The Lemon Tree

by Helen Forrester

  And now she feared she was caught in a trap. Would Joe believe the child was his?

  As John pushed the door of her sitting-room with his foot, bringing in a tea tray which included a modest-sized bottle of rum, a gasping scream rent the air. John stopped, then hastened to put down the tray. He listened intently. Perhaps the child had come. It had not. Loud moans followed, and the twittering voices of women comforting.

  ‘Who’s up there?’ asked Wallace Helena, pulling a chair to the table to sit down and pour the tea.

  ‘Mrs Murphy, the midwife, and Mrs Barnes is helpin’ her.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘Mrs Murphy says as all’s well and not to worry – but you can’t help being wishful that she didn’t have to go through this so that we can have a family.’

  John looked quite shaken, so Wallace Helena assured him that, once she had the baby, she would forget about the pain. It was a trite remark, but it seemed to comfort him.

  ‘Yes, Miss. Thank you, Miss.’ He withdrew, his expression still apprehensive. The baby could be safely born; yet, all too often, the mother could die of childbed fever within a week. He hoped he had been right in putting his faith in Mrs Murphy, the midwife.

  Wallace Helena splashed rum into her tea and thought dejectedly that she would have to go through the same ordeal as Elsie, if she kept the child. Alternatively, an abortion often led to a painful death for the woman.

  But, above all, she dreaded the calumny she would face, whether in Liverpool or in Edmonton, if she carried the child to fruition and Joe refused to marry her. And the child itself would suffer, like Benji had suffered.

  Better to abort it, she decided grimly, as she poured another cup of tea and added rum to it.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Wallace Helena did not hear Elsie’s triumphant shriek as John Patrick Fitzpatrick entered the world, nor the happy running up and down of the women attending to mother and child. She was sound asleep on top of the coverlet of her bed, still in her camisole and petticoat; the rum had done its work.

  She slept until nine in the morning. Then Mrs Barnes knocked on her door, to inquire rather anxiously if she would like her breakfast. ‘I’ve brought you a can of hot water,’ she called through the door.

  Dragged back from the dark oblivion in which she had spent the night, Wallace Helena responded sleepily. Then as consciousness returned, she swore. Oh, my God! The soapery! The bank! The child!

  She stumbled out of bed and shouted that she would be down in a quarter of an hour. Her natural liking for Elsie asserted itself, so she opened the door and hissed down the stairs after Mrs Barnes, ‘How’s Elsie?’

  Mrs Barnes turned her cumbersome body to slowly look up at her, her careworn face beatific. She whispered back, ‘She’s fine. She’s sleepin’ now, thanks be. It’s a boy – and he’s loovely. You must see ’im later on.’

  Wallace Helena had to smile at the woman’s pleasure. ‘I will,’ she promised, and shut her door.

  Once she was washed and her hair brushed and neatly knotted at the nape of her neck, Wallace Helena’s mind cleared and she went down to breakfast with some of her usual energy. The rum must have been excellent quality, she thought, as she tackled her breakfast bacon; she had not slept so well for weeks. She quelled the sense of panic that began to rise in her, at the thought of the decisions she must make, and told herself that other women must have faced some of the same problems. Last night she had had a terrible shock; today, she would try to keep calm and deal with it.

  No matter how she tried to gather up her courage, she still felt an appalling aloneness amid her difficulties. She longed to have her mother to talk to. She feared Joe’s reactions, and, in any case, he was so far away; she must make a decision within a few days, at most.

  Before she left for the office, she told Mrs Barnes not to bother to make lunch for her; she would eat at work. That, she thought, would ease the pressure in Elsie’s house. She took a last pull at her after-breakfast cigarello and regretfully stubbed it out. She doubted if she could ever stop smoking.

  It was easy to say to herself that she would analyse coldly the difficulties she was in; it was much harder to do it. The minute she allowed her thoughts to rest on any aspect of her predicament, such a turmoil of emotion rose in her that common sense was blotted out. Common sense said, ‘Go quietly to North Wales for a holiday and be rid of the intolerable burden within you. You have enough problems already.’ Sentiment whispered, ‘It’s Joe’s child, an unexpected expression of years of devotion to each other. Remember, you may not be able to have another one. Remember!’

