The Midwife's Daughter

by Patricia Ferguson

  All the while Mr Pyncheon played the piano, butterfly light and waltzing for the garden party, swiftly military when soldiers appeared, and so cleverly that the soldiers seemed to march in time. Then the screen went black, for a moment, and words appeared:

  ‘Cowes Week!’ whispered Lily, and giggled, amidst other mutterings from elsewhere in the audience. ‘Come again?’

  Grace shrugged, hardly bothering to register her own puzzlement, but the film soon turned out to be nothing to do with cows at all, but with boats, and people in white hopping in and out of them, with other splendid views of the seaside, and not all pebbles and rock like the stretch beyond the harbour at Porthkerris at low tide, but a huge clean beach of bright sand, with ladies almost as lovely as the King’s friends sitting upon it beneath enormous umbrellas, their children jumping in and out of the shallow foamy water. There were little beach huts, and flags blowing in the breeze, and donkeys, and all the while the music sang blow the man down sea shanties, and Grace was there, at this seaside place she had never even imagined, almost able to smell the sea and hear the waves turning.

  Then there was another film, a little story about a man whose wife insisted he helped with the spring cleaning instead of going out to play tennis, and who messed everything up so much, knocking over buckets and breaking windows, that at last his wife begged him to go and play tennis after all. The music was very bouncy so you could tell the story was meant to be funny, though somehow it was not: hardly anyone laughed at all.

  Lily was vexed. ‘Much better last time,’ she said loudly, when the lights came up. ‘That was daft, that was.’ But Grace could hardly speak at all for wonder. She had visited the royal garden, she had floated there, seeing but unseen, and outside, in the ordinary daylight at once dull and glaring, she still felt some of that glorious abstraction.

  You sat in the dark, and then became part of whatever was on the screen: it was a double invisibility, both real and make-believe. In the Picture Palace you could disappear twice over. It was the safest place of all.

  ‘When can we come again?’ said Grace.

  Violet put up a bit of a struggle. News from London was one thing, stories might well be some licentious or immoral other. Especially if they came from America.

  ‘But it’s Miss Pyncheon, Ma, in the tithe barn! She ain’t going to show nothing dirty, is she? Honest – where’s the harm?’

  ‘In idleness,’ said Violet, ‘sat there in the dark.’ But she could remember broadly similar arguments with her son Bobby years ago, about beer money and football. She’d had more energy in those days. And then her dear boy had turned into a man and disappeared almost as if he had never been. Looking back now it seemed to Violet as if those years had passed in days.

  ‘Waste a money,’ she said, but her heart wasn’t in it.

  Grace was old enough to know that it was best not to bring up the subject of her Aunt Bea. But it was hard not to, when she thought how much Bea would enjoy the Picture Palace. How she would love to see the ladies’ dresses, as fine, or finer, than those of the Redwood ladies long ago, when Bea had been their own maid! She risked it:

  ‘I write and tell Aunt Bea about it? The cinema, I mean – maybe she’ll come and visit, we could all go!’

  Violet folded her lips in a way that meant trouble. ‘She ain’t replied to my last.’

  Grace was allowed neither to defend nor criticize her aunt, which had made for some tricky moments over the years. ‘Ain’t seen her for ages,’ she said at last, her voice and manner entirely neutral. Grace was good at neutral: practised.

  ‘You and me both,’ sniffed Violet, and the conversation was at an end.

  The newsreel had been a disappointment, as usual – since that first time there had hardly been any beautiful dresses at all – but the story afterwards had been thrilling. There had been a terrible moment when she thought the little boy was going to drown right in front of her, and Grace had to hide her eyes. But the faithful dog, despite being so ill-treated, had leapt to the rescue just in time. It was a wonderful relief to join in the applause when the lights came back on, and Mr Pyncheon stood up at the piano, and bowed.

  And it was odd, Grace said as they trailed out of the barn, when you came to think about it, because she couldn’t actually remember him playing anything at all.

  ‘He was though, at it hammer and tongs,’ said Lily, laughing at the violent picture her own words suggested.

