The Midwife's Daughter

by Patricia Ferguson

  They were very busy for a while. In a coarse sacking apron Grace swept and swabbed the pavement outside, then took a different broom and mop to the wooden floor within. All the wooden surfaces and shelves and glass-fronted cupboards had to be dusted and polished, and a great many lengths of material and other folded items needed to be taken up, shaken and re-folded, in the constant war against moths. The windows needed almost daily attention, inside and out, the rugs had to be beaten, the dried flowers shaken and rearranged, the allurements of sofa and table neatened and re-styled, the embossed metal sides of the cash register given a quick polish; it was often a race to get everything freshly dried and dusted before opening time.

  ‘Have you done the window stuff?’

  Ostrich feathers today, set in one of Mrs Ticknell’s enormous vases, the velvet beneath them scattered with other accoutrements essential to headwear, one or two big velvet roses, a little basket of assorted silk ribbons.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Good girl. Fly cuppa tea?’

  Mrs Ticknell needed tea as much as she needed talk. There was no tea-drinking in the shop, of course; that was unthinkable. But behind the shop, through the stockroom, was Mrs Ticknell’s own kitchen, with a smart enamel gas stove where you could boil a kettle just like that, in two minutes flat, without needing a fire at all.

  Today as she filled the kettle Grace thought to herself, as usual, When I have my own home I will have a gas stove just like this one, but this time quickly felt almost dizzy at the sheer effrontery of the idea that came with it, that this vague future gas-stoved house would not just be her own, but also Tommy Dando’s.

  Oh, my Lord, what a thought!

  Half-laughing aloud at herself she made the tea and ran back to the shop to relieve Mrs Ticknell.

  But he sent me the card!

  While Mrs Ticknell was in the kitchen she took the valentine out of her skirt pocket and unfolded it. She wished she hadn’t done that now, the crease all wonky like that. How could she have ever thought it was Tim Bineham or poor old Cliff? It occurred to her for the first time that Tommy had been there early outside the shop in order to see her, that he had come on purpose, and that if so, he might well be there another day too.

  The card trembled in her hands. Another day he would be prepared, he would speak. He would say something. How would she reply?

  The shop doorbell rang and someone came in. Grace scrabbled the card back into her pocket.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Thornby, what can I do for you?’

  Grace usually felt very awkward with Norah Thornby. Several times over the years, she had seen her mother Violet, on catching sight of Mrs Thornby, draw herself up in a manner that in anyone else might have seemed a bit theatrical, and then turn on her heel, or cross the road. It was no use asking how, of course, but Grace knew that Miss Thornby’s mother had once badly wronged her own.

  And Norah was Guy Thornby’s sister.

  One summer when they were ten, Grace and Lily had played a game of teasing Guy Thornby. He was only in Silkhampton in the school holidays, and was very easy to spot, so neatly dressed, so hilariously posh and weedy, and generally carrying his mother’s parcels for her, or her shopping basket. It had been wonderfully funny to keep him in view, making faces at his back, laughing, darting behind street corners or into shops whenever he looked round, then falling into step behind him as soon as he turned back.

  The following summer they had played it again, in fits of scornful giggles; but the year after that things had changed. Guy Thornby was different, or they were; at any rate, as he left the playing field where they had watched him idly tossing a cricket ball from hand to hand all by himself, he had stopped near the place where Grace and Lily lay hidden, as they thought, in the long grass beside the railway embankment, and given them a friendly little wave.

  After that the game had swiftly altered. He stopped being the object, and joined in, spotting them back. All unspoken, all without any direct contact whatever, new rules developed: you only won if you were first to point your forefinger. Then only if you pointed both at once.

  They spied on him at the church fete, popping out from behind the different stalls, hah! winning three times in a row. He dropped behind his parents on the way home from church, crouched to re-tie his shoelaces, jumped up quickly, hah! He cheated, suddenly leaning out of his father’s motor car as it shot by, hah! Lily hid behind the sandwich board outside the tobacconist’s, jumped out, hah! Grace at dusk outside the tall house in the square, ready to jump out, hah! from behind the lamp post, but spotted instead, and by Mrs Thornby herself, smartly tapping down the stairs towards a waiting taxi, taking Guy’s arm, and saying, casually but still loudly enough for Grace to hear, ‘What’s that grisly creature doing here?’

