The Child's Child (4 page)

I stopped myself there and suggested I pull myself together out of wild imaginings. James had probably come only for the weekend and was one of those obsessive writers, compelled irresistibly to a keyboard as they once were to a pen and ink.

A
PART FROM
Mary Barton,
I had never been happy with the works of Elizabeth Gaskell. Carla told me that everyone used to call her “Mrs. Gaskell” until feminism intervened and dropped the honorific. Her novels all have axes to grind. They aim to set the world right, as many Victorian novels do, but many try to disguise this, which hers do not. I sat on the sofa in the study to begin
Ruth,
very much aware that I would be outside in the garden in the swing seat but for James Derain’s watching me from the other study. This was pure paranoia for I had no reason to believe that he would watch me or cared at all what I did. If I was not out there, it was because I knew I couldn’t settle to my book just under that upper window, in the eye line of anyone sitting at the desk.

Ruth
isn’t a slow read, it’s almost a compulsive read, and I raced through the early chapters. What struck me was that while those other novels are about other things as well, have subplots and interwoven stories,
Ruth
is concerned entirely with seduction and illegitimacy. Hardy’s
Tess
has the courtship of Angel Clare and marriage to him; Wilkie Collins’s
No Name
and
The Woman in White
are much more involved with the legal aspects; Hetty Sorrel’s history is important but still subservient to Dinah’s work and religion and to the Bede family’s way of life. So here I was in Verity’s study, learning what it was really like to know one is pregnant by a faithless lover, to put on a wedding ring and call oneself “Mrs.,” yet ultimately deceiving no one. Every character in
Ruth
believes she has committed a terrible sin, even the sympathetic ones, the kindly ones who take her in and share what little they have with her, even they speak in hushed voices of her sin and her “crime.” The Bensons’ old servant Sally forcibly cuts off Ruth’s hair so that she may “sham decently in a widow’s cap tomorrow,” and Ruth submits without protest, for she too believes she has sinned and her punishment is justified.

This was where I laid down the book for the time being, rather surprised that I who have read
Tess
and
Oliver Twist
without feeling more than pity and wonder could be so affected by a novel written 150 years ago. There was no doubt in my mind, so persuasively honest is Gaskell’s writing, that the social scene was really like this, this was the fate of the “fallen woman.” She is thought to have based the character on a real woman called only Pasley, whose life of rejection and banishment to a penitentiary seems to have been worse that anything Gaskell allowed to happen to the fictional Ruth.

That evening I was going out with friends, just a meeting in a pub. I certainly wouldn’t change out of jeans and tee-shirt and I wouldn’t keep my eye on my watch, checking that I was not late, as I had sometimes done in the past. I would even put on trainers instead of my newish, rather nice sandals because I meant to walk across the Heath to Highgate. These trainers were in a cupboard in a spare room on the top floor. They were up there because I still hadn’t emptied the wardrobe and cupboard in my bedroom of Verity’s clothes. I told myself and told Fay, who offered to do the emptying for me, that as a busy solicitor she shouldn’t take on that and I didn’t mind their being there. But the truth was that I liked them in the house, they reminded me of her, and sometimes I opened the wardrobe and put my cheek against silk or delicate wool and smelt the Coty L’Aimant she always wore.

Upstairs, I found my trainers and was putting them on when I heard a sound that made me jump. It was coming from the other side of the wall in Andrew’s part of the house and was the five-note signature of Windows starting up or logging off. A little phrase, but not much like Proust’s. So James Derain was working here and in the study. Well, what had I expected? I knew it already and it was stupid of me to mind. I directed my thoughts and my eyes back to unmarried mothers and real ones this time, not the fictional kind.

