‘Typical Mother,’ says Clemmie when he has left. ‘Not choosing quite the right sort of man. Seemed damn sharp to me.’
‘That’s only,’ Bea replies, ‘because he told us that there wasn’t much money left.’
‘I think that may be rather understating the situation, Bea.’
After a surprising, but modest, bequest to Celeste, there are several to trades unions and, of course, a substantial one to the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. What remains is to be divided between Clemmie and Bea. However, Mother, for reasons that will now only be known to herself, left no indication of just how the houses, pictures, plates even, should be divided.
‘Blast her,’ says Clemmie, and it is Celeste who looks shocked at this. ‘After all those years,’ Clemmie continues, ‘of telling us to be practical and now what are we supposed to do, saw everything in two?’
‘I think you are both,’ cut in Celeste, ‘old enough to make a few decisions. She clearly thought you were capable of it. In any case, you should be damn grateful.’
How odd, thinks Bea, Celeste is batting for Mother. A little late, perhaps. It would have been a bit more convenient if they had managed to ride the same train while they were both alive.
‘Thank God there’s no heir,’ says Clemmie, then chokes. ‘I didn’t mean it that way, just not some wretched cousin that everyone else usually suffers. We’re too happily nouveau riche, if you can bear the irony of the riche bit, to have entails and distant male cousins who inherit, and things like that.’
‘They’d be dead anyhow,’ replies Bea.
‘Beauhurst,’ interrupts Celeste.
‘Lord knows when the soldiers will be out of there,’ replies Clemmie. And Bea finds herself saying, ‘Why don’t they just have it? You never liked it anyway, Clem, and it’s not as if anybody is going to buy it now. We’ll be lucky enough if they agree to take it.’ Clemmie purses her lips. The room is still for a moment, then she nods. Celeste looks up and smiles. Item one crossed off the agenda. Item one simply crossed out of their lives.
‘You don’t suppose,’ says Clemmie, ‘that anyone will want to buy Park Lane?’
And Bea, who didn’t cry this morning, finds herself fighting back the tears.
‘All settled?’ asks Edie as she totters into the room. Bea shrugs her shoulders. The house is Clemmie’s, too, and she wants, says she needs, the money for it, ‘Or Gowden’s roof will quite simply cave in.’ For a second Bea wonders whether she and Celeste could club together to buy Clemmie out. If only the pictures weren’t all, as Edward had so rightly said, fakes. But a house like this without pictures, and dozens of servants if not inhabitants, would feel deserted. So no, it’s obvious, Bea will go to live with Celeste, and Park Lane will be put up for sale.
‘Will probably be snapped up by an awful sort,’ says Clemmie. ‘Doesn’t bear thinking about.’
Edie is out of her chair and straightening her clothes. She looks around the room and at Celeste, Clemmie and Bea, curiously slowly. Then she pulls herself up sharply.
‘Well, I’m just popping off,’ she says, and struts towards the door. She stops on the threshold and turns to blow a kiss to the room. ‘Goodbye, darlings.’ And a minute later they hear the clip of her heels echo up from the hall.
‘How odd,’ remarks Clemmie.
‘What’s odd, Clem?’ asks Bea.
‘Not quite sure, just something.’
Uncertain of what else to do, the three of them sit there for an hour or so, going through more ‘practicalities’ as their tea grows cold and the light outside even greyer.
‘How long have I got,’ Bea asks, ‘to say goodbye to this place?’
‘You’ll be much better off with me,’ Celeste butts in. ‘Think you should hop over this afternoon. You don’t want to be living here with people poking their noses and purses into every corner. Besides, it’s a bit of a mausoleum, isn’t it, Beatrice, my dear?’
‘She only died here, Celeste, we haven’t buried her under the floorboards.’
‘That doesn’t mean to say that she has, in every sense, gone. It will do you good to—’
‘It still annoys me,’ Clemmie breaks in.
‘What, Clementine?’
‘That she came up to London just at the beginning of another wave of the flu, having hardly been here for years. I can’t help feeling it was somehow negligent of her. She was always too damned busy with her causes to think about any of us.’
