The Midwife's Daughter

by Patricia Ferguson

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Brandy.’

  ‘I’m teetotal.’

  ‘Just drink it, Godsake,’ said Bea, and her tone was too tired for further offence. They sat for a moment, sipping and coughing. Violet’s made her shudder with disgust, it was like drinking paraffin, she thought, but still she could feel the strength coming back to her with every burning drop.

  ‘What George said, my nephew George, daft as a brush he is,’ said Bea, her voice sounding stronger too, her eye a little more lively, ‘I saw red because I’d already thought it, see. I’d already thought it. That she was maybe not full African, or wherever it is her folks are from. I’d thought it, and tried not to, if you see what I mean. But he calls her that – that name –’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And we has a bit of an argument, as you might say. And he’s going, What, don’t you know? All surprised. And he says, You can tell just by looking at her: she ain’t black enough, she’s half and half. So I says, Oh no she ain’t, she’s proper black! And he says no, too pale. And I says, well, I dare say there’s all sorts of black folk, same as whites, why not! Look at Spaniards, I says, look at Turks. They ain’t the same colour as you and me, are they? Still white though! And he says, George says, He’s seen plenty, he’s been all over the world, and he says, there ain’t nothing wrong with her, and he don’t mean nothing by it, only she’s got a fair bit of white in there somewhere, and I got to face facts. Tells me! I got to face facts! So I says, Well, he can get out of my sight and stay out, and if he thinks he’s taking any cottage of mine from now on he can think again. And that’s a fact,’ she finished, her voice a furious sneer, as if the hapless George stood before her still.

  ‘But I thought that, too,’ said Violet pleadingly, dismissing George altogether, ‘about the other black folk, I mean. Being like us, different sorts – Greeks and Norwegians!’

  ‘Not that different,’ said Bea, after a pause.

  ‘You’re sure then?’

  Bea nodded.

  ‘So is it – that she’s yours?’

  A pause.

  ‘Not now,’ said Bea. ‘Never mine now.’

  Violet could only whisper. ‘How, then?’

  ‘Don’t you know? Can’t you work it out? You just need to think back a bit. About me.’

  ‘When you was in France?’

  ‘When I was too busy swanning about the Continent to go to my own mother’s funeral. When I give up being a lady’s maid, and Paris, and London, decided I’d much rather work in a dirty old four-ale bar in the back a beyond. Yes, then.’

  This sounded more like the normal Bea.

  ‘But you told me –’

  ‘A pack a lies. Anyone who wanted to would a seen right through it. But you didn’t want to, that’s all.’

  ‘I just believed you! Are you angry with me now, because of that? What sort of sense is that?’

  ‘None,’ said Bea sadly.

  There was a silence. Violet sipped her drink, feeling its fiery nastiness all down her throat. ‘So you – you had a child, then, Bea? Did you?’

  ‘Didn’t have a name. Didn’t even do that for him.’

  A boy! She had had a son! ‘But you – you couldn’t have children,’ Violet whispered.

  ‘No. As it turned out, I could only have the one,’ said Bea. ‘And he was it.’

  ‘Oh, Bea.’

  ‘This chap. He was a Frenchie, one a their gardeners over there, the Redwoods’ gardener, I got the sack, caught seeing him. I dint care, we was going to be married. But soon as I tell him I’m expecting he does a bunk, turns out he’s married already.’

  ‘When was this, you were, we were what, nineteen –’

  ‘Twenty. Old enough to know better.’

  ‘What did you do, then?’

  Bea sighed. ‘I come back on my own, down Exeter way. Had a bit of money owed me. Stayed in a place, don’t know where. He was born. Thought of you then, Vi! And our mother. It was bad. Normal. I don’t know. He was healthy-looking afterwards. I couldn’t look at him, I couldn’t bear him, I thought. All his coming had done to me. I blamed him, can you imagine that! I was a fool. I was the most foolest girl in Christendom, and I gave my baby away, my only one, I dumped him, I wrapped him up in my good shawl and I took him to Exeter and I walked to the workhouse there and I waited until dark and I left him on the doorstep. I saw them take him, he weren’t outside in the cold for long. I saw them take him.’

