“God’s got damn good eyesight if he can see any improvement in the Boswicks. What’s wrong this time?”
Margaret told her.
“It’s on our way, really.”
“Our way is through Lewisham, not Greenwich.”
“I know, but in any case I had to go out of my way for Mother’s daffodils.”
The Boswicks lived in two rooms in a row of houses which had been condemned as unfit for habitation before 1939, but which delayed housing plans had left standing and, perversely, Hitler’s bombs had missed. A smell of cooking cabbage, unwashed bodies and a never-cleaned lavatory met Margaret’s nose as it reached the door, but her nose registered nothing, for such smells were its daily portion. From experience she kept to the centre of the passage, avoiding the peeling layers of ancient wallpapers behind which probably lurked bugs. Nor, as she climbed the stairs, did she risk touching the decrepit banisters. She knocked on a door on the first floor, calling out at the same time, “It’s me. Can I come in?”
Mrs. Boswick’s voice was full of pleasure.
“‘Ullo, Doctor, we wasn’t expectin’ you.”
Lily had been a pretty girl when Margaret had last seen her, but her children had probably arrived too close to each other. She looked, Margaret’s unconsciously professional eye observed, anaemic. She also looked hardened. She was dressing her baby. She gave Margaret a smile which had no friendliness behind it, but a you-keep-out-of-my-affairs insolence.
Margaret knew the room well, but she glanced round, seeing it as the N.S.P.C.C. officer would see it if he had to be called in. The room was kitchen, living-room and bedroom, for the Boswicks’ only other room was something little larger than a cupboard in which the Boswick boys slept. She saw Mr. and Mrs. Boswick’s big bed, and the two camp beds shared by the Boswick girls. There was no provision for Lily or her children.
Lily had finished dressing her baby. She laid it down on one of the camp beds on which her elder child was already playing. She sauntered to the table, sat on it and took a packet of cigarettes out of her pocket and lit one.
Margaret had a look at the babies. They were, she observed, healthy. Lily, for all her hard expression, must be a good mother.
“What splendid children.”
As Margaret had approached her babies, Lily, though pretending to be uninterested in anything she might do, had twitched to attention like a scared animal.
“Any reason why they shouldn’t be?”
Mrs. Boswick was shocked. She was a nuisance, thriftless, careless and a cadger, but she was genuinely fond of Margaret.
“What a way to speak to the doctor, Lily!” She dug an elbow into Margaret’s side to show she must not pay any attention. “Lovely, aren’t they? This is Jim. Smile at the Doctor, Jimmy, boy. The baby’s Rita.”
Margaret played with Jim. As the child laughed she saw Lily’s face soften. Evidently not only a good mother but a loving one. She must be helped so that she could care for her children properly while her husband was in prison.
“Where are you and the babies sleeping, Lily?”
Lily paused to think of an insolent reply. In that second, Mrs. Boswick broke in quickly:
“It’s only temporary, of course . . .”
Margaret silenced her by a hand on her arm.
“I’m here to help. The Canon telephoned me. Come along, Lily, let’s try if we can’t think of a plan. I can see you are a good mother but you know as well as I do, if your babies suffer while your husband’s not working something will have to be done . . .”
The little theatrical performance of insolent indifference was over. Lily began to cry. Through her sobs came pitiful bits of information. It was not having a proper home that had got Lennie down. They had a room in someone else’s house and it had been nag, nag the whole time from the landlady. Lennie hadn’t been able to stand it and had taken to going out at nights and that was how he met the rough crowd who got him into trouble. He was not that sort really but he was kind of driven to it. It was, Lily guessed, her fault that he had taken a hand in the smash and grab. She had heard of a flat that could be had if you slipped the caretaker fifteen quid, but they hadn’t fifteen quid. Lily was very bitter about the revolver; she was sure Len had never had such a thing. She believed one of the others had shoved it in his pocket when he saw they had been nabbed. Lily had hung on to their home as long as she could, but after what had happened to Len the people who owned the house had got nastier than ever. She had a bit of money and relief had looked after them, but after Len was sentenced the people of the house were so rotten to her she couldn’t stand it any longer. She sold their furniture and came home.
As Lily talked, through Margaret’s mind was running the trail of things that must be done in the attempt to straighten Lily’s affairs. The sources that must be tapped for money, the talks and arguments with housing officials about a room. The Canon must deal with the Len end of the story. He could perhaps get hold of the prison chaplain and see whether it really was bad housing and mixing with a rough crowd which had been Len’s downfall. She patted Lily’s shoulder.
