The Child's Child (20 page)

Nothing about Sybil’s appearance was eye-catching. She had always been rather dowdy, and now, at past thirty, she looked what people would call a typical spinster. Her shoes were flat-heeled lace-ups, her costume dark grey broadcloth, just like a man’s but for the skirt substituted for trousers. Sybil had never cut her long, dark auburn hair, and now she wore it in an unflattering bun at her nape. But her pleasure at seeing Maud and her reaction to Hope with her fair curls and dark blue eyes was all Maud could have longed for. Sybil had brought her a present, a fluffy terrier on wheels, that Hope received rapturously and, remembering her mother’s teaching, said thank-you for.

“She’s lovely,” Sybil said. “Not much like any of us but that doesn’t matter. She looks a happy child.”

“I think she is. I hope so. I wish she had more children her own age to play with, but Mrs. Tranter and her husband have moved to Dartwell and their little girl too, of course.”

“Maud, I have to ask you, I hope you won’t mind, but the people here, do they know about Hope?”

Maud knew very well what Sybil meant, but still Maud meant to ask her to spell it out. “What do you mean, about her?”

“You know.” Sybil looked uncomfortable. “That she’s not—well, born in wedlock.”

Maud spoke stiffly. “John and I call ourselves Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin. Everyone believes Hope is his child.”

“Oh, Maud.” Sybil placed her slice of Madeira cake back on her plate, looking as if the news she had received had spoilt her appetite. “Oh, dear, Maud, was that wise? Didn’t you think about the consequences?”

“What consequences?”

“Well, what if John wants to get married? What if you do?”

“I won’t and he won’t. Hope thinks John’s her father, and there’s no reason why she won’t go on doing so. Now let’s change the subject. How’s mother? How’s Ethel?”

Sybil, who plainly didn’t want to change the subject, told her that Ethel was “expecting” her first child in January and took no notice of Maud’s flashing eyes and pursed mouth. “No one told her she was a disgrace to the family, did they?”

“Oh, Maud” was all Sybil could say to that. She expected a happier response when she told her sister their mother was well, missed Maud a lot, and would like to see her. “She says bygones will be bygones if you’ll only come and maybe stop with us for a couple of nights.”

“I could, but I don’t want to see our father.” I make him sound like God, Maud thought, but didn’t know how else to put it, and
he had behaved like God to her, a jealous God, punishing disproportionately. Reaping where he had not sown, she remembered from her churchgoing days, and gathering where he had not stored. “Mother could come here,” she said, “if she misses me so much.”

Never the soul of tact, Sybil said, “She wouldn’t do that. You see, if you came to us, she says, please, could you not bring the child. She doesn’t want to see her.”

Maud’s reaction was far from anything Sybil expected. She thought her sister might protest that she had no one with whom to leave Hope or that she had never been separated from her and wasn’t about to start now. But Maud screamed. She screamed and burst into violent tears, seizing hold of the little girl, who had been playing with her toy dog, and clutching her so tightly that Hope also began to cry and howl. The two of them rocked back and forth, sobbing and grabbing at each other’s clothes and hair. Sybil turned white. All she could say was “Oh, Maud, Maud, don’t. Please stop. What have I said that’s so terrible? Please stop.”

Into the midst of this John walked. “What on earth is wrong?” He looked from one sister to the other. “What have you said to her?”

“Nothing, nothing. I only said that if she’ll come and see Mother, not to bring Hope.”

Maud’s tears had subsided. Hope was still whimpering and hiccupping. John laughed. “I can see that would start the fireworks.” He said to Maud, “You don’t have to go anywhere if you don’t want to. You’re making a fuss about nothing. Have another cup of tea, that’ll do you good.”

Sitting up straight, directing a look of enraged distaste at Sybil, her face bright red and wet, Maud said, “I will never go near that house again. I’ll never go to Bristol again. You can tell her I don’t
want to see her as long as I live or she does, and as for Father, he’s dead to me already.”

Sybil stayed the night in Maud’s bed, and Maud slept downstairs, Hope in her cot pulled close to the sofa. In the morning, before he cycled off to school, John showed Sybil the vegetables he and Maud were growing behind the house in a patch Maud called the kitchen garden.

“It helps us make ends meet.”

“But you have a good salary, don’t you, John?”

“There are three of us to live on it. Down here, I don’t get the London weighting.”

Sybil left on the bus for Ashburton, rather peeved because Maud wouldn’t come too, to see her off.

