The Child's Child (14 page)

John was able—almost—to tell the truth. “With her parents in Bristol. I’ll be going back there tomorrow morning.”

He had intended to get himself a bed, if he could, in the inn called the Red Cow or else get the bus back to Exeter. This would be better. Would they feed him at the Red Cow?

Mrs. Tremlett assured him they would. Her brother, Mr. Lillicrap, was the landlord. Meanwhile, her momentary suspicions gone, she would make him a cup of tea and let him have a packet of tea and a jug of milk for the morning.

The afternoon clouds departed, leaving a clear sky. It had been mild; now it became quite hot. John went for a walk, exploring the village, noting a shop and making his way into the church. Like all country churches, even on the hottest day, inside the silent nave it was cool and still. Along the pews, in front of every place, was a hassock embroidered in bright wools with the symbols of Christianity, a white fish on a blue ground, a yellow lamb on green, and many crosses of all colours. Two large vases of flowers, hollyhocks and daylilies, stood in front of the altar. John wondered if Maud would come here on Sunday mornings, or had she, like him, abandoned her faith? He remembered what she had said about not wanting to believe in God any longer and doubted if she would adhere to Methodism after her treatment by their parents.

If he had been a character in a book, he thought, sitting here in a country church on a summer afternoon, the incumbent of this parish would have come in, a vicar or rector, walked up to him, and asked if he needed help, and perhaps he would have poured out his heart to this kindly clergyman. But he wasn’t in that fictional church, he was here in All Saints, Dartcombe, and in future if he needed to confide or confess, it would have to be to Maud. He went back to No. 2 Bury Row, observing its neatness, the rather shabby but well-kept furnishings, the staircase covered, he supposed, in that fabric called drugget. He would give Maud the bigger bedroom with the double bed and the view of the village street and this church. His would be the smaller room at the back, where he could look out on the garden and the wooded hills beyond.

Sensing that it would be a wiser move to order the local drink in the Red Cow instead of his usual pale ale, he asked for a half-pint of cider. It seemed a good choice, and Mr. Lillicrap extended a large, calloused hand across the bar when he introduced himself. The other men looked at John and looked away, but one or two of them nodded. John thought that perhaps he should have gone into the saloon bar, and that sitting in there at a table would have been more acceptable to these men, who were obviously farm labourers. None of them would have been in any doubt that he was a professional man. Nor would he be able to bring Maud in here. He doubted that any Dartcombe woman had ever set foot in the Red Cow or any other public house. Mrs. Lillicrap would be the only female to be seen here. A large woman, whose Devon English was almost unintelligible, she served him soup followed by ham and eggs in the small parlour, where he understood that the family usually ate.

S
OMETHING ABOUT
his parents’ home made writing to Bertie impossible within its walls. Guilt and shame were only two among the many emotions even thinking of it made him feel. So he had brought paper, an envelope, and a stamp with him. His fountain pen was always clipped over his breast pocket. He had written once before since he’d come home, but had done so, feeling absurd and stared at, sitting on a bench in the park, the paper resting on a book on his knees. Now he was alone with no one to see, and as he sat down at Mrs. Tremlett’s ring-marked but well-polished dining table, he felt a fullness of the heart that is one of the feelings lovers have, of a joyful breathlessness, the whole body charged with longing.

The long letter was the most passionate he had ever written. He told Bertie how terribly he missed him, how in saying he could
give him up and never be with him again, he had written the worst of lies. Without as much inhibition as he had once had, he wrote of the things they had done together, sinful in most men’s eyes no doubt, thought of by John as wrong when he spoke of them to Bertie, but now clearly appearing as entirely right because they loved each other. The letter covered several pages, and when he reread it he expected to be ashamed of some of the things he had put down in ink on paper, but he felt no more shame than he would in reading a love poem of John Donne’s or a scene from Shakespeare.

Upstairs, he was surprised to find the single bed in the back bedroom without sheets or pillow slips. Linen was inside a cupboard, but he was too tired to make up the bed, and stripping off his suit and shirt, he got under the eiderdown and onto the blanket-covered mattress without any other covering. It was only eight o’clock. He fell asleep at once and slept until he was awakened by the loudest and most tuneful choir of birds he had ever heard.

