The Child's Child (12 page)

She was in minor disgrace at home. Her father didn’t ask her why she wouldn’t be a bridesmaid, he told her to forget “all this nonsense” and accept that it was her duty to perform this service for her sister that most girls enjoyed. Mary Goodwin took her cue from her husband, and Sybil joined in. What was wrong with her? She had never been a stubborn girl. Why was she taking this ridiculous attitude? Rosemary told Maud she was getting fat—well, not exactly fat, but a good bit bigger than she used to be.
Plump
was the word Sybil used, studying her critically but too innocent to come to the true conclusion.

Maud had decided that she would tell John. She was teaching herself to walk slightly bent over, pulling her increasing stomach as nearly as she could towards her spine. On the eve of Ethel’s wedding she told her mother she was feeling ill, she thought she was sickening for something. It wasn’t entirely a lie. The sickness of the early weeks was long past, but her nervousness and fear had affected her stomach so that she suffered continual sharp pains and diarrhoea. A cousin of theirs—a married woman, of course—had had a miscarriage at three months. Maud didn’t know what her symptoms had been, no one would tell her, that wouldn’t be right, but she guessed there would be pains and perhaps bleeding. To her misery, she never bled, but the pains might mean she was losing the baby.

Her mother in pink with a cloche hat and Sybil and their cousin Wendy in their blue, frilly bridesmaid’s dresses went off to the church in one hired car, Maud’s father and Ethel in another, Ethel in calf-length, cream lace and a veil tied round her forehead just above her eyebrows with white ribbon sewn with roses. John
refused transport and walked to the church. It wasn’t far. Maud, uncaring about her disgrace, oblivious to everything except her looming fate, sat at home on the lavatory in pain, hoping and praying for the blood to come. It never came, and when the others came back, minus Ethel, she had to go downstairs. One good thing, one tiny ray in all this gloom, was that she would now have her bedroom to herself.

She had meant to tell John but she didn’t. Suppose it made him despise her as a loose woman? He was going next day and she hardly spoke to him. Wondering what was wrong, he went back to London to pack up and move out.

L
EAVING THE
great barracks of a school in the hinterland of the Marylebone Road was no hardship to John. His pupils had not been the half-starved, wretched little creatures of London’s East End, but they were deprived indeed, and he seldom came across one who showed the least interest in what he tried to teach them. The staff were mostly women, all but two of them unmarried, and the single ones desperate to be married. For most of his four years there one after the other of them had made clumsy flirtatious advances to him, one of them either leaving when he did or lying in wait for him in the playground to ask if she could walk a little way with him. He was never rude, so he couldn’t bring himself to say no. Then she would suggest a cup of tea in the nearest café. He could refuse that, though, on the grounds that he had to be home in five minutes. Only one of them ever touched him. That was no more than an attempt to put her arm into his, but his reaction, instinctive though it was, the homosexual’s reflex, so distressed her that she ran away from him with a whimper.

Now he had left for good. He had already paid his last rent to Mrs. Petworth, his two suitcases were packed with everything he possessed in this world apart from the books he had left in Bristol. Clearing out his life to start a new one, the room bare but for his bedclothes and an empty teacup, he sat down to write to Maud. It
puzzled him that she had only once replied to his letters. He tried to think—“puzzled his brains,” as Bertie had once put it—what could be wrong with her and could only come up with the idea he had had before, that some boy had made her unhappy. He wrote that he was looking forward to being at home again in a few days’ time, to seeing them all but especially her. He would see
her
and find out, he wrote, but wrote gently, what was wrong with her. It upset him very much that she had hardly spoken to him on his last day at home. His letter was interrupted by a tap at his door. It could only be Mrs. Petworth. It was Bertie.

John was so aghast to see him and so overjoyed that he almost fell. He took an unsteady step backwards.

Bertie came in, turned the key in the lock, and took John in his arms. “I couldn’t keep away, not when I knew you was going the day after tomorrow.”

“You shouldn’t have come. You know what I said, that I wouldn’t do it anymore.”

“I never believed you.”

John looked at him in despair. “I love you. I don’t know what to do.”

“I do.”