“You could leave Hope with Mrs. what’s her name.”

“Tremlett. Her name is Mrs. Tremlett. I don’t know why everyone is always trying to get me to leave my little girl with other people.”

So they parted on waspish terms.

Maud, whom John had once described as a cheerful girl who never sulked, was sullen and morose that evening. When John asked her what was wrong, all she said was “I wonder what Sybil would say if she knew about you and your
friend.
”

W
HEN
J
OHN
had said that he had three people to support on his income, he wasn’t telling the whole truth. For the past few months he had been supporting Bertie as well. The days when Bertie only received money from John when he asked for it were gone, the days when John put a pound note or two pound notes into an envelope and sent it with a covering note were in the past. Now, each week, he sent his lover a postal order for nearly twice the sum that Bertie earned serving behind the counter in the ironmonger’s shop. John couldn’t afford it, and every time he sealed up the envelope and dropped it into the pillar box, he thought that he was buying Bertie’s love.

In the past he had sometimes planned to save enough, even if it took him weeks, to take a room for one night in that hotel Bertie coveted. John didn’t get far. Hope needed new shoes, she had a rash or a cough and the doctor had to be sent for, the roof of No. 2 Bury Row sprang a leak and Mrs. Tremlett refused to pay for mending it, so John had to. John said nothing, just accepted, but Maud reproached their landlady, calling her a skinflint, which led to her asking for an extra five shillings for their cleaning. “If that’s what I am,” she said to Maud but with a grin, “I’ll need my pay going up.” Learning to be “a real dressmaker,” as she put it, Maud needed more and more fabric to work on and more paper patterns to buy. The hotel plan came to nothing and now never would. All John’s spare cash went to Bertie.

A letter came from him unexpectedly. He never thanked John for the postal orders, and John attributed that to his lover’s embarrassment at being given money. A letter these days was rare, and Maud, picking it up from the doormat, brought it to him held out between thumb and forefinger at arm’s length as one might carry a bag of rotting food. John, eating his breakfast, was growing tired of pandering to her whims. More and more he was resenting the way she took everything as if it were her right and gave nothing in return beyond doing the housekeeping, which was more for herself and Hope than for him. He opened the letter in front of her. It told him that Bertie’s mother, who was only in her fifties, had died of a growth in her throat. His sister’s husband had paid for the funeral.

The tone of his letter wasn’t sorrowful but almost exhilarated. His mother’s house was a poor little place in Paddington, not far from the station, but it had been hers and now it was his. John expected an invitation to follow, but there was nothing. Still, he refused to be downhearted, knowing how hard Bertie found writing anything and how composing a letter tired him out. John got up from the table and told Maud Bertie’s news, not so much to annoy her as to make her realise and accept that Bertie was his friend and his doings of the greatest interest to him.

“I don’t want to hear,” Maud said.

“What has Bertie done to make you dislike him so?”

“It’s what you and he have done together. I’ll never forget the noise you made in the next room to mine and me with my innocent little child.”

He said nothing. Later that day, when school was over, he sent Bertie his usual postal order and put a note in with it asking if he could come and stay a night the following weekend. Knowing how writing was so difficult for Bertie, he added that there was no need to answer if it was all right for John to come on Saturday the sixteenth. Only if it wasn’t convenient was Bertie to “drop me a line.”

M
OST DAYS
Maud sat down at her sewing machine once Hope was bathed and dressed and playing with her toys, to teach herself procedures more difficult than turning up hems and sewing on buttons. Perhaps she could find an evening class in Ashburton where a teacher taught tailoring and leave Hope just for a couple of hours with John. While she was thinking along these lines, resenting John yet feeling guilty about him, the doorbell rang. She wasn’t expecting anyone. She got up and looked out the window, from where you could sometimes see who it was on the doorstep. But before she turned sideways to see the front door, she saw an enormous and extremely elegant black car parked outside the house, a Rolls-Royce. She recognised only the make of car, which everyone knew at once from its gable-shaped front, a gleaming silver. Of the woman on the doorstep she could catch a glimpse from where she stood of a tailored suit and fox fur, unsuitable for a country village, and a bright splash of yellow hair.

Maud went to the door.

The woman said, “Alicia Imber, and you must be Mrs. Goodwin. How do you do?”

