The Child's Child (10 page)

When he was alone, in bed at night, or as now travelling some long distance, he let his thoughts take a journey of their own and remember how he and Bertie had met. At the same time he wished that it had been somewhere else, some green country place perhaps or a foreign city of beautiful buildings and antique treasures, where of course he had never been, instead of a pub in Paddington. He saw it as a sordid place, crowded with dirty, hoarse-voiced labouring men and presided over by a fat landlord and a sluttish barmaid. His own idealistic dream of such an encounter—for it had been love at first sight for him—would have had them meet each other alone and with eyes for no one but one another. But it had been the Prince Alfred, half a mile from where Bertie lived in Bourne Terrace, round the back of Paddington station, and a little farther than that from Orchardson Street, and it had been a cold, wet evening. Bertie’s beauty, his grace, his height, and his wonderful blue eyes had lit the place for him, and his smile, with his golden head held a little on one side, promised a lovely, happy future.

What they did that evening and subsequent evenings, even though often in squalid places, brought that happiness for a while, but gradually guilt had closed in. It was wrong. He couldn’t get away from that. He tried hard to persuade himself that though lust could be wrong, love never could. His sister Ethel was allowed to love Herbert Burrows, her fiancé, allowed to linger on the doorstep with him exchanging kisses before he went home. John’s kisses shared with Bertie had to be taken and given in the deepest secrecy because society and he too knew that while Ethel’s were right and good, his were wrong and bad. All that lovemaking was wrong and must be abandoned for good.

The train emerged from the tunnel into Devonshire.

T
HE THREE
men who were the panel had liked him, he could tell that. They only said they would let him know, but he could tell he had pleased them, due perhaps to his having his degree from the University College of the South West of England just up the street. The others would have only teacher training qualifications or no more than Higher School Certificate. They would be surprised too that he was giving up a teaching post in London and the extra money called the London weighting to come to work in a small Devon country town. Perhaps they would be suspicious, but he was sure they wouldn’t guess the truth. They had asked him about his wife and he had had to say he wasn’t married. Then one old busybody suggested that perhaps he had a fiancée, and John, feeling guilty and ashamed, lied and said that there was someone. They were saving up to get married. He was afraid one of the panel might say that in that case he was surprised John was giving up a better-paid job, but none of them did. Fiancées, nearly as much as wives, met with approval.

He had a long wait for his next train, the one that would take him to Bristol, and he was hungry in spite of the sandwiches. In a café he had a cup of tea and a poached egg on toast and sat thinking about the lie he had told. He told lies all the time, he was more or less resigned to that, and most of them were concerned with when was he going to find a girl or when was he going to get married. Because the only social life he had was with Bertie and the men Bertie knew, he came into little contact with middle-aged women who might try to foist their spinster daughters on him. He teetered too on the border of being a gentleman. A doctor was one but not a schoolteacher, though he might be if he was head of a school. This meant he would never be invited to tennis parties or tea dances, he would be asked to tea only with women teachers, and he would be expected one day to marry one of them.
He had lied to them as well, talking in a vague way of a girl in Bristol living in the same street as his parents.

Half an hour before his train was due he made his way to the station at St. David’s and sat on a seat on the platform. A good many more lies lay ahead of him. His parents would want to know why, if he must leave London, he couldn’t take a job in Bristol; his sisters would ask about the girls he knew. They would all enquire as to what he did at the weekends. His parents were Methodists, as he and his sisters were or had been. His mother would want to know if he went regularly to church, and to this question too he would lie as he would to all the others. He had never set foot in the little Methodist chapel round the corner from Orchardson Street.

The train came and he got an empty carriage, wondering why he had longed to see them all, to come home. Not just now but for always he would have no real relationship with any of them because what love for them he had, what companionship, would be distorted and made pointless by lying. He realised then, sitting in the train, that even when he became celibate, he would still be constrained to lie. The older he grew and the longer he remained single and unattached, the more his mother and the three girls would question him about women friends (or the absence of them) and the more hold out to him the pleasures of marriage, ending, probably every time they spoke of it, in asking him if he didn’t want children.