Mary Wollstonecraft had an illegitimate child by a man called Imlay and would have had another had not the philosopher William Godwin married her five months before the birth of the girl who became Mary Shelley. That was in 1797. Rebecca West had a child by H. G. Wells, Dorothy L. Sayers had a child by a man called Bill White. Both these births were in the teens of the twentieth century, and the writers had the children as a gesture of defiance. But they put no illegitimate children into their fiction, though Sayers has a “fallen” woman in
Strong Poison.
The date of this novel’s publication was 1930, a few years after Verity’s own birth. Harriet Vane is tried for murder, and at her trial her history comes out: she has cohabited with a man without marriage for a year, and if she is not ostracised by the people she knows, this is because they are an arty, bohemian crowd. Others deeply disapprove of her, but things have moved on a bit. No one talks about her crime or her sin. She is not sent to Coventry or cast into outer darkness, and eventually, many books later, she is considered sufficiently redeemed so as to be able to marry Lord Peter Wimsey. Of course she doesn’t have a baby—not, that is, until she comes to have several in wedlock.

Sayers’s child was born in 1924. She seems to have made no attempt to look after John Anthony herself. No doubt she wasn’t prepared to call herself Mrs. or wear a wedding ring. The baby was fostered by Sayers’s cousin Ivy and called Sayers “Cousin Dorothy.” Even when the novelist married Atherton Fleming in 1926, John Anthony continued to live with Ivy. Sayers’s parents deeply disapproved of her marrying in a registrar’s office and never knew they had a grandson. She wrote once more about marital irregularities and touched on illegitimacy in
The Nine Tailors,
in which a couple marry in the belief that the woman is free while in fact her husband is still alive. Their children are illegitimate and must remain so even though the Thodays marry as soon as they legally
can. This is more of a typically Victorian situation, the kind of thing Wilkie Collins wrote about, than a subject for a novel published in 1934. It shows, though, that the desperate need for respectability was still going strong long after Verity was born.

While I was learning all this, someone tapped at the study door. I knew who it was because Andrew and I had never knocked on doors when the other of us was inside. We just walked in. This had to be James. He was carrying a book, an oldish paperback of
The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Determined to be nice, I told him untruthfully that I was just making tea and would he like a cup? He would, so I made two mugs of tea and carried them into the study. All the time he was talking about Wilde’s novel, how it was banned when first written in 1891, then issued in an expurgated edition—though it’s difficult, as James said, to understand what could possibly have offended. Apparently, some reviewer or commentator of the time said no innocent woman should be allowed to read it, and this reminded me of Toby Greenwell’s prudish mother. James had bought Wilde’s new (or original) version. He couldn’t see much difference between the two, a word here, a phrase there. He drank his tea and at last came to the reason for his visit. It was an olive-branch call. His apology when we met in the street wasn’t enough and he needed, apparently, to underline it. He asked if there was any more tea.

While you have boiling water and tea bags there is always more tea, and I reluctantly produced it. James was now telling me an anecdote or story about contemporaries of Wilde’s, two men called Raffalovich and Gray who were in love with each other, and how Raffalovich gave up everything to follow Gray and live near him when he went into a monastery. It was interesting and quite romantic, but I had to go out quite soon, I was already late starting, but when I told James that I had to go out and had to leave now, he obviously didn’t believe me.

I recognized that I was contending with someone who was quick to take offence. He had come into my life without my having anything to do with it, he had been
brought
in. Taking his cue from Andrew, he thought he could just knock on one of my doors when he felt like it and come in and stay and stay. Andrew probably said to him, “Oh, I never knock on doors, she’s my sister, but perhaps you’d better the first time.” When I started imagining him just walking in any time he liked and then suggesting we all live together and I could cook for them and make them tea whenever they liked, I knew I was letting the whole thing assume gigantic (and hysterical) proportions. Of course that wouldn’t happen.

By this time I was in Wedderburn Road and nearly there. Damian and Louise were already in the King of Bohemia, sitting at a table sharing the
Evening Standard.
When I came in, they jumped up and kissed me and I realized how much I’d missed them.

M
ORE OLIVE
branches next day, this time on my part. I asked my brother and James in for supper.

