The Child's Child (27 page)

“I can’t understand why you came to live here with me if you were going to go away the moment some man asked you.”

“Not ‘some man,’ Maud. Please don’t say that.”

Maud began to cry and sobbed even more when Elspeth sat beside her and took her in her arms. She clung to Elspeth, whimpering
that it wasn’t fair to leave her alone in this place where she knew no one.

“You know me,” Elspeth said. “I’ll be living less than half a mile away. We shall see each other all the time.”

Maud spent the next day in bed, saying she felt unwell. Going upstairs to see how she was, Elspeth was told Maud wanted to know nothing about the wedding, when or where it was to be, because she had no intention of attending. In her opinion, Elspeth had treated her badly, pretending to come here as a companion to Maud while in fact bent only on catching a husband. Elspeth managed neither to take offence nor to produce excuses, but said only that Maud would feel differently when she got used to her friend’s changed status.

E
LSPETH AND
Guy were married in St. Jude’s church in the beginning of June 1939. Only Guy’s sister, Patricia, and her husband, Alicia Imber, and two friends of Elspeth’s from Ashburton were present. After lunch at River House they left to spend their wedding night in Weymouth. That evening after dinner, feeling like Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Elspeth told her husband she wasn’t a virgin.

Unlike Angel Clare, Guy started laughing. “Funny you should say that because nor am I.”

Her lover—the only one—had been a musician she had met while studying in London. Thinking she should tell Guy about him, she began rather hesitantly, but her husband said she “really need not” as it wasn’t his business and anyway it was a long time ago.

Next morning they took the ferry to Saint-Malo and three trains across Europe for their honeymoon on the Amalfi Coast.

True to her word, Maud had failed to attend the wedding, and she stopped Hope’s going. The first postcard that came from
Elspeth, Maud put into the coke boiler unread, but by the arrival of the second one she was so miserable and sorry for herself that she read it and wept over it. Elspeth had written that instead of remaining away for a month they were returning early in spite of having “such a blissful time.” The coast was the most beautiful place she had ever seen, the sun shone all day and at night the sky was full of stars, but in other ways Fascist Italy was uncomfortable, and if war was coming, their place was in England. If they delayed, they might not be able to get back. Maud decided she would give Elspeth and Guy the cold shoulder in a dignified way but would gradually “come round.” They should see that she was not angry but hurt by what they had done, which she now saw as purposeful deceit.

Maud began counting the events in her life which she calculated had soured her and made her what she now was, a sullen woman with a huge share of self-pity. It had begun of course with the conception, then the birth, of Hope. Next had come John’s horrible and ugly ideas of what constituted happiness for him; then his disappearance and death; lastly the tendency of everyone, it seemed, to desert and abandon her. Even her daughter, once the dearest in the world to her, was showing in her eyes more affection for Elspeth and her husband than for Maud.

E
VACUATION FROM
London and the other big cities was not confined to schoolchildren and their mothers. Between the end of June and the beginning of September, 3.5 million people moved from areas thought to be dangerous to safe ones. A cousin of Guy’s that he hadn’t seen or spoken to for twenty years drove up to River House in her Daimler and presented herself on the doorstep, begging for “sanctuary.” The rector and his wife found themselves harbouring the parents of children who were at boarding school with their daughter. The Fox and Hounds, never
before dignified with the name of
hotel,
took in two families from Plymouth willing to pay inflated prices for rooms from which the landlord turned out his own children into the attics.

Unenthusiastic about taking in London evacuees—stories about lice-ridden, filthy, and half-starved children were rife—Guy and Elspeth nevertheless went to Ashburton station and, with the approval of the billeting officer, carried off a young woman and her pair of wide-eyed, frightened waifs wearing armlets and labels and carrying their gas masks. At River House, their mother being too shy to speak, Elspeth took Arthur and Rose into the garden to play with her new puppy. While the spaniel went off to chase rabbits, the children stared in silence at the river Dart and the woods and hills beyond, at a pair of swans gliding down the stream and the dragonflies, whose iridescent wings skimmed the water. They held their pinched faces up to the sun, and Arthur said, “Have we died and gone to heaven, miss?”

