Jubilee (Book 1 of The Poppy Chronicles)

by Claire Rayner

  ‘He said I was bedecked, Auntie Jessie! The horrible man said I was bedecked! I’m not, am I? It’s a lovely hat and muff –’

  ‘They’re beautiful and you’re beautiful in them,’ Auntie Jessie said. ‘The most beautiful Poppy in the world.’ And Poppy laughed and whirled to speak to Mama. But she looked cross now, and was standing there unpinning her hat and smoothing the veil and frowning.

  ‘I don’t want her to grow up vain and foolish, Jessie, please. She looks well enough; but there is no need to make such a matter of it! I wish I’d never bought the things, now, for she has thought of nothing else since. Poppy, take them of immediately and put them away. I do not want to hear another word about them or –’

  ‘But he was horrible, Mama! I never want to have any grandfathers ever if they are as horrible as that. Do I have to have them?’

  Jessie crowed with laughter. ‘Will you listen to the boobalah! The head she’s got on her, it’s a miracle! But Millie, tell me, was it so bad? What happened?’

  ‘Poppy, go upstairs –’

  ‘You’re wrong, Millie! Believe me, you’re wrong –’ Jessie leaned forwards. ‘Listen, last time we talked you promised me, you remember? You said no more secrets.’

  ‘I made no promises.’ Mildred’s face was stony. ‘You said it. I didn’t, so –’

  ‘Well, I’m saying it again. Secrets make troubles. Let the child listen and learn – she’ll come to no harm. Tell me what happened.’

  ‘He was horrible!’ Poppy burst out. ‘A great big horrible man. The other men were silly, except for the curly one, he was all right and the lady cried a lot, she was silly too, and there were ever so many chairs and tables and it’s dark and scary when you go in and there are stairs up to the front door outside as well as inside and no one said have a cup of tea like you always do and Mama does and there were no nice smells like here and the man who was horrible, the grandfather, he smelled worst of all –’

  ‘Poppy, for heaven’s sake, child!’ Mildred said and Poppy looked at her, a little scared and then, emboldened by what she saw, said, ‘Well, it’s true, Mama. You know it is. All of it. Do I have to go back there ever?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Auntie Jessie said and Mama frowned and said sharply, ‘Why?’

  Auntie Jessie shrugged. ‘Who knows how things turn out? People change, they get ill, die even. There comes a time when you have to think again, make new decisions. One day she may have to go back, even if you decide you don’t want to right now.’ She grinned. ‘I get the idea you agree with our little one here. You won’t be going again.’

  ‘No,’ Mama said shortly and looked at Poppy and she clapped her hands delightedly and took her hat and muff and ran to take them up to her room.

  As soon as she had gone Mildred said swiftly, ‘I’d really rather you didn’t talk about it in front of her, Jessie. I know I said – but all the same, it isn’t good for her, all this upset.’

  ‘She seems to me to be dealing with it nicely. I never saw a child look less upset, believe me.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but she’s an odd child. She thinks more than most, I suspect, and hides a lot. And there’s another thing – I don’t want her to feel –’ She shrugged, and her face seemed to go blank. ‘I want her to feel always loved and wanted, whatever she looks like. To make a fuss over prettiness is a way of making a sin out of ugliness. I don’t know how she will look when she is older – now she is pretty enough, as all children are, but later perhaps –’

  Jessie looked scandalized. ‘That one, later? A beauty. A complete beauty! What else? With those curls and that skin and that little face? And she’s got your eyes, amber eyes they are, like the best dark amber, lovely –’

  ‘I told you, Jessie, no fuss about looks, or I will have to make rules about you coming here again and –’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, I know. But about the visit, tell me, what happened?’

  Mildred managed to smile, a little crookedly. ‘Poppy said it all. The house was as I remembered it, too lavish by half, and altogether stifling, and my stepmama did indeed cry the whole time, and the boys – my brothers – were tiresome. And then he came in. I had chosen the time carefully to be sure he would not be there, but I was wrong. Or perhaps someone told him I was coming, for I had sent Mama a note. I did not wish to alarm her – anyway, there he was, and very unpleasant he made himself. I was not surprised.’

