The Gipsy's Baby

by Rosamond Lehmann

  All at once Chrissie darted from the obscurity of the cottage towards her mother. I caught a glimpse of her grimy burning face before she buried it passionately in Mrs. Wyatt’s skirts. Another thing I noticed was that a spasm contracted Mrs. Wyatt’s lips and forehead, as if the impact made her wince with pain. She put an arm round Chrissie’s head and clasped it to her side.

  ‘There’s a silly for you!’ she cried with rough love. ‘Whatever will these young ladies think? She’s shy, that’s what it is. Ooh, she did create! Never mind, duckie, it’s all over now. Mammie’ll get you another kitty. Look now, these lovely little ladies have come to see you.’

  ‘To say we’re sorry,’ muttered Jess heroically.

  ‘Oh dear, and we know they wouldn’t have had it happen for the world.’

  But Chrissie remained mute, tense, annihilating herself; all of her repudiating us.

  My father touched us on the shoulder, and it was all over, and we could go. I had been nervously fingering the wood of the rickety porch, and had my hand raised, picking at the paint blisters. Suddenly I felt it seized and snatched to Mrs. Wyatt’s lips. I heard her cry wildly:

  ‘Look at her little white hand!’

  Tingling from head to foot with blushes, I was unable to join in the mutual expressions of cordiality and farewell. We went away down the cinder path and when we came to the group beneath the tree my father stopped.

  ‘You know, we’re dreadfully sad,’ he said. ‘We love cats as much as you do.’

  They stared at us, their eyes pin-pointing from a great distance. But Maudie said politely:

  ‘Oh well, it can’t be helped. It don’t matter.’

  ‘Dad says ’e’ll beg a puppy for us when Jet at the farm ’as pups,’ said Horace.

  ‘Good,’ said my father. ‘Remember puppies like a nice bowl of water—clean water—handy for whenever they want to wet their whistle. And I’ll tell you a thing they don’t like. They don’t like to be tied up all day. In the end it makes them so cross they feel like biting people. Just as I’d feel. Wouldn’t you?’

  They looked extremely wary now, their faces blank with suspicion and alarm. Not a word came out of them. My father walked round behind them to the back of the tree and examined in a meditative way a hole freshly dug in the ground.

  ‘That’s a fine hole somebody’s dug.’

  ‘We done it for Fluff,’ said Maudie. ‘’Orace done it. But our Dad took ’er away and put ’er somewhere else. ’E said Alfie and them would go digging ’er up all day.’

  My father stirred the earth with his toe:

  ‘I fancied I saw something shine,’ he said. ‘What can it possibly have been? Come and look, one of you.’

  Cautiously Horace got to his feet and came and stood beside him.

  ‘Just here,’ said my father.

  Something gleamed in the loose dry soil at the bottom of the hole. Suddenly Horace crouched and started scrabbling; then he whisked upright again, his face drawn, mottled a dull pink.

  On his palm lay some earth and a half-crown piece. He was trembling all over.

  ‘Well, I’ll be blessed!’ said my father. ‘What an extraordinary piece of luck that you should have dug just there.’

  Maudie picked up the baby and came and stood beside her brother. The one in the box clambered out and joined them. Finally Horace said in a toneless whisper:

  ‘’Oo do it belong to?’

  ‘Why, to the lot of you,’ said my father. ‘Finding’s keeping, you know, when it’s buried treasure.’

  We went out of the gate, and when I looked back I saw Horace scuttling towards the cottage, his head down, and the little one scuttling after him. Only Maudie remained under the plum tree, her stomach stuck out to support the weight of the child in her arms, staring after us.

  ‘You did drop it in, didn’t you, Daddy?’ said Jess, who liked to have everything shipshape, with no excuse for mystification.

  ‘I saw you,’ I said; and I had; and was in consequence brooding beneath the cloud of too much light. For it had come home to me in a flash, as the coin left his pocket for the earth, that my reading of The Treasure Seekers* had been at fault, and that my father and Albert Next Door’s Uncle had practised an identical deception. This was an absolutely new idea to me, and caused me a shock of disillusionment.

  My father sighed and smiled.

  Surreptitiously, for fear of Jess’s eye, I squinted sideways at my little white hand.

