The Child's Child (24 page)

Maud had her answer. But still she asked.

“We haven’t seen him since goodness knows how long,” said Sybil. “Mother had a letter saying he’d come and see Dad, but he never came.”

“Weeks ago, that was,” their mother sniffed. “He remembered my birthday last year but not this.”

“I don’t know where he is,” Maud said. “He’s missing. He’s disappeared.”

Her mother turned on her a look that seemed like hatred. “He won’t come here wherever he is. Thanks to you, he’s cut himself off from his family. He’s never even seen Ethel’s children. He can spend his time and his money on your by-blow, but his legitimate nephew and niece might as well not exist.” With that, Mary pressed her napkin to her eyes and ran out of the room.

Maud realised there was no point in her staying longer. She kissed Sybil, who, though tactless, had always been nice to her and must lead a miserable existence in this house. As Maud was leaving, her sister said, “Oh, by the way, I nearly forgot, Ronnie Clifford got married last week. She’s a lady doctor. I was surprised.”

Maud wasn’t surprised. He was bound to marry someone sometime, and it plainly wasn’t going to be her. But Sybil’s words made her quickly forget the kindly feelings she had had towards her sister. “I don’t know what business it is of yours” was her parting shot.

She walked to Temple Meads station and got into the train that was standing there, as if waiting for her. Clearly, John was missing, John had disappeared. She asked herself what she should do, and with that thought came another. She was quite alone, had no one to turn to, no one to consult. Her mother plainly hated her, her father was nearer death than life, Sybil was useless. Anyone she told would also have to be told of the years of deception, that John was not her husband but her brother, not Hope’s father but her uncle. Much as she liked Gladys and Daphne and Mrs. Tremlett, she knew these people were not fit to advise her and, if they were told the truth, would turn against her.

Hope had her ninth birthday and a party as was customary for little girls. Maud made her a dress out of white organdie but, as she remembered Mrs. Imber’s snub, without smocking. Would the Imbers help her? The memory not only of Mrs. Imber’s dismissal
of her, but also the older woman’s refusal to let her daughter come and play with Hope, was still with Maud, but since then Charmian, the Imbers’ only girl, had died of tuberculosis, and her mother, said to have been bowed down with grief, was a changed woman. Mr. Imber, whom Maud had never met, might be prepared to give her advice, and both of them, being so different from the village people, were less likely to be shocked and horrified when told of Maud and John’s deception. One mild, damp day just after Christmas, she had even begun the walk along the footpath, past the church and up the drive to Dartcombe Hall, but when the house was in sight, she lost her nerve and gave up. There must be someone among her acquaintance to whom she could confess the charade they had acted out for nearly ten years, but it wasn’t one of those people ranked so far above her as the Imbers. Oddly, her dislike of Alicia Imber increased from that day as if, instead of being innocent of any involvement in Maud’s abortive quest, the chatelaine of Dartcombe Hall had turned her away from the house.

Hope continued to ask about John until Maud lost patience and told her not to speak of him again. There was no sign of him. By now he would have lost his job at the school, probably his chance of a pension one day. He must be dead. She thought quite suddenly of Elspeth Dean, who had offered her, if not a shoulder to cry on, an ear to listen to confessions. The spring term had just started. Maud was anxious, even if she was obliged to confess to weakness and shame and inadequacy, to look what she truly was now, rich and handsome. She dressed in the clothes she had worn for that wretched visit to her family, the red tweed suit, the coat with the fur collar, and the red court shoes, took the bus to Ashburton, and waited outside the school gates at half past three.

The boys came out, one master, then another, then for five minutes no one. From John’s description Maud recognised the headmaster leaving, getting into his black Austin 7 that was
parked just inside the gates. Everyone must have gone before Elspeth appeared, unmistakeable in her green cloak and carrying her violin in its green leather case.

“Mrs. Goodwin!”

Maud said nothing. She gave Elspeth her tight smile.

“What brings you here?”

“Would you please call me Maud?” was all she could find to say, but almost immediately found words, though not the words she had intended. “My daughter will be coming out of school now. A friend is going to meet her and keep her till I come back. If we go to a café and have a cup of tea, will you let me talk to you?”

“Of course. But wouldn’t it be better if I came back to your house with you and we talked there?”

“Would you do that?”