  ‘What did he say about our boobalah?’

  ‘He said nothing of her. Referred to her as “it” and my “by-blow” and said I was to take the brat away. Sent for the footman and had us escorted from the house.’ Her face darkened even further. ‘And only Wilfred protested. My own blood brothers stood there like stuffed monkeys and let him rant and said nothing. He roared at Wilfred too, of course, but at least he stood up for us.’ She shrugged. ‘There is no need to speak of it again, Jessie. We shall never go back there while that man is there, whatever you say. I have promised Poppy so, and there’s an end of it. There will be just she and I. She said that –’ She stopped beside the table, holding her apron in her hands, ready to put it on. ‘She sat there in the omnibus and said she wanted boiled eggs for tea and just she and I by the fire. And she will have what she wants. Just she and I –’

  There was a little silence and then Jessie said in a carefully neutral voice, ‘Without me, then.’

  Mildred flushed. ‘Of course not. We shall go on as we always have. You visiting us and we visiting you –’ She grinned then, a little awkward suddenly. ‘Not as often as you would like, perhaps, but if you had your way you’d live with us. We’ve been through all that before –’

  ‘Well, that’s something,’ Jessie said and heaved herself from her chair to go over to the range to make the tea, for the kettle had started to sing more purposefully. ‘The child won’t lose by having an aunt as well as her mother by the fire sometimes, I promise you.’ She made the tea, pouring the kettle slowly and deliberately, not looking at Mildred. ‘And what about Lizah?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘You said you’d bring Poppy to see him. You agreed with me he had a right – and that she did too, to know her other relations. Not just her West End ones.’

  Mildred closed her eyes for a moment. ‘Oh, Jessie, give me a chance, will you? Haven’t I had enough to put up with today? Don’t start harrying me to go and see Lizah –’

  ‘– and my mother –’

  ‘Yes, yes, I know, I remember. Your mother. But give me time. I promise I’ll arrange it. Poppy shall meet them – and then we’ll see. But not just yet. I can’t cope yet. And anyway, I must consider Poppy. I cannot think it’s good for her, all at once like this. Be reasonable, Jessie. I try very hard to listen to you, even when it goes against the grain with me. At least give me credit for that and don’t rush me.’

  ‘I won’t rush you,’ Jessie said. ‘And I won’t rush Poppy. But don’t leave it too long, Mildred. It gets to be a habit, you know, not doing things. You stand and look at fences and they grow like they was bushes, higher and higher, and then you think you can’t ever get over ’em, so you don’t even try. Lizah’s a good boy at heart – it won’t hurt you to try again –’

  ‘He’s a man, not a boy.’ Mildred was sharp, almost as sharp as the knife with which she was now slicing bread to be toasted.

  ‘By me, he’ll always be a boy,’ Jessie said. ‘How many eggs should I put on? She can eat two, the little one?’

  ‘Of course not! That would be far too much. Don’t make her greedy too, Jessie, for heaven’s sake!’

  ‘Ah, pfft –’ Jessie made a soft sound with her lips. ‘Such a terrible influence I am on this child! It’s amazing she loves me. But you do, don’t you, dolly?’ And she held her arms wide again as Poppy came back into the kitchen, her pinafore ready to be buttoned on the way Mama liked best, and hugged her so that she almost disappeared into her capacious bosom. And Poppy hugged her back, for she was Auntie Jessie and though she was almost as large as the nasty grandfather
had been, she was a much, much nicer person. In fact, Poppy thought, Auntie Jessie was really very beautiful.

