Mothering Sunday

by Noel Streatfeild

  Mrs. Miggs dipped her scrubbing brush in her pail of water. She ran a finger thoughtfully over the brush bristles.

  “Of course, I speak as I find, but you know the number of ’ouses I work in, and the sort of people I’ve always worked for.”

  “None but the best.”

  “That’s right. Seems to me what you might call ladies and gentlemen ’aven’t the same feelin’s as the likes of people like me. They don’t seem to feel responsible like for their relatives. I suppose it’s never ’avin’ ’ad to face the shame of the work’ouse but I must say they seem to me a ’eartless lot. Why, do you know, at Lady E’s, though she’d got that nice car, and ’er mother’s buried just outside London, she didn’t go once to see the grave let alone put flowers on it all the while I worked for ’er. The cook often spoke of it to me. Now me, though it’s a four-penny ride and a bit of a walk, I go to the cemetery to ’ave a look at Mum’s and Dad’s graves regular once a month, and I always manage a few flowers.”

  Mary made an agreeing cluck but her mind was on Anna.

  “‘It’s not money,’ I said to Miss Mills. The Robinsons may think it’s money but they only know what they hear, not being in the family; but if the old lady’s going queer we know what’s turned her, and no wonder. Might turn anybody. I wouldn’t mention this even to you, Mrs. Miggs, only you’d heard it all before ever you came to work here.”

  “That’s right. Lady E. told me when I asked for me reference.”

  “Yes, but you don’t know everything.” Mary left her stove and bent over the kneeling Mrs. Miggs. “She bore up wonderfully at the time. Miss Mills saw her and said she was as calm as though nothing had happened. It was when he broke out something seemed to go in her. ‘Don’t talk about him.’ Those were her very words. The doctor called here on her day off and Miss Smyth heard her tell Mrs. Betler. ‘Oh, Jane,’ the doctor said, ‘I spoke to Mother again on the telephone yesterday. I said to her, “If only we knew where Tony was!” and do you know what she said? “Don’t talk about him any of you. I never want to hear his name mentioned again.” Oh, Jane,’ the doctor said, she sounded as if she hated him. Mother to hate Tony!’”

  Mrs. Miggs looked knowing.

  “Seems queer to feel that way about your own son, and I never could, no matter what, but my sister, she knew—well, not to say knew—but she had a friend what knew Mrs. Splice—you remember Fred Splice who was ’ung for stranglin’ a girl—‘The Girl in Blue’ case they called it—well, Mrs. Splice said with ’er own lips to my sister’s friend, ‘It’s no surprise to me,’ she said. ‘I said since ’e was no more’n a nipper, “Born to be ’anged.”’ Those was ’er very words. ‘Born to be ’anged.’ Just shows you can’t tell, doesn’t it?”

  Mary went back to her stove. She wished now she had not told Mrs. Miggs about old Mrs. Caldwell, but since she knew so much she had thought she might as well know the rest. Besides, she enjoyed talking about the family, but it grated on her to hear Mrs. Betler’s mother compared with Mrs. Splice. When she spoke again her tone made the social gulf which yawned between herself, cook for many years to the family, and Mrs. Miggs, fairly recently acquired charlady, show clearly.

  “Of course you don’t really know the family, so couldn’t be expected to understand.”

  Mrs. Miggs was a Cockney and therefore not one to take sauce from any one. She knew a dozen answers which would have made Mary know she couldn’t “come it” over Mrs. Miggs. Still, no good came of making bad feeling with people you worked for, if you meant to go on working with them, and she did mean to go on working with Mary. Her Ursula was much of a size with Mrs. Betler’s Lucia, only Ursula was not so stout, and Mrs. Betler was good about passing on clothes. She changed the subject.

  “Pity they aren’t all goin’ away to-day. Give you and Miss Smyth a nice rest-up. You could do with it with the spring about. ’Tisn’t only the old plates of meat that feel it—gets you all over. It’s the blood I always say.”

