For she was Mrs Dimond, the parish’s best handywoman. There were several others, of course, in a place the size of Silkhampton, but everyone knew that Ma Higden, though competent, was sometimes the worse for drink, and that Mrs Trewith’s legs were so bad that she could manage only her closer neighbours.
But by now anyone in Silkhampton of the poorer class, aged thirty-five or under, stood a fair chance of having been seen into the world by Violet Dimond. On any street at any one time there might be two or three people she had once wrapped in flannel warmed at her bosom; most often these days she attended the childbeds of women she had herself delivered. Sometimes all the children gathered together for a summer’s evening play out on the street were Violet’s, though most local children tended to fall silent at the sight of her.
She was Mrs Dimond, urgently sent for in the middle of the night, ready to practise the arcane behind closed doors, in possession of the grisliest secrets of the hidden adult world; sent for, sometimes, in resignation, in grief; for apart from the unspoken horrors of birth, Mrs Dimond was also the woman you went to after a death. Everyone knew she made no charge for laying-out. So far there had been several whose first and last human touch had been from Violet Dimond’s practised hands.
In short Violet had status in Silkhampton, even a mystique, so the first journey back from the station carrying Grace in her arms was an unpleasant surprise. Though it was the time of day when honest folk were working, a large number of idlers seemed to throng the meaner streets about the railway yard, hanging about on corners and leaning out of windows the better to stare at her as she passed. The sudden smack of these hard glances reminded her uncomfortably of the long-ago ribald young men; one or two were clearly minded to break off whatever they had been doing and follow after her for another look. A set of shrill and dirty little boys who should have been at school set off after her as well, two of them racing ahead to get in front of her, and bobbing along backwards in the road. She was spoken to without ceremony, even rudely:
‘What you got there, Missus?’
‘That a darkie? That’s a darkie, ain’t it? Where d’you get’un?’
‘Hey, Mrs Dimond!’
Violet made no reply, though she treated one particularly noisy and importunate urchin to a brief pale-grey basilisk stare of her own, after which he slunk away. Don’t hurry, said the inner voice she had heard before, when first arriving at Bea’s village. Don’t hurry, and don’t look down.
It was hard to say what sort of luck it was that Gracie chose this moment to awake. The long walk up the hill to the station had exhausted her, and she had fallen deeply asleep as soon as the train was fairly started. Now she wriggled in Violet’s arms, pulled herself upright and peeped over Violet’s shoulder at the dirty little boys, at the dozen or so folk ambling along in the mud of the street behind her.
There was an immediate response, a quick increase in crowd-noise, a leap of satisfaction, as if by looking back at them Grace had somehow performed. Violet held her all the tighter, and walked on without looking back. The temper of the crowd, she told herself, was not necessarily malevolent; they had just been seizing on something new to look at. Though of course such neutrality might change on an instant. It would be her task, she thought, to work out beforehand why such an instant might arise.
The gathering fell back as Violet left the rougher streets behind. Now there were just passers-by startling, taking second glances, and elbowing one another.
‘Missus,’ said someone, touching his hat. He stopped, and so did Violet. Mr Crowhurst, who worked in Fuller’s shoe shop. Cobbler, and father of two, one very recent; both Mrs Dimond’s.
Violet nodded, a little taken aback. He would never normally stop her in the street. ‘Morning, Mr Crowhurst. Mrs Crowhurst well?’
Mr Crowhurst was quite a young man, his face pale and greasy beneath his hard round hat. He made her no answer, but cried, ‘Well I never! What you got there?’ his tone jocose, familiar.
Violet paused, to let him know what she thought of him.
‘This here’s Gracie, from the orphanage,’ she said coolly, ‘come to stay with me for a bit.’ The last few words gave her a slight pang, for she knew they were a lie. But it had occurred to her that a certain vagueness, where Grace was concerned, might be all to the good. If folk assumed she was here only temporarily, they would be less inclined to fuss, and by the time they knew she was here to stay, why, they might not bother to at all. The lie was giving them time to behave themselves.
