The Solitary Child

by Nina Bawden

  “James told me she was happy with her grandparents.”

  She answered dryly, “Apparently not.” She hesitated. “They are bad for her, anyway. They are indulgent and foolish. They belong to a generation which discarded any kind of God and accepted instead a whole body of psychological clap-trap which is both more illogical and more superstitious than the religion they despise. It’s a common pitfall. They’re the wrong people to bring up a child like Maggie. She would grow up without any real idea of right and wrong.…”

  “Is she like her mother?”

  She watched my face. “To look at—a little. Not otherwise.” She paused. “Do you want me to go on?”

  Her eyes were slightly disapproving as if she thought me curious and vulgar. “I’d rather know,” I said.

  “Eva was a difficult woman. There was always trouble, even in the beginning, because she didn’t get on with mother. Mother disliked her behaviour and upbringing, and I think she was quite right to do so. But she didn’t interfere. Although this was her home and she loved it dearly, she moved to London and took a flat. James never forgave Eva for that. She was a very spoiled and self-indulgent woman. She was pretty and vain, and James gave way to her far too much. He was always sentimental about women. Of course, Eva spoiled Maggie abominably.…”

  She looked angry and a little intolerant. Her lips parted as if she were going to say something else. Then she got up with an abrupt, clumsy movement and went to the window, turning her back to me.

  She jerked at the curtain. The window gleamed, blacker than black, reflecting in its centre the lighted room.

  “It’s a filthy night.”

  Sleet, flung by the wind, clattered against the glass. We listened, in silence, to the noise of the night.

  “Perhaps she’s gone to an hotel.”

  “She hadn’t any money. They found her purse lying on the bed. There wasn’t much in it, anyway. She put most of her money into a piggy bank. The kind you have to break to get it out. She’d left it on the mantel-piece.”

  She turned from the window and looked at me.

  “Why don’t you go to bed? You look beaten.”

  “I’d rather stay. Is there anything we can do?”

  “They’re going to telephone if they find her. The police are looking along the road from Leominster. They’ve tried the hospitals.”

  “How old is she?” It seemed suddenly absurd that I didn’t know.

  “Sixteen. She looks younger.…”

  I thought of the long, dark road and the barren country. At sixteen you were sensible, almost grown up. But not if you were alone, without money. Not if you were afraid of the dark. There were always the sudden, wild terrors of adolescence, destroying without warning a precarious maturity, clutching at you out of the night.

  Ann was watching me out of the window. One of the dogs stood beside her with pricked ears. Gently, she caressed its head. She closed the curtain with a rattle of wooden rings along a bamboo pole. The room was small and safe and enclosed again.

  “You mustn’t suffer for other people or imagine you know how they’re feeling. In a way it’s presumption.”

  She spoke angrily, with the awkwardness of the very shy. And, as so often happens, the clumsiness blunted and spoiled the kind intention. She looked at me, half-dismayed, as if she knew she had not said what she meant in her troubled heart. Then she came to me and put one arm briefly round my shoulders. It was, for her,

  an almost unbearably intimate gesture.

  The night dragged on, heavy-eyed and sleepless. Towards three o’clock, I dozed in my chair and woke sharply and in pain. I released my cramped and stinging arm and rubbed it. The room seemed very bright and hot, my mouth was thick and dry and tasted sour.

  James and Ann sat on either side of the freshly stoked fire. Their faces were turned towards me, steady and inquiring, as if I had cried out the moment before waking. I remember that I felt as if I had just come into a room and interrupted a conversation between people I barely knew. They were not unreal but their reality was limited like an image seen briefly through the wrong end of a telescope, still and clear but small and very far away.

  Then they moved and spoke, wearing suddenly the false faces of people talking to a stranger.

