The Midwife's Daughter

by Patricia Ferguson

  ‘They don’t mean nothing by it,’ said Grace, ‘mostly. It’s just idleness. They’re clocking me the way they clock the weather. They’re thinking, Oh look, there’s that Gracie Dimond. It ain’t like I’m a surprise. And just now it’s, Oh look, there’s Gracie Dimond’s intended – foreign, ain’t he?’ and she laughed. ‘I had a friend when I was a little girl,’ she went on, ‘Lily, her name was, left town now. I used to wish I was her, wish I could change places with her for a day or two, just to find out what it was like not to be the one that everyone had to take another look at.’

  ‘Oh, Gracie.’

  ‘No, don’t be all sorry for me, I ain’t. Later on – well, we grew up, Lily got looked at, you know, in the street and that, because she looked so nice. But it don’t matter how nice I think I look. There’s always t’other reason, see, the first reason. That’s what being a freak is like.’

  ‘You ain’t a freak,’ says Joe heavily.

  ‘You got to understand what it’s going to be like, if you marry me.’

  ‘When. It’s when, Gracie.’

  ‘In fact you’re very popular in this town, d’you know that?’

  ‘Me? How d’you mean?’

  ‘With one or two young chaps’ mothers. Taking me on means no one else can. See?’

  And he had noticed that there were occasional visitors, even to a backwater like Silkhampton, whose heads turned with more sharpness, who looked harder. Sometimes that was surely because she was so pretty, thought Joe. Any chap seeing Grace would want another look. If she were this pretty but white, would he resent the stares as much, or less?

  No point wondering, Joe decided. She wasn’t white. She was Gracie.

  But was it the brownness that gave some what they seemed to feel was licence to stare more openly, more crudely? Or Lord, was this what being a pretty girl was like, no matter what colour you were?

  Grace laughed, when he suggested this. ‘How should I know? I mean, I can’t have a go at being a white girl, can I?’

  They sat on the broad white rock looking out to sea, making plans. After the wedding they were to spend a whole week in her Aunt Bea’s house right beside the sea a few miles away.

  ‘They know me there,’ said Grace. ‘And ’tis only proper busy high summertime. Then they got ice-cream stalls and donkey rides and all sorts.’

  And strangers, thought Joe, whose stares would not be automatic or idle. Already he understood that proper busy meant best avoided. Visiting strangers might follow up curious glances with hostile words. It had happened, she said, when he asked. No, not that often. Not always. But it put you off. Made you careful. Surely he could see that?

  ‘So – you’d always want to stay put here then? Not move away, like?’

  ‘Where would I move to? Where would things be different for me, Joe? You tell me that.’

  Joe had no idea. Except he wished he hadn’t asked her now. The change in her voice went right through his heart.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gracie.’

  Grace sat very still. ‘You got to understand. Round here’s like this: people who really know me don’t notice. Everyone else always will. I’m the Two-headed Lady. My friends and all, they talk to my two heads, and they don’t notice, they’ve stopped seeing them. And there’s some as think, almost proud-like, look, there she goes, that there’s our Silkhampton Two-headed Lady! That’s what you’re letting yourself in for, Joe: I’m the freak. I’m the Silkhampton Darkie.’

  She holds his hand with her whole one.

  ‘What about you, then?’ he says softly. ‘You could have had anybody – no, don’t shake your head, it’s true. You’re beautiful and clever and lovely. What you doing with me? Half a proper bloke, that’s me.’

  Grace kisses him, leans back to give him a long mock-considering look.

  ‘More like three-quarters,’ she says.

  Still it’s a constant anxiety for him. He’s a cripple without a trade, without an education, other than the roughness he has learnt on the streets and in the army. The mud of the bomb crater has gone right into him, he thinks sometimes, gone right in and dirtied him inside, so that he can never be properly cleaned up.

  His arse hurts when he walks, and it’s all very well talking about weddings and planning honeymoons, but if all that comes to pass he will eventually have to take his trousers off and somehow be a man on his wedding night. And it’s all very well too talking about honourable scars and the nobility of a wound gained in battle and that sort of carry-on, but he’d bet what you liked whoever first said all that wasn’t thinking about a chap with half his bum shot away.