‘Well well,’ said Mr Crowhurst now, abashed, and stumbling a little over his words, ‘I’ll bid you good day then, Missus.’ He made off, but Violet was almost immediately stopped again.
‘Good morning, Mrs Dimond, and oh my goodness me, what’s this?’
‘This here is Grace, as I’m taking in for a little while. Say hello, Gracie, to Mrs Thornby.’
Eleanor Thornby was not local, but had come from the next county as a girl, and married Ned Thornby in the days when Thornby’s on the square had been a perfectly serviceable draper’s. Now Thornby & Son had expanded next door, and on to upper floors, and begun calling itself a department store. Over the years Mrs Thornby too had acquired a certain double-fronted splendour. She was active on several local Ladies’ Committees, with the likes of Mrs Caterham, or Mrs Grant-Fellowes; was known to have taken tea at Wooton Hall. Her children, of course, were not Mrs Dimond’s, but had been delivered in the nursing home, by Dr Summers himself.
‘D’you talk?’ said Mrs Thornby now, to Grace, who made no reply, except to look soberly back at her. ‘What big eyes!’ said Mrs Thornby, ‘though I suppose they always do look big, don’t they! Contrast, you know,’ she told Violet. She turned back to the baby, leant closer: ‘Shy, are we? Eh?’
But the child’s attention was caught, Violet saw too late, by the big curling feather on Mrs Thornby’s great hat, and before Violet could stop her she had reached up and made as if to grab at it. Mrs Thornby stepped back smartly with a little cry.
‘Oh – isn’t it quick!’
Instantly Grace set up a furious wailing, frightened at Violet’s sudden movement, deprived too of the beautiful softness of the feather, which had so called to her hand, begging to be stroked. Violet mouthed her apologies and escaped over the noise. She felt panicky; something in Mrs Thornby’s tone had undone her. There had been nothing tentative about Mrs Thornby; her interest had been so straightforward, so guileless: a good-humoured woman at the zoo, tempted to take a stick and give the exotic creature behind the bars a gentle ladylike prod.
They will get used to her, Violet told herself, as she carried the still-sobbing Grace through the narrow alley, to the safety of her own back door at last.
I will get used to this.
Inside Grace fell silent, and put one finger in her mouth, looking about her. Violet set her down, arms aching.
‘There! This is home, Gracie.’ For a minute or so Violet watched her, standing still in the middle of the room. She thought piercingly of her daughter Ruth, the last little girl to stand just so. There seemed no likeness at all today; strange how fleeting it was, coming and going day by day. Violet remembered Him who had led her this far, and sent up a quick prayer for strength.
‘This here’s the fire, which I must light right off, if we’re to get any dinner. What d’you say to fire, now, Gracie?’
‘Hot!’
‘That’s right. Very hot. You stand right away there, then. That’s a good girl. Just a minute …’
Violet set going the fire she had left ready-laid in the range, realizing as she did so that for the moment there could be no more popping out to the shops on minor errands. Not on her own, anyway. She would have to take Grace too, even to childbeds, and wherever they went – well, it would be non-stop, she thought, for a while.
‘Not that I’m anyone to talk,’ she said to Grace, as she went to find her shopping basket. For hadn’t it taken her a little while herself, to stop seeing the child’s strangeness
?
‘Now then, what am I after?’ Violet asked herself aloud, as usual when she was getting ready to go out; but this time she heard herself, and understood for the first time that she was no longer alone in the house, that from now on there was someone to talk to, someone who would hear and answer. It seemed to her then that despite making an honest living, despite letters from her dear son Bobby, despite church and the bible-reading group and the sewing circle, despite the market and friends and acquaintances in the street, despite all these riches, that without ever knowing it she had been drowning in loneliness for the last fifteen years.
