by Melvyn Bragg
Grace simply did not know what to do with herself. She did not know where to put this thing that was her body. When she came home from the hospital she felt relieved at the private familiarity of it after what she feared had been the transparency of her feelings at Prospects. But soon the brief moment of peace would pass. She would go out into the fields, down the paths, anywhere to be alone. Yet when alone she was not wholly aware of who she was and what she was, now, alone. Her skin crawled with agitation as if it longed to be sloughed off. What did it mean – ‘he had always been a bit of a romancer’?
Alan was gone. That was the truth of it, wasn’t it? He was lost to her. She had said in her letter she would ‘wait for him to get better’ but by return Alfred had told her that it would be ‘fruitless’. He was very sorry. Alan was going to take a long time to mend; the doctors said he could even get worse.
But Grace did not mind that! She wanted to be with him so much. She would look after him. She would spend her life looking after him. They loved each other. What could be better than being with the man she loved and what did it matter that he was ill and getting more ill? He would need her more. Did they not realise how much she and Alan loved each other?
I know you are being very kind. But I have to say that Alan and I loved each other in a very special way. I don’t mind how ill he is. I am more than happy to spend my life with him, as a companion, as a good friend, just to be near him. I know he very much wants me to be near him. He told me that and I want to be near him. I will take care of myself. I am sure there are jobs available. I don’t mind hard work. But please, Mr and Mrs Marshall, will you let me come and see him at least and then maybe we can go on from there? There is nothing else in my life I want more than to be with Alan.
She had posted it as soon as she had finished it so as not to have time to rewrite it and moderate the strength of feeling that she feared might unnerve them. It did.
Dear Grace,
It is with great regret that I have to bring this correspondence to a close. My principal duty – and that of his mother – is to Alan. He needs peace and quiet and no disturbances of any kind at all. Be assured that Elsie and myself go and see him on a regular basis and make sure that everything is being done that can be done. I am truly sorry that it has turned out like this but I think it would be unfair of me in any way to keep alive any hopes you might have. So I sign off now, wishing you all the best in the life you have ahead of you.
Yours sincerely,
Alfred Marshall
It was soon after receiving that letter that she admitted, to Sarah, that she was pregnant.
She sank down to the dark seabed of her self where consciousness only flickers and the unconscious is peopled with silent, shadowy, fearsome creatures of harm. She lay in her bed like a corpse. Sarah had to feed her one or two spoonfuls of soup at a time. Her eyes, so keen, so sharp and lively, were glazed in such sorrow that Sarah could scarcely bear to look. Grace had lost herself.
Wilson was almost as unmoving as Grace. He had taken the news badly. He felt betrayed, a feeling new to him and all but unbearable. Sarah made some excuse about the young man being taken ill again and Grace being dissuaded from seeing him but Wilson knew. He knew that the man was a scoundrel and if he had still been in Prospects Wilson would have gone down there and taken the whip to him, wounded hero or no wounded hero. He had blighted Grace’s life and skipped off, and now he was refusing to take responsibility. There was not a word in Wilson’s spoken vocabulary black enough to describe that.
But, to Sarah’s grief, Wilson took against Grace. She had conducted herself so well with Frank, and he such a fine man. Now, this soldier boy had turned her head and she had given up her virginity to him, a stranger. It was not the Grace he knew; not the Grace he had watched and delighted in. This was not the Grace he wanted under his roof.
‘You must let her stay at least until she has delivered the child,’ Mr Walker told him. ‘This is your minister talking, and I am advising you to do this for Christian reasons.’
The old man, now almost sunk into himself, stared at the preacher and offered no response.
‘We have to learn to forgive,’ said the minister, ‘especially to forgive those we love. We will soon be asked to forgive our Great Enemy in War and many of us will find that hard but we will do it. How much more important, then, to forgive those nearest to us? You cannot put the girl out of your house, Mr Carrick. I will not let you lose your conscience in this matter.’ Mr Walker would not be challenged on this.
The old man would not reply.
‘The chapel will pray for you,’ Mr Walker said to Grace, in the attic bedroom.
‘No,’ she said quietly, rather hoarsely, but emphatically. ‘No. No. I want no prayers in the chapel.’
‘But the congregation wants to help you.’
‘No. Most of them think it’s my own fault and it will be more than I can bear.’ For once, in days, she was animated. Her eyes fastened on his sympathetic gaze. ‘Promise me. Please. No prayers, no sermons. Nothing. That’s the least I can hope for. Nothing. Please!’
‘Her earnestness,’ he said to Sarah, ‘a better word is passion, though I hesitate to use it, is compelling. There is something quite frantic about it. I fear that if I disobey her it will make her even more ill. And yet, Mrs Carrick, it is her duty to obey me.’
‘I’m going along with her,’ Sarah replied. ‘I think that doing nothing’s the best course.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll call again tomorrow.’