  * * *

  And the next day Poppy started school and that completed the most exciting week in her whole life. Mama walked with her to Baldwin’s Gardens, making sure she looked neat and tidy with her hair tied in neat bunches at the back and her new pencil box and her slate and her indoor shoes carefully stowed in a bag which had her name embroidered on it, and when the bell rang she joined the lines of chidren walking into the great sooty red-brick building, turning to wave at Mama who was standing outside the gates with all the other mothers. She wasn’t a little girl any more, she was a big girl, Poppy Amberly, a big girl, not a baby, but a grown-up sensible girl who had to do work, learning to read and write and count and thread beads and sew. No more would she sit in her room and struggle alone with the hard words in The Wonders of God’s Beautiful World. She would have teachers to help her and tell her what to do, and not just Mama when she had time. No more would there just be Poppy and Mama. Now there would be Poppy and Mama and her teacher. And Poppy looked at her mother and waved and felt sad for her that she couldn’t come into school as well and have a lovely time with teachers and beads and books. How sad, thought Poppy as she plunged fearfully yet cheerfully into the maelstrom of her school life, immersing herself in the smell of chalk and ink and disinfectant and unwashed children, how sad to be Mama and not have anything so lovely to look forward to each day!

  She was right to feel sorry for Mildred, for Mildred was indeed unhappy. It was not just parting with her daily companion that distressed her. She had been fully prepared in her mind for it, had been braced for the time that would come when she would have to let other people take care of her precious child, when she would have to relinquish her control of Poppy’s mind and her behaviour, allowing others to guide her. She had managed to hold Jessie at bay – well, at least partly so – but she had known that school days would mean an irrevocable change. Poppy would cease to be hers as she had been all this past five years, and would belong to others, and eventually to herself. But sad though that thought had made her, it did not distress her nearly as much as what had happened at her father’s house, and nor did it worry her so much as the fact that Lizah had returned to the edges of her life.

  Jessie’s words turned and writhed in her head as she walked back from Baldwin’s Gardens to her ovens and the day’s work, and went on doing so as she beat eggs and kneaded yeast dough and washed currants and chopped almonds. Every time she opened the oven she thought of Jessie cooking for Lizah; every time she withdrew another golden cake or pie she thought of cutting a slice of it for Lizah; every time she sent out another consignment of her finished cakes and counted the money she had earned she thought of having Lizah to help her with her business. Even when Poppy came home for her midday meal, brimming over with excitement and chatter about all she had seen and done with the other children and Miss Rushmore, her teacher, Mildred thought of Lizah. And was furiously angry with Jessie in consequence.

  But, she told herself, as Poppy, still chattering but now full of the good dinner Mildred had made her eat – despite her protestations that she wasn’t at all hungry and anyway she hated semolina pudding – went back to school for the afternoon, it wasn’t really Jessie’s fault. Sooner or later this day had to come. I did not produce Poppy all alone. She does have a father, however unsatisfactory he may be in some respects, and that means I may not stand between them.

  Or does it? Surely, as the person who has cared for her day in and day out since her birth, I am the best person to know what the child needs? If I decide that she is better off not knowing that ne’er do well, that foolish man who thinks that what matters is the appearance of wealth rather than real worth, that coward who runs away from his responsibilities rather than facing up to them, and whose first response to the news of his child was to suggest destroying her, who can say I am wrong? There would not be another anywhere who would not agree with me.

  But that did not comfort her, for others’ opinions mattered nothing to her. For Mildred it was essential only that she had a good opinion of herself; if she felt she had behaved well, then others’ censure ran off her like water from her newly greased cake tins. The trouble was that when she thought of Lizah, her own body let her down and confused her thinking. She felt again that crawling of need across her back, that sweet deep ache that only he could relieve. The worst part of the visit to Leinster Terrace for Mildred had not been Edward Amberly’s display of spleen and ugliness; it had been the sight of the Park and the little cluster of trees with the long grass beneath them where the daffodils grew in March – and she shook herself and went grimly back to rubbing down loaf sugar to make the icing for a special cake she had been asked to bake for the wedding of the daughter of the licensee of the Golden Fleece at the other end of Leather Lane. There were some things it was not right to think about at all.

  But one thing she should think about and that was what she was to do about Poppy and Lizah. He did have a right and so did she; so what right had Mildred to prevent them from knowing each other, just to protect herself? It was that which she thought about constantly, that day and for many days afterwards, indeed for some weeks. And found no answer at all.