  ‘But – couldn’t you – why didn’t you bring him here, bring him home? Mother was dead. I’d a given you a place. My own sister!’

  ‘Would you indeed. Maybe now you would. Not then, Vi. Don’t you kid yourself.’

  It was true, Violet thought. Beatrice at twenty; would I have let her, a wanton version of myself, and already ruined, would I have let her and her bastard child stay in my own home, with my own young husband? And with that old misunderstanding already, and not so old in those days, about whose property Ned Dimond first had been! Mine, thought Violet, surprising herself a little with the vehemence with which this thought occurred to her, even now. He was mine first and mine thereafter, whatever people said.

  ‘Bert Givens and me,’ said Bea, ‘we only had the one, you know, my daughter, as lived a week. And the next one stillborn. Never carried another full term. So there was my punishment, I thought, right enough. I sinned and I was punished for it. And before you start –’

  ‘– I wasn’t going to –’

  ‘I meant giving him away. That was the sin, not the other thing.’

  ‘Yes. I know that’s what you meant. But you think your, your son –’

  ‘My son, yes. Grew up and had to do with a black woman.’

  There was another long pause. Violet felt weak, trembling all over sitting there, one hand still clamped round her glass full of poison. There was no sorting her emotions. There were so many of them and all at once.

  There was an overwhelming sense of disconcertion. All these years she had thought she had adopted a strange little outcast, and from Christian charity; that the likeness to Ruth was a signal from the Divine.

  But anyone, any heathen, would surely take in her own kin.

  Grace was kin.

  And then a great shiver of some feeling completely unidentifiable, a slew of it, ran all through her, she went hot and shivery; she was going to faint, she realized. She got herself sideways out of the chair and dropped on all fours on to the greasy crumb-strewn flags of the floor, all splashed now with cold tea, and scattered with broken china and fruitcake, though most of that mess lay dashed right up against the wall. There were the newspapers Bea had dropped, what felt like hours before. Violet crouched beside them for a moment or two, making herself breathe slowly, then got up on to her knees and asked for help.

  Had she preened herself, all these years, for carrying out an especially hard duty without faltering? Had she prided herself on the superiority of her faith? And delighted in thus showing it off before the world?

  Dear Lord, forgive me! I have been blind, foolish, prideful.

  But the pride was essential, some other part of her mind replied. It was a necessary strength. After all, it has been a hard row to furrow; the pride helped, for all its sinfulness.

  Violet felt the voice of divine reason in this, and dried her eyes, and presently was able to get up again and slide back into the chair opposite and look at her sister’s face.

  ‘So your son –’

  ‘Fine son,’ broke in Bea, her mouth a hard line. ‘Fathers a child and buggers off. Like his dad, hah!’

  ‘You don’t know any of this. Not really.’

  ‘I see her,’ said Bea, ‘your Gracie, sat a-sewing, and I thought, why, she looks just like me. I felt the needle in her hand. As if it were my own. And the shape of her cheek. I saw you in her – how many times have I sat beside you when we were girls – and I saw her, and that she was you. All these years I been blind to it. And you know why. We both know why, don’t we!’


  Violet shook her head, but Bea went on, with a jeering tear-ridden gusto –

  ‘All on account of her colour! And ain’t that such a good joke! God’s own joke. He says, This is what it’s like being All-Powerful. I can make jokes like these. I can make you give up your only child, and then just for fun I’ll make you give up your grandchild too. What a good joke that is, on me now! Don’t you think?’

  Violet’s eyes filled with tears. Bea’s blasphemy seemed so full of pathos; she knew the Lord in His kindness would overlook it. She herself brushed it aside: ‘You don’t know any of this for sure,’ she said as firmly as she could.

  But as she spoke she saw again the little greyish face turned towards her in the Infirmary, and Ruth looking up at her. Ruth, Grace’s cousin. Gracie, her own niece; no – great-niece. She remembered too the joy of taking the sickly baby into her arms, when her whole body seemed to recognize the child. And all the time the truth had never once crossed her mind. Nor Bea’s.