A small creature runs into the room in a blur of blond, starch and tweed, and buries itself in Clemmie’s lap.
‘Good God, Clementine,’ says Celeste. ‘Is that one of yours?’
‘No,’ she replies, stroking the boy’s hair. ‘It’s Edie’s Archie.’
‘I’ll see if any of them know what Edie’s up to,’ says Bea, and rings the bell.
When Susan appears Bea asks her when Edie is expected back.
‘Back?’ says Susan.
‘Yes, back.’
‘Oh.’
‘Oh, what?’
‘Well, I didn’t think she was coming back, Miss Beatrice, not with—’
‘With what, Susan?’
‘With her trunk, and all.’
‘Her trunk?’
‘Yes. Labelled it was, too. Mombasa it said.’
25
GRACE’S WAR ISN’T OVER. THE FIGHTING MAY HAVE finished in France and Flanders, Russia, too, but here, in this runt of a farmhouse outside the village of Gowden, Grace is still a prisoner. Grace and Baby, and all the little words and softness of his not quite two years.
Not that Grace hears many of his words, for she only has him to herself at night, and then she has just his breath to listen to behind the locks put on her door. Even when, in the daytime, Mrs Blunt doesn’t have Baby in her farmer’s-wife arms that’ll crush him if she holds him any tighter, she doesn’t take her eyes off him for a minute, and Grace can hardly get close. Mrs Blunt bars the door into that gloomy kitchen with a chair, making Grace have to knock and beg through the wood-planks to be allowed into the same room as her own child. She has to shout, too, to make herself heard, what with the clattering and washing flapping, and every machine that grinds too loud as you turn it. When she’s shouting, and Mrs Blunt’s not hearing, or just not answering, Grace’s heart pounds so high in her chest that it might pop out of her mouth.
She should have run the moment she first came. She had been as fresh as she could be from volunteering for the Women’s National Land Service Corps: two weeks on a training farm and new boots that laced almost as high as her knees, breeches even. Though she’s a loose belted coat over these. Regulation. For modesty. The WNLS had sent the girl with no apparent friends or family straight down here. The first thing she saw was the grey-walled house. It was blackened with dirt on the rump of a building out the back; the privy standing in a sea of as much animal doings as there were inside it. All round in the stinking mud were near man-traps of nails and rusting barrels that she’d tripped over as she made her way through. By the time she reached the front door she hadn’t been able to see a scrap of that leather she’d polished on her new boots.
Grace knew then, didn’t she: even before the door was opened by Mrs Blunt clutching her spear of a broom as though she’d give an ox a run for its money. Even before Grace saw Mr Blunt bent, hooklean, over the table, scraping at a block of wood with a knife, and not looking up or saying a word. But Grace could hardly go back to the Land Army and say it wasn’t to her liking, not to mention that she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, not in the circumstances. And where else was she to go? She’d walked out of Park Lane one afternoon with not much more than the clothes on her back – for none would fit more than a month. She had imagined how she might leave the house, handing back her uniform and sailing off in her office clothes, but it could hardly have been more different. She hadn’t even left a note, just vanished into the war with her shame. And now she’s had Baby, she can barely get near him. For Mr and Mrs Blunt sa
y they are sure, as sure as day, that Baby is the son of their own son, Robert. And Mrs Blunt isn’t letting Baby out of her sight.
Robert hadn’t yet gone to France when Grace arrived. He wasn’t a handsome man, just a tall, skinny boy with pitted skin and shoulders not yet broadened; he looked as though he’d crack when he put his shoulder to the horses. But steel wire, he was: he’d ease the plough through gatherings of stones, put there by the pixies at night, he’d joke, and when he leant down to listen to you it was like a gentle giant, sweet as honey, just as Joseph had been before he went off to the war. But Grace wasn’t that type of girl, who’d do that in the state she was already in; though Mrs Blunt had fair pushed her at him, as though if Robert were taken with Grace, he might decide to stay.
