The Child's Child

by Barbara Vine

  John wondered why Bertie wrote in this fashion when he himself poured into his letters so much adoration and passion and promises of enduring love. The answer must lie in the awkwardness Bertie felt about writing, his inability to select suitable words and phrases. John knew he would think about this question of their meeting all day, while he was supposed to be teaching boys Boyle’s law, while he was marking essays, trying to find a way round this seemingly insoluble problem. Staying a weekend in a hotel was impossible. He couldn’t afford it, and Bertie certainly couldn’t. With Bertie’s poverty in mind, he wrote him a loving note and, not for the first time, put it into an envelope with two pound notes he took from the tin he kept in a drawer. Maybe it was less than two weeks’ wages to Bertie, but it would help. John took the letter with him when he left for school, and Maud, who was standing in the tiny hallway, stared at it and no doubt read the address.

  LIFE WAS quiet and dull at No. 2 Bury Row. Events which enlivened it were, for John, Bertie’s occasional letters, and for Maud, Hope’s cutting another tooth or, now that she was approaching two, uttering her first words. Maud had hoped the first word of all would be mama, but in fact it was dada. Where she learned to call John that Maud never knew, only guessing that she had heard Gladys Tranter’s little girl call her father Dada or perhaps some other one among her friends had encouraged Hope to give John that name. It was the only possibility open to them, but neither of them liked it, John because he saw it as teaching the child to lie, Maud because, secretly, she believed that at some time in the future she was going to have to tell Hope the truth of her parentage. And what would happen if there was ultimately a reconciliation between herself and her mother and Ethel? For her father, Maud still kept unchanged hatred and resentment. Or if Sybil, who quite often wrote to her, wanted to visit? She never spoke of these things to John, sure he would neither understand nor care.

  Rosemary Clifford, not Sybil, was the first to come. The doorbell rang at No. 2 Bury Row one afternoon soon after Maud and Hope had finished their midday dinner and Maud had laid the baby down for her nap. She expected to find Daphne Crocker, her new neighbour at No. 4, on the doorstep. Instead, it was Rosemary, but a Rosemary transformed into a smart young lady, her hair marcelled, lipstick on her mouth, wearing a linen skirt and a black-and-white jumper, her feet in black patent shoes with double straps across the instep.

  Nothing was said for a moment.

  At last Rosemary said, “Can I come in?”

  “It’s not very tidy.” Maud thought immediately that this was a stupid thing to say, but she made it worse with “It’s a bit of a mess really.”

  Rosemary laughed. “I knew you lived here. I mean, in Dartcombe. Sybil told me. But not exactly where. My auntie Joan lives in Dartwell Magna, and I’m staying with her, so I begged a lift from Mrs. Imber—my mother knows her—and asked at the Red Cow, and they sent me here.” Rosemary laughed again, apparently from sheer happiness, and sat down in the middle of the sofa. “Where’s the infant, then?”

  “She’s asleep. She has an afternoon sleep.”

  “And you live here with John?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s she called?”

  At this moment a wail came from upstairs. Maud sprang up. “I’ll fetch her.”

  She could have carried Hope down at once, but she wanted her to be seen at her best, so she hurriedly dressed her in the latest frock she had made, pink and blue flowers on white winceyette, elaborately if a bit unevenly smocked. Hope had white socks on and pink shoes with straps.

  “Hold Mummy’s hand and we’ll walk down.”

  They got to the fourth step from the foot, and Hope put up her arms and said, “Mummy, carry.” She was shy of the strange lady.

  “Her name is Hope,” said Maud.

  “That’s a good choice. I expect you needed all the hope you could get.”

  The little girl looked as if she might cry, but she didn’t. Perhaps she was fascinated by Rosemary’s scarlet mouth and matching fingernails, or perhaps by the way the strange lady was staring into her eyes and smiling.

  “I thought as much,” Rosemary said. “I wondered as soon as Sybil told me, and now I know. She’s exactly like Ronnie.”

  Maud blushed a fiery red. “Yes. She’s his. There was never anybody else.”

