by Melvyn Bragg
‘She’s a credit to you,’ said Grace, with difficulty.
‘She’s your little girl,’ said Mrs Johnston. ‘I can see you in her every day.’
‘Can you?’
‘Oh, yes. There’s no mistaking it.’
Grace nodded, rather brusquely, but gratefully . . .
Mary came back down. Grace had an all but mad longing to pick up the child and put her on her knee and hug her, hold her, smooth her hair, kiss her, be a mother and child. But it would confuse her, she thought, and she knew that Mrs Johnston thought the same.
When it was time to go, Mrs Johnston walked along the yard with her.
‘I’m here while I’m needed,’ she said.
‘I know,’ said Grace. ‘Thank you.’
‘If the time comes when your circumstances change, you only have to tell me and I’ll pass her over.’
The two women stood together for a few moments and then, aware that their silent standing might draw attention to them in that crowded and inquisitive street, Grace said, ‘I’ll go now.’
‘I feel for you,’ Mrs Johnston said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
. . . Dr Fraser came to Prospects soon after you left [wrote Miss Birkett]. I found him most reliable and not at all difficult as were one or two of the other doctors. He married well and now practises in Carlisle, which would fit in with your plans. I have written to him. He will no doubt get in touch one way or the other. I have told him of your circumstances and I am certain he will be discreet.
Nothing much changes in Oulton which I find rather comforting. Whenever I see your grandmother she talks about you most affectionately.
Yours sincerely,
Margaret Birkett
Grace had waited almost six months for this. She had, unconsciously she realised, expected Miss Birkett to deliver an immediate response to her first letter. Her return note had seemed rather dry, concluding with the sentence ‘I shall do my best for you but I do not want you to raise your hopes.’ But now this! It had been worth the wait.
It was only later that Grace understood the care Miss Birkett had taken. Grace’s decision to work in Carlisle had had the impact of a conversion. Carlisle was perfect! It was a big city where she would experience the anonymous freedom she had tasted in Birmingham. Oulton people rarely enough got to Wigton: the expense of the extra twelve miles to Carlisle was unthinkable for almost all of them. Carlisle was only half an hour on the bus from Wigton. The journey from Grasmere was lengthy and costly. She was already dreaming of possibilities and of Mary and herself united.
But for Miss Birkett it required the greatest discretion. She picked up the urgency of Grace’s desire, but Miss Birkett would not let that influence her. It was no bad thing for Grace to be curbed. However much she sympathised – and she had taken the young woman to her heart – she saw a flaw that had not yet been eradicated: the recklessness, the lack of awareness of consequences. It would do her no harm to stay longer in Grasmere where, by all reports, she was doing well, even giving assistance to Mr Logan by copying out some of his documents in her fine handwriting.
Moreover, the right people were hard to find. They had to be broad-minded. What Grace had done was not publicly tolerated. In private there could be more flexibility but only a little. Such women were best sent far away from home. It followed, Miss Birkett reasoned, that absolute discretion was essential. There could be no gossip, none. They had to be a couple, a bachelor would not be acceptable. Finally there was the delicate matter, as Miss Birkett saw it, of tone. It would not do if Grace were to be overly pitied or condescended to. This was very difficult to guarantee. And the absence of the child would always be present in their minds. They had to be the sort of people who could override that, not scratch at it now and then, like a sore, or allude to it in moments of strain.
Miss Birkett was pleased that it had taken only six months. Everything had been explained to the Frasers. She had visited them in Carlisle and was satisfied. This, she thought, was the best destination Grace could hope for.
Matters moved slowly in Grasmere and Grace found that the cosiness of the place, its hemmed-in isolation, her unvarying routine, all that she had found protective, now seemed constraining. And although she found this a curious reflection, she had become too much part of it. In the winter and autumn it renewed its antique character as a small, slow Lakeland farming village and it was then that the few who lived there all the year round knitted closely together in secure communal warmth.