  26

  And yet there was an answer there, and she found it inadvertently. By taking so long to decide what to do about taking Poppy to meet her father, she found the decision taken from her hands.

  Late one Friday evening in October, when the lamplighter had come round not long after tea, for now the days were drawing in the evenings were becoming wintry, Mildred was sitting by the kitchen fire picking over raisins and listening to Poppy read to her. She glowed as she listened, for the child had come on by leaps and bounds in this first month of her school life. She had herself taught Poppy to read when she had been an eager four-year-old with what seemed like an inborn passion for books, and had been amazed then at the speed with which she had picked up her alphabet and come to recognize the shapes and meanings of words on the page, but now she was remarkably fluent. Mildred listened with a half smile on her lips and her fingers flying over her task as Poppy read eagerly from her newest book, Mrs Nesbit’s The Treasure Seekers, which had been loaned to her by Miss Rushmore at school. There were a few words over which her tongue tripped – though only the very longest ones – but she was clearly enjoying the story hugely. And Mildred listened and watched and enjoyed her enjoyment.

  The rapping at the front door was an intrusion they both resented, Poppy frowning and reading more loudly in an effort to overwhelm the noise, but she had to stop when Mildred set aside her bowl of raisins and went out to the passageway to unbolt the front door and peer out into the dark street.

  ‘Millie? Let me come in – oh, am I glad you’re here! I was afraid you might be out –’

  ‘Where do I ever go in the evenings?’ Mildred said, mildly enough considering how little she relished the interruption. ‘I’m always here. What’s the matter?’

  ‘I’ll tell you, give me a minute to catch my breath, and I’ll tell you –’ And Jessie pulled off her hat and pelisse and flopped, panting, onto Mildred’s chair by the fire, almost sending flying the bowl of raisins which had been left perched on the fender. Very unusually, she made no effort to hug Poppy, but sat there fanning her sweating face with her hat and Mildred, closing the door against the chill of the passageway, frowned. She must have run from the omnibus to have got herself into such a lather, and that she also failed to make her usual fuss of Poppy, now sitting staring open-mouthed at her aunt from her small stool, betokened great agitation.

  ‘Let me make you some tea, Jessie,’ she said, her mind going at once to the practical remedy for all problems in Jessie’s world. ‘And I’ve got a ginger cake that broke when I turned it out, so we’re having it – then you can tell us what it is that’s –’

  But amazingly Jessie waved the suggestion away. ‘No – no, listen to me. We’ve got to stop h
im, Millie. My Momma will go mad, it’ll kill her, we’ve got to stop him. You’ve got to help me –’

  ‘Jessie, for heaven’s sake, what are you talking about? I’ve never seen you in such a taking –’ And nor had she. Jessie had always been the practical one, the sensible one, the person who strode through everything in the same cheerful insouciant way, be it joy or tragedy, but now she sat there panting and sweating and staring at Mildred with an expression of such anxiety on her face that she looked like an imitation of herself rather than the real person Mildred had known for so long; and anxiety sharpened in her. ‘Now, calm down, take your time, and tell me slowly what it is that has distressed you so.’

  Obediently, Jessie took a deep breath and leaned back in the chair, clearly trying to compose herself, but the look of anxiety in her eyes did not lessen.

  ‘I was out, you see. Tonight – I was out with Nate Braham – he’s started bein’ serious about me, and I need a bit of attention, even from the likes of Nate Braham – and we went out to supper at his sister’s place, being it was Friday night. And we were talking about this and that and Nate started arguing about when it was that Marie Lloyd did that last show of hers at the old Britannia, and got it all wrong and wouldn’t be told. He’s a stubborn devil, that one. So I said I had the programme from the show at home, I’d go and fetch it and show him he was wrong. Thank God there was the argument, or I wouldn’t have got home till late and who knows, Nate might have come with me and I’d not have gone into the kitchen at all and – anyway, I got home, to get this programme, must have been about nine, half past – house empty of course. I didn’t expect him to be there –’