  ‘See, it was you I thought of, on account of Ruth, her looking so like,’ said Bea. ‘When they brought her in. They thought she would die, her lungs were that bad. And,’ she added, her voice suddenly almost a whine, ‘they told me she was a darkie. They said she was.’

  ‘So that’s what you saw,’ said Violet, thinking to comfort her.

  ‘Yes, that’s what I saw. That was all I saw. So I missed her. I let you take her, I give her to you, when she was mine all along, my own granddaughter.’ Bea laid her head down on her arms on the table, and hid her face.

  Violet sat still. This aspect of things had not occurred to her at all. She tried to imagine the span of Bea’s feelings.

  She tried to face her own. Had there been a quiver of dismay in the thought that Grace was actual kin of her own, blood-related? Was she really no better than the foolish locals who crossed the road when they saw Grace coming? She examined herself, and decided that on the whole and in this case she was. It had been simply a shock, after all, she thought, the shock of things being otherwise from what you’d always thought they were. Why, she was used to it already. But was Bea?

  Had to do with a black woman, Bea had said of her son: sounded indecent, Violet thought. Might there not have been a perfectly legal marriage? What was Bea assuming, about her son, about Grace’s real mother? She must ask. ‘Bea,’ she said urgently, and the wet face tilted up. ‘You ain’t ashamed of her, are you?’

  Bea rubbed at her wet face with one hand. ‘Course not. Why should I be? No,’ she added, and her voice, its plain sadness, went straight to her sister’s heart. ‘It’s me I’m ashamed of.’

  Violet thought piercingly of Grace herself; all that she too had missed, unknowingly. Surely it was all true, the likeness so clear? She thought of herself while they sat knitting that evening, little Gracie struggling with the scarf, herself with the mittens, and being cruel to be kind but cruel all the same: telling the child outright that the Silkhampton lacemaker was no relation of hers! Her aunt no aunt, that she herself, Violet Dimond, was no relation either, that no one was, in the whole wide world, poor little thing! What were they to tell her now? But that must be for another day, she decided. They would talk about that some other time, not today.

  Violet got up, and knelt at Bea’s side to stroke her arm. ‘Come on now,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry, Bea. I’m sorry I hurt you. I wish I hadn’t broke your things. I make some more tea now? Bea? Say something, my own dear, do.’ She kissed Bea’s cheek; the first time she had kissed her sister for – why, I don’t know how long, she thought.

  ‘Not ashamed of Gracie,’ said Bea, turning her face to look back, so close. How ill she seemed, Violet thought, her unwashed hair coming down, her drawn sallow face all blubbered with tears. ‘But I might have a son alive, a fine son, as’ll desert a woman with a baby. That’s what he did, that boy I left behind, I left him on the doorstep, and so he left her. And I’ve been thinking, I keep thinking: How am I to live, with all of this! I can’t! I can’t live with it, Vi, I can’t!’

  ‘Don’t you talk blasphemy now,’ said Violet, getting swiftly to her feet. ‘Don’t you dare! And you know nothing about your son.’

  ‘No,’ said Bea quickly. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘I meant – nothing about what he wanted or what happened to him. Look at your Bert!’

  She swept a bit of broken china out of her path with the side of her boot, and began pacing up and down the small room. ‘Your Bert and all his crew – heaven knows men die every day, they go out to hard work like your Bert, like my own Ned, and they don’t come back alive!’

  She turned about again, full of energy, full of truth, she felt, as if an obvious reality were being revealed to her, and she had only to voice it.

  ‘And I’ll tell you this: I’m sorry, Bea, but I think your son is dead; I think he died. That’s why the mother was on her own with her baby, trying to work for her bread, poor soul. And her – well, we don’t know nothing about her neither.’

  ‘They took her from the water. You know they did, they took her from the water, drowned in the harbourside –’

  ‘They took someone from the water. We don’t even know it was her! She weren’t the only black woman in the country, there’s whole streets of ’em over to Cardiff, so I’ve heard. There, see – maybe you ain’t heard the worst. Maybe Grace’s mother weren’t just black. Maybe she was all out Welsh!’

  A joke; of all things, and at such a time, a joke had leapt into her mouth as if she had planned it out beforehand.

