by Susan Sallis
Autumn became winter. In November the river flooded and her bus back home was stuck for several hours. She caught a cold.
She wasn’t really ill but the cold became a cough and that turned into bronchitis and eventually she was persuaded to visit their local doctor. He had known Connie for years and thought aloud that he would give her the once-over. Then he asked her a lot of questions and took a blood sample. He prescribed antibiotics.
‘Once the course is finished you should be fine. But if the blood test shows anaemia you’ll have to have iron tablets.’ He looked at her over heavy spectacles. ‘I cannot believe you did not know you were pregnant. Didn’t the absence of your periods mean anything to you?’
Connie stared at him, brown eyes enormous. She croaked, ‘I’ve been low. Assumed . . .’
‘As I said before – I cannot believe it, Connie. We were all so pleased you were going off on an early honeymoon, yet it didn’t occur to you that pregnancy could be a perfectly natural outcome?’ He grinned suddenly. ‘Cancel your mother’s plans. Get thee to a register office, woman. You’re a jolly good three months!’
She took the slip of paper and said, ‘Thank you.’ She was numb. She walked to the pharmacy and collected the antibiotics, then walked home.
Her mother tried to be pleased. Connie said, ‘Look, I know it’s going to be awful – small village, etc. And you’ve got to live here, Mummy. I’ll get a flat in Worcester. Don’t argue about it. Mrs Adams might be able to help and I can be completely honest with her.’
‘After all,’ Rosemary said, ‘it is nineteen sixty.’
Connie glanced at her, surprised. She nearly made one of their little jokes – ‘What has that got to do with the price of beans?’ – and then thought better of it. The strange thing was that when the shock wore off, she could be quite pleased about the pregnancy. Except that she knew her mother would hate having to tell people.
She smiled and pecked Rosemary’s cheek. She felt a small surge of something akin to happiness. She said, ‘Oh Mummy . . . let’s work out her birthday . . . Well, of course I know, darling! It was August the . . . Where’s the calendar? I’ll look at the one in the hall.’
She left the room and Rosemary listened to her talking to herself as she turned back the pages of the calendar. She seemed happy! She must have been in love with William all this time. Rosemary made up her mind then and there. She would go into Birmingham tomorrow and talk to William. Straight.
Connie came back in. ‘I reckon it will be May the twenty-fourth. If it’s a girl we’ll call her May. What do you think, darling? Such a lovely old-fashioned name.’
Rosemary guessed that her eyes were bulbous again; she closed them tightly and then turned and smiled at her daughter, who was unmarried, pregnant and very happy about it.
‘Lovely,’ she said.
She insisted that Connie should take the car the next morning and as soon as it had gone she put on her boots, matching fur coat and hat and, feeling like the Cossack she looked, walked down to Barnt Green station and caught the train into Birmingham, leaving it at Selly Oak.
William’s new secretary was probably Rosemary’s age and seemed unable to smile.
‘You’ve come on the wrong day, Mrs Vickers,’ she said with a hint of satisfaction. ‘Mr Mather is expecting his first client in ten minutes and is booked solidly until four thirty this afternoon.’
‘Much too late,’ Rosemary said briskly. ‘I’ll take this first ten minutes. Thank you so much.’
There were protests which she ignored as she swept into the inner office and said in a voice she hoped the secretary would hear, ‘You should invest in a charm course for the new girl, William. She has none whatsoever!’
He looked up, surprised then anxious, then hearing her words properly he smiled. Rosemary melted and opened her gloved hands helplessly.
‘Sorry. I’ve come on an errand I am not going to enjoy. Probably neither will you. And if ever you tell Connie I was here, that – that – that will be it.’
‘How is she? Is she ill?’ He stood up, leaned across his desk and took one of the fluttering hands reassuringly. ‘Sit down, Rosemary. You’re flummoxed.’
She collapsed gratefully. He had used her first name. And flummoxed was nowhere near a legal term. It was homely.