  ‘Well, I know. But you know what I mean. You sort of – don’t really listen to him, do you?’

  ‘Funny job. Getting ignored all day.’

  ‘Sounds alright to me,’ said Grace.

  They both sobered. Lily’s mother had arranged work for her, starting the following month, in service at one of the big new-built houses where the perry orchard used to be. Sometimes Lily talked about the electricity and the bathrooms with hot-water taps, and sleeping in a bed all by herself for once. But Grace knew she was afraid.

  ‘At least you ain’t going far,’ she said. Three of Lily’s older sisters were long in service already, and hardly ever had time to visit.

  Grace herself was staying at home. For the present, was how she put it, when anyone asked. For ever, was how she sometimes put it to herself. She could work in a shop perhaps. In Silkhampton. There would be occasional newcomers coming in and staring and asking her the usual stupid questions, and looking taken aback or amused or excited when she sounded local; but mainly everyone hereabouts knew her, knew Violet, and saw her or didn’t, but either way would not startle. Grace hated startling people. Or better still she could work in the back of a shop, hidden altogether, busily doing – something useful, away from all eyes. Factory work no: too many strangers, perhaps rough people. Rough people tended to be open. They Said Things. Service no: same possibilities, smaller scale perhaps, but harder to get away from.

  ‘When I start up my dress shop,’ said Grace, ‘you can come and show the latest.’ She knew this was what the ladies did; Aunt Bea had several times accompanied the young Redwood ladies to places in London where pretty young girls had come in and out wearing all sorts of lovely new dresses, showing the ladies styles of daywear, and tea-gowns, and dinner dresses, and ballgowns, once even nightdresses and underwear!

  ‘I ain’t doing knickers,’ said Lily.

  ‘You’ll have to. I’m the boss. I’ll say, Put them drawers on, Houghton, or you’re sacked.’

  ‘Can’t I do the ballgowns?’

  ‘Maybe. If I’m in the mood. It’s going to be on the square, or just off the north side. Dark green paint, my name in all swirly gold writing.’

  ‘A lovely dress in the window!’

  ‘No no no, that ain’t class: just velvet drapes and a vase of flowers. String of beads maybe.’

  ‘How will folk know it’s a dress shop then?’

  ‘Word a mouth,’ said Grace. ‘Ooh, Lady Snotface, what a charming costume! Makes you look less like a baboon than normal – where’d you get it?’

  ‘Why, Mrs Ratbag, ain’t you heard?’ said Lily. ‘All us Snotfaces goes to Gracie Dimond.’

  ‘Ain’t there a waiting list?’

  ‘Only ten years,’ said Lily.

  Round the corner they ran into trouble. Tommy Dando, Art Coachman and Ted Hall, three abreast on the pavement.

  Grace only saw Tommy.

  ‘You bin to the pictures.’ That was Ted Hall.

  ‘You should know,’ said Lily to him sweetly.

  ‘I seen that dog one sixteen times,’ Ted admitted.

  ‘But he still cries at the end,’ said Tommy.

  ‘No, I don’t!’

  ‘Every time!’

  ‘I do not!’

  ‘Where you off to, girls?’ That was Art Coachman: Linda’s brother, buck teeth.

  ‘Never you mind,’ said Lily, linking arms with Grace. The sun was warm, the day was lazy, late afternoon. The light on the pavement was golden. Grace stood in the shade of the striped canvas outside Fuller’s Shoes, Lily beside
her, in the sun.

  ‘Come on a picnic,’ said Tommy Dando. ‘We’re going to the river.’

  The other boys glanced at him, very quickly, but Grace saw. An instant plan, then.

  ‘Not likely,’ said Lily. ‘All muck and cowpats anyway.’

  ‘Not the place I know,’ said Tommy. ‘Is it lads? Place you can paddle. Show us your ankles,’ he added encouragingly.

  Lily did not reply; she gave a little squeak as of outrage, grabbed Grace’s hand, gave her a tug. Together they dodged round the boys and ran.

  ‘Ladies! Perfectly civil invitation!’ Tommy bellowed after them, as they tore along the pavement, breathless with joyful indignation. Ankles indeed!

