Spilt Milk

by Amanda Hodgkinson

  Without any income now, she had to rely on her own stores to eat. She had stocked up on tinned foods before her money had run out. She’d bought flour, lard, sugar and salt, raisins and tea. All through the summer months she preserved fruit and made jams and pickles with this moment in mind. Jars of beans and tomatoes and cases of apples filled a shelf in the pantry. By being careful she’d had plenty to eat over the winter and enough to last to springtime.

  She gathered sticks and branches and made a log pile taller than herself. In the orchard, clumps of waxy snowdrops bloomed and Vivian picked bunches of them, filling the cottage. Jars and old tin cans filled with white flowers lined the stairs, the shelves and windowsills. They gleamed like hundreds of tiny candles. Dressed in the red robe the vicar’s wife had given her, Vivian prepared her home for the child.

  When her time came, she screamed because she thought someone might hear her and come to help. When nobody came, she fell silent. Nellie’s hagstone hung from a string over the mantelpiece, a charm to protect her. She had piled wood by the fire and brought in the last of the coal. Vivian laid out Rose’s old newspapers on the floor and fed the stove until the kitchen was so heated, sweat ran down her face. The windows steamed as though a hundred faces were pressed against them, watching her solitary endeavours.

  ‘That baby was cold as winter,’ Anna was saying, sitting by the fire in her cottage, holding court, regaling Nellie with her tales of birthing local women. ‘I can assure you, the child’s mother saw it was gone from us. She was crying like a cat stuck down a well. I cannot tell you what wholly occurred that day, but I rubbed the little thing with my hands, standing over the fire with it, massaging it till it coughed and spat and took a breath. I put it to its mother’s breast and it sucked so hard the mother fainted.’

  ‘Is that really true?’ asked Nellie. She was stirring a pot of soup on the cooking range. Anna was full of stories and Nellie doubted most of them, but they drew her in nevertheless.

  ‘Do I look like a liar?’ said Anna. ‘I en’t got no tall-tale blisters on my tongue. I only speak the truth, and if I don’t like the truth then I don’t speak it. So there.’

  Nellie nodded. She’d heard Anna say that many times. She had been living with Anna and her daughter Louisa for a month now. Several times she’d walked up to her old home, thinking she might speak to Vivian. Once she had been standing behind the elder trees, hidden from view, and Vivian came out of the cottage to feed the hens. Her sister’s face was dreamy-looking, her eyes shining with a peacefulness Nellie did not recognize. Was Joe Ferier in the cottage? It stopped her heart to think of them together. But no. She was sure Vivian was alone. Her sister moved slowly through the long grass of the orchard, lazily, like someone who did not know they were being watched. She wore a red dress and a pretty blue shawl. Her blonde hair cascaded around her shoulders. Vivian had been skinny before, but she looked womanly now. It hurt to see Vivian looking so content. To realize that living alone suited her well.

  The hens – Nellie’s jolly red hens – followed Vivian across the garden, chasing after her skirts like fond children. Vivian was talking to them. She went indoors singing an old hymn Rose used to sing, the cottage door banging shut behind her, the hens settling on the doorstep to wait for her. Nellie turned away. Her sister did not need her.

  It was surprising to find there were still women in the village who called upon Anna Moats to deliver their babies. Nellie had gone with her to two confinements. It had been alarming to see women lumbering like wounded cattle through the pain of childbirth. Nellie felt useless. She did not know how to help. Their cries frightened her. ‘There’s no romance in childbirth,’ said Anna at the bedside of a labouring mother. ‘You hold her hand and tell her she’s a bloody marvel,’ she instructed Nellie as the woman’s face twisted in pain on the pillow. Nellie did as she was told. Such a small gesture, the clasping of another’s hand in your own. The woman clung to her. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘Thank you. Thank you.’

  The same day, Nellie and Anna did a tooth extraction. The old soldier in the village had a rotten tooth. He was in agony, a gin sweat pouring off him. Cheek like a cooking apple, green with infection, shiny, round and swollen. Nellie got the tooth in a good grip with the pliers, her knee on the man’s chest, and then exclaimed loudly that the smell was too much to bear. She’d almost vomited over him, and Anna, gin-soaked herself, pushed her aside and pulled the blackened tooth, promising them all a tot of drink when it was over.

