Someone Special (3 page)

Muttering crossly, Hester stripped off jumper, blouse and skirt, hung them over the rack and hauled it back to the ceiling, then glanced down at herself. Her breasts, engorged by the milk, looked huge, out of proportion on her thin body. They were far too big for the little bust-bodice she had previously worn and she had told the doctor bluntly that they could not afford a nursing bodice which she would have no further use for once Helen was
weaned. As she moved, her big, rather painful breasts moved too, but more slowly, as though parodying her. They reminded her of the cows she saw swaying into the milking shed in the early mornings, their udders veined and bulging with milk. Her breasts were veined too, she could see pale blue lines on them, and her nipples had darkened and spread … she hated her new body, hated it.

But one consequence of her new body was baby Helen, so she must not grumble. Not even when she looked down at her flaccid belly, empty now of the child but not yet shrunk into decency. The nurse at the clinic had repeated yet again that in a couple of months, if she did the exercises the doctor had recommended, she would get her slim figure back, but at times she doubted even the nurse. Flesh wasn’t elastic, how could it simply shrink back to its youthful tightness? But Sister said because she was so young that was just what would happen, and Sister had been wonderful. When Helen had been born and Hester had been in such pain and so afraid, Sister had been a tower of strength. She had been right when she had said the pain would soon be over and that she, Hester, would forget it when she held her child in her arms, so she probably knew about saggy stomachs, too.

Hester turned from hauling the rack back into place and glanced at the window. It was difficult to see out for the steam and the rather draggly curtains but she thought she saw a movement in the yard outside. Hastily she scurried out of the kitchen, heading for her bedroom – she did not want to be caught waltzing half-naked round the kitchen by anyone, not even Matthew. Especially Matthew, she decided, trying to cover her breasts with her arms and wincing at the pain of it. She had not yet moved back into the main bedroom with her husband, she and the baby slept in the little room; she had pleaded night-feeds and exhaustion and Matthew had agreed to wait a little,
so now she ran into the small room and grabbed another blouse, a thin, much-darned jumper and her green wool skirt. She was putting them on when two things occurred to her: one was that the movement outside the kitchen window would have been the washing on the line; the other was that if she put dry clothing on before towelling her hair it wouldn’t be dry clothing long.

When she had ducked under the clothes line in the back yard, she had wondered why the line was there, where it caught virtually no breeze, and not in the castle grounds. I really must rig it up somewhere else, where the washing will catch whatever sun and wind there is, she told herself, but right now I must get myself presentable again. She seized the towel which hung beside the washstand and stood before the mirror, rubbing her hair vigorously. She stared accusingly at her reflection as she did so, keeping her eyes averted from her huge, bobbing breasts. She was even paler than usual, her strong, blackish-brown hair hung in rat-tails down past her shoulders, and the thick, uncompromising black eyebrows which she always intended to pluck into fashionable arcs were drawn into a frown of disapproval. She quite liked her amber-coloured eyes framed with stubby black lashes, but they didn’t seem to fit her small, triangular face with its blob of a nose. They were too big, and the expression in them wasn’t sweet or meek, it was challenging, as though she were daring people to notice her plainness.

The nuns of course said plainness did not matter, especially if you were clever. They had known Hester was clever and had accordingly sent her to the paying convent school, reminding her far too often that she owed them gratitude for their generosity. She knew it, promised to do her best, make something of herself. Thank God, she thought fervently now, that she had been pupil-teaching at a school in Chester when they had realised she was pregnant and turned her out. The nuns had planned such
a bright academic future for her; if they saw her now they would believe her friend Annabel had been right when she had said there was something strange about Hester.

Annabel had been a prim, conventional twelve-year-old with neatly braided blonde hair and meticulously tidy clothes, the complete opposite of brainy, impetuous Hester. But Annabel had once told her, in a moment of honesty, that Hester looked like a changeling.

‘You know, the baby that appears in the cradle but never cries,’ Annabel said earnestly as the two of them surveyed their images in the long mirror in the cloakroom. Annabel, conventionally pretty as well as conventionally good, smoothed her pleated tunic skirt down over her long legs in their black stockings. ‘I don’t suppose you cried much as a baby, Hester; you certainly never cry now. You just tighten your lips and look down and jut your chin.’

