The Child's Child

by Barbara Vine

  Her father was all right, she said, but he had been bombed out of his house in the Harrow Road and gone to live with his sister in Basingstoke. She showed what Goshawk called “the sentimentality of the working class” when he asked about the old man whose dog died with him. No, she never even knew what the man was called, but it was a crying shame him dying like that, all alone but for his dog, it brought tears to your eyes. Reenie suited the action to the word and gave a little sob.

  The young man in the photograph? She might have seen him and she might not, she couldn’t say. She remembered the incident of the oar put back in the wrong place, the poor old man shouting and yelling and the dog running up and down and barking, but she couldn’t have said when it happened. A lot of fuss about nothing, if you asked her. Now if he’d asked her about another young man who often came into Teds Café, she could have told the inspector about him. He was so good-looking, he looked like Leslie Howard, but she wouldn’t want her husband to hear her talk like that, he was that jealous.

  “This other young man, the handsome one,” said Goshawk, “did he ever come in the café with anyone else?”

  “Of course he did, but only men. All the girls’d have been after him, but he steered clear of them. Didn’t want to get tied down, if you ask me.”

  Goshawk referred to the photograph. “Did you ever see him with this man?”

  Reenie couldn’t say. She might have. She couldn’t remember everyone who came in. “Only the good-looking ones, eh?” said Goshawk, and she giggled.

  “I can tell you where he lives. It’s Bourne Terrace off the Harrow Road. I know what you’re thinking, but I’m a married woman. It’s my auntie lives down there, that’s how I know.”

  None of this was much help to Goshawk. He went to Bourne Terrace but it told him nothing. What did he expect this grim, dirty street to tell him? He had no reason to suppose, anyway, that the good-looking young man had any connection with drowned John Goodwin. The rest of his week’s holiday he spent calling at houses on both sides of the canal, but so many streets had been devastated by bombing that his quest inevitably came to nothing. For the time being, he had to leave it. A big murder case in Clapham near where he himself lived occupied all his time and attention. It was bombs falling near Paddington station where Goshawk’s sergeant lived in one of the houses that escaped the destruction that brought John Goodwin’s death again to mind. Goshawk took a walk along Bourne Terrace, relatively unscathed but for a damaged house here and there, to come out into a scene of terrible devastation, a whole district flattened but for remnants of little houses, sliced in half by bombs, here and there an exposed wall with a fireplace still in it and patterned paper on the part that remained. He wondered if Reenie’s aunt had survived and, come to that, the handsome young man. What he should do, he told himself, what he should have done two years before, had such an action not been forbidden, was to have a couple of detective constables conduct a house-to-house enquiry in Bourne Terrace. Perhaps he should do it himself on a day off just as he had performed a similar exercise in Elkstone Road. For what purpose, though?

  He had no name, no photograph, no date, and no evidence, but something had haunted him across those years, a question he had forgotten to ask Reenie. He went back to her home after six months, doubting if she would still be there. But she was, and to his surprise she recognised him. Her husband, she said, was in the army, he’d been called up in the over-thirty-four intake.

  “There’s been a lot of bombing in back of here,” Goshawk said. “Was your auntie all right?”

  “Fancy you remembering! Well, she was, but her house took a direct hit. Auntie was in the Anderson shelter in the garden, and who d’you think was in there with her? A girl that’s called Dot and that young chap I told you about, the good-looking one. They was all in there and they was all okay. His place wasn’t touched.”

  Goshawk went home, where he reread his brother-in-law’s letter. Albert Edward Webber of 43 Bourne Terrace, Paddington. He had been living in Devon, it appeared, living with a woman who was either John Goodwin’s widow or his sister.

  24

  MAUD NO longer read a newspaper, and though she listened to her wireless set, it was never to news bulletins. Coming home from school one day in late November, Hope told her mother she had heard that Bristol had been heavily bombed on the night of the twenty-fourth. Although Hope had never met any of them, she knew that her mother’s parents and sisters lived there.