  ‘He’s got his eye on you,’ said Lily later, when they had calmed down. They were sitting on one of the low walls around the strawberry field, where the lines of white-green berries lay neatly on their thick straw beds.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Grace vehemently.

  What did Grace know about Tommy? She thought she knew a great deal. His full name, his parents, where he lived. His easy place at the top of the class, his handwriting, his husky voice reading the lesson sometimes in Assembly. More, closer, his particular smell, snuffed many times over the years, the shape of his hands, his straight eyebrows, so dark despite the fairness of his hair, his bright blue eyes. The way his shirt fell over his chest, the hardness of his wrists, the down on his forearm. His smooth cheek, pink as any pretty girl’s. The casual swagger of his long legs.

  Grace had not actually spoken to Tommy directly for years; not since the day Mr Billy had taken them both to the ballroom at Wooton, and showed them Barty Small and the Lady. They had been in the same room often since then, the same halls, the same Picture Palace, the same church, and for some time Grace had often been flamingly aware of him, careful to note his whereabouts, marking him out, so that she safely could turn away and pretend not to have seen him at all.

  Nor had Tommy tried to speak to her; even today he had turned to Lily.

  ‘Why d’you say that?’ Grace asked now, to get Lily to say more.

  But Lily only shrugged.

  ‘Reckon it’s you he likes,’ said Grace, still trying.

  ‘Don’t talk daft,’ said Lily.

  Grace instantly began to worry that what she had said almost in jest – that Tommy liked Lily – was actually true. This was somehow rather enjoyable, a manufactured anxiety, as unlikely in its yearning unsettling way as the dress shop with Grace Dimond over the door in gold lettering: both dreams of a future full of drama, and wild success, and love, and loss.

  Life’s not like that, said Violet’s voice in Grace’s head, Life is duty.

  But then there was always Aunt Bea in Grace’s head too, muttering something a little different. More on the lines of: What’s duty but scouring and cookery! Stay away from all that, Gracie my love!

  ‘Got any money?’ said Lily. ‘We could go home past the chip shop.’

  ‘Got sixpence,’ said Grace; so they did.

  Sometimes she thought vividly of escape. Not of her own, but of Barty Small’s, the brown boy in the picture at Wooton Hall.

  When he was this age … I bet when he was my age … when he was rising fourteen …

  At night, sleepless beside Violet, Grace pictured Barty Small grown up, Barty not-Small enough now for the white-haired lady’s caresses. Barty Small rising as a distant clock struck one, getting out of his bed fully dressed and ready, his buckled olden-times shoes wrapped in a cloth beneath his arm as he crept in his socks down all the back flights of stairs from the attic where the servants slept, perhaps to the kitchen to take a bit of bread, something set out ready for the servants’ breakfast … everything dark and quiet, the house dogs there raising their heads, standing up hopefully, stretching as Barty softly draws the bolts on the kitchen door, and trying to nose their way outside to go with him, but No, home, stay home, he tells them, giving their silken heads one last stroke, and closes the door silently on their whines, knowing he will never see them again. Never see anyone here again!

  Grace in her bed walks him down the long gravelled drive in the moonlight, a few coins in his pocket, bread and bacon wrapped in the cloth that had held his shoes. He is running away to join the navy, he is running away to sea. He tramps along the starlit summery lane the three miles to Silkhampton, and the whole town is dark and asleep, not even gas light then, not so much as a candle lighting the square, but he passes right along past Market Buildings, outside this very window, and Grace sees him so vividly, she feels sure that what she is imagining must simply be the truth, that it really happened just like that, because of the connection only she and Barty share. She knows that for a moment he paused outside her window, just feet away, standing quite still in the moonlight, as if aware of her, the girl in the future, the one like him.

  Then he turns, and walks on into the darkness towards the coast road.

  That’s what you can do if you’re a man, thought Grace. You can run away. You can take a chance. Did Barty find his own people again? Did he know their names? If he found them, how could he bear it that he had become so foreign to them, and they to him?