  ‘So will you deliver this baby?’ Anna asked Nellie and Louisa. ‘Mrs Thomas will be labouring with her sixth child, but I can’t walk there with my bad legs. She’s a strong woman and it’ll be an easy birth.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Nellie. ‘Not without you. I’m afraid of what might go wrong. I think she should get a nurse.’

  Anna scowled. ‘A so-called qualified midwife wants fifteen shillings to do what I do for eight. Three months’ training these women get, and I’ve more years’ experience than I care to remember. A doctor costs one pound. All well and good if your husband’s working, but Mr Thomas hasn’t had full-time work in months.’

  ‘We’ll do it, Mother,’ said Louisa roughly. ‘No need to take on.’

  ‘Can you manage a bowl of soup, Anna?’ asked Nellie. The old lady thanked her and Nellie turned to ask Louisa, but she was putting on her coat, saying she was going out. It was a dark afternoon and snow was beginning to fall. Nobody would want to walk anywhere in this, except Louisa had told Nellie she was meeting the wheelwright, who had asked her to go away with him if he could get at his savings without his wife knowing.

  ‘I’ll be back before you know it,’ said Louisa, and gave Nellie a wink.

  ‘You think you might go and see your sister soon?’ asked Anna as Nellie ate soup. ‘You and Vivian were so close. It’s a sad thing to see you apart. A man, was it?

  ‘Usually a man involved when women fall out,’ Anna said when Nellie didn’t reply. ‘Well, don’t leave it too long. It takes courage to go and make things better. You’re a brave girl, Nellie.’

  ‘I don’t think I am,’ said Nellie, and watched snow falling against the window.

  Anna Moats thought she would miss Nellie when she was gone. She was sure Nellie would go back to the sister she loved. That was obvious. Nellie was stubborn and acted tough and distant with folk, but it was plain to see the woman had a heart as tender as a naked heel in a new boot.

  After Louisa left, Anna sat back in her chair and told Nellie she had been the midwife who’d delivered both her and Vivian. What a laugh to see the girl’s astonished face! Of course Rose had never told her.

  ‘You were our mother’s midwife?’ asked Nellie.

  ‘For both of you. I brought you into the world, my dear. Your afterbirth is buried in the same place as your sister’s. Right under one of the apple trees in your orchard.

  ‘A slip of a thing Vivian was, born early and quickly. You were another story, Nellie. A long labour and a breech birth. You came feet first into the world, which is no way to arrive. An awkward birth makes for an awkward child, you know. Baby girls who make their mothers suffer at birth grow up contrary in later life, thinking themselves too good to get down on their knees and scrub a kitchen floor.’

  ‘Well, I’m not like that,’ said Nellie.

  ‘No, you’re not. Not at all. An exception, you are, Nellie Marsh. I’ll have a bowl of that soup now, if I may?’

  Anna sat by the fire, sipping from the bowl Nellie put in front of her. She wouldn’t say it, but Nellie’s mother had nearly died of exhaustion. All the long hours of labour she’d sat on the bed, back rounded, her white cotton nightdress bunched over her thighs, legs pulled up, her hands holding them apart, trying to look over the vast curve of her belly, crying as if she was calling the child out of her. Cursing the father of it and Anna too, for her inability to make the pain go away. Poor Rose Marsh. And so young. Rose’s mother had been a saint, claiming the children were her own daughters, and h
er husband going along with it. Oh yes, people said an awkward birth made an awkward person. But surely in this case it was the mother, Rose Marsh, unmarried, already shamed with one little bastard daughter, who had been turned awkward and hardened by Nellie’s birth?

  Six

  Vivian held her baby girl in her arms, bundled up in a piece of blue velvet, pressed against her heart and the warmth of her chest, the way shepherds carried lambs, knowing the beating of their own hearts might just work miracles. She took the path along the river. The wind rushed over the water, running fast ripples across its surface. Ahead she saw a woman bent against the wind. She was in the arms of a man, and the two of them went away across the fields. For a moment Vivian thought of Joe and felt a sharp stab of envy. The passion of the couple stirred the lovesickness she still suffered with.

