by Barbara Vine
The letter might be from a friend, someone John had met at college perhaps, or it could be from a girl. Maud hoped in a way it was from a girl. Maybe a girl was more likely to put a little ring over an i. He had said he would never marry, but young as she was, she knew people said things like that and changed their minds when they met the right one. Her thoughts flew ahead to after the baby was born and John’s girl came here to visit them. Before they married, she and John would have to move so that the neighbours couldn’t find out, John and the girl would have a wedding, and they would all live together in the new place. Maud would say she was a widow, and they would all get on well, the new Mrs. Goodwin loving the baby as much as if he or she were her own. Maud put the letter, which had given rise to such daydreaming, on the sitting-room mantlepiece.
After Mrs. Tremlett had gone, carrying with her a big basket full of linen to be washed, Maud sat down on the floor with the sewing materials John had bought for her: pins and needles, reels of black and white cotton (the coloured ones would come later), a pair of scissors, a paper pattern for a baby’s nightgown, and a length of white lawn. She knew she was not so good a sempstress as she had led John to believe she was. The sewing machine was yet to come, and she had yet to learn how to use it. Meanwhile she tried pinning the pattern to the fabric, cutting it out, and tacking the pieces together. She was still at work when John came home, carrying a paper bag, itself wrapped in brown paper in case the blood from the scrag end of beef came through.
“The butcher’s shop was full of women,” he said. “I was the only man, and I think I was the only man to be in there all day. The butcher was too polite to laugh. When he’d served me, he said, ‘It’s not often we see gentlemen in here, sir. They do the eating of it and the ladies do the buying.’”
JOHN HAD never before seen Bertie’s handwriting but guessed the letter was from him. Who else would be writing to him? His mother or father perhaps. He had written to them, telling them he was settled in Bury Row with Maud nearby in the care of Mrs. Tremlett. Nearby was the word he used, not wanting to commit himself to writing next door. It was unlikely they would even think of writing to Maud. He wrote about the beauty of the village and the countryside, the ancient church and the churchyard where a famous poet of the last century was buried, the bicycle he had bought, and the ease of the journey to school all day. No answer had as yet come. The letter that had come he opened carefully, his heart beating faster.
His own letter to Bertie, written on that night he had spent alone in the cottage, had been full of passion as well as tender love, but Bertie’s reply was devoid of that. It was short, and the personal part contained descriptions of acts they had certainly performed together as well as words Bertie had often used while they made love, but still John was profoundly shocked by them. This aspect of their love he felt was sinful, led to policemen and police courts, to violence in the streets, to prison and a whole spectrum of ugliness and shame. These were the words that went with sodomy and buggery and which led to stringent laws being made to plant in the minds of young men a horror they dared not overcome. Yet they excited him, they seemed inextricably associated with Bertie, his beauty and his voice and his powerful attractions. Should he try to write to some extent in this vein when he answered? If it would make Bertie care for him more, need him and love him—yes, he thought he would.
But when he had read the letter again and again, knowing it and the terrible, beautiful words by heart, he would wait until Maud had left the kitchen to lay the table, and then he would open the door of the range and put Bertie’s letter on the burning coals inside. Doing this would hurt terribly, but he dared not leave such a document—he thought of this sheet of paper as a document because of the words it contained—in this house for Maud or even Mrs. Tremlett to find.
While keeping his eyes on the little passage and the kitchen door beyond, the letter in his trouser pocket, its presence nevertheless reminded him of what he had to do. One day, he thought, not now, not yet. If she asked him about the letter, for instance, she might ask whom it was from, expecting him to say from a woman. Even though he had told her he would never marry, he knew that denial would carry no weight with her, would carry no weight with any woman. She would like him to have a girl, and if he did, it would naturally lead to marriage. When he imagined her response to his telling her the truth, he felt sick with self-disgust. You could never say this to a girl. Girls didn’t know that such tastes, such behaviour, such desires, existed, or if they had heard it hinted at with sniggers or downturned mouths and mock shudders, their reaction was to recoil. “Queers,” men like him, wore women’s brassieres, with padding to resemble breasts, and put red ink on their underpants to look like the blood that came from women once a month, but just the same they hated women. Bertie had told him all these things. John knew only that he was different, yet could never say so.
Sometimes he encountered old men who lived alone but were not widowers. One such was living in their street in Bristol, and probably one in this village. John knew they were like him, unable ever to tell anyone the reason for their solitary lives, condemned to answer their families’ repeated suggestions that it was time they married with the response that was not a reason, that they were “confirmed bachelors.” It was rather better when two single men shared a house, for so repressive was the taboo on homosexualism—he hated the word, but what else could you call it?—that few if any people guessed why they were together.
Maud’s emergence from the kitchen with a tablecloth over her arm and a hand full of cutlery interrupted this unhappy reverie. Through the open doorway he watched her lay each place with a knife, a fork, and a spoon, and when she went to fetch water glasses from the sideboard, he slipped into the kitchen and pushed Bertie’s letter into the range.
