by Anne Bennett
‘Well, your Angela will be another one if you don’t watch out.’
‘I have no authority there, you know that,’ Hannah said with asperity then added thoughtfully, ‘Do you know, I don’t know how Arthur would react. He’s put her on a pedestal and if she stumbled or fell off, it would humiliate him. I don’t know that he’d stand it.’
‘He’d have to stand it.’
‘No listen, Gloria,’ Hannah said. ‘He did it to me. Put me on a pedestal and I fell off it totally when he realised I’d had sex with another man. The fact that I was engaged to the man and it happened only once made no difference. I was defiled, soiled. Angela he has created and moulded and will continue to mould, but she will grow up, have relationships, boyfriends, sex.’ She shook her head and a long shudder of apprehension about the future ran down her spine.
Chapter Fifteen
Angela made her first Holy Communion in June 1955. Hannah didn’t know where Arthur had got the dress, but it was the most exquisite thing she’d ever seen, though far too elaborate for a child. As Gloria said, ‘You’d think he had her decked up for a bride.’
Angela’s satin and silk dress, bedecked with ribbons, bows, seed pearls, little rosebuds and lace, fell over many starched petticoats like a dainty white flower. Her snow-white veil hung down her back and the diadem, holding it in place, flashed with stones and on her feet were white patent leather shoes. She made every other girl there seem dull in comparison.
Josie couldn’t help contrasting it with her first Communion, in a dress worn by all her sisters. Her mother had done her best, but her heart hadn’t been in it for her father was dangerously ill. But, all in all, many of the other girls’ dresses were as bad or worse than hers and given the choice she’d prefer to look like everyone else and not stick out like Angela did.
Not that Angela seemed to care. She paraded and flounced about the house, accepting praise as her due. Her daddy said she was the most beautiful girl in the world, prettier than any princess, and she believed him, like she believed everything he said.
The rosary he presented her with was mother-of-pearl and her Bible bound with white leather. Hannah told her daughter, who was fishing for compliments, that she looked lovely, which was true, but Angela, used to more lavish praise, pulled a face.
But then her daddy was there scooping her up. ‘Do you love me, Angela?’
”Course I do, Daddy. I love you millions and I’ll love you forever.’
‘I’ll always be your best man, the one you love the most?’
‘Always. You’re the bestest in the world.’
Hannah shivered at the interchange between them. Forever was a long time for a child of seven.
The party Arthur planned for Angela’s first Communion was the most lavish to date. Hannah wondered if he had a hint of shame for what he was doing to the child, but no. Pride alone shone in his eyes as he beamed at her while Hannah squirmed at the malevolent looks the mothers shot her way. They’d assume, all of them, that Hannah had bought the dress, because it was a job mothers usually did.
They would think she’d done it just to show every other little girl in the parish up. She could almost hear them condemning her.
And this is what she told Vic when he asked how it had gone. ‘Why can’t you tell them the truth?’
‘How can I?’ Hannah said. ‘Nothing was said, do you see, I just read the looks. Anyway, do you think I really want to admit that I am such a useless mother that I don’t even choose my own daughter’s Communion dress?’ She sighed. ‘That’s what Arthur banks on, you see. He reads me like a book at times. He knows what I’m fearful of and plays on that.’
God, Vic thought, what a marriage.
Hannah gave a sigh. ‘And there’s something else.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know, but Arthur has something planned.’
‘To do with your daughter?’
‘Of course. Every thought in his head concerns Angela,’ Hannah said. ‘It won’t be good, not for me that is, not when he has this stupid sneering smile on his face.’
‘Why don’t you ask him? Face it?’
‘Because he’d not tell me,’ Hannah said. ‘You don’t know how it is in our house. We seldom speak, Arthur and I. He talks at me when he wants to. We don’t ever discuss anything. He tells me and I have to do it, or put up with it. He’s told me my needs are unimportant and I seldom ask him questions, you lose the habit of it when you get no answers.’
‘Hannah, how do you stand it?’
Hannah shrugged. ‘I stand it because I must,’ she said wearily. ‘I tell myself people cope with worse. He doesn’t drink or gamble the housekeeping. I’ll find out in the end.’
