by Annie Murray
Dolly felt full of that tight bursting feeling again. She was just going to be pushed around from pillar to post, with no one ever asking her!
She saw Mom silence Susanna with a glare, even while taking in the fact that Susanna was right.
‘You’d best stay away from there and take anything you can get.’ Mom turned to Dolly with an intense look. She folded her arms across her massive bust, leaning forward on the table. ‘Now, so far as everyone else is concerned, you’ve left service because the lady of the house died and they’ve sold up. It’s far enough away – no one’ll know.’
‘God sees all our actions, however many lies we tell,’ Charles pronounced gloomily.
‘Oh, shut up Charles,’ Rachel said irritably. ‘That’s no help, is it? It just makes us feel worse.’
‘Thank heaven, God and Dorrie Davis aren’t one and the same,’ Phyllis said. ‘I’m damned if I’m having that interfering tittle-tattler crowing over me and my family.’
Dolly picked at her food. None of it tasted right and she didn’t know how long it would stay down. Even eating was unpleasant these days.
‘I should never’ve come back,’ she said, in barely more than a whisper. ‘I should’ve done away with it. Got rid of it . . .’
‘That’s enough from you, you wicked girl!’ Mom roared at her. ‘No more talk of that! Now eat up, all of you!’ She had piled their plates with potato. ‘You’ve got to eat for two – all of you.’
They were all living on their nerves.
‘But I’m not going to stay looking like this, am I?’ Dolly wailed, laying down her fork and putting her hands over her face. ‘I’m going to get all big out the front and everyone’ll be able to see clear as anything! And then I’ve got to have it and I don’t want to!’
‘You should’ve thought of that before you went out gallivanting,’ Susanna said furiously.
‘What do you know about it?’ Dolly cried, bursting into tears. ‘You weren’t there – you don’t know what happened and it didn’t happen to you so don’t preach to me about it!’
As she put her hands over her face she caught sight of her brother’s. His expression was full of pain and she realized that for all his piousness, he was suffering with her. This made her cry all the more.
‘I’m sorry, Dolly,’ Susanna said stiffly. She barely sounded sorry and only touched Dolly’s shoulder for a moment. ‘It’s just making things very difficult for all of us. You must see that.’
Dolly nodded, wiping her eyes. ‘I never meant for it to happen,’ she said. ‘He just—’
‘Enough, Dolly,’ Mom said. ‘We don’t need to hear any more about it.’ She finished chewing on a rubbery mouthful of the liver and looked round at them all. They could tell she was thinking; calculating everything out.
‘What Dolly needs,’ she said, ‘is any old job. A factory – nowhere near here – so she can leave and no one’ll give it a thought. Tomorrow, Dolly, you’ll go out round the factories . . .’
She pushed back her chair and stood up to stack the plates. They all listened, Dolly among them, a kind of relief washing through her. Mom knew what to do.
‘Now listen to me. You’ve all got to do everything I say, to the letter. Let’s go over it again. For now, all you girls’ve got to do is put yourselves about. Dolly, Rachel – make sure you don’t keep wearing the same coat. Keep switching them over. You’re not that different in size. Susanna – you could swap yours with them sometimes too. All we can do at the moment is sow the seeds for later. And keep painting that mole on your face, Dolly. The only other thing is, you must keep on about how you feel the cold. Understand? You feel the cold, you dress up warm – keep mentioning it. And eat.’ She picked up the mashed potato spoon like a threat.
‘But . . . ?’ Rachel tried to interrupt, but Phyllis held up a hand.
‘Charles,’ she ordered. ‘All you’ve got to do is to keep your mouth shut. I should have thought you could manage that.’
Charles had his eyes fixed on his plate with the air of someone who may be bodily present but is mentally somewhere else. Dolly felt a pang of pity for him. But he managed a nod.
‘For a couple of months, everything’ll be as normal. After that we’re going to have to get very clever. We’ll have to be cunning as serpents. And – I’m going to have to write to Nancy.’