Maud knew you were not expected to reply to this enquiry but say “How do you do?” back. She was so taken aback by the sight of her caller that she could only say, “Come in,” but resisted the temptation to ask her to excuse the mess, of which there was none. Hope, who had been playing with her wooden farmyard, transferring painted-metal Jersey cows from the farmyard to the meadow, left the herd to wait behind the gate while she stared at the newcomer, who said a smiling hallo to her.

“I see you’ve been sewing. Heaven knows how you find the time. I know I never should.”

Mrs. Imber was tall and thin. Maud judged her age at forty, which was the callous overestimate of youth’s instant dislike as
Alicia Imber was only thirty-four. The fox fur’s sharp nose and furry forehead nestled against her rouged cheek. Maud asked her to sit down, but instead of doing so, she hovered over the sewing machine, picking up and scrutinising the half-finished winter coat Maud was making for Hope.

“Very nice,” she said, smiling. She laid the coat down. “It was about your sewing that I came. Mrs. Clifford—I think you know her niece—told me the smocking you do is very good, and I was wondering if you could make a dress for my little girl. Would you like to show me a sample?”

Mrs. Clifford was Rosemary and Ronnie’s aunt. What business had she to put this patronising woman onto her? Maud was thinking as she went upstairs. She brought down what she considered Hope’s prettiest dress, green with white and red flowers, the smocking red. Mrs. Imber scrutinised it as if she were a judge in a needlework school-certificate examination, but she smiled. “Well, yes, very nice.” She laid the dress down on the arm of a chair.

“Can I wear it tomorrow, Mummy?” Hope said, darting a suspicious glance at Alicia Imber as if she thought the woman intended to steal it.

“If you like.” Maud said to her guest, “How old is your daughter?”

Like most mothers of a family when asked about one of her children, Mrs. Imber took the question to apply to all of them. “My boys are eight and nine, and they are called Christian and Julian, and my little girl, Charmian, is six. As you can imagine, I miss my sons dreadfully and so does their sister, with no one to play with, but they are away at their private schools and what must be must be.”

“If you could bring Charmian here, I could take her measurements and tell you how much material to buy.”

“Yes, well, we’ll see. Charmian isn’t very strong and I was hoping you would come to me at Dartcombe Hall.”

Maud summoned up all the nerve she had. “It would be best if you came here.”

“Oh, dear. You do like to make the rules, don’t you? I’ll come next Tuesday, shall I?” Maud knew that “shall I?” was a mere figure of speech, meaning nothing. “Good-bye, my dear,” Mrs. Imber said to Hope. “I don’t know your name.”

That evening Maud relayed the conversation to John, but with exaggerations as people with paranoid tendencies do, and adding a phrase she had read somewhere, the first of many such inventions.

“You don’t have to have that woman here,” he said, “or make a dress for her child. We can manage without that.”

“What does
noblesse oblige
mean, John?”

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s what she said to me when she was leaving,” Maud lied.

“It means an aristocrat owes it to himself, or maybe God, I don’t know, to bend to the needs of lower-class people.”

“Thank you.”

J
OHN WISHED
he had lied. Any translation, such as the almost incomprehensible “nobility obliges,” would have done. It soon appeared that Maud’s work wasn’t good enough. John, when buying her the sewing machine, had hoped she would use it and earn something to augment their income, but he knew now that this wasn’t going to happen.

He found it easy enough to be untruthful when he told Maud he was going to London to stay a night, to whom, and why. One of the teachers at school had invited him to come with her to visit her parents in a place called Twickenham. This was half-true, for Elspeth Dean had invited his “wife” as well, but of course he had politely refused. The great thing was to get Maud to believe him, and it appeared that this time she did.

Bertie hadn’t replied. John had said not to do so if coming on Saturday was all right, so evidently it was. Everything seemed to be going smoothly if you didn’t count Maud’s pressing enquiries as stumbling blocks. Who is she? Why have you never mentioned her before? Do you like her? And worst of all, “Do you love her?” It wasn’t the first time he had left Maud alone. On two occasions, taking a room in a boardinghouse, he had stayed a night away. It had always amused him (and been hilarious to Bertie) that the landladies wanted to see the ring on the third finger of the woman’s left hand when it was a couple hoping to stay, nearly asked for their marriage certificate and made them sign the visitors’ book, watching to see if she forgot and signed Jean Brown instead of Jean Smith. No landlady had suspected anything untoward of John and Bertie, they were obviously pals who would quite naturally be happy to share a bed, not just a bedroom. But no such minor incidents this time. They would share their bed in Bertie’s late mother’s house.