  Guy not looking round that time.

  Even now Lily still dug Grace in the ribs with her elbow from time to time: Guy Thornby, two rows ahead at the Picture Palace, Guy Thornby on a push bike, look! But Grace remembered his mother’s words, and that if he had deeply blushed he had not looked round, and that she herself was grisly, and a creature, and somehow though the words were hardly the worst she had ever heard they hurt more than she might have expected, and sometimes still did.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Thornby, what can I do for you?’

  Miss Norah Thornby, of course, was a real young lady, of the kind quite unfamiliar with mop or bucket. Though she had for a time attended the Silkhampton Council School (considered perfectly adequate for a daughter, though not of course for the boy), she had left early, in the year of the coronation, sent to a private boarding school for young ladies outside Plymouth.

  Even so, Miss Thornby too had her own reasons for feeling uneasy.

  She had known from an early age that her mother, Mrs Thornby, indefatigable in her charity work, had done all that she could to save the local poor from the revoltingly dirty and untaught likes of Violet Dimond, which made talking to Grace Dimond awkward enough; but further, while Grace had forgotten her earliest school days, Norah remembered everything, had in fact a painful nostalgia for her time at the Council School, for those simple days when she had not known, not even suspected, that she was that unlucky and hopeless thing, a plain girl. And she remembered clearly one especially happy summer dinner hour in the meadow, when the infant Grace had consented to nestle on her own lap, on the bench beneath the damson tree, while they made daisy chains together. Miss Thornby remembered adoring Grace Dimond.

  And now grown-up Grace was so stylish, so very pretty, so composed. So different, of course, from Norah Thornby, who had turned out unfortunately tall and stolid, as Mrs Thornby herself so often sighingly remarked, in private and otherwise.

  Miss Thornby knew that she was meant to look down on Grace, representative of the lower orders, member of an inferior race. But somehow she just couldn’t manage it. Not being able to correctly look down on Grace Dimond was just one of the many things Norah Thornby felt inadequate about.

  I envy her, thought Norah, and was ashamed of herself, not so much for the sin as for committing it about someone so far beneath her; circumstances of such potent and complicated social unease that she could hardly stand up straight, let alone speak normally.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Thornby, what can I do for you?’

  ‘Oh, ah, um –’ said Miss Thornby, and blushed. She was a blusher just like her brother, her freckles frequently disappearing in a blotchy tide of crimson.

  Normally this sort of thing was enough to make Grace stumble a little too, shyness being so infectious. But not today. She had glory within this morning, enough to deal with a dozen Norah Thornbys.

  ‘I think your order come in this morning,’ she said warmly, and she opened the deliveries drawer, flipped through it, brought out the right little packet. ‘Here ’tis – was there anything else, Miss?’

  ‘Um – no, thank you,’ said Miss Thornby.

  ‘Two and six then, please.’ Grace loved Ticknell’s cash register. It had roun
d metal keys, white inlaid with black, like tiny versions of the organ stops in St George’s, spelling out all the possible numbers and coins, some in combination. You firmly pressed the right ones down and in return little ivory tickets popped up in the glass top, spelling out the bill you’d just keyed in, while at the same time the tray below burst itself forcefully open with a great rattle of loose coin. When Grace had first started work she had often forgotten the till tray and it had caught her hard in the stomach, but now she tended to play a little game with it, standing just out of its reach, or neatly stepping sideways at the last moment. Missed me!

  Miss Thornby took her change. ‘Ah, Grace –’ she began, then stopped. Grace, she had half-imagined saying, Gracie, my dear, do you remember, not so long ago, that last school fete, and the folk dancing in the playground, and the Scenes from Shakespeare, Teddy Hall was Henry V, he stood on top of the bicycle sheds, do you remember that? I was there, I was there then!

  ‘Yes, Miss?’

  ‘Nothing, sorry,’ said Miss Thornby, smiling effortfully.