  2

  That was the first act in our relationship with the Wyatts: unpropitious, fraught with omens. It was my younger sister Sylvia who subsequently insinuated them, first into the garden, then into the house; and so forever into memory and imagination.

  Sylvia had long ago swept away any class barriers which she considered irksome, and for preference selected comrades from among the back lane children. In the self-created rôle of Lone Scout, wearing a personally designed uniform girt with a stiff leather belt and stuck with knives, ropes, whistles, assuming a gruff husky voice and a sort of backwoodsman’s accent, she roamed the lane and mingled in the seasonal hopscotch and top-whipping. She knew every single one of the children, name, age, details of private life and all. Her experiences must have been interesting—much more so, factually speaking, than my own. I feared the caterwauling noises that floated up in the evenings to the nursery window; I shrank from the drawings and inscriptions upon the pillars of the railway arch. They printed themselves with scorching precision upon the cavern walls behind my eyes, but I passed them furtively, hoping they would—wouldn’t—would be rubbed out; as they sometimes were—only to reappear again—by some anonymous purifier working secretly with an indiarubber in the night.

  I never thought of the back lane kids as children like myself: they were another species of creature, and, yes, a lower. I imagined their bodily functions must in some nameless way differ from my own. But for Sylvia they were objects of whole-hearted fascination, beings to be emulated and admired. Such posted announcements as: Rosie Gann goes with Reggie Hiscock, with accompanying symbols, were transcripts of mysteries into which she had initiated herself without dismay or shame. There never was a little girl less likely to see something nasty in the wood shed. What she did see she accepted with an unwavering speculative eye—an eye that from birth had met the shocks of life impenetrably with one cold answer: ‘Just as I expected.’ I was fluid, alternately floored and ecstatic; but she was what

  I believe theosophists call an old soul, and the parents, nurses, governesses, schoolmistresses of the world impressed on her nothing except a tacit determination to resist their precepts. Jess cried out fiercely: ‘Unfair! Unjust!’; and I wept, and hastened to be accommodating, because of a wish to be loved by everybody; but Sylvia gave away no clue that might have provided an opportunity for character-moulding. She learned a number of interesting words and rhymes in the back lane; and sometimes she came in from play with a faintly stupefied expression, as if there had been a good deal to take in.

  She used to conduct parties into the garden by the bottom gate, and lurk with them among the shrubbery. My parents were democratic in their ideas, but I doubt if they would have encouraged their visitors, had they been aware of their presence. So far as I know, they never were precisely aware of it. The shrubbery was profuse, in the late Victorian style, containing many a secret chamber and named vantage point. The game was to see unseen. Generally all was silence, but now and then owl hoots, unseasonable cuckoo calls issued from the depths of the foliage: ritual cries, maybe, or merely a leg-pull for the gardeners. But gardeners are, I think, particularly unsusceptible to leg-pulls based on natural phenomena; or perhaps it is that custom has dulled their response to the calls of birds: anyway they gave no outward sign of attention or perplexity.

  There were also occasional raids on the cherry, plum and apple orchards during the ripe seasons—triumphs of strateg
y one and all; differently organised indeed from the wretched affair of the ungentlemanly Barstow boys and the peaches, to which I lent myself: but that is another story.

  These were the days when each portion of the garden, every shrub-girdled bay of grass and rose bushes, every dark sour-smelling haunt of fern and creeping ivy beneath the laurel-planted walks had its particular myth, its genius or indwelling spirit. Now, when I go back home, I am confused sometimes by double vision. A veil clouds my eyes, and at the same time a veil is stripped off; for a moment time’s boomerang splits me clean in two, and presences evanescent and clinging as webs, or the breath of flowers on the wind, drift in the familiar places, exhaling as they pass a last tingling echo of primeval rapture. Almost I remember what, besides myself, hid in the forests of asparagus; what whispered in the bamboos round the pond, and had power over the goldfish and the water lilies; what complex phantom rose up from the aromatic deeps of lavender when I brushed white butterflies in flocks off the mauve bushes.

  Sylvia’s myths, intense as mine, were different in their nature, and we never exchanged or shared them. Mine leaned to prettiness and fairies; hers, I feel sure, were bonier, more unromantic, masculine. We ranged ourselves roughly as it were—Little Folks against the B.O.P. Jess took in The Children’s Encyclopaedia, and she cleaned out the rabbit hutches and nursed the puppies through distemper, and knitted scarves and mittens—proper, wearable ones—for my father and my brother, while daemonically we roamed in the sacred wood with bloomers torn, and black powder off branches in our matted hair.