  “I don’t know why you’re telling me,” Maud said. “They’re nothing to me.”

  She was far more concerned and shocked by the news brought to her by Guy that Bertie had been sent for trial to the Central Criminal Court for the wilful murder of her brother, John. And he had stayed here, in her house! She had given him money! Because of him, everyone thought she was a loose woman! As for her parents, she had almost forgotten their existence, and when she had a letter from Sybil two days later to tell her that their father had died on the night of the bombing, she threw it away without replying. Nor did she go to the funeral, though Sybil had written again to tell her when and where it was. And when Elspeth showed that she was shocked by her refusal to go, Maud told Elspeth how she had changed since her marriage from the unconventional, bohemian creature she used to be.

  Patiently bearing her mother’s moods, on a day in the school holidays just before Christmas, Hope changed. Maud hadn’t taken to her bed but had been silent all morning. Heavy rain was falling, and Hope had had her usual recourse to books. She had been reading for three hours when suddenly she laid down her book and said, “What happened to Daddy?”

  Maud was startled because Hope had given up calling him Daddy a year before he went away. “Your uncle, you mean.”

  “Well, I never really knew, did I?”

  “He was your uncle, my brother. He died.”

  “If you won’t tell me, I’ll ask Elspeth. She knew him.”

  “All you need to know is that he went to London and drowned in a canal. You weren’t particularly fond of him, were you?”

  Hope made no answer. “You’ve never told me who my real father was. You’ve never told me anything.”

  “Don’t speak to me like that, Hope. You should have respect for your mother.”

  They had both been invited to River House for Christmas, and this time Maud agreed to go. She had made sure that Alicia Imber would not be there. Hope asked if she could stay on over Boxing Day and the next day, when she heard that the Imber boys were coming.

  “If Mrs. Harding will have you,” Maud said. She expected Hope to call Maud’s friend that, though Hope never did. She was fast learning to disobey her mother because in her opinion Maud made such ridiculous rules. “Those boys are men now. They won’t have time for a little girl like you.”

  There was some truth in that. Hope had just become eleven while Christian reached seventeen. He had a car of his own now and drove his brother to River House, where the two of them took part in grown-up conversation and drank sherry along with the adults. Hope played with baby Adam while longing to be alone with Christian, Julian making a third if need be (if absolutely need be). When they had gone, she too went home. She felt she had lost her only friends, for the children she had known in Dartcombe had been missing from her life for several years now. At school she liked a lot of girls and they seemed to like her. Most of them lived in Ashburton, and she had gone home to tea with some of them. One good thing about having a mother who was a “semi-invalid,” as Hope was instructed to tell people, was that Maud noticed less and less whether Hope was at home or not, but asking a friend back to tea—even if she got the tea ready herself—was not allowed. The two girls would make a noise while Maud was having her afternoon sleep. She was twenty-seven years old, but she led Hope to believe she was thirty-one. To reveal her age at all to her daughter—any age—was hateful to her, but even worse would be to let her know that Maud had been only fifteen when the child was born. Eighteen was respectable—let her believe that.


  Much as Maud wanted nothing to do with her family, her upbringing died hard. She had taught Hope the difference between right and wrong, or what Maud thought was the difference. One thing Hope’s mother had never told her was where babies came from, but Maud was already anxious to keep her daughter aloof from the dangers of men’s company so gave her some limited sex education. As Hope was to tell a friend many years later, it was “how babies came out but not how they got in.” The girls at school took the opposite line. Childbirth interested them not at all, though they were saturated in biology lessons with diagrams of the female reproductive system and encouraged to watch pet rabbits giving birth. Fertilisation was another matter. Those confident enough to instruct the others correctly called sexual intercourse fucking, in their innocence having no idea that this was the worst of all possible “swear words,” unspeakable in society, never heard or uttered by most of their parents, and unprintable for years to come. The process it defined was described by an embarrassed teacher as getting married, loving your husband very much, and sleeping beside him “in a special kind of loving embrace.” If Hope wondered what married people did, a couple such as Elspeth and Guy, for instance, her curiosity was soon satisfied by one of the confident ones, who gave her a graphic account, very different from the “loving embrace” version.