The four children all looked at each other in bewilderment. Dolly’s eyes met Susanna’s frowning ones.
‘Who the hell’s Nancy?’ Rachel said.
‘Language, Rachel,’ Mom scolded. ‘Nancy,’ their mother, who to their knowledge had no living family in the wide world, announced, ‘is my sister. The youngest of my sisters.’
Twelve
‘Hello, Rose, dear, and little Lily – now do tell me what sort of week you’ve had.’
Muriel Wood said almost the same thing in greeting every Sunday after Holy Communion. Rose found it comforting. Muriel took a genuine interest in other people’s activities, perhaps as a way of diverting herself from the sadness of her own life.
She was a slender, old-fashioned lady in her early thirties. Her clothes were simple, never anything frippery. At any time except the deepest of winter, she was almost always seen about in her favourite straw hat with a blue band. She had a round face with a pink, scrubbed complexion and pale, innocent-looking blue eyes.
Rose both liked and admired her, for her cheerfulness and for the way she devoted her life to her son Oliver, now six. He could not remember either his father or elder sister Elizabeth, having been barely a year old when both of them were taken by the Spanish Influenza in 1920. Rose had seen a photograph of little Lizzie Wood, a sweet, dark-haired child like her brother. The thought of the loss of her little girl was something Rose found almost unbearable to think about.
They always chatted once the service was over. Rose looked forward to Sundays. Harry never came to church, of course, had no time for all that sort of ‘eyewash’ as he called it. He thought all vicars were ‘a load of poofters’ (Rose had never got over being shocked by his language), and wouldn’t have anything to do with them. So it was a pleasant, sociable time for her.
Of course she never told Muriel what sort of week she had had. Not in any deep way. She would never have said what Harry was really like or what she felt. It would be rude and disloyal to discuss the mixture of awe and contempt with which her husband seemed to regard her. Muriel always put on a brave face and almost never mentioned her struggles or grief but tried to count her blessings. And Rose, admiring her, tried to do the same.
Last week, Muriel had approached her, this time in her sober winter hat in dark green felt and her black coat, her face a pale smile between the two. They stood in the church porch out of the wind, the organ still sounding faintly in the background.
After the usual exchanges about their week, Muriel said, ‘I was wondering if you had progressed at all with the piano, dear?’ She touched Rose’s arm for a moment. ‘Not meaning to flummox you. Not at all, dear. I know what a lot you have to do. But I am ready and willing when you feel the time is right.’
Rose had been thinking about it. She had sold another embroidered cloth and had some money saved. Anything they did with the piano would have to be when Harry was out.
‘I saw an advertisement for a piano tuner in the paper,’ she said. ‘From the works in Ombersley Road, you know, where they make the pianos.’
‘Oh, well, that’s marvellous,’ Muriel said. ‘Then we can make a start once you’re ready. I can pop over while Oliver is at school. And you can come to me sometimes if you like. That’ll be nice, won’t it, Lily?’
She beamed at Lily and Rose saw the soft light in the other woman’s eyes as she looked at her daughter and it wrung her heart. She could see that this meant a lot to Muriel. She was too delicate to mention that the two shillings Rose would pay her for Lily’s lessons would also come in very handy.
Rose thought quickly. Ideally it would need to be when Harry was out, and his work was u
npredictable. But surely he wouldn’t be rude enough to turn away someone who was prepared to give his daughter tuition at a reduced rate? She’d have to try and get him in a good mood, and she knew the one way to do that.
‘I think if we give it another week,’ she said, ‘we should be ready by then.’ She gathered herself up. ‘I’d better get back – see how our dinner is doing.’
Harry was in when they got back, waiting for his Sunday dinner, after which he was planning to go fishing.
‘Hello, love,’ she said brightly as they got in. At least he’d kept the fire going; the house was warm and full of the mouth-watering smell of beef and Harry seemed quite relaxed, sitting dozing by the range.