  Mary did not like stand-offishness in her kitchen, but she was not going to discuss her employers any more that morning. Comparing old Mrs. Caldwell with Mrs. Splice indeed! Such ignorance! Besides, she had views on the Betler children that she talked about to nobody but Annie. They had both been with the family since the children were babies. They remembered Alistair, and what he had meant to his parents. There had been no going away then to see old Mrs. Caldwell, leaving him behind. No wonder. He was a boy to be proud of, if ever there was one, and so good-looking. Even now it made her and Annie feel sick to remember the day the telegram came. Annie had taken it to Mrs. Betler and she said to her dying day she would never forget the way she read it, crushed it in one hand and said, “No answer, Annie,” and turned her lips up as if she was smiling. Kept that smile she had, too, for days and days. Made herself hum a tune every time you looked at her. Anything so you shouldn’t know how she felt. Terrible time it had been for every one. Anthea locking herself into the lavatory to cry, or burying herself under the bedclothes, anywhere to drown the sound of her sobs so her mother wouldn’t hear her and say, “Anything wrong?” Mr. Betler had been the worst. Aged years in a day. Peter had come to her, bless him. Eleven he’d been, but she had sat him on her knee and rocked him to and fro like a baby. Couldn’t stop him crying. Annie said it was terrible the day he cried at table and his mother snapped out, “Whatever are you crying about, Peter? Is anything wrong?” and Mr. Betler had jumped up, slammed his fist on the table and said, “Oh, God, Jane!” and had gone to his study, locked the door and not come out until the next morning. Still, you shouldn’t let the living suffer for the dead for that wouldn’t bring them back. No good denying Peter and Andrew hadn’t Alistair’s looks nor brains, still they were nice boys, and Anthea and Lucia were nice girls; it didn’t seem right to keep nagging at them because they weren’t up to Alistair’s class; they couldn’t help that. Didn’t bring out the best in them the way they were treated.

  “They couldn’t go, Andrew being up for his tooth and needing seeing off and that, and you know what hotels are; been hard enough to get the rooms for themselves, most likely, without trying to bring all the family.” Mrs. Miggs kept her head bent for her lips twitched. In her circle she was considered a great wag and never more so than when describing Mary on one of her high-hat days. Already her sharp Cockney ear was noting inflections and planning comments. “You know what ’otels are?” “Oh yes,” I said, “I know me and me old man pop into The Ritz ’otel every Saturday night regular.” Mary having, as she supposed, achieved her object and put Mrs. Miggs in her place, was irritated by her silence. She spoke with the authority of her position. “I must ask you to get a move on, Mrs. Miggs, and finish my kitchen. Lunch is early on account of them making an early start.”

  On the top floor where once had been nurseries and where there were still bars across the windows to prove it, Annie, assisted by Lucia, was turning out Lucia’s room. It had been the day nursery but during the war, for periods when the children were able to be at home, they had not used the nurseries as, being at the top of the house, they were considered unsafe. By the time the war was over Lucia was eleven. Jane knew she ought to have done something about the day nursery before she turned it into the child’s bedroom, but it was one of the many things she had let slide. She was exhausted, mentally and physically, and incapable of raising the energy to do the little that was possible at that time, and, as the years passed, she had allowed herself to forget about it. When she remembered the room, which was seldom, she told herself she would make it up to Lucia by seeing she had a really pretty bedroom when she left school; perhaps things would be cheaper by then. Neither Annie nor Lucia, as they turned out the room, saw anything the matter with it. It had got what a bedroom needed. A bed, a table with a mirror on it, a couple of nursery chairs, what had been the toy cupboard for clothes, and those that had to hang went into Andrew’s cupboard in the old night nursery. It struck neither Annie nor Lucia
as odd that though rugs were back on the market, at not too exorbitant a price, the floor was still covered with the worn cork-backed linoleum of its nursery days. The walls were as they had always been in Lucia’s lifetime, lemon yellow with a Beatrix Potter dado, and though portions of Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter had peeled off, it did not occur to either of them that for little expense or effort the room could be distempered and the paint touched up either by an expert or by Lucia herself. They did not notice that in order that Annie, who was thorough, could give a weekly polish to the cork-backed linoleum, Lucia had to move the large dolls’ house, William the rocking-horse, the solid nursery table, the high guard in front of the gas stove, and that she might dust, take out of the low bookshelves, amongst many much valued nursery books, any number of old annuals and unwanted trash which should long ago have gone to paper salvage. It did not even strike them as strange that a girl of fourteen whose parents, allowing for the poverty of the times, were quite well off, had no bedside lamp but had concocted for herself a string pulley which went over the door so that the centre light by which alone the room was lit might be turned out when she had finished reading and was ready for sleep. Indeed, far from seeing inertia or lack of enterprise in keeping the room as it was, from old associations they regarded it with a sort of affection. Annie, as she gave a final polish to the scraped marks where William’s rockers had rested, reached over to give one of his legs an affectionate slap.