‘You mean I look like an elvish brat?’ Hester had said with mock indignation. ‘Annabel Cranbourne, what a horrible thing to say!’

But Annabel hadn’t meant to be unkind, she had just said what came into her head. And perhaps she had been right; even now, so long after Annabel’s remark, Hester could see what her friend had meant. Her eyebrows tilted up at the corners and her eyes were set at a slight slant. Her chin, though small, did jut. It was a pity because she longed – what girl did not? – to be beautiful, but even prettiness had been denied her. However, pretty or not, her fate was sealed. Her lovely bright future had come to nothing because she had so wanted a bit of fun out of life, and anyway, she had Helen, didn’t she? Though not yet seventeen years old, she was a married lady with a little girl of her own and it was time she started acting the part instead of driving poor Matthew into making his own lunch … dinner … and lighting his own fire.

Not that Matthew seemed to mind. He may not think
I’m pretty, Hester thought, dragging her thick, wiry hair back with one hand and lassooing it into submission with a rubber band, but he must like me or he would never have agreed to marry me. Would he? No, of course he wouldn’t. She had run back to Rhyl, not searching for him, but because she dared not return to Liverpool and thought she might get work in the seaside town. She had run into Matthew on the very first day, but had said nothing about her condition; it had not been necessary.

‘Hester!’ he had said. ‘I thought you’d gone for good! Oh, my dear.’

He had proposed marriage and she had accepted. And you’re grateful to him for that, aren’t you, she asked herself severely? And for Helen, of course. Darling little Helen, who would do all the things that Hester would never do now, who would be the famous actress, the prima ballerina, the first girl ever to scale the Matterhorn or swim the Channel or ride the winner of the Grand National. Hester’s dreams could still come true, though in future she would dream them for Helen rather than herself.

As she dressed, she heard the muttering cry of a child waking from sleep. Hester pushed her feet into her old slippers and padded out of the bedroom into the parlour. She plucked Helen, pink-faced and blinking, from her nest in the blankets and carried her through to the kitchen. She settled herself comfortably in the ancient rocking-chair and put the baby to her breast; as the child began to suck, Hester pushed off with one foot, rocking contentedly. She let her mind wander back to her childhood, when she had hoped for such great things: she would marry a prince, live in a castle, be someone special. Was this, then, what she had been born for, was this the real purpose of Hester Jane Coburn, née Makerfield? Was her destiny not to be someone special, but to rear and cherish someone special? It seemed likely
now, with the child’s dark mossy head butting Hester’s thin little arm, and the baby’s avid mouth tugging at her nipple, that bringing Helen up would be a full-time job.

The chair creaked, the baby sucked, the fire settled in the range. Hester was almost asleep when the baby pulled her pointed knees up hard into her small stomach, spat out the nipple and began to squall.

Wind! Hester slung the scrap of humanity across her shoulder and began rubbing and patting the small, solid back.

‘Poor baby, poor little one, then … does it hurt? Never mind, mummy will make you better.’

An enormous burp rattled from the baby, making Hester laugh. She held the child gently against her face, kissing the rose-petal cheek.

‘There, is that better? What a big burp that was, you nearly made mummy faint with fright!’

The baby, feeling Hester’s mouth against her cheek, wove her head frantically from side to side, seeking sustenance once again. Failing to find it, she began to mutter, her fists coming up to press and push at the unresponsive flesh.

‘No, sweetheart, you won’t find milk there, but if you look here …’ Hester slid the child down across her bare skin, loving every touch, and pushed her against the full breast which had been dripping in sympathy ever since the baby started to feed. With the skill born of ten days of finding the nipple, Helen homed in on it and sucked. Hester’s foot began to rock the chair again and her mind, freed from the necessity of dealing with her daughter, began to wander once more.

The nuns were always on about the evils of dreaming, but I never could see it, and now I’m proved right, because even if this is what my life is to be about, my dreams are still my own. I can be anyone, rich or poor,
plain or pretty, clever or stupid. So I’ve not ruined my life, despite what the nuns may think.