But it took a further fortnight before Hannah found out what Arthur had planned. During the fortnight, Arthur had been out a lot and stayed out all night on more than one occasion but Hannah had just been glad of his absence. But now, one evening, as they were finishing their meal, he licked his lips and with a grin of satisfaction, like a cat that’s had the cream, spoke directly to Hannah. ‘After the child is in bed, I wish to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Go into the breakfast room and wait for me.’
Hannah’s eyes met those of Pauline and Josie. She had told them already that she thought something was afoot and now they knew that this was it, the moment when she’d be told.
Later, she gazed at Arthur as if she couldn’t believe her ears. ‘A boarding school! Arthur, she’s but a baby.’
‘She is no baby,’ Arthur snapped. ‘She will be eight in November.’
‘But why?’
‘Why? Because I want her to mix with the right society, that’s why. You saw the performance at her Communion. She outshone every other child there because they’re common. Little more than guttersnipes some of them. I want her removed, I want her companions to be more her equals and I want her husband to be the right sort.’
Hannah stared at Arthur. Where in God’s name did he think he came from? A jumped-up travelling salesman when she met him. Fortune had shone on him, that was all. True, he’d risen in the firm, but surely not far or fast enough to make him forget his roots, or where he came from?
And these people, she told herself, that he’s just called common and degraded in such a way, think him a grand fellow. It’s me they think of as Lady Muck, me they pull to pieces and snigger at behind their hands and me they’ll blame for this last outrage.
For that’s what it was, an outrage to send a little girl away from a more than adequate home, because their neighbours, who were fine, upstanding people in the main, could not be considered good enough for her to mix with.
But worse was to come. ‘It’s a Catholic school of course,’ Arthur said. ‘A convent school in Leeds called St Anne’s.’
‘In Leeds?’ Hannah’s voice echoed in a shriek. She felt herself going alternately hot and cold and the room began to tilt away from her. ‘You can’t,’ she begged. ‘Please, please, don’t send her so far away.’
‘Can’t? What is this, my dear?’ Arthur said. ‘You know I can do as I please with my own child. The school is highly recommended. It’s right out in the countryside in its own grounds. Hannah, are you all right? Hannah!’
Hannah was far from all right; she’d fainted clean away and in the dark recess of the night, after she’d been helped to bed, she woke screaming and thrashing in the bed. It was the nightmare she’d had many times – a nun taking her baby further and further away and her trying to run after him, but with each step getting further away.
This time, though, Josie was there to comfort her. ‘Hush, Hannah. It was just a dream, that’s all. Hush. It’s all right now.’
But it wasn’t all right. As Hannah jerked into full consciousness, she remembered it all. Was she never to forget the past? Gloria always said, ‘As you sow, so shall you reap.’ Well, she’d sowed well, hadn’t she? Dear God, was she to pay for it till the day she died?
‘Hannah, what is it? What’s upsetting you so much?
’ Josie cried, holding Hannah’s shivering frame in her arms.
When Pauline and Josie had been called in by Arthur earlier and seen Hannah crumpled before the fire, Josie had thought Arthur had hit her. ‘What have you done?’
‘Nothing.’
Josie, on her knees before her aunt, looked up at him. ‘You must have done something.’
‘Nothing, I tell you. She fainted.’
‘Well what did you say to make her faint?’
‘It was nothing to do with what I was saying. I was telling her about the school I’ve chosen for Angela.’
Neither Josie nor Pauline, not even after they’d roused Hannah and helped her to bed and got the full story from Arthur, could believe that what Arthur had said had anything to do with Hannah passing out. ‘Granted, she might have been upset,’ Pauline said. ‘I was myself, learning of a child of seven being sent from home. It’s what the gentry always did to their sons and I never held with it then either. If she’d cried I could have understood it. I mean she’s never passed out before, has she?’
‘Not that I’ve known.’
If it had been a different household, Pauline might have thought Hannah was pregnant, but she knew that to be an impossibility.
Josie knew that too and she urged again, ‘What is it, Hannah?’
