Privileged Children

by Frances Vernon

  Jenny sighed. ‘Anatole, why don’t you tell Liza that she’s a lazy pig instead of shouting about her to me?’

  ‘What good did telling Liza ever do? She just looks dreamily through you. You know that perfectly well.’

  Finola started to whimper. ‘Pick her up,’ said Anatole. ‘I shouldn’t be shouting, it upsets her.’

  ‘I suppose she thinks it’s her who’s made you angry,’ said Jenny. ‘God, it must be terrible to be a baby. Can’t walk, can’t talk, can’t read, can’t even feed themselves or control their bodies at all.’

  ‘Finola is past that stage, thank goodness,’ said Anatole, but he was frowning at Jenny and cooking with less vigour than before.

  ‘Yes, but she’s still pretty helpless. And she still doesn’t talk at all, though she understands everything. Why is it that everyone thinks it’s terrible when someone is paralysed when they’re grown up, and yet we don’t think it’s awful for a baby to be like that.’

  ‘It is a normal condition which one grows out of, you know,’ said Anatole.

  ‘Yes, but it doesn’t seem like that to the baby, does it? And that’s one’s first experience,’ mused Jenny, ‘everyone being so much bigger than you, so powerful, so strange, and you able to do absolutely nothing. I bet we don’t remember being a baby simply because the experience was so ghastly that we’ve cut it out of our minds.’

  ‘But if you are loved …’ said Anatole, slowly ladling the eggs on to a plate for Finola while Jenny held the child closely and allowed her to pull her hair.

  ‘That can make things better, obviously. But all the love in the world can’t make you able to do things for yourself if you’re a baby.’

  ‘So independence is worth more than love?’ said Anatole.

  ‘I think so,’ said Jenny, ‘certainly in such an extreme case.’

  ‘An extreme case?’ said Anatole. ‘Jenny, I must go. I shall have to waste money on a bus if I’m to get there within half an hour of the right time. Can you feed her?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Jenny. ‘It’s quicker to walk nowadays, the buses are so irregular.’

  ‘Well, I shall just have to try my luck.’

  Anatole borrowed Augustus’s overcoat, which was considerably less shabby than his own, and a hat belonging to a cousin of Clementina’s who was currently staying at Bramham Gardens.

  He took a very crowded bus from Earl’s Court to Belgravia, and walked several hundred yards to Eaton Place. The Belgravia streets were quiet. There were no wartime posters on the walls. Well-polished motorcars stood outside the wide white portals of some of the houses. Due influence had preserved even some of the iron railings from requisition.

  The door of the Fawcetts’ house was opened by an elderly butler.

  ‘I’m afraid, Monsieur Anatole, that Miss Louisa is with Miss Willsford at the moment. It is half-past ten.’

  ‘Then the lesson is cancelled?’ said Anatole eagerly.

  The butler considered. ‘I will inform Miss Willsford of your arrival. Please wait here.’ He walked slowly upstairs.

  When he at last came back — after Anatole had spent some time on the exceedingly uncomfortable hall chair which had been designated to him — the butler announced that Anatole would be allowed to give Miss Louisa her violin lesson at eleven o’clock. He was meanwhile expected to remain in the hall. Anatole gritted his teeth.

  ‘Psst!’ It was Lady Caroline.

  ‘I’ve been waiting for you for ages,’ she whispered. ‘Come in here. Whatever held you up so long?’

  ‘A traffic jam,’ shrugged Anatole.

  ‘Oh, so irritating.’ He did not know to what she was referring.

  Caroline was tall and handsome in the manner which had gone out of fashion ten years ago: she was a full-bosomed, dark-haired woman with heavy features and rich colouring. Anatole briefly wondered why he always ended up with tall women when he thought that he was looking for someone nearly as small as himself.

  ‘Tell me,’ began Caroline, ‘how’s your wife getting on in the War Office?’

  ‘It bores her to tears,’ he replied, ‘but it gives her something to do, which is the important thing.’

  ‘I did think that everyone under twenty-five became a nurse if their parents allowed them to,’ said Caroline. ‘Your wife is terribly young, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Anatole.