9
TIME PASSED and John never said a word. Autumn came, bringing wet weather with it. Maud was learning that Devon is so green because it rains a lot. Her belly swelled more and more and the baby moved. Contrary to John’s expectations, Mary Goodwin wrote to Maud, and Mrs. Tremlett had to bring the letter in, believing that Maud’s mother had mistaken the number in Bury Row.
“You can read it,” Maud said to John, her eyes filling with tears. “Not that it’s worth reading. It’s unkind and mean. She says that she hopes I’m learning my lesson now, but that there’s not much chance of that, the way I’m living in comfort with a kind lady and my brother next door. She knows it’s next door now, John.”
“I’ll have to tell her another lie. I’ll write to her to send your letters care of me, give her some excuse, but I daresay she won’t write again.”
“They’ll have to be let know when the baby comes.”
There was no doctor in the village. Dr. Masonford from Ashton, five miles away, paid his visits to patients in a pony and trap just as his predecessor had done half a century before. Mrs. Lillicrap from the Red Cow told John when he asked her that if all went well, it shouldn’t be necessary to call the doctor. With her experience in midwifery, she would come herself to deliver the baby. John remembered the monthly nurse who had been in the house in Bristol when his mother gave birth to Maud. Ethel had had to move in with Sybil to provide her with a bedroom, and remembering this made John see insuperable difficulties. Any nurse he engaged would require a bedroom, and this would mean his giving up his room to sleep with Maud. The nurse and Mrs. Tremlett and Mrs. Lillicrap would see nothing unusual in this. Indeed, they would assume that this was what was happening all along. The idea of a monthly nurse must be given up, and he with the two women would take on the care of Maud and the baby. He saw that he had begun to weave a tangled web when, by the means of an invented marriage, he first practised to deceive.
LETTERS WERE regularly exchanged now between John and Bertie. John, at least on paper, was losing his inhibitions. He saw the absurdity of quoting from the Song of Solomon in his outpourings but couldn’t resist addressing Bertie as “thou whom my soul loveth,” telling him he had dove’s e
yes and a mouth like “lilies, dropping sweet-smelling myrrh.” Knowing that a generally held view was that the Song referred not to love between two human beings but that which subsisted between Christ and His Church—while thinking this attitude ridiculous, John still feared he might be writing blasphemy. Bertie never commented on these extravagances when he replied. Perhaps they made him feel awkward or else he didn’t understand them. The latter, John thought more likely, as he had never known Bertie to be embarrassed.
All Bertie’s letters John burnt. It became a ritual, waiting for Maud to leave the kitchen, then moving quickly out there to open the door of the range and push the single sheet of paper inside. Bertie wrote in pencil on cheap lined paper. No doubt he didn’t possess a pen. John tried not to feel shame on Bertie’s behalf for the bad spelling, the little circles instead of dots over the letter i, the lack of punctuation, but it did nothing to lessen his love. In a way he was relieved to burn the latest letter because then he could no longer see the illiteracies while holding in his memory the passionate expressions.
Bertie wanted to come and visit him in Dartcombe. Having made a kind of vow never to make love with him again, John had broken this undertaking almost as soon as the opportunity came. Bertie made it plain that he wouldn’t take any further protestations of celibacy seriously, though he put it in far cruder terms. John longed to see him and asked himself constantly if there was any way this could come about. If at last he could bring himself to confess the truth to Maud, would that make a visit from Bertie more or less possible? The trouble was—or the joy and glory was—that if Bertie came to No. 2 Bury Row, they would make love, and how could that even be imagined with Maud in the house? Whatever happened, he must bring himself to tell Maud before she had the baby.
She was big now, “as big as a house,” according to Mrs. Lillicrap. She commented approvingly when Maud said the baby was moving so vigorously that he or she had pushed a plate off her lap and sent it flying.
“It’s a boy,” said Mrs. Lillicrap, the expert. “You’re carrying him low, and that’s always a sign. Strong too. Girls don’t kick and shove like that.”
Maud thought it would be nice to have a girl because you could give her a pretty name. This was a proper way for a young wife to feel, Mrs. Lillicrap said approvingly, but unfortunately it was a boy.
“Best to be a man in this world. You want to think of it like that. And Mr. Goodwin will be pleased. A man wants his first one to be a boy.”
“He won’t mind what it is,” Maud said, and how could he when it wasn’t his?
She still estimated she had two weeks to go, but Mrs. Tremlett, who had had eight of her own against Mrs. Lillicrap’s three, said it would come sooner than that. All the leaves had fallen by now and so had a great deal of rain. But the past two days had looked like summer, apart from the bare trees, the sky bright blue but the sun never far from the horizon and setting early. Maud no longer went out, she had become embarrassed by her bulky shape, and when she sat at the sewing machine, hardly knowing where to put her great belly, she gave that up too. A small wardrobe of garments suitable for either sex had been created not very skilfully, and now, sitting in an armchair with her feet up on a stool, she was finishing off the white shawl she was knitting.
At this stage of her pregnancy, John chose to tell her he had been and would always be, whether he practised his “vice” or not, a homosexual. He wasn’t being callous or insensitive, he told himself, it would mean little to her, she would not even be much interested, it was too alien from her even to concern her, but he had so driven himself, his mind racked by keeping this vital fact of his existence from her, that he felt he could no longer remain silent for another day.