“Cheer up. Next week I’ll have a talk with the Canon and we’ll see what we can do to help. In the meantime, where are you and the babies sleeping?”
The situation was not clear. Mrs. Boswick said that Lily had one of the camp beds and the two girls to whom it belonged went in with the others. Lily said that her sisters couldn’t be expected to like having nowhere to he, especially Rose, who was working and had to get out early. Margaret suspected the truth was that Lily and her babies slept on the floor. As she listened to the explanations her mind ran round searching for even temporary help. Suddenly an idea came to her.
“I know what I can do, at least I think so. I’m seeing my mother to-morrow.” She turned to Mrs. Boswick. “She’s one of those women who never throws anything away. In the old nursery, which is never used now, there was a folding cot. I’ll get it out of her. It’ll take up no room all day, and it’s got rails round it, so we shall know the babies are safe at night. I’ll bring it in on Monday.”
As Margaret came back to her car Freda looked at her inquiringly.
“Well?”
“It’s an awful mess. There’s never been room there for half the Boswicks, but with Lily and her two children it’s impossible. They must be moved. I’ve promised to bring up a folding cot from my mother’s. That’ll help for the moment.”
“From your mother’s! I thought you said she never parted with anything.”
“She will when I tell her about Lily. After all, she never even sees it. I don’t suppose she’s put a foot in the nursery for years.”
“Was it your cot?”
“We all slept in it when we were babies I suppose, but I wasn’t a baby in the house Mother’s in now. When I look at a family like the Boswicks it seems awful things can be so unfairly divided. I’ve often told you about that house we lived in when Father was alive and estate agent to old Cousin Tom. I can’t remember it well for I left it when I was nine or ten, but there was such a lot of room and everything so clean and smelling nice and then look at the Boswicks.”
“I know; but happiness seems detached from material things, especially if you are born into horrible conditions. I don’t suppose you in your Queen Anne house laughed more, if as much, as the Boswick children in that ghastly slum, and they certainly laugh more than we ever did in our rectory in Cornwall. I bet Lily’s babies are magnificent.”
“All Boswicks are good-looking, as you know, and Lily’s two are really lovely, and apparently healthy, though, mind you, that won’t last if they are long in that room—but, however much they laugh, and however healthy they are, it isn’t fair that people like myself should have such lovely memories and the Boswicks such foul ones.”
Margaret drew up her car outside a florist’s. The woman who owned it came out to her, a sheaf of daffod
ils in a paper wrapping on her arm. She pulled the paper back so that Margaret could see the flowers.
“What about those? Better even than last year’s, aren’t they?” She put the flowers on the back seat. “Aren’t they lovely, Miss Dixon? I said to Fred last night, ‘Don’t you forget the doctor’s daffs when you get to the market.’ He didn’t half laugh. ‘Not likely,’ he said, ‘I’d have remembered them even if she’d forgotten to order them. I’m as sure to buy those daffs as I’m sure to buy holly of a Christmas.’”
Margaret gazed lovingly at the flowers.
“They are beautiful. I do adore those frilly orange edges to the trumpets.”
The woman was watching Margaret’s face with pleasure.
“I knew you’d be pleased. Remember that time in the war when flowers weren’t allowed to come to London, and Fred got them for you from my sister at Orpington? They were this sort. I can hear my sister now. ‘But I don’t want to sell them,’ she said. ‘Can’t help that,’ Fred says, helping himself. ‘They’re for the doctor. Must have her daffs of a Mothering Sunday.’”
“Why,” asked Freda when they were on the move again, “does it have to be daffodils?”
Margaret steered round a tramcar.
“I don’t know now you ask me. It’s one of those things that always has been. It started when I was awfully small. I seem to remember somehow acquiring some for a Mothering Sunday when I was of an age to ride in a pram. I can remember a blue rug and the yellow daffodils lying on it.”
Freda did not speak again until they were clear of the tram lines.
“I wonder if you’ve got those lovely memories of your childhood because you are you, and whether mine in retrospect seem muddled and unhappy because I am me.”
To Margaret that was not a question needing thought. Her answer flew back.
