in scorn by Ronnie Clifford had given a place in her mind to that monster. He couldn’t tell her. And strong as he was teaching himself to be, he leaned on the coward’s resource. One day he would tell her, but not yet. One day he would tell her and tell her too that he had given it all up, it was all over for him.

  SHE SAID good-bye to her mother and gave her a cold kiss on the cheek, but Maud stuck to her resolve not to speak to her father and she walked past him without a word, preceding John down the steps. John had arranged for his clothes and books to be sent on ahead for Mrs. Tremlett to take in. Maud’s clothes, or those she could still get into, he carried in the two suitcases in which he had brought his own. She said she was a good sempstress, had come top in the needlework class at school, and told him she would make all her own clothes in future and the baby’s. John promised that once they were settled in, he would go into Exeter and buy her a sewing machine.

  Sybil asked her to write and Maud promised she would. In this way any news she had to tell would be passed on to those parents with whom she had no desire to communicate. John could write to them if he chose, she said to him when they were in the train. On the third finger of her left hand she wore the wedding ring John had bought for her. If her parents had noticed it, they had said nothing, probably thinking that in her condition, now obvious, it was the only course for her to take. The train steamed along through fields that were the rich, damp green the cattle loved and occasionally yellow with ripened corn. Looking out the window but seeing little of all this, Maud was conscious of being happy for the first time since that day her mother had walked into her bedroom while she was dressing. She was happy and dreaming now of a home that would be a real grown-up house and hers and John’s and where in the wintertime her baby would be born.

  8

  THE CLIMATE of opinion and behaviour Maud had grown up in had led her to expect the life ahead of her to centre on wifely devotion, accomplished domesticity, and motherhood. Recently, because of her success at school, her parents had talked about the possibility of her going to university, the college at Exeter perhaps, but she had known that though this might lead to her becoming a teacher, such a job would last only until she married, and then those woman’s duties would overcome other aspirations. Now they had come upon her in a rush. She would not be a wife to John but would find herself with something like a wife’s function; the cottage would demand tidying and cleaning and linen-washing, and in only a few months motherhood would arrive.

  She thought of this as they travelled in the bus from Exeter to Dartcombe. The countryside around Bristol was lovely enough but not so lush as this, not so richly green, so that you wondered how the bus could manage to tunnel through the narrow lanes with their steep banks and tree branches which almost met overhead. The earth was dark red, the fields small and square, enclosed by hedges and alternating with dark woodland. If she had not been told by her English teacher that while when writing you may compare art to nature, you must never compare nature to art, she would have been reminded of the patchwork quilt her mother had made and which covered her bed at home. She would never see it again, and that thought brought a small, almost silent whimper. But John heard it and took her hand.

  Seeing this and the tender look he gave her, an old woman sitting in a nearby seat caught Maud’s eye and gave her an approving smile. Her pregnancy, beyond concealment, was very apparent now, as was the gold ring on the third finger of her left hand.

  “Are you feeling all right?” John asked her. “This bus is rather bumpy.”

  “I’m very well. It’s nice here, it’s lovely.”

  She could tell that pleased him, and she was aware of how fond she was of him. Still, it was a shock to her when, after a short walk from the bus stop to the cottage in Bury Row, John introduced her to Mrs. Tremlett.

  “This is my wife, Maud.”

  It had to be so, of course, but was it wrong to tell such a huge lie? It had to be told. You might say that the whole purpose of their coming here together and living together in this place, confronting this grim-faced but kindly woman, was founded on that lie. The alternative was the hideous truth, for that was how it now appeared to Maud.

  Mrs. Tremlett was too polite to say what she was evidently thinking, that this young wife was very young indeed. She herself had been married at sixteen, and Mr. Goodwin’s wife was not much more than that. Like her own, the wedding was one that had had to be because of a coming child. But she said nothing, only ushered them in where the table was set with tea things, and although it was warm and still summer, a fire was laid in the grate.

  “Your bed’s made up,” Mrs. Tremlett said, “so you’ll have nothing to do. Mrs. Goodwin can have a good rest after her journey.”

  The bed was the first sign of what they would have to contend with in the future. “We shall get used to subterfuge,” said John. They were upstairs in the bedroom and Mrs. Tremlett had gone. “I shall make up the bed in the other room for myself, and somehow that will have to be concealed from our kindly neighbour if she’s going to do our cleaning.”

