The Child's Child

by Barbara Vine

  Hope continued to ask about John until Maud lost patience and told her not to speak of him again. There was no sign of him. By now he would have lost his job at the school, probably his chance of a pension one day. He must be dead. She thought quite suddenly of Elspeth Dean, who had offered her, if not a shoulder to cry on, an ear to listen to confessions. The spring term had just started. Maud was anxious, even if she was obliged to confess to weakness and shame and inadequacy, to look what she truly was now, rich and handsome. She dressed in the clothes she had worn for that wretched visit to her family, the red tweed suit, the coat with the fur collar, and the red court shoes, took the bus to Ashburton, and waited outside the school gates at half past three.

  The boys came out, one master, then another, then for five minutes no one. From John’s description Maud recognised the headmaster leaving, getting into his black Austin 7 that was parked just inside the gates. Everyone must have gone before Elspeth appeared, unmistakeable in her green cloak and carrying her violin in its green leather case.

  “Mrs. Goodwin!”

  Maud said nothing. She gave Elspeth her tight smile.

  “What brings you here?”

  “Would you please call me Maud?” was all she could find to say, but almost immediately found words, though not the words she had intended. “My daughter will be coming out of school now. A friend is going to meet her and keep her till I come back. If we go to a café and have a cup of tea, will you let me talk to you?”

  “Of course. But wouldn’t it be better if I came back to your house with you and we talked there?”

  “Would you do that?”

  “Come on. I know the Dartcombe bus times, and there’s one due in just ten minutes.”

  They waited for it at the stop. “I think that when I talk to you,” Maud said hesitantly, “you may be very shocked and—well, disgusted with me. And with John. I’ve decided that if I’m going to talk to anyone—well, you—I must tell everything and not keep anything back. I thought I should warn you of this, so that if you think you wouldn’t want to get involved because you’re—well, a single woman who may not know that such things go on—oh, I don’t know, but I’m just trying not to get you sort of entangled in shocking things.”

  Elspeth was laughing, shaking her head and laughing so that her red hair flew out and crackled as Maud had heard such hair does. “You don’t know me, Maud, but I hope you soon will. Now here comes our bus.”

  Sitting at the very back of the bus with Maud next to the window, Elspeth began to show Maud how to know her better. “I did my training in London. I was in the music school there, thinking I could become a concert violinist, but perhaps I wasn’t quite good enough for that. I had a little flat in Chelsea, a walk-up with a tiny kitchen and sharing a bathroom with four others. Somehow I gathered a lot of friends about me. We were a bohemian crowd, I’m sure you know what that means. We were musicians and actors and artists, none of us very successful, none of us well-off, and none of us conventional.

  “On the floor below me lived two young men who were lovers. I can see by your face you know what I mean. They called themselves queer, but some people called them Uranians and some inverts. There were several couples and they lived together but they weren’t married. I had someone I lived with, but we need not go into that now. It’s enough to say that it didn’t work out, and in the end he left me. I had a little money but it was running out. I managed to get a job playing my violin in a big department store, but the truth is I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear sitting there playing Tchaikovsky and Chopin on my violin while people laughed and chatted as if I wasn’t there.

  “I’m talking too much. You don’t want to hear all this. I’ve explained the essential things, why you won’t mind telling me things. You won’t find I’m shocked.”

  “Why did you leave London?”

  “There was nothing for me to do there and no one I much minded leaving behind. My lover was gone. I applied to various schools in the country and got this one, teaching music to boys. They’re very nice to me, I love it.”

  Turning to face her, Maud understood that she now saw Elspeth in a new light. Until ten minutes ago she had seen her draperies as ridiculous, her long hair gipsyish, but now she saw a beautiful face, green eyes that were unlike the way she had used to view them, as catlike, sharp, and untrustworthy. Elspeth’s were soft and kind.

  “I will fetch Hope,” Maud said, “and then we’ll have tea and talk.”

