The Midwife's Daughter

by Patricia Ferguson

  ‘But what I really wanted, my dear, was to give you these. It’s just a first try, like – I hope you take ’em kindly, as they are meant, Gracie.’ Her smile was uneasy, and for a second Grace glimpsed the strain beneath Mrs Ticknell’s bright almost-normal manner.

  She took the wrapped parcel, and slipped off the Ticknell’s pale blue ribbon. Beneath it she found a flat familiar box, and started back, dropping the box on to the table with a little gasp of horror. Peony Lewin’s pink and white gloves!

  ‘No no no,’ said Mrs Ticknell immediately, ‘it ain’t them, Gracie! Not hers! Dear Lord, no, I wouldn’t give you them blessed things! It’s just the same sort of box, see?’

  Grace had to sit still for a moment, while her breathing and heartbeat slowed back down, and Violet, who had been rolling pastry, turned round and spoke quite sharply: ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘It’s nothing, Ma, honest, I’m fine, sorry, Mrs Ticknell.’

  ‘I’ll open it for you, shall I? Here.’ Mrs Ticknell’s own hands trembled a little, Grace saw. Beneath the usual tissue paper lay a pair of plain black gloves, in a fine jersey with plenty of give.

  ‘See I had to guess, like, some a the measurements. Your size, though.’

  Violet stepped over, her hands floury. ‘What’s this, Gracie? Oh.’

  ‘Very kind of you,’ said Grace mechanically. ‘Thank you, Mrs Ticknell.’

  ‘No, no look, dear – try them on, won’t you?’ She picked one up, and held it out: the right one.

  There was such a strong aura of nightmare about it that Grace had to force herself to take the limp black thing from Mrs Ticknell’s coaxing hand. It swung with a curious weight; it already had fingers in it, she realized: three severed fingers.

  ‘Kapok,’ said Mrs Ticknell. ‘And a bit of fine corset wire. Well-covered – I don’t know how it’ll last, of course. And I had to guess a few things – if you could see your way to letting me take a proper measure, Gracie, I could do ’em much better, see?’

  Grace put the glove on. Mrs Ticknell had slightly overestimated the stuffing, so the glove did not sit perfectly on her hand. But she had been close.

  ‘The wire’s to give ’em a bit a bend, see? I didn’t want ’em looking, you know, all stiff, like sausages or summat, the wires got curves in, like, like fingers. I thought it’d look more natural, see?’ She fell silent, her own hands clasped in front of her.

  Grace picked up the other glove, and put it on. Watching her (her own floury hands to her mouth), Violet remembered the little girl she had told was no relation, who had lost the heart for knitting, who had held up her mittened hands afterwards, and said, ‘Look, Mammy, I’m the same as everyone else now!’

  Looking down at her gloved hands, palms upturned, Grace flexed her fingers. The wired kapok, of course, did not curl in; but as Mrs Ticknell had said, the false fingers had their own jointed curves. They looked almost normal; merely relaxed. In movement, thought Violet, they would hardly show at all.

  Grace turned her hands over, held them palm to palm, let the fingers interlace.

  ‘I could do ’em better,’ said Mrs Ticknell quickly into Grace’s continuing silence, ‘and what I thought was, I could make ’em interchangeable, sort of thing, so’s you’d only need say one or two really good pairs of ’em, pop ’em in and out, fit ’em into any pair a gloves you like, maybe sew ’em in extra safe, matching, lacy white in summer maybe, see what I mean?’

  Grace leant forward, put her arms round Mrs Ticknell’s neck, and held her close.

  Miss Thornby came to call. She brought with her a small box of chocolates and the two most recent copies of a magazine called The Film Lover’s Weekly. She seemed a young woman transformed.

  ‘No, I shan’t stop, thank you. I just came to say goodbye, Grace – well, to tell you how jolly pleased I am to see you looking so well, of course, but I’m leaving home next week, as I’m going to do some nursing, some training in London. Maybe off to France – I do hope so!’