  “I can do the cleaning, John. We don’t need her.”

  “We shall, you know. When the baby comes. We’ll let her come once a week for now to keep her hand in.”

  “We have to pretend we’re sharing this bed?”

  “Of course we do. Think about it, Maud. What’s she going to think if this young couple, newly married, sleep in separate beds?”

  “Not that newly married, I hope, John.” Maud put her hands to her swollen stomach, laughed, and burst into tears.

  “Come on now, it’s all right. Everything’s going to be fine, Mrs. Goodwin. I’m going to do the bed now, and then we’ll have our tea.” He found sheets initialled MT—for Margaret Tremlett, he supposed—in a drawer in the bedroom tallboy and set about making up the bed. The last time he had done this it had been for himself and Bertie, and knowing they would never again share a bed, he felt a pain that was physical.

  THURSDAY WAS to be Mrs. Tremlett’s day. She came early but John had already gone because it was his first day at his new school, and Maud was up washing clothes in the scullery sink. The kitchen range she knew how to operate, but the copper in the scullery puzzled her. How did you get hot water into it, and, come to that, out of it when the washing was done?

  Mrs. Tremlett opened the door in the bottom of the copper, inside which a fire was laid. “You leave that to me, my dear,” said Mrs. Tremlett. “You mustn’t use that dolly in your condition. Thicky, little old sheets can come next door with me and I’ll see to them.”

  She always spoke in a gentle, friendly way, but it only made Maud wonder what treatment would have been meted out to her if her landlady had known the truth, that she was fifteen and unmarried, could never be married. She wasn’t sure what a dolly was but guessed it might be the wooden pole with a kind of wooden plate on the end of it that stood in the corner. How was she to wash John’s sheets? Perhaps by hand, using a bar of yellow soap and rubbing the linen against that wooden board with the bars across it. She would ask him when he came home. The sun was shining and she went out into it, standing in the front garden, holding up her face to the warmth.

  They had been there a week and she had learnt all about the village shop, where you could buy tea and sugar and meat and fruit in tins as well as candles and string and oil for the lamps. Eggs and potatoes came from the farm on the hill, and a horse and cart laden with churns brought the milk, which the dairyman poured into her own blue china jug. For a butcher and a baker you had to take the bus into Ashburton or Newton Abbot, and she had done that once, at the former not knowing what cuts of meat to buy and very aware in this warm weather that whatever she bought must be cooked at once or it would go off. John said it would be best if he bought their meat after sch
ool and brought it home with him, two lamb chops, for instance, or mince to make rissoles or a cottage pie.

  How thoroughly she had been looked after and tended to at home! While it went on, she had never thought about it. It just happened and she took it for granted. Mother and “the maid” did it all, with the charwoman whose niece had drowned herself coming in once a week to “do the rough.” Somehow Maud doubted if that life would ever be hers again. She had put an end to it by one of the two “acts” people called love she had performed with Ronnie Clifford in the meadow on the way home from choir practice. If she thought of Ronnie now, it was with bitterness.

  The postman was coming up the village street, carrying his sack, which must be heavy even though it held mostly paper. All those letters coming to friends and relations from friends and relations. I wish I had a friend, she thought, my relations have been no good to me. Well, John has, but John is now my pretend husband. And Rosemary is lost to me because of Ronnie. The postman was opening their gate and coming up the path. He said good-morning and Maud said good-morning, and he handed her a letter but of course it wasn’t for her. It was addressed to J. Goodman, Esq. Maud took it into the house and sat down in the sitting room. Esq., she knew, was short for “esquire,” a polite way of addressing a man, better than Mr. and perhaps the next best thing to Sir or Lord. Some people said they could tell from the handwriting if the writer was a man or a woman, her father said he could, but Maud was sure she would be unable to do that. This writing sloped backwards, which she had been taught was bad and should be stopped when the writer was a child, just as left-handedness should be stopped and changed to right-handedness, as had happened in Ethel’s case. The man or woman who had written this envelope had put a little circle over the i in Devonshire instead of a dot, and that was a solecism her English teacher had called “illiterate.”