  Caroline came to sit beside him and looked down at the floor.

  ‘Why did you marry her?’ she said.

  ‘Caroline, I don’t want to talk about it with you, because you can never remember even the commonplace details of my private life, such as my address.’

  ‘Darling! Why are you cross? But you really aren’t happy with your wife, are you?’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t refer to Alice as my wife. I always think that Charlotte has been resurrected from the dead when that expression is used.’

  ‘Charlotte?’

  ‘There, you see, you are quite uninterested in my life when it does not affect you directly. I have told you that my first wife was called Charlotte.’

  ‘Anatole, do tell me why you’re in such a bad mood.’

  ‘I am not in a bad mood. Could you please tell your damned butler to show me into some room to wait and not leave me in the freezing cold hall.’

  ‘I know, isn’t it icy? It’s all this economising for the war effort; you see, one feels one must cooperate. Do you know I haven’t ordered one new dinner dress this season. Of course, I’ll tell Higgins,’ she added. ‘I’m sure economising can’t be a good thing, you know. After all, if one doesn’t buy things, trade collapses, and how can that be good for the country?’

  ‘Caroline, you support British trade and industry not when you order twenty-five new evening dresses but when you pay for them.’

  ‘Good heavens, you really are in a bad mood, darling. Whatever’s happened? Can’t I help?’ She put her hand on his thigh. He said nothing, so she caressed him. He pushed her hand away.

  ‘You’re tired of me,’ she said.

  ‘Caroline,’ sighed Anatole.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ she said. ‘I’m being a tiresome, demanding mistress. What do you want me to be like, Anatole? I’ve been cheerful and frivolous, and you don’t like that, and I’ve tried to help you and you don’t want that either.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Caroline,’ said Anatole. He looked out into the street and did not move as she talked.

  ‘You’re so lucky, Anatole. Everyone loves and needs you so much. You don’t appreciate how marvellous it is to be wanted like that.’

  ‘I know what it is like,’ he said.

  ‘Anatole, I don’t know what I’d do without you. Since Charles was killed I’ve been so alone. My husband never sees me any more, and of course it would be worse if I did have to see him. And as for my friends — well, apart from the relief-committee work, of course, one’s never even serious with them, let alone intimate.’

  ‘When your sons have been killed, are you serious with one another then?’ said Anatole.

  ‘One doesn’t say anything except how sorry one is,’ said Caroline. ‘It’s almost as though really showing one’s misery is betraying the war effort. It’s only with you that I can show myself, so to speak.’

  ‘You must make a new sort of friend, Caroline, and you will have no more need of me,’ he said. ‘It is bad to depend on one person you know,’ he added, for her face, swiftly turned towards him, was trembling, and her eyes were blank with tears. Caroline had always reminded him of someone from his past. Now he remembered that she was a rich, heavy, unhappy, middle-aged woman, very like a lady whom he had known in Paris in 1900. The Parisienne had however not been handsome, but Anatole had then been able to make love to her despite that, as she had been paying him to do. Anatole closed his eyes and wrapped his arms round himself.

  ‘Anatole, please come here tonight.’

  ‘I can’t, Caroline, it’s my turn to cook and I cannot ask anyone else to do it; they’re all worki
ng so much harder than I. The other men don’t have to cook,’ he muttered.

  ‘When will you come?’

  He looked at her. He opened his mouth, closed it again and then said, ‘I don’t know, Caroline. I must go and give Louisa her lesson now. Goodbye.’ He went upstairs and waited outside the school room for ten minutes.

  Louisa Fawcett, who was twelve years old, managed to look very like her mother without being a turn-of-the-century beauty. A belt was tied beneath her plump waist and her legs were encased in thick wrinkled stockings.

  ‘Monsieur Anatole, the string on my violin’s broken,’ she said.

  ‘When will it be mended?’

  ‘I don’t know, it’s so hard to get things done nowadays, Miss Willsford said, with the war and everything.’

  ‘All right, but as I have come all the way here we can have a piano lesson instead. Louisa, don’t look so cross, please. I know you hate music, but I can’t stop your parents making you learn to play, I’m afraid, and I have to earn my living by teaching you.’