M
AUD WANTED
children one day, two at least, when she was married. At fifteen, attending a school where the pupils stayed till they were eighteen, she thought she was probably the only girl in the County High School who had had relations with a man. Those were the words she used to herself,
relations with a man
, because she knew no other except
the act,
but she hadn’t connected it with what her mother called
offspring.
In a daring, almost incredulous way, she was proud of what she had done. It made her grown-up, a woman, even though it was the deepest secret, and though she had surrounded what they did and its circumstances with romance, she had decided that once—well, twice—was enough. The preliminaries to it, cuddles and kisses, caresses like those in the silent films she saw, she much preferred. The culmination that he had insisted on and she hadn’t resisted for long had hurt, and she had bled nearly as much as when she had her monthlies. The second time there had been no pain but nothing much else either, a disappointment, though she hadn’t told him that.

Now two things were due in her life, the visitor that was her brother, John, and the visitor, as her mother called it, that she and her friends called the curse. John was coming on Friday evening, the curse should have come ten days ago, on the tenth of April. If she had been irregular like her friend Rosemary Clifford, who sometimes went five or even six weeks between visitors, she wouldn’t have given it another thought. She tried to remember
if anything like this had happened before in the three years since the first visitor, but all she could recall was that once it had come two days late.

Ronnie was Rosemary’s brother. She hadn’t got to know him through Rosemary but because she was in her school choir and Ronnie was in the boys’ school choir. The choirs met when they were giving concerts together in St. Mary’s church hall, and after the performances or the rehearsals Ronnie walked her home. Her parents didn’t like her singing in a Church of England hall, but she calmed them down by reminding them that it wasn’t the church itself. Now she wished she had listened to them. They didn’t object to Ronnie. They thought he was a nice boy. As far as Maud was concerned, he wasn’t nice, he was gruff and he grinned too much, but he was by far the best-looking boy in the school. Besides, as far as Maud’s parents knew, Rosemary was with them. The Goodwins lived in the outskirts of Bristol, and Ronnie walked Maud home across the fields. On one of those walks home they went inside a barn doorway and he kissed her, but it was too cold to hang about. Two weeks later, when it happened, it was a lovely evening, exceptionally warm for early spring, and a slightly cooler evening the second time.

Until she tried it, Maud had only a vague idea of what relations with a man consisted of, but she knew all about pregnancy, which she called expecting, and quite a lot about childbirth. Her mother had had a fifth child three years before, but it had died when it was a day old. On the Friday morning of the day John was coming, she woke up in the morning in the room she shared with Ethel, and the first thing she thought of was not John’s arrival in the evening but that eleven days had passed since the curse was due to have come. It wouldn’t be a curse to her. She got up and went to the bathroom they all shared, praying for a trace of blood on the lavatory paper. But someone else was in there and had turned the key in the lock. She wasn’t desperate to go, only
desperate for that blood. Now she was reaching a stage when she could no longer tell herself the delay was due to the cold she had had the week before last or that she had miscounted. It must be that she was going to have a baby. A little sound like a whimper escaped her, and a quiet sob followed it. The bathroom door opened and Sybil came out.

“Was that you making that noise?”

“What noise?”

“Like you were crying. You weren’t, were you?”

“You imagined it,” said Maud in a lofty tone.

Her sister went off to her bedroom, tall, slender Sybil, a dressing gown over her peach-coloured slip, her hair at this hour falling down her back like a brown silk cloak. Maud had used to speculate if Sybil, eleven years her senior at twenty-six, had ever done the act with a man and was sure she hadn’t. Maud went into the bathroom, sat down on the lavatory seat, and pushed her forefinger into what another girl at school, not Rosemary, had told her had the Latin name
vagina.
The finger came away damp but bloodless.