  ‘Well, may I wish you the best of luck, Miss?’ asked Violet stiffly, one hand still on the doorknob. She could not quite smile at this child of Mrs Thornby, but she could be polite, she told herself; and Grace just behind her said, ‘Won’t you come in for just a while, oh do!’ very nicely. But Miss Thornby only smiled back, her freckles disappearing in her fine red blush, and waved herself goodbye.

  Linda Coachman came to visit, with one or two roses from her mother’s garden. Her eldest brother had been killed; the army had sent back a parcel of his things, she said, all mouldy and smelling like death itself, his trousers covered in dirt, and his jacket marked with his blood, with no more concern, said Linda Coachman, than if he’d been a dog of theirs that had died. Their mother had turned sick and faint at the sight.

  ‘Who’d a thought it would all go on so long?’ said Violet.

  Had they heard about Tommy Dando? asked Linda presently.

  Heard what?

  Gone; left a note for his mother, saying he’d heard tell he could get into the army in Plymouth, city recruitment dint ask so many questions, or want certificates. Gone for a soldier, and only sixteen!

  ‘Surely they won’t take him,’ said Violet. But Bea, who was also visiting that afternoon, spoke up from the other side of the fire, said that she thought they probably would; that she had heard from one or two recruiting agents she knew, as had stayed now and then in the old Red Lion. If you’re big enough, you’re old enough, was their motto: some of these city places were shameless. Grace looked at her, but Bea kept her head down, as if intent on her sewing.

  ‘Well,’ said Linda, ‘it was a fortnight ago he went, and he ain’t come back. So I reckon he’s in, don’t you?’

  ‘’Spect so,’ said Bea. ‘How’s his poor little sweetheart taking it?’

  ‘Didn’t know he had one,’ said Linda, brightening a little. ‘Oh – you don’t mean Lily, do you, Lily Houghton?’

  ‘Weren’t she the one?’

  ‘Something and nothing, that were,’ said Linda, sniffing. ‘All in Lily’s head if you ask me.’

  ‘Poor Lily,’ said Grace.

  The following day she decided to go out, to visit the market with Violet; ate a good breakfast, tidied her hair, put her hat and coat on, Mrs Ticknell’s special gloves ready in her hand; got all the way to the front door before she realized.

  ‘Oh – I can’t!’

  ‘What? What d’you mean?’

  Grace felt faint; she staggered as she went back to the kitchen, sank down on the chair beside the range. She bent her head down, and tried to take slow breaths.

  ‘Gracie, what’s wrong?’

  Presently her heartbeat went back to near-normal, and she was able to answer, ‘I don’t know. I just felt – dizzy.’

  Which was not the whole truth. But the whole truth was so hard to understand. It seemed to Grace that she had felt frightened. Terrified! Her legs all weak, her heart walloping in her chest, her head swimming, as if it had not been Violet waiting for her beside the front door but a blood-streaked tiger. Where was the sense in that?

  ‘I just felt – dizzy. I think I’d better stay here. You go without me, Ma. Honest. I don’t feel up to it. Sorry.’

  ‘Bit much, going on market day,’ said Bea, later. ‘You ain’t been out for months, Gracie – you want to go out when it’s quiet-like.’

  But Grace knew she did not want to go out at all. She wanted to stay inside, in the bedroom where she could see out on to the street. She wanted to stay at home reading The Pickwick Papers.

  Once Violet, sitting across from her at the fireplace, had tartly interrupted her: ‘Is it meant to be funny?’

  Grace had had some difficulty coming back into reality. ‘What? You say something?’

  ‘Yes, you keep tittering – what you laughing at?’

  ‘Am I?’ That was a pleasant new wonder; the idea that you could disappear from yourself so completely that you didn’t even hear yourself laughing. That you could laugh without leaving th
e strange otherworldliness of the story.

  Once or twice, after that, she tried reading various bits of notable hilarity aloud to Violet, so that she could share the joke, but that never worked. It wasn’t, after all, a joke; it was something in the way the words lay on the page; she found that even reading them aloud to herself drained some of the comedy away. No, it only worked when you read it in private. Which was odd, because usually things were only funny when other people found them funny too.

  ‘You got to go outside, Gracie – you can’t just stop in here.’