Local authorities in the reception areas had carried out house-to-house checks on possible billets. A man called on Maud, but she told him she had no room, citing Mrs. Newcombe, Elspeth, and the long-dead John as residents at The Larches as well as herself and Hope. She was later to wish she had taken a mother and child or two, for they would have been welcome compared with the evacuee who in fact turned up. This man’s arrival, after Christmas, was to begin the damage to her character for the second time, and through him, ultimately, her reputation, such as it was, was ruined.

T
HE FIRST
of September 1939 was to have been the day when the school-leaving age was raised from fourteen, but it never happened—and was not to happen for eight years—for that was the day Hitler marched into Poland. Great Britain had threatened the German dictator with dire consequences for such an act,
but the ultimatum was not obeyed, and on September 3 Neville Chamberlain broadcast to the nation that Britain was now at war with Germany.

People were terrified of bombing, especially in London, later on with good cause, but it was to be a long time before bombs fell. England settled down into an uneasy peace that nevertheless seemed a compromise between peace and war. Some of the children were taken back to London, but not Arthur and Rose, whose no-longer-shy mother begged Guy and Elspeth to keep them while she returned alone. Apparently she was worried about what her husband “got up to” in her absence. Although she had already come to love the children, Elspeth was glad to see Mrs. Cramphorn go. She had done her best to stop the children from taking baths, reading books, and eating vegetables. Besides, Elspeth was expecting her first child in the following summer and was finding it hard to stop herself from listening when Mrs. Cramphorn constantly dilated on the horrors of childbirth and their lifelong consequences. Not for a full year would Arthur and Rose go back to London, into the care of relatives, their mother having disappeared.

Social life in the country remained largely unchanged. Cinemas and such theatres as there were had been closed on the outbreak of war but later on reopened. In London the dance halls were packed, but cinemas closed at six and League football, stopped for a while, resumed on a reduced level, a relief to the promoters of football pools, the most popular form of gambling in Britain. Christmas passed quietly at River House. Rather surprising Elspeth and her husband, Maud consented to bring Hope for Christmas dinner, but changed her mind when she was told Alicia Imber and her sons would also be there. She intended to send Hope on her own and her daughter was about to leave when Guy arrived in his car to fetch her. Maud spent Christmas alone, listening to the wireless and eating slices of the fruitcake she had made.

J
ANUARY AND
February were the coldest since 1895. The Thames froze hard for eight miles of its length, and there were huge falls of snow. Mainline trains were hours late, but not the train bringing a young man travelling on his own from Paddington to Ashburton. He caught a bus to Dartcombe, where he found No. 2 Bury Row occupied by strangers who had no idea where Mrs. Goodwin (an exaggerated emphasis was placed on that
Mrs.
) had gone. Mrs. Tremlett knew. She had met him once before and, bearing him no ill will, gave him Maud’s present address.

“She came into money. She’s quite the lady now, by all accounts.”

“The Larches, Ottery St. Jude,” he repeated, writing it down.

“It’s five miles at least,” said Mrs. Tremlett, “and there’s no way of getting there but by shanks’ pony.”

He had never heard the expression before but he guessed what it meant. Carrying his heavy knapsack on his back, he would have to walk it through what remained of the snow. His clothes were inadequate, an old, nearly threadbare coat that had once been his father’s, cotton trousers, and shirt. It was March and still cold, though the hours of darkness beginning later. British summer time had been changed. Fields lay under a dappling of half-melted snow while the hedges and trees remained as black as midwinter, a pale bluish light that seemed unnatural lying over the landscape. He set off to walk, knowing that the soles of his shoes were worn so thin that his bare feet inside them would soon be soaked.

In the distance, shrouded in grey mist, Dartmoor lay bleakly on the horizon. Darkness came slowly and it grew colder. The glitter on fences and gateposts told him of frost. All signposts and place-names had been removed for the duration of the war, so he had no idea whether the village he was entering, one cottage, then two, then a row of them, was Ottery St. Jude or not. And all these
little stone houses were in darkness, the blackout applying in the countryside as well as in town. His feet were so cold and numb that he wondered if you could get frostbite in England as well as in foreign parts. As the dark closed in, he had to peer closely at each gate and sometimes go right up to a front door to check on the cottage name. Most had only numbers. The Larches wasn’t to be found. Maybe he had further miles to walk.

