‘They won’t go to waste,’ said Bea, busy with the teapot. The kettle on the little spirit stove in the hearth had clearly just boiled.
‘You ain’t put out?’ asked Violet. ‘’Cause they’re best et today.’
‘Knew you was coming,’ said Bea complacently.
While it had always been Beatrice’s habit to embrace their strange connection, Violet’s to make light of it, the effrontery of pretending that, in superb acceptance of her own insight, Bea had actually been expecting three dozen fairy cakes out of the blue – this was too much, straight away.
‘Know why and all, do you?’ said Violet spitefully.
‘Looking tired,’ said Bea, in the same tone. ‘Keeping well? Sleeping alright?’
Violet hesitated; sighed. Not five minutes, she thought, and it’s already business as usual. She remembered the crouching children of her church-dream, and made an effort: ‘Well no,’ she said, more gently.
There was a pause. Bea set out china, pink-flowered teacups and saucers and milk jug all the same, and produced two buttered buns on matching plates.
‘Me neither,’ she said at last.
‘Bad dreams?’
Bea nodded, eyes averted. Ah, thought Violet. But she could not bring herself to ask any further, lest Ruth be named aloud.
While Bea poured the tea, Violet looked about her. The room was a sort of large cupboard, she thought, cosy enough, if you didn’t mind not being able to see out, the one window being so high, and with a proper rocking chair set beside the neat little range, though the fire was out. She sat down opposite Bea at the small square table. Anyone peeping in at us, thought Violet, would see a strange sight, the matching china and matching women; like herself Bea was in black, full-skirted.
‘Remember playing Mirrors, Bea?’ She was thinking of a long-ago game they had mainly played in public in the street, for the amusement of other children, the two of them pretending to be one posh lady and her reflection as she sat at her glass, pulling faces while she plucked her eyebrows or bristly chin, picked her teeth, and painted her cheeks and lips with rouge; the secret accord between them had made almost simultaneous movement easy, Beatrice following Violet, or Violet following Beatrice. And more than once, lost in a complete shared concentration, forgetting their audience, they had reached a certain mysterious point of departure, when neither of them seemed to be following the other; when for a little while they could literally act as one, without effort, without thought. There had been something wonderfully exciting and satisfying about this practice, some quality of flight about it, as if they were sharing wings. At the same time it had felt dangerous; Violet especially had suspected that they were opening themselves to some power offensive to heaven, of the kind once labelled magic, or witchcraft.
But sometimes, in different mood, they had played the game in private, and as a contest. Then whichever of them had been following would try not just to keep up but to overtake, to force the other to follow instead, both in a hostile silence moving faster and faster, in more and more jerky and unpredictable ways, until one of them – Beatrice usually – would lose her temper completely and hurl herself forward through the non-existent frame of the imaginary mirror, a girl attacking her own reflection, an image lunging out to tear at reality’s hair.
‘Remember playing Mirrors, Bea?’
Bea said nothing, but lifted her cup in her left hand, just as Violet was lifting her own in her right. For a moment Violet spoilt things by half-laughing; then suddenly the game was on, as if they had never stopped playing it. A bite of bun, the pause while chewing, a big swallow, back to the teacups, Violet following Bea, but remembering instantly the possibility of gaining control herself. For almost a minute, they Mirrored one another, more and more seriously as their movements gained complexity, the hand up to theatrically push back a lock of hair, the sudden lean backwards, arms folded, sitting forward again resting on one elbow, half-rising, sitting back down again, Violet all the while grimly hanging on, not a single chance to pull ahead, until at last Bea caught her out completely, smacking her hands palm down on the table just as Violet had anticipated clapping them together.
Violet felt Bea’s fierce triumph: Me!
‘You,’ she agreed, aloud. She saw that for the moment they could be in accord.
‘Ought to get going,’ said Bea, also equably. Presently she stood up, took her apron from the hook on the door and put it back on. ‘We’ll take ’em some cakes,’ she said, and gave Violet a big enamel plate.
‘How many?’
