We went on to the little landing and I opened the door of the back room. It was filled with afternoon sun streaming on the little bed, the toys, the animals from the Noah’s ark lying scattered on the floor and Big Teddy sitting in the now discarded high chair. The sun illuminated my baby’s nursery as if it were a stage set.
My mother literally reeled. I’ve heard of people reeling from shock but never seen anyone do it before. She was tottering back on her heels and if I hadn’t caught her, she would have fallen down the stairs. She pushed my supporting arms away and cried, ‘Charlie, come up here.’
Charlie came stumbling up the narrow, twisting stairs, stumbling because his feet were too long to fit the treads. We retreated from the landing and he followed us into the sun-filled room. ‘Well, what’s the matter?’ he snapped. ‘Looks all right to me.’
Mother clawed at him like a demented cat. ‘You fool, can’t you see that this is a child’s room? She’s got a baby hidden away somewhere.’ She looked round wildly and made to pull the cot cover back.
Trying to control myself, I said in what I hoped was a calming voice: ‘Don’t bother, your grand-daughter is in a nursery across the Green. Actually it is just about time to fetch her now. How about coming with me? It will only take a few minutes.
I held out my hand to her, hoping she would take it, but she slapped it and then my face and shouted, ‘You fool, at least you could have had an abortion! No wonder you have been in hiding all this time. Charlie, take me home.’
She tottered down the stairs with poor Charlie stumbling after her. From an upstairs window I watched them scramble into their ugly little car and drive away, then I fetched Tommy home. Her hands were filled with paper butterflies they had been making in the nursery.
Chapter Seven
I didn’t see the Forbeses that weekend. I didn’t see anyone except the customers who came to the shop – oh, and Miss Murray, but I couldn’t really talk to her. She was quite pleasant the few times she had seen Tommy but she obviously didn’t want to be involved with her in any way. She appeared to be afraid of being roped in for babysitting and that kind of thing, although she was the last person one could ask. She would have had a fit if a child upset a mug of milk on the carpet, or worse, if it did not make it clear that it needed to use its pot. Miss Murray was far kinder than she appeared to be but you couldn’t confide in her or tell her the things your mother said and did.
Then Mr Crimony came again and as usual without warning. I saw him from the window getting out of his horrible little car but he didn’t open the door to mother because she wasn’t there. He tapped on the shop window with something metal, a nail file I thought, but it turned out to be his car keys. I’d already locked the door and turned the cardboard notice to ‘Closed’, but he went on tapping and eventually it so got on my nerves I let him in.
‘Shall we go into the back room?’ he said in a funereal voice. ‘I see you are closed,’ and I realized that to him the sign was very important, like ‘Keep off the Grass’ or something. It was nothing to me because I often changed the notice and there was one that said ‘Back in Ten Minutes’ that I used quite a lot.
We entered the back room which was dark that day although it was almost summer; the handsome plates on the dresser hardly noticed. Mr Crimony went to sit on the buttoned Victorian chair, then changed it for an uncomfortable Gothic one already sold and waiting to be collected. He laid his hat, a bowler this time, and soiled driving gloves on the table and said heavily, ‘Bella, you may be wondering why I’m here. I can understand that you don’t want to see me after the way your poor mother went on. But it was a shock, a fearful shock to us both, particularly to your mother, to hear that you had a child that no one knew about. A little girl, did you say it was? And what about her father? You’re not married, are you?’ I shook my head and he added, ‘No, we didn’t think so.’
He went on asking impertinent questions which I occasionally answered with a movement of my head. He was behaving as if he were a relation or someone in authority and after about ten minutes of this questioning I told him so and added, ‘If mother wants to know anything about my child, she can ask me herself.’