“Come on. I know the Dartcombe bus times, and there’s one due in just ten minutes.”

They waited for it at the stop. “I think that when I talk to you,” Maud said hesitantly, “you may be very shocked and—well, disgusted with me. And with John. I’ve decided that if I’m going to talk to anyone—well, you—I must tell everything and not keep anything back. I thought I should warn you of this, so that if you think you wouldn’t want to get involved because you’re—well, a single woman who may not know that such things go on—oh, I don’t know, but I’m just trying not to get you sort of entangled in shocking things.”

Elspeth was laughing, shaking her head and laughing so that her red hair flew out and crackled as Maud had heard such hair does. “You don’t know me, Maud, but I hope you soon will. Now here comes our bus.”

Sitting at the very back of the bus with Maud next to the window, Elspeth began to show Maud how to know her better. “I did my training in London. I was in the music school there, thinking I could become a concert violinist, but perhaps I wasn’t quite
good enough for that. I had a little flat in Chelsea, a walk-up with a tiny kitchen and sharing a bathroom with four others. Somehow I gathered a lot of friends about me. We were a bohemian crowd, I’m sure you know what that means. We were musicians and actors and artists, none of us very successful, none of us well-off, and none of us conventional.

“On the floor below me lived two young men who were lovers. I can see by your face you know what I mean. They called themselves queer, but some people called them Uranians and some inverts. There were several couples and they lived together but they weren’t married. I had someone I lived with, but we need not go into that now. It’s enough to say that it didn’t work out, and in the end he left me. I had a little money but it was running out. I managed to get a job playing my violin in a big department store, but the truth is I couldn’t bear it. I couldn’t bear sitting there playing Tchaikovsky and Chopin on my violin while people laughed and chatted as if I wasn’t there.

“I’m talking too much. You don’t want to hear all this. I’ve explained the essential things, why you won’t mind telling me things. You won’t find I’m shocked.”

“Why did you leave London?”

“There was nothing for me to do there and no one I much minded leaving behind. My lover was gone. I applied to various schools in the country and got this one, teaching music to boys. They’re very nice to me, I love it.”

Turning to face her, Maud understood that she now saw Elspeth in a new light. Until ten minutes ago she had seen her draperies as ridiculous, her long hair gipsyish, but now she saw a beautiful face, green eyes that were unlike the way she had used to view them, as catlike, sharp, and untrustworthy. Elspeth’s were soft and kind.

“I will fetch Hope,” Maud said, “and then we’ll have tea and talk.”

M
AUD HAD
intended to hold back certain parts of her story. John’s relations with Bertie—and possibly with others?—surely there was no need to tell. Nor was there any need to mention her sister Ethel’s refusal to know her or Ronnie Clifford’s treatment of her as if she were a street woman he had picked up somewhere. His marriage to the “lady doctor” might be kept dark. But at some point in Elspeth’s description of her London life, her absolute acceptance of what Maud’s parents called “living in sin” and of the two young men as lovers, Maud decided that if she talked, she must tell everything. Anything else would be useless and a kind of insult to Elspeth.

All this thinking, something Maud was unused to, made her head ache, and once she had made the tea, set out a big homemade ginger cake on the table, and opened a new tin of Huntley & Palmers biscuits, she swallowed two aspirins. Having met Elspeth before, Hope talked to her with little sign of shyness while both of them ate large slices of cake. John wasn’t mentioned in front of the child. Maureen Crocker, Daphne’s daughter, was coming over to play, and the two girls went up into Hope’s bedroom. Maud was so certain that John, for some reason, was never coming back that she had given his room to Hope.

A dark blush mounted into her face as she began telling Elspeth the history of her life and John’s from the day she’d first started walking home with Ronnie. Her face felt so hot that she put her unaccountably cold hands up to it. A fire blazed in the grate but she was still cold.

“Take it slowly,” Elspeth said. “I think you’re not used to talking about yourself.”

It was true. Maud had hardly ever done so, and never to her mother, whom she now saw as the natural recipient for the confidences of a young girl. She warmed even more to Elspeth but
still couldn’t bring herself to say much about what had happened between her and Ronnie. But she could tell of the discovery of her pregnancy, of her
mother’s
discovery of it, of her parents’ plan to put her into a Methodist home for unmarried mothers. As she began to tell of John’s sacrifice to take care of her and to provide her and Hope with a home, she saw for the first time what he had tried to give up for her, and, in failing, what he had lost.