But Grace wanted away from it all. She wanted a life she could begin to shape for herself rather than one, however kindly, imposed on her.
Three months after she had received Miss Birkett’s letter, she arrived in Carlisle. As soon as she stepped off the bus and into the crowded late-afternoon street, she relaxed. She asked directions and walked to her new home. The two bags were not heavy. She was a strong young woman.
Grace had two rooms to herself. They were attic rooms, sloping, gabled and plainly furnished. But there were two! An interconnecting door took her from the bedroom to what Mrs Fraser called her sitting room. ‘This one was lying empty doing nothing,’ she said, her cigarette used as a pointer, ‘and so we thought we’d give you the use of it.’ She looked around. ‘It needs some pepping up but I expect we’ll manage that, between us, as time goes on.’ She took a puff at the cigarette and peered at the room. ‘It’s rather bare . . . Take your time to unpack and then come downstairs. I expect you’ll be starving.’
Two rooms! She walked through the door from one to the other and then back. And then she did it again.
One for her and one for Mary. It was a sign.
In each of the rooms there was a window out of which, when she stood on the small stool, Grace saw a view she could look at and not tire of. The Frasers’ large Victorian house was on a rise of land to the north of the city. The lower ground floor served as the surgery, which was entered by a side door. The ground floor held a sitting room, a kitchen and a dining room. On the first floor were two bedrooms and Dr Fraser’s study. The boys’ rooms were above that – ‘the boys’, Martin and Lionel, were fourteen and sixteen and ‘away at school’. The attic rooms were up a twisting little staircase at the top, which, Grace was pleased to notice, gave the best view.
She looked down on the city, the medieval castle plumb in the foreground, the medieval cathedral and the big Victorian covered market just beyond, and beyond them the core of a city there in some form on that spot since the Romans had made it one of their strongest British fortresses. And, beyond the city, she saw a swathe of land speckled with farms and then the rise up to the northern fells, splendid in the distance, attracting their own weather of racing clouds and heavy rain.
Her nature, which she had steadied and which in the inner retreat of the Lakes had helped heal itself, now began to feel something of its old confidence.
She sat on the bed and looked at her estate. She was deeply pleased. The sensation went through a mind unaccustomed to such material pleasure. She smiled to herself and tried to bounce up and down on the ironing board of a bed. She would buy a softer mattress for Mary.
But – careful! she counselled herself. Careful. One step at a time. Inch by inch. She had let the genie of exhilaration out of the bottle. It had to be put back in, firmly, and the bottle stoppered. She had not schooled herself to outward patience for those years to throw it away now. One step at a time.
She went down the twisting stairs. Halfway down was a bathroom. Presumably she could use that one. Perhaps it was for her sole use. She would ask. It was odd how awkward she felt in anticipation of asking such a simple question.
The Frasers were a busy couple. He took on more than his share of non-paying patients. He was also active in the town: on the committee of the rugby club, a golfer, and a Rotarian. George Fraser, who had played in the pack of the Carlisle rugby team in his day, was as burly as you could wish for in a comforting doctor. He wore one of his three heavy three-piece tweed suits for most of the year an
d was pleased to point out their great age. His ruddy face was well weathered and well whiskied. He rather cultivated the padding gait of a bear.
Agnes was stringy, more intense than her husband but not oppressively so. Her thick, corn-coloured hair was scraped into what looked like a rather painful severity. She wore the merest dab of makeup. Her nose was strong and dominated a slim face, stern but easily provoked to laughter. Her time, since ‘the boys’ had gone, was partly devoted to running a small infants school in a nearby slum, a free school that she had founded. Her other passion, not entirely appropriate, it was thought, for a doctor’s wife, was politics. She had been a suffragette.
‘I think she’ll do very well,’ she said, a few evenings later. They always talked through the day over his last whisky. Agnes rarely drank.