It was as much as people could do not to call. Gossip was a substitute. What a fall it was for Grace, so lovely, so clever, so fine and natural! Frank, some said, was well out of it; others blamed him for not being the man and going down to that Prospects place and sorting the soldier out. But that was Frank: you couldn’t ruffle him. And the soldier, they said, had run away, or he was dying, or he’d gone back to the Front. Whatever it was, it was a terrible shame, and a shame on Grace, many thought, that would never be washed away. She ought to have known better. She did know better and yet look what she had let happen. Girls less clever and pretty than her had not fallen into that trap. It was a side of her that some had never suspected but a few declared they had seen it coming all along.
Miss Birkett – of Prospects – arrived in style on her grey mare. The hired man, drawn to the farmyard by the clatter, took the horse like a groom and Miss Birkett entered the farmhouse.
Wilson was in the garden. Sarah was stacking logs by the fire. Miss Birkett put out her right hand and Sarah, having wiped her own, took the firm handshake and indicated a chair.
‘A perfect farm living room, Mrs Carrick.’ She looked around with an auctioneer’s bold stare. ‘Not a thing out of place!’
‘Thank you . . . I was about to make some tea.’
‘That would be marvellous. Can I see Grace while you’re doing that?’
‘. . . Yes. I’ll take you up the stairs.’
Miss Birkett, rather military in her fitness and her precise movements, was a little forbidding, no doubt the lady, Sarah thought, but there was a warmth she trusted. She pointed towards a chair by the bed and left the two of them together. Miss Birkett noticed that there was a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets on the bed, lying within reach. It never did to underestimate these young country women.
Grace wished she had not come.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Miss Birkett began, in a softer tone than Grace had heard her employ.
Grace gave no response. She saw the ruddy sheen on the finely drawn face, the bundle of grey hair hastily knotted to fit under the riding cap, which she had left on the downstairs table. She heard a kindness she had not heard before.
‘You must be very tired and very upset. You couldn’t be better cared for.’ She glanced around. ‘What a pretty room. I should have brought some flowers.’
Grace’s resignation thawed a little.
‘I won’t tire you further, Grace. I hope you don’t mind – I’ve said that,
haven’t I?’ She laughed. ‘I must be a little nervous!’
Why? Grace was puzzled.
‘I have three points to make. I even put them on a piece of paper.’ She fumbled in her deep pocket and then said, ‘I don’t need it . . . I feel responsible, Grace. You were under my care. You were one of my brighter girls! It was my responsibility to make sure you were safe and I failed. I ought to have spotted what was going on. I ought to have nipped it in the bud. I will not forgive myself.’
Grace made a gesture that indicated forgiveness.
‘No, no. I failed.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Right. Grace. I want to tell you something. What has happened to you has happened to other people before. I know this to be true.’ She paused, she hesitated, she considered. Then she went on, ‘And while the world wants to cast the first stone, there are those of us who can understand. Those of us who can sympathise. You are not a bad person, Grace. You are a fine young woman. What has happened is unfortunate and I believe the young man is . . .’ (evading his responsibilities? Miss Birkett had heard that he had been involved in a similar incident at the previous hospital – she ought to have known that! But this was not the time to say it. There would not be a time, she decided there and then, there would not be any time to say it or to countenance it being said) ‘. . . back in hospital. Some of these young men have suffered too much.’
Grace nodded. This was true. Alan had suffered too much.
‘But you are not on your own,’ the visitor said, her ramrod back having moved not an inch in a speech that was taking more out of her than she had anticipated. ‘There are those who will help you and I am one of them. There is nothing you need say or do now. But when you do need help I will be at your side. Now, I must leave you to rest . . .’ She would impart the gist of this to Mrs Carrick.
Miss Birkett went to the home of her sister nearby. The Hall was a modest seventeenth-century house that had somehow survived the indigence of a succession of squires to be snapped up by the owner of Prospects. The sisters were on close terms. She knew that her semi-reclusive younger sister would want to know every detail, not for gossip, for a sort of comfort.
When Grace got the strength and the will to leave the house she chose the quieter walks but wherever she stepped she felt a tremor beneath her feet. She had read The Scarlet Letter and now she lived it. The minister was to move to another chapel. It was time for a change, he had told Grace, but, through Betty who was proving a reliable young carrier of gossip, he had been asked to move because he ‘went on and on about how everybody had to forgive their enemies and that meant you as well as the Germans. They said he went on about you too much,’ said Betty. Betty did not need to add that many of the Primitive Methodists looked on Grace as a fallen woman and a blemish on their chapel and were not forgiving. The minister’s attitude had fired their obstinacy with one especially challenging sermon and from then on the line was drawn.
So Grace walked, she felt, in shame. But walk she must. The doctor had told her that lack of air and exercise would endanger the health of the child. Just as she must eat properly: she was not one now, he said, but two. Grace grasped that immediately and set herself to do as she was bid. But every encounter along the walk was a trial. The quieter walks seemed to be more populated than usual. And every passing neighbour released another surge of shame.
Were they only saying little beyond ‘Hello’ because they were shy and kind? Or because they were condemning her with the meanest portion of speech they could utter? Two of them said nothing at all and Grace felt cut to the heart. She had known these people all her life. She lasted about fifteen minutes of the first day and when she got back to the farm, feeling drained of life beyond her understanding, she went to her bedroom and longed for Belle to be there, to hold, to talk to.