  ‘No, I know. I will, course I will. Presently.’ When I’ve finished this, thought Grace, though the idea by now filled her with dismay. What would happen to her when she had finished The Pickwick Papers? How would she manage the thoughts that Mr Pickwick at present kept so totally at bay?

  Often she lay awake and found herself thinking of her past. It had been one long struggle, an endless fight to feel normal, ordinary, the same as everyone else, and all the struggle had brought her to was a further marking-out, another outward difference to add to the first. She thought of her reflection in Ticknell’s blinded window that Valentine’s Day morning, and how perfect it had looked. But that had been a trick of the light, she thought; the darkened glass had simply hidden her difference, made nothing of something that was absolutely fundamental.

  He would not have tried to touch me like that, if I had been white.

  If she was aware, if she accepted that the colour of her face would always change everything, but in unpredictable ways, was that any kind of armour?

  It was recognizing this thought that made her remember how she had felt, weeks ago now, beside the front door that market day, faint with terror, unable to so much as put her hand to the front-door handle.

  It was not armour at all. On the contrary, it was simply a formless burden, and since her accident it had become too heavy to carry outside. She could only stay at home, and read, and read, the books she had already, the books she begged Violet to borrow for her from the library, Violet taking volumes from the shelves almost at random, so ill-at-ease was she in that atmosphere of silence and overt learning. Sometimes she struck gold, sometimes dross. The gold took you away from yourself altogether, gave you blessed hours of being someone else. The dross simply worked less well.

  Books tell us so many comforting lies, thought Grace, rigidly awake beside Violet in the bed they had shared for so many years, accidental lies, and some that are meant. They give us endings that are not death, they give us a now that is never over, and – biggest lie of all – they give us men and women who understand themselves.

  All my life, thought Grace, I have not understood myself at all. I have carried my weight of difference unawares, and never noticed how much it weighed me down. Well, now I do. Now I feel it. But there is still nothing to be done about it. I’ve always known there are no people for me to go to, no country where I will fit in.

  They were right, at school, putting me in the same set as Maggie Barnes and Clifford Petty or Judith Laws; this is what they feel like, after all. They carry their burdens too, Maggie Barnes at the mirror, seeing that sweaty moon-face looking back at her, Clifford lacing up his great boot like a blacksmith’s anvil at the end of his leg, Judith Laws not right in the head, it was true, but did that mean she didn’t catch what was said to her, or said behind her back, in those strange low-set ears?

  And all this time I have longed to be the same as everyone else – well, suppose, inside me, I am the same, after all? The same in the important secret ways. Suppose everyone else is afraid, thinks others know better all the time, feels in the wrong?

  Sometimes Grace thought of talking about these ideas with someone, but there was no one to tell. She understood that Violet had convinced herself that her daughter’s difference had been more or less cancelled out by her loving care; it would be too unkind to disabuse her, especially when Grace knew some of the conviction was due to her own silence, or outright deception.

  There was Aunt Bea, of course, far more worldly. But Bea already knew too many secrets. To tell her more would again betray Violet. And Aunt Bea has secrets of her own, thought Grace. How had she let Tommy Dando know which recruiting station would ask him no questions? I don’t want to know, thought Grace. I don’t want to risk her telling me.

  Once she could have said anything to Lily. That clever tact of hers: it was as if she understood. But Lily was lost to her, and in more ways than one. She had left service, and gone to Plymouth with her two oldest sisters, who had also given up their places to work in a munitions factory, making guns or bullets or bombs, Violet had said, where once the factory had made agricultural machinery; all three beating swords out of ploughshares.

  The money was very good, Aunt Bea had said straight back, and the hours were nothing compared to service, beck and call all day and half the bloody night, no need to be so sniffy about it, said Bea, and for a moment it had looked as if those two old warhorses were about to gallop into battle again as they had so many times in the past.

  But then they had met one another’s eyes, remembered Grace. She had intercepted that glance, and read it easily, with the new acuity her long confinement seemed to have given her. Not in front of Grace, said the glance. Let nothing upsetting be said in front of Grace.