He grunted a greeting as she came in. Some of his fishing tackle lay by his feet and he had obviously been fiddling with hooks and lines. He was a doer, Harry, not a reader or a thinker. Rose had never seen him read more than the headlines in a newspaper and scan quickly over the sports pages.
‘Have a good pray, did yer?’ he enquired as she quickly set the table while the cabbage water bubbled away on the range. But he spoke lightly, joking.
‘Yes, thank you,’ she said evenly.
Lily sat close to her father, longing for his attention, but wary of him. Dark moods sat in him like coils waiting to spring. Lily always seemed ready to leap out of his way and Rose felt just the same.
Only Rose knew that some of it was her fault, that she frustrated his manly tendencies. She was not as he thought a wife should be.
‘’Ere – look –’ Harry leaned over towards Lily suddenly and thrust something in front of her.
Lily took one look, then screamed and almost fell trying to get away. ‘Don’t like it!’ She was beginning to cry. Harry was chuckling.
‘Soft little ha’p’orth!’ he said scornfully.
Rose raged inside. Could he not be nice – just for once? Instead of sticking a tobacco tin full of squirming maggots in his little girl’s face? His idea of a joke, of course, but why did he have to be so rough and nasty?
‘Never mind, babby,’ she soothed Lily. ‘Your dad’s just having his little joke.’
Swallowing her fury she carried the crisp, golden potatoes to the table. Lily came and clung to her skirt, her eyes red, and snivelling half-heartedly.
‘Come on, bab – you sit down with your father.’
‘Smells good, that does,’ Harry said, rolling his sleeves down. ‘You’re a good cook, wench, I’ll say that for yer.’
It was true, she was. That was something Rose could do to please him. She had learned from her mother and from Mrs Plummer, who had cooked for Professor Mount.
They sat eating in the steamy room. There was a plum pudding simmering in the background and the window was misted up. It felt warm and cosy and for some minutes as they ate they were almost friends. Rose looked along the table at her husband’s swarthy face, heavier now than when they had first met. She remembered him as a cheerful lad, back in those days, full of jokes. Thinking what a different man he was now, she felt sorrow for him and for herself. His war wounds were on the inside. And there was her guilt . . . Always that.
‘Where will you go this afternoon?’ she asked pleasantly.
Harry chewed on a mouthful of beef with evident enjoyment, and caught up a gravy-soaked lump of potato ready on his fork.
‘Dunno yet. Down Hall Green way, p’r’aps.’ He was looking down at his plate so that she could only see his brows.
Look at me, she thought. Please at least look at me. She knew he didn’t love her, nor she him, not now. It was as if they lived on opposite banks of a river which they found it impossible to cross. They moved back and forth, parallel and distant. But she longed for it to be different, for love. They might spend the rest of their lives together – couldn’t they make it better somehow?
After dinner, he set off into the thin afternoon light, his bicycle waiting at the back. She stood up to see him go and touched his arm.
‘Tonight,’ she said softly, looking into his face.
This made Harry look round, startled, taking her meaning. He hesitated, in a moment of confusion at her forwardness, her unusual willingness, as if he might stay now and lead her up to the bedroom.
Rose stepped back. ‘I hope you have a good catch,’ she said, smiling.
She was frightened of intimate relations with her husband right from the beginning. It was not the act itself so much: what she was really terrified of was childbirth, haunted as she was by what had happened to her mother. To deliver children meant pain, fear and death. In addition, from what she saw around her, having too many children meant crowding and poverty and sickness.
When Jenny Green had beckoned her over a few days ago, looking so faint and sick in her doorway, Rose had been touched and glad to help. She had been glad to feel she could be asked to do something good. She had always felt rather alone in the world and wanted more friendships and people around her.
Jenny Green had made no secret of the fact that she was expecting and the situation filled Rose with horror. She could hardly bear to think of the seething number of children in the Greens’ house, the poverty and daily struggles of it all. Jenny Green’s husband had been sick for ages and he looked absolutely terrible. And there was that old lady in the background in her widow’s weeds like Queen Victoria. Everything about the household filled Rose with panic. It gave her the feeling that life could quickly disintegrate into squalor and chaos . . .