“Of course not. From everything you’ve told me things were difficult for you, they would have been for any child. You see we were such an easy family. We were very fond of each other, and everything was simple for us, no problems. I suppose Henry and Jane were miserable when my father died, but I don’t think I understood clearly that he had gone for ever. Of course, I minded in a way, and I did mind leaving that lovely house and moving to the one Mother’s in now, but I soon got over that, as we all did. We had such lovely times in the new house. I felt awfully grown-up there. I was a nursery child in the first house, kept with Felicity and Tony, who was a baby of course, but in the new house I became one of the big ones. Jane and I had a governess. I don’t think the governess could teach but I always liked lessons so I suppose I learnt something. I don’t believe Jane ever learnt a thing. Looking back there seem to have been days and days when she never came to lessons at all. Mother was easy-going I suppose, and she had been taught by the most marvellous Miss Macintosh and thought all governesses were like her Miss Macintosh, but at last she must have noticed how ignorant Jane and I were for quite suddenly, just about the time Henry left Eton and joined up, we were packed off to a boarding-school.”
Margaret was usually so full of talk of her patients that she seldom had time to talk of her family. Over the years Freda had carefully pieced together such snippets of information about the Caldwells as Margaret let fall. Though her health was so much improved her confidence in herself was still shaky, and at all times at the back of her mind, and, in moments of depression in the forefront, she knew there would be no confidence at all if she had not Margaret from whom to draw strength. It helped to explain too, her feeble grip on her life, when she could see another family’s childhood laid out before her like a map, and could lay her fingers on this place and on that and tell herself, “If only I had been brought up like that I wouldn’t have broken down.”
“Obviously having a bad governess doesn’t do any harm. We were wildly well-educated and look at all of us and look at all of you. I suppose Jane was clever enough to catch up at school. You always say she’s the cleverest of the family.”
Margaret frowned at the crowded road, peering between cars and vans for a true reply to that.
“So she was, so she is, though of course, Henry’s the real scholar. You know those dragon-flies that sort of shine. I remember looking at one of those. It was about the second year I think after Father died. We were in the new house. It was during the first war, so of course, we all had to help, particularly at gardening. I was gardening and I saw a dragon-fly dart past and I thought, ‘That’s like Jane.’ Funny how you remember things. I can still see that dragon-fly and I still think Jane’s like one. There we all were, Mother, Nannie, Henry in the holidays, the same two maids we’d always had, me, Felicity, Tony, but, looking back, there seems at that time to have been mostly Jane, shining like a dragon-fly.”
“Why at that time? Did she change?”
“I don’t know if she did, or I did. I expect I got awfully schoolgirlish and rather self-centred and smug after I went to school, and when I was about fifteen or thereabouts Felicity had come on a lot. She was always the beauty of the family. As a matter of fact I’m the only plain one. You don’t believe it, Dixon, knowing only me, but Felicity and Jane are not only good-looking but your sort of smart; well done hair and painted nails and all that and they aren’t dull like me. I’m a bit of a family joke, I always was. That’s why it’s a waste to buy me a dress to change into this evening. I bet they’re all saying, ‘Better not take anything decent to wear for dinner because Margaret won’t have anything to put on.’”
“They’re wrong for once. It’s a damn nice dress if only you remember to change into it. Did Jane like school? She doesn’t sound the sort.”
“There were awful rows at first, I think. I didn’t pay much attention because I was so happy; I’d always wanted to learn properly and at last I had the chance. In the end I expect Jane liked it all right. She was always the sort of girl all the other girls know about; she was always doing something nobody had ever done before; in the end she ran absolutely everything. She was always a marvellous organiser I suppose, but after we went to school I don’t remember a single holiday when she wasn’t getting something up and making the rest of us help. I didn’t mind the bazaars and fêtes so much; it was the plays and pageants which were so awful. As I’ve told you, I’m the worst actress in the world, and being the plain one I was usually made to take a man’s part. I was much the same shape then as I am now. Imagine what I looked like in a short tunic and tights!”
