by Barbara Vine
After she had been given tea and comforted, Guy drove her home. Maud made no apology to him for her abuse. She never did apologise to anyone. Once he had left, her intention was to go to bed, but she had something important to do first. There was no sign of Hope. What had happened was the trigger that would set off a change in Maud’s life. Writing materials were fetched out, a sheet of the headed paper she had scarcely ever used, the fountain pen Elspeth had given her for a birthday present, and an envelope to which she affixed a stamp from a book of stamps Hope must have bought and left behind. She sat down, first addressed the envelope to John Greystock, Esq.—if they called him Jack, he must be John, mustn’t he?—Windstone Farm, Ottery St. Jude, Devon, then wrote, taking it slowly and carefully:
Dear Mr. Greystock, After much careful thought, I have decided that I can accept your proposal. Perhaps you would call and we can discuss arrangements for our forthcoming marriage. I would like our nuptials to take place as soon as is convenient. With kindest regards, Yours sincerely, Maud Goodwin.
Reading it, Maud found nothing unusual in this letter. Calling a prospective husband Mr. with his surname would have been acceptable in 1847 but hardly a hundred years later. Still, she liked it and wouldn’t have considered changing it. Jack had not renewed his proposal, but this she chose to ignore. He had not yet accepted her and perhaps would not, but this she hardly considered. As to the banns and the description of her as a spinster, perhaps they could get married in a registry office, where she had an idea no reference to her status or whatever it was called would be made.
She was quite pleased with what she had written and took it to the pillar box at once. It was still early when she returned home, but she went upstairs, had a long, hot bath, and retired to bed. Nothing unusual in that. When had the hour or the position of the sun affected her bedtime? Not for years.
28
WHEN HOPE came back, Christian was with her. Judging from her own experience, Maud had made up her mind that the father of her daughter’s child would never be seen again. Even if he wanted to “stand by her,” his mother would stop him. But here he was, on her doorstep, Hope having rung the doorbell instead of using her key. Maud got up to answer the door.
She had decided she wasn’t going to speak to him, she wouldn’t even look at him.
Hope said, “When I told you this morning, I thought there was one question you were bound to ask me, but you didn’t.”
“Oh, yes, and what was that then?”
Hope and Christian both came in, walked into the living-room.
“If you’re not going to, we’ll tell you,” said Hope. She looked at Christian and he smiled at her.
“Perhaps it’s best if I tell your mother, Hope.”
The words were scarcely out when Maud screamed, “Don’t you dare speak to me. I never asked you in here. You can get out.”
“I was only going to say,” he said, “that we’ve just been to see Mr. Morgan, and he’ll marry us in three weeks’ time.”
Maud was speechless. It never crossed her mind to apologise. She wouldn’t have known how to. She stared at him, she stared at Hope, then threw her arms round her, an unfamiliar embrace from which Hope escaped and retreated a little. For her mother’s happiness Hope felt only distaste and a touch of dismay at the triumphant and almost virtuous note Christian had put into his announcement. Ever since she knew of her pregnancy and told him, she had wished she had the courage not to get married, but to do the modern thing that some people even in 1947 were doing and live with him “in sin.” She had even told him so, but wistfully, soon yielding to his insistence that they marry. She hadn’t been strong enough to hold out against him and (it would soon follow) his mother and her mother and everybody else they knew.
Good-bye to university, she had thought, and it was no good his saying she could go there later or in two or three years’ time. She knew that would never happen now. Her reputation would be saved and the child would be legitimate. That was all. Without really knowing what being in love was like, she knew she wasn’t in love with Christian.
Her mother brought out a bottle of sherry and three glasses, and if anyone thought alcohol wasn’t good for Hope as an expectant mother, no one said so.
For the first time in her life Maud proposed a toast. “To mother and baby.”
Hope stared. She could hardly believe her eyes and ears.
IT HAD been a good and satisfactory day. On the whole. But Maud soon put out of her mind the screaming fits and destruction of other people’s possessions. If she even remembered them at all. Hope was getting married to a wealthy man and would live in comfort a long way away. Nothing to worry about there. She too would have a rich husband, and she pictured the engagement and wedding rings he would give her, the dress she could have made for her wedding. But, no, no church wedding for her where the word spinster would be mentioned. Still, she could have a lovely afternoon dress and hat. She might even make things up with Ethel and renew her affection for Sybil so that they could come. She would have to think about the Hardings, whether she could break her rule and forgive them for leading Hope into immoral behaviour, something she was now sure they had done, in spite of their denials. A long time yet to go before sunset, she fell asleep with the yellow light on her face.
29
HOPE AND Christian were married on a fine Saturday in November at St. Jude’s church. Christian’s mother and stepfather were there and his brother, Julian, and Hope’s mother, Maud. The Hardings came with their children and a large number of Imber and Brown relatives. But no members of the Goodwin family were invited, and if Sybil Goodwin or Ethel Burrows read the wedding notice in the Western Morning News, they gave no sign of having done so to Maud or Hope. Rosemary Clifford, now Rosemary Lindsay and on her second marriage, wrote to Maud, sending best wishes to the young couple, passing on her brother Ronnie’s greetings to his daughter and enclosing a cheque from him for twenty pounds. Maud threw letter and cheque into the fire, a rare occasion when an angry gesture of hers was justified.