She said, ‘I’ve got ten minutes. It won’t take that long and I might as well come right out with it.’ She drew a breath and heard it catch in her throat. ‘Yesterday Connie went to the doctor for some antibiotics. She’s had a bronchial cough most of the month.’ She shook her head at his sounds of concern. ‘The doctor diagnosed something else besides bronchitis. She is pregnant, William.’ She waited. He said nothing. He was looking past her at the wall, his face expressionless. She said, ‘William, I am not shocked. The war . . . moved all of us on. As it were.’ Suddenly she was embarrassed and when he was still silent she was – just as suddenly – very angry.
‘Look here, William. If her father was alive I suppose he might still have brought a horsewhip with him. As it is, I have to appeal to your better feelings. I expect you to run into Connie by chance. She is working at Worcester Cathedral and I’m sure you can think of a reason for going there. You will be looking unhappy – not difficult in the circumstances. You will cheer up immediately when you see her. You will tell her how much you have missed her and you will beg her – I mean beg her – to marry you.’
‘Do you think that isn’t my dearest wish?’ His face was no longer without expression; it was angry. He was angry with her. He had the audacity to be angry with her. ‘I have never stopped loving her and she knows that.’ He leaned across the desk as if she might be hard of hearing and enunciated very clearly, ‘She is no longer in love with me!’
Once, in another life, she had heard her husband use the word ‘bollocks’ and she longed to use it now.
‘Rubbish! It’s quite the other way round! When you meet her you will see what I mean. She has been desperately unhappy. Now, carrying your child, she is different. Very happy. Though she has no hope at all of seeing you again, she has something that is yours.’
He sat back, frowning prodigiously. She held up her hand as if he was about to speak. ‘I’m not saying more. I’m leaving.’ She got up, then turned at the door. ‘I will just add that this . . . this arrangement . . . has nothing to do with immorality or impropriety of any kind. I happen to think that you and my daughter are well suited and will have a very happy marriage.’
She was gone. William sat still for the rest of that ten minutes and then his secretary announced his first client of the day and Mrs Heatherington came in, all smiles and fox furs, and he drew a chair forward.
She said, ‘My dear boy. It is good to see you again. I have come to tell you that I met Archie just yesterday and let him off the hook. All that terrible business in the summer made my feeble efforts to avenge myself seem paltry. Simply paltry. And you were right, it worked like a charm. D’you know what he did? He grabbed me – actually grabbed me – and kissed me and then he kept right on. And the upshot is, he is taking me out to dinner tonight at the Lygon Arms.’ She laughed like a girl. William heard himself laughing with her.
She said, ‘I’m going to Worcester first. There’s a little shoe shop somewhere near the Shambles. I used to go there a lot when I was younger. I see myself in a pair of these boots – you know, the sort that Jean Shrimpton has been showing off.’
He wondered who on earth Jean Shrimpton was.
‘May I take you to Worcester? I want to drop into the cathedral. You remember Connie Vickers, my one-time fiancée?’
‘Oh my dear, such a shame. She felt responsible for that boy’s death, didn’t she? I thought you might get together again once some water had gone under the bridge.’
He decided to be frank. ‘I’m going to have another try. She works in the cathedral. Shows people round, fetches and carries . . . I bet she’s good at it.’
‘I bet she is. She was good with those kids, wasn’t she?
’ Mrs Heatherington was – as Philip Marlowe would have said – ‘on the case’. ‘I’ll come with you. Make it look coincidental. Then you can sort of spring on her. Rather like Archie did on me.’
He was slightly doubtful but nodded. He picked up the internal phone and cancelled the rest of his appointments. ‘Mrs Heatherington and I are off to Worcester,’ he explained. His secretary said nothing.
Six
FROM THE MOMENT she saw William and Mrs Heatherington lurking in the shadows, Connie knew what was going to happen. When Mrs Heatherington exclaimed, ‘My God, it’s Connie!’ she was not able to stop the little smile she felt lifting her face. And when William lurched towards her so obviously urged by an elegantly gloved hand, she felt the same melting sensation that she had known before.