  Outside Anna Moat’s cottage, Vivian hesitated. She had never been here before. But Anna Moats would be able to help her. She’d know how to make her baby strong. She crept to the window and peered inside.

  What she saw nearly made Vivian drop the baby. Nellie was there, standing at the stove, candlelight illuminating her back. She was stirring a pot, and she stopped suddenly and turned her head towards the window. All this time Vivian had suffered alone and Nellie was at Anna Moats’s house?

  She heard footsteps. Louisa Moats and a man talking together. That was who was on the riverbank. That ragbag woman and the wheelwright. Vivian felt herself chastised all over again. Nellie was here, punishing her still; but surely, after what she had endured alone, she deserved to be forgiven? She turned and hurried back to the cottage, tears stinging her eyes.

  At home she lay in her bed with the child. The fire had gone out. The stove was cold. She had no coal left and no strength to get in wood.

  ‘Nellie will come,’ she whispered, drawing the baby closer. ‘Nellie has to come back now.’

  ‘I’m swollen up,’ said Mrs Thomas. ‘I can’t even get my shoes on. I need a doctor, but my husband says he’s drunk in the pub and won’t come out. You’d better know what you’re doing, you two.’

  Mrs Thomas’s five children stared out from their seats beside the open hearth. Baby clothes were airing by the fire.

  ‘This is an infusion of blackthorn leaves,’ said Nellie, handing a bottle to Mrs Thomas. ‘From Anna, for your pains.’ Nellie took gloves from her pocket. ‘Can we boil some water? I need these to be as clean as possible.’

  ‘What is she going to do with another brat?’ whispered Louisa as Nellie boiled the gloves. ‘Don’t look like she can manage the ones she’s got. Do you reckon I should tell her how there are ways you can bring off a cure in the early months? Just in case she falls pregnant again after this one? Means you can keep your husband happy and yourself in a decent state too.’

  ‘You children should go and play,’ said Nellie loudly, though she knew it was far too cold for them to be outside. She wished Louisa would stop talking like this.

  ‘You should know too. Every woman should,’ whispered Louisa. Nellie coloured darkly. Louisa talked of purges and cures, pennyroyal and Epsom salts, castor oil, bitter aloes, a bit of gunpowder on a dab of margarine.

  ‘When I was a littl’un,’ Louisa said, fishing the gloves out of the water with a pair of wooden tongs, ‘there was always women wanting help, coming up our garden path. Coins in their hands and problems in their bellies. I helped me ma and I never looked away. Not once. I’ve seen stuff would have you on the floor in a dead faint.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Nellie, and wondered if she didn’t feel faint right now.

  Anna Moats had been right. Mrs Thomas knew what she was doing. The baby was born quickly and without fuss. Nellie wrapped it in a clean sheet, trying not to notice the swollen genitals, scarlet as boiled beetroot. She set about tying off the cord with a shoelace as Anna had showed her.

  ‘This one’s called Christopher,’ said Mrs Thomas, lying back on the pillow. ‘Handsome little chap, en’t he? My lovely boy. Christopher Thomas. He’ll go far, when he grows up. I got a good feeling for him.’

  Nellie thought he was anything but handsome. She handed him to Louisa, who dangled him upside down and slapped his buttocks. The older children stood in the doorway, scratching their heads, laughing when the baby screamed. Mrs Thomas was seedy with lice too. Nellie had seen them moving through her hair as she wiped sweat from her brow.

  Outside in the cold night, Nellie stood with a spade in her hand. Snow was still falling. She had blood on her apron and her hands were shaking. She kicked the spade into the ground, making a hole. The frozen earth didn’t want to yield and she grew warm, chipping away at the soil. She bent to pick up the bucket and tipped it, pouring the afterbirth into the hole, kicking the earth back over it and stamping the ground down. Anna Moats said it was important to bury it deep. That way the child would never stray far from home. Like having your roots in the ground, Anna reckoned. You might go away, but you’d always come home because that’s where your beginnings were.

  Nellie had been surprised when Anna had told her that her beginnings were in the orchard by the cottage. Vivian’s too. And if Anna had been their mother’s midwife, then why had Rose always disliked the old woman so?