  “Gee up, William, Lucia’s going to push you home.”

  Lucia was an awkward fourteen. Always a stocky child, with adolescence she had swelled wherever it was possible to swell. At the same time her hair, which as a small child had been corn-coloured, had darkened to mid-mouse. She put back the last dusted book and, before coming to attend to William, forced as much of her head as possible through the bars before the open window.

  “Oh, Annie, it’s such a lovely morning! That pigeon’s still on its nest.”

  “Looking at pigeons won’t get your room done and lunch is early, remember.” Annie looked affectionately at the girl’s back. “I expect you wish you were going to the country, too.”

  Lucia swung round, shocked at stupidity from someone whose intelligence she rated highly.

  “You can’t think that. Imagine all the relations at once! All looking at Mother with faces people wear when they are looking at cripples, all so sorry she has a daughter as fat and plain as me.”

  Annie, upset because there was truth behind the child’s statement, made disapproving tch-tching sounds.

  “How you do run on. The times I’ve told you beauty’s only skin deep.”

  “It’s deep enough for Mother to be ashamed of me, especially up against . . .” Lucia broke off, fumbling for a distraction to prevent Annie noticing her slip. “William’s tail needs glueing again. I’ll ask Peter.”

  Annie had not been distracted. She knelt upright.

  “No need talking about William. You were going to say ‘Up against Virginia.’”

  Lucia came across to Annie and crouched beside her. Although the door was shut she spoke in a whisper.

  “Yes, but you won’t tell any one, will you, dearest, darlingest Annie.”

  “It’s no good soft-soaping me, and you know it. Fancy your Aunt Felicity fixing it! Why, your mother told me and Mary that it had been decided that over you grandchildren it was to be all or none.”

  “Aunt Felicity didn’t fix it. Virginia did. She telephoned the hotel herself and booked a room. They’ll only know she’s there when they see her. I expect everybody else will be furious but Aunt Felicity won’t mind.”

  “Mrs. Wilson maybe won’t think anything, but your mother will be no end upset, on account of her Ladyship as much as anything.”

  “Aunt Carol won’t mind as it’s only Virginia. Everybody knows about Grannie and Virginia.”

  “Did know, you mean. Things are different now.”

  “That’s why Virginia has simply got to go. She can’t bear it any more. She’s got to find out for herself.”

  Annie wagged a finger.

  “There’ll be trouble about this. Going to stay with her Grannie on her own was one thing, but being the only grandchild when all the family are there isn’t going to be liked at all.”

  Lucia got up. She crossed to William and pushed him into position.

  “Well, it’s too late to get us there, thank goodness. You see, Annie, you can say what you like, but I know from looking-glasses how I look, and if I didn’t I’d see it in Mother’s expression.”

  Annie’s face was soft with love and pity. She hardened her voice to disguise her feelings.

  “The rubbish you talk! If you were going you know your Grannie would be just as pleased to see you as any of them, saving, of course, Virginia, and the same goes for your Aunties and Uncles. They love you for yourself and not how you look.”

  “Grannie does, and Aunt Margaret loves everybody, but Uncle Henry doesn’t love me nor does Aunt Carol, and I can’t think why they should. Aunt Felicity does a bit perhaps when she remembers.”

  “Now then. Now then.”

  “I don’t mean Uncle Henry and Aunt Carol don’t like me. They just don’t see me at all, and if I had a child that looked like Helen I wouldn’t see a niece that looked like me. It’s no good-looking prim, Annie. If you had a daughter like Helen who was dressed in teen-age styles by a grandmother in America, however nice you were you couldn’t help feeling and looking despising at a niece who only had the cast-off clothes of a sister who never stuck out in the same places as she does.”