  ‘Who was that?’ said Mrs Ticknell, entering a few minutes later, her hair in proper order and a clean apron on. ‘Oh, her. Brother got all the looks there – he’s joined up, that Guy, did you hear? Off to France.’

  ‘Is he?’ Grace kept forgetting the war. It was so boring. And it had seemed to promise such excitement at first, so many young men standing about shouting on street corners, and people putting flags up, and the old Silkhampton Colliery Band playing military marches on Sunday afternoons. But then it all just fizzled out. Though newsreels at the Picture Palace now tended to feature young recruits practising at rifle ranges, singing round campfires, or lining up for breakfast.

  ‘Only eighteen,’ said Mrs Ticknell.

  This seemed a fair soldierly age to Grace, but she could see she was meant to look serious, and did her best. Poor Lily would be sad; it was clear she still had rather a crush on him, thought Grace, pityingly. As if a gent like Guy Thornby would look at a girl like her! At an under-housemaid! He was a right old sissy anyway, thought Grace, compared to Tommy Dando, who’d make two of him. And Tommy not sixteen yet.

  ‘You go and have your tea now. Just five minutes, mind!’

  13

  It was more than a week before she saw him again. He was coming out of the baker’s just as she went in. He started, she made no sign at all. Still when she came out again she knew he was there. Yes: idling in front of the tobacconist’s, pretending to look at the pipes in the window. She walked towards him, unhurriedly, making it clear she had not seen him, until just as she reached him he turned, touched his hat, and fell into step a little behind her.

  ‘Miss Gracie?’

  She went on walking, and so did he. Her heart hammered. She kept her face averted.

  ‘I’ve got a letter for you. Can I give it to you?’

  Grace hesitated, then briefly turned her eyes to his and felt the warm shock of his returning gaze.

  ‘Alright,’ she said, to the distance.

  He gave her not the envelope she had instantly pictured, but a small folded note, passed quickly from his right hand to her left; then he tipped his hat, turned, and casually made off back in the direction they had come from. The whole thing was over in seconds.

  Grace too walked away as if untroubled. But he must have had the note ready in his pocket. Perhaps he had carried it for days, waiting for the chance to speak to her privately! Oh, what on earth did it say?

  Suppose it wasn’t from him!

  The horrid thought that Tommy was somehow acting as a go-between for someone else – Art Coachman, perhaps, or someone else’s older brother – made it hard to carry on walking home normally, instead of instantly finding out there and then. But an open note in the hand would be so visible. As it was despite all his care there was still a chance someone had seen. That someone might tip Violet the wink. Saw your Gracie this morning, talking to young Tommy Dando, on the street bold as brass! Thought you ought to know, Mrs Dimond. Thought it best to tell.

  She waited until she was home, and sure that Violet was still out at the market, then unfolded it.

  His handwriting. One line of it:

  Dear Grace, I think about you all the time. Tom

  She gave a great gasp, then rushed to the mirror, to see her reflection’s response; it looked back, glittering with joyful amazement. He thinks about me all the time! About me. He thinks about me: all the time.

  Grace had to sit down for trembling, and covered her eyes with her hand. She could hardly breathe for happiness. What a thing to write to her, to trust to her, what a thing to hand over in the street – the openness, the daring!

  Though of course he was handsome Tommy Dando, who never got caught at school, who never got the strap, who could charm his way out of, into, anything. A thought that sounded rather like Violet at her driest; but Grace did not heed it for long.

  There was supper to get started, and various other daily tasks waiting, but for now Grace could do nothing but sit in the armchair by the dying untended fire and give herself up to a delicious inner swooning, that felt somehow constructive, as if it was an achievement in itself: active dreaming.

  So when Violet came in half an hour later Grace was for a moment simply puzzled by her scolding.

  ‘What’s this – you ain’t done nothing at all, you lazy girl!’

  Violet had begun the afternoon with a fairly heated exchange with Rose Whitely, who for years had kept the pie stall in the market, and for whom she was a regular supplier. Mrs Whitely had agreed, out of the kindness of her heart (she at first implied), to move the stall from its usual prime spot to one altogether less favourable, in order to accommodate a friend’s new cheese-selling venture. Violet had quickly discovered that the friend was in fact the woman who ran the dairy in North Street, known to be ruthless in all business matters, and who had simply paid Mrs Whitely to change her pitch.