Robert took Grace out into the fields before he left, and showed her how to shake the horses on, how to sometimes pull them from the front. Grace pulled hard. You’ll hurt yourself, Miss Campbell, he’d said. But she wanted to hurt herself, hadn’t she, wanted to make what was in there come unstuck, that was why she’d run to a farm. Every night Grace touched her belly with her fingers, hoping there’d be nothing there any more, then she’d put the palm of her hand on it and when she felt Baby move she’d hate herself. Another life, she’d think, all that goodness, even with her being so bad.
It was Grace’s fault for not keeping Robert when he went, so Mrs Blunt said. But Robert had been going to France before Grace came, even if a thunderbolt had had him. He hadn’t limped into the recruiting station like Mrs Blunt had told him to. Mrs Blunt behaved as though she blamed Grace for that, too. All the extra Grace had to do then, as if Mrs Blunt was making a point.
The telegram came so quick you could still smell Robert in the house. Missing, nothing found, and all those stories of boys drowning in mud. Once, when it rained, Grace saw Mrs Blunt staring out of the window at the swamp in the yard, chickens slipping in it, falling over, and struggling back up. Then she turned to Grace and shouted at her, pushed her out of the door with that broom-spear, saying that’s what it was like for Robert, you know.
It was November that Grace couldn’t hide it any longer. There Grace was, the portions she was being given on her plate growing smaller; there’s less for everyone, Mrs Blunt had been saying, like there were rations on a farm of all places. And less for you than us. Though you could just see there was more of Grace by then, and Mrs Blunt, her eyes running down over Grace’s stomach, stopped. Grace waited for it, the roar, being shouted at to pack her bags, that this house wasn’t a place for that sort of thing. It didn’t come. Mrs Blunt stood stock still, eyes inward, mind slowly turning. Then she stuck out her fingers to count the months. Grace was told to sit down quickly, and was asked what was she doing with all that sowing, let alone those buckets, and it wasn’t up to her any more. Robert’d be sure to come back now. Grace had to make sure all was right for him. No thinking of herself, said Mrs Blunt, there’s everybody to consider now. And what it means to Mr Blunt, to have a little Robert on the way.
As the portions on Grace’s plate grew again, she couldn’t see the harm in it. So she sat down and shut her mouth, feeling right thankful that they were going to look after her and Baby, especially given that, even with all she had been doing, Baby was still there. She didn’t want to go about for the next few months, either, not with Miss Beatrice’s sister, Miss Clementine, no, Lady Dagbert, Grace should call her, not two miles off. Imagine the luck of it, Grace to be posted so close. No doubt there’d be all sorts from Park Lane wandering about and one sight of Grace and it’d be all out then. No, Grace wasn’t going near the village until she could go way beyond it, and for that she’d need her baby in her arms, not lolling in her stomach.
When Baby came, it was too late to go. Mrs Blunt had Baby up and in her arms as soon as he appeared. Grace only held him when she nursed him, and Mrs Blunt was right strict about that from the start. Not that Grace has been nursing him awhile. All she has is her night-times, when she curls up tight with Baby in her bed and runs her fingers through the blond locks she can’t see in the dark. ‘It’s not long,’ she whispers to Baby, ‘not long until we’re away.’ But it’s herself she’s saying this to, and she hasn’t the rest of it to tell.
Any day Grace could leave the field, hitch a ride to Birmingham and vanish into the city, but she wouldn’t be able to take Baby with her, not with him walled into the kitchen, Mrs Blunt’s apron strings tied round his waist. Sometimes Grace wonders whether she could snatch him away. Then she thinks of Mrs Blunt’s arms clamping him tight, and Baby screaming as he is being torn this way and that. As for night-time, Mr Blunt sleeps with that ring of keys under his pillow, Mrs Blunt has told her straight, and Grace’s window is barred. She could take a file from the stable and saw away at a bar bit by bit. But she couldn’t do it in a single night, and Mr Blunt’s eyes are sharp as pins. Where’ve you to go anyway, says Mrs Blunt. For in the more than two years Grace has been with them, not a single letter has she had.
Maybe Grace could go to Aunt Ethel, invent a husband who’s dead in the war, and there’s no shortage of those. Some invention it would have to be, though, for Aunt Ethel’s the sort who’s too interested, asks questions like the schoolmistress she is. No, the only other place Grace could go is to one of those homes for unmarried mothers who have nobody to give their babies to. And they’re not places anybody would want to be.