‘A dozen first off. Here, I’ll take ’em.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘This way,’ said Bea. Holding the piled plateful of little cakes in one hand she stepped smartly out of the sitting room, and Violet followed her up a flight of stairs, along another stretch of corridor, and down another staircase to a double-door, which she rapped on and opened.
‘Come on in, Vi.’
It was a large room, with several small windows leaded in little square panes. Someone near the door stood up as Bea entered, a nursemaid, holding a baby. ‘Morning, Mrs Givens.’
‘Morning, Beth. This here’s my sister, Mrs Dimond.’
Beth, naturally, goggled a little, but said no more; perhaps she had already been warned. Violet in any case took no notice of her; her heart was jumping inside her with fright, for the room was full of crouching little children.
‘Come along, my lovelies,’ cried Bea, ‘see what I’ve got for you!’
At once the children, little ones, not old enough for schooling, boys and girls together, all of them clad in grey, got up in a body and tumbled towards Bea quite as if she were a favourite; leaving behind them on the oil-cloth floor the scattering of wooden bricks, the little babyish heaps of treasured special leaves and pussy-willow mice that they had been playing with, and Violet almost laughed aloud. Though it was sobering to reflect how her dream had misled her. She had allowed herself to fear a fantasy; doing Satan’s own work for him, she told herself.
‘Let ’em outside, will you, Beth,’ said Bea to the nursemaid. ‘We don’t want crumbs all over. Come on now, line up then.’
They were too little, thought Violet, to take notice of a stranger, even one that looked so familiar, and anyway the cakes held all their attention. She watched the hubbub of straightforward delight at the unexpected treat, Bea holding the plate just out of reach while the children got themselves into a fairly orderly queue towards the open door, some of them leaping up and down with excitement, all of them craning to see what she held.
‘What do you say?’
‘Thank you, Mrs Givens!’ in ragged piping chorus.
Violet watched the cakes distributed by a door now opened on to a small cobbled yard. The boys in dark grey shorts, of a heavy worsted, the girls in lighter grey pinafores, and all of them, thought Violet, bearing some mark of the unmothered: the plainest hairstyles, a dried-snot trace well-crusted here and there, a tang of old urine from yesterday’s wetted drawers. But they were rosy and plump enough; she knew of children otherwise.
‘Out you go now!’
When the nursemaid had followed them, Bea turned to Violet. ‘There’s one more,’ she said. She held up the plate, with the last cake on it. ‘Through to the sickroom.’
Their eyes met, and Violet understood that here was the source of the nightmares that had so troubled them both; that Bea had sent her. In childhood they had often dreamt in common, but very rarely since. And dreaming can be a nonsense, Violet reminded herself. There is only One we can trust in.
‘Here,’ said Bea, handing Violet the plate. ‘You give it to her.’
They climbed a creaky wooden spiral staircase behind a door in the corner of the Infants’ room to reach another corridor, where Bea at once opened a further door and held it for Violet to pass through.
At first she was a little dazzled after the dark corridor, as a watery brilliance reflected from the lake outside made the Infirmary walls almost seem
to glow. It was a large square room with four iron bedsteads against one wall, smoothly made up, and opposite them four iron cots. Only one cot was occupied.
Violet looked.
‘Oh,’ she said.
Something resembling a human child was half-lying, half-sitting in the cot in the corner. But it was like no other child Violet had ever seen before, a terrible yellowish-grey in colour, with a thin lifeless scrabble of russet fuzz on its head, and skinny wasted arms and legs, spidery.
‘Negro,’ said Bea. Violet turned this word over and over in her mind, until at last she understood. She had never seen such a thing before, hadn’t ever considered the matter. She had seen occasional black men: once a group of them singing in a music hall years back, once one looking none too well all by himself on the docks at Plymouth. She knew they existed, black men, knew that they lived among the lions in Africa, waving spears and sometimes eating missionaries. Of black women she had no notion at all, but pictures of the singers in their striped jackets, and the bedraggled sailor, and the fierce spear-throwers safely on the other side of the world, all flashed confusingly into and out of her mind, leaving her struck dumb with surprise, and something like awe.