She had wanted to tell him about the baby so much. He’d had a rotten deal during the war and he deserved to know that he was going to be a father, though he might think – after what had happened – that she might not make a very good mother. Even as the thought went through her head she dismissed it. She was no longer the girl who did not know about love and sacrifice; not any more. She knew that William loved her and always would. And she had known ever since that terrible accident in Cornwall that she loved him.
He opened his arms, perhaps to keep his balance, but he might still have fallen if she had not reached for him and checked his impetus. Crushed together, they subsided against an ancient pillar which had, quite obviously, been built for that very reason. Mrs Heatherington, disappearing into the shadows, heard the faint murmurings amplified by the soaring ceiling.
‘Oh William.’
‘Oh Connie. My darling girl. Don’t leave me.’
‘Never. Never again.’
‘My dearest dear . . .’
And she smiled almost smugly.
They were married just before Christmas. It was a register office wedding, much to Rosemary’s disappointment, but she accepted that Connie might be a little embarrassed by a white dress affair and really there was hardly any family left on either side. ‘What about Debbie? And Ruth Arbuthnot?’ They had all been inseparable at school and would surely be hurt at being left out of the wedding.
‘I know.’ Connie turned her mouth down with mock regret. ‘Especially when they got me in a corner afterwards to ask whether I had put on any weight.’ She smiled. ‘It wouldn’t worry me, Mummy. I’m really, really happy about it all. I’d announce it from the rooftops if it wouldn’t embarrass William.’ She hugged her mother. ‘But it would. He’s not ashamed, darling – not at all. But he’s really very shy. And he wouldn’t know what to say to them.’
‘I know, darling. I know. I’m glad you’re not having this quiet wedding because of me. I wouldn’t mind being next to you on the rooftops, actually. I can’t think why I am being so – so modern. I’m sure Maria already knows. Though quite how, I’m not sure.’
‘Could it be because of this?’ Connie held her thick sweater close to her. Mother and daughter looked at each other and began to laugh.
Connie said, ‘I honestly thought poor Philip’s drowning had changed everything. And here we are, laughing together. How can that happen?’ She took her mother’s hand. ‘Mummy, you’ve been wonderful. It must have been awful for you. I’m really sorry.’
‘Don’t say that, Connie. Whatever happened has brought us so close. William too. And now we’ve got the wedding to look forward to.’
Afterwards, Rosemary thought how . . . how . . . significant the whole thing had been. She had consulted a local florist and when they went into the register office it was full of chrysanthemums, their distinctive wintry smell completely overriding the normal carbolic. The registrar was all smiles. Arnold Jessup, carrying a top hat and wearing a morning suit, squired Mrs Flowers and Mrs Heatherington. Maria wore an unsuitable gauzy dress – ‘Organdie, my dear, you rarely see organdie these days.’ Mrs Heatherington eyed it enviously. She had subdued her usual garish taste on darling Arnie’s advice and wore a navy blue woollen suit that now looked dowdy. But other neighbours from the village looked even worse. And Connie’s mother wasn’t much better in a bottle-green dress and coat with a matching hat that made her look like Robin Hood.
But really no one looked at anyone else when Connie came in on her mother’s arm, her whole face smiling at William so that he stopped looking as if he were at the dentist’s and seemed to open his whole being as he smiled right back. Mrs Heatherington drew in her breath; Maria made an oohing sound; Arnold Jessup said audibly, ‘I say!’ and Mrs Flowers put a hand to her mouth.
Connie had once been told that she looked like Snow White and on her wedding day she had gone for the whole thing. From the centre parting in her dark hair to her puffed sleeves and close-fitting bodice and on down to the full skirt made fuller still with the now old-fashioned New Look petticoats, she was a replica of the cartoon Snow White. Her mother had thought it was a clever way to disguise the undeniable fact of the coming baby. But it was Connie’s way of shouting it from the rooftops.
Afterwards, there was a wedding breakfast at a hotel near Evesham and then the happy couple left for a night at another hotel specializing in honeymoons. There were four-poster beds and candlelit dinners and a six-piece band who would play almost anything requested. Connie thought it was gratingly synthetic but William had chosen it so she entered into the spirit of the place until she too was loving every minute. She chose Ivor Novello songs and danced with her head on William’s chest and her eyes closed.