  “Your mother’s always bought good plain things. I speak as I find and I can’t say different.”

  “Yes, but good plain that fitted Anthea, but not me.”

  Annie polished furiously for a moment or two. Then she raised herself up, pointing her bees-waxed rubber at Lucia.

  “You’re in this business of Virginia going. I wouldn’t wonder if you planned it.”

  Lucia skidded across the polished floor. She knelt and laid her hands on Annie’s knees.

  “Why do you think that?”

  Annie looked down at Lucia’s podgy, rather grubby hands, and was puzzled at the almost tearful affection they stirred in her.

  “I’ve got ears, haven’t I? I know how you two telephone each other, don’t I? I know Virginia doesn’t have the education nor upbringing your mother thinks is right, but she’s a dear little girl and I know you’d do anything for her. Can’t help it if twice two makes four, can I?”

  Lucia leant her weight on her hands, as if by physical pressure on Annie she could add strength to her words.

  “Nobody must stop her going. She’s simply got to find out why she doesn’t go to Grannie’s any more. I’ve told her lots of times to just go down and see Grannie but she won’t do that. She’s frightened Grannie would be angry. But to-morrow is different; all the grown-ups are going so Grannie won’t be alone anyway, and Virginia thinks, and so do I, one more won’t make any difference, and somehow, when she’s there, she’s going to get Grannie alone, and find out.”

  “What does she think she’s going to find out?”

  “We don’t know, but there’s something. Mother told Dad that she thought Grannie was breaking up, but Virginia says that’s a lie, she saw her just before Christmas and she was exactly as usual. We wondered if it was a disease; you know, like leprosy only not leprosy because you don’t get that in England much, but something which made her look frightful. There’s something called The King’s Evil; we’re not sure what it looks like but it might be that. Anyway, whatever it is, Virginia wouldn’t care and she wants to tell Grannie so.”

  “Constance has heard from the couple that work next door . . .”

  “The Robinsons at Mr. Gnome Pickering’s. I know, Constance told Virginia. They say Grannie goes away for hours, and when she’s in she won’t see anybo
dy. Doesn’t that sound as if there was something about her she didn’t want people to see, poor darling?”

  “Your mother has heard from that Miss Doe. She’d have said if there was anything like that.”

  “Virginia says Miss Doe wouldn’t say anything if Grannie didn’t want her to; at least only to her greatest friend, who is matron of the Cottage Hospital. Virginia says Miss Doe tells the matron everything but telling a nurse is like telling things to a doctor, they never repeat what they’re told.”

  Through Annie’s head was running the gossip as retailed by Constance. The Robinsons thought the trouble was money. Even if the trouble were money, which Annie did not believe, she could not speak of it to Lucia. What would the child think if her Grannie was short of money and her family doing nothing? Still less could she speak to the girl of what, in her own and Mary’s opinion, was the root of the matter. Trouble enough to turn any one’s brain, let alone an old lady’s. Because she could not say what was in her mind and found it difficult to say nothing with Lucia leaning on her, staring into her face, she pretended annoyance and gave the child a push.

  “Get away with you, keeping me gossiping here, early lunch and all! We’ve got this room to finish.”

  Peter’s bedroom was on the floor below. It had been Alistair’s bedroom. It had a lot of Alistair in it and almost nothing of Peter. Alistair’s school groups. Alistair’s books. Alistair’s cups. Alistair’s caps. It was easy for Peter to leave Alistair’s things undisturbed, for he had no cups or caps, and no school groups he wanted to display for he had never been part of a team, and in such school photographs as he appeared it was hard even for him to find himself. “That’s me up at the back, at the side.” He had added a few books to the shelves, but not many for Alistair had owned a grand library showing a mind interested in most subjects. Many of Alistair’s books were above Peter’s head, but many had been read and reread and showed it. He had collected a small library of his own, bought with his own pocket money, but that touched on his ambition, which he kept secret. An ambition could remain an ambition, and you could work at it, and dream of it, provided nobody said “Don’t be silly,” so his personal library together with his secret hobby was in boxes on the top of his wardrobe. The only objects which marked the room as especially his were his asthma remedies. Many times he had put those remedies away. In a room so burgeoning with Alistair he had thought his array of cures looked sissy.