  Sylvia’s customary visitors never came near the house, let alone into it; but the Wyatts did come. They worked away noiselessly, like termites, and in the end our foundations collapsed, and they were in the nursery. It was the summer my mother went back to New England to see her people, and took Jess with her. Our infant brother was sent to the seaside with Nurse, our unpopular Belgian governess returned to her native country for a lovely long holiday, and Sylvia and I remained at home to keep our father company, with only Isabel the nursemaid to supervise us.

  It was a beautiful time. All over the household a slackening of moral fibre took place. Mrs. Almond our cook had friends in most afternoons, and we showed off to them and made them clap their hands over their mouths to gasp and giggle and exclaim that we were cough-drops, cures or cautions. Mossop imported a fascinating curly-haired nephew called Charlie, a professional soldier, who played the concertina and encouraged us to sit on his lap. I stayed up to dinner every night. The Wyatts advanced their operations.

  One day Sylvia said in an off-hand way:

  ‘Isabel, the Wyatts are in the garden. They want to come up and see our toys.’

  Another time Isabel might have replied that want must be their master, or: ‘And so does the sweep’s grandmother, I dare say. The very idea! What next?’—but she was in particularly mellow spirits that afternoon and she answered: ‘Well, I can’t see the harm in that. A cat may look at a king, so I’ve heard tell;’ and she went on pinning together the cut-out front portions of a new blue sateen blouse over her opulent bosom, and humming snatches of After the ball was over.

  She was a strapping girl with red cheeks and a full blue marble eye. She sang loudly, in operatic style, with maniac tremolos, as she went about her work. She had a bottom drawer, and a bone in her leg, and saw handsome strangers in the tea-leaves, and bade us leave a little for Miss Manners, and threatened to give us what Paddy gave the drum; and was apt to answer our questions obliquely with a tag or a saw. She was without tenderness. Her mind was not on us. A set-back in her private life on her day out, or a telling-off from Nurse occasionally made her sulky, and then she was apt to give us sharp pushes and be rough with the comb; but she had a fund of easy animal good nature, and we liked her very much, and admired her looks as much as she did herself.

  Sylvia went away, and came back with three Wyatts behind her: Maudie, Horace, Chrissie. They stood in a block at the nursery door.

  I said would they like to look in the toy cupboard; but they made no answer. ‘There’s the rocking-horse,’ said Sylvia; but their eyes darted up and down, over the walls, along the floor, not focusing. A deep flush came up and began to burn in Sylvia’s cheeks. Nothing more happened. Then in came Isabel, swinging her hips, looking particularly pleased with herself—I suppose the blouse was turning out a nice fit—and crying amiably: ‘Well, here’s a lot of smiling faces, and no mistake!’

  We giggled, abashed, and the Wyatts looked at her in a stunned way. Then a minute ventriloquist’s voice came out of Maudie, remarking politely:

  ‘Hope it’s no trouble.’

  ‘Trouble? I’ve got trouble enough without troubling about you. All my ironing to do. Mind the wind doesn’t change on those doleful dials of yours, that’s all, or we’ll all have something extra to mope about. We don’t eat children in this nursery, you know.’ She picked Chrissie up in her arms and gave her a little shake; and Chrissie strained back, her wreath of hair slipping forward and hiding her face as she bowed it low, low on to her chest, out of Isabel’s sight. ‘Curlylocks! Oo, aren’t you a thin mite! We’d never get a square meal off you, would we?’

  A tiny doll’s titter issued from the other two, and at that encouraging symptom Sylvia and I broke out in hearty laughs of relief. A section of Chrissie’s eye was visible, frantically rolling. Suddenly she pitched forward in Isabel’s grasp, flung both arms round Isabel’s neck and hung there convulsively, buried and silent.

  ‘Lor’ love a duck!’ said Isabel after a second’s pause, her voice taking on a startled gentler note. ‘You cling on like a little monkey, don’t you? Just like a little monkey on a stick.’

  She carried Chrissie over to the musical box, wound it up and put on a disc. Out tinkled After the ball was over in liquid midget notes. She gave Chrissie a kiss and set her down, saying: ‘Be a good girl now, there’s a love. You’re all right.’ Then she gave a nod to Maudie and tweaked Horace’s ear and went out.