  And the fact is, thought Grace, everyone who looks like me is a stranger to me. Even if I wanted to take a chance, leave everyone and everything I know, even if I were brave enough to run away, there is nowhere on this earth that I could run to. I would only ever find strangers. Only ever be one.

  Grace turning her face into her pillow, and allowing herself for the moment to despair. Violet all the while breathing softly, fast asleep beside her.

  12

  The following year he sent her a valentine. Well, someone did.

  ‘Who’s that from?’ said Violet at breakfast.

  Grace handed the card over.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t know, it ain’t signed.’

  ‘No need for that tone,’ said Violet, holding the card at arm’s length. Grace thought that there was every need: Violet was often so vexing these days. Sometimes just the sound of her breathing was enough to make Grace long to leave the room, to flounce off, but there was nowhere to flounce to, unless she went to bed. There was no getting away from Violet for long.

  ‘What tone? I dint ask for it – how come it’s my fault?’

  ‘I dint say anything was your fault. I just asked who it was from, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s a valentine card!’ Grace cried. ‘How should I know?’

  Violet looked at her daughter, and sighed.

  ‘Have it back please,’ said Grace, quiet with fury, and she reached across the table and almost snatched it; she was suddenly certain that the card had come from someone insulting, someone whose merest glance was insupportable – sly Timothy Bineham, or Cliff Petty clumping along on his giant boot, dim dreadful boys who would class themselves with her, with smart clever comely Grace Dimond, and all because –

  ‘You ain’t finished your porridge.’

  ‘Don’t want it,’ cried Grace, and banged the door behind her, her coat unbuttoned, her hat on anyhow, her gloves still in her hand. She ran through the garden, out into the back lane, and along it to the street behind the square, where she had played so often as a child. Her own quick footsteps, her neat little iron-clipped heels on the pavement, calmed her, they sounded so grown-up.

  She reminded herself soothingly that she was going to work.

  The wool-shop job was Violet’s doing. Years before, she had attended Mrs Ticknell, delivered her of a healthy male child, and then to the surprise of all present sent urgently for Dr Summers, and stayed calm, even unsurprised, when three minutes later instead of the afterbirth a small pair of feet had suddenly descended between the new mother’s parted legs: he was a footling breech, as Dr Summers had explained afterwards.

  Well before the doctor arrived though Violet had turned Mrs Ticknell about, sitting her on the edge of the bed, and sat herself down facing her as the second twin – another boy – descended slowly over t
he side of the mattress, his legs, little bum, his back, one bent arm, the other, each shoulder, gently holding him, carefully freeing up the cord with one quick hand, until the baby hung there by his neck, nape showing. Then she let go; her hands hovered, but she let him hang, while Mrs Ticknell screamed, and her mother hid her eyes.

  ‘He’s got to come slowly,’ cried Violet, and then she took the baby firmly by his two heels, and swung him upwards, his back to his mother’s front, and held him there upside down, some of his little face now showing – chin, nose, puffy closed lids – until by degrees the whole of his head at last slipped free, and he took his first breath, gave one long wail just as Dr Summers arrived downstairs, pinked, and opened his eyes: Gerry Ticknell, Jim’s younger brother, the two of them as dear a pair of cheerful boys, said Mrs Ticknell, as ever warmed their mother’s heart.

  ‘I hear you got a place for a girl,’ said Violet over the wool-shop counter two decades later, and Mrs Ticknell, what with one thing and another, could only agree, that yes, she had, and that yes, she’d heard young Grace was that clever with her needle; so yes, why not, a trial, perhaps; six months, maybe; see if it suits – both ways, mind, Mrs Dimond, both ways?

  Ticknell’s Wool Shop suited Grace very well.

  Besides wool the shop dealt in every possible embroidery and fine-sewing requisite; its clientele were thus not only local and on the whole well-heeled, but feminine. Men were rare, strangers more so. The atmosphere, the smell of cleanly new wool, was busy but tranquil. Here was a place, anyone opening the shop door might feel, where the quiet purpose of everyday making and mending had its true importance recognized. The darning or knitting or sewing in your lap was part of the business of being a woman; it had the ordinary dignity of work.