The Child's Child

by Barbara Vine

  Maud burst into tears. Instead of explaining, all she could say was “It’s just a bad word, Hope. You don’t have to know what it means.”

  But the insult to her daughter decided her. They must leave Dartcombe. She must rent or even buy a house in Ashburton or another village. She decided she would be incapable of doing this herself, but Elspeth could do it for her. Elspeth had said she would return anytime she was wanted, and she was wanted now. She could find estate agents (or whatever they were called), she could write to removal people—wasn’t there a firm called Pick-ford’s? Elspeth would know—she would know what needed to be bought for the new house. She would see about Hope’s leaving the village school here. Elspeth could be to her what John had been and could now no longer be.

  The spring term was halfway through for Elspeth. Maud wrote to her, begging her to come. Maud’s own needs had become paramount to her. Perhaps they had always been. That Elspeth might have a life of her own with friends and occupations of her own hardly occurred to Maud, but Elspeth recognised Maud’s helplessness. One of the worst things that could happen to a young girl had happened to her, but having a child without a husband, instead of strengthening her, had made her more dependent on others. When Elspeth arrived in Bury Row on the Friday afternoon, she found Maud in bed with Hope sitting beside her and a tray of tea things on the eiderdown between them.

  Now her friend had come, Maud said she would get up, but getting up didn’t mean putting on clothes, and she came downstairs in her dressing gown. Maud soon made it clear to Elspeth that she intended to do nothing towards finding and buying a house except paying for it, nothing towards furnishing it or choosing it somewhere convenient for the school Hope would go to after (and if) she had passed the entrance exam taken at the age of eleven. These were to be Elspeth’s jobs. Maud complained about suffering from that invisible and unprovable illness, recurrent headaches, but when a visit to the doctor was suggested, she said it was well known that nothing could be done to cure migraines.

  Elspeth had long thought it strange that Maud possessed no wireless. Electricity had come to Dartcombe three years before, and central lights hung in all the rooms. But the only way for national and international news to come into the house was by a newspaper bought in the village shop, where Maud never went. Elspeth’s own wireless was too cumbersome to be brought with her. She suggested that having this now nearly indispensable adjunct to a household might improve Maud’s quality of life, even restore her happiness, and Maud rather reluctantly agreed. Elspeth went into Ashburton next day and bought a wireless in a veneered wood-grain case, which the shopkeeper delivered that afternoon. She also visited an estate agent, listing her friend’s requirements: a house, not a cottage, a big garden, at least three bedrooms. Maud had no idea how much she should pay, and knowing how much she had inherited and invested, Elspeth suggested she could afford up to four hundred pounds.

  IF MAUD gave much thought to poor dead John, she said nothing about him to Elspeth. He was gone and she had forgotten him. Elspeth thought that now Maud had money of her own, John’s value in her life as a provider was in the past, and whatever affection she had had for him when first they lived together, all that was over now. She never spoke of him, but Elspeth believed that he was there in the back of her mind as a vague threat, someone who, beyond death, might yet affect her through the kind of life he had led.

  It was a cold, wet spring, a horrible April. But Elspeth had found a house for Maud, and Maud, persuaded to visit it, liked what she saw and agreed to the price of 375 pounds. The house was mid-Victorian, redbrick, double-fronted with a slate roof. The garden was walled with fruit trees and shrubs but no flowers except when Maud first saw it, when the trees were a mass of white and pink blossoms swept by gales and rain. It belonged to a man of about forty who lived in a fine Georgian house on the edge of Ottery St. Jude and owned several properties in the village.

  Elspeth had come to stay over Easter, and Maud took it for granted she would be with her every weekend. In the evenings the two women listened to the wireless and heard about the war in Spain and the prospect of a war with Germany. Maud had never before taken any interest in international events, but Elspeth was politically minded and took the side of the Republicans while Maud favoured Franco. But even this was a departure for Maud, who barely knew that England had had three kings in one year in 1936 or that Edward VIII had abdicated.