He turned down his bottom lip and said darkly, ‘That’s one thing she won’t do. You don’t know your own history, girl. I’ve known your mother for nearly forty years. Our parents were friends, particularly our fathers. Did you know that your grandfather was a coal merchant at one time, the same as my father was? Then he changed and became a timber merchant, in Pimlico of all places, and we didn’t see so much of him. We still went for holidays together and I remember your mother, Annie, scrambling up the rocks and climbing cliffs, quite fearless she was and she swam well too. She was seven years younger than me and made me feel so ashamed. Then she could speak French. She’d picked it up from her mother, who was half French as you know, and because I was jealous I teased her quite a lot. So we quarrelled. She had a very quick temper, even in those days.’
He stopped talking and lit a cigarette although he wasn’t a smoking man and hadn’t even a match in his pocket. I had silently handed him the box from the cooker. I couldn’t speak because I was quietly praying over and over again, ‘Please God, don’t let Crimony be my father.’
He went rambling on. ‘After your grandfather died and left your family very badly off (we always said he’d have done better to stick to coal – wood wasn’t his line), well they drifted back to Kilburn and managed somehow. Your uncle Ted got quite a nice little job in insurance and your mother became a pupil-teacher at the school where she stayed all those years. Games and French were her subjects and I think at first she quite enjoyed herself there. She was very keen on tennis in those days and used to play on some courts at Swiss Cottage. Sometimes I used to join her there on a Saturday afternoon but I wasn’t in her class. The man who owned the courts used to coach her quite a bit and didn’t charge a penny. Thought he’d make her a champion, no less.’
I stopped praying for a moment and said, ‘It’s strange she never let me play, I wanted to at school and it might have got my weight down a bit.’
Mr Crimony fixed his pale blue eyes on me in such a way that we were staring each other out: ‘It’s not surprising that she didn’t want you to take up tennis, because you were the reason she had to give it up. Annie was very bitter about that, very bitter.’
I said, ‘Now I come to think about it, tennis champions don’t seem to go in for babies much, not like actresses. If she felt like that about it, why did she get married?’
Crimony’s pale eyes held mine even more intently and I thought, ‘Now it’s coming.’
He hunched his shoulders and growled like a bad-tempered old dog. ‘This is going to be a shock to you. You were conceived out of wedlock. Your mother, who I’d hoped to marry, had behaved like any slut of the streets and had had intercourse with a man she hardly knew, a man she met playing tennis. It took her four months to persuade him to marry her, four months of purgatory. Her brother Ted knocked him to the ground, but that didn’t help much. You see, his family were against it, didn’t think Annie good enough. They gave in eventually and there was a quiet wedding, in a registry office I believe. I didn’t go, of course. I didn’t see Annie again for at least six years and I was married by then myself.’
I was saying under my breath, ‘Thank you, God, thank you that I’m not Crimony’s child,’ and when I finished thanking God I started to laugh, I couldn’t stop. It wasn’t a happy laugh, but I felt better for it, and looking at Mr Crimony sitting in his Gothic chair I could see he was shaking with a kind of laughter – or perhaps tears. I was longing to get him out of the house so that I could think about my parents, so many things were becoming clear. I opened my mouth to say, ‘You had better go now, Mr Crimony,’ but instead I said, ‘Perhaps you’d like a drink before you go, Mr Crimony. There’s some sherry on the dresser,’ and I fetched two glasses from the shop.
Chapter Eight
On the first Monday of May Gertrude
telephoned and asked me to close ‘the silly old shop’ and spend the day with her, gardening. ‘You haven’t been here the last two weekends and you can’t imagine what is happening out there in the garden. The flowers seem to be completely taking over, every root, bulb or seed I have planted has taken root and the place is like a jungle.’
‘But what about the gardener I sometimes see mowing the lawns?’ I asked.
‘Well, that’s just it. He only does the mowing, pruning and general tidying up, but has no contact with the flowers, that’s my job. I love it normally.’
I remembered her condition and agreed to come although there were several things I’d planned to do in the shop. It was a perfect early summer day, ideal for gardening, and after what I’d been through with Crimony I needed a change. So I hung ‘Closed’ on the door and set off for Richmond by bus because Bernard wouldn’t allow Gertrude to drive now she was five months pregnant and the baby had started to flutter about. He seemed to think a moving baby was more vulnerable.