He remembered Mrs. Tremlett calling Maud “quite the lady” and talking of her coming into money. Perhaps she now lived in a big house and had become rich. Perhaps she now had a husband, which was a less welcome thought. But as he was picturing some burly farmer coming to the door, he found himself in a patch of deeper darkness and saw that he was in the shade of several trees which, though leafless, were something like the shape of Christmas trees. Again he went up a path to a front door. He had found what he was looking for. Barely readable but still beyond a doubt when he brought his eyes within a couple of inches of the letters was the name The Larches. He put his finger to the bell push and heard the shrill sound ringing through the house.

M
AUD HEARD
the bell ring. Of course she wasn’t going to answer it. Few people called on her, none after dark that she could recall. Someone must have mistaken the house, she thought, easy to do in the blackout. It rang again and Hope called out, “Mummy, that’s the front door.”

“Yes, I know.” Maud spoke so softly that the child couldn’t hear.

She expected whoever it was to give up and go away, but instead a violent racket began, the bell ringing and the front door shaking with the blows rained on it, as if one finger was on the bell push and the other hand beating on the wood panels. Hope, who was in the dining room reading, dropped her book and rushed into where her mother had just turned off the wireless and was standing transfixed. “Is it an air raid, Mummy? What shall we do?”

Maud stood inside the front door. “Who is it?”

“It’s all right,” a man’s voice said. “I won’t hurt you.”

She recognised the voice. Her first thought was to retreat into the house, hide in the living-room, and stuff her fingers in her ears. But his renewed hammering made her think he might break the door down. She undid the two bolts and opened the door. “Bertie.” She even remembered his surname. “Bertie Webber.”

“I’m frozen.” He stepped inside and held out his hand to her. “I had to walk from where you was living before.”

She ignored the hand. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m an evacuee, Maudie. I’m scared to stop in London.”

“You’d better come in for a minute. You can’t stay. And don’t call me Maudie.”

He looked about him, taking in Maud’s new prosperity, as he made his way ahead of her into the living-room. Hope was there, staring at him with large, round eyes. “My, my, you haven’t half-grown.

“Nice place you’ve got here.”

“Yes,” said Maud. “I like it.”

She expected him to ask about John, but he didn’t. “You got anything to eat in the house? I’m starved. Preferably to drink, in fact. I could do with a double scotch, since you didn’t ask.”

He had already sat down. She sat opposite him, one arm round Hope and holding her close to her as if the child were under threat. “This place is bigger than Dartcombe. There’s a public house and a hotel where you could get a room—if they’ve got any left. The people who’ve come from Plymouth have taken most of the rooms.”

“If they’d got twenty, I couldn’t take one. I’ve no money. I used all I’d got on my train fare and it was a single fare. I’m not planning on going back.”

“Why aren’t you in the forces?”

“Just like a woman. That’s what they all say. I’ve not been called up yet, that’s why. I hope it happens soon. My job’s gone and my lodger’s gone. I’ve not got a bean, Maudie.”

She went into the kitchen, came back with a mug of tea, two thick slices of bread, and a pot of plum jam. She wasn’t going to give him her butter or cheese ration. It had begun to rain. She could hear it drumming on the porch roof. “You can stop here one night, but that’s it. I can’t have a single man staying here. There’ll be talk. The people round here are just waiting for the chance.”

He was wolfing down bread and jam. “You’re a doll.”

She told him to have a bath before he slept in her nice, clean sheets. “Five inches of water, that’s all we’re supposed to have.”

Humiliated, he simply nodded, but he had the bath. Proud of the home she now had, she showed him to the bedroom he was to have and preened herself when she saw the awe in his eyes. After he had gone to bed, she lifted the blackout curtain over the front door, went out into the porch, and stared through the rain at the dripping larches and the empty road as if she expected to see droves of curious and censorious people on the lookout for breaches of morality on her part. In her bedroom, the door closed and locked, she wondered why he hadn’t asked about John. Because he knew what had happened to him? Or because he had forgotten his existence?