Fiercombe Manor (46 page)

There was silence for a long minute, and then Tom looked up at me.

“I said to you once, on the way back from the meadow, that you must have loved him a great deal, and you said that you had. You used the past tense. I wondered about it afterwards, but then put it down to his death. Do you still love him?”

“No, and that was one of the moments I began to realise it. Perhaps I never really did. It seems like a childish infatuation now. I suppose he took terrible advantage of me. He was that sort, and I didn't realise.”

“Does he know?”

“Not about the pregnancy or the birth. The last time I saw him, I meant to tell him but knew there was no point. I couldn't bear to, when it came to it. Aren't you shocked?”

He shrugged. “No, not really. People do strange things when they're swept away by their feelings. He was married and older—if anyone's to blame, it's him. And—” He broke off, and I saw that he had reddened.

“Tom?”

“Well, I'm glad you're not in love with him,” he said gruffly. “He doesn't deserve you. Or the child.”

I smiled and put out my hand to cover his. “Thank you.”

“So, is the part about you going back to London to live with your parents still true?” he said. “You know you can stay here as long as you like. I won't tell my parents anything, nor Mrs. Jelphs—though I think she would understand. She's very fond of you, you know.”

I looked down at the child in my arms and clutched him to me a little tighter. My mother would have read the letter by now—the letter that told her nothing. I couldn't keep her away indefinitely, though. Something stopped me from telling Tom the whole truth then. I realised that what I was really ashamed of was not my affair with a married man but my mother's plan to give away my child. What would he think of her? What would he think of me, for allowing that to happen? I wasn't sure he would be so understanding about that part of it, somehow.

“Yes,” I said heavily. “My mother will come in a few weeks, once I've completely recovered, and then we'll go back home.”

“I'll miss you when you do,” he said softly. “But perhaps I can take you out for dinner in London one night? The business that delayed me coming back last week means I'm going to have to stay down here much more than before, but I'll be in London sometimes.”

“Perhaps we could,” I said sadly, though I didn't think it would ever happen. London was a different world. There, our differences would seem so much more pronounced.

Just then Mrs. Jelphs came in with a breakfast tray for me. Tom got up hurriedly, and I snatched back my hand, which had still been on his.

“Ah, you're awake,” she said cheerfully. “And how's this little one?”

She lifted the baby gently from me, and Tom placed the tray on my lap. Suddenly she tutted.

“I've forgotten your letters! They're still on the kitchen table.”

“I'll go and fetch them,” said Tom.

“Letters, for me?” I said, when he'd gone.

“Three letters all in the same hand, and one from your mother—I recognised her handwriting. The other three were sent weeks ago but were overlooked at the post office. They didn't recognise the name, and the address was wrong. Whoever it was must be persistent, to have written three times.”

Dora. She had written after all. My heart lifted briefly until I remembered my mother's letter; my putting off of the inevitable.

“I hope you don't mind, dear,” Mrs. Jelphs continued cheerfully, “but I sent my own letter to your mother while I was in the post office, once I'd seen that she'd got your letter and you'd been able to tell her about little Joseph's arrival yourself. I wanted to pass on my own congratulations, of course, but I also wanted to reassure her that we were looking after you properly.”

I found I couldn't quite catch my breath.

“What did you say?” I blurted, unable to keep the panic from my voice.

Mrs. Jelphs looked at me oddly. “Just what I said: I congratulated her on becoming a grandmother and said you were both
doing well. I also said that she was welcome to stay a night—your father too—when they came to collect you, if that made their arrangements easier. It's a long journey. Thomas, I hope that's quite in order?”

He was back with the letters, which he put down on the bed next to me.

“Yes, yes, of course,” he said quietly.

