by Jo Baker
Later, Dad had us share out Mum’s jewellery, me and Lucy. She lifted off the rosewood lid, and turn by turn we picked out the pieces from their cushions of pink baize. We laid them out on the counterpane: the charm bracelet that had fascinated us when we were little; the locket with a picture of her father in uniform; an embroidered bronze swimming badge that neither of us could remember winning; earrings and brooches; pendants and beads, dating from her grandmother to last Christmas. I looked up at Lucy, at her clear skin, her greyish eyes pink with tears. I can’t do this, I said, and she shook her head; me neither. We put everything back, neater than she left it. We sat on the counterpane and talked about Dad, and how Dad would cope, what we between us could do for Dad. And then Lucy went back to Paris, and Dad went back to work, and then Cate arrived, and I just got on with it.
All the time I’d been scrubbing baby bottles clean, sterilizing them, washing my hands again and again till the skin cracked; all the time I’d been boiling kettles, letting them cool, filling the bottles, counting scoops of formula, one for every fluid ounce of water, and losing count, and staring down at the powdery surface of the liquid, and pouring the formula into the sink in a rage at my own incompetence, and scrubbing the unused bottles, putting them back into the sterilizer, and starting again; all the time I’d been wearing sunglasses on cloudy days, pushing the pram around the park, the scar pressing itself against my jeans; all the time, this house had stood, gathering desiccated flies, the air drying in the sunshine, the spider plant dying in the bathroom. The soap splitting into cracks. The lampshade gathering dust on its bones. The static growing. Waiting.
There was movement outside. The shock was almost physical. An elderly woman came out of the front door of the cottage across the street. Until that moment I hadn’t seen a soul. I wiped my cheeks with my fingers and turned to watch her.
She had a bucket in her hand. She had that old-lady stooped carefulness. She set the bucket to one side of the step, then knelt down, took a scrubbing brush from the bucket and knocked it against the side. The curve of her back to the street, she rocked back and forth as if in prayer, the flesh-coloured soles of her slippers vulnerable and tender. She dipped her brush into the bucket, tapped it, and started scrubbing again, this time with tiny circular movements, as if cleaning a large tooth, the action making her jiggle on her haunches as she worked. Then she got up stiffly, and emptied the bucket into a road drain, and the suds spilled back onto the tarmac like spat toothpaste. She was wearing a navy cardigan, a knee-length skirt. She looked up, and looked straight up at the window where I sat. She raised a hand and waved.
Not to me.
I knew it. I knew she wasn’t waving to me. There was someone else in the room. Standing just over to my right, just out of my line of sight. I could feel it in my flesh. A young woman, younger than me, needing to be noticed. If I just turned my head a fraction, she’d be there.
I glanced around.
Sun blared through the far window. The door onto the landing stood ajar, and a dim strip of space beyond. No one. I got up from the bed. The mattress creaked, eased itself back into shape. I stood there in the sunshine, breath held. Listened. Nothing.
I moved over to the bookcase, set a hand on the upright. I had an image of myself as a child, clinging to the side of a swimming pool, children’s shouts bouncing off the surface of the water, water glittering, and Mum in up to her chest, hair in soaking ringlets, smiling encouragement, outstretched fingertips just out of reach.
The room was filled with empty, dusty sunshine. Prickling silence.
I drew a breath; I could have sworn to it: the silence shifted. As if another breath had been drawn, as if someone anticipated me and was about to speak. My body fizzed with adrenaline. I let go of the bookcase, took a step into the sunshine. I don’t quite know how, but the air seemed to change, to soften, to lose its charge. There really was nothing. I pressed my eyes with the heels of my hands, ground at them. I glanced back out of the window. The street was empty: the old woman had gone and the suds had trickled away. I had to know what she had seen. If she had seen what I had felt.
I ran down the stairs and walked straight out of the house, letting the door slam behind me. I crossed the street to the cottage. The door knocker was a curled brass fist, cold and smooth and solid in my hand. I knocked and stepped back off the doorstep. I had left footprints behind in the damp.