  Ann said, “I’ve stayed too long.” She bent her face down towards the dog beside her and rubbed it against its dripping muzzle. “What will Maud say, my Jillikins? She’ll be oh, so cross. We shall have to creep in like little mice and not bark, or do anything noisy.…”

  “Harriet, you must go to bed.” James approached my chair, hands outstretched to help me. His face widened, became a gigantic cinema face, every pore enlarged, each single hair visible and quivering as under a magnifying-glass. Then he receded through a fog of weariness so that he floated, a flat, pastel face against the commercial mist of a romantic photographer.

  Somehow, I got to my feet and leaned against his supporting arm. The cold air outside the room revived me.

  James said cheerfully, “Too much brandy. When you’re already tired, it’s always a mistake.”

  My own voice came from a great distance and surprised me. It sounded high and precise, like my mother’s voice.

  “I’ve never had brandy before. Am I drunk?”

  “A little. Would you feel better if you were sick?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t feel sick.”

  “You could put your finger down your throat and wiggle it.”

  I giggled. “It sounds painfully domestic. I’d rather not.”

  The bedroom was cool, the bed high and wide. James helped me on to it. My head sank into down, the room lurched about me. I opened my eyes and James’s face appeared above me, unhappy and concerned.

  “Can you undo your stockings? I’m going to put you to bed.”

  His voice was anxious. I giggled again and turned on to my face. The pillow was soft and smothering. I squashed it away from my mouth.

  “Harriet’s going bye-byes,” I announced. “Stockings and all.”

  He sounded as if he were choking. I rolled on to my back and stared at his pink, gasping face.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  He bubbled with laughter, his shoulders shaking, his hand across his mouth. The tired lines round his eyes had gone.

  “I’m damned if you will,” he said softly, his hand on my breast.

  “You ought to say good-bye to Ann.”

  “She won’t mind. This is our first night at home.”

  “Not for you.” The drunken tears trickled from the corners of my eyes and he kissed them away. “It’s not the beginning for you. I’m not as important to you as you are to me.”

  “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “You talk to me as if I were a child.”

  “You are. And you are the whole of life for me. I would be useless without you. I swear it. Believe me?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry, darling. I’m a silly, jealous bitch. Not nearly nice enough for you.”

  “You’ve only one bad habit. You talk at the wrong time.”

  We both were tired and rather drunk but, for the first time, passion seemed an urgent need and not a casual pleasure. I thought: this is how people feel in war-time or in the middle of some more personal disaster. Then, as now, the act of love is the only permanence, the desire to be rooted in life.

  The springs unwound slowly and James lay still beside me, apparently sleeping, his warm, inert arm across my body, my shoulder beneath his heavy head.

  “Why do I love you so much?”

  “I don’t know. I’m only grateful that you do.”

  His voice was tranquil and lazy. I could not see his face but he sounded as if he were smiling. He said, with gentle insistence, “I am so full of love for you.”

  “I’m glad that there are two of us,” I said. “Like the animals in the ark.”

  He did not answer. After a little while I moved my aching arm; propped on one elbow, I looked down at his sleeping face. His skin was fl
ushed and damp, the fair hair spread out on the pillow like a plume. I wanted to put out the light but the switch was on the far side of the bed and I was afraid of waking him. So I lay, waiting for sleep, watching the still circle of light on the ceiling.

  Chapter Five

  I put out my hand to James but he was not there. Coming up from sleep like a drowning man breaking the surface of the water, I saw with dead eyes the shock of light, the unexpected, empty pillow.

  Then I was completely awake, cold and unsurprised. I slid from the bed and shivered, barefoot on the wooden floor. I found the things I had worn the day before, discarded by the foot of the bed. I put them on with stiff, unready fingers.

  A man’s voice shouted at the front of the house. I went to the window and looked out over a wide sweep of gravel to the white gates and the lane beyond. A herd of brown and white cows stepped daintily down the lane and filed patiently through an open gate into a field opposite the house; behind them, a man trudged through the mud and closed the gate. He removed his cap and scratched his head, plodding back up the lane and out of my field of vision behind a block of what looked like stabling to the left of the gravel drive. An archway in the high, creeper-covered wall led from the drive into a cobbled courtyard of which I could see only a tiny fraction because a car was parked across the entrance. To the right of the drive there was a low wall built with rough stones; in the centre of it there was a lych gate into a field. The lane wound, a thin thread between high, black hedges, to the main road half a mile away.

