Mothering Sunday

by Noel Streatfeild

  For one moment Henry considered talking to Carol. She only saw about a quarter of the troubles he saw. Laying your burdens on someone else was an undoubted relief. If only he did not know that he already cut a pretty poor figure in Carol’s and her parents’ eyes he might have talked to her; in fact, the inner Henry was in favour of it, but the outer Henry could not unbutton the figure he had built to let the inner Henry out.

  “I don’t know why you expect me to have any influence with my mother. There was the First World War, and then Cousin Tom more or less adopting me.”

  “Still we could make a plan of what should be done. Does she listen to Jane?”

  Henry stared at the fields and hedges sliding by. Queer how far apart he and Jane had grown, yet at one time they had been inseparable. They had never spoken of those days; did Jane remember? The friendship had really started that first holiday after their father died when he came first to the new house. Jane came with his mother to meet him at the station. Odd how some moments out of the past seemed to have photographic qualities. Many far more important moments must have disappeared for ever, but there was the little railway station, and the shabby Morris with the handyman driver who in those days drove it, standing beside it, and there, walking on either side of him, were his mother and Jane. Strange, in so vivid a memory, that his mother alone was blurred. Black. She certainly wore black but he knew that she had worn black at that time so it was not memory. Jane was absolutely clear. He remembered being surprised by her. She was skipping with excitement, apparently because he was home. Her eyes said, “Wait until I get you alone, I have so much to tell you.” She had even changed to look at. She was a nice-looking child with brown eyes and dark curls, but she had always been at cross-purposes with everybody, which had given her a smouldering, sulky look. Her constant cry to him had been: “Oh, you are lucky to be sent away to a boarding school. I simply hate being at home. Oh, I wish I was a boy!” On that morning at the railway station, engrossed though he was with his own emotions, he could feel she was a new Jane. She was happy. It shone from her. She could only have been twelve at that time. She must have been an unusually adult twelve, for she had known exactly the mood in which he would come home, and what was coming to him. She had gripped the rest of the family in her arms, and knew he too would need her. She had shown him over the new house. He noticed with surprise her proprietary air. “I put that shelf in your room for your books.” “I said we’d have Irish stew for lunch because you adore it.” Had she any real sympathy for him when she came to the garage to watch him crying himself sick, or had she just waited for him to break down in order to sweep him, with the rest of the household, under her control? He had moaned between sobs: “She doesn’t care even now if I’m home or not. I thought she’d want me now.” Henry could still hear the tone of Jane’s reply. “She doesn’t care about any one. She still only thinks about Daddy, but she’s glad of me; everybody’s glad of me. You’ll be. You’ll see.”

  Henry felt Carol’s question had remained awkwardly long unanswered.

  “I doubt if any of us could make Mother do anything she didn’t want to do, but certainly not Jane.”