But she must be practical; she began to think about Matthew’s meal, because that was her next task when the child was fed, changed and put back in her basketwork cradle. There was a bit of meat pie, and a heel of cheese … was there still bread? If not, she really should bake, but she made awful bread. If the rain stopped and she took Helen out in her sling, she could buy a loaf in the larger village a couple of miles from the lodge. It was a good walk, but perfectly possible in an afternoon. The baker was friendly too. He spoke Welsh, of course, but he changed to English when he saw she had entered his shop. Different from the butcher, a big fat man with mean little eyes who addressed Hester in Welsh though he knew she hadn’t so much as a word of the language.

I really ought to learn Welsh, Hester told herself, rocking gently, smoothing her free hand around Helen’s face. But it’s so hard when no one else speaks it – Matthew didn’t, he’d lived in Sussex until his employer had inherited Pengarth Castle from a profligate uncle, and of course his employer, Geraint Clifton, didn’t speak Welsh either, since he too had come from Sussex. Matthew had worked for the Cliftons on their dairy farm, with its neat little house and eighty well-kept acres, before Mr Geraint had inherited the vast, rambling castle in the wild hills of Wales, as well as the mountain of debt which accompanied it.

It was a pity in a way, Hester mused, that the old man, as Matthew called Mr Geraint, had taken to Pengarth Castle like a duck to water. If he’d had any sense, he would have looked at the state of it, and the size of the debts, and got back into his motor and returned to Sussex. But he had fallen in love with the castle, Matthew told her, dreaming of the day when it was mended and made good, when it was the sort of home he wanted and
could be proud of. He was a worker, the old man. He’d worked with his own hands inside and out, making good wherever he could. Matthew and he had laboured side by side to make a couple of rooms habitable and he had recently sold a farm which had been more or less derelict when he arrived and had made good money out of the deal. He had parted with his Sussex home years ago, of course, and ploughed the money into Pengarth.

Hester had never been in the castle or met her husband’s employer, but Matthew had told her about them both. The old man with his passion for the place, his stubborn refusal to give up, and the great hall with the roof so riddled with holes that pigeons and jackdaws flew in and out without let or hindrance. The long gallery, empty of the family portraits which had once graced its walls – the old man had sold many of them to pay for re-roofing the kitchen – and the bedrooms in the towers, the windows broken, the floors unsafe. But it seemed to Hester a place of infinite romance and infinite possibilities. She could not blame the old man for loving it, wanting to restore it, even though a sensible, down-to-earth part of her mind knew that there was a difference between dreams and reality, knew that if the place was as bad as Matthew said, restoring it would be impossible unless you were a millionaire several times over.

What millionaire would want to live here, she thought looking discontentedly at the rain-smeared pane, hearing the wind getting up and tugging at the little house as though it wanted to raze it to the ground. There wasn’t much doing, though if you had a motor – and the old man had a lovely one – you could get to Rhyl in the summer, see a bit of life. Indeed, it was because the old man had gone to meet some friends in Rhyl that she had met Matthew.

That summer! So warm, so wonderful … her first little taste of freedom. A summer job at a hotel so that
she could earn some money and see a bit of life before plunging into her first real job as a pupil-teacher at the convent school in Chester.

She had so enjoyed her summer of freedom. The hotel work had been hard, but she hadn’t minded because she always had mornings or evenings free. And once she got to know Matthew they spent a lot of time together one way and another. He had wanted to marry her then, but she’d said no. She wanted to earn her own living, see something of life. She had had no idea, of course, that the growing intimacy with Matthew was the way you grew a baby; no one had told her anything about babies until the horrible old mathematics teacher at the convent school had forced her to see a doctor. He had confirmed what the teacher had so cruelly suspected – that Hester was pregnant.

She had been close to despair that winter day in Rhyl. She was six months gone and was beginning to show and she guessed that even if she got work, before long someone would realise her condition and throw her out. Meeting Matthew again had been like a wonderful dream after the nightmare of the past few weeks. And Matthew had been so good; he had asked her once more to marry him and she had accepted without hesitation. Even if marriage wasn’t exactly freedom it could be made into a lovely thing. There was her garden … she would walk into the village for the bread, and while she was there she would see if anyone was selling seeds or little plants. She would ask Matthew which would be best; he knew most things about gardening and growing. He was too busy up at the castle to bother much with their own plot but when his mother had been alive she had planted the garden at all seasons, providing them with fresh vegetables; Matthew had told her so and, flushed with enthusiasm, she had vowed to do the same.