I heard footsteps approaching and fixed a smile on my face. The door opened. I didn’t know what I was going to say. It was stupid coming over: I should have thought it through. How could I ask? The old woman opened the door, smiling. Then her expression faltered. She looked at me, studying my features, her brows pinching.
“Hi,” I said uneasily. “I’m Rachel; I’m the Clarkes’ daughter.”
“Is your mum with you?”
“No,” I said.
“It must have been you then,” she pulled a self-deprecating face. “My eyes aren’t so good anymore. I’m Jean, Jean Davies. Come on in. I’ll make some tea.”
She turned away, expecting me to follow. I went in across the blue- and blood-coloured lino tiles, into the dark hall. I’d have to face it, again. The telling.
WILLIAM STEPHEN WORE THE family christening gown, and howled when the water dripped onto his head, a sure sign of the Devil leaving him. I stood as godmother, and swore to renounce the Devil and all his works. There was a jar of bluebells on the windowsill above the font. The Reverend was solemn, handled the baby with uneasy care, and when I took the hot squalling bundle from him, he smiled at me, relieved, and for that moment, it seemed almost as if all distinction of rank had disappeared and we were not master and servant, nor pastor and parishioner, but God’s children, standing together and equal before our Father to welcome this new, howling Christian child into His family. I smiled back at the Reverend, and took the baby in the crook of my arm, the white gown dangling in soft folds, his little body struggling, his face red and furious. I dipped my head to talk to the child, to comfort him.
Agnes had her head covered with a light lace scarf, which had been her grandmother’s. She looked pretty, though still pale and tired.
“He’s a fine strong lad. He’ll be a credit to you,” the Reverend said, when the service was over. Agnes’s cheeks flushed dog-rose pink. It was a pleasure to see it; it seemed a sure sign of her full return to health.
—
It was maybe a fortnight after the christening. It was a beautiful May evening; the sky was deepening blue and there was birdsong from the garden. Agnes had the baby lying in the curve of her arm as she sat, his head turned into her bodice and his nose pressed against the cloth. He was starting to be pretty. The room smelt of his milkiness. I read the story to Agnes, keeping my voice low so as not to disturb the child, and Agnes smiled as I read, but the baby stirred, and mewed, and she lifted him and set him against her shoulder, rocking back and forth, back and forth, crooning to him, and he just went on crying. I stopped reading.
“Is there anything I can do?”
She shook her head, and laid him down in her lap. She unbuttoned her dress, and her breast inside was hard-looking, streaked with blue, and the nipple was welling drops of pale bluish milk. I looked down at my hands. She tucked the baby inside her clothes, and he began to suck. She arranged her shawl over herself and the child. I looked up again at her and smiled, but she was smiling down at her son.
“Shall I read on?” I asked.
She shook her head, and did not look up. I thought I should say something about little William Stephen, but could think of nothing to say that I hadn’t said already, and so we just sat there in silence, the only sound being that of the baby’s sucking and swallowing and the fire crumbling into coals. She looked up at me, her face pinched.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Sometimes. A little.”
I nodded.
When I bent to kiss her goodbye, she thanked me for my company, and the way she spoke, thin and b
reathy, mouthing the words at me rather than saying them, seemed to me to be the meaning of it all, and how everything would be from now, nothing left for me in her but the husk, the weightless chaff of words.
The evening was full of birdsong and May blossom. I walked down the coffin lane, the mud hard and dry underfoot. I came to the salmon pool and sat down underneath the hornbeam tree. A heron stood at the far bank, staring down into the water for the flicker of fish. I heard the church clock strike the quarter-hour. An otter slipped out of the water at my feet, saw me sitting there, looked at me with its wet eyes, and turned in one smooth movement to slip back into the water, as soundlessly as if it were formed entirely of that element.
I got back around the three-quarter bell, expecting to be scolded for my lateness, but the house was quiet, and the kitchen was cool and dim. Dad was asleep in his chair, with his head thrown back and his mouth open, the fire crumbling into ashes at his feet. I put some sticks on the fire and lit a rush-light. I drew a chair over to the windowsill and set the candlestick on the chair arm to have the best of both lights. I got down my Pilgrim’s Progress.