  Henry looked back again at the landscape. Was that the answer? He had never understood what had happened. For three years everybody had been glad of Jane, nobody more so than himself. She had made him feel wanted in a way he never had when his father was alive. In their new home there was no possibility of any one making a sportsman of him, for there was no fishing or shooting and no horses, but Jane found something which took him away from spending his whole time reading and which he did enjoy. Conniving with the handyman driver they learned to drive. No car ever had more lavish attention than the two of them gave to that old Morris. Both being too young for licences they could only drive in lonely lanes, but it was their pride to see that the car was as soignée as an old car could be. Over the cleaning and the polishing of it they had talked of everything under the sun, especially of his future. Jane wanted him to go into the diplomatic and not to marry, so that she might keep house for him. “I’d make a gorgeous ambassadress, you know I would.” He had seen that; Jane would be a good ambassadress, but he had not seen himself as an ambassador. What he had really wanted was to be a professor or don, though he was vague as to how you became such things. Jane, he remembered, had been indignant. The only one of the family who was being properly educated to want to bury himself in a stuffy college where he would be no good to his sisters. It was ridiculous. As one holiday slipped past another, by wordless agreement they dropped the subject of his future. So many boys they knew seemed scarcely to have left school before they were killed, his career either as a diplomat or don seemed too chancy to be worth discussing. Instead they planned for the family. The handyman gardener had long disappeared into some form of war service. There was still a cook, a house-parlourmaid and a nurse, but war or no war they would not do any but their usual work and grumbled endlessly for things, an ever lengthening list, that they could not have. Looking back, Jane seemed at that age to have got through a remarkable amount of work. There were her lessons, given to her and Margaret by a daily governess, but he doubted if she had bothered much with those. There was the garden, which he seemed to remember as being full of vegetables, and certainly nobody looked after it except Jane, assisted by Margaret, unless perhaps, though this he could not remember, his mother helped. Certainly his mother had been the car driver, for he could distinctly recall the shocked discussions he had with Jane about her driving, which had been vile and not good for their beloved Morris. He and Jane seemed in retrospect to have spent a lot of his holidays with a double saw piling up fuel for the winter. Between bouts of sawing how earnest they had been. He remembered hearing that Jane was dissatisfied with Margaret’s education, and how calmly he had accepted “She’s like you, awfully clever, but rather slow about other things, if you don’t mind my saying so. I think she’ll have to get a scholarship at one of those big schools. I’m finding out about it.” He heard that Felicity was, in Jane’s opinion, getting spoiled by Nannie and it was time she started lessons. Nannie had brought them all up and took no nonsense from Jane, and Jane knew it, but worried none the less. It was queer, looking back, how he had come to accept that Jane ran everything and confided in him her household worries. It had never seemed to surprise him that his mother took so little interest. She had been about, and yet somehow she had not. Looking back he could only see her in the haziest way until that spring morning. It was the last day, or nearly the last day, of his Easter holidays. He and Jane were having a final log cutting with the double saw when their mother came by. She stood watching them with the strange smile that she had at that time, which seemed a way of twisting her lips and had nothing to do with how she felt. She said, “What a lot of wood, darlings!” Jane answered, as she always did at that time when speaking to her mother, as if she were a child, that they were a big family and used a lot of wood. Their mother, still staring at the logs, still smiling her queer smile, said, “But not in the summer. I shouldn’t think you need cut such a lot until next holidays.” He could feel even now the pause and the way he and Jane had looked at each other before, slowly, he had said what he had often said before: “I’ll be in the army before the summer holidays. You know that, Mother.” What had happened then he had never understood. His mother had said: “The army! Henry!” Then slowly her face had flushed. She had put both hands to her cheeks and stared at the two of them as if seeing them for the first time. “The army? But you’re fifteen!” They had told her how old they were but she did not seem to need their words; she was sorting facts for herself. “Henry, eighteen. Jane, you’re fifteen. My baby is three. Where have I been?” Without another word she had hurried away.

  Carol had been thinking of Jane.

  “No, I guess that’s natural. They’re both the independent type. I guess she was always that way, even as a little girl.”

  Henry made an agreeing grunt and retired
back into the past. It was when he had that first leave from France that he lost his friendship with Jane. He had no idea why, probably they had grown apart. He with his war knowledge; she sheltered in the home. He did not remember that leave clearly; he had been too restless to stay at home; there had been the visit to Cousin Tom and the new future, if he should live, that promised, and there had been the usual hectic time in London. He remembered being hurt with Jane. He had meant, he believed, to have confided in her a little of what he was enduring but she had changed. She seemed, in memory, hard, unresponsive, wrapped up in herself and her own interests and at loggerheads the whole time with her mother. Anyway she had been no good. He had told her nothing and he had never really known her since.

  “Yes, she was always independent. She was sent to school the year I joined the army, and Margaret, who was and is the most faithful family letter writer, used to describe the scenes which went on between her and various mistresses. I should think the school had hell with Jane.”