In the front room Grace had clambered on to a chair so that she could look out of the window. ‘Not much to see that way,’ Violet told her. ‘We got the garden t’other side.’ She saw herself taking Grace’s hand and showing her all the different beds and the henhouse and the apple and cherry trees Mr Dimond had so neatly espaliered along the sunniest wall, saw herself teaching her new daughter all she had missed teaching Ruth, and her heart filled with painful happiness.
Grace meanwhile had slid down to turn her attention to the basket, which was a handsome one, fairly new and trimmed with fancy plaiting all around the edge. She bent to put one arm through its long leather handles, but she was so little that when she stood up the basket was still resting on the floor.
Violet laughed, and Grace at once took her arm out of the handles, bent to carefully put it back again, and, with a quick check to make sure Violet was still watching, straightened up again. Once again the basket stayed put. The face she turned to Violet now was all mock bafflement: why, the child was joking with her, Violet saw, trying to make her laugh again; and her near death not four weeks past! She could hardly speak for smiling.
‘Come market day, we’ll see if we can’t find you a basket all for your own, shall we?’
‘Littlun?’ said Grace. ‘Little basket?’
It was her first sentence, first question.
‘That’s right, my lady,’ said Violet, sweeping her up, basket and all. ‘Little basket for a little madam.’ She kissed Grace’s cheek, and they went outside.
5
Over the next few weeks Violet grew very tired indeed of making the same replies to the same questions, put to her over and over again by what seemed to be an infinite number of people, some of them downright strangers. Never you mind, she was sometimes tempted to reply rudely, to some further shameless piece of nosey-parkering. But the inner voice warned her to treat all curiosity as benign.
‘This is Grace. Say How Do to Mrs Gundry …’
To Mrs Warne, to Mr Pender, to Rose Whitely, to deaf old Marjorie Skewes from upstairs.
To the Reverend Mr Godolphin. Who actually came calling, simply opened the back garden gate one morning, and stood there turning his hat in his hands.
‘Why, vicar!’ exclaimed Violet, in surprise. She had been sewing runner beans, much impeded by Grace, to whom she had finally given the smallest trowel, and who was now haphazardly applying it over by last year’s potato patch, where she could do least harm.
Violet stood up, aware of her muddy hands and rough sacking apron, and then of Gracie’s earth-flecked hair and stained pinafore.
Perhaps she made some gesture indicating this; at any rate Mr Godolphin at once spoke, all smiles: ‘Quite alright, quite alright, just passing, thought I’d call upon the young lady I’ve been hearing so much about, and there is the young person, good morning, there!’
Mr Godolphin prided himself on his ability to put his lowlier parishioners at their ease. However, like many local men, gentry or otherwise, he was, though not fully aware of it, a little afraid of Mrs Dimond, afraid and embarrassed: constantly aware at some level of how she earned her living, that she had seen things best left unwitnessed, and that she was actively involved in all kinds of grotesque and dangerous female activities. There was about her too a certain quality of watchfulness, that made him uneasy; and she was less inclined to smile at him than other women.
She was more clearly suspect too, for her Methodistical leanings, the Bible group, the refusal to take Communion; on the other hand she came to church twice every single Sunday, and her unusual authority in the area surely encouraged other less determined souls, thought Mr Godolphin, to keep up their own attendance.
‘Come and say good morning to Mr Godolphin, Gracie! No, not in your mouth, not till we wash your hands! Sorry, Vicar.’
‘Not at all, not at all, charming! Yes … yes.’
His tone, though, held a certain speculative edge.
There was a pause. Had he been an equal, Violet would have spoken: What? What’s the matter? As it was she stood in silence, and waited.
‘Though there have, ah, been comments. Comments made. To me. About the, ah, about our young friend here.’
‘Oh yes?’ Violet’s heart gave a zestful thud of anticipatory anger, though outwardly she went on calmly watching Grace back at work on the hole in last year’s potato patch.
‘Some feel,’ said Mr Godolphin carefully, ‘that Grace is perhaps a little young for St George’s.’