She must be careful not to make a sound. She wanted to scream or howl like an animal in pain but she couldn’t. And she couldn’t have a baby. That would be appalling, outrageous, impossible to contemplate. A girl down the road had had an illegitimate child; “born out of wedlock” was how Maud’s mother put it. Everybody in the neighbourhood knew, and if any friend called who didn’t know, this girl was pointed out and her story told. The Goodwins’ charwoman’s sister-in-law had a niece who was expecting without being married, but she never had the baby. She drowned herself in the Bristol Channel. Maud thought of drowning herself or putting her head in the gas oven, but not yet, not yet. It could still be all right, God would make it all right. Why did she go to chapel every Sunday morning, why had she gone to Sunday school every Sunday afternoon and sung hymns in the choir and prayed
and prayed if God wouldn’t show mercy unto her? He couldn’t punish her like this for something she had done in those sunset fields, in the long grass among the coltsfoot and the celandine, and hadn’t even enjoyed—could He?

T
HE
G
OODWINS
were far from rich but they were “comfortable.” John Goodwin had inherited a bookbinding business from his father, and it had always done fairly, if not spectacularly, well. He had married a woman he met at chapel, the only child of Jonathan Halliwell, who kept a draper’s shop in the High Street. On his daughter’s marriage he gave her and her husband a thousand pounds, a huge sum. John and Mary Goodwin used it to buy a house up the street from the chapel because both of them were deeply devout. Jonathan died shortly after this purchase had been made, leaving his widow rich. She furnished the young couple’s new home for them with some valuable and beautiful pieces and several paintings, including a Burne-Jones and a Holman Hunt, though these were not much valued at the time.

Was it a happy marriage? They never asked themselves or each other that question. They were together, they were used to each other, they had four children, none of whom had given them much trouble. John had a BSc in biology and a teaching job, Sybil was a typist, Ethel worked for her uncle who now managed the draper’s, and Maud was still at school. It looked as if she might be doing well enough at her schoolwork to go to a university, unheard of among the Goodwin females and her mother’s family, the Halliwells, but the University of Reading’s school of art was a possibility and she might get a scholarship.

Goodwins and Halliwells seldom if ever thought about anything deeply. Young John was the exception. Life had made him think. In politics his parents were Conservatives, and if Mary was triumphant or joyous at having just got the vote for herself and
her two older daughters the previous year along with all the other women of Britain over twenty-one, she gave no sign that she was even aware of it. Their religion was laid down for them, no thinking necessary there. The same went for their moral values. They had absolute faith in their children’s holding the same views as they did. With their parents’ example before them, why should they stray?

If not exactly worried about it, Mary was uneasy about Sybil’s failure to find a young man since a previous boy had jilted her, but Mary dealt with her mild anxiety by thinking as little about it as possible. Ethel was engaged to a man seven years older than herself who worked for His Majesty’s Customs and Excise, a highly suitable connection. Ethel and Herbert Burrows had met through a cousin of Mary’s whose husband’s nephew he was. If, as Mary put it, it was “high time” Ethel at twenty-two and especially Sybil at twenty-six were married, in his father’s estimation, John at twenty-five was “far too young.”

That Friday evening when John told his parents about the interview and the panel’s enquiry into his matrimonial prospects, his mother said, “Well, they’ve got a point there, John.”

He sighed to himself, thinking, It’s begun.

They had just had high tea, for although the Goodwins had graduated to a live-in servant, always known as “the maid,” they had never progressed as far as eating dinner at seven thirty. The maid, Clara Gadd, served cold ham, tongue, a salad of lettuce and tomatoes, beetroot in malt vinegar, and bread and butter, followed by tinned peaches and tinned milk. Mary had her snobbish side and would have liked to call the maid by her surname, simply Gadd, but she didn’t quite dare. When it seemed that John was about to talk of salaries and accommodation, Mary shook her head at him and put a finger to her lips. If Mary had known any French, Maud said to him later, she would have said,
“Pas devant les domestiques.”