  “What about Margaret? Surely, as a doctor, she might be able to make your mother see she can’t live alone. She can put it on health grounds.”

  “Margaret! Hope she’ll keep off her practice.”

  “I surely hope you behave yourself. You were very rude the last time she dined with us when she told you how well the National Health Service would work. Mind you, Margaret’s not my type, but she’s a wonderful woman. Working away down there in the docks.” Carol laughed. “I do hope she’s got something nice to wear. I’ve seen her in that one coat and skirt for years. I feel sure she does wash, maybe more than most of us, but she always looks kind of mussed up.”

  “She always looked like that. Hasn’t changed much. She was a fat, plain little thing with glasses and pigtails; now she winds the pigtails up, that’s the only difference.”

  “Didn’t your mother ever see she looked as pretty as she could and had fun?”

  “I don’t know. When I was up at Oxford I came home for a dance or two and she was around. I don’t know whether Mother had tried but she always looked damned awful.”

  “And Jane and Felicity so smart!” Carol considered Felicity. When she had married she had seen a fair amount of Felicity. They were both newly-weds and much of an age, and had both married dull men. Carol had wondered a lot about Felicity’s reasons for marrying George. Felicity was a charmer; she could probably have married any one; if so, why George? She had, when Carol had first known her, spent a lot of time with her mother. They seemed, from what she said, to be the greatest friends. Because of the births of first Helen and then Paul, and the increasing number of social engagements that came her way as the member’s wife, she had seen less of Felicity in the immediate pre-war years. It was not her fault for she had tried to see more of her, and had suggested that Virginia should come to stay since she and Helen were the same age, but Felicity, who had always been vague, was at that time more illusive and vague than usual, and somehow, without apparently refusing many invitations, just disappeared. Carol did not know when the break between Felicity and her mother had occurred but sometime during the war. It was one of the few family things talked about by the brothers and sisters and which in-laws were allowed to discuss, but it was a dead horse now. Nobody knew what they could have found to quarrel about; they just clearly had and it wasn’t Virginia because she was always, until the last few months, with her grandmother. Carol said:

  “A pity about Felicity and your mother. If only they hadn’t got up against each other she was the one to fix things.”

  Henry did not bother to answer so obvious a remark. Instead he said:

  “I wonder if George is coming. Hope not.”

  Carol was not going to confess how much Jane hoped that too, and how broad had been the hint that all in-laws save Simon were warned off. Nor was she going to tell Henry how her own bet was that Felicity would not turn up. She had got Henry safely into the car, and though he wouldn’t turn back now, she did not want him sulking again, especially as they were only a few miles from Paul’s school. He’d sulk all right if Felicity did not turn up. It was possible he would see he had to be there if all the family were there, but if one were missing he would be horrible to manage. Happiness wrapped her as if it were a warm cloak, as she saw on a signpost how near they were to Paul’s school. In her mind she could see Paul standing at the school gate. She could see Helen waiting, with other girls whose parents were taking them out, in the hall at Fairfield. She pushed her worries to the back of her mind. From now on she belonged to the children, and was going to think of nothing but them; she would go back to her probing into the Caldwell family when the children were back in their schools. Maybe having seen Helen and Paul and talking of them afterwards would loosen Henry up. She smiled at him.

  “I’ll draw up in a mile or two and you can drive. I must do something to my face before the children see me.”