Dad started to snore. The smell of old mutton fat from the rush-light was strong and unpleasant; I could have taken a dipped candle but it would have caused more trouble than it was worth. I turned a page. My eyes followed the lines of print. I shook the cobwebs from my head and tried to pay attention, but it wasn’t working; I couldn’t get through the words and into the world beyond. I was stuck there, in the darkening kitchen, with my father sleeping drunkenly in the chair; I was not walking the close-clipped grass at Christian’s side, setting out with him on his journey from Destruction to the Eternal City. All I could think was, Agnes is gone from me. It was right, and proper, and it made me feel that I would choke.
I let the book fall closed, and held it at the flyleaf. I looked at my name written there in Mr. Forster’s hand, my name, my prize for Scripture, the date of my leaving school. I’d been an idiot all this time. Since I first heard that there was going to be a baby, I’d thought somehow that it would be just like a doll that we could play with when we wished, and leave aside when we chose to.
I wanted more than anything just to lay my head down and close my eyes and be alone, but there was Dad there, snoring out drink fumes, and there would be others home before long; the house was always either full or threatening to be full. Sally had had the right idea, to go and be prenticed. At nineteen, I was too old, and I didn’t need to ask to know that there wasn’t money for it, with the boys sent out, and Sally to be indentured now. To get away meant to go as a live-in servant in another village or in one of the towns, it meant millwork in the city, or it meant getting married.
The clock struck ten. The rush-light was burning low, sputtering. I licked my fingertips and pinched out the light. I levered off my clogs and carried them upstairs. I was going to lie down on the boys’ bed. I would stay there till they got home and turned me out.
On the landing, light slipped out under Mr. Moore’s door, pooling on the bare boards. I could smell the honey-scent of beeswax. A chair creaked. There was a breath, like a sigh. He moved: I heard the scrape of the chair on the floor. I shrank back into the darkness, but then the light was gone, pinched out. I heard the rustle of tugged covers, the creak of the bed. I leaned against the wall, pressing my head back into the rough stone and let a breath go shakily.
He had my room, he had my bed, he had beeswax candles and I had stinking rush-lights and was begrudged them. He passed me in the house as if I were a ghost. He was the stranger, but he had made me a stranger here.
I crept into the boys’ dark, untidy bedroom and lay down in my clothes. The pillow was musty and sour. My old bed was just a single course of stones away. Mr. Moore lay, so to speak, within arm’s reach of me. I turned and curled around, tugging the covers close, then twisted back again. My thoughts softened, started to drift, and in the darkness I was in my old room, and Mr. Moore was in my bed, and I was standing over him, watching him sleep, and his eyes flicked open, and he looked up at me.
Ted woke me in the cold dark, shaking me by the shoulder. I heaved myself out of bed. The landing was dark and Mr. Moore’s door shut. The house was silent as I went downstairs. Dad had gone and Sally was asleep on the rug. I lay down beside her, and listened to her breathe. I couldn’t sleep. The images of my dream would not be shaken clear: Mr. Moore lying in my bed, looking up at me.
I must have drifted off eventually, because the five o’clock bell woke me cold and sore on the hearthrug. I washed my face and hands and neck, struggled into my clothes and clogs, drank some cold tea, ate some bread, and left the house as the sun was rising. The sky was salmon-pink with little wisps of golden cloud. I turned my back to it, headed down the village street, towards the vicarage.
I have never liked the way the vicarage looks at me, its big sash windows somehow blank, whatever the weather, whatever the light. Crunching up the gravel drive, through the dark yew trees and underneath the willows, I could feel the dim glass blink at me through the gaps in the shrubbery, making me feel guilty, making me feel ashamed, as if it were wrong for me to walk the same drive that was crushed by horses’ hooves and carriage wheels, by the slender soles of ladies’ shoes. I ducked around the side of the house, and in through the servants’ entrance. The smell of mice in the scullery was terrible; as usual there was no sign of the cat; Petra was too well-fed to consider catching vermin. I undid my clogs and put on my work slippers. My apron fastened in a careful bow, I straightened my cap in the vague coppery reflection of a milk pan.