J
OHN HAD
accomplished a lot, but he still had more decisions to make, and these perhaps were the hardest. How much to tell Maud? Something would have to be told to his parents, and then there were his sisters, but Maud’s opposition was what he had to expect and what he might have to overcome. When he returned home, he found her still up in her room, but now it was a voluntary incarceration. She had stuck to her resolution to never again speak to their father, she was cool to their mother, though she seldom saw her, and Sybil was spending most of her time before and after work up there with her sister. Ethel, the married woman, had chosen to join her parents in a disapproval of Maud that amounted to horror, made all the worse by Maud’s refusal to admit her shame.

She was drinking the tea Clara Gadd had just brought her. John studied her appearance searchingly, and she, mistaking his motive, supposed he was noticing that her pregnancy was becoming apparent.

“It shows, doesn’t it? If I went outside in the street, people would see.”

“I wasn’t looking at you for that. I was hoping you’d pass for eighteen or nineteen. I think you would. We could pass you off for eighteen.”

“What do you mean by ‘pass me off’?”

He told her. He told her about the cottage and Mrs. Tremlett and the pretty village and how everyone would be told she was John’s wife, expecting their child.

She blushed deeply. “Oh, John, I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. It will be easy once you get used to it.”

“Won’t they find out?”

“How? We’d be Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin, John Goodwin and Maud Goodwin, which is what we are now. I’ll get you a wedding ring. I’ve already told the woman next door that you’re my wife—she’s our landlady. You’ll like it there, Maud. The birds sing so loudly in the morning, you won’t believe it. I shall get myself a bicycle so I can ride to school, and you’ll buy our food in the village shop. People will notice your figure and they won’t be disgusted or angry, it will be just what they expect in a young married woman. They’ll congratulate you.”

She listened in silence. To her it was as if he were telling her a fairy story, something that couldn’t be true, couldn’t happen. “They won’t let us. Mother and Father won’t let us.”

“They will.” He didn’t say what was in his mind, that they would be glad to get her off their hands. In spite of the depths her relations with her parents had reached, she could still be hurt if she felt that they didn’t want her. “They will let us.” He had already hinted to them, and more than hinted, that he had found
a place in Devon for Maud where she would be looked after and mentioned Mrs. Tremlett’s name as a reliable woman to care for her, and at last he had told Maud that he and she would be living under the same roof. “You mustn’t worry,” he said. “There’s nothing for you to worry about except keeping fit and well for the sake of the baby.”

Her mind was travelling ahead. “After the baby is born, what shall I do? Where shall I go?”

“Stay with me, of course. As far as other people are concerned, it will be our child, we shall be its mother and father. We shall live together and everyone will think we’re married.”

“John, would you leave me alone now? It’s a lot to take in at once. I’d like to be alone for a while just to think about what you’ve said.”

Next day, she approached the question he knew must be asked and which he dreaded. “There’s a teacher at my school who used to say to us that we’d got all our lives before us. It was because of women over twenty-one getting the vote last year. You can do great things now, she said, all your lives are before you. Well, I was thinking, all your life is before you, John. Mine may be over, we can’t tell what will happen when my baby is born, but you, John—you’ll want to get married, really married, you’ll want children of your own.”

“I shall never marry.”

“But you don’t know that. You’ll meet someone and fall in love and want to marry her. Why not? She won’t want me in the house with my baby.”

“I shall never marry,” he said again.

Now was the time to tell her. He sat there in silence, thinking of the words he would use. Whatever he said must sound hideously coarse to her, perverted, gross, scarcely believable. You know what happened between you and Ronnie, he would have to say, well, it’s like that in a sort of way, only we’re both men.
He would explain that they loved each other, try to tell her that sexual intercourse could be beautiful between men just as it could between a man and a woman. Maybe talk about the Greeks—those
damned
Greeks, he swore to himself. The opprobrium in which most people, nearly all people, held men like himself reared itself up in his consciousness like a monster, a hairy Caliban, crocodile-headed, an embodiment of all that was evil in mankind. It might be that she too from what she had picked up at school or heard whispered in scorn by Ronnie Clifford had given a place in her mind to that monster. He couldn’t tell her. And strong as he was teaching himself to be, he leaned on the coward’s resource. One day he would tell her, but not yet. One day he would tell her and tell her too that he had given it all up, it was all over for him.