  ‘What do you see in me?’

  I think you will let me be who I want to be, I think you will not interrupt me, is some of the true answer, but Grace is not ready yet to trust him with that.

  There is something about you that catches at my heart every time I see you: also true. She can say that, and has. She had liked the look of him straight away, that first day in the kitchen at Wooton. Even before he had stood on the other side of the enamel-topped kitchen table while she kneaded the bun dough, and said what he said.

  ‘What’s up with your hand?’

  When she looked up, hardly knowing how to respond to this crassness, he had already been blushing, his face and throat a bright deep red with shame. His eyes looked panicky, overwhelmed, as if the painful heat all around was making them water.

  She thought piercingly then of Guy Thornby; not Captain Thornby, as of course he had been when the German sniper took him, but the slender boy of fourteen or so, jumping out from behind a stall at the vicarage fete, pointing his fingers and shouting hah! to make two girls laugh; then hauled off by his mother in the taxi that time, not looking at Grace, but flushing as feverishly scarlet as ever a boy could go, his poor ears burning crimson.

  The young man on the other side of the table had rather a look of Guy Thornby, she thought. Not just the blush: the delicacy of his mouth, perhaps; his thin wrists.

  ‘Sorry,’ he had said, his voice husky, a boy’s voice. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’ She liked his strange accent, so hard to follow, so unclipped. It wasn’t a bit posh; no, it was manly, though, she thought. It made him sound tougher than he looked.

  ‘No matter,’ she said. ‘’Twas long ago.’ It was pleasant to remember that both sides of this were true. ‘What about you?’

  And he told her a story that could have come straight out of the Daily Mail, derring-do and all-lads-together and gallant soldiery. It was a sort of politeness, she thought. Or did he really believe in that sort of thing? Plenty still seemed to; but something in his eyes seemed to suggest that he did not.

  ‘I’m Joe,’ he said after it. ‘Joe Gilder. Will you tell me your name, Miss? Please.’

  How sweet it sounded in his coaxing accent! She told him, watching his face and wondering how old he was; she guessed twenty. Then he wanted to help her with the kneading, a piece of nonsense, of course, as if he could; but she still felt sorry for him, tender about his helpless regret. When he came closer to wash his hands at the sink beside her, she could see how difficult movement was for him, painful, his knuckles white on the handles of his crutches.

  ‘Is they proper dry?’

  ‘They proper is,’ he had said straight away, and his mimicry of her own voice was so accurate, and so unexpected given his earlier awkwardness, that she burst out laughing. But of course, she thought, he thinks the way I speak is just as peculiar as the way I think his; she longed to quickly write this idea down, for it had not occurred to her before, and she knew how maddening it was to go home knowing she had had a possibly-useful-one-day thought, failed to record it, and thus forgotten it for ever.

  But her laughter had made him relax, and his answering smile had so altered his face, made him look so playful and aware, that she had at once felt a sudden warm shimmering weakness in her insides, such as that she had not felt for years; hadn’t wanted to feel it, had hardly even thought about such things, not since the last
night Tommy Dando had come calling.

  Then the intentness of his gaze, as she sprinkled the flour over his outspread palms, his curious delight; it was like playing with a child. But his adult look down at her had made her heart flutter.

  Very soon after that, of course, he was off, limping away with the other poor boy, the one in the wheelchair. She had stayed where she was beside the table, though the others had clustered about in farewell. He had turned as he went through the doorway, and she had just caught sight of him over Mrs Berenger’s shoulder. His eyes had met hers with what felt almost like a click, a touch; and then he was gone.

  She was glad of it, she decided. He had been altogether too much, too keen, too eager. Too obvious. The feelings he had somehow inspired were in fact uncomfortable, even unpleasant.

  Were Tommy Dando.