When the two of them had left me to my breakfast—Tom leaving rather reluctantly, I thought—I opened my mother's letter. Naturally it said nothing of the baby's birth; she had known nothing about it when she sat down to write her reply. She would almost certainly receive Mrs. Jelphs's letter the next day, and probably catch the train as early as the following morning. It was possible I had just a couple of days left at Fiercombe. I picked up the other letters, which were from Dora—I knew her messy, looping handwriting as well as my own—but then put them aside again. I didn't have the wherewithal to concentrate on them in that moment.

As if sensing my agitation, the baby, who Mrs. Jelphs had put down in a Moses basket by the window, began to fuss. I went over to him and put my little finger in his mouth to soothe him, thinking furiously all the while.

More than anything, I wanted to stay where I was. All the anxiety and claustrophobia I had felt on the day I went into labour had fled with the arrival of Joseph. My terror that I would take after my grandmother—and perhaps my mother too—was now overshadowed utterly by the thought of giving away my child. I understood that women had done this out of dreadful necessity for centuries, but I couldn't for the life of me imagine how they had borne it. I didn't think I would be able to. It would be that wrenching apart that would send me mad, if anything was going to—I felt sure of that.

But what could I do? I was back to where I had been before I left London for the countryside: trapped and utterly reliant on others. I didn't dare tell Tom and Mrs. Jelphs the whole truth. I couldn't run away: I had no money. My father would never go against my mother. As for James, my instinct in the café that last time had been right, I knew: he would not want to know about it.

So I did nothing. I felt as if a seam of pure fear lay just beneath the surface of my skin, rippling and threatening like lava to break the surface. The only thing that eased the anxiety, just slightly, was being in Tom's presence, and so I spent as much of that day and the next with him as I could. He pushed Joseph in an ancient perambulator that had once belonged to him so we could take a sun-dappled walk through the beech woods, and then spread a rug and sit by the stream once I tired. Only once did I allow myself to pretend that we were a family, Tom Joseph's father—it was too hard to return to reality.

The baby changed something between Tom and me, even during the anticipatory lull of those two days. His presence softened us both. Tom was no longer so proud and quick to take offence, and I was less afraid to show my affection towards him. The attraction, that flinty charge between us, had not dimmed but changed. I realised that not only I but both of us were playing a child's make-believe game of a happy family: father, mother, and baby, all living harmoniously in a place of almost fairy-tale beauty. Around us the birds sang, the breeze caressed, and the stream burbled contentedly, and I couldn't imagine why I'd ever thought of the valley as melancholy. The threat was now beyond its steep sides, and I wished for the first time that I could lower the blue sky like a lid, sealing us off from the rest of the world.

A telegram from my mother arrived on the third day. By a quirk of fate, she had missed Mrs. Jelphs's letter for a day—my
father having picked it up with his newspaper by mistake. The fact that she had gone to the expense of a telegram spoke volumes of her anger at my deception, though the message, which had to remain neutral enough for other eyes, said only that she would arrive at the station the following afternoon around two o'clock. She thanked Mrs. Jelphs for her invitation to stay, but said that we would return on the last train, which left Stonehouse at twenty past five. There would be time only for a polite cup of tea at Fiercombe, and I watched Mrs. Jelphs frown in confusion as she realised that.

I lay awake for a long time that night, my exhaustion after the birth no match for the fear that juddered through me. I tried to calm myself when I was feeding Joseph, not wanting to somehow transmit my feelings through my milk, but by the time he woke hungry for the third time—just as the dawn light revealed the first overcast sky I'd seen since the storm—I was restless enough to dress and take him downstairs.

We were in the small parlour when Tom came in, his eyes as smudged with tiredness as mine. Joseph had already fed and was quiet again.

“We didn't wake you, did we?” I said.

Tom shook his head. “No, it was just one of my bad nights.”

“Were you thinking about Henry?”

“No, not him,” he said shortly.

We sat in silence for a few minutes until he spoke again.

“Is it too early for a drink?”

“Yes, it is,” I said. “You drink far too much.”

My nerves were making me short-tempered, but there was genuine concern for him too.