Christian bought a little house in a pretty street in Chelsea, and there in a nursing home in Sloane Avenue, Hope’s son was born the following June. But long before that, another wedding had taken place in Ottery St. Jude. Jack Greystock had finally given up proposing to Maud when her letter came, had given up months before, and received the letter with a kind of wonder. It made him smile but he also greatly admired it. A poorly educated man himself, though not illiterate, he marvelled at the expressions she used. Nuptials, for instance, was a word he had never heard before. He thought long and hard about the letter, considered showing it to his mother, but decided against it. It was Maud herself that he thought about, not best pleased that she had taken it upon herself to propose to him without waiting for him to come again to her, but on the whole this scarcely bothered him.
Maud was undeniably good-looking, lovely figure, good legs. She looked healthy. She had money, a private income, and he knew that rather than renting it, she owned The Larches. The daughter, who might have been a nuisance hanging about the place, was about to get married herself and apparently intended to live in London. Her existence showed him that Maud was a fertile woman who would bear him children. He would accept her proposal, but keep her waiting a few days. During those few days, which stretched into a week, Maud suffered the agonies that would have been hers had she truly been in love with Jack Greystock. He would never reply, her money would run out, his mother would forbid the marriage, one by one everyone she knew would desert her. Her daughter was soon going, her only friends would be sure to abandon her once Hope had left. The illness she was convincing herself she had when she’d told Hope she was a “semi-invalid” was taking the form of recurrent headaches, a pain in her back, a temperature that came on in the evenings.
All these symptoms, or whatever they were, went away when Jack Greystock arrived on her doorstep. He walked in, put his arms round her, and kissed her. Maud submitted, she thought she had better. After all, th
ere would be plenty more of it if they were to be husband and wife, and she must get used to it. Ronnie Clifford and the springtime meadows were a world away.
Genial and cheerful when everything was going his way, Jack told her without being asked that he had never believed a word of that village gossip, but he was adamant on the subject of a registrar’s office wedding. Of course they would be married in church, no question about it.
“Don’t let me hear any more nonsense like that,” said Jack, no longer genial but taking a hectoring tone.
Maud whimpered but let him hear no more nonsense like that. The vicar, an innocent, unsuspicious man, took it for granted she was a widow, and that was how she was referred to in the banns: “Maud Jean Goodwin, widow of this parish.” She could hardly believe her luck and was cheerful for the rest of the day. But in the years to come she sometimes wondered if that single word, the wrong word in the right place, would make her marriage illegal; if perhaps the time came when Jack wanted to escape matrimony or, come to that, she did, they could get out of it by telling the vicar she had really been a spinster.
The wedding was quiet, attended only by Jack’s mother and some village people, his friends, not Maud’s. But the Hardings came and Mr. and Mrs. Christian Imber came. Jack took Maud on honeymoon for a long weekend to Sidmouth, where she began sharing a bed with a man, something that had never happened to her before, and something else that had only happened twice, sexual intercourse. She remembered something she had forgotten for years, the teacher telling her and the other girls that sex between husband and wife was a “special kind of loving embrace.” She had no intention of passing that one on to Jack. He never said much, but told her again and again that he was crazy about her. It became a kind of mantra, accompanying every sexual advance. He never used contraception as he hoped for several children, and she didn’t know how to.
If Hope’s marriage, entered into so young, seemed happy enough, with four children arriving in twelve years—they jogged along, as Christian put it, pointing out that few people divorced in the 1950s—Maud’s was something of an ordeal. While Jack kept her in a higher level of comfort than she had been used to, he behaved as if the Married Women’s Property Act, now more than seventy years old, had never been passed. Taking it for granted that everything she possessed should be transferred to him, he nevertheless refused her a joint account on the grounds that women knew nothing about handling money. Jack was a sadist in a small way. It amused him to make Maud afraid of him, justifying his intimidating behaviour by reminding himself that his wife hadn’t been a pillar of virtue when he married her. There was the illegitimate child for one thing, then the funny business of pretending her brother was her husband, not to mention that murderer who had lived in her house. A spot of bullying was only what she deserved.
He was a big man with a loud voice, and her feeble shows of defiance resulting in his “That’s enough of that, my girl,” his hands clenched into fists, reduced her to a sullen silence. He never struck her but often thrust his face close to hers, his jaw jutting, as he reminded her that in making her wedding vows she had promised to obey him. The children he wanted never came. If he blamed her, he never said so, though his mother sometimes reproached her, accusing her of “doing something to interfere with nature.” But the Greystocks lived well. Windstone Farm was a land of plenty while for years the country suffered postwar privation. Their harvest supper was a great event in Ottery St. Jude. Maud did most of the cooking for it—the best cakes on display were hers—as she did for the dinners Jack liked to give frequently for his numerous friends and their wives. These were the only times perhaps when Jack and Maud gave the impression of being a happy couple, as Jack boasted about her housewifely skills and showed her off in a new dress he had chosen and bought for her.