  IN MARCH, Bristol suffered again. Maud made no attempt to find out what had happened to her mother, Sybil, and Ethel and her family. Plymouth had so far escaped the bombs, but suffered a two-night blitz on the twentieth and twenty-first, flattening the centre of the city and damaging suburbs. St. Andrew’s Church, Plymouth’s Anglican cathedral, was almost destroyed. Afterwards, for years, it bore on an arch left standing the single Latin word Resurgam. I will rise again.

  Thirty thousand people were made homeless in Plymouth. One young woman, married to a serviceman, abandoned her now ruined house on Mutley Plain and, with her new baby in a sling strapped to her chest and her two-year-old in a pram, walked half across the destroyed city to wait for a train that would take her to Ashburton. She had once been a pupil of Elspeth’s and had heard that she lived in Ottery St. Jude. With another long walk ahead of her in the bitter cold, not until the dawn of the next day did she reach River House. Elspeth was pregnant with her second child, but she took Pauline Moran and her children in. Of course she did. She never thought twice about it.

  News of their arrival soon reached The Larches. Hope brought it to her mother, not in bed at that particular time, but reclining on the old sofa, now reupholstered.

  “We ought to have taken them. Elspeth’s going to have her baby soon, and they’ve only got Mrs. Grendon to help. Susan’s left and gone into the munitions factory. We’ve got two spare rooms, we ought to have taken them.”

  “Please don’t be silly,” said Maud. “That sort of thing isn’t for you to decide. I’m the mistress of this house in case you’d forgotten.”

  “Then I shall go up to River House and help whenever I can.”

  “So long as you don’t forget your homework comes first.”

  Hope was growing into a tall and good-looking girl. She wore her long, fair hair not in two plaits as was the fashion, but a single one, a thick, golden pigtail. Her eyes were a clear dark blue, her features classically regular, if the lips were a little too full for perfect beauty. She had become what Maud called (secretly to herself) the “spitting image” of Ronnie Clifford. Like most children, she had loved her mother dearly when she was younger. John Goodwin had never meant much to her nor she to him. But he had been there, he had been some sort of a companion, someone to talk to. These days her mother never spoke to her unless Hope spoke first. Sometimes she thought Maud wouldn’t notice if she walked out one day and never came back. Her love for her mother was receding fast and turning to contempt. What kind of a woman pretended to be ill when she was in fact well and strong? What kind of a person had no friends, rejected all offers of friendship, and had even begun to turn away from the one woman who had never deserted her in the face of all kinds of rebuffs?

  Elspeth gave birth to her daughter, Dinah, after a long labour and a painful delivery, and Elspeth had to stay in bed for a week after it. Brave and resourceful, Pauline Moran had got her children out of Plymouth, had kept them warm in blankets, had walked for many miles with them, breast-feeding the baby on the way, but once at River House she had suffered a violent reaction, become feeble and frightened, unable to perform even the simplest household tasks. Hope took over. It was Easter, so there was no school, and she moved in.

  “But, darling, you can’t do this,” Elspeth said. “It’s not right at your age.”

  “A lot of nursemaids in Victorian times were no older than me and they managed fine.”

  Hope too managed fine. Mrs. Grendon cleaned and changed beds and did the laundry. Guy showed an unexpected talent for cooking, much to his housekeeper’s disapproval. He even began making the bread, the wholemeal kind the government said everyone should eat. For two years now they had been growing vegetables in what used to be the flower gardens, keeping chickens and ducks and even a pig, which became a pet because no one had the heart—let alone the ability—to slaughter it when the time came. Hope looked after the babies, four of them, none more than two years and two months old. In January the meat ration had fallen to a new low level and stayed there, but Guy managed meals for Elspeth with eggs and vegetables, and Hope ran upstairs with them, sitting beside her while Elspeth fed Dinah, thinking but not saying, I shall do that myself one day.

