‘You’re not her father, then?’ Mrs Abinger seized her opportunity.
‘God, no. I’m it’s uncle. My sister’s child.’
‘And you’re taking it to her, I daresay,’ prompted Mrs Abinger, trying to cloak her curiosity by turning questions into statements.
‘Well, er – ’ he shifted on his seat and sucked at his lower lip – ‘actually, no.’
Mrs Abinger with her heavy head on one side, was looking so amiably ready to understand anything he might say, that he suddenly blurted out, in quite a different, more natural voice than the fade-away drawl he had used so far: ‘She’s dead, you know. Died having the kid. And we heard two weeks ago that her husband had been killed in Flanders.’
Miss Loscoe lowered her eyes and thought he should not have spoken of it. Mrs Abinger leaned forward and said: ‘I’m so sorry, my dear. I didn’t ought to have asked.’ She held the baby away from her shoulder and looked into its bloated face. ‘Poor little soul,’ she said. ‘An orphan, then.’
‘Fine start to her life.’ The young man gave a silly sort of bitter laugh and Miss Loscoe looked at him sharply. This was no time to be laughing. If one must talk about death, one should use the kind of voice in which she now intoned: ‘Poor little unwanted orphan child. Never to know a mother’s love.’
‘Oh, she’s not unwanted,’ said Sir Rodney. ‘It’s just that the family can’t cope. My mother’s ill, and the other grandmother … well, anyway. In fact, I was positively the only bloke handy to bring her on this trip or I’d never have taken it on. Fine way to spend your convalescent leave.’
‘You’ve been wounded?’ asked Miss Loscoe, hoping he would not tell, if it were somewhere not Quite.
‘Smashed foot,’ he said briefly.
Mrs Abinger glanced triumphantly at Miss Loscoe. ‘Who’s going to look after her then?’ she asked the young man, flopping her body to and fro as she rocked the baby.
‘She’s going to a children’s Home. Oh, quite a decent place, I believe. No Squeers and all that.’
Mrs Abinger looked blank, but Miss Loscoe nodded to show she followed the allusion. ‘I always say it’s a small world,’ she said. ‘My sister works in a home for orphaned children, and on this very line too.’
‘That’s where we’re going,’ said Mrs Abinger. ‘We – ’ She was almost choked by a mad idea that suddenly surged up inside her. Such a wonderful, impossible idea that it left her scarcely enough breath to falter: ‘It’s not – it wouldn’t be – oh no, but of course – it wouldn’t happen to be at Bolt Bay, I don’t suppose?’
‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘It’s one of the best, they tell me. I say,’ as he saw them weaving about excitedly, ‘is that where you’re going? How rum.’
He took it more calmly than Miss Loscoe and Mrs Abinger. Miss Loscoe could not get over the smallness of the world, and made thrilled little staccato conjectures as to what her sister would make of the coincidence.
Mrs Abinger still could not speak properly. She was still filled with the idea which she dared not voice, yet which had taken such possession of her that she feared the words would burst out of their own accord.
Sure enough they did. Clutching the baby to her, she gasped: ‘I’m going to Bolt House to choose a baby to adopt. I suppose – oh, I don’t suppose – you’d let me have this one!’
‘Ellie!’ Miss Loscoe was scandalized. Coincidence or no coincidence – to say such a thing right out like that to a perfect stranger! ‘Well,’ she told her sister later, ‘I didn’t know where to look.’
But she was looking at Mrs Abinger, staring at the eager quivering of her fat red face, wondering whether she were going to take a fit. She was acting so queer, saying a thing like that, and actually waiting there open-mouthed, as if she expected to get an answer. Ellie was the best of souls, but she was only a tradesman’s wife, after all. Miss Loscoe would never have become so friendly with her if it had not been for the war, which levelled everybody. A grocer’s wife, with that poky little flat over the shop, to be thinking of adopting the baby of a titled family. Whatever would Sir Rodney say?
He did not seem affronted. He had leaned back a little before the onslaught of Mrs Abinger’s eagerness, but he smiled and said: ‘That’s jolly sporting of you, I must say, but the fact is, they don’t want her adopted. Oh God, no. When my mother’s better, and the kid doesn’t need so much looking after, she’ll probably have her back.’