Harry had been her rescuer. They had married barely knowing each other when she knew he had survived the war. She was in love with the idea of love, was desperate to get out of service, and there had been such a shortage of men. Marital relations seemed just a vague, far-off part of it all then. She hadn’t known what it was all about – barely had any grasp of it. Nor did she realize how much the young man who had once courted her had changed.
The wedding night had been a shock, but they had expected that. It was later that things went sour.
‘You don’t want me, do yer?’ he would rave at her. ‘You married me false – you’re a cold fish, Rose, that’s what you are.’
All the way through she had tried to avoid catching for a baby. Turning away, rejecting him, asking him to withdraw at the last minute – which he only sometimes managed and resented her for. One way and another, for the first couple of years she managed not to have any children, but of course, in the end she did catch for a child.
All through her pregnancy with Lily, Rose was certain she was going to die, if not from the pain, the horrifying delivery, then of the fever afterwards. In fact, both the pregnancy and birth had been healthy and normal. But it was still agonizing and so frightening. Harry found the business of having a child burdensome. And Rose couldn’t believe her luck would last. Her mother had had three before she died, hadn’t she? In the end she would be damaged, gored in some way by a baby, and die. It felt like her fate. She resolved never, ever to carry a child again.
‘If we just keep it to one,’ she would say, ‘we can give her a good life – a better one than we’ve had. That’d be the best thing, wouldn’t it?’
While Harry agreed in theory that it was better not to have many mouths to feed, he wanted his pleasures without the consequences. So often, their relations were an awkward fumbling in the dark, his thickset form on top of her, pushing so urgently after overcoming her resistance that he was all ready to explode inside her.
‘Please, Harry, don’t!’ she would beg. ‘Take it out, please – quickly!’
Sometimes he would lose the impulse and she would hear him curse bitterly in the dark, pumping with his hand to give himself the finish he needed, and the next day they could never quite look each other in the eye. At those times he seemed to loathe her and she resented him passionately for having such needs.
Once she had met Muriel Wood, through church, Muriel had made a remark, just in passing, as if she thought Rose would know what she meant – something about people confining their relations to t
he ‘safe’ time.
Rose could not stop herself blurting out, ‘What d’you mean by that? Safe time?’ She had never heard anyone talk about anything like this before.
Muriel, who was both down to earth and shy, blushed thickly but did explain – vaguely anyway. She told Rose that the week before your monthly period was due was supposed to be a time when you would not fall pregnant. ‘You need to keep a count, dear,’ she advised.
And because of Rose’s determination, her strict counting of time and date, she had managed to keep them ‘safe’. There were times, she knew, when it was all right. She would not catch for a baby.
And today was one of those times.
She lay in bed in her white nightdress. Her hair was down and for a moment Harry turned from where he was sitting on the side of the bed, to look at her. The oil lamp was still burning on the chest of drawers.
‘Yer a damn pretty wench, d’yer know that?’
He sounded puzzled, defeated in some way. Her looks had bewitched him, yet he could not find in her all he needed. It was the same for both of them – such a mismatch and disappointment.
He was undressing and when he stood up his . . . She never did know what word to use, even to herself. The only words she could think of were ‘male thing’ or ‘manhood’ . . . was half erect, pointing stiffly across the room. Her eyes were drawn to it. She found it fascinating as well as alarming. Before she married she had never seen a man naked, not even her brother Peter. Well, Professor Mount, once, but that hardly counted and he’d been a very old man and had had his back to her.
Harry threw off the rest of his clothes quickly. She wriggled over in the bed as he pulled back the covers on his side. For a moment they lay facing each other, avoiding each other’s eyes, then, for a second, seeking each other out, uncertain. Once again she saw that he was in awe of her. She made him feel like a rough diamond he had said, once or twice. Her being so pale, so pretty and ladylike.