  ‘If the pregnancy is aborted and you can live without Joe, you can stay in Liverpool – and never have to face a Canadian winter again. You can live a civilized, refined life – with every comfort.’

  ‘And without Joe, it would be as empty as the food cupboard before the harvest,’ prompted sentiment ‘He’s all the family you’ve got – except for Benji, who in his deprivation of the Estate is another problem of family, blast him.’

  Family? What is a child, if not the perpetuation of a family?

  In the course of the morning, she and Mr Bobsworth discussed the satisfactory financial standing of the Lady Lavender with two greybeards at the bank. Specimens of their signatures were then put on file, so that cheques could be honoured by the bankers.

  Wallace Helena gave only half her attention to these formalities. She kept thinking about her mother delightedly nursing a little grandson; Leila had nearly gone mad when her brothers had died as children in Beirut, Wallace Helena remembered; and here she was, ready to consign her own child to perdition. As one of the bankers tenderly blotted her signature, she wanted to cry.

  Though respectful to her, the bank staff persistently addressed Mr Bobsworth and not herself, assuming that he would be in charge of the company’s finances, and that Mr Al-Khoury, whose signature they would collect later, would be running it.

  With a picture of her mother’s grandchild dancing before her, Wallace Helena smartly disabused them of this idea with a polite snub. Responsibility for the soapery was not going to slip away from her like that; it would be passed down the family by her.

  It was curious that the unthinking machismo of two old men in a bank should infuriate her so much that it drove her to an immediate decision. But it did. Sparked by bitter resentment, a mother instinct began to rise in a woman who had never wanted to be a parent, feeling that the world was too cruel a place into which to bring a child. Somehow, she swore, she and Benji would nurse the soapery along. It offered a way out from the slavery of a homestead, if not for her, for the baby. And her half share in the homestead might grow more valuable – might even now have a market value, since the railway had come to Calgary and opened it up to Europe.

  As she and Mr Bobsworth, looking gravely important, sat quietly in a hackney carriage weaving its way slowly back to the Lady Lavender, she hoped that soon there would be a letter from Joe. She had given him the alternatives; he might feel old enough and tired enough to come to a more clement country and marry her – but there was so little time. She began to panic that some sharp-eyed employee, like old Georgie Grant, used to so many enceinte women in the packed streets in which he must live, would spot what Dr Biggs had – and make her name mud in the Lady Lavender. Pride made her clamp her lips together, till her face looked as if it had been hewn from rock. When, a little later, she sent Mr Helliwell out to get some lunch for her from a nearby café, he wondered anxiously what had happened to the charming lady who had asked him to buy a copy of William Wordsworth’s work for her. She had given her orders to him as testily as her uncle would have done on a bad day. When he set a pile of beef sandwiches in front of her on her desk, however, she did say, ‘Thank you,’ and a few minutes later, when he brought a pot of tea for her that he had made himself, she was immersed in reading Mr Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’. Must’ve been hungry, he comforted himself, and thankfully went to have his own lunch.

  Wallace Helena was
unexpectedly very hungry, and she ate all the sandwiches; she did not have the same success in absorbing ‘The Solitary Reaper’. No matter how hard she tried, the charming words danced in front of her eyes and made no sense. Eventually, she put the volume down. Crossly muttering, ‘Damn Georgie Grant,’ she took out a cigarello and smoked it.

  It calmed her fretted nerves, but by the end of an afternoon spent in setting down her ideas for the immediate future of the Lady Lavender, for discussion, first with Benji and later with Mr Tasker and Mr Bobsworth, she was coughing badly.

  She put down her pen, wiped her face with her handkerchief and looked at the somewhat disjointed jottings before her. It seemed suddenly pointless. If she kept the baby she would be out of circulation for some months, no matter what she planned.

  She had gathered from one or two conversations with Elsie that most women did not go out more than was necessary, when they were breeding. Elsie said that middle-class ladies were penned up like chickens. ‘If they go out in the street, they sometimes get jeered at,’ she had added.