‘C and P,’ said her husband. ‘Character and potential.’
‘There isn’t such a terrible lot to do, in fact. With the boys gone the place is quite presentable. She goes through it like a knife through butter.’
‘Efficient?’
‘Ten out of ten. You’re always droning on about your filing and the other stuff. I’m sure she could help you with that. It would give her more of an interest.’
‘She’ll need to type.’
‘Even you can type.’
‘One finger.’
‘I’m sure she’ll be equal to it. It’s not exactly a high standard you set.’
Grace’s interests were building up. But in the first months it was her keenest pleasure to walk in the centre of the city and especially in the covered market. There were times when she was hemmed in by people, all but jostled by the shoppers, trying to pick out the calls of the stallholders, crushed but serene that she was there, with all the others, just one of a crowd. The immersion into others was a baptism into her new life.
And there were Mrs Fraser’s books – detective stories, many of them, freely urged on Grace whom she had ‘spotted as a reader’ and, uniquely in Grace’s experience, happy to talk about them with her. ‘George reads nothing but the Carlisle Journal,’ she said. She would lend Grace books by Dorothy L. Sayers and Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie and others and seek out her opinion on them. Nor did she allow just a tokenistic ‘I liked it’ or ‘Not as good as the others.’ Agnes enjoyed talking about the characters – were they believable? That was the crucial thing, she said. If you didn’t believe in a character how could you possibly go on? And did the writers cheat with the plots? Grace began to go to the library. And so, gently, Grace was led into talk about politics and ideas of the day, which gave her both confidence and another interest.
Over that first year, there were regular visits to Wigton, but she held her fire. There was the weekly letter enclosing the maintenance and the weekly reply of two or three lines. Thank you for the money. Mary is well.
The two attic rooms had assumed some of the glow of Sarah’s kitchen. Agnes had shuttled up from the cellars a few pieces of brown furniture, which responded to high polish. She had also found a couple of rugs in there and two prints of the Scottish Highlands. Grace had broken her vow of thrift to buy a second-hand flower vase, a jug, a candleholder, two china shepherdesses in frilly dresses, which Mary would surely like, and a few other knick-knacks from the quaint poky little shops in the lanes in the middle of the city. And books: there was the beginning of a library. She felt fortunate. Soon she would be reunited with Mary. Her heart was lighter, her step had a spring in it: life would be good.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
‘I remember that cupboard,’ John said. ‘It was to the left-hand side of the fireplace in the kitchen. Grandma Johnston kept ‘‘rummage’’ in it. ‘‘Go and have a rummage,’’ that’s what she would say.’
‘That’s what she said to me as well!’ said Mary, well enough to sit in the chair beside her bed, cushioned and upright.
‘There was a brass box beside it. It was decorated with a picture of a village street, two men walking in different directions and two dogs, I think, and thatched cottages – all done in brass. You still have it,’ he said.
‘Do I?’
‘In your house.’
‘That’s good.’ She pointed her forefinger. ‘You have a good memory. That’s very good. In my house.’
The furniture was in store. The few articles of sentimental value had been taken to London for safe keeping. The brass box was now in John’s study.
John’s father Harry had joined up for the Second War. Mary had moved from the house in the yard with the washhouse and lavatory she shared with three other families and gone back to ‘Mother’s’. John had lived there throughout the war and for a few years after it when his father had come back and they had been unable to get suitable accommodation. At times it seemed that his mother’s years in that unchanging house and that unchanging yard and his own time there were one and the same life. By the time John arrived there Mother Johnston was a stout matriarch, her boys now men; the other foster-child had moved south and there were two lodgers and yet . . . John’s recollections included a slow ease of daily life as well as sudden pitches of anger, a secure sense of refuge in that little higgledy-piggledy community.
‘I would sometimes hide in that cupboard when I thought she wanted me to do a job,’ Mary said. ‘Mind you, she knew where I was. She just pretended she didn’t. And sometimes when Grace came.’