  She knew from her reading that sometimes people talked to vicars or doctors. But the very idea of trying to explain herself to Mr Godolphin made her smile. Dr Summers was a nice old thing, it was true, but he was still a man, no, a gentleman – hopeless.

  Mrs Ticknell might understand. She took me on, thought Grace, at some risk. I hadn’t understood that at the time. I thought only of myself, and how I was going to stand being stared at over the counter, and asked silly questions; but she took risks of her own.

  I miss her, thought Grace. I miss the shop. I would love to see it again. But you didn’t tell Mrs Ticknell anything, unless you wanted it spread all about the town.

  I could tell Peony Lewin.

  That was an odd thought to catch herself out in. Imagining talking to a ghost from a nightmare!

  Until she saw the connection.

  Something bad had happened to Miss Peony Lewin. At any rate, she had been so unhappy that she had taken a complete way out. There was, for everyone, a complete way out: there was that.

  I have that, thought Grace, and was comforted.

  20

  The weeks, months passed. One day settling down after breakfast she found that there was nothing new left to read. She even picked up the film magazines Norah Thornby had left her, and flipped idly through their grainy pictures, the actors rather an ill-favoured middle-aged lot, she thought, compared to the actresses, all as young and as pretty as Sally Killigrew, or even prettier. She would have liked to visit the Picture Palace again; Aunt Bea had mooted it more than once.

  ‘Just you and me, eh, Gracie? There’s a Charlie Chaplin film. You like him, don’t you? Supposed to be a really good one too. Tomorrow, maybe?’

  But of course it was out of the question. She couldn’t go outside without taking up her impossible burden.

  ‘Maybe.’

  There was nothing to read in the magazine though. The articles were nonsense; thin flowery stuff about the actors’ plans to learn French or play Hamlet. She thought of Norah Thornby, being a nurse in London, doing something useful, important, and felt a faint stirring of something like envy. Miss Thornby useful and important, whose mother had wronged her own, whose brother Guy she and Lily had played their pointing-finger game with, so long ago it seemed. He was doing well, according to Mrs Ticknell, he was Captain Thornby already. He was being useful and important too.

  Grace was restless. It was days since anyone had called in to see her. Everyone thinks I’m all alright now, she thought. Since Aunt Bea had gone more fully back to work, and Violet had accepted more shifts at the bakery, she was alone nearly all day. Usually she worked a great deal in the garden, but today it was raining hard. There were alway
s chores, mending, extra washing, ironing. She could use a needle fairly well, was almost used to the extra stretch required of her shortened middle finger. But all these chores left the mind free to wander, and hers often wandered into places that made her groan with despair.

  She walked from bedroom to front room and back again: her country now. If only it would stop raining! Working in the vegetable garden was somehow soothing to the mind, perhaps, she thought, because it was strenuous. Could she go out and dig in the rain?

  Walking back into the bedroom she had another look through her small collection of books. No, none of them ready yet to read again. Then she noticed one that had no title at all. What was this? But when she opened it there were no words either, it was blank, and she remembered Mr Vowles coming with his wife, Mr Vowles who had always boomed at her so, and called her his nut-brown maiden. Poor man, his son had died of his wounds after all, though they had got him home just beforehand.

  Hector, thought Grace. It was painful to think of Mr Vowles, Mrs Vowles; they had been so alight when they’d come calling, when they knew he would be home soon.

  She took the book back into the kitchen and sat down with it at the table. How lovely it was, how soft its leather cover! She opened it again and held it close to her nose, and sniffed in its sweetish flowery smell of new paper. It seemed somehow full of promise, this small book.

  ‘It’s to write your thoughts in,’ said Mrs Vowles, smiling in her memory. But I don’t want to write them down, I want to stop them altogether, thought Grace. Anyway, the book was too beautiful to write in. She would keep it always, she thought, and if she ever thought anything really good, noble, she would write it down with a special pen, in her best handwriting.

  But there was nothing else to do. It was like the early days of her illness, when she couldn’t do anything but read no matter how hard the book seemed. Suppose she wrote lightly, with a pencil? Then she could rub things out as well, leave no trace behind.