To my surprise he laughed. “No one has said that to me for years. My mother has long given up, says I won't be told.” He ruffled
his hair in the way that had become so familiar to me. “Don't you want to know what I was thinking about?”

I looked at him and hoped he wasn't going to ask my advice about his father, or his inheritance, or something of that kind. I simply couldn't think about anything but my own fix in that moment.

“I was thinking about how much I didn't want you to go.”

It took me a moment to absorb his words, and when I did, I promptly burst into tears. At the sound, Joseph opened his eyes and looked at me in apparent astonishment. Tom came over to sit by me and pulled out a creased but clean handkerchief.

“I'm sorry, I just meant that—”

“There's something else you don't know,” I cut across his words. “Something about Joseph that I couldn't tell you before, because I couldn't bear to have you despise me.”

He nodded at me to go on, his face grave.

“When my mother made up the story that would allow me to come here, it wasn't just so I could . . . recuperate in the fresh air. It was because my pregnancy had to stay secret. My mother was horrified when she found out. I did well at school, and then I got a good job, but she always wanted me to settle and marry. When I did what I did, with a married man, I ruined things for all of us, not just myself. Because there was never a husband, there can also never be a baby, do you see?”

I watched comprehension flood his face.

“So where . . . ?” he said.

“She decided that it would be better, more anonymous, to . . . arrange things in London. When we got back, we would give the baby to an orphanage straightaway. I suppose it will be too late today, by the time we get back, so it will be tomorrow now.”

So I didn't disturb the baby again, I handed him to Tom and then put my head in my hands and wept, as quietly as I could.

“I don't know what to do,” I said through the tears. “All night I've been thinking about it—where I might go if I ran away before my mother gets here, how I could earn some money to keep us—but none of it works. It's impossible. There's no way out.”

He looked stricken rather than angry. “Don't you have any other family you could go to? Or even give the baby to, for a time, have them adopt it so at least there would be a connection there?”

I shook my head. “We've lost touch with my mother's wider family, and all my grandparents are dead. My father's sister lives in London, but she couldn't possibly . . . Besides, my mother would never allow it, not so close to home. It's not like here, where you can hide away. She would be sure that someone would hear of it. She couldn't live with the shame of that.”

“What about you?” Tom said softly. “Could you live with the shame?”

“I could, for him, but how would we live? I can't work if I have a baby, and if I can't work, there's no money.” I laughed bitterly. “And who would marry a woman in my position? My mother would disown me if I disobeyed her, and then Joseph and I would be entirely alone. I have no choice. It's as simple as that. I just haven't been able to admit it to myself until now.”

I had a fleeting thought of Elizabeth. Our circumstances had seemed so different, and yet were so much the same at root: both of us women, both of us mothers, and both of us entrapped by those supposedly closest to us, unable to direct our own destinies.

Tom didn't say anything else. He got me some tea, and bread and butter, and simply sat with me until Nan arrived for her morning's work. When Mrs. Jelphs came in and found us there,
he distracted her from my red-rimmed eyes by talking about the flood damage. As he did, I held on to Joseph as tightly as I dared, studying every texture and line of his tiny body as if the memory of it would be some sort of compensation after he'd been taken away.

The weather didn't improve as the morning wore on towards afternoon, the sky a hard white hung with wisps of low cloud like old smoke. Ruck left in the carriage at one o'clock, and from then time seemed to accelerate, hurtling towards the time of my mother's arrival. I hadn't even finished packing when I heard the carriage wheels on the gravel.

She looked thinner than I remembered her—as if my predicament had whittled the flesh from her bones even as I had grown bigger with child. She didn't embrace me, and though I hadn't expected her to, I saw the scene through Mrs. Jelphs's eyes and blushed at the absence of affection. Tom was nowhere to be seen, and in a way I was glad of it—not quite able to imagine his and my mother's worlds colliding in Fiercombe's gloomy kitchen.