“He brought this man here,” Maud said. “They slept together.” The blush was beginning again. “I didn’t want it, but I couldn’t stop him. I’m sure this must shock you, considering John wasn’t a stranger.”

“Oh, I knew about him. I’ve always known.”

“You can’t have!”

“I really did. I could tell. Don’t look like that, Maud. That I knew doesn’t mean anyone else could, and I’m sure they didn’t. That’s why I used to wonder why he’d got married. I didn’t know you were brother and sister then, remember. It made me want to get to know you both better, but you rather froze me out. I understand that now too.”

Maud told her the rest. She was suddenly tired but her headache was gone. She looked down at her clothes, the tight, short skirt, the stiff tailoring like the garments of a secretary or a typist, she thought, the shoes of too bright a colour and too high heels. Whom was she trying to impress? All that must soon be over and a hard time coming.

“What am I to do?” she said.

“I think we must go to the police. Do you have a police house in the village?” Maud nodded. “It will all come out now, I’m afraid. I’d say ‘your secret’ except that that sounds a bit melodramatic. You see, John may be lying dead somewhere with no one knowing who he is or what’s happened to him.”

“I thought of that.”

“There’s no time like the present. Is it far?”

“Just down the road and in the next street. Must I do it now? What about Hope?”

“Ask a neighbour to keep an eye on her and the other child.”

Elspeth seemed slightly amused by Maud’s change of dress, smiling but in a kindly way when she came downstairs in an obviously homemade frock and lace-up shoes, her face a picture of fear yet with a new determination.

“ ‘We who are about to die salute you,’ ” said Elspeth. “Come along. You’ll feel better when it’s over.”

So Maud, trembling all over, both hands clenched on the strap of her bag, went to PC Joseph Truscott’s house, interrupted him at tea with his wife and sons, and told him John Goodwin was missing, had been missing for nearly two months. She told him too, the tears falling from her eyes, that he was not her husband but her brother, leaving out, on Elspeth’s instructions, any mention of what Maud called to herself but not to him or Elspeth his taste for or activities of “gross indecency.”

PC Truscott thanked her in his slow and stolid way. He would “let them in London know.” She should be let know if anything came of it. No surprise was shown, though Elspeth felt great haste was shown in hurrying them off the premises. She thought but didn’t say to Maud that the moment they were out of sight, Truscott would be sharing all this information with his fascinated wife. How long before the whole village knew?

S
INCE FIRST
she came to Dartcombe, Maud’s had been a sheltered life. She had never realised this herself. The painful incidents in it, Mrs. Imber’s rebuffs, Bertie’s visit, Rosemary’s and Sybil’s visits, stayed with her, festering. There they would be for ever. They were high spots in her existence, if high spots can be bad and troubling. But this interview with PC Truscott overwhelmed everything. It seemed to her that she had been obliged to tell him things no one should ever know and which would ruin for ever her reputation and her life in the little society she had made for herself.

Weeping bitterly when they were home again, she sobbed to Elspeth that she couldn’t be alone here in Bury Row with these terrible revelations—as she put it—hanging over her. Elspeth’s promise that things would be better once Maud had confessed to the policeman couldn’t have been further from the truth. She felt worse now than she had when she’d found out she was pregnant with Hope. This was the worst day of her life, and she blamed John for it.

The hesitation was momentary. “I’ll stay. Of course I will. You’ll have to lend me a nightgown and a toothbrush.”

Maud threw her arms around Elspeth’s neck. Then, a changed woman, her tears dried, Maud went away to cook something for supper. When John went away all those weeks ago, he had taken his toothbrush with him, so Maud gave Elspeth hers, first carefully
boiling it in a pan of water. She offered to give Elspeth her bed, but this was refused in favour of the green velvet sofa in front of the dying fire. Hope was so enthralled by Elspeth, her long, red hair, which the little girl was allowed to plait, her cape and the contents of her handbag, combined comb and brush, a lipstick called Tangee, which looked transparent in its case but turned red on the lips, photographs of their new guest’s mother and Elspeth’s brother and sister. For the first time, Hope forgot John and failed to ask when Daddy was coming back.