Whited sepulchre, thought Violet with pleasurable scorn, for she had never had much time for vicars in the first place.
Dr Summers was a different matter. Would he busy himself bending to the mean silliness of others? Would he ask her the usual nosey-parkering questions? It was painful to think that he might. He was more important to her than Mr Godolphin; for one thing, he was her bread and butter. They had (as Violet put it) been working together now for upwards of thirty years.
Dr Summers took on the ladies, or at least, any woman who could meet his full private obstetrical fee. For the less well-off but provident there were trades unions and savings clubs and local insurance schemes, backed up by the Council, while the poorest of all, the improvident, the destitute, who hadn’t so much as a spare ha’penny to pay anyone anything at all, let alone any savings, relied on his charity, and on that of the hospital he visited.
The fact was that Dr Summers attended only the childbeds of those who directly paid him his full fee. He generally stayed away completely from all the others, who were then charged a much lower fee in order to keep him and his expensive qualifications safe in bed at night, though if anything seemed to be going wrong, of course, Mrs Dimond was free to call him; that was their arrangement.
Dr Summers did the paperwork, and collected the much lower fees; Mrs Dimond did the deliveries, and was paid whatever the household could manage, a sum that varied from several shillings to nothing at all, or goods in lieu, some useful bit of carpentry or boot-repair or basketful of plums. None of this seemed at all unfair to Violet: Dr Summers was the one with all the learning, and though she had called him rarely over the years he had always come promptly. More than once he had taken a woman into the cottage hospital, and delivered a living child when Violet had thought all was lost; she had watched him insert his forceps, and knew that he had a gentle hand, that matched his gentle manner.
‘Well, now, what have we here?’ Dr Summers got up from behind his desk, and walked round it to meet them. ‘We meet at last, hello, young lady. I’ve heard all about you!’
‘This is her; this is Grace. Doing well, sir, thank you; but I was thinking maybe you’d take a quick look at her, sir, if you’d be so good.’
He was a faded man, once gingery, now a rusted brown.
‘Do sit down then, Mrs Dimond, will you, and take her on your lap, that’s it, now then, Miss Grace, if I might have a quick listen to your lungs, young lady, if you please, just pull the blouse up a little, will you, Mrs Dimond, good, deep breath now … thank you … good. Cough pretty well settled now? Yes?’
When he had finished examining Grace he leant back against his desk.
‘I did write to my colleague, you remember, Dr Jefferson, who saw her in Exeter. But I’m afraid there are no further details to give you. I gather the lodging house was down by the docks there, and that the woman involved – the, ah, you know the one I mean – was in employment, you know, fish-packing, that sort of thing. There doesn’t seem to have been any husband on the scene. No papers of any kind, I’m afraid. Nothing to go on at all.’
‘She ain’t got no certificates,’ said Violet, who was in fact unsure how much certificates mattered. She had few herself; but then she wasn’t just starting out in life.
‘Well – how old do you think she is?’
‘I’m seven,’ said Grace suddenly, and the grown-ups laughed.
‘That’s our door number, Gracie! What do you think, Doctor?’
‘How many teeth have we got, Mrs Dimond? Open up, please, Miss Gracie, that’s it, wide as wide, show me your breakfast … ah … let’s say, two and three-quarters, and it’s what, June, so that’s, well, that’s somewhere in September, 1900. The turn of the century, no less. She can have my birthday if you like – that’s the ninth. What d’you say, Miss Gracie, shall we share birthdays?’
It occurred to Violet when she was home again that he had not mentioned Grace’s colour at all; nor had he refrained from mentioning it, as if out of politeness, as some so clearly did, which was often just as awkward. He had behaved as if there had been nothing unusual to notice or pretend not to notice; just seen another little girl.
Violet marked him up.
6
Bea arrived, uninvited, for a visit. She brought with her a pillowcase stuffed with old skirt lengths, and was weighed down on the other side by her sewing-machine.
‘You needn’t a bothered,’ said Violet stiffly, seeing it. ‘I run her up a coupla dresses.’
‘So I see,’ said Bea.
It was typical of Bea, thought Violet, that the only thing she had always taken seriously was frocks.