Freda enjoyed piecing the Caldwell family together the more because so much was puzzling. The only member of it she knew had been so bred and educated that she was what, presumably, Henley had meant when he wrote “captain of my soul.” So too, though she had not met them, were, she supposed, Henry, Jane and perhaps Felicity. Henry had not climbed to the heights he had been expected to reach but, more than likely, that was because he had no wish to. Jane had not done anything exceptional with her life but she had married a brilliant man and had, from Margaret’s description, a happy home life and splendid children. She did not know much about Felicity but she had a nice husband and child, and judging by the picture papers, was a great social success. How far could such a breeding-ground account for a Tony? Margaret had not talked much of Tony since he became the family black sheep. Not, Freda knew, because she criticised or blamed her brother, but because he was suffering and she could not get near him to help, and that hurt her. Probably she thought about him a lot. It would be impossible for somebody who spent so much of her life probing into the causes of suffering not to try and discover what had produced a weakling, if nothing worse, in so virile a family. Did Margaret lay a finger on the possibility that Tony had been spoilt? In the days before Tony had become a black sheep, amongst the Caldwell snippets Margaret had let drop there had been several that had made Freda wonder, if not only Tony, but Felicity had been spoilt. Why only Tony and Felicity? Margaret had said: “No, Felicity never went to school. She said she’d hate it.” “Tony didn�
��t go to Eton. He went to a co-educational. Mother thought he was too delicate.” “He was a very highly-strung little boy.” “We never had holidays by the sea. Tony hates the sea.” “Mother never could say no to Felicity, she was such a darling and so pretty.” Why had not the three elder Caldwell children resented this spoiling of the younger two? In her own home, when her scared mother had now and again given some little favour to one or the other of them how quickly they had all noticed it and shown resentment. How quickly too the fact that his children were jealous had been spotted by their brilliant, egotistical father and how cruelly his tongue had lashed them. Had there been no tongue amongst the Caldwells to lash? Of course the father was dead but Jane sounded the lashing sort. Perhaps all the Caldwells were born with the loving, uncritical spirit which was so much a part of Margaret. If there had been more of that spirit in the Dixons would they have grown up better fitted to live? Shut up in that Cornish rectory they had never had a chance. Their father, with no mind for miles around to equal his own, first souring and then going bad on himself. How, in an effort to create mental equals he had jibed and lashed at his children, firing them certainly to use their brains but developing them all too fast and lop-sidedly. Brilliant they had certainly been, but children never. And look what had happened to them. She had broken on the verge of attaining almost anything. Leonard had hanged himself before an examination and the other three had lost all brilliance before they had left school. None of them had married; all lived as if life were a tight-rope. The snippet of the Caldwell family which was Tony would seem to fit better into the Dixon puzzle. She did not want to meet the Caldwells in the flesh, though it would be interesting to be a fly on the wall to-night and see them all. Margaret was, she knew, worried about her mother. They would discuss her and they would presumably, if no one outside the family could hear them, discuss Tony. She could almost see them. Henry she could imagine from his speeches and pictures in the papers. She could not visualise his American wife. Margaret found her so alarmingly sophisticated and well-dressed that she viewed her with a schoolgirlish awe which prevented her drawing a picture of her. Margaret said Jane was like a dragon-fly. Pretty tired looking dragon-fly, Freda guessed, for she was rising fifty, but probably the sort who would stay vital to the end. Margaret, until he was killed, had talked a lot about Alistair. She had never said how his death had affected his parents; probably she did not know. Jane sounded the sort to keep her injuries to herself. Certainly it had not even for a day kept her from her work. She had been something very important in W.V.S. On several occasions during the war when some urgent need had cropped up amongst her patients Margaret had asked her to speak to Jane on the telephone. It would have been easier, Freda had decided, to get through to the Queen. Mrs. Betler was always at a meeting, in conference, away lecturing or hemmed in by a bodyguard of stooges; so much so that she never had spoken to her but had left messages. Leaving a message for Jane was impressive, the result was so immediate. It was like rubbing a magic lamp. Like genii W.V.S. members arrived on the doorstep either bearing help or saying help was on the way. If she were a fly on the wall at the family gathering she knew she would recognise Jane even before she spoke. She was much less certain she would know Jane’s husband. Probably he looked the legal type, which would help. Otherwise she had nothing to go on. Margaret spoke of Simon or George if she had visited either sister, but they were just the men her sisters had married; the fact that her sisters had married them was enough for her; they must be “nice.” She seemed to have no mental curiosity about them. Freda supposed she would recognise Felicity. She had seen countless photographs of her, and on two occasions portraits of her in the Academy. She was only just forty and apparently still beautiful. She had always, Freda guessed from what Margaret had let fall, been a man’s woman. “It didn’t matter much how I looked once Felicity began to grow up; at dances and things people only looked at her.” There were any amount of stories of her escapades from about the age of fifteen onwards. She seemed to have been a daring girl, crazy on horses, for many of the stories had to do with borrowed hunters and their owners. Felicity, as etched in by Margaret, was a heroine of a romance and with no more substance.
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