Sometimes Grace even thinks through what if she left Baby; she can’t say they don’t care for him here. All the food he could eat and more. In the evenings Mrs Blunt sits stitching for him, and the needle could be going through Grace, the more for Grace hasn’t a needle or cotton to sew for him herself. There’s the farm, too. It would all be Baby’s, so long as they think he is Robert’s. Maybe Grace mustn’t think of herself but what’s best for him, and she’s not a thing to offer. But her insides are turned out of her at the thought. She’d never be able to smell a thing but for his sweetness, and what would her cheeks feel if they were pressed against an empty pillow at night. It only takes a second’s more thought to remember that the Blunts are March mad. Grace could never leave Baby with them, not even with all he might get. Why, they might coo over him now but who’s to say it wouldn’t be him barred in next?
Still, some wicked days she wishes he hadn’t been born yet. If it weren’t for Baby, she’d still be back at Park Lane, waiting for Joseph to come home. Then her taste turns sour, and she thinks she’ll fry for that thought. Though she’ll be frying anyway for what she’s already done, all of it, for God’s not merciful any more, they all know that. Even a vicar must stumble over those words in the service. Though Grace hasn’t been let near a church.
Grace wonders what Mrs Blunt’ll do with Grace when Baby’s big enough to need to run around outside more, for that’s when Grace could take him. Grace looks at how he is walking, and counts the months before Mrs Blunt will have to let him out of reach. Maybe they’ll lock Grace up whenever Baby is playing out there, but Mrs Blunt is still talking as though Robert’s coming home. ‘Them telegrams are wrong half the time,’ she says, and repeats the story she read in the newspaper of the boy who came home to find his name already up on the church wall. ‘You’d’ve thought them in charge don’t have an idea what’s going on out there.’ Though she can’t believe it, Grace keeps mum. For so long as Mrs Blunt thinks Robert’s coming home, she’ll keep Grace and Baby well for him.
Grace is sitting at breakfast and Mrs Blunt is talking again about how Robert might have been lost and could still be found: taken prisoner, joined another regiment, become confused. Grace is all nerves because now the war’s over, it’ll be clear soon, won’t it, that Robert is none of these things, and she so wants Mrs Blunt to go on believing Robert is coming that her mouth goes off of its own accord. ‘Perhaps,’ she says, for it’s all she can think of doing at the moment, ‘perhaps he might have just run away.’
As soon as she’s said it, she realises what she’s done, but it’s too late to catch the words
back again. Mr Blunt lifts his head and stares straight at her with eyes that look as though the colour’s washed out of them, and his hands twitch up.
Better be dead than a deserter; or the parents of one.
*
Mrs Blunt has hung black about her photograph of Robert, and yesterday she said that Baby is their memory of Robert. It’s how he’s come back to us. Almost as fast as Grace can think, something has changed. Grace can see it in the way Mr Blunt looks at her sideways long and hard till she catches his eye and he turns away. Clear as day, now that the Blunts have decided Robert’s not coming back, Grace is just in their way.
Grace has to leave with Baby, and she’s no time for pride any more. She’ll have to ask for help wherever she can, and that’s from the one person she’s told herself she could never go to. As little as Grace might not be able to open her eyes for the shame of it, and there’s not a chance he’d let her keep Baby, he would at least give Baby a future. Not send him to the workhouse as a bastard child. And now, now there’s a chance he’d be allowed the time to come and find the two of them.
He would never forgive her, and Grace wants to weep at the thought he’ll know how she’s let him down. So long as he didn’t know she could pretend that he loved her still. But she has to put Baby first. Even if she might as well put a knife in her gut as she hands him over to Michael, and he asks her to leave.
She slips two pieces of paper and envelopes from Mrs Blunt’s desk, pen too. And stamps. Hides them under her pillow for when she goes up at night. It’s only when the wall is rattling from Mr Blunt’s snoring, and Baby’s breath is soft and deep, that Grace slides them out. She lights the candle, whispering a prayer that nothing will bring either of the Blunts out of their room. And she writes.
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