‘She’s not to be adopted then?’ repeated Mrs Abinger on the dying, disappointed breath of her collapsing idea.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Oh, definitely no. She’s got to grow up a Cope, for her sins.’
‘Of course. I quite understand.’ The idea was quite dead by now. Mrs Abinger suddenly realized how tightly she was holding the baby, and slackened her arms, looking at it there in her lap as if she wondered what she was doing with it at all.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t ought to have spoken like that. I don’t know what made me think of such a thing.’
‘No indeed,’ said Miss Loscoe, and Mrs Abinger, seeing her drawn brow and pursed mouth and tapping foot, realized the full enormity of her presumption.
‘Here – ’ she held out the baby to its uncle, who made futile passes with his arms, uncertain how to hold it.
‘You put her back,’ he said, but Mrs Abinger had forfeited her rights. Officiously, Miss Loscoe took the baby and tucked it, tight as a City umbrella, into its basket again.
Mrs Abinger looked miserably out of the window at the foregathering houses of Newton Abbot, and dreamed about how lovely it would have been to have this baby. A high-born baby, whose father had been a war hero, the mother a tragic and beautiful lady, fair and pale no doubt, like her brother.
She would have brought her up so ladylike, spent money on sending her to a good school, tried to make George move into a better neighbourhood if necessary. How she would have gloried in her aristocratic looks and dainty ways! For blood will out, Mrs Abinger knew, and the little girl would always have been like a swan among geese with the children of the Portobello Road.
It wasn’t as if they were working-class people. They had their own business and enough money put by for a daughter to have everything nice. They were well thought of by everybody–nothing for a child to be ashamed of. Why, George with his neat clothes and his finicking ways with his nails was as aristocratic looking as –
Mrs Abinger looked across at the exquisite, assured figure flipping over the pages of the Tatler, saw the polish of him which not even the havoc of war could dim, came out of her dream, and slumped, pressing her hat brim out of shape as she stared at the stamping boots of soldiers mustering on Newton Abbot platform.
Mad, she must have been to have thought of it. You had to laugh though. She might tell Phyll some day, as a joke. A baronet’s niece living over a grocer’s shop! You couldn’t help laughing at the idea. Why, that kind didn’t even come her way as customers, never knew the Portobello Road existed, as like as not.
The baby, digesting, hiccuped and murmured like a dozing old man.
‘Go to sleep, Joy,’ said her uncle, without looking up.
Mrs Abinger turned her head. ‘Is that her name – Joy?’
‘What? Oh – ’ he lowered the magazine – ‘yes. Joy. Joy Stretton.’
Joy Stretton. Mrs Abinger looked out of the window again and saw herself following Joy’s career in the papers and society magazines. Knowing when she was presented at Court, and what she wore at her coming-of-age party; knowing when she got engaged to some handsome young nobleman; knowing her wedding day.
And on that day, Mrs Abinger would go and stand in the crowd outside St Margaret’s, as she had at other weddings when she could get up West on early-closing day. When Joy came out like an angel, with her lilies, and her veil thrown back in a cloud round her beautiful face, Mrs Abinger would think of today, and have a little cry, perhaps.
But wouldn’t Joy laugh if Mrs Abinger were to step forward, a fat grocer’s wife
from North Kensington, and say: ‘When you were a baby, I held you in my arms, and dreamed of having you for my daughter’!
As the train went through Ivybridge, Miss Loscoe, who was still not really speaking to Mrs Abinger, shut her book into her case with a snap and said to the carriage at large: ‘Queens-bridge is the next stop. I think I’ll pop along and titivate.’
She went out. Mrs Abinger brushed crumbs off her coat, straightened her hat and tucked away the slippery brown hair that never would make a tidy bun. She buttoned her gloves, stood her raffia bag and handbag in her lap and waited, looking wistfully at the Moses basket, wondering whether she could offer to carry the baby out.
Rodney Cope stood up to smooth his uncreased tunic, and flicked a speck of dust off his trousers. ‘Lord, doesn’t a train journey make you feel a wreck?’
Mrs Abinger had not expected him to speak so friendly to her again. She thought she had spoiled that little intimacy they had established over feeding the baby, when anyone would have thought they had known each other for years.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, pleased. ‘I always say the first thing you want when you arrive is a good wash.’