And Hannah for the first time told Josie the whole story from her meeting with Mike Murphy until she came to live with Gloria. Sometimes Hannah cried and so did Josie, but Josie never let go of her aunt, nor did she speak and the short summer night was ended and the sky lightening before Hannah finished her tale. ‘Are you shocked, Josie?’ she finally asked.
‘No, Hannah. Just so incredibly sad for you,’ Josie said.
‘You see now why I couldn’t come to your father’s funeral?’
‘Oh yes, perfectly.’
‘When it was over, the birth and everything, I told myself I’d go, see how you were. But I was so ill, distraught, you know, and so ashamed. I just wanted to hide myself away,’ Hannah said.
‘And why did you marry Arthur?’
‘To have children, that was the main thing, and also to have someone special to love and cherish me,’ Hannah said. ‘I suppose really I’ve never got over my father rejecting me.’
There was a moment’s silence, then Josie said, ‘You didn’t make a good bargain of either, did you?’
‘No, Josie, I failed on both counts,’ Hannah said. ‘But the nightmare I had tonight and the reason I fainted and was upset was because of where the school is that Arthur’s chosen to send Angela.’
‘Leeds?’ Josie said. ‘Pauline and I couldn’t understand that. I mean, neither of us could think why she had to board anywhere, but that apart, did it have to be so far away?’
‘No, it’s not that, or not totally that,’ Hannah said. ‘It’s the place – Leeds. I’ve never been back since. I’m afraid of the memories it might evoke.’
‘Maybe it’s time to lay the ghosts,’ Josie said gently. ‘What you did with a man you loved and were engaged to be married to wasn’t such a terrible thing. I think you were more sinned against than a sinner. Perhaps it’s time to face that.’
‘I don’t know if I’m ready to face it,’ Hannah admitted. ‘And if Arthur was to ever find out …’
‘He doesn’t know about the baby then?’
‘No,’ Hannah said with a slight shudder. ‘He knows I wasn’t a virgin when I married him. I was what he called “soiled”. That’s why he moved out of the bedroom.’
‘I was glad he did,’ Josie said. ‘When you shared a room he used to yell at you, terrible things, obscene words, I used to try not to hear, but he was too loud.’
Hannah said, ‘I think you need to know the kind of man Arthur is, Josie. You’re not a child anymore and it’s good to know,’ and she told Josie all about Arthur’s sexual problems and how he became aroused and how they’d managed to make love just the once, resulting in Angela.
‘Does anyone else know this?’
‘Just Gloria. Do you remember her coming around that dreadful winter and she saw the bruises and my split lip?’
‘Yes, after my tenth birthday,’ Josie said. ‘She gave me that lovely pendant that I wear all the time.’
‘Yes, that’s right. After that, I told her.’
‘What about the baby? Who knows about him?’
‘Again just Gloria,’ Hannah said. ‘The nuns arranged that I stay with her, so she had to know. Vic also had to know of course, when I was having Angela, but he doesn’t know everything.’
‘You’ve not told Pauline?’
‘No,’ Hannah said. ‘Once, when she first came here, I viewed her as the enemy. She looked after my baby better than I ever could. I thought she was on Arthur’s side.’
‘She might have been,’ Josie agreed, ‘but she isn’t any more, I know that. Can I tell her? It’s best for her to know.’
‘All right,’ Hannah said, ‘but no one else. Whatever you say, I am ashamed and don’t want it broadcast.’
‘I won’t say a word to anyone else,’ Josie promised. ‘I’ll nip down and make us both a cup of tea.’
Hannah nodded, but when Josie returned a few moments later, Hannah was in a deep sleep such as she hadn’t enjoyed for some time, for her heart was eased now that she’d told Josie everything.
‘Won’t you miss her dreadfully?’ Elizabeth asked both Hannah and Arthur when they’d gone round to the Banks’ for the evening.
‘Of course,’ Arthur said.
‘Our two boarded,’ Elizabeth went on. ‘But not until they were eleven and then I cried for a week, didn’t I, Reg?’
Reg affirmed that she did and then asked, ‘Why Leeds, Arthur? Isn’t there a place nearer?’