  MAUD HAD intended to hold back certain parts of her story. John’s relations with Bertie—and possibly with others?—surely there was no need to tell. Nor was there any need to mention her sister Ethel’s refusal to know her or Ronnie Clifford’s treatment of her as if she were a street woman he had picked up somewhere. His marriage to the “lady doctor” might be kept dark. But at some point in Elspeth’s description of her London life, her absolute acceptance of what Maud’s parents called “living in sin” and of the two young men as lovers, Maud decided that if she talked, she must tell everything. Anything else would be useless and a kind of insult to Elspeth.

  All this thinking, something Maud was unused to, made her head ache, and once she had made the tea, set out a big homemade ginger cake on the table, and opened a new tin of Huntley & Palmers biscuits, she swallowed two aspirins. Having met Elspeth before, Hope talked to her with little sign of shyness while both of them ate large slices of cake. John wasn’t mentioned in front of the child. Maureen Crocker, Daphne’s daughter, was coming over to play, and the two girls went up into Hope’s bedroom. Maud was so certain that John, for some reason, was never coming back that she had given his room to Hope.

  A dark blush mounted into her face as she began telling Elspeth the history of her life and John’s from the day she’d first started walking home with Ronnie. Her face felt so hot that she put her unaccountably cold hands up to it. A fire blazed in the grate but she was still cold.

  “Take it slowly,” Elspeth said. “I think you’re not used to talking about yourself.”

  It was true. Maud had hardly ever done so, and never to her mother, whom she now saw as the natural recipient for the confidences of a young girl. She warmed even more to Elspeth but still couldn’t bring herself to say much about what had happened between her and Ronnie. But she could tell of the discovery of her pregnancy, of her mother’s discovery of it, of her parents’ plan to put her into a Methodist home for unmarried mothers. As she began to tell of John’s sacrifice to take care of her and to provide her and Hope with a home, she saw for the first time what he had tried to give up for her, and, in failing, what he had lost.

  “He brought this man here,” Maud said. “They slept together.” The blush was beginning again. “I didn’t want it, but I couldn’t stop him. I’m sure this must shock you, considering John wasn’t a stranger.”

  “Oh, I knew about him. I’ve always known.”

  “You can’t have!”

  “I really did. I could tell. Don’t look like that, Maud. That I knew doesn’t mean anyone else could, and I’m sure they didn’t. That’s why I used to wonder why he’d got married. I didn’t know you were brother and sister then, remember. It made me want to get to know you both better, but you rather froze me out. I understand that now too.”

  Maud told her the rest. She was suddenly tired but her headache was gone. She looked down at her clothes, the tight, short skirt, the stiff tailoring like the garments of a secretary or a typist, she thought, the shoes of too bright a colour and too high heels. Whom was she trying to impress? All that must soon be over and a hard time coming.

  “What am I to do?” she said.

  “I think we must go to the police. Do you have a police house in the village?” Maud nodded. “It will all come out now, I’m afraid. I’d say ‘your secret’ except that that sounds a bit melodramatic. You see, John may be lying dead somewhere with no one knowing who he is or what’s happened to him.”

  “I thought of that.”

  “There
’s no time like the present. Is it far?”

  “Just down the road and in the next street. Must I do it now? What about Hope?”

  “Ask a neighbour to keep an eye on her and the other child.”

  Elspeth seemed slightly amused by Maud’s change of dress, smiling but in a kindly way when she came downstairs in an obviously homemade frock and lace-up shoes, her face a picture of fear yet with a new determination.

  “ ‘We who are about to die salute you,’ ” said Elspeth. “Come along. You’ll feel better when it’s over.”

  So Maud, trembling all over, both hands clenched on the strap of her bag, went to PC Joseph Truscott’s house, interrupted him at tea with his wife and sons, and told him John Goodwin was missing, had been missing for nearly two months. She told him too, the tears falling from her eyes, that he was not her husband but her brother, leaving out, on Elspeth’s instructions, any mention of what Maud called to herself but not to him or Elspeth his taste for or activities of “gross indecency.”