Bertie stayed the night, John’s last night at Mrs. Petworth’s. If she had known, she would have objected only because if John wanted a friend there overnight, he should have paid the extra rent. Two young men lying close beside each other in a single bed caused her no qualms on grounds of morality. John slept for a while, then lay wakeful, reproaching himself for his weakness of character, for the speed with which he had given in to Bertie’s persuasions. John had resolved that the sin of having relations with a man was in his past and he must atone for it by the manner of his future life. That life must be celibate, and his friendship with Bertie, if it was to continue with so many miles between
them, must be chaste. Bertie turned over in the narrow bed and laid his arm over John’s waist. With a sigh that was halfway to a whimper, John got up and spent the rest of the hot, stuffy night in the armchair.

W
HATEVER HAPPENED
to her in the whole course of her life, Maud thought, she would always remember this day, the
date
of this day, the sixteenth of August 1929, three days after John came home to stay. She was fifteen years old, due to be sixteen on December the thirtieth. On Friday the sixteenth of August at half past eight in the morning, her mother walked into the bedroom that was now Maud’s alone and saw her standing in front of the cheval glass in only her petticoat.

“Oh, Maud,” she cried out. “Oh, Maud, oh, Maud, oh, good heavens.”

Maud said nothing.

“Maud, do you know you are expecting a child?”

“Of course I do. I’m not an idiot.”

Maud stepped into a skirt, the waistband of which could no longer fasten, and pulled over her head an overblouse Mary Goodwin had never before seen. Maud turned on her mother a face of the deepest woe, of utter tragedy. “Aren’t you sorry for me, Mother? Don’t you pity me?”

“Pity you? I don’t know. I’m in a state of absolute shock. I must think. What is your father going to say?”

Maud opened her mouth to scream, but laughter came out, hiccupping peals of it. Her mother smacked Maud’s face, not hard, a token smack, because that was what you did to hysterical girls. It made Maud cry. She sank down weeping on the bed, scrubbing at her face with a corner of the sheet. Mary Goodwin stood there, shaking her head, just shaking it back and forth like an automaton.

“Don’t you care for me at all? What will become of me? Don’t you care?”

“You have shocked me beyond belief, Maud. Care for you? You have ruined all possible caring for you. You have done a wicked thing.” Mary Goodwin began to pace the room, stopping to stare blankly out the window, turning to come back and turn again. “You had better stay in this room. I’ll bring you something to eat later. I thank God Ethel is away from here, I thank God she’s married. As for poor Sybil—it’s better if she doesn’t see you, if you keep away from her.” Mary paused, struck by a sudden thought, a possibility. “Tell me the truth, did he force you?”

Maud knew the word if her mother didn’t. “You mean, did he rape me?”

Mary Goodwin went white.

“No, he didn’t. It was just as much me.”

Her mother might have shown some satisfaction at that, some sort of relief, but perhaps she felt neither satisfaction nor relief. Perhaps rape would have been preferable. “When is it due?”

“I don’t know. December, I think.”

“I shall go and tell your father now before he goes to the office. I don’t suppose he will go now. No doubt he will want to talk to you and tell you what we have decided.”

Maud sat up. “What do you mean,
you’ve
decided?” She shouted it. She had never before been rude to her mother. “What do you mean?”

“You’ll be told when I’ve talked to your father.” Mary moved towards the door. “Of course you can’t stay here. He will agree with me there. He’ll say we can’t keep you here.”

Maud was paralysed by her mother’s words, transfixed by a mixture of panic, ignorance, and fear. The closed door trapped her like a wild animal shut in a cage. She had never known of anyone in her position before, never read a book or a story in which an unmarried girl found herself pregnant, never been told
of such a girl as a warning, though now she remembered Sybil’s pointing out to her a poor, badly dressed woman in the street. She pointed her out and said she had a little boy at home she told people was her brother, her mother’s youngest child, but he wasn’t, he was hers, “born out of wedlock.” What had her mother meant by “you can’t stay here”? Where could she go? For the first time in her life she felt utterly alone. Would they put her out into the street and lock and bolt the doors against her? That thought made her brace herself, tell herself not to be stupid. They couldn’t do that, they wouldn’t. They were her
parents.