‘By George yes. I hope the hotel has a decent bath. I say – ’ He looked down at the basket in that apprehensive way of his, as if he had a monster there instead of a particularly beautiful baby. ‘How are you getting out to Bolt Bay from the station?’
‘There’s a bus that connects with this train, they say,’ Mrs Abinger quoted Miss Loscoe’s sister.
‘I’ve got a cab ordered,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’
‘No really, it’s very kind, but we couldn’t accept, I’m sure.’
‘I wish you could. I don’t want to be left alone with the kid. Suppose she’s sick? And turning up carrying her. I shall feel such an ass. I never know which way you’re supposed to point them.’
When Miss Loscoe came back, with the schoolmarm expression she had worn since her friend’s faux pas accentuated by her dragged-back hair, Noah’s Ark hat, and buttoned up frock coat, Mrs Abinger said triumphantly: ‘The gentleman has been kind enough to offer us a lift out to Bolt House. That’ll be better than the bus, won’t it?’
‘I daresay,’ said Miss Loscoe ungraciously, ‘but if my sister is off duty, I’ve no doubt she’ll meet us on the bus.’
‘Then I hope you’ll come,’ Sir Rodney said to Mrs Abinger. ‘You can’t desert me now in my hour of need.’
‘If it was a case of that – Oh well,’ said Miss Loscoe, ‘I’m not saying she will come. She doesn’t take her off duty, as often as not, she’s so devoted to her work. In which case, I’m sure we should be quite pleased to help you with the baby.’
As the train slowed down, Mrs Abinger made as if to pick up the basket, but Miss Loscoe seized one handle, and they carried it down the platform lopsidedly, for Miss Loscoe was tall and Mrs Abinger dumpy. The basket tipped still more as Miss Loscoe peered about for her sister.
‘You’ll know her by her hair,’ she said. ‘You never saw such a colour. And thick! She can hardly get a brush through it.’ But this was evidently a day when Nurse Loscoe was devoted to duty.
‘Well,’ said Mrs Abinger, as they started off in the stuffy horse cab, with the basket lying across both their laps, ‘you can’t help laughing, can you? We come here to fetch away one baby, and turn up with another. Whatever will your sister think, Dot?’
‘Yes, she’ll have to laugh.’ Mrs Abinger, being in disgrace, should not have been so jolly and cheerful, but Miss Loscoe had to agree, for her sister was a great one for seeing a joke. She could not deny her that.
Bolt Bay was a small fishing village huddled into a gap in the rocky cliffs, where a stream came down from the inland hills. The sea, pushing in to meet it, had hollowed out a perfect natural harbour, a goblet of sheltered water, where the fishing boats could lie behind the arm of the little cob. There was a jetty where old men sat on lobster baskets mending nets, a sickle of firm sand, and outcrops of slithery rocks among which the tide lingered in warm pools.
‘Looks as if I’m bringing Joy to the end of the world,’ said Rodney Cope, and yawned once more. He felt as if he had been travelling for ever. It would be good to get back to Town tomorrow.
‘No wonder my sister calls it a dead end,’ said Miss Loscoe. She sat back, missing most of the view, but Mrs Abinger, looking from the cab, was enchanted with the place, as thousands were to be in later years when it was inevitably discovered into a holiday resort.
But in 1918, bungalows and nautically named villas had not yet begun to straggle up the sides of the cliffs and inland up the valley towards the farms. The hotel had not been contemplated, and the cobbled cottages had yet to sprout annexes and plumbing and notices of Crab Teas.
Between one high-tide wash and the next, the white sands were practically untrodden and the shrimps lurked unmolested under the seaweed fringes of the pools. The only outsiders who came there were the visitors to the Children’s Home, and one or two artists, too decrepit to do anything about the war, who made a cult of Bolt Bay and would paint nothing else on the South coast. One of them was sitting with a sketch book on the sea-wall, where the cab turned away from the harbour to climb the drive to Bolt House. He was a raffish man in a linen hat and rope shoes, and he gave them a look as dirty as his jersey, as if they had no right to be there with hats and umbrellas and suitcases.
Bolt House stood well above the village, an ugly, aseptic white block, with five symmetrical gables and a garden of terraced lawns. The horse pulled the cab at a walk past a group of children playing with a nurse, and Mrs Abinger said: ‘Oh look, Dot! Is that your sister?’