When he first began, talking in a veiled way and with many euphemisms for relations between a man and a woman, she blushed a fiery red. She laid aside the needles and the white wool and, hanging her head, looked down into what remained to her of a lap.
“It can be like that,” he said, “when it’s not a man and a woman but two men together. Do you understand what I mean?”
She said nothing but shook her head vehemently.
“It is like that for me, Maud. That’s why I can never get married.”
Suddenly she burst out, “But it can’t be. It’s not possible. Men and women aren’t made the same.”
He shook his head. “That’s not the important part, that’s nothing.” Wasn’t it? Was it really nothing? “It’s love that’s important, isn’t it? Love like you had with—with Ronnie.”
A look came into her face he had never before seen there. It was compounded of anger and contempt. “You call that love? That wasn’t love, it was two animals in a field.”
It was his turn to blush. After that he didn’t know what to say. The silence was awful. If only she would ask questions, but she sat as if petrified in her chair, her belly filling all the space between arms and cushions while her arms and legs looked thinner than ever, her slender neck longer. She was all the child she carried, it had taken her over, and it was motionless now, waiting to be born and set her free. Inconsequentially, he thought he now knew for the first time what that phrase in the Bible about a woman’s being delivered really meant.
He made himself go on. “I made up my mind when I came here with you that I would never be like that with a man again. That has to be over for me—well, for ever.”
She seized upon that one word again. “You mean you did that while you were in London? What you said a man could do with a man? You did that?”
Instead of replying, he said, “I promise I never will again.”
“I don’t understand what it was you did.” Turning her face away, she said, “I don’t want to. I don’t want you to tell me any more.”
It had been dark for hours but was still only eight in the evening. The silence that had fallen was like a physical barrier between them, a wall. John thought he had never in all his life felt so lonely, not when he first went to live in London, not when he told Bertie they must never make love again. This kind of loneliness makes you feel you will never again speak to a living soul, never feel a human touch. Maud picked up her knitting to put it away, the way women do, rolling up the finished work, placing the two needles side by side, and pushing them through the ball, before tucking the little parcel it made into her red-and-blue crocheted knitting bag. She got heavily to her feet, one hand in the small of her back.
“I think I’ll go up now.”
“Maud, Maud, wait a little while, please.”
“No, I’ll go up now.”
As the people who lived in these cottages and these villages had done since time immemorial, she put a light to her bed candle and lumbered upstairs with it. There was no gas in Dartcombe, and while Dartcombe Hall and the rectory and one or two other houses had electricity, most residents used oil lamps downstairs and candles on an upper floor. Maud, who had learnt these things quickly, carried her candle in its blue enamel holder in her right hand, shielding the flame with her left. This meant she couldn’t hold on to the banister.
“Let me help you,” John said.
“I shall be all right on my own.” Her voice was cold and tremulous.
He understood that she didn’t want him to touch her. His touch would be a contamination. He sat down there, deep in thought, for half an hour, then another half hour. What was he to do? The fire died to a red glow, then to grey ash with a spark at the heart of it. He fed it with small pieces of coal just in time, having no wish to go to bed himself, the strange idea coming to him that he would be even more alone up there, even lonelier. The way Maud had reacted was not at all as he had expected, though he hardly knew what he had expected. Perhaps he had thought that she would say it was all right, things weren’t the way they used to be, the world was changing. “You fool,” he said to himself. “She’s a child, she’s fifteen. You have shocked her to the core. . . .”
As if summoned by his words, which he had spoken aloud, she appeared at the top of the s
tairs, this time clinging to the banister. Her candle she must have left in her room. In a ballooning white nightgown she had a ghostly look, half-lit by the light from the single oil lamp on the table in front of him.
“John, it’s started, the baby’s started.”
He sprang to his feet. “Oh, Maud, it’s all right. I’m here.”
“I’ve had an awful pain and I’m having another one now.” She would have doubled up her body if she could have. “How long does it go on?”
He forgot about loneliness, forgot despair. “I don’t know. How would I know? I’ll go and fetch Mrs. Lillicrap.” The absurdity of this woman’s name struck him now and not for the first time. “I’ll fetch her. You must go back to bed.”
“All right. I’m sorry I was so horrid to you, John.” She stumbled back into her bedroom. “I wish you hadn’t told me, though. I really do wish that.”
10
A SET PIECE carried in John’s mind was of a man pacing up and down a passage while on the other side of a door hung with a white sheet a woman was screaming. His mother’s labour was nothing like that, even if he had been in the house to hear it. Perhaps he hadn’t been in the house but he and Sybil were sent away to an aunt or grandmother, he couldn’t remember. Pacing wasn’t possible outside Maud’s bedroom door, the space was so small he would likely have fallen downstairs. Nor was a sheet hung over the door and she wasn’t screaming, but a soft moaning reached him from behind the door. Still fully dressed, he sat downstairs where he couldn’t hear those sounds, drinking tea.