‘So you hid in the cupboard as well,’ he said, bringing her back, he hoped, to where they had begun. It was a good day, one of her better days. The energy for it seemed to be in this memory of fear. ‘Why was that?’
‘I thought she wanted to take me from my mother.’
He waited for her to go on. He wanted her to say that the woman who wanted to take her away was her own mother. But he was too afraid it would upset her.
‘I wanted to stay with Mother. I didn’t want to be taken away,’ she said. ‘The Johnstons were a very nice family.’
Grace had worked it out and put her plan on paper. This made it seem more real. She liked settling at the table in her sitting room, a small coal fire, the curtains always open, an armchair, a rug, the prints, with luck a few flowers from the garden in the vase she had bought. It was as if the room extended her, added to her, and yet protected her. It seemed so intimately hers and hers alone. No one else ever entered. A small bell outside the door would summon her from time to time but she knew her hours. And this writing pad was another extension to her mind.
She had begun to do some secretarial work for Dr Fraser and the novelty of it had engaged her interest immediately. Soon she became involved with the lives of those whose files she catalogued. He encouraged her to help him. He had taught her how to put the instruments in carbolic acid. He liked to spend a few minutes with her after morning surgery going through his diary. Already she could type as quickly and more neatly than he. But she preferred to handwrite. It seemed more authoritative. Agnes complimented her on her hand. Grace immediately ascribed it to the teaching of Miss Errington, who had taught them all the copperplate script.
Now that she was settled in the city and in her work, to sit alone in the evening with book and pen, in her sacred sitting room perched on top of a house on a hill, was better far than anything else. In that solitude she could find her own company. She could ‘suffer her own company well’, as people in her childhood had phrased it. And the pen took her out of that self. A few strokes, a few words, and the lists – there were many lists – would grow, and from the lists possible worlds would flow. She kept an occasional record – it had not the daily rigour of a diary – of observation and opinion on what she saw and heard. These were locked away in the only drawer in the two rooms that had a key and the key was buried at the bottom of her pocket. Sometimes she would even write a few paragraphs about the village she had come from, which now seemed marooned in her past, neither dead nor alive.
But the lists that were the longest were the lists about Mary. One of them was devoted to places she could take her away to for day tr
ips, perhaps even for a weekend. That would be the best way to start, she thought. After that, after several outings, she would approach Dr Fraser about bringing the child to live with her – a child old enough by then not to be a nuisance. Finally she would talk to Mrs Johnston and to Mary herself.
One thing at a time.
She took the bus to Wigton. She was more comfortable in the town now. Or stronger? She walked around to the house in the Council Yard on a summer’s afternoon, still cautious but without the burn of shame.
The women sat outside the house in the warmth of the sun and Mrs Johnston brought out tea. Mary had said a polite hello, held out the ageing doll as evidence of continuing gratitude, and slipped back inside the house when the women began to talk of matters that bored the little girl.
But her ears were pricked up. She had sensed they might be talking about her. She was never far from the open door. Her mother and the other woman would often talk about her and she did not want to miss that. She was puzzled by Grace, as she had been instructed to call her. She seemed too old to call by her first name. She was very kind and Mary knew that Grace liked her but she did not know why Grace was there, and so regularly, and yet when she arrived Mrs Johnston made special efforts and she herself had to look presentable. Then there would be the presents – always something, a sixpence, a packet of sweets . . . The girl kept a literal distance from her, as if she feared being snatched away. And this fear fed into what she now overheard.
‘I thought I’d take her away next month,’ said Grace. ‘At the beginning of the summer holidays.’
‘That would be a good time,’ Mary heard Mother Johnston reply.
‘Do you think she would mind?’
‘You’d have to ask her but she’s biddable. She’ll do as I say.’
‘And what will you say?’ Mary caught the anxiety, which fed her own rising panic.
‘I’ll tell her she must go with you.’