Miss Loscoe peered over the basket. ‘Oh dear me no,’ she said. ‘Lily is my elder sister, you know.’
The Matron was at the front door to meet them, one hand protecting her cap from the sea breeze, the other protecting her eyes from the sun which blazed low at the harbour mouth. Mrs Abinger was glad they had come with Sir Rodney, for Mrs Jessop was intimidating, with her spade of a jaw, masculine eyebrows, and monstrous starched cap, which tugged at its moorings when she let go of it to shake hands. She greeted the two ladies as if she were not quite sure who they were, and they stood by, while a great to do was made over Sir Rodney and the baby.
When another nurse came out to take Joy, Mrs Abinger poked Miss Loscoe, who frowned and shook her head and moved a step farther away.
Seeing that he limped with a stick, Mrs Jessop looked as if she would have liked to have Sir Rodney carried into the house too. She tried to put a hand under his elbow, but he stood back politely for her to go in first, so she summoned the other two and sailed in, her cap subsiding as she entered the hall, which was dark after the evening glare outside.
As she followed Miss Loscoe in, Mrs Abinger looked back at the lovely little amphitheatre, the dazzling water black-edged under the shadow of the cliffs, the first clouds of the day waiting on the horizon to draw the sun into a glorious sunset, and regretted her years in London. Perhaps when George retired? But he did not care for the seaside or the country, and he would never leave all his clubs and societies. ‘They wouldn’t hear of my going,’ he would say, as he had that time when the anniversary meeting of the West London Provision Retailers’ Fellowship had come at Easter, and they had not got to Bournemouth after all.
It was a clean house, smelling of floor polish, milk, and washed babies. Mrs Jessop took them into her over-furnished sitting-room, where in contrast to her virile appearance, everything possible was tasselled or frilled or draped with scarves, and announced that they would all have tea. Mrs Abinger was dying to see the babies, Miss Loscoe was dying to see her sister, and Rodney Cope was dying to get into his waiting cab and back to the comparative civilization of Queensbridge, but they had to have tea first.
Mrs Jessop was starved of sociability. Having no one to talk to but the staff and the children, she had a reservoir of conversation accumulated for visitors. It poured over her lips like an unl
eashed weir, while Rodney sat looking defensive with his chin tucked in, helping himself to all the sardine sandwiches. The two ladies sat on the edge of the sofa with listening expressions and little fingers elevated. Miss Loscoe never ate much in company. She nibbled round a cress sandwich, as if there might be a slug in the middle, and would not drink more than one cup of tea for fear her stomach should rumble.
Mrs Abinger, who was ready for her tea after the journey, wished that Matron would stop talking for a moment, and offer her a third cup and pass the shortbread. Was she not going to cut the chocolate cake then? It might be just there for show, and wanted intact for a more important tea-party to-morrow.
But Sir Rodney Cope made this party important, surely? Matron seemed to think so. She talked almost exclusively to him. When she was in private work before her marriage, she had nursed Rodney’s mother through an illness. She told him a lot about this, and asked several times after Lady Cope, without waiting for an answer. She tried to keep up with all her titled or wealthy patients, and for years had subjected Lady Cope to four page commentaries on the weather, the state of the world, and her own doings in it. That was how this Home had come to be thought of for Joy.
She did not talk about the Home or the babies. She had them all the time, but it was not often she had an officer to talk to about the war as seen from Bolt Bay. When she had told them about the escaped German prisoner who had been caught with his pockets full of carrots which she knew had come from her kitchen garden, Mrs Jessop tapped a knife on top of the cake, lightly, so as not to spoil the icing, and cocked her towering cap inquiringly at them.
‘Yes, thank you. I don’t mind,’ said Mrs Abinger. ‘Just a small slice.’
Miss Loscoe declined, and Sir Rodney said he really must be getting along, and reached to the floor for his stick.
‘Don’t dream of cutting into it just for me,’ said Mrs Abinger hastily. ‘I’ll just take a shortie, if I may, to fill the cracks.’ But Matron, who did not want to cut the cake, carved her a large triangle by way of teaching her a lesson. Mrs Abinger had to bolt it while everyone was getting up and preparing to leave the room.
Joy and Josephine Page 2