  She squashed the mess he had made of his dough, worked it back into the rest, then suddenly gathered up the raw shapes she had made herself and pushed all of it back together. She would start the whole process again, she thought. There was calm in bread dough, in the repetitive turn and tuck, turn and tuck, in the clean yeasty smell. You could let yourself think, kneading dough.

  There. Now it was as if he had never been.

  She paused, one hand on the floury table.

  ‘Alright, Gracie?’

  She started, looked up: ‘Oh, yes, hello, Ma. Course.’

  Her mother’s eyes lingered on her for a moment, unreadable. ‘They nearly ready? Only it’s got so late.’

  ‘Two minutes.’

  Violet went away, and Grace bent her head over her work again. Quickly she divided the dough, laid the neat little shapes in place. There was nothing like as much cinnamon as she would have liked; but by now even the vast store cupboards of Wooton were running low. Look out to sea now and all you thought about were the German U-boats hunting the convoys; and everyone had heard about the hospital ship, laden with the wounded, torpedoed and sunk just a few miles off the Cornish coast. It had been in February, the sea at its coldest.

  They had thought themselves safe at last, Grace thought, remembering the ship again. They were all so near home.

  Sometimes she felt almost sure, for no reason that had much sense to it, apart from the rough approximation of the date, that Tommy Dando had been on board The Glenart Castle. All his mother had heard was that he was dead, some three weeks after he had first been reported wounded. The strangest thing was that word had soon got about that Tommy had not only joined up underage, but made use as well of his own dead brother’s name. Mrs Bold at the Post Office had at first declared the War Office had made some grisly mistake, reporting the wounding in action of Private Samuel Dando, when everyone knew Sam Dando had died years back, poor little soul, of the diphtheria. But the later telegram confirmed his death: as if Mrs Dando, it was murmured, had lost the same son twice over.

  Once Tommy had loomed huge and terrifying at Grace’s every horizon, there had been no direction to turn to that did not finally end with him. But lately, even before his death, he had begun to lose this significance. He isn’t coming back, Grace reminded herself, rolling the buns into neat rounds. Sam that was really Tommy, he was never coming home again. There is nowhere on earth I will ever run into him, there is no need to hold myself ready to not-see him. I will always not-see him.

  What happens now, surely, is up to me. Am I to go on letting him into my thoughts like this? Is he to stop me smiling at someone else?

  Because he has. He just did.

  She thought again of the soldier, of his desperate blush, remembering that she had promised him an extra-nice bun. She shaped two into one fine big one. She would label it somehow, she decided, make sure he got it. Joe Gilder.

  He had certainly admired her; it had shone from his eyes. That had been very nice to see.

  At the same time, and at a level too deep for thought, she felt his handicap as something of an advantage: no chance of someone who could hardly walk turning into Tommy Dando once the door was closed.

  I could knock him over with one hand, thought Grace suddenly, in clear playground argot. I could knock him over one-handed, and that’s alright, because one good hand is all I’ve got.

  She remembered thinking this much later that afternoon, as she wrote Joe’s name on the paper bag with the special bun inside. But I liked him straight away too, Tommy, she thought, and hearing this tore a page from her latest notebook, and wrote a defiantly forward note on it.

  6 May, ’18

  Dear Corporal Gilding, it was nice to meet you, here is the bun you helped make.

  Yours sincerely, Grace Dimond, 7a Market Buildings, Silkhampton

  ‘What do you see in me?’ Joe asks, and another true answer would be, You put a final stop to Tommy Dando, but Grace doesn’t trust him yet with that one either.

  At their first arranged meeting – furtive, barely semi-private – in the kitchen garden at Wooton, they had talked mainly about books, about reading. It had been a shock of delight to discover that Joe Gilder was a reader.

  ‘What else could I do, lying on me front all day? Weeks I had a bloke on one side nattering away nineteen to the dozen, but he’s talking to the angels and his mum and dad and he’s got a taxi waiting outside, he’s off to the Palladium – I mean, sometimes I give up, joined in, it was him and me and the angels – and the bloke on the other side had a jaw wound, couldn’t talk at all. So for ages it was read or nowt.’

  Like Grace he had struggled at first, reading as haltingly as he had read as a child at school –

  ‘Oh I know, so did I!’