  PC Truscott thanked her in his slow and stolid way. He would “let them in London know.” She should be let know if anything came of it. No surprise was shown, though Elspeth felt great haste was shown in hurrying them off the premises. She thought but didn’t say to Maud that the moment they were out of sight, Truscott would be sharing all this information with his fascinated wife. How long before the whole village knew?

  20

  SINCE FIRST she came to Dartcombe, Maud’s had been a sheltered life. She had never realised this herself. The painful incidents in it, Mrs. Imber’s rebuffs, Bertie’s visit, Rosemary’s and Sybil’s visits, stayed with her, festering. There they would be for ever. They were high spots in her existence, if high spots can be bad and troubling. But this interview with PC Truscott overwhelmed everything. It seemed to her that she had been obliged to tell him things no one should ever know and which would ruin for ever her reputation and her life in the little society she had made for herself.

  Weeping bitterly when they were home again, she sobbed to Elspeth that she couldn’t be alone here in Bury Row with these terrible revelations—as she put it—hanging over her. Elspeth’s promise that things would be better once Maud had confessed to the policeman couldn’t have been further from the truth. She felt worse now than she had when she’d found out she was pregnant with Hope. This was the worst day of her life, and she blamed John for it.

  The hesitation was momentary. “I’ll stay. Of course I will. You’ll have to lend me a nightgown and a toothbrush.”

  Maud threw her arms around Elspeth’s neck. Then, a changed woman, her tears dried, Maud went away to cook something for supper. When John went away all those weeks ago, he had taken his toothbrush with him, so Maud gave Elspeth hers, first carefully boiling it in a pan of water. She offered to give Elspeth her bed, but this was refused in favour of the green velvet sofa in front of the dying fire. Hope was so enthralled by Elspeth, her long, red hair, which the little girl was allowed to plait, her cape and the contents of her handbag, combined comb and brush, a lipstick called Tangee, which looked transparent in its case but turned red on the lips, photographs of their new guest’s mother and Elspeth’s brother and sister. For the first time, Hope forgot John and failed to ask when Daddy was coming back.

  Nor did Mrs. Tremlett ask when she came in to see if everything was all right—it was so unlike Maud to go out in the evening leaving Hope with her.

  “Quite all right,” Maud said, understanding that if the news was to circulate in Dartcombe, it hadn’t yet reached her neighbour.

  The sofa was still disarranged with blanket and eiderdown. Elspeth had gone into the kitchen to wash. “An overnight visitor, I see,” Mrs. Tremlett said.

  “Just a friend from John’s school.” As soon as the words were out, Maud wondered if she had said too much, but Mrs. Tremlett seemed to accept it without question.

  THE MILK no longer arrived in a jug from the churn but in bottles. Maud hesitated before going out of the front door to fetch it. No one was about in Bury Row when she picked up the single milk bottle, but as she returned, Daphne Crocker came out of No. 4, looked her in the eyes, and turned back, slamming the door behind her. It had begun.

  “Don’t leave me,” Maud said again when Elspeth came out of the kitchen in Maud’s dressing gown.

  “I must. I’ll go back to Ashburton and fetch some things—including a toothbrush. When I’ve locked up again, I’ll come straight back and I’ll fetch the shopping so you won’t have to go out if you don’t want to.”

  “I shall never want to again,” said Maud dolefully.

  “All right, but I shall have to go back to school. It won’t be as bad as you think. You’ve made a great drama out of it, but these people are only ordinary country people. They’re not fiends, they’re not witch-hunters. Maybe some of them will turn their backs, but does that matter so much? My mother says you need to have a broad back in this world.”

  “Only I haven’t,” said Maud, not liking to be told she had made a drama, as if taking things seriously hadn’t been justified.