  It was Elspeth who had to tell Mrs. Tremlett that Maud wished to terminate her tenancy. Such news as hers can’t be kept secret for more than a day or two in a village such as Dartcombe, and Maud’s neighbour already knew that she and Hope would be leaving.

  “I know most of the people here have it in for her, but I have never been like that,” said Mrs. Tremlett. “Poor thing, she was only a child when she had a child.”

  Gratified, Elspeth hastened to tell Maud of these kind words, but Maud only said that how she lived was no business of the neighbour wife’s and Elspeth should wait and see when Mrs. Tremlett tried to charge Maud for damage to the interior of No. 2 Bury Row.

  “You haven’t damaged it, have you?”

  “Of course I haven’t, but you try telling them that.”

  But other residents of Bury Row no longer acknowledged Maud’s existence and shut themselves up in their houses when the Pickford’s van came to take the furniture to Ottery St. Jude. On their first evening in The Larches, the man who had sold Maud the house walked up from River House, bringing with him a bottle of champagne, something Maud had never before tasted and Elspeth had only tried once. He told the two women he was a writer of fiction and a journalist who wrote for the News Chronicle. Elspeth asked him if he thought war was coming and, if so, would they be safe in the Devon countryside.

  “I think the Germans will bomb Plymouth,” Gabriel Harding said. “It will be an important target for them because of the dockyard. But I’m sure you’ll be safe here, though we may all get refugees—if that’s the word—from Plymouth taking shelter with us.”

  Maud seemed horrified at the prospect, and Elspeth noted their visitor’s tolerant yet amused eyes on her. After he had gone, they went back to tidying up, making beds and putting away kitchen utensils and the food they had brought. While Maud was spreading the new pink eiderdown on her double bed—she had passed the old one on to the spare bed—she asked Elspeth if she would give up her tiny, two-room flat in Ashburton and come live with her. Remembering her friends in the town, a man who was becoming more than a friend, her job, and the five-mile distance from Ottery St. Jude, Elspeth said she would think about it. In bed that night, just before sleep came, she thought about the writer, a widower as she had learned, a comfortably off, nice-looking man. Had that glance he gave Maud meant not that he believed her ignorant and selfish but rather that he admired her? Certainly, at twenty-five she was a beautiful woman. If he was looking for a wife . . . But Elspeth was asleep.

  WHEN SCHOOL, both for Elspeth and Hope, broke up at the end of July, the former had still not made up her mind whether to accept Maud’s invitation. In some ways it was attractive. Elspeth would pay her way, but Maud had by now told her repeatedly that she wouldn’t want rent for the two or three rooms she would put at her friend’s disposal. Maud suggested too that Maud should buy a car. Both could drive it and Elspeth could use it to go to school.

  “Like the headmaster,” said Maud, as if this would be a temptation.

  What would happen to her, Elspeth wondered, if their new neighbour—he had asked them to call him Guy, as everyone did—fell in love with Maud, if he hadn’t already fallen in love with Maud, married her, and took her and Hope to live with him at River House. Elspeth would be without a home and with no means of getting one. Guy was a frequent caller at The Larches. He brought them fruit, strawberries and raspberries and red currants, from his kitchen garden. He had his own pew in St. Jude’s church and asked them to use it, which Maud sometimes did with Hope. Elspeth, an atheist who called herself a humanist, said she attended enoug
h assemblies at school without the need to do so on Sundays, and Maud and Hope were welcomed on their own. This only confirmed Elspeth’s belief that Guy was choosing Maud for the second Mrs. Harding.

  In August, when Elspeth had been staying for three weeks at The Larches, something changed all that. A note addressed to Miss Elspeth Dean was put through Maud’s letterbox early in the morning before either woman was up. Hope found it and laid it beside Elspeth’s plate on the breakfast table. The postmark was noted, and Elspeth wondered who in Ottery St. Jude, where she knew hardly anyone, could be writing to her. She knew by now Maud was not much interested in other people. After watching Elspeth open the envelope, Maud, indifferent, went out to the kitchen to make a fresh pot of tea. He had written:

  Dear Miss Dean, I have two tickets for a concert of Mozart and Vivaldi in Torquay on the evening of Saturday week. It would give me much pleasure if you would accompany me to Torquay. The concert begins at seven p.m. If you do me the honour of accepting, we would leave here at five thirty and I would call for you in my car.