Gertrude was waiting for me in the courtyard at the front of the house. She was examining a passion flower cutting that she had recently planted hoping it would climb up the walls of the house. It had been about three feet high when I’d last seen it but now it was careering up the wall and had already reached a bedroom window. I laughed and said she was like Jack and the beanstalk. She pointed out a patch of wild violets. ‘You remember the violet I dug up from the roadside – look how it has multiplied. Even the carved bear has canary-creeper growing over his back. I don’t know where it came from, but I haven’t the heart to pull it up. Soon it will be a golden lion.’
We walked through the cool house into the garden, blazing with sun and colour, a jumble of tulips mixed with forget-me-nots and groups of heavy-smelling hyacinths, borders of polyanthus and the luxuriant leaves of peonies springing up and hiding struggling small plants. Against a crumbling stone wall there was a patch of blood-red wallflowers. I have never cared for wallflowers much except for their scent; to me they seem rather shaggy and shapeless, but these were perfect, like an illustration in a gardening book. We went to the little potting-shed/conservatory where Gertrude started her seeds in boxes and pots. It must have been five weeks ago that I had helped her plant the annuals intended to fill the summer beds and the stone urns she was so fond of. The glass had been removed and green leaves were pouring out of the boxes, the petunias and dahlias already in bud and demanding to be transplanted.
There were a few boxes at the end of the row where the green wasn’t very high and Gertrude remarked, ‘That’s queer, these are weeks behind the others and I remember they were all planted at the same time. It was a Sunday and you helped me.’
I said, with shame, ‘Those are the ones I planted.’
We both started to laugh and Gertrude, still laughing, said, ‘That proves Bernard is right as usual. He says that primitive people believe that pregnant women have special powers and they use them to plant the crops. Rather hard on the pregnant women, though.’
We planted, thinned out the hardy annuals, cut back and weeded, filled the urns with young petunias and trailing lobelia and watered the transplanted seedlings. There were so many surplus young plants Gertrude insisted that I take them home and plant them in the yard attached to the house. Although it had a certain amount of sun and was fairly private I’d never considered it as a garden, but, now I thought about it, I remembered noticing some green leaves pushing up through the tired earth that could be Michaelmas daisies and also some golden rod, and there was a straggling rose bush that had gone wild and a clump of something that might be self-seeded hollyhocks. On my way home I bought a garden fork and I started my garden that evening.
It was enclosed with high walls on two sides, a fence with a few lilac bushes above on the west side and on the south a low wall and large gates that led to the main road and were never opened. The ground was partly paved and partly wild green weeds which I gradually turned into a rough lawn. There were slight indications that someone had once made a herbaceous bed round three sides of the yard but more recently coke had been stored there. As I dug up splinters of glass, chips of china and coke I pretended to myself that it was a suitable place to find small treasure, so I dug deeper than I would have normally. I did find a few small coins, a cut-glass salt-cellar with an almost undamaged silver top, and something that might have been the remains of an antique bracelet but was more likely part of an old copper pipe. But my deep digging was rewarded when I exposed some really large York stones which I made into a low wall with climbing flowers planted both sides. If it had been higher I’d have planted wisteria there; instead I had it growing up the south wall of the cottage, dark mauve, and with it the rare white floribunda called ‘Alba’, and I hope they are still growing there to this day. The soil was tainted and dead, just dirt really, so I bought expensive earth and put it round each plant and sprinkled bone meal over the entire garden. After I bought a hose for watering I promised myself that it was the last thing I’d buy until the autumn. Then I broke my promise and spent ten pounds on a magnolia tree and this made me feel really ashamed and for the rest of the summer the only thing I spent on the garden was my time.