  Elspeth brought clothes to change into, but less than half the number Maud would have packed for herself. Elspeth did the shopping by herself, took Hope to school, though the child was quite old enough to go on her own, saw the policeman again, and managed to get him to tell her that a body had been found, a man had drowned in a canal in London. More than that he wouldn’t say and said he would have preferred to tell anything that had to be told to Maud herself. But Maud didn’t want to speak to him, didn’t want to listen to what he might have to say. She received some curious looks from neighbours, and women who had passed the time of day with her in the past no longer spoke. Two days later Elspeth went back to Ashburton, but with many promises to return at any time Maud might want her.

  PLUCKING UP her courage was an effort of will Maud had never been good at. But one fine morning in early spring, when the garden and the lane were growing green and the blackthorn had burst into its tiny white flowers, the weather raised her spirits, as it does everyone’s. She would go out. If she met a neighbour who turned away from her, she would plant herself in front of her and force her to listen while she explained. Mrs. Tremlett hadn’t been near her since she commented on Maud’s overnight visitor; Gladys followed her mother’s example in everything, so she too hadn’t been seen. Mrs. Paine in the village shop was coldly polite to Maud but that was all, and after a single visit Maud hadn’t gone there again. But now she felt that everything could be explained, and she would do it even if it meant confessing Hope’s illegitimacy. Maud still had to learn that while to resolve is easy, to enact that resolution takes rehearsal and practice and even the kind of will she didn’t possess.

  John was probably dead. He was likely the drowned man they had pulled out of the canal. She didn’t know and didn’t want to know. She asked herself if she felt any sorrow for her brother and told herself she didn’t. He had forfeited any grieving for him she might have had by his shameful behaviour. Now she had money, she could forget him, begin again with Hope, perhaps in a new place. Then, after Elspeth had been gone a fortnight and Maud had managed to avoid seeing the looks she got in the street and being ignored, another letter came with a Bristol postmark. This time, though, the address was in Ethel’s handwriting.

  She remembered the only other time Ethel had written, and that was to John. Dear Maud . . . How strange that people always began letters like that; even when they would never call you dear to your face, even when they had never met you, were writing a business letter or one that held a series of insults. You were always “dear” to correspondents.

  Father has asked me to write to you and tell you what follows. As you must understand, he is unable to perform this task himself. The police came to Mother and Father and then to us to tell us about the truly horrible discovery they made in a canal in London. Someone was needed for the dreadful task of identifying the body they found. Father could not possibly do such a thing so they aske
d my husband. Being a very courageous and resolute man, Herbert agreed.

  He has just returned from London, where he looked at the remains and identified them as our brother John. Herbert may have to go back to attend the inquest. This is involving us in great expense. I must say I think that if you had reported John missing earlier than you did and had gone to London to see the body yourself, you would have saved your sister and brother-in-law, apart from the financial consideration, a great deal of pain that will endure for a long time.

  You should realise that your expenses are minimal. You are now a rich woman with no one but yourself to spend your money on. Living in the country has not changed you, Maud. You are the same childlike creature you were when you ran away and broke Father’s heart all those years ago.

  Your affectionate sister,

  Ethel

  Maud was learning that the widely held belief that the people whose judgment you don’t value can’t hurt you is not true, or not true in her case. Ethel’s censure caused Maud disproportionate distress. She was particularly indignant at being referred to as living on her own as if Hope had never been born or should be treated as nonexistent.

  Instead of going out as she had planned, Maud went back to bed. It was the start of a habit of a retreat from life, an escape from trouble into oblivion. Although she had slept well the night before, she fell asleep almost immediately and was still asleep when Hope came home from school at half past three and when she opened Maud’s bedroom door, she worried that her mother must be ill. Maud got up and scolded her for making a fuss. Hope had given few signs that things had changed for her since the man who might have been her father or else her uncle had disappeared. She had become a much quieter child who was pleasant and affectionate to her mother, but noticeably never confided in her. How she might be getting on at school, what she was learning, who her friends were apart from George Tranter and Maureen Crocker, Maud was told nothing about. So the abusive epithet must have gone deep with Hope for her to tell her mother that evening, “What’s a bastard, Mummy? Trevor Pratt called me a bastard.”