‘It can’t have been,’ said his wife. ‘We’re having the brawn mould. I told Mrs Dingwall. I do all the catering, you know,’ she told Mrs Abinger, ‘on top of everything else.’
‘Now you mention it, I do seem to smell something burning, don’t you?’ Mrs Abinger sniffed.
‘Don’t ask me,’ said Mrs Jessop. ‘My nose has never been the same since my sinuses went in that terrible winter of 1916. I’ll ask the girl.’ She rang the bell, but at that moment, the door burst open, and the cheerful maid, distraught now and wild-eyed, panted in.
‘Oh Mrs Jessop, please come quickly! There’s a fire in the babies’ room. Oh, it’s terrible! Come! Oh please! Cook said: “Whatever’s that burning?” I hadn’t but opened the door when the smoke hit me. Oh my days! It’s terrible – a terrible fire – ’ She followed them, burbling, as they ran down the hall.
Mr Jessop was wonderful. You never would have thought it of such a gone-to-seed-looking man. Smoke filled the little cubicle, so that it was impossible at first to see what had happened.
Mrs Abinger screamed and would have plunged in, but he pushed her back so hard that she staggered against the opposite wall, and rushed in himself, making swimming motions with his arms through the smoke. In a moment, he was out again, coughing with great whoops, to thrust a bundle of smouldering blankets at his wife.
She tore them off, took one look at the baby and ran with it out of the back door into the air. Mrs Abinger dived into the room, choking and half-blind, and found Mr Jessop scrabbling under the wreckage of the cots, which had collapsed on top of each other. Somehow, they got the baby out, and Mrs Abinger, with streaming eyes, groped her way after Matron out of the back door. The cool evening air struck her burning face like fire.
She laid the baby on the ground as Matron had done with hers, but she did not try to knead air into its chest as Matron was doing, and yelling at her to copy. Matron’s baby was black-faced, with blood all down one side of its head. It was crying and gasping and choking.
Mrs Abinger’s baby was dead.
They had laid the two babies on Matron’s sofa. The live one was wrapped in shawls and blankets, and had been given brandy. Sticking plaster sat drunkenly over the cut on its temple. The dead baby was wrapped only in a sheet. Someone had wound a bandage round its ear, but the blood and yellow fluid still seeped through, staining Matron’s chintz.
They had not covered its discoloured face, because they were still trying to discover which baby it was. Joy and Josephine had been alike enough before. Now, scorched, swollen, and battered, they were indistinguishable.
Mrs Jessop, who had risen to the actual crisis, had come down to earth again now. She was in a livid temper. She kept pounding at Nurse Loscoe with: ‘I told you to label them. If you had labelled them, this wouldn’t have happened. Don’t you see the responsibility is all mine? I told you to label them. What am I going to tell Lady Cope? What are you going to do about it?’
What could Nurse Loscoe do, except stand with her hands hanging, looking stupid and blind, because she had taken off her misted glasses and could not see where she had put them? She had cried so much already that she could not be goaded to any more tears. All she could do when Matron paused for breath, was hopefully to suggest that the dead baby was one or the other, and when Matron ridiculed that, suggest the opposite, which Matron contradicted as scornfully.
Humphrey Jessop had gone shakily upstairs with a strong whisky, coughing raucously and looking into his handkerchief like la Dame aux Camélias. He had done his part. He had even thrown buckets of water and put out the fire. He washed his hands of the post mortem.
His wife had tried to incriminate him for not remembering how the babies had been lying, but he had said rudely: ‘If you’d had the guts to go in first, you’d have seen they were all jumbled up,’ and slopped away in one rope sandal and one horny bare foot.
Miss Loscoe, who had not come down until it was all over, had turned faint and been given some of the baby’s brandy, which made her cough more than the baby. She reclined now in an arm-chair, one given-over hand trailing to the floor, the other holding a handkerchief over her face.
Mrs Abinger was still crying. When anyone looked at her, she dabbed her streaming face and said the smoke had got into her eyes. She was crying for Joy or Josephine. She neither knew nor cared which.
If Joy were dead, it was unbearable to think of. If Josephine were dead, she had no baby, and that was more unbearable. Worst of all, whichever was dead, it was her fault.