Hope and Christian sometimes came to stay with their troop of children, allotting a few days to Windstone Farm, twice as many to Alicia Brown and her husband down in the village, and a weekend to Guy and Elspeth. Jack made no secret that the Imbers’ visits were a nuisance to him, but they showed him one thing, that children were tiring creatures to have about the house and not having any of his own might be a blessing. After the family had left, he and Maud always found themselves closer for a few hours than at any other time, their accord deriving from a shared dislike of the Browns, Jack’s because Geoffrey Brown had once snubbed him at the County Show, and Maud’s from the mythical noblesse oblige. Always quite abstemious, Maud celebrated her family’s departure with a glass of sherry while Jack had tumblers of whisky and water. Without realising it, she had replaced her forebears with her descendants, so that Hope and Christian had taken the place of Mary and John Goodwin and their children those of Sybil and Ethel, people to be resented and ultimately disliked.
Time passed and Maud gradually separated herself from Elspeth and Guy. As Jack put it, Maud had eggs and milk and game “coming out of her ears,” and no need of charity from the likes of the Hardings, snobs as any friends of the Browns must be. Maud was in Ashburton one Friday morning, shopping for a pair of shoes. Clothes rationing was long past; Jack had given her the money and told her it was all right with him for her to splash out a bit. A car drew up at the kerb, and Ronnie Clifford got out of it. The great changes that come to a man’s or a woman’s appearance over the years had not yet taken place in either of them, and she recognised him at once. He may have known her, and she thought he had by the deep flush that coloured his face. Her stare fetched from him an “Oh, hallo,” but the word which should have come after it was absent. He had forgotten her name.
In silence she walked away into the shoe shop.
1
I HAD NEVER lived quite alone before, I had always shared or had a neighbour living just across the corridor. Dinmont House was quite a place to be alone in, so large, so high-ceilinged, and, if in a street of houses, isolated inside its ivy-covered walls. Just as I had been when walking along the canal towing path and the cyclist nearly knocked me over, I was aware of my special vulnerability and of my baby’s. Fay had known that and had asked me if I would like to stay with them for the next four months and beyond if I liked. I was grateful but I refused. She pressed me, almost nagged me, which was most unlike her. After I had failed to answer my phone a few times but let it go to message and then failed to call back, she came round—in both senses. I was determined not to stay with them, but I gave in enough to agree that in future if she rang me more than three times without getting an answer, she and Malcolm would drive over. I think she understood that I felt I had to be here for Andrew when he came back. If he ever did.
I never gave a thought to James’s ghost or to power cuts. The former wasn’t possible and the latter was something I could cope with. Sara came with her baby, Ashling, and Damian came with his fiancée and their baby. Fay and Malcolm often came. People talk about loneliness as if any sort of company puts an end to it: the cleaning lady coming in for two hours or someone calling himself a friend but whom you’ve never really liked. Anyone will do, apparently. I was lonely but I was lonely for Andrew. Not even for James, though I appreciated his phone calls and his attentive e-mails. I kept in mind what he had said about never again lying to Andrew, and I wondered if this extended to his telling my brother each time he was in touch with me, or had his promise been to tell the truth but not the whole truth? While Andrew had lived here, days had gone by when we didn’t see each other, but I wasn’t lonely then. I knew I would see him tomorrow and if not tomorrow, the next day.
Another source of anxiety was the thesis, and I had begun thinking that maybe they were going to reject it out of hand when I heard with a date for my viva. I was to defend it on a date in October. I went along to confront the two women and a man, expecting to be told that many changes needed to be made, but when I walked in, I was greeted as Dr. Easton, to my great surprise. Mostly, after that, it was praise and congratulations, and only when I was about to leave did they mention, as if in passing, that “one or two little things
” needed my attention.
I KNEW the trial of Kevin Drake was in November but I had forgotten the precise date, yet I had this curious feeling that after Andrew had given his evidence and it was all over, things would somehow come right. But how they would resolve themselves I didn’t know. Thinking along these lines would always lead me to the enormity of what I had done because it was what I had done, not so much what James had done. I could have said no, I should at any rate have acted no. And it would have been easy. It could have been done pleasantly and with a smile, with a shake of the head and a gentle removal of myself. Now, when I revisited the event, I could hardly imagine why I had done it. I wasn’t in love with James, I wasn’t passionate about him, madly attracted, nothing like that. These inquisitions always ended with my telling myself that if I hadn’t done it, I would not have been carrying Tess, not had Tess inside me, moving herself about in a cheerful, determined way.
Last winter, the weather had been bitterly cold, heavy frosts and snow falling in November. We even had that rarity, a white Christmas, that so many people seem to enjoy. This year it is mild, even warm, like September. Flowers are coming out that shouldn’t bloom till April, and yesterday I saw a swallow that should have gone off to a southern country but was deceived by the mildness and stayed behind. I worried about that swallow, though I never saw it again, and I wondered if it had died. But the cold we expected never came.