‘I ain’t run up a dress in my life,’ said Bea, ‘and I ain’t starting now.’ She had a proper tape measure, and real French chalk, and cut out a paper pattern from newspaper, and held it up against Grace’s back, and made no end of fuss, thought Violet. Neglects her own mending, but if there’s ever a chance of something showy –
‘She’ll grow into this, come winter,’ said Bea. The coat was to be of a soft dark blue plaid, with a matching muff on a length of silken cord, to go about her neck.
‘Look at this, for the lining! Sky blue!’
‘I’d a thought you’d have enough a sewing,’ said Violet, ‘all them poor tykes.’
‘Nice change get away from grey flannel,’ said Bea, sucking thread. ‘Make something proper, like. Here,’ she said to Grace, ‘you have a look at these!’ and she took up her button-tin, gave it a rattle, and held it out for her.
Violet felt all her most ancient fears rise within her: sitting there at her own table by her own window, enticing her own child, was another, who was still, somehow, herself. The familiar suspicion that she was outside her own body looking at herself came back to her, unnerving as ever, and with it the old anxiety that her sister was not only another version of her self, but a better, more successful one. Why, folk had always liked Beatrice more than they had liked Violet, straight off, from when they were the size Grace was now, even their mother had favoured her! Bea always laughing and shouting and carrying on, blowing her own trumpet, making sure she always came first, you could be sure of that!
‘I ain’t stopping long,’ said Bea, sidelong from the sewing machine.
As if wearing her face wasn’t bad enough, Bea must listen in to her thoughts as well! For a moment Violet was tempted to rush over and commit the old strange act of slapping her own cheek; at which Bea let go the little wheel, and sat back, and looked straight up at her.
Violet heard the thought as if it had been spoken: We’re past all that. She nodded slightly, to show that she had understood. Then Bea turned back to her sewing, and Violet, ashamed, went out to her onion bed to dig herself into a better frame of mind.
The truth was that Bea had seen the world, and Violet had not. Violet had stayed in the town where she was born and worked hard, and tried to live a sober God-fearing life; and yet these solid virtues always seemed diminished in the presence of Beatrice.
Bea had never really been interested in learning their mother’s skills. At first, growing up, they had fought to accompany her, taking it in strict turns to carry the special bag, sit up all night with some labouring woman’s older children, go in at last to help with the delivery, to watch and remember.
But: ‘You go,’ said Bea one night, when it was certainly her turn. She’d rather finish trimming her new petticoat, she said; and that was that. They were thirteen. ‘I ain’t cut out for it,’ she said later. ‘I ain’t got the patience, all that blessed waiting about. And I’d as soon touch a toad as another dead Christian.’
And yet their mother had not reproached her, had helped instead to find her other work, first in kitchen service at the vicarage, where she had complained a great deal about having to get up at five, and then as an under-housemaid over at Wooton Hall, where her skilled refurbishment of an outworn dress given to her by the housekeeper attracted first the attention of one of the growing daughters of the house, and then of t
he lady; a year or two later, installed as the daughters’ own maid, Bea went with the family to London for the winter, and lived there, and saw London town, and helped the young ladies get ready for all sorts of parties and balls, and sat up at nights sewing and tearing apart and re-sewing and cutting and basting.
Nearly three years of this adventure; she was carried abroad, even, visiting Paris, and staying with Miss Daphne and her cousin at Nice. She had been there when their mother died suddenly, of heart disease.
Then there had been some falling-out with the young ladies, the nature of which Violet had never discovered, but Bea had come back to England too late for the funeral, announced that she had had more than enough of service and fancied a bit of a change, and taken a job Violet hated to remember even now, serving drink to all sorts of men, in a public bar, of all places, a haunt of low sin and wickedness, though she had, naturally, soon had the luck to encounter handsome Bert Givens there, and he had turned out steady enough, for all his blue eyes.