She kept trying to confess that it was she who had switched on the light and caused the wire behind the wall to burn through to the heavy picture and send ‘The Age of Innocence’ crashing in flames on to the babies; but she could not say it. She did not think she ever could, although it would haunt her for the rest of her life. No one knew that the switch had been down. While they were all in the smoking, sodden room inspecting the cause of the fire, she had guiltily switched it up again. No one knew that she had been in the room before; she would never tell anyone now.
Matron sat down at her desk and beat her fists against the tape which tied her cap under the chin. ‘Someone has got to tell Sir Rodney,’ she said. ‘Someone will have to telephone his hotel.’ It was quite clear who would have to do it.
‘But what am I going to tell him?’ asked Nurse Loscoe.
‘He must come out here and decide for himself which is his niece.’
‘But he won’t know, Matron. He couldn’t tell them apart when they – when she – when they were both alive.’
‘That’s right, he couldn’t,’ Matron grew suddenly thoughtful. She got up and bent over the babies. Doped with brandy, the live baby slept, and whimpered a little because its head hurt.
Mrs Jessop made a decision and nodded to herself. ‘Don’t tell me that isn’t Joy Stretton,’ she said loudly. ‘I’m absolutely sure of it. You’d better go and tell Sir Rodney, Nurse, that his baby is injured and shocked, but alive.’ Why, how could she ever have contemplated telling him anything else?
Mrs Abinger was not going to stand for this. If Josephine were really dead, that was one thing. If Matron was trying to take her baby from her because she was afraid of the Copes, that was another.
She stood up, not caring how she looked, her determination checking her tears, so that she was able to say: ‘I’m afraid I must contradict. From my knowledge of the two – and I did see Joy all the way down in the train – it’s the other way about.’
They faced each other. Mrs Abinger scarlet and desperate, Matron outraged, with flaring nostrils. Miss Loscoe removed the handkerchief to watch them.
‘What do you say, Dot?’ Mrs Abinger appealed. ‘Come and look. You saw Joy as much as I did.’
‘Oh, please don’t ask me,’ moaned Miss Loscoe. ‘I can’t bear to look. I’m funny like that; I just can’t stand terrible sights.’
‘Don’t you think I’m right?’ Mrs Abinger appealed to Nurse Loscoe, who opened her mouth, but trembled it shut again as Matron snapped: ‘Don’t ask that fool. She’s made enough trouble as it is.’
‘The Father,’ Mrs Abinger suggested. ‘The one who found Josephine in his church. Couldn’t we get him to come along and see if he knows her?’
‘He’s half blind,’ scoffed Matron. ‘He wouldn’t know. In any case, I’ve quite made up my mind. I will not stand for being argued with like this in my own drawing-room.’
‘And I won’t stand for being done out of my rights,’ retorted Mrs Abinger, surprised at herself. They glared at each other until a sudden squeal made them both turn to see Nurse Loscoe bang a hand against the side of her head, as if to capture the fly of an idea that Mrs Abinger’s suggestion had settled there.
‘Of course!’ she cried shrilly. ‘Now I remember why I didn’t label them at the time. I remember thinking: “Well, there’s no call,” I thought, “since –”’
‘Now don’t start making excuses, please.’ Mrs Jessop turned away as if she could not bear any mor
e. ‘You’d better go to the telephone and tell Sir Rodney what I told you.’
‘But Matron, it was because the foundling baby had a little crucifix. The chain was broken and I fastened it round her neck with wool. “That labels you,” I said to her.’
‘Well, it isn’t on either of them now, as you’d know if you could see half an inch beyond your nose. I’ll thank you now to go and do as I ask you, and put an end to all this nonsense.’ Mrs Jessop went to her desk and started slamming papers about, as if the affair were settled.
But Mrs Abinger had also had an idea. She put her hand in her pocket. ‘Suppose the cross should have dropped down and got caught in the nightie. It’s worth looking.’ She bent quickly to the sleeping baby.
‘Now don’t you meddle with Lady Cope’s baby,’ said Mrs Jessop. ‘If you dare uncover her – ’
But before she could get there, Mrs Abinger, after a pretence of fumbling under the blankets, had turned round again, dangling the cross on its broken chain triumphantly from her hand. Nurse Loscoe stood on tiptoe, blinking and shaking her head as if to clear it. Had she really seen what she thought she had seen?