We beat the bedroom carpets that day: it’s a nasty job. When they’re rolled up, carpets slip out of your grip, they slump and loll and are a trial on the stairs, and there is nothing to get hold of. Maggie was at the top end, staggering and sweating by the time she got to the half-landing, and I was at the bottom, stepping uneasily backwards down the stairs and taking most of the weight. The carpet drooped heavily between us. Mrs. Wolfenden watched from the landing, not because we needed watching; we’d been in the household longer than she had. Maggie and I had to bite our tongues all the way from the bedroom to the scullery. It was only once we’d heaved the carpet out into the yard that we were free to mutter and gripe, though the freedom was short-lived. We slung the carpet over the rope, and started beating, and then there was no more opportunity for complaint; talk meant getting a mouthful of dust.
—
The boys were playing in the street when Thomas came. I heard them shout to him and heard the scuffle and laughter when he joined in the game. I’d washed my face and hair, and the rest of me at the washstand in my parents’ room, stripped to my shift, while Sally leaned against the inside of the door to keep anyone from coming in, talking about Mrs. Forster’s new bonnet as I scrubbed off the carpet-dust and perspiration and mumbled my replies. Sally left her post to help me rinse my hair, pouring the water for me, making me catch my breath at the cold, at the rill she let run down the back of my neck and on between my shoulder blades. After, as we tidied away the tea things, I could feel the faint dampness of my braids against my head, the scent of sage and rosemary, the crispness of fresh clothes, the cool tautness of my skin. It was pleasant to feel so clean.
But now that I heard Thomas about to come in it seemed an awkwardness; he might notice, he might say something. I stacked plates, then wiped the table, trying to cover my confusion, knowing Sally wouldn’t miss it, because she misses nothing. There were other voices too; men’s voices, kept too low to distinguish the speakers. Then the door opened and Dad came in, his cap pushed back. Thomas followed him, took off his cap, nodded to me and Sally, said good evening. Then Mr. Moore came in. He said nothing. I noticed that he looked at me, and that his eyes lingered a moment too long. He took off his hat, and went over to the dresser, and stood considering my books.
“All right, young Williams?” Dad said.
“My dad’ll be up shortly,” Thomas replied. “The Huttons and Mr. Gorst are coming too, f
rom down our end of the village. Once they’re done for the evening.”
Dad brushed down his jacket front, drew himself up a little taller. “That’ll do rightly, lad.”
“We should be getting on,” Mr. Moore observed.
Dad agreed effusively and gestured Mr. Moore towards the stairs. Thomas seemed suddenly very conscious of himself. I caught a glance of his, there was a pinkish flush to his forehead. He followed the two older men up the stairs, and I just stood there, holding a dish and a teacloth in my hands. I heard them move around above me: they were in my room.
“Come on,” Sally said, “or we’ll be here till suppertime.”
She finished clearing the tea things, and I poured the hot water from the kettle into the tub and washed up the crocks. I listened to the movement and the ongoing exchange of conversation upstairs but I couldn’t catch the words. It seemed to be Dad’s voice mainly. When Mr. Moore spoke, it would cause flurries of agreement from my dad; Thomas didn’t seem to say anything at all. Sally set down a dried dish, and waited for the next, and she looked at me as if to say, Of course I know what’s going on; so there was no way under heaven that I would actually ask her. The chimes began for half-eight, and I handed her the last tea plate, and she dried it, and put it down on the stack, and I went out of the back door with the tub and slopped the water onto the herb patch. I took a pinch of melissa, and rubbed it between my fingers, then tucked it into my bodice for the scent. I came back in, dangling the tub from one hand, as Mr. Gorst was coming in the front door, tobacco trailing after him, and behind him came Joe Stott and then the Hutton boys. Sally and I said good evening, and they nodded politely, and went upstairs, to our old bedroom. My face began to burn. The door had barely closed on them when there was a knock; I opened it and there was Mr. Bibby, his nose red as a rosehip, and Mr. Jack and his son from up Locka way, smelling of sheep, and then old Jimmy Williams, Thomas’s dad, with his hands still black from the byre; all of them coming in with red cheeks and a cloud of evening cool air, going past us with a nod and up the stairs, and joining the crowd in our old bedroom. The press of weight on the boards above us, the low rumble of voices, were like a gathering storm.