  She sat down heavily on the piano stool. ‘When I go to school next year I can give up learning the piano. Anyway that’s what mother said two weeks ago. I suppose she’ll change her mind.’

  ‘Is there any piece which repels you less than the others which you can play?’

  Louisa chose ‘Goodbye, Dolly Gray’. Anatole controlled his expression as she thumped out the tune. ‘Sing it,’ he said, ‘if that would help you.’ Anatole did not teach her singing and had never heard her voice: she sang far better than she played. He told her so and she blushed.

  ‘Monsieur Anatole,’ she said, ‘if you don’t like teaching, why don’t you play the violin yourself? In an orchestra or something?’

  ‘Because I am not good enough,’ he said. ‘Always remember, Louisa, that I teach because I am an inferior musician. Never respect your teachers.’ He said it as though he were angry with her.

  Anatole had two hours to wait until he gave his next lesson, which was also in this part of London. He had forgotten to bring any sandwiches with him. Usually, on this empty day of the week, he ate something in the park. In any case it was too early for lunch. Hyde Park would be grey and wet, full of skinny leafless trees. Instead of going there Anatole walked slowly through the red Edwardian streets west of Sloane Street.

  To eat in a restaurant near here would cost at least half a crown. He might as well, he thought, spend more than that if he was going to waste his money. He felt hungrier than he had been for a long time.

  He found a small restaurant near Basil Street. It was early as yet, but the restaurant was beginning to fill up with people. Anatole reckoned that he must be the oldest person present. The restaurant was filled with small, rickety new tables and chairs. It was not well lit. A very modern gramophone was playing a tango tune in one corner. Sitting at the tables were girls out alone with men who were probably not their brothers; they wore make-up and smoked quite openly and their skirts stopped at mid-calf. If only Caroline’s daughter were old enough, Anatole thought, he would have heard a lot about the corrupting effects of the war. Several of the young men at the restaurant were officers on leave and it was at the tables where they sat that the talk and the laughter were loudest.

  Anatole ate a small expensive plate of an over-spiced stew of some kind, and drank half a bottle of wine. It was very hot in the restaurant and he felt almost tipsy though he had drunk so little. He paid his bill and went out to roam around until a quarter to two, when he went to Cadogan Square. He was to see the only pupil of his who had much talent; she performed particularly well, but he scarcely noticed it. Afterwards he went to another appointment in Kensington, and then he returned to Bramham Gardens.

  Everyone was out, except for Clementina’s cousin Edmund. Clementina had left a note saying she had taken Finola with her.

  Edmund Graham had no closer relations than Clementina, who was fifteen years older than he was. He had come to Bramham Gardens to convalesce from a head wound. He was also suffering from shell-shock, but this he sometimes denied. He rarely left his room in the basement and rarely saw anyone but Clementina, but Anatole found him sitting in the kitchen with a half-empty bottle of whisky before him on the table.

  ‘Have a drink?’ he said, flourishing the bottle with a gracious expression on his face.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Anatole. He poured himself a stiff one.

  ‘Been teaching little girls their scales?’ said Edmund.

  ‘Alas, yes,’ said Anatole.

  ‘Don’t you feel bored, doing that all day?’ Or scribbling music or whatever else it is you do. Don’t you feel you ought to be out there?’

  Anatole looked at him and saw that his eyes were puffy with alcohol.

  ‘Apart from anything else, I would not be considered medically fit for the cannon’s mouth,’ he said. ‘They want strapping specimens of young manhood.’

  Edmund waved his hand. ‘Totally irrelevant,’ he said, ‘absolutely irrelevant. And even if that’s true — even if that’s true — you damned Hun-loving conshies get under my skin. If you want to sit round here in this squalor scratching one another’s backs I don’t mind that,’ he scowled. ‘Look at me, you. I’ve spent three years in the damned trenches and Clementina invites me to this mad household (why on earth don’t you have proper servants?) when I’m invalided out, because she’s charitable, is cousin Clem. So I come here and I don’t want your damned pity. But all I hear from you is how I’ve betrayed the human race. You don’t even have the damned courtesy to pretend to my face that all that pain was worth it.’