‘There!’ Mrs Abinger swung the crucifix under Matron’s nose, quite carried away by her own powers of deception. ‘What did I tell you? It’s Josephine! It’s my baby. My Josephine’s alive!’
Mrs Abinger slept that night in the back bedroom of a fisherman’s cottage. They had tried to make her send for a cab to take her in to Queensbridge, but she wanted to be near, to take her baby away early next morning before Sir Rodney arrived. How could she face him when she might have kidnapped his niece? She might give herself away.
She was surprised that she did not feel more guilty. She did not care now whether it were Joy or Josephine. All she knew was that it was her baby, and no one was going to take it from her. If it should be Joy – well, she had got her heart’s desire, and no harm done. She knew she would care for her better than someone, however wealthy, who could send a baby to a woman like Mrs Jessop rather than have the bother of looking after it. And if Lady Cope were ill and grief-stricken, it might be a relief to have no baby to remind her of her poor dead daughter.
All night long, Mrs Abinger lay awake in the thick-walled, stuffy room, arguing down her guilt. It was not Joy. It was Josephine, Josephine, Josephine, she kept telling herself, as she listened to the sea and watched the curtain blowing in the tiny window. She heard the grating of a boat on shingle, and the rough Devon voices of two men coming back from midnight conger fishing. It was Josephine, whom nobody but she wanted. She must never remember that it might be Joy, never tell a soul, because she had done a wrong thing, and it was best put out of mind.
She lay awake and saw the square of window fill with the first no-colour between darkness and dawn. She smelt the freshening air and watched the light grow. The gulls had only just begun to cry, when she heard the bed creak in the next room, and the murmurs of the man and his wife getting up with the dawn.
She got up too and looked out of the window. She had seen dawn in London, gilding the chimney pots and tantalizing mean streets with an hour’s slanting glory, but she had never seen anything like this great rosy fan of rippled clouds that spread into the sky above the hills. It arched forward over the bay and was reflected in the stretch of wet sand and pools that waited for the tide. Beyond the harbour mouth the sea glittered, and on the horizon it was already blue day.
‘And this happens every day,’ thought Mrs Abinger. ‘Every day the same, yet every day fresh as the beginning of the world. That’s where it is.’ Awed, she went back to bed and slept until the fisherman’s wife brought her a cup of tea two hours later.
Miss Loscoe had slept at Bolt House after all. She had been difficult. She would not go with Mrs Abinger to the fisherman’s cottage, and she felt too queer to go alone into Queens-bridge. Matron, exasperated by the whole business, had shut herself up with her brawn mould and Humphrey and left them to do what they chose. So the two young nurses shared a room, quite content to giggle half the night in one bed, while Miss Loscoe lay next door, stiff and straight as a martyred corpse under the jolly eye of Nurse Tillings’ young man, pinned on the wall above the black iron bed.
‘I never had a wink of sleep,’ she announced in the train going home. ‘You look as fresh as a daisy, Ellie, I must say.’
‘I slept like a top,’ beamed Mrs Abinger, who was nursing the baby like a statue of primitive motherhood, all arms and lap.
‘I don’t know how you could after what happened. I never want to go through such an experience again. Sleep? I was much too upset to get near it.’
‘Well, it’s come out all right now, hasn’t it?’
‘For some, I daresay. But I had to lie there thinking of your baby starting out in life with a cloud of tragedy over it.’ she gloomed.
‘Perhaps the children kept you awake,’ said Mrs Abinger cheerfully.
‘You never heard such a shindy as they made this morning. And the nurses – talk about clattering cans and heavy shoes! But it wasn’t that. I couldn’t have slept had I been in my grave. I couldn’t fancy a mouthful of breakfast this morning. My sister was quite upset.’
‘Poor soul,’ said Mrs Abinger, ‘she had a trying time of it yesterday. She is nice, Dot. I like her ever so much.’
Miss Loscoe took this for granted. ‘She’s the mainstay of that harum-scarum establishment, I can see,’ she said dauntlessly. ‘Why, if it hadn’t been for her knowing about the crucifix – ’
‘By the by, Dot,’ interrupted Mrs Abinger, ‘there’s no need to mention the little cross to George should you see him. You know how he is about such things; he thinks it’s superstitious. He won’t stand for Catholics.’