He whispered, ‘Are you happy, darling?’
‘I am the happiest person in the world.’ She lifted her head and looked at him and saw a reflection of her own happiness in his eyes. She thought, surprised, that she was happy because he was happy. It was so obvious. But it was a revelation.
William’s house was on the main A38 road from Worcester to Birmingham, not far from the famous cricket ground. It had a basement and an attic. A row of bells still connected the basement to all the other rooms; the attic had been the nursery and William’s rocking horse commanded the day room.
Connie loved every inch of it. Her happiness was practically tangible that winter of 1960–61; it became a joke between them. William called it her central heating system. When he got in from the office he tried not to hug her until he had taken off his outdoor things and warmed his hands by the fire, but she would have none of it. She wrapped herself around him, sometimes with a potato in one hand and a paring knife in the other. He loved to find her in the midst of domesticity and she knew this. When Mrs Heatherington had cut out a page from a magazine and told her to prop it above the kitchen sink, she had read its advice with a small smile of rejection. William did not yearn for a bandbox wife and pristine house. She watched him relax, open up, respond completely to the slightly chaotic way she took on the house and the cooking. He was glad her mother helped her, coming across country at least three times a week armed with rubber gloves and wrap-around pinnies, but it was always Connie’s domain. She turned down his offer of professional help; her mother did not hinder the learning process that was happening in the house. She and William had just a few months to know each other simply by a touch, a look, a shared dislike of spinach. The baby was accelerating a process that – in other marriages – might take years to flower. Yet they felt like children, learning by playing. William told her that she smiled in her sleep. The thought of him watching her asleep was wonderful.
She was a natural explorer and Number Five gave her plenty of scope. She had always loved the space and light of the Lickey Hills, and in spite of the cruelty of its sea she had recognized the amazing wildness of Cornwall. The stone staircases and side chapels of the cathedral spoke to her of the mystery of the past; and now there was this sense of joining another continuum that was held inside this Victorian semi. There was evidence – just here and there, peeping from corners and transoms and cast-iron fire grates – of the other people who had lived here. She found it interesting and amazingly comforting.
She had a sense of other mistakes having been made, of other tragedies being lived and absorbed.
She had known for ages that William had been the youngest of three brothers. Mr Jessup’s secretary had told her that. William himself told her that the others had died in a battle just outside Tripoli. He had paused and then added that ‘the parents’ had gone to London at the tail end of the war to receive the posthumous medals. One of the infamous doodlebugs had demolished the small hotel near Paddington where they always stayed on London visits. It happened in the early hours of the morning and hopefully they had known nothing about it.
It was Mr Jessup himself who had told Connie quite brusquely that William had parachuted from a plane above Arnhem. He had survived to come home from the war to an empty house and what could well have been an empty life.
And now . . . already the house had filled up. The evidence of the past was still there and it seemed to breathe again as Connie dusted off the rocking horse and scoured the saucepans used by other people with the name that she now had. Mather. People seemed pleased that another Mrs Mather had moved into Number Five. An elderly neighbour telephoned and said she had borrowed Mrs Mather’s sewing machine to make blackout curtains. ‘It’s twenty years old, my dear, but it works splendidly and I would so like you to have it back.’ Her gardener brought it down on a sack trolley and William trundled it into the kitchen, put a new drive belt on the side and Connie treadled away to some purpose, making curtains for the night nursery, delighting in the thought that her mother-in-law had used it – probably to make blackout curtains too.
One day when the snow was arriving horizontally from the north-east, Connie found a rag doll in a cobwebby cupboard. She held it up to the light and saw that the calico was still strong and rough. She washed it carefully, squeezed it in a fluffy towel and sat it by the fire while she had her afternoon rest. Then she went into the kitchen and found remnants from the nursery curtains and settled at the old treadle machine, making a doll’s dress. She showed it to William with some pride.