  Apart from business communications in respect of job interviews, it was the most formal letter Elspeth had ever received. Her first question to herself was, Why had he chosen her over Maud? Only, surely, because he knew she was a music teacher and the function was a concert. Her second, whispered in front of the mirror in the bedroom, was, Why do you make so little of yourself? She undid the chignon on the back of her head and let the mass of red hair fall about her shoulders. The man in Ashburton she supposed she would marry one day, a teacher like herself but in a different school, disliked the colour and preferred her to wear a hat. So might this man, she thought. What did it matter?

  She put off telling Maud, then thought how cowardly she was being and came straight out with it.

  “I wonder why he’s asked you,” Maud said. “He could have anyone. Good-looking, plenty of money, that house, he’s quite a catch.”

  “He’s asked me to a concert, Maud, not to marry him.”

  “Goodness, no. I should think not.”

  “Anyway, I shan’t go.”

  HIS CAR was a black Armstrong Siddeley with comfortable leather-covered seats. Being driven anywhere in a car was a treat to Elspeth. They glided smoothly along the narrow lanes, where the hedges in August were overhung with wild clematis and the reddening berries of the wayfaring tree, while Guy asked her about her music, the instrument she played, her pupils, her favourite composers. This drastic change of subject was perhaps inevitable in the climate of dread which was closing in on England, to revert to that day’s paper and the news that Hitler had a million men under arms. But when the sea came into view in a steep vee between the hills, they stopped for a while, and Guy said it always reminded him of the Amalfi Coast and was just as beautiful. Elspeth said she had never been abroad, then wished she hadn’t said it because it sounded like angling for an invitation—as if such a thing were possible.

  Vivaldi’s Four Seasons came first, the Mozart being saved up for after the interval, and because it was warm even after sunset, they walked out onto a broad balcony from which the sea could again be seen. Guy saw someone he knew and introduced her to Elspeth as Alicia Imber, a friend of his. Elspeth immediately recognised the name as that of a woman who had been rude and patronising to Maud, or so Maud said. But Alicia was charming to Elspeth and said she hoped to see her again, though Elspeth found it embarrassing when Alicia said Guy must bring Elspeth over to Dartcombe Hall for tea.

  “She’s a good friend of mine,” he said to Elspeth when they went back into the concert hall. “A widow now. Her husband was the dearest man. She has two sons, Christian and Julian, and she had a daughter, called Charmian. The poor child died of tuberculosis when she was twelve.”

  “Some say that’s the worst thing that can happen to anyone,” said Elspeth, “to lose a child.”

  “I can believe it.” He hesitated. “Would you come with me if I drove over there one day? I know how much Alicia would like it.”

  Elspeth found herself blushing but she managed to speak firmly. “Of course. I’d like to.”

  The Mozart transported Elspeth to joy. It was rare for her to hear live music apart from that which she—sometimes with the school orchestra—made herself. She was aware of her companion’s eyes once or twice turned to her face, appreciating perhaps her rapt expression. On the return journey she found herself, perhaps too effusively, she thought, thanking him over and over for the concert, but he seemed to like her enthusiasm.

  Next day, persuading herself that her decision had nothing to do with Guy and the concert and his invitation to a small party he was giving on the following Wednesday, she told Maud that she would give up her flat in Ashburton and come to live at The Larches.

  21

  WAR WAS averted for just a year, though how short the postponement would be had not been known or even imagined when Neville Chamberlain had returned in triumph from Munich in September 1938. He carried with him a sheet of paper signed by Hitler and expressing the wish that the English and the Germans should “never to go to war together.” All over the country the usually phlegmatic English gathered in the streets, cheering and dancing, drinking and congratulating each other. At River House in Ottery St. Jude, Guy’s housekeeper asked him if he planned to have a party, but he said celebrations were premature. Hitler was not to be trusted, and after Czechoslovakia, who knew which country he would invade next?