  She would have liked to tell Rosemary everything, the way her parents had wanted to put her into that Methodist home, the things her father had said to her, how he had threatened her with the adoption of her baby. Above all, she would have liked to talk about her feelings, her misery, her dread, the temptation of suicide, the loneliness until John came to her rescue. But she couldn’t. It was impossible. In some play somewhere, when she was in school, she had read the expression I cannot heave my heart into my mouth, and that was exactly how she felt. Not just to Rosemary but to everyone who hoped that she would confide in them, even John, particularly John. Talking about her feelings, even weeping while she spoke of them, had once been possible, but no longer, and John and Bertie together had, so to speak, by what they had done, shut her emotions up inside her just as if they had taken hold of a full bottle of water and pushed a cork tightly into it.

  To Maud’s amazement, Hope had climbed onto Rosemary’s lap and was sitting there playing with the contents of her black suede handbag. Clever Rosemary had understood that if there is anything a two-year-old going on three likes to play with, it is the powder compact, the comb, the lace handkerchief, the purse, the lipstick, and the cigarette packet she finds in a lady’s bag. Rosemary had her cigarettes in a case with her name cut into its silver surface, and now, having first offered it to Maud and been refused, she took one out and lit it.

  Hope said, “Hope have cigarette.”

  Rosemary laughed. Had she always laughed so much? “Not till you’re grown-up.” She put Hope on the floor with the bag and its contents, excepting the compact and the lipstick. “You don’t want sticky red stuff all over your furniture. I’m going to tell Ronnie. Is that all right?”

  “He won’t believe you.”

  “Yes, he will. He’s come down from Oxford now and he works in a bank. I don’t mean behind a wire cage like those people who hand out money when you give them a cheque, I mean something called a merchant bank. Would you like to see him?”

  Maud said, “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, why not? He’ll be thrilled when he knows this little sweetheart is his.”

  “I doubt that.” Maud’s friend was so sophisticated and so clever, yet Maud thought she knew more about men than Rosemary did. Maud had been through more, she had lived.

  “We could all have tea. You could bring her and we could have tea in that nice hotel in what’s it called? Newton Abbot.”

  This time, Maud laughed, a harsh, metallic sound. “I think I will have that cigarette,” she said, though it would only be the third one she had ever had in all her life.

  “That nice hotel” in Newton Abbot was the one Bertie had seen after arriving at the railway station. That was what John thought of when Maud told him as much as she wanted him to know of Rosemary’s visit. He and Bertie had seen each other a few times over the past two and a half years, meeting in London in the school holidays for just an afternoon, once in a boardinghouse in Reading because it too was on the Great Western main line. Bertie had remembered the nice Newton Abbot hotel, but it was well beyond their means. In the boardinghouse Bertie had told John without shame, or even supposing John would be hurt, that he sometimes went cruising on Hampstead Heath, picking up young men, or found a guardsman in one of the London parks who would “do it for cash” though he wasn’t “queer” himself. These confidences had brought John savage pain and jealousy, but when he protested to Bertie, all his lover said was “I daresay I’d give it up if you and me shared a place down where you live.”

  John was ashamed of his reaction to Maud’s news; his heart had leapt when he’d heard that Rosemary intended to tell her brother Maud had his child. Ronnie had fail
ed to answer John’s letter telling him of Maud’s pregnancy, but he was older now, they all were. Maybe he had changed. This might lead to Ronnie’s offering to marry John’s sister, taking her away and thus leaving John free to live with Bertie. It was a giant leap to make—but was it? It rather depended on what kind of a man Ronnie Clifford was, and John hadn’t high hopes of him after he had had no answer to his letter. If it were me, John thought, I would be so excited at being a father, I would rush off at once to see my sweetheart and my daughter and after that . . . But he couldn’t imagine doing what was necessary to father a child, couldn’t imagine wanting to do it. He had never made love to a woman and knew he never would.