‘Maybe,’ Arthur said. ‘But this place is highly recommended. I went to the priests at the Abbey and this is the one they suggested. First-rate education, they said. However much it will hurt us, we must make sure that Angela has the best chance in life. Of course we’ll see her, we’ll go up weekends and check that she is all right.’
‘Oh Hannah,’ Elizabeth said later when they were alone. ‘You are so brave.’
Hannah wanted to say she wasn’t at all brave, that it would break her heart when the child walked out the door and that when she began in September, she’d not see a bit of her till the Christmas holidays. ‘How does Angela feel about it?’ Elizabeth asked.
Angela was fine. Arthur had make it all sound so exciting for the child and she believed every word from her father’s lips was the gospel truth. ‘She … She’s looking forward to it,’ Hannah answered truthfully. ‘She’s not a bit nervous, not so far anyway.’
Arthur reiterated what Hannah said later as Elizabeth poured out their after dinner coffee. ‘I’ve told her all about it,’ he went on. ‘And shown her the pictures. We’re off to look around the place next week.’
‘Oh, I always think it sets your mind at rest when you see where they’ll be,’ Elizabeth said to Hannah. ‘Somehow you are able to picture them afterwards, like the time we went to see her nursery school. It helps settle any anxieties you might have.’
Hannah saw Arthur’s eyes widen in surprise for he’d never known Hannah had visited Angela’s nursery school with Elizabeth. And now the bloody woman had put him in a quandary, for he’d had no intention of taking Hannah with him on his trip to Leeds, but if he didn’t now, the Banks, particularly Elizabeth, would think it odd.
Hannah saw the set of Arthur’s jaw and his eyes harden as he looked across the table to her. She hadn’t known until the moment before that Arthur planned to visit the school the following week, but knew with piercing clarity that he had had no intention on God’s earth of taking her with him until Elizabeth had spoken. The smile didn’t reach Arthur’s eyes as he said, ‘Yes. It will be a nice run out if the weather stays fine. We’re quite looking forward to it aren’t we, my dear?’
Hannah would have liked to have thrown the hot coffee in Arthur’s face and told the cold-hea
rted, cruel man exactly what she thought of him, but his reaction if she did that didn’t bear thinking about. She gripped the cup so tight in her hand, her knuckles turned white, and she fought to control her voice as she said, ‘Yes, and like you say, Elizabeth, it will ease the parting if I feel happy with the school.’
‘You did well, my dear,’ Arthur said as they drove home. ‘You probably know I had no intention of taking you with me?’
‘Oh, I knew all right,’ Hannah said. ‘But now you must because if you don’t, Elizabeth Banks will take a very dim view of it altogether. And take it from me, she’ll get to know about it if you change your mind at all. It would never do for them to lose their good impression of you, now would it?’
‘Be careful, my dear,’ Arthur said and his voice was clipped and as cold as steel. ‘You are in no position to threaten.’
‘Maybe not, but you take care, too,’ Hannah retorted angrily. ‘Don’t push me too far. I might feel I’ve got little more to lose. Even a worm can turn, you know.’
Gloria said she couldn’t see the point of folks having kids if they were going to send them away just as soon as they could and what was the matter with Hannah that she couldn’t put her foot down.
‘Where Angela is concerned, I have no say.’
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Gloria snapped. ‘You’re the child’s mother.’
‘I might as well not be,’ Hannah said glumly.
‘Give up that bloody job and learn to be a mother.’
‘You wanted me to work,’ Hannah said. ‘And you were right. It’s restored my self-respect. But with Angela it’s too late. She adores her father and what he wants, she wants. To be honest, she just about tolerates me, because she sees little of me. If she saw more of me, she’d soon show her true colours and probably put me in my place.’
Gloria shook her head. ‘You’ve been a fool to let it go so far.’
‘You don’t understand,’ Hannah said. ‘It hurts to know your child dislikes you so much and it hurts when she says so and is never even corrected for it and sometimes even applauded. I have had two children, Gloria, and one doesn’t even know I exist and the other doesn’t care if I do or not. It’s hard to take.’