  JANE

  The Betlers lived in a Bayswater square. A five-storeyed and basemented house of incredible inconvenience. Mary Jones, the cook, Annie Smyth, the house-parlourmaid and a daily, Mrs. Miggs, were there to serve it, but that was not enough; the house was an octopus sucking at the leisure of all who lived under its roof. When Jane let her mind dwell on the toll the house demanded from them all she flared with uncontrolled impatience, just in the way she had done when she was a girl. She was fundamentally a good organiser and to see time flung away on an exceptionally unpleasant example of Victorian house building set every nerve in her body tingling. On the other hand, when she faced the alternative of house hunting for a place easy to run which would yet accommodate them all and be shaped to suit the existing curtains, carpets and furniture she felt as if she were sickening for a mortal illness. Everybody, she supposed, harboured a horrid collection of ways from which they had deteriorated from themselves when young, and she certainly had one to face over running a house. Some day she and Simon planned to retire to the country and when they did, she told herself, she would have the perfect country house perfectly run. She never foxed herself into believing what she told herself; for one thing she could not see Simon retiring; she did not believe the legal profession ever did; she thought, like old soldiers, they just faded.

  On Saturday morning, because spring was about—a fact which could be seen even in the sooty garden of the square—the work demanded by the house seemed particularly irksome. The kitchen had been modernised to the extent of a gas stove and refrigerator, and a boiler which was supposed to carry hot water over the entire house but which never even attempted so unlikely a feat. Mary, preparing the lunch, and Mrs. Miggs “doing” the kitchen floor were unaware of how often the spring dragged their eyes to the window. Mary could only guess at the blue sky beyond the area railings, but Mrs. Miggs, on hands and knees, could, from certain angles, see a tree in the square garden.

  “Spring in the air,” said Mrs. Miggs. “Makes me feel me plates of meat.”

  Mary would never sink to using rhyming slang but she understood it.

  “Same here.”

  Neither woman knew they blamed the kitchen. They were used to its large stone floor covered by worn inadequate oilcloth; to the vast, never-used range with its remarkable gift for collecting dust; to shelves in the wrong places, sinks which never drained properly and all its other time-wasting, spirit-bowing defects. It was that sort of kitchen. Many people had worse.

  Mrs. Miggs sat up on her haunches to rest her back. In addressing Mary by her surname she always slightly accentuated the “Mrs.” “Mrs.” might be a courtesy title in kitchens but, to Mrs. Miggs, unless backed by marriage lines it meant nothing.

  “That right they’re goin’ away to-day, Mrs. Jones?”

  “Just him and her. Spending to-night in a hotel with her family, and all going over to her mother to-morrow. It’s Mothering Sunday she was telling me.”

  “What’s that?”

  Mary shrugged her shoulders.

&n
bsp; “Something they kept up in her family. Silly, she thought it, she told me, so she never brought our children up to it. Still. it’s nice all going to see the old lady. I’ve packed a fine parcel—jam, a cake, some sardines and a tin of that bacon we had in a parcel from America.”

  Mrs. Miggs shook her head.

  “Don’t ’old with givin’ food away where there’s children in the ’ouse.”

  “No more do I. Last year I wouldn’t let her, so she sent her sweet ration.” Mary lowered her voice. “I didn’t say anything this year, seeing there’s trouble. Looks like the old lady was going a bit on the upper storey.”

  “Terrible when they start to break up. I’ll never forget when my mother started to go. With ’er it was ’er legs. Terrible sufferer she was with bad legs and it made ’er queer in ’er mind. Created somethin’ shockin’ about everything before she was took.”

  “From what I can hear and that’s only through people called Robinson who work next door to the old lady—not that I know them but Constance Mills does—you know, who works for Mrs. Betler’s sister, Mrs. Wilson—well, she used to go in to them for a cup of tea and that when the children’s cousin, Virginia, was there, and she took her down to stay with her grannie. The Robinsons have written to Miss Mills to say they are worried. Seems Mrs. Caldwell’s taken to roaming, out all hours, and won’t see anybody; they reckon it’s being so much alone. She hasn’t had anybody living in the house since Christmas. Miss Mills says she can’t think why as Mrs. Conrad who was there was very nice; the Robinsons think it’s money but it can’t be that. Sir Henry wouldn’t let her want, and Mrs. Wilson’s got plenty and Mrs. Betler would help; even the doctor could manage ten shillings a week, shouldn’t wonder.”