Of course it was a shame that none of their babies had lived beyond a few days. But Bea had turned her hand elsewhere, taken on the old four-ale Red Lion just up from the harbour, and by slow degrees extended the licence, modernized the kitchen, made a new separate entrance for the refurbished saloon bar, turned upper storerooms one by one into bedrooms, all (thought Violet) pretty enough in their slapdash finery, and finally advertised the Red Lion Hotel – Sea Views, Every Modern Convenience – in several London newspapers. Then the place was full, from May to November, while less-well-heeled locals were made welcome all year round in the tap, and Bea by some accounts had made a fortune, which accounted for the lease on the cottage by the harbour wall.
But it had accounted too, some said, for the fine and, as it turned out, under-insured new boat that had drowned Bert Givens along with his three-man crew, so (almost-thought Violet, for such ideas were too mean and self-serving to be fully aware of) much of the pain of Bea’s worldly success had been pretty well cancelled out.
A lifetime of balancing, thought Violet now, almost consciously, as she hauled up the shovel, first Bea wins, then I do, then she does, and all the time I’m working out who has won, and who has lost, and her thought was right that she sent me, we are past all that, she is past all that, and I must try to be past all that too, for Grace’s sake, and for my own soul’s sake, Amen.
Here her thoughts surfaced, and presently Violet prayed aloud under her breath as she turned the crumbly earth, begging for forgiveness and for the strength to rise above her own smallnesses and jealousy.
When she went in again though, to see about some dinner, Bea had Grace on her lap, letting her turn the handle of the sewing machine. It gave Violet a fearful pang; it was instantly obvious to her that she could never hope to compete, that Grace would remember Bea now, and ask when she was coming again, and talk longingly about her, and miss her. It was a second or two before Violet could see the sewing machine as a divine test she was already in danger of failing.
Help me, Lord, thought Violet, and went to put the kettle on without another word.
The following week Violet took Grace to the market, Gracie wearing one of the dresses Bea had made for her, a dark blue cotton with a little red and white gingham at the collar and cuffs, and looking, Violet thought, as pretty as a picture, though she had not of course said so, for fear of making the child vain; especially as Gracie was clearly tremendously proud of herself in this dress, and looked about her with a conscious turn of the head, all ready to be admired, it seemed to Violet.
Many in Silkhampton had met Grace now, and no longer started at the sight of her. Some petted her in a sort of luxurious sorrow, as if saddened by the thought that there was nothing to be done about so much unwonted darkness; some merely petted her; others crossed the street to avoid her. There were several, Violet had noticed, who were always somehow on the other side of the street. A few, waiting to be served in a shop, suddenly remembered something, and dashed away should Violet and Grace arrive to stand behind them; some remembered the something when they had just arrived themselves, and saw Violet already in the queue, her foster daughter at her side.
It is not all malice, Violet told herself, it is mainly unease at novelty, and this she went on firmly believing, until such times as malice was made unmistakeable.
‘Some folk don’t know how to behave,’ she told Gracie, when she thought there was at least a chance that the child had understood some fresh slight shown her. ‘Some folk ain’t got no more sense than they was born with, and more shame to them.’
Mrs Warburton, for example. Passing the stone pillars of the George and Dragon’s portico, they had come upon a group of mothers talking with their little ones, and as they squeezed by Violet had seen one of the women tug at her own daughter’s skirt, to move her well away from Grace, lest even their clothes touch. The tug was deliberate, showy; for Violet to see, as much as for the little girl herself. Here, Violet was forced to admit, was malice proper. She made it her business to look into that mother’s face, and was not surprised to find that it was that poor drab Jessie Warburton, whose children she had delivered, and whose husband drank his wages.
‘Something bothering you, Mrs Warburton?’
A hesitation; taken aback. But Mrs Warburton clearly felt that right was on her side.
‘Why yes, there is. What’s that dirty thing doing here, you answer me that!’ She grinned a little as she spoke, as if she took a nervous pleasure in her own daring.
‘What dirty thing is this?’ Violet kept her voice low and cool and steady, her delivery-voice, deep with authority. With all her power she willed Mrs Warburton to fear her.
‘That, that dirty black,’ muttered Mrs Warburton.
Violet left a pause. She felt others around her in the little crowd waiting for her to speak. They were waiting, she thought, to decide which side to be on.
‘My daughter’s clean as any little girl here,’ said Violet mildly. ‘This is just another child, Mrs Warburton, and of such is the kingdom of heaven.’