  A tractor muttered in the distance; a red mail van changed gear as it drove up the lane to the gates of the house. As I watched, a woman appeared through the stable arch. She carried a basket in front of her, her head bent above it, leaning forward against the wind. A white apron flapped round her legs like a flag. The postman climbed out of the van and took the basket from her; she moved her hand up to her hair. For a moment they talked; their mouths moved, their arms gesticulated like the arms of dolls in a puppet show. His head inclined towards her, the postman sorted out a pile of letters in his hand. She pointed across the fields to the range of hills and then, as if jerked by a common string, they both turned and looked up at the house. Their eyes ranged along the line of windows and I drew back behind the curtain afraid, suddenly, that they would think me prying.

  I looked round the unfamiliar room, the heavy furniture, the white walls, the suitcases by the door, unopened and still labelled as if for departure. The pale sunlight fell through the wide window and puddled on the floor.

  Loneliness overtook me like fear. I ran from the room and found Ann in the kitchen, perched on the table, a coffee cup in her hand.

  She was wearing her outdoor clothes, a thick camel coat and mittens. She could not have slept; her face was devastated by the long night’s vigil, folded into a hundred delicate lines of pain.

  “I thought you were asleep. I was going to bring you your breakfast in bed.”

  “Thank you. But I don’t really enjoy it. You sit on the toast crumbs.”

  She frowned. “James has gone out. He hoped he’d be back before you woke. I’m sorry, it’s a shame on your first morning.…”

  “Where has he gone?”

  She spoke carefully. “You mustn’t worry. He’s gone to the police station. He won’t be long.”

  “Have they found her?”

  “Not yet. The police arrived on my doorstep about an hour ago. They rang James from the cottage and asked him to go along to the station.”

  “Is it serious, do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Apart from the lorry driver, they’ve found no one who saw her.” She blinked at me sleepily. “Of course we’re worried.… Can I get you some breakfast?”

  “No thank you. I can’t eat in the mornings just now. It’ll get better later on.”

  She looked shy. “Are you pleased about the baby?”

  “Very.” We smiled at each other, she got off the table and said, really, she had to go.

  “Must you?” I was suddenly reluctant to be alone. “Stay a little longer, have another cup of coffee.…”

  “I ought to go back. Maud isn’t at all well this morning. She has migraine so badly.…” Her fingers fiddled uneasily with the top button of her coat. Her eyes—they were a very pale, cold blue—stared distantly out of the window. “Besides, James asked me to tell you Maggie’s grandparents are coming. They rang the local police. There is nothing they can do, of course, but they were very anxious … they may expect to come here.” She focused her eyes on my face and said, with difficulty, “Do you mind? It’s hard on you, so early on. You should start off happy. It makes a difference.”

  She paused. “James wondered if you would like to stay with me at the cottage until they’ve gone.” She forced enthusiasm like someone hauling a heavy weight. “Maud won’t mind, I’m sure. And I’d like you to see the cottage.”

  “I’d love to. But some other time. Just now, I’d rather stay.”

  She said, relieved, “I thought you would.” She smiled hopefully. “Perhaps it won’t be too difficult. And James would rather have you here.”

  “It must be difficult for him.”

  “Naturally.” She avoided my eyes. “Will it be all right if I ask Mrs. Evans for some eggs? She’s always let me have a few out of the house supply but we—we weren’t sure whether you might not want to make some new arrangement.…”

  “Of course not. Please take what you like.” I was conscious of a faint awkwardness in her question and my reply; surely, I thought, she was entitled to take what she needed? I wondered how much of her shabbiness was a pose, as James had suggested, and how much actual poverty.