  Blank; then Bea’s tiny shocked breathy smile. Soon it faded into more tears, but they had less edge to them already, Violet thought. She could tell some of Bea’s dreadful burden had lifted, from sharing it.

  She herself was still full of strange feelings.

  It had occurred to her early on that if George Givens had seen that Grace was Half and Half, so too might others have noticed; anyone the least bit travelled. So perhaps, unbeknownst to her, it had always been rumoured all through Silkhampton that Grace was really family, an illicit connection of her own. Had it been? Would such talk have got back to her, if it had?

  On the whole she thought it would; someone like Aggie Ticknell would not have been able to keep mum, not with Gracie herself in front of her day after day. She would have dropped hints, until at last Grace began to understand her. And so far, nothing; so perhaps most of Silkhampton had no such suspicion; most of Silkhampton, after all, had hardly gone as far as the next village.

  And George had maybe only given the matter any thought because Grace was, as he saw it, adopted kin of his own.

  Not that I should care either way, Violet reminded herself.

  And then she arrived at her own truth. It seemed to her that the long battle with her sister was now over, and for good, and that she herself had unquestionably won the field. Nothing in her own life could compare for sheer disaster with Bea’s. She remembered how she had felt leaving the Home with the baby in her arms, that she was kidnapping someone else’s child, stealing her. And all the time it had been poor Bea she had robbed. Nothing else could possibly count now. No further skirmish could change this final outcome. There was somehow little savour in it though.

  She must be generous in victory. ‘She calls me Ma,’ said Violet carefully, ‘but she loves you dearly. She was talking about you only this morning. How you’d love the jacket she was lining, how you’d like to choose the colours for it same as her.’

  ‘She’s clever with her needle same as me,’ said Bea, sitting up, and wiping her face with her hand.

  ‘That’s so,’ said Violet. ‘She proper takes after you there.’

  Violet stayed the night. She had left Grace a note, implying that Bea had some minor indisposition, that she would be back the following morning, that there was a little pie all ready for her in the larder, and that she was on no account to forget to bolt the back door before she went to bed. She would perhaps enjoy, Violet thought, having the place all to herself for an evening, the bed
all her own for a night.

  She herself had never liked sleeping alone. Bea had showed her an empty room – heaven knew there were plenty, and more in the unused wing all locked up – but she had found herself a little uneasy about taking it. There were stories about the place, after all. Stories about the lake, especially, the sort you could scoff at perfectly easily in daylight, but which wouldn’t be so much fun to think about come nightfall, when you were all alone with just a candle for company.

  ‘Couldn’t I bunk in with you, Bea?’

  Of course Bea’s room was in a similar state to the housekeeper’s sitting room, full of dust and general disorder. They had done a little preliminary tidying there, changed the bed – there were any number of sheets, said Bea, burrowing into the great linen cupboard on the third floor, wearing a bit thin these days maybe after all these years, but look, see, the crest embroidered on every corner, just like on the old carriage one. Soft as silk to sleep in.

  When the bed was done, the mattress turned and given a good bashing, the clean sheets all pulled tight, they had gone out for a breath of air, first to the front of the House, talking to one or two of the children still playing out near the carriage drive after their tea, then crunching over the weed-littered gravel round the locked-up side wing to the back, where the great stretch of water, the Rosevear Lake, lay still and mirror-golden in the evening sunshine. But no, thought Violet, she herself would never be able to look on that shining surface with any real pleasure.

  ‘Ain’t it a danger,’ she asked, ‘for the little ones?’

  ‘Oh, they won’t none of them go near it,’ said Bea. ‘Ghosts got their uses.’

  When they got back refreshed Violet suggested they tackle the sitting room a little more thoroughly before supper, but there were still limits, she saw, to sisterly togetherness, and the gleam in Bea’s eye as she said she’d manage it all perfectly well later, thank you, warned her that she had now fully reached them.

  All the same the rabbit pie went down very well. They talked the whole time, about all sorts of things, not only Gracie and her difficulties and her virtues, her prettiness and cleverness, but about their own past, about their mother and father, how he had killed himself with work or been killed, at any rate, never paid a living wage, poor soul, let him strain his sinews all day; they remembered the time of starvation.