S
HE SAID
good-bye to her mother and gave her a cold kiss on the cheek, but Maud stuck to her resolve not to speak to her father and she walked past him without a word, preceding John down the steps. John had arranged for his clothes and books to be sent on ahead for Mrs. Tremlett to take in. Maud’s clothes, or those she could still get into, he carried in the two suitcases in which he had brought his own. She said she was a good sempstress, had come top in the needlework class at school, and told him she would make all her own clothes in future and the baby’s. John promised that once they were settled in, he would go into Exeter and buy her a sewing machine.

Sybil asked her to write and Maud promised she would. In this way any news she had to tell would be passed on to those parents with whom she had no desire to communicate. John could write to them if he chose, she said to him when they were in the train. On the third finger of her left hand she wore the wedding ring John had bought for her. If her parents had noticed it, they had said nothing, probably thinking that in her condition, now obvious,
it was the only course for her to take. The train steamed along through fields that were the rich, damp green the cattle loved and occasionally yellow with ripened corn. Looking out the window but seeing little of all this, Maud was conscious of being happy for the first time since that day her mother had walked into her bedroom while she was dressing. She was happy and dreaming now of a home that would be a real grown-up house and hers and John’s and where in the wintertime her baby would be born.

T
HE CLIMATE
of opinion and behaviour Maud had grown up in had led her to expect the life ahead of her to centre on wifely devotion, accomplished domesticity, and motherhood. Recently, because of her success at school, her parents had talked about the possibility of her going to university, the college at Exeter perhaps, but she had known that though this might lead to her becoming a teacher, such a job would last only until she married, and then those woman’s duties would overcome other aspirations. Now they had come upon her in a rush. She would not be a wife to John but would find herself with something like a wife’s function; the cottage would demand tidying and cleaning and linen-washing, and in only a few months motherhood would arrive.

She thought of this as they travelled in the bus from Exeter to Dartcombe. The countryside around Bristol was lovely enough but not so lush as this, not so richly green, so that you wondered how the bus could manage to tunnel through the narrow lanes with their steep banks and tree branches which almost met overhead. The earth was dark red, the fields small and square, enclosed by hedges and alternating with dark woodland. If she had not been told by her English teacher that while when writing you may compare art to nature, you must never compare nature to art, she would have been reminded of the patchwork quilt her mother had made and which covered her bed at home. She would
never see it again, and that thought brought a small, almost silent whimper. But John heard it and took her hand.

Seeing this and the tender look he gave her, an old woman sitting in a nearby seat caught Maud’s eye and gave her an approving smile. Her pregnancy, beyond concealment, was very apparent now, as was the gold ring on the third finger of her left hand.

“Are you feeling all right?” John asked her. “This bus is rather bumpy.”

“I’m very well. It’s nice here, it’s lovely.”

She could tell that pleased him, and she was aware of how fond she was of him. Still, it was a shock to her when, after a short walk from the bus stop to the cottage in Bury Row, John introduced her to Mrs. Tremlett.

“This is my wife, Maud.”

It had to be so, of course, but was it wrong to tell such a huge lie? It had to be told. You might say that the whole purpose of their coming here together and living together in this place, confronting this grim-faced but kindly woman, was founded on that lie. The alternative was the hideous truth, for that was how it now appeared to Maud.

Mrs. Tremlett was too polite to say what she was evidently thinking, that this young wife was very young indeed. She herself had been married at sixteen, and Mr. Goodwin’s wife was not much more than that. Like her own, the wedding was one that had had to be because of a coming child. But she said nothing, only ushered them in where the table was set with tea things, and although it was warm and still summer, a fire was laid in the grate.