A negro child! What a sight to see, what an astonishing thing!
‘Dear heaven,’ said Violet, using the strongest words at her disposal. ‘Oh my goodness me!’
She judged that the child was between two and three years old. She was mute in the cot, not looking up when the door opened, and very still, all but her right hand, whose fingers were playing with a stray tape from the neck of her nightdress, laboriously rolling it up, then unrolling it. Her breathing was stertorous. Violet could hear it from across the room. There was a smell too, of sweetish decay, of sickness, stale air, and old urine.
‘Pneumonia,’ said Bea. ‘Thought it’d finish her off.’
Violet could only whisper. ‘Where she come from?’
‘Some place over Exeter way, left behind, don’t know her name, nor nothing else.’ As she spoke the child listlessly raised her head and turned towards them, and Violet for the first time looked fully into the small greyish-yellow face.
There was a silence. The baby turned again to the stray tape; Violet gave a little gasp of pain and shock.
‘Yes,’ said Bea.
For the child looked entirely familiar to them both. Apart from her colour and the thin dull frizz of hair, the baby in the cot could have been Violet’s own lost daughter, Ruth.
‘You didn’t think to tell me?’ whispered Violet, when she could speak again.
‘Didn’t think she’d live.’
‘Ah,’ said Violet, conceding the common sense of this.
‘But she don’t speak,’ said Bea. ‘See? Even when it looked like she’d live, I couldn’t – the doctor reckons she’s simple. She ain’t right, Vi. And look at her. What was I supposed to tell you?’
Violet nodded. Yes: that colour. How could a negro child look like Ruth? ‘Can I take the bars down?’
‘Here. I’ll do it. They took a drownded woman from the harbour there a month back,’ added Bea on a whisper. ‘Another darkie, see: maybe the mother.’
‘Can you leave me a while?’
‘Well – I suppose so. You know where to find me?’
‘No. I’ll manage.’
‘I’ll be in the kitchen,’ said Bea. The door closed softly behind her.
Violet put the plate down on a table near the window, and went back to the cot. For a moment she stood looking down at the baby, now looking up. She had never felt frightened of a child before. She knew black men were not as good as white ones. How could they be, when for the most part they lived in grass huts, and were cannibals and so on, still using spears when white men had rifles? They were primitive natives. This child was one of those. Was, perhaps, disgusting.
She moved a wooden chair near to the cot, sat down, swallowed and slowly put out a hand. Violet had never been one to make free with other women’s children. It was years since she had even touched a little one, apart from the immediate necessary handling of birth, and then she passed the baby at once to its mother.
Would her own flesh shrink from this alien? The child’s thin fuzz of hair was softer than it looked, baby-fine. Violet’s fingers trembled as she stroked it. Then her arms seemed to decide for themselves, and reached out and slowly took the child up and set it gently on her lap.
It made no sound or struggle, but sat stiffly upright, fingers holding fast on to the stray end of tape, but all of them still now, a little frozen claw.
Violet felt stiff too. Her heart pounded in her chest, her mouth felt dry. She held the rigid foreign creature close. ‘There, there,’ said Violet, and began to rock herself and the baby gently to and fro. Presently she thought of other things to say:
‘I’m Mrs Dimond,’ she said in a tender coaxing tone no patient of hers had ever heard, nor ever would. ‘I’ve come to see you.’ She went on rocking. The baby felt warmer in her arms now, softer. ‘There, there,’ said Violet, over and over again, rocking them both.
A long time went by. Very slowly, the child seemed to loosen and unfold herself. Her hand relaxed, and she let go of the tape, and leant back, curled against Violet’s bosom.
‘There, there.’ Violet hardly dared to breathe, went on rocking and murmuring, but when the child at last turned her head, and made the faintest suggestion of snuggling, she felt an almost overpowering sense of physical happiness, a glowing and profound relief, as if long trouble or pain had suddenly ended. My daughter, said her exultant body. Here is Ruth given back to me.