Mrs Warburton’s pale lips folded in at this. What could anyone say, against the Word itself?
‘And thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, Mrs Warburton; that’s a very hard one, for some.’ At this Violet looked up, and caught the eye of Mrs Warburton’s actual next-door neighbour Maryann Harvey, one of those standing by, and slightly raised her eyebrows. This drew a laugh, for everyone knew the Warburtons were a noisy lot, what with all the drunken shouting and carryings-on.
‘Morning, Mrs Harvey. That your young Phoebe?’ Now Violet simply ignored Mrs Warburton, turned aside from her. She had delivered Phoebe, of course, and a tricky feat it had been, for the baby had been a full month early, and not ready to suck. Violet had shown her how to feed the child drop by drop from a spoon. There was Phoebe, dear little thing, clearly the apple of her mother’s eye. Would Phoebe’s grateful mother stand by while the Warburton talked of dirtiness?
‘That’s my girl,’ said Mrs Harvey, and turned too, shutting Mrs Warburton out. ‘Say hello to Mrs Dimond, Phoebe, as saved your life! And who’s this, what a pretty dress, is this Grace?’
Yes; this was grace indeed, thought Violet. If it was a little shameful to drag Him into a street argument, to indulge in religiose theatricals, how the crowd all about had heard her words, and swung towards the light! This was heaven’s grace, thought Violet, that had once again swiftly lent her Bea’s own wit, to banish sin where it stood.
They took their shopping home in equable silence. Grace adored her new little basket, a miniature version of Violet’s; she had insisted Violet put some shopping in it, and with tremendous ceremony was carrying home a reel of cotton, two needles, and a pink sugar mouse in a paper bag. Violet carried everything else, but with a light heart. Every now and then she smiled down at the child’s proud delight.
It had never before occurred to her that Divine grace might be playful.
7
The visitor came on a Tuesday after
noon, just as she had settled Grace for a nap, as the child was fretful and a little feverish; Violet was waiting for the last set of pies and meanwhile taking her mop to the kitchen floor, where she had spilt flour, when she heard the rap on her front door.
No one usually knocked there or waited for the door to be opened, so the visitor had been kept standing on the pavement for a while, since she had taken no notice of Violet calling ’twas open, but just gone on knocking until Violet had at length set the mop down and gone to open the door.
It was Mrs Thornby, the lady whose great feathered hat had so fascinated Gracie.
‘Mrs Dimond, good afternoon. May I come in, please?’
Violet was too surprised to speak. She had seen Mrs Thornby often, of course, glimpsed in passing many times over the years, carrying a smart little shopping basket about in the High Street or the market, in the pew the family always used at church, with other grand ladies in the old tithe barn at Christmas time, and at fetes in summer; but hardly to speak to, yet here she was, asking to come in! Still speechless Violet stood back, so that there was room for her visitor to enter.
‘Thank you,’ said Mrs Thornby. Thenk you.
Her hat today was less splendid, though it was still large, and trimmed with much intricately folded netting. It sat very neatly on her hair, which was teased out in some way as if to accommodate its breadth. She also wore a tightly fitting blue cotton jacket trimmed with darker blue velvet ribbon, and a dark green skirt with a flounce on it, trimmed with the same velvet. To Violet she was all perfumed magnificence, which would have surprised Mrs Thornby, as that lady was on purpose for this visit wearing her oldest clothes, and had been feeling quite self-conscious standing on the pavement outside in case anyone she knew saw her there in such shabbiness.
‘May I sit down?’
Violet had absolutely no turn of phrase to deal with this unprecedented situation. By and large few crossed her threshold. Callers stood upon the doorstep, and conversed there if need be. She met her own friends and family connections at church, at the Bible group, or at the market; she chatted in the street sometimes. But her circle did not practise any sort of casual dropping-in. They saw virtue in keeping themselves to themselves. Despite her own unrivalled access to other people’s households – over the years there were few of the poorer streets she had not entered – Violet kept so unthinkingly to this code of privacy that she had never once revealed to anyone any detail of her patients’ domestic arrangements, no matter how inadequate these might be. This was not exactly discretion; more that it had not even occurred to her that there was anything to be discreet about.
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