  It was all right then: the paralysis was dissolved. Horace mounted the rocking-horse, dubiously at first, clutching its mane and letting out a sharp panicky ‘Hey!’ whenever it moved; gradually with increasing bravado. Maudie walked softly about, looking at the rugs, the fireguard, the screen we had plastered with cut-out pictures from magazines and seedsmen’s catalogues. She looked at the doll’s house, and the doll’s cot, but she never so much as put out a finger to touch anything. Playing seemed a concept unknown to her. She threw off polite remarks, such as: ‘Ain’t it a big room?’ and: ‘Is that your picture book?’ She stood with her sagging, broken-down working woman’s stance, and looked long at the coloured print of Madame Vigée Lebrun* and her daughter above the mantelpiece. I explained that they were mother and child, and that the lady in the picture had executed the work herself. She said: ‘Is it hand-painted, then?’ I said dubiously I thought it was a copy but that the original was indeed hand-painted. She said however did she manage then, when she’d got both arms round the kid? I was stumped.

  After that she said: ‘Where d’you keep your clothes and that, then?’ and I conducted her to my bedroom, and opened the cupboard. Our wardrobe was far from extensive, but I felt a mounting possessive complacence as I displayed my frocks. She still seemed apathetic, but at the back of her eyes I could now see a fixed point of glittering light. I was overcome by the desire to present her with a pink cotton frock which I disliked. Though I was nine and she rising thirteen I was fully as tall as she. This wish strove with fear of being scolded should the transaction be discovered, and the resulting conflict held me powerless.

  She said: ‘Which is your best, then?’ and for a climax I took down my dancing-class frock of crimson accordion-pleated silk. She put out her hand to touch it, but did not do so.

  ‘We’ve got bridesmaids’ frocks too, from our cousin’s wedding,’ I said. ‘Apricot satin with pearls embroidered on the belt.’

  ‘Where
are they, then?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, they’re put away,’ I said. ‘We’re not allowed to take them out of their tissue paper.’

  Feeling suddenly a peculiar revulsion from clothes, I led her back to the nursery, where Horace was still on the rocking-horse, and Chrissie still crouched by the musical box, with Sylvia putting on Robin Adair, The Bluebells of Scotland and After the Ball for her in unbroken succession.

  A noticeable thing was their apprehensiveness about any spontaneous moves. We were accustomed to the uninhibited pounces and rushes of our social equals when they came to tea; but the springs of these children were crushed back and could not leap out.

  There came a battering and a whimpering at the door, and who should tear in but Jannie, fresh from some round of local visits. We were embarrassed; but they looked at him without ill-will while he gave himself up to the raptures of reunion. Horace even bent to stroke him, remarking:

  ‘You copped our Fluff, you did.’

  ‘’E still comes round our back door,’ said Maudie. ‘Our Mum says she can’t like hold any think against a dumb animal when it’s their nature.’

  We could think of no suitable reply.

  Then Isabel came carolling back, and swung Chrissie up again and set her on her lap, saying cheerfully: ‘Well now, let’s have a look at you. Found your tongue yet? Eh?’

  Chrissie nestled against her shoulder, half-hiding, but relaxed, coy. The others came and stood close beside Isabel, trustful, smiling faintly.

  ‘You’re all right, Chris,’ said Horace.

  ‘Our Mum says she’s a funny girl,’ said Maudie. ‘She says she don’t know where she come from. She’s not like the others, she says.’

  ‘She can’t ’arf bite when she gets ’er temper up,’ said Horace.

  ‘Yes, I bites,’ whispered Chrissie, beaming.

  I think it was the only thing I ever heard her say.

  Isabel burst out laughing.

  ‘Oo, you little sinner!’ she cried. ‘Don’t you know what happens to little girls who bite? They get turned into nasty little dogs, they do. Don’t you ever do such a shocking thing ever again.’ She tilted Chrissie’s chin up and looked at her indulgently. It was plain that the beauty of the creature had caught her fancy. ‘Two-pennyworth of bad ha’pence, that’s what you are,’ she said; and then, goodnaturedly, she swept us all out to the garden and told the Wyatts to mind and run along home at once now.