“Not this time, Sis,” Andrew said. He gave me an unexpected kiss, a gesture which made James’s lip curl as if we had been involved in some incestuous obscenity. A creature of moods, James had changed once more, becoming unnecessarily critical and scornful, refusing the meal I offered. I said that was fine and anyway I had work to do, suddenly feeling not so much angry as close to tears. A slug of vodka was what I wanted, but I settled for a cup of tea instead. I ate some bread and cheese while imagining all kinds of unwelcome things: James’s moving in, avoiding me when he could, calling me
she
instead of by my name, and encouraging Andrew to have less to do with me, walking into my part of the house when he wanted something, even taking over rooms and playing terrible music, though I had no evidence for any of these last.

After a long time, reclining on the sofa with my feet up, no lights on, I listened to the silence of the house. Houses like this one, large, standing alone in their gardens, even places in the suburbs of a city, are silent in the evenings. The utter quietness seemed to confirm my fears, though of course it did nothing of the sort. This was an opportunity to start on Greenwell’s book, but I’d promised myself not to read anything but books for the thesis at least until I’d started to write it, so I turned away my eyes
and made my way into the study, turning on lights as I went. I worked on the thesis for a couple of hours, concentrating on the unbelievable guilt and dread of discovery felt by Lady Dedlock over giving birth to Esther Summerson. But you don’t have to believe Dickens, that’s not what he’s about. If I describe him as the “father of magic realism” in my thesis, will my supervisor call me presumptuous? Probably. So I went to bed, thinking as I often did about how these women felt when they knew they were pregnant, the disbelief, the realisation, the horror, shame, fear, and wish for death.

I
T WOULD
probably have been good for me to run next morning, but Hampstead isn’t the best place in the world to go jogging unless you’re on the Heath. I was walking in the other direction and hadn’t the right shoes on. I picked up the
Evening Standard
in Heath Street and went into a café to look at it while I had a cappuccino. The front-page lead was a murder in Soho the night before, the stabbing of a young gay man outside a club in Old Compton Street. When you’re in my circumstances and you read something like that, your heart does miss a beat. But it wasn’t Andrew, it wasn’t James, it was someone called Bashir al Khalifa. His picture, taken a couple of years back, showed a handsome young man from somewhere in the Middle East. Perhaps he came here because he believed no one would persecute him for his sexual orientation, and they didn’t persecute him. They killed him.

I stayed out a long time, going down into the West End on the 24 bus and calling in at the London Library to pick up a couple of Victorian novels I needed and Verity didn’t have on her shelves. Neither she nor my grandfather catalogued their books, and I wondered if I should catalogue them. It would be quite a task but one I thought I would enjoy. Must finish the thesis first and read Greenwell first, of course. On the bus going
home—walking to Hampstead is uphill all the way—I thought about phones and realised I’d scarcely known a time when the mobile didn’t exist. Fay had a big, brick-shaped, black thing when I was a small child and it never worked well. Before that, like everyone else, we just had a landline, one actually with a dial that had letters on it as well as numbers so that once upon a time you could phone exchanges called Ambassador and Primrose and Riverside. And you could get away from the phone bell. You just went out. You weren’t imprisoned by the phone as you are now. Of course (as the observer from another planet might say) you could leave your phone at home, but the point of a mobile is that it’s mobile. It is almost as if it’s inside you, living in your head, never letting you be alone. Turn it off, says the ethereal visitor, only you seldom do. Light in weight as it is, what’s the point of carrying it if it’s turned off?

As if it wanted to prove to me how useful it was, a call came in while I was on the bus. It was from Sara, to say that she was almost certain she was pregnant and if she was, she would be very, very happy. Could we meet for lunch soon, say, tomorrow? I came into the house to find the door to Andrew’s living-room was wide-open and the music coming out was Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” Andrew called out, “Come in here, Sis. You’re laughing so you can cheer us up. We need cheering up.”

Bob Dylan was coming from an iPod speaker. Andrew turned it off and came up to me and hugged me.

“What’s all this then?”

“Oh, don’t say that,” said James, whose voice was quite different from the day before, who even looked different, worn and older. “You sound like a comic cop, and we’ve had enough of cops for ever, haven’t we, And?”