  There was a knock at the door. A girl, in a cotton dress and cardigan, her tightly permed hair scraped into an Alice band. She was exuberantly plump, the firm, jolly flesh seemed about to burst out of her dress in several places. She wore a bright, mauve lipstick and an extraordinary quantity of rouge.

  “The man’s come to fix the Telly,” she said.

  “Janet.” Ann’s voice was frosty. “This is Mrs. Random. I hope you’ll do your best to look after her.”

  “Surely.” She grinned widely at me, her voice had a faint American twang. “Have you told her about my Charlie?”

  “Not yet. We haven’t had much time to talk. But I’m sure Mrs. Random won’t mind.” She turned to me, speaking with kind, class-conscious condescension. “Janet has a dear little boy. She likes to bring him to work with her. He’s very little trouble.”

  “Of course I don’t mind.”

  Janet smiled again. “Thank you ever so much. He’s ever such a good boy except when he’s cutting his teeth. You must feel like a pea in a drum, Mrs. Random, rattling about in this enormous house. It must feel funny, like those people who squatted in country houses just after the war—all that empty space all round them.” She folded her arms across her big breasts and leaned cosily against the door jamb. “Shall I make a cup of tea for the television man?” She was warm and friendly and my heart lifted.

  Ann said, “I expect you may, but don’t gossip too long. Show him where he’s to put it first.”

  “O.K.” She beamed and departed, her feet slopping in soiled tennis shoes.

  Ann whispered, “She has to bring the baby—Mrs. Evans doesn’t like to keep him at the cottage. Janet’s her only daughter and she feels the disgrace dreadfully. She nearly turned her out because she wouldn’t wear a wedding ring.”

  “Poor girl. She must have been very brave to keep her baby.”

  “With that sort of girl it’s very seldom bravery, just inanition. You mustn’t be sentimental about her or she’ll never do any work at all, she’ll spend her time making cups of tea.”

  We went down the wide stairs together. Ann glanced at the telephone table in the hall and said, “The post’s come.” The baby lay in his pram in the porch and Ann bent over him. “There’s my lovely fellow, my good boy,” she said. The baby had a gay, sloppy face, he chuckled and A
nn poked his tummy. For a moment I saw in her face the ghost of what she might have been, a big, lusty woman, rich with love and children. Then she stood up and looked at me and the ghost was gone; her right eyelid flickered its sad little message of frustration and despair.

  The telephone rang inside the hall. We said good-bye and I went indoors and picked up the receiver. There was a pile of letters waiting by the telephone.

  James’s voice crackled on the line.

  “Darling, are you all right?”

  “Yes, of course. When will you be back?”

  I ruffled through the letters with my free hand. They were for James, they looked like bills.

  “Not yet, I’m afraid. Did you miss me?”

  “Terribly. What are you doing?”

  “I’ve got to go to the station to fetch my parents-in-law.” There was a pause. “Did Ann tell you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she still with you?”

  “No. She had to go. She said Maud was ill.”

  At the bottom of the pile of letters there was one for me. The name and the address were printed in green ink. I picked it up and held it in my hand.

  “Maud’s the original old man of the sea. Will you be all right alone?”

  He sounded worried. “Why shouldn’t I be?” I laughed to make it sound convincing.

  “Good girl. Dearest, I’m so sorry about it. I’d made so many plans for our first day.”

  “Poor sweet. But we’ve got the rest of our lives,” I said, feeling pity for him like a burden on the back of love. He always made plans in detail and with careful, absorbed delight, so that when his arrangements were upset he was pathetic, as pathetic as a child deprived of a birthday treat.

  “It’s not the same thing, is it?”

  “Darling, it doesn’t matter.” I knew, already, that it was seldom possible to move him out of a mood of despair. “When will you be back?”

  “I don’t know. It depends whether she turns up.”

  He sounded uninterested, as if we were discussing someone he barely knew. I fingered the letter in my hand and wondered who had written to me.