  Wallace Helena mentally recoiled, both from the idea of being confined and of being humiliated in public. Her hands clenched in her lap, she stared out of the grubby office window at a sky promising perfect harvest weather. Frustration made her furious to the point of tears.

  If the bloody Turks had had an ounce of compassion for their Christian subjects, she considered bitterly, she would probably now be living contentedly in Beirut, with full-grown sons, and summer holidays in Beit-Meri to look forward to; not a real worry in the world. Once one’s roots were gone, the normal values by which one lived shattered, it was easy to trip up and be plunged into situations which would never have occurred, had the even tenor of one’s life been left undisturbed.

  She felt sickened, as she considered the attitude of the men round the Fort, if she had an obviously illegitimate child. She would be open to propositions as if she were a prostitute. They might call after a vinegary woman they believed to be a despised Jewess, but they would not touch her; with a bastard in her arms, it would be far, far worse. Unless Joe married her.

  She closed her eyes. Her head throbbed, and she cursed that she had not realized, earlier, what the stopping of her menses spelled out. ‘What you don’t expect, you don’t see,’ she fumed helplessly.

  She longed for Joe’s slow, rich voice patiently sorting out the chaos in her mind for her, pointing out the options she had and the probable outcome of each of them. Between the two of them, they had always found ways out of situations that had left their neighbours decimated; snowstorms, grasshoppers, drought, Indian uprisings, epidemics – they had crawled through all of them to better days. But there was a real joker in the pack this time – a baby, which she was not prepared to plan away.

  There was a knock at her office door, and she roused herself. Benji put his head round the door. ‘All right if I come in?’ he queried cheerfully.

  She smiled as best she could and told him to enter. She had not seen him all day, because he had been across the river to Birkenhead, to see a middleman who distributed their products in Cheshire. Now, as he came in, he asked if all had gone well at the bank.

  ‘Quite well,’ she told him. She poured herself some water from a carafe on her desk and drank a little.

  He stood looking down at her, hands in pockets, and she went on, ‘I’ve arranged for you to see them tomorrow, to give them a new specimen signature. They’ve now got Bobsworth’s and mine, and they’ll honour cheques signed by any two of us.’

  ‘Good,’ he responded, and then, as she began to cough, he said, ‘You must see a doctor.’

  She was startled by the remark and glanced quickly up at him, her eyes wide, as if suddenly frightened. Then she looked down again at the sheaf of papers on her desk, and replied, ‘I saw one last night – and I must remember to pick up the prescription he’s making up for me, on my way home tonight.’

  The last words came out slowly, as if her mind were elsewhere, and to Benji she looked extremely dejected. He wondered if the sudden absolute responsibility of the soapery was weighing on her. He had expected her to be bubbling with ideas and plans; dejection was not something he normally associated with her.

  He had been on his feet all day, so he slowly pulled forward a chair and sat down beside her.

  By degrees, he was realizing that the Lady Lavender had always been part of his life and that he did not want to leave it. This meant that he must resign himself to working with Wallace Helena, provided she stayed in England; and, though he often found her maddening, he liked her. She was family, and he felt a surprising warmth at having someone to whom he could speak frankly, without fear of serious censure. She barked and snapped like an irate terrier, but she rarely bit.

  Wallace Helena put her elbows on her desk and rubbed her eyes with her fingers. Make up your mind, she ordered herself. You’ve either got to tell Benji everything and go on from there, or you have to say that you’re tired and are going to take a week’s holiday in North Wales.

  Since she did not seem inclined to start a conversation, he told her about a successful arrangement he had made with the Birkenhead middleman to distribute posters with their washing soap; and he’d cut the wholesale price by a halfpenny to encourage him.

  Though she nodded acquiescence to this agreement, she showed no enthusiasm; it was as if a light had gone out.

  ‘What’s to do?’ he asked himself. Something was wrong. Had the company’s finances proved to be in a worse state than anticipated? She had not yet told him the details of her visit to Benson.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked softly in Arabic.