Violet’s mind fluttered, turning up more flashing pictures of half-remembered bits and pieces of information, grass huts, slaves picking cotton in America, cannibals wearing bones through their noses. Here was not Ruth, part of Violet told herself sternly. Ruth was safe with her Maker. This was someone else’s child, product of unquantifiable sin. This was a child no one wanted.
‘Got summat for you,’ murmured Violet, slowly standing up, the baby in her arms. She carried her over to the window, where the lake reflected the blue sky and glittered in the sunshine, looking as unlike the drowning-pool of her nightmare as any body of water might; all the same she picked up the cake and turned to sit down again facing well away from the window, the child once more settled on her lap.
‘This is for you, this is,’ she said tenderly.
Sitting sideways now, the baby looked down at the cake, back up at Violet. Seen close at hand Violet saw how dull the eyes were, how chalky and dry the lips. The greyish khaki colour was partly one of sickness, she realized. There was Death in that face, thought Violet, and her insides at once turned over with dread, with resolution. ‘You eat it,’ she said, ‘it’s nice.’ She smiled at the baby’s apparent doubt, saw her fumble. ‘’Ere. Let me. Look, now.’ Neatly she broke the cake into four. It smelt golden with egg and sugar. Violet lifted a fragment to the baby’s mouth, and she ate.
‘There. Ain’t that nice? Want some more?’
Now she was feeding herself. She was of that age, Violet saw with a pang, to put nearly all her fingers into her mouth as she ate. Still not eager, though. Not stuffing it in the way a child ought. No appetite, thought Violet, as the child turned listlessly away. So sickly still. Her mind raced ahead, to possets, to proper broths given little and often, to egg yolks stirred into mashed potato, and nourishing custards. Ruth, said her body.
Mine anyway, said her mind.
‘Now then,’ said Violet, putting the barely touched cake aside, ‘I’m going to make you all nice and tidy. ’Cause I can tell you’s a bit on the damp side, ain’t that so, my lovely. Then I’m a-going to see my sister; and then we’re a-going to see the Matron. And then I’m a-going to take you home. See?’
The baby made no sound. Doctor reckons she’s simple, said Bea in Violet’s head.
Taking you home with me anyway, thought Violet. Maybe not today, but soon as I can.
She remembered the curious sensation
she herself had had in St George’s Silkhampton, that all would be clear to her if she let herself alone, let her mind clarify. She felt sure now that this was a divine message she had been meant to understand. That the child looked like Ruth was not a snare, but a signal. This was what she was meant to do, her duty, her delight.
Violet smiled at the strange-coloured baby, now her own, she was certain, by God’s dear grace.
The child said nothing, and did not smile back, but drowsily turned her head, and hid her face against Violet’s neck.
3
The Matron was puzzled, but asked few questions. It was hardly her place to hang on to a child someone was ready to give a home to. Especially a child so deeply unpromising.
‘She ain’t even British – have you really thought about this, Mrs Dimond? Neighbours’ll have a deal to say. There’s other little girls be less trouble. No? Sure, now?’
But mere weeks after Violet’s first trip to the Home, she was walking down the gravel path the other way, the baby in her arms, on her way to Bea’s house in the village down by the harbour.
Bea had married a fisherman, who had done very well for himself before being carried off by a certain winter storm. He had left Bea with the leasehold of a snug cottage right against the harbour wall, and she rented it out for the winter to her nephew, also a fisherman. Every April though the nephew and his family decamped to a less tidy cottage two miles inland, and then – like many of the other houses in the village – the place was let at a very different rate to a range of people with money to burn, artists mostly, who sat yapping about the light for weeks on end, painting pictures set up on easels all over the village, along the harbour wall and at various vantage points on the lane that climbed up to the clifftop. One or two of Bea’s guests had taken it upon themselves to paint their pictures on the inside of the cottage walls too, though so far there’d been nothing, said Bea, that a good bucket of whitewash couldn’t put right.
This was mid April; Bea had put off her first summer tenants for a week, so that Violet and the baby might take a little healthful sea air. The lane was fairly dry and easy underfoot, and quiet, apart from the birdsong. Larks rose in almost every field as they passed.
The Midwife's Daughter Page 4