  Regularly he burnt the letters he had from Bertie. He was afraid Maud might find them if he kept them to read and reread. Because he pressed Bertie for a photograph, he finally sent one, a picture of himself with his mother in a tiny garden with a wire fence round it. Bertie’s mother wore a crossover, flowered overall and bedroom slippers and looked as old as the hills—well, more like seventy than fifty-five. This John refused to burn, but he cut Bertie’s mother off it. He looked at it every night, wishing it were of Bertie on his own. By day he hid it, firstly in one of the drawers in his bedroom, then, realising that Maud or Mrs. Tremlett opened this drawer to put his clean shirts inside, in one of the pockets of his overcoat. But truly, nowhere was safe from these women. He often lay awake at night, asking himself but never getting an answer, why the world was so horrified by Uranians and so furious with them, when in fact they harmed no one by what they did.

  Another disturbing thing was happening to him. He had begun to think that he had been wrong or, rather, unwise to set up this little household with Maud and Hope. When he first thought of it, the arrangement had seemed so good to him, the answer to every dilemma: his homosexualism, the trap Maud had got herself into, where they were to live and how they were to live, the illegitimacy of Hope. Moving in here and pretending to be husband and wife had indeed solved these difficulties, but it depended on his celibacy; that which he had believed would be easy enough to stick to had turned out to be nearly impossible. He was now daily brooding on how he could escape from this situation of his own making, asking himself if he could afford to keep up two homes, one for Maud and the child and another for himself and Bertie. It pained John that every time Bertie wrote these days, he asked for money. John was afraid of losing Bertie if he refused and now found himself regularly making a contribution to Bertie’s expenses, which amounted to doubling his wages.

  WHETHER ROSEMARY had ever told her brother about his child, Maud didn’t know. Time went on, Hope was three years old, and no letter came either from Ronnie or from his sister to say she had told him. This caused Maud no distress, only resentment. All her feelings were for Hope, whose father seemed to have no longing to see her, so sweet and beautiful as she was. When the doorbell rang, Maud half expected to see Ronnie there, as if making surprise calls on people you hadn’t seen for years might be a family trait.

  It was years too since she had seen Sybil, though they wrote to each other. Then her sister invited herself to visit and stay the night if Maud was happy with that. Maud wasn’t happy, but, as she put it to herself, she could put up with it. She cleaned the house from top to bottom, baked a Madeira cake for tea, changed the sheets on her own bed for Sybil to sleep in—Maud would sleep on the sofa—and dressed Hope in the new dress she had made for her, white lawn, trimmed in pink and with pink smocking.

  Nothing about Sybil’s appearance was eye-catching. She had always been rather dowdy, and now, at past thirty, she looked what people would call a typical spinster. Her shoes were flat-heeled lace-ups, her costume dark grey broadcloth, just like a man’s but for the skirt substituted for trousers. Sybil had never cut her long, dark auburn hair, and now she wore it in an unflattering bun at her nape. But her pleasure at seeing Maud and her reaction to Hope with her fair curls and dark blue eyes was all Maud could have longed for. Sybil had brought her a present, a fluffy terrier on wheels, that Hope received rapturously and, remembering her mother’s teaching, said thank-you for.

  “She’s lovely,” Sybil said. “Not much like any of us but that doesn’t matter. She looks a happy child.”

  “I think she is. I hope so. I wish she had more children her own age to play with, but Mrs. Tranter and her husband have moved to Dartwell and their little girl too, of course.”

  “Maud, I have to ask you, I hope you won’t mind, but the people here, do they know about Hope?”

  Maud knew very well what Sybil meant, but still Maud meant to ask her to spell it out. “What do you mean, about her?”

  “You know.” Sybil looked uncomfortable. “That she’s not—well, born in wedlock.”

  Maud spoke stiffly. “John and I call ourselves Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin. Everyone believes Hope is his child.”

  “Oh, Maud.” Sybil placed her slice of Madeira cake back on her plate, looking as if the news she had received had spoilt her appetite. “Oh, dear, Maud, was that wise? Didn’t you think about the consequences?”

  “What consequences?”

  “Well, what if John wants to get married? What if you do?”

  “I won’t and he won’t. Hope thinks John’s her father, and there’s no reason why she won’t go on doing so. Now let’s change the subject. How’s mother? How’s Ethel?”

  Sybil, who plainly didn’t want to change the subject, told her that Ethel was “expecting” her first child in January and took no notice of Maud’s flashing eyes and pursed mouth. “No one told her she was a disgrace to the family, did they?”