  The sound of her own language always drew her closer to him; it was the language of her childhood filled with nuances of love and respect. His concern was obvious, and she put out her hand towards him in a hopeless gesture. She said with a break in her voice, ‘I don’t know how to tell you, Benji. How to explain. What to do.’

  He went rigid. ’is it to do with the Lady Lavender?’ he asked tensely.

  She made a wry mouth. ‘Yes – insofar as what happens to me affects it.’

  Oh, Lord! Something must have really blown up; she certainly looked a wreck. He swallowed and, filled with foreboding, said, ‘You’d better tell me.’

  ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

  He looked at her in complete astonishment, and then burst out laughing. ‘Well, I’m blessed! Congratulations! You always insisted that you were single and I accepted it. But I suppose you felt it would be better in business to be known as Miss Harding?’

  ‘I am single; that’s the trouble.’

  His grin vanished. ‘Are you engaged – or courting?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  He looked at her in wonderment. This stick of a woman casually bedded? She wasn’t the type. He couldn’t believe it. Benson? Helliwell? Don’t be funny, he told himself.

  ‘You weren’t attacked – in the street – or down in The Cockle Hole?’

  ‘Raped? Far from it.’

  Feeling he was sinking in deep water, he inquired, ‘Will the father marry you?’

  ‘I’m not sure. You see, the father is in the Territories, at Edmonton. If I write to him, it’ll take months to get a reply – and my condition will be obvious pretty soon. And I’m not too sure that he’ll believe it’s his – because of the dates.’ She gazed at the astonished man before her, the frank despair in her eyes communicating her distress to him.

  This is how my mother must have looked, he realized uneasily, when first she knew I was coming. Pity welled up in him.

  Wallace Helena was telling him about the obliging nursing home in North Wales, and he instinctively revolted against the idea. To his knowledge, he had not fathered any children himself, so this was the first of a new generation. ‘You can’t do that,’ he protested, ‘you could die yourself.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to lose it. I want it,’ she said forcibly, as if to confirm her earlier decision at the bank.
‘It’s simply that I also want to stay here and see the soapery flourish – and Liverpool is such a beautiful place in which to live.’ At the last words, her voice dropped wistfully.

  She pursued a slightly different line of thought suddenly, and said, in the hope of conveying to him something of what she had been through, ‘I’m so alone – not physically – but I am mentally. There’s nobody left who knew me in Beirut, nobody who understands – or has, perhaps, a duty to try to understand, what it’s like to be torn up by the roots and be tossed into an absolute wilderness.’ She stopped, and he waited, feeling that there was more to come. Then she said, ‘At least my own child is part of me, flesh of my flesh, as I was to my mother. It’s probably the last chance I’ll have to recreate a lost family.’ She smiled a little grimly. ‘At least I can teach it Arabic!’

  Her cousin echoed her smile. He remembered how carefully his father had taught him Arabic; he must have felt like Wallace Helena.

  ‘Would the father agree to settle in Liverpool?’ he asked. Who was the man anyway? Her partner?

  She sighed. ‘I honestly don’t know. I doubt if he would be happy here. But I have asked him.’

  It must be her partner, Benji decided. His mind began to race. She had said once that the man might like to farm here. He hoped to high heaven that he would not want to poke his nose into the affairs of the soapery; if she didn’t have a special marriage contract, the man might well manage to take over the Lady Lavender under some pretext or other.

  Wallace Helena was looking at her hands tightly clasped on the desk. She loved Joe, would always love him – and it was his child; she had been completely faithful to him. It was all very well to say that the babe was flesh of her flesh; it was his, too. He was, however, clearly jealous of the people she had met in England, and this sudden pregnancy, after so many years with him without children, would look highly suspicious. She had been a fool, she thought bitterly, to break an iron rule in Calgary. Her mother had always warned her that it took only one miscount and one could be pregnant. But her fear of the long journey, of doing everything alone, had been overwhelming, and she had given herself to her lover with the despairing feeling that, even on a train, the journey was so long and dangerous that she might not survive. A last fling, she considered wryly.