  If the residents of Ottery St. Jude knew that Maud had never been married and Hope was illegitimate, no attempt was apparently made to ostracise her. Not then. Not yet. Maybe they accepted her because of the frequency with which Guy visited The Larches, giving as it were his seal of approval to the woman who had bought the house from him. Another reason was possibly that she was known to be well-off, in possession of a private income derived from an inheritance. Unmarried mothers with nameless children were usually poor, obliged to work at menial jobs such as a maid or charwoman. Not that Maud made friends in the village. She was thought to be standoffish with airs above her station.

  Elspeth’s decision to move into The Larches, and before the autumn term began, was what Maud had wanted, and if she failed to greet the news with an outburst of delight, this was probably because she never showed much enthusiasm for anything. Going to bed for the day was becoming, if not a habit, an indulgence of hers when anything even mildly unpleasant happened, even rain’s falling in the morning. For all that, her already handsome looks improved as her twenties progressed, and she was even better dressed now she could afford more expensive clothes. Her neighbours stared when she walked to the post office in a smart tailored suit with a fox fur and a pillbox hat, while Elspeth continued to dress in a jumper and skirt and the only coat she possessed. But Maud believed that men are attracted by smart clothes. While John was alive, she could never think of marrying because she was supposed to be married to him. She could never think of being attractive to men because she was a married woman. Things were different now. She had no wish to be married, but she would have liked men to want to marry her.

  She appeared not to notice the friendship or something more that was growing between Guy and Elspeth. Plainly, she rather disliked Guy, whom she continued to call by his style and surname in spite of being asked not to. Yet Elspeth noticed—she doubted if Guy did—that Maud dressed with the greatest care in her newest garments when he was expected to call, even going to the village hairdresser that morning. Elspeth was aware too, much to her dismay, that Maud believed Guy was attracted to her, was perhaps in love with her, even when he called to take her friend out. Maud even explained that these outings were all to musical events (though they were not) because music bored her while Elspeth liked it and indeed taught it.

  “I told him I’d fall asleep if I had to sit through a—what’s it called? An oratorio, is it?” Maud told Elspeth.

  She and Guy had been to hear Messiah in Exeter Cathedral, a source of wonder to Maud. Christmas came, and this time Guy did have a p
arty. Maud refused to go, saying she had always hated the season and longed to have a quiet time at home by herself. And “by herself,” increasingly frequent, seemed less and less to include Hope. Elspeth took Hope to the party, where she renewed her old, brief acquaintance with the Imber boys, Julian, who had just started at Oxford, and Christian, who was home for the holidays from Stowe. When Maud heard that Alicia Imber had been there, she was furious.

  “Don’t think you can bring that woman here,” she shouted at Elspeth. “You don’t know how she insulted me.” Elspeth had been told many times. “My daughter wasn’t good enough for that child of hers who died, that Charmian, if you’ve ever heard such a ridiculous name.”

  Elspeth said quietly that she wouldn’t dream of bringing anyone to The Larches without asking Maud first. “It’s your house, Maud.”

  “I’m glad you realise that.”

  Elspeth took the bus into Ashburton every weekday morning and sometimes back again. But Guy had begun meeting her in the Armstrong Siddeley after school and, instead of dropping her at Maud’s gate, driving her back to River House or taking her out to dinner. Maud seemed to have no objection to Elspeth’s going out two or three evenings a week, and Elspeth wondered why Maud had wanted her to share the house with her. An efficient daily woman called Mrs. Newcombe kept The Larches clean, did all the washing and ironing, and even cooked if Maud had taken to her bed. But she seldom spoke and, when she did, offered no opinions. She never seemed to gossip. Hope often spent the evenings in her mother’s bedroom, doing her homework and listening with Maud to the wireless. The newspapers carried frightening stories about “storm clouds gathering over Europe,” and extracts from Hitler’s rants, but the BBC’s broadcasts were anodyne, avoiding European news. Maud enjoyed the comedians and the serials.