This was nonsense, and they both knew it. Small children came to church and when they yelled were taken out and hushed in the porch, or taken home if there was no help for it; when they were old enough they might attend the Sunday school; but Grace, after sitting in puzzled silence through the first half of her first Sunday morning service, had fallen asleep during the sermon, and made no sound when awoken for the final hymn, a pattern she had luckily repeated the following week.
It was simply a way out; one Violet was not at all ready to take. The words jumped into her mouth: ‘A little young?’ she asked. ‘Or d’you mean a little dark?’
Mr Godolphin bit his lip. ‘I’m afraid there are some who feel,’ he said slowly, ‘that your, ah, charge has no place in St George’s.’
‘Why’s that then?’ said Violet, determined to make him say it, determined that he say the words, so that he himself would hear them on the air, and know how he shamed his cloth.
He was silent. For himself, he had thought Grace utterly delightful. Like many he had never seen a negro person before, not in the flesh. Grace, introduced to him after the first service, had smiled at him, and hidden her face in Mrs Dimond’s skirts, as shy and pretty as any little child he’d seen; but Samuel Pearce, his own verger, and Mrs Restarick, who was so active in church matters and who had personally funded the installation of the radiators, had each separately come to see him in order to explain their misgivings as to the continued presence in St George’s of the ‘unfortunate creature’ (said Mr Pearce) so inexplicably being carted about by that hitherto perfectly worthy Mrs Dimond, who had (‘kindest way of looking at it’, said Mrs Restarick) just gone completely off her head. One or two other rougher parishioners had been more forthright, and asked him indignantly why he was allowing an animal in church, and told him that if he went on doing it they would find a church more fit for clean respectable Christian Englishmen. And women.
‘Well, now,’ said Violet, watching him. It was perhaps a question of numbers, she thought. If he’s had complaints, how many? Is he counting all the ones that stayed silent? Which way would the silent ones go?
‘I thought perhaps we might compromise,’ said Mr Godolphin at last. ‘I wondered if you might consider coming to the earlier service.’
‘Won’t there be folk at the early one, then, who reckon Gracie’s too young?’
The true answer to this was, that there well might be. But it was a small enough congregation at nine in the morning. And all of them happened to be the sort of people Mr Godolphin felt pretty sure of being able to talk round, or even firmly squash, should need arise.
‘And what about Evensong?’ said Violet, before he could come up with a presentable version of this. ‘Are we allowed at Evensong?’
‘My dear Mrs Dimond, please, it’s not a question of allowing, or not allowing –’
Violet’s face said: isn’t it?
�
��It’s simply a matter of trying to do our best in a, in a far from perfect world. I myself welcome your, your charitable act. Applaud it. But –’ and he gave a little entreating shrug, palms spread – ‘we must make allowances – in our hearts, Mrs Dimond – for those as yet unready to do so.’
Why’s that, then?
‘It’s my duty to welcome all to God’s house, to His own house here at St George’s. How can I allow the arrival of one new parishioner to dishearten and displace others?’
Violet folded her arms. They said: coward.
‘And I shall continue to pray, Mrs Dimond, for Grace to receive a proper loving Christian welcome from all our parishioners; I feel sure that time is all that is required; which is why I have come to ask you to consider this – I agree – unusual proposal of mine.’
Inwardly he was running through the usual (again rather thinly sprinkled) Evensong crowd: Mr Pearce once in a blue moon, the Restaricks hardly ever, except at Christmas, of course. The rougher sort never.
‘I think Evensong will be alright,’ he added, and at last fell silent.
Violet raised her eyebrows. They said: think?
‘I should very much like,’ said Mr Godolphin, ‘to see you and Grace at Evensong. Every week.’
Violet nodded. Presently he took his leave, and as he closed the gate behind him she saw that he felt he’d managed the little difficulty rather well. In her heart she marked him down. He was no Good Samaritan; if he’d seen the wounded traveller in the parable, he would have passed on by, oh, regretfully, no doubt, with just that little heave of his shoulders, those spreading helpless palms. Oh, if only I could help you, dear me, what a pity!
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