‘I shouldn’t dream of it,’ said Miss Loscoe. ‘I’m sure it’s no concern of mine. I was merely going to remark that if it had not been for my sister, we shouldn’t be straightened out yet.’
‘No, that’s right,’ said Mrs Abinger, glad of the chance to resurrect the toppled legend of Miss Loscoe’s sister. ‘She’s got a head on her shoulders all right. And she doesn’t have it too easy, does she, with Matron so funny tempered? I’m sure I’d have walked out long ago.’
‘And let them down? She would never do that.’ Miss Loscoe cleared her throat, and looked severely at Mrs Abinger, daring her to challenge the coming lie. ‘My sister,’ she said, ‘told me that Matron had said this morning she didn’t know where they would be without her.’
2
‘Yes, and Mum-may.’ Billy Moore hung round his mother’s dressing-table while she was trying to do her hair. ‘I want to tell you something.’
‘Get on with it then,’ she said, in the slight drawl which she had copied years ago from a girl at Roedean, and never lost. ‘And don’t fiddle with that scent bottle.’
‘I’m not. I want to tell you something. Mum-may – ’ His stories always took hours. ‘Well, you know Mrs Abinger.’
‘At the Corner Stores? I ought to, after eight years.’
‘Well, do you know, she’s got a baby. A girl one. She let me play with it when I went into the back-room to get some currants. And Mummy, I do wish we could have a baby like that.’
‘We’ve got one, darling. Surely that’s trouble enough? Leave that scent bottle alone.’
‘Yes, but Wilf’s a boy, and he’s ugly. And Tess is too old to play with. Mummy, I do think Mrs Abinger’s lucky. Her baby has much prettier clothes than ours.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’ Mrs Moore twiddled up a side curl, cocked an eye at her reflection, shook her head, and combed the curl out again. In the mirror, she saw a figure like Mrs Tittlemouse come into the room.
‘Here’s Nanny,’ she said. ‘It’s bedtime.’
‘I want you to read to me.’ Twice usurped in the nursery, Billy had to be demanding of his rights.
‘I’m going out, so it’s no use making that face. I never knew Mrs Abinger had a baby, Nanny,’ she said to the grey little old nurse waiting in the doorway. ‘I s
hould have thought she was a bit old …’
‘So should I, ’m, but you’d be surprised what some women can manage. The Deaconess was forty-seven turned, when she had her twins.’
‘It seems so funny we didn’t know about it.’
‘It does indeed. But she’s stout at the best of times, and always being behind the counter, you see …’
‘When do you suppose she had it?’
‘It looks a good five-month baby to me.’ Nanny moved her lips calculating. ‘It will have been at the Easter, I daresay, when we were away.’
She saw Billy looking from one to the other of them, forming a question. His mother would have let him ask it, and given him a grown-up answer, but Nanny did not hold with that at five, or any age. With all her children, her answer to biological questions had always been: ‘Because.’
So she said: ‘Come along now Billy, do, and leave Mummy’s things alone.’
‘Nan,’ he said, going to her, ‘wouldn’t you like us to have a girl baby with bows and bobbles on its clothes like Mrs Abinger’s?’
‘Oh yes, I daresay. Oh yes, oh yes.’ She nodded her wispy head at him. ‘I haven’t enough to do already, I suppose. If you don’t come now, you’ll have to bath yourself.’
‘Well, I’d like that.’ He could always confound her harmless threats.
The Moores lived on the corner where the broad slope of Chepstow Villas swept indifferently across the beginning of the Portobello Road. The front of their house faced the respectability of May trees and green gates and steps hearthstoned before breakfast, but the back windows looked out over slated slum roofs all the way to the Kensal Rise gasometer. Chepstow Villas was the last outpost of Kensington before it degenerated into North Kensington, and the Moores’ house, being on the corner of the road that led to the slums, was the last outpost of Chepstow Villas. The contagion of the Portobello Road had infected it with a back-yard, instead of a garden like all the other houses along the winding slope to Bradley’s.
Joy and Josephine Page 5