Almost every evening we gardened, Tommy and I. I let her stay until the dusk came and sometimes so late we went to bed at the same time. She so enjoyed stirring up the earth and watering the flowers with her little can, often getting so wet I had to take her soaking clothes off and, if it was still warm, I let her play naked. Fortunately no interfering neighbours could see us. She liked to run round the garden with her arms behind her and the palms of her hands facing upwards so that she almost appeared to be flying in the pallid evening light.
One evening when the watering was finished we were eating a simple meal of milk, cornflakes and fruit, sitting at the garden table I’d bought from a junk shop and painted white. We were eating by the light thrown into the garden from the cottage windows, but parts of the garden were almost dark. Suddenly we were disturbed by a rattling at the gate, then there was a head jumping up and down like something to be shot at at a fair. Perhaps it said something above the sound of the traffic, but I wasn’t sure.
Leaving our unfinished meal, I hurried Tommy into the house and through the side door that lead to the shop and, when I switched on the light, there was a face against the window, peering. It seemed a mad face to me, but when it started calling ‘Bella, Bella’ the voice was vaguely familiar. Then, to my dismay, I saw it was Stephen, not looking mad at all, just annoyed at not being recognized. Reluctantly I let him into the shop and then into the back room and said crossly, ‘I wish people would leave me alone. I suppose mother gave you my address.’
I don’t think he heard me because he was too intent on staring at Tommy, who had picked up a toy trumpet and was handing it to him to blow. He turned away from her and said in a cruel voice, ‘Is this the child your mother thinks is mine? She must be mad. You said you were pregnant by me as an excuse not to share the insurance money. Don’t think it is the money I care about, keep it for all I care, but the deceit, trying to pass that little blackamoor off as my child.’
I shouted, ‘Shut up, you conceited idiot. I never passed her off as your child, she’s mine. I don’t even know her father’s name, so she’s doubly mine. Mother has never seen her and didn’t even know she existed until a couple of weeks ago, so what right has she to interfere?’ And I scooped my child up in my arms as if to protect her.
For a moment she looked as if she were about to cry. I don’t think she had ever heard angry voices before. She buried her face in my neck, then looked out and with the sweetest smile again held the trumpet out to Stephen. To my surprise he gently took it and blew a long note and as the smile broadened he blew another. My anger faded. It seemed ridiculous to shout at a man blowing a tin trumpet. I put Tommy down and drew the curtains as if it were an ordinary evening. Anger and fear had left the room and I said, ‘I was just about to make a cup of coffee. Would you like one, St
ephen?’
I put Tommy to bed and we sat talking in a friendly way. I asked after old friends I hadn’t seen for years and he told me of marriages that had ended and of new ones that had taken place, jobs that ended and new ones that hadn’t always taken place. Stephen was fortunate and still had his advertising job. Then we became more personal and he told me about his girlfriends, several casual ones and three more permanent, that is to say they had lived in the flat we used to share. I’d always felt like a lodger when I lived there. It had never been a home like the shop was. Everything had to be done Stephen’s way and my belongings tucked away and not in evidence. I supposed it had been the same for his other girlfriends. Poor things, no wonder they didn’t last long. Then he was asking me questions and of course the main one was my daughter’s parentage. Who was her father? I told him the simple truth but he could hardly believe it because it sounded so unlike my usual behaviour. He didn’t understand that when one is unhappy and without hope one does strange things, perhaps even murder. He went on asking unnecessary questions: ‘But what did he look like? Was he very dark? What did he do for a living?’
All I remembered was that he was kind, that he appeared to have problems, though I couldn’t remember what they were, and that he wore this rather smelly red velvet jacket, and even went to bed in it.
‘He doesn’t sound very attractive to me,’ Stephen said, staring hard at my face. ‘You could do better than that,’ and he ran his finger down my scarred face. ‘This thing has improved so much one hardly notices it after a few minutes.’
I felt my hand instinctively rising towards my scar but it didn’t reach it and I said offhandedly, ‘People get used to it and so have I.’ I knew his next question would be, Had I a lover? He might even suggest that we become lovers again. I didn’t want him as a lover; but I needed friends. I had so few.
The Juniper Tree Page 5