  Nellie gathered flat stones and laid them on top of the compacted soil to keep foxes away. She heard footsteps and stopped. It was Louisa.

  ‘The husband has turned up. I don’t think they need us any more. I forgot to say, I saw your sister earlier. She was outside the house. Ran off like the devil was after her. It en’t none of my business, but I reckon you should go and see her.’

  Nellie felt snow melt on her eyelashes. She tasted the icy flakes on her lips. Yes. She would go and see Vivian. It was time.

  ‘I’ll come with you, shall I?’ asked Louisa.

  Nellie hesitated. She dropped a last stone down on the turned earth.

  ‘If you like.’

  She realized she would be glad of the company.

  All around, white flakes of snow flew. Nellie and Louisa pushed through a gap in a hedge, crossed a wooden bridge over a ditch and continued down a track enclosed by trees. The wind picked up, tunnelling along the alley of trees, and the snow fell faster. As they came to the end of the track, the land rose slightly and there was the cottage.

  The door was ajar. Nellie stepped into a room no warmer than the outside. She reached instinctively to the table and found a lamp and a box of matches beside it. She lit the lamp and looked at her old home like she was seeing it for the first time. Smoke from the cooking range had blackened the ceiling. A sampler stitched with red lettering and green leaves entwined around them hung on the wall. God bless our mother, the stitching spelled out. A small brown stone with a hole in it dangled from a length of string over the mantelpiece. Nellie recognized it. The hagstone.

  There were footsteps on the stairs and Vivian came down, calling her name, a candle in her hand. Her feet were bare. Her hair hung matted around her shoulders. Nellie was shocked by her sister’s appearance, but she tried to smile. To make the moment seem less strange.

  ‘You came,’ cried Vivian, and dropped the candle, which flared and went out. She threw her arms around Nellie’s neck. ‘She’s upstairs. My baby is upstairs. I don’t know what to do. I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve been so afraid, but I knew you’d come home.’

  Nellie pushed her sister away. What was she talking about? Had she taken in an orphan child?

  ‘No. It’s my baby. Joe’s daughter. Come and see her. Bring the lamp.’

  Vivian led them upstairs, her bare heels black with dirt, stepping over jam jars and tins filled with dead snowdrops.

  The lamp lit the room softly and the ceiling looked low, the walls dark and indistinct. Vivian drew back the bedclothes where a baby lay on the pillow, swaddled in a blue velvet cloth. It was nothing like the newborn they’d just delivered, who had swung his fists like a fighter and was pink as a fresh boiled shrimp. This baby’s skin had a yellow tint. Louisa lifted the lamp towa
rds the child to see it better. She sucked air in through her teeth, like a farmhand looking over a horse, assessing it for its usefulness.

  ‘A little girl, is it?’

  ‘This is Josephine.’

  Nellie’s mind was full of memories of Mrs Thomas’s overheated little house, the children and the rudely healthy baby boy.

  ‘Who helped you, Vivian? Who birthed this child?’

  ‘I did it alone. I thought I might die. I wanted to but then there she was, my own little baby, and I was glad I was alive. Do you want to hold her, Nellie?’

  Nellie shook her head. She felt Joe’s betrayal all over again, and she saw he had betrayed Vivian too. She remembered the day she had found Joe’s hat in this bed. The hatred she had felt for her sister. ‘We must get the fire lit,’ she said, struggling to know what to do. ‘We need to warm you both up. This place is freezing. A baby needs to be kept warm.’

  She went downstairs and busied herself lighting the stove, relieved to have something to do. She told Louisa to fill the kettle, and Vivian came and sat with the baby by the stove.

  ‘I’m waiting for Joe to come back,’ she said. ‘I want him to see his daughter. And then we’ll all live here, together. All of us, Nellie. We’ll be happy, won’t we?’

  Nellie didn’t answer her. Her heart had turned, in a matter of moments, to a cold damp stone, heavy and incapable of feelings. She would never live with Joe. How could Vivian even speak of him? She became practical and quiet, ignoring Vivian’s nervous chatter. She found some woollen socks and put them on her sister’s cold feet. She draped a blanket around Vivian’s shoulders too and blew on her icy fingers to warm them.