Then she thought about John. He was at home, in his bedroom, perhaps still in bed. Would they stop him seeing her? Would they make her go away so that he couldn’t see her? Why hadn’t she told him already? Had she been too afraid? Hysterics came back, making her scream and sob and beat at the wall with her fists. The door flew open and her father came in. It was the first time he had ever come into her bedroom without knocking, and she knew without knowing how she knew that she had forfeited all his respect. She sank down on the bed crying.

“Sit up,” he said, “and be quiet. Making a noise won’t help.” She lifted her head, her face red and distorted, wet with tears. “A fine sight you are. I don’t want to talk to you about how you got in this condition. The man can’t marry you, you’re too young to marry, and by the time you’re old enough, it will be too late for legitimacy.”

The possibility of marriage hadn’t crossed her mind. Only one thing her father was saying struck her, and that was his failure to mention the child she carried. He was purposely avoiding that as if the child were some sort of unmentionable disease, and in so doing he did her some good. He made her angry.

“You can’t stay here,” he said. “It wouldn’t be fair on your sister to risk her being contaminated by you. There is a home I know of
where women such as you can be sent to live and work. In fact, it is a charity of mine, I contribute along with several other members of the chapel to its upkeep. It goes against the grain with me that a daughter of mine should be sent there, it’s a shameful thing, but we have no choice.”

Maud shouted, “I could stay here. This is my home. Why shouldn’t I stay here?”

“In
my
house where your innocent sister lives? Stay here where everybody we know would see your disgrace? I think not. You will have to go to Wesley House and think yourself very lucky you’ve not been turned out into the street.”

By some instinct or prevision, making a leap of years into the future, Maud knew that whatever he might desire or her mother wish for, this was the last time she would ever speak to her father. If she had to be sent to this home, so be it, but she was speaking to him now for the last time. Adrenaline poured into her blood.

“What did you mean by ‘too late for legitimacy’?”

He looked at her as if she had done something dirty, soiled herself or stripped off her clothes. “Thanks to this new law which came in, in April, sixteen has become the age for legal marriage. You will not be sixteen until the thirtieth of December. Your mother tells me you expect to be confined in December. Therefore legitimacy is impossible.”

“I shall tell Grandma. Grandma will help me.”

“You will not tell your grandmother. In any case, she is away on her holiday in Switzerland.”

“John will help me.”

“John won’t be allowed to see you. In any case, he has gone out. He has errands in town and will be out all day. By the time he comes back, you will be settled at Wesley House, and for the future an adoption will be arranged.”

The last time she would speak to her father for ever. . . . Then let it be good, she thought, learning defiance, learning strength. “My baby will be mine and stay mine and live with me. He will never see you or speak to you as long as I live. When you’re on your deathbed,” she shouted, “I won’t see you. I won’t go to your funeral. I will never speak to you again. I hate you.” And she burst into hysterical sobs.

H
E HAD
things to buy. At his new school he would be teaching maths as well as general science, so he bought a book to help him brush up on his trigonometry and another which would refresh his chemistry knowledge and included the periodic table. He had meant to go to a tailor in London for the suit he needed but the prices were beyond his means, so he settled for the tailor his father had always used. There he was measured for a suit in the cheapest material they had, a dark grey broadcloth. All this took him less time than he expected, and the bus from the city centre brought him home before lunch.

His parents and his sisters expected him rather later, and he thought it might be displeasing to his mother if he used his key, presuming on his status as an adult and the son of the house. He rang the bell. An almost unheard-of thing happened. His father answered the door. Instead of being at the “works,” as his mother always called the office, John Goodwin was at home.

“Dad, is everything all right? Has something happened to Mother?”

“No, well, no need to trouble you with it immediately. Your mother is quite well. Come in. Didn’t we give you a key?”

The house was more than usually silent. In the living room, the largest and pleasantest of all the rooms, Mary Goodwin and Sybil sat in armchairs opposite each other on either side of the fireplace. It had turned cold for August, but of course there was
no fire, and the fire screen, a framed embroidery of improbably coloured tropical birds, hid the grate. Neither woman got up, but while Sybil continued to look at her hands folded in her lap, his mother turned to him a doleful face. Someone must be dead. He went up to his mother, laid his hand on her shoulder, said, “Where’s Maud? What’s happened to Maud?”