  Kate came in. Her shift in the hospital had in theory finished at lunchtime. She threw her hat on the table and fell into the rocking chair by the stove. She took off her stained overall with Dr McQuillan sewn on the pocket, and kicked the newspaper aside. One of the cats climbed on her lap as she was pulling the pins out of her hair. She took up a volume of poetry which had been published in 1913. Edmund watched her.

  ‘See?’ he said. ‘She can go away from the hospital and come back here and forget about everything. You can never ever get away from it when you’re out there,’ he said. He was snaking.

  ‘I know,’ said Kate. ‘I spent eighteen months in a hospital in France, if you remember.’ She had been dealing with men like him all day and through half the night. She resumed her reading of a pretty country poem which she had found meaningless before the war.

  ‘All right,’ said Edmund, ‘all right. You know as much about it as a woman can do. But as for you, Anatole — you just sit in your liberal pacifist bath and talk. You’re too lazy even to get up and start subverting the war effort which you hate so much. As a matter of fact you don’t even talk, not like the rest of them do. You listen to everyone and agree with everyone, you can even understand my point of view. And it’s because it all just passes over your head. I don’t care if the Germans win now I’ve done my bit,’ he said. ‘I just hope the damned war clears away the damned fence you’ve all been sitting on so that next time you can’t sneer at us from up on high.’

  Anatole got up and went over to Edmund’s chair. He was not quite tall enough to tower over him even though Edmund was seated.

  ‘I’ve had Kate telling me about the hospitals. I’ve had Alice telling me about the War Office. I’ve had Caroline talk to me about her dead son. I’ve had you talk to me about the trenches. And you all say how lucky I am not to be involved at all, and how I can’t possibly understand. If I can’t understand, why don’t you just leave me alone instead of piling your miseries on top of me?’

  ‘Anatole,’ said Alice, who was standing in the kitchen door, ‘why don’t you ever tell people to leave you alone, in that case?’

  ‘I am telling you!’ he shouted. ‘And I am going away. I shall go to — to Wales for a month, on my own, and you can take care of Finola.’

  He waited for her to look horrified. Kate began to remonstrate. Alice said: ‘That’s a good idea.’

  CHAPTER 12
/>   KING’S NORTON

  OXFORDSHIRE

  Christmas 1919

  The house in Bramham Gardens was deserted over Christmas 1919. Kate had gone to stay with her sister in Dundee. Augustus and Clementina had gone to live in a house of their own again shortly after the armistice. Jenny was staying with a friend from her new school, Queen’s College, and Anatole, Alice, Liza and Finola had gone to King’s Norton.

  On 23 December, Liza and Alice were trudging through the woods near Aunt Caitlin’s house. They had been gathering holly and they held huge bundles gingerly in their arms.

  ‘I’ve decided what I’m going to do,’ said Liza. ‘I’m going to teach myself to type, and then I’m going to try and get a job with a publisher. I’d like to become an editor eventually, and I might be promoted, even if I am a girl.’

  ‘Are you glad you left school in the summer?’ asked Alice.

  ‘Oh yes. I didn’t feel it was necessary for me to get a formal education, because I can teach myself the things that really interest me just by reading books. It’s different for Jenny. You have to have lessons to learn maths and chemistry.’

  Soon after she had left school, Liza had got a job as a shop assistant. The hours had been long, the work dull and tiring, and she had been sacked after three months after being caught reading a novel under the counter for the second time.

  ‘You certainly ought to get another job soon, Liza. We need the money to keep Jenny at Queen’s,’ said Alice gently.

  ‘I know,’ said Liza, biting her lip. ‘I’m sorry. I will learn to type soon. Clementina showed me how to teach yourself. You have a card with all the keys drawn on in different colours, and you attach the card to the typewriter so that you can’t see your hands or the keys underneath.’

  ‘It sounds like creating more difficulties than there need be, to me,’ replied Alice.

  ‘Clementina says it’s easier.’

  ‘She ought to know, I suppose.’