  “She is like another daughter to me,” Elspeth said to her husband.

  When Hope finally went home to prepare for a return to school next day, Maud said she might have brought some eggs with her, the Hardings must have dozens, and when did they expect their first strawberries to ripen?

  The sewing machine John had bought her Maud had used for only a few months. The rebuff she had received from Mrs. Imber remained with her always, and the sewing machine symbolised it. Every time she looked at it, even under its cover, she remembered Mrs. Imber’s words or constructed words Maud imagined the woman had said. The real words had been swallowed up in a series of insults. Maud’s life since Hope was born had become so sheltered and protected that she had never learnt to take criticism and perhaps profit from it. She had never understood that what she did might be less than perfect, or that any woman in her situation, if she wants to live a contented life, must show the society she moves in that in spite of her past she is worthy of respect. She dealt with even the smallest problem by taking to her bed and brought up her child by inflicting precepts on her while giving her no example to follow.

  Noblesse oblige, Mrs. Imber had said to her, Maud had taught herself to remember, meaning that upper-class people owed it to themselves to be condescending to what she had heard John call the proletariat. The work she had done, making that dress for the child who had died, hadn’t been up to Mrs. Imber’s standards. The woman had refused to allow her daughter to come to play with Hope. From making Maud indignant, this rejection had rankled over the years until it had now reached a peak of bitterness and resentment. In her memory Alicia Imber’s words had been so distorted that Maud now remembered her saying that the smocking on the dress was poor and far below the standard she expected; she wouldn’t “dream” of allowing Charmian to come to play with a lower-class child such as Hope.

  “I hope you’ll never mention those people in this house,” Maud said to Hope. “Don’t you realise how grossly that woman insulted me?”

  “It wasn’t Christian and Julian who said those things to you.”

  “If you went to church like you should, you’d know that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, and that means mothers too. Or in other words, those boys are chips off the old block.”

  Maud never went to church herself. The congregation was composed entirely of residents of Ottery St. Jude, the occasional guest of one of them, and now the influx from Plymouth. Setting foot inside St. Jude’s o
n a Sunday morning or evening would mean talking to her neighbours or even getting to know them. Hope never went. When the rector called—he said he was “looking in”—Maud told him she had gone back to being a Methodist. She was still shocked when her daughter said she was an atheist. Hope lost her belief in God when He did nothing to stop the bombing of Plymouth but let the Germans make thirty thousand people homeless and left refugees from the stricken city, mothers with small babies, to wander about Dartmoor in the bitter cold of the night.

  “You’ve been listening to that Pauline” was Maud’s only comment.

  ALICIA IMBER married again. Her new husband was the widowed father of a boy Christian and Julian had been at school with. The big wedding was at All Saints, Dartcombe. The Hardings were of course invited and, to her surprise, Maud with Hope.

  “Not that I would dream of going,” said Maud. “Fancy marrying a man called Brown, it’s almost as bad as Smith.”

  “I’d like to go. You could wear your pink dress.”

  Maud had used all her annual allowance of clothing coupons on it, fearing, as the rumour had it, that a range of hideous garments called Utility, with no trimmings, pleats, or cuffs, would appear in the shop. A year was to pass before this happened, but she was taking no chances. The dress had a full skirt and a tight bodice with tiny buttons from neck to waist. Twenty-five pearl buttons, she noted. Maud sometimes put it on when she was alone and wore silk stockings and high-heeled shoes with it. Once or twice Hope had come home and found Maud dressed like that with one of the best china teacups on a tray and the silver teapot.