  “Oh, Maud” was all Sybil could say to that. She expected a happier response when she told her sister their mother was well, missed Maud a lot, and would like to see her. “She says bygones will be bygones if you’ll only come and maybe stop with us for a couple of nights.”

  “I could, but I don’t want to see our father.” I make him sound like God, Maud thought, but didn’t know how else to put it, and he had behaved like God to her, a jealous God, punishing disproportionately. Reaping where he had not sown, she remembered from her churchgoing days, and gathering where he had not stored. “Mother could come here,” she said, “if she misses me so much.”

  Never the soul of tact, Sybil said, “She wouldn’t do that. You see, if you came to us, she says, please, could you not bring the child. She doesn’t want to see her.”

  Maud’s reaction was far from anything Sybil expected. She thought her sister might protest that she had no one with whom to leave Hope or that she had never been separated from her and wasn’t about to start now. But Maud screamed. She screamed and burst into violent tears, seizing hold of the little girl, who had been playing with her toy dog, and clutching her so tightly that Hope also began to cry and howl. The two of them rocked back and forth, sobbing and grabbing at each other’s clothes and hair. Sybil turned white. All she could say was “Oh, Maud, Maud, don’t. Please stop. What have I said that’s so terrible? Please stop.”

  Into the midst of this John walked. “What on earth is wrong?” He looked from one sister to the other. “What have you said to her?”

  “Nothing, nothing. I only said that if she’ll come and see Mother, not to bring Hope.”

  Maud’s tears had subsided. Hope was still whimpering and hiccupping. John laughed. “I can see that would start the fireworks.” He said to Maud, “You don’t have to go anywhere if you don’t want to. You’re making a fuss about nothing. Have another cup of tea, that’ll do you good.”

  Sitting up straight, directing a look of enraged distaste at Sybil, her face bright red and wet, Maud said, “I will never go near that house again. I’ll never go to Bristol again. You can tell her I don’t want to see her as long as I live or she does, and as for Father, he’s dead to me already.”

  Sybil stayed the night in Maud’s bed, and Maud slept downstairs, Hope in her cot pulled close to the sofa. In the morning, before he cycled off to school, John showed Sybil the vegetables
he and Maud were growing behind the house in a patch Maud called the kitchen garden.

  “It helps us make ends meet.”

  “But you have a good salary, don’t you, John?”

  “There are three of us to live on it. Down here, I don’t get the London weighting.”

  Sybil left on the bus for Ashburton, rather peeved because Maud wouldn’t come too, to see her off.

  “You could leave Hope with Mrs. what’s her name.”

  “Tremlett. Her name is Mrs. Tremlett. I don’t know why everyone is always trying to get me to leave my little girl with other people.”

  So they parted on waspish terms.

  Maud, whom John had once described as a cheerful girl who never sulked, was sullen and morose that evening. When John asked her what was wrong, all she said was “I wonder what Sybil would say if she knew about you and your friend.”

  15

  WHEN JOHN had said that he had three people to support on his income, he wasn’t telling the whole truth. For the past few months he had been supporting Bertie as well. The days when Bertie only received money from John when he asked for it were gone, the days when John put a pound note or two pound notes into an envelope and sent it with a covering note were in the past. Now, each week, he sent his lover a postal order for nearly twice the sum that Bertie earned serving behind the counter in the ironmonger’s shop. John couldn’t afford it, and every time he sealed up the envelope and dropped it into the pillar box, he thought that he was buying Bertie’s love.

  In the past he had sometimes planned to save enough, even if it took him weeks, to take a room for one night in that hotel Bertie coveted. John didn’t get far. Hope needed new shoes, she had a rash or a cough and the doctor had to be sent for, the roof of No. 2 Bury Row sprang a leak and Mrs. Tremlett refused to pay for mending it, so John had to. John said nothing, just accepted, but Maud reproached their landlady, calling her a skinflint, which led to her asking for an extra five shillings for their cleaning. “If that’s what I am,” she said to Maud but with a grin, “I’ll need my pay going up.” Learning to be “a real dressmaker,” as she put it, Maud needed more and more fabric to work on and more paper patterns to buy. The hotel plan came to nothing and now never would. All John’s spare cash went to Bertie.