  But there had been no choice but to keep going –

  ‘Yes, there’s nothing else you can do!’

  And one of the nurses had lent him books –

  ‘Don’t say H. G. Wells – it was H. G. Wells, wun it!’

  ‘Nay; I do like him, though; but first off, first book I really read, it were Robert Tressell – you read it? The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists?’

  ‘Never heard of it.’

  ‘I’ll lend it, it’s great. It’s all about the working man, letting the bosses crush him. Twelve months in hell, told by one of the damned. It’s about socialism.’

  ‘What is that?’

  Joe was no politician, and his account of the law of surplus and supply confused him almost as much as it mystified Grace. They agreed though that she simply had to read the book for herself; that in return she would lend him her own precious copy of The History of Mr Polly.

  As first dates go it could hardly have been better.

  22

  The photograph stood on the chest of drawers for a long time. It was not quite a wedding picture; it had been taken in the small studio at Porthkerris, set up to catch the holiday trade, mysteriously still open, though it was September. They had been lucky with the weather, too – every day was warm and fine enough to walk out with a picnic towards the rocky little beach, or amble slowly up the hill to the woods that lined the clifftop there.

  The photograph had been taken on their last full day, and what Grace liked about it most, she said, were the accidental lies it told.

  ‘Look at us, Joe, what d’you see?’

  By the time the photograph arrived in its stiffened brown envelope they had moved into the two small rooms above the sweetshop in the square, next door to the bakery where Joe was learning his trade.

  This had all been arranged so smoothly, with so little fuss, that it had been months before he had understood how many wheels had been quietly turned within others. How could he have guessed, for example, that his prospective mother-in-law had delivered all three daughters of the baker she now worked for, and that this on the face of it very odd fact was somehow enough in itself, all these years later – the girls long since married, with children of their own – to ensure that any hint or suggestion of Mrs Dimond’s as to trial jobs, apprenticeships, payable premiums, the respect due to disability resulting from war wounds, and the length in general of the working day
, would fall on astonishingly receptive ears?

  There had been money involved, too.

  ‘I got money,’ said Grace, sounding perplexed. It was two days before the wedding.

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘My Ma says. She’s been sent money every week for years, only she don’t know who by.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Yes, I know. Ten bob a week, donkey’s years. She reckons it’s someone done her a bad turn one time, making up for it. Or maybe someone grateful – she used to go to childbeds all the time, see, olden days. Anyway she ain’t spent it, the money, or not all of it. She got through some of it right enough when I was ill. And I didn’t work for ages, you know, after my accident. She’s put it in my name, what’s left of it, in the Post Office. Ask me how much it is, go on.’

  ‘It’s your money, Grace. Not mine.’

  ‘It’ll be ours the day after tomorrow. Close on a hundred pound.’

  Joe gaped. ‘You pulling my leg?’

  ‘You’d fall over.’

  She was joking, but Joe had to sit down anyway. It was wonderful to be freed from a lifetime’s anxiety, and at the same time it was dreadful. It was a man’s job to support a woman; he knew no proper husband should rely on his wife.

  And the worst of it was, he had already been approached, secretly, by his fiancée’s aunt. He was still barely used to the idea of Mrs Givens, this keener harder simulacrum of Violet Dimond, the steam-powered version (he thought privately) of what was bad enough just drawn along by holy water. No denying it, he’d been appalled to find that there was two of them, that he was going to be a man with two mothers-in-law.

  Bea Givens had hailed him in the street, just after Grace had agreed to marry him. He had left Wooton by then, given his honourable discharge; she took his arm as he was coming away from the doctor’s surgery, and insisted on walking with him to Market Buildings. She had been rather smartly dressed, and smiled at him winningly; during the course of their walk home she had never missed a passing acquaintance, waving at several who hailed her, even stopping for a minute or two to chat to someone with a cat mewing in a basket, and the really frightening thing, he thought afterwards, was that she had kept up the talk at him almost the whole time, despite these frequent interruptions and her own polite ladylike tone and expression.