But there was no lack of courage in her and the next day she went out again. And the next. And continued every day but Sunday when she never left the farm. Although two or three people were determinedly sympathetic, most had cast her as the fallen woman. A few enjoyed her humiliation. But her health stabilised; the weeks of sickness passed by, the child inside her grew larger, more visible, more consuming even, a companion on the walks.
There was an evening when she took a longer walk and met Frank. He had left the village and returned to his home farm but twice a week he would cycle through and exercise Miss Birkett’s hunters. As Grace usually took her walk in the morning, they had never met. Now, though, as spring came through, she would go out twice a day.
He rode towards her, high on the lead horse, the second on the rein behind him. She stepped aside to give him a through way. She felt so suddenly dizzy she thought she might faint.
He stopped and looked down on her. The same calm look. The same Frank. Everything seemed the same except her, except them, except the life that would now not be lived, the path that had not been taken.
What Frank saw was a face he still loved, just a little plumper now but every bit as fine, he thought, the milkmaid complexion even more emphasised and the lushness of the silky black hair, abundant, bundled into a crown. And then his eyes dropped and he saw the pregnancy and Grace knew that he saw it and that the unborn child would be for ever too much for him. Besides, she said, in this instant conversation with herself, she loved Alan; she would always love Alan whatever happened. But then Frank looked at her again in that safe, calm way, that old certainty of promise.
‘Bearing up?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Oh, yes. You?’
‘Yes. There’s always plenty of work.’
‘How’s Miss Birkett?’ To say something; to keep him there; to say anything.
‘Quiet as ever. I don’t know why she keeps the horses . . .’
‘And . . .’ But she was done. She ached with a sadness she did not want to know. She gestured. Frank nodded and touched the flanks of his horse with his heels.
‘Walk on,’ he said.
And they walked on. And she looked after him and saw the riderless horse quietly, obediently, following Frank as he wended his way down the lane and he did not look back.
Worst of all was her grandfather. Wilson would not say a word to her. Grace could scarcely bear his silence. She spent as little time as possible in his company but there were mealtimes and times when she was helping Sarah and Betty. He was not nasty about it but he never once addressed a direct word to her. She was barred from all affection and all kindness. She sorrowed for him in her bed. But she could see him in the dark of her room, bound in ice beside the fire, waiting only for her to be gone from under his roof.
It was a difficult birth. Grace was unable to feed the child, who was taken away to a neighbour who was a wet nurse. Her absence made Grace’s condition even worse but ‘she would survive’, said the doctor. ‘All she needs is time and help, which I know she’ll get here.’ And so she did, from Sarah and Betty, but the judgement of Wilson would not be tempered with mercy. When she was well enough, she would leave his house. Grace was aware of conversations with Miss Birkett. She so longed for her grandfather to come and see her in her bedroom. Just to stand there at the door would do. She was in a terrible depth of confusion, unhappiness and pain. She wished it had been a boy and looked like Alan. She wanted the name ‘Ruth’, her mother’s, but Sarah said that Wilson would not allow that. The child was called Mary.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Mary lay on her side coiled in the foetal position as helpless as a child. He watched over her. Was he watching over an invalid? Yes. Was she in pain, or imminent danger? No. Was her illness curable? Not in her time. The problem would be solved too late for her. Too late for him, too. Knowledge was not moving fast enough for the increasing mass of the already very old. They were a new phenomenon. Only now were groups of researchers concentrating their energies on the afflictions of age.
John had sought out an acquaintance who was up to speed on these researches. It was research or mass euthanasia and most likely culling, she said. ‘We are too many.’ She had told him th
at any solution was some way off, that by 2050 between two and three million people in the UK alone would be suffering from Alzheimer’s or allied diseases and that it was a crisis in waiting. Her own mother was suffering the beginnings of it – she was lucky that it had been spotted so soon. Many times it was hidden with conscious or unconscious cunning, she said. Who wanted to admit to it? There was a shame about it as there was about all diseases that seemed to be visited on the weak. There was a new drug that might slow it down but perhaps his mother was too far gone . . .
And, this fanatically fit middle-aged academic had added, however hard you tried to fight it, however many workouts at the gym and cryptic crosswords and five helpings of fruit and vegetables a day and, of course, no smoking, meagre drinking, minimal meat, regular sex, six-monthly total check-ups, no coffee and five walnuts for breakfast, it could still strike. Later, possibly, but if, as could well be, it was genetically embedded, then when it saw the opening, it would seize it.
‘My husband’s mother had vascular dementia,’ she said, ‘just like yours.’ It was now quite a regular feature of John’s life that he would encounter someone who was related or close to a sufferer from a form of dementia. John said that he had found singing helped. ‘Scientifically proven,’ she replied. ‘It’s very interesting how songs can be recalled in toto when everything else has gone. But what also works, my husband has found, is to take her back to her childhood or any other vivid times and help her describe them and tell her how good her life was.’