  Mrs Whitely tried to keep the sum involved a secret, but she was no match for Violet, who was disgusted.

  ‘If you’re going to take a bribe,’ she said, ‘you should at least take a big’un. What was you thinking of? You’re going to lose that much in the first month!’

  Mrs Whitely wrung her knobbly hands. ‘Oh, Mrs Dimond, d’you think so?’

  ‘I do; and what’s more I’m going to lose it too.’

  ‘But I’ve took the money now!’

  ‘You spent it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Give it back to her then. Say you’ve changed your mind.’

  ‘I can’t do that!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just can’t!’

  ‘D’you want me to, then?’

  ‘Oh, Mrs Dimond, would you?’

  ‘Well, if you won’t,’ said Violet. She sounded merely resigned, though within she was alight with pleasurable fury and ready for battle. Spoil my business, would you? Prey on the weak-minded, and then with a mean, no, a cheese-paring bribe?

  So Violet had exchanged a few plain words with the woman in the North Street dairy, set the money down on the counter, and coolly walked out leaving it there, which was all nicely enlivening enough, but as she passed St George’s she was hailed, diffidently, by a woman she knew she ought to know.

  ‘Mrs Dimond, ain’t it?’

  Not one of her own, surely? Violet hesitated; she had never yet forgotten a woman she had delivered. ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s May Givens, ma’am,’ said the woman anxiously. She was younger than Violet, though it was hard to tell by how much, her figure youthful, her face all wrinkles. ‘My husband, he’s your sister’s nephew, Bert Givens’ nephew.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Violet. Not one of her own then, so that was alright. Wife of the fisherman, who had the cottage by the harbour every winter. ‘George, is it?’ she said.

  ‘That’s right, ma’am. I was hoping to speak to you, hoping you’d put in a kind word.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘With Mrs Givens. Your siste
r, I mean. On account of – see, we’ve always had the field cottage for the summer no question, but she’s still so angry – we can’t stay where we are, you see, ma’am, we have to get out come the end of March, and if we can’t go to the cottage, I don’t know where we can go, not with the four of ’em and all, and George, he’s tried talking to her, say he’s sorry, but she won’t see him, so I says to him, to George, I says, what about a-going to see you, Mrs Dimond, see if you can maybe have a word with her, and he says no no, ’cause it’s all on account of your young Gracie in the first place, but I –’

  ‘What about her? What about Grace?’ said Violet, sharply breaking in.

  Mrs Givens took a small grimy handkerchief from her sleeve, and dabbed at her eyes. ‘She ain’t told you? He dint mean nothing by it, Mrs Dimond, I swear, he’s that fond of her, we all are –’

  ‘Let’s go and sit in the church porch,’ said Violet, since May Givens’ voice was rising and falling altogether too loudly for someone naming Grace Dimond. They passed through the lych-gate and the churchyard, where the daffodils were rising. There seemed no one about. Violet sat down on one of the stone benches beside the great church door, and after a moment’s hesitation May Givens sat down beside her, though not too close, and folded her hands submissively in her lap.

  ‘So. Your husband – he insulted my daughter?’

  ‘No, no! Mrs Dimond, please, he dint, not on purpose! He just called her by his own little name for her. He dint know it were wrong. He’s done it years – the maid herself, bless her, she don’t mind.’

  Oh doesn’t she, thought Violet, and her heart hardened.

  ‘And what is his own little name?’ she asked.

  May Givens looked as if she might cry with embarrassment.

  ‘Come along,’ said Violet unkindly, ‘I ain’t got all day.’

  ‘It’s just Half and Half,’ muttered May Givens finally.

  ‘What? What did you say?’

  ‘Half and Half. He dint know it was wrong. How’s young Miss Half and Half, he asks her, only out of fondness, but your sister, ma’am, she flared up proper! She laid right into him, ma’am, she ain’t let him near her since!’