Spilt Milk

by Amanda Hodgkinson

  ‘Expecting what?’

  ‘A baby.’

  Birdie tried to grab hold of her mother before she fainted. She opened her eyes to find herself in her mother’s lap, on the cobblestones.

  ‘Who is he?’

  Birdie shut her eyes again. There was no point in saying.

  Nellie watched her daughter walk away into the pub. She stood outside, breathing slowly. She had never imagined having a child herself, and now that child was going to be a mother. She’d cared for Birdie the best she could, but obviously had done a useless job of it. She supposed she was like Rose. Not properly maternal. Unlike Vivian, who would have been a good mother but had never been lucky.

  Nellie remembered Birdie’s birth well. The speed of her labour. How she had looked down and there, between her trembling thighs, seen the baby, slick as a winkle pulled from its shell. There she had lain, neither a truth nor a lie. Nellie’s baby. And again that confusing, vulnerable love had squeezed her heart.

  ‘Nellie, are you out there?’

  George was standing in the doorway, illuminated by the yellow gas lamp.

  ‘Just coming in,’ she said, and hoped that by morning she would have an idea of what to do about Birdie. She certainly wasn’t going to tell George yet.

  Thirteen

  Vivian came to the pub because what else could she do? When she got the telegram from Nellie, she had caught the train the same morning, determined to help her sister and niece. And how long had it been since she stood here in this forlorn little street by the railway bridge, looking up at a set of pub doors, summoning the courage to go inside? Over fifteen years, she thought. Yes, it must be.

  Nellie had aged a bit but so had she, and yet Vivian felt like they had never been apart. Nellie was just the same woman. Her hair was still long, though she wore it piled on her head now rather than in that tight plait she used to favour. And it was tinged with grey, of course. Didn’t she look like Rose? In fact, it was startling, the resemblance.

  Nellie didn’t mention Birdie and ushered her inside, through the pub, into the back rooms. There she offered Vivian a seat on a hard leather couch, explaining that it was new. Bought on hire purchase from one of the modern showrooms that had opened up on the Essex Road. Nellie had seen it advertised in a magazine, and George had got it delivered.

  Though she said nothing, Vivian thought the couch she was slipping about on was hideous. An awful modern thing.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked.

  Nellie hugged herself.

  ‘I’m all right. Or I was until now. You’ll have to see what we’re doing in the pub, Vivie. George has renamed the saloon bar “the refreshments bar”. We’re getting a lot of married couples coming in these days, and they want a bit of class. Some of them want cocktails, would you believe? George says these new housing estates going up everywhere are bringing in a different kind of customer.’

  Vivian knew Nellie was talking too much. Her sister was near to tears. She couldn’t fool her for a minute.

  ‘Where is she, Nellie?’ she asked.

  ‘Gone shopping up west with George for the day. I’m so glad you came.’

  ‘Of course I came. What’s to be done though?’

  ‘Birdie’s a good girl. I don’t want you to think she isn’t.’

  ‘Have you spoken to the boy involved? She’ll have to marry him.’

  ‘She says she met him at a dance and doesn’t know his name.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Vivian, and lit a cigarette. ‘I see.’

  Nellie got up and began to pace. ‘Shall we go out? I’m afraid George will come home and find us here. Whatever happens, he mustn’t know. It would hurt him so badly.’

  ‘But if she keeps it?’

  ‘If she keeps it, then we’ll tell him when we need to tell him.’

  Nellie took Vivian to walk along the embankment and see the sights across the river. Vivian suggested Birdie stay with her. They could say she was working in her tea room and nobody would be any the wiser. Vivian could help Birdie bring the child up if she chose to keep it. Her house was big, and she still felt a great deal of affection for the girl. There was no shame in Vivian caring for relatives. But for Birdie it would be harder. Her life would be ruined.

  ‘That’s what scares me,’ said Nellie. She told Vivian how in the pub just the other day she had heard a girl being described as used goods. Nobody wanted that kind of insult levelled at them. ‘Used goods. It made me want to swing for the chap. What a thing to say. I think it’s my fault. I’ve not been a good mother.’

  They sat on a bench in silence. Vivian still remembered the time Birdie had lived with her. If she had stayed, if the girl had grown up in her care, perhaps this would not have happened.

  When was it now? My goodness, right back in 1922. She’d come to take the child home with her. She had felt rather heroic, turning up at the public house. Henry had suggested he give her some money for the child’s keep. That had been typical of him, she felt. Turning a family matter into a businesslike arrangement. She didn’t want a penny from him, she’d told him.

  Vivian had taken the little girl home. The walk back from the train station was a strong memory. She had finally got what she wanted so badly. A child to care for. Birdie in her pram sat up smiling at passers-by. How marvellous it had been. Up Riverside she’d gone, over the bridge where below the ducks paddled in the clear waters of the river. People said hello. Men lifted their hats to her. Several women made little clucking noises and waggled their fingers at Birdie.

  ‘A girl, is it? Niece, you say? You’ve got your hands full there,’ they said. ‘She looks like trouble. Oh, what a cheeky face!’

  Vivian had never had so many strangers talk to her before. The way other women looked at her as she walked through the town centre – it was as if she had joined a secret club of motherhood. As she neared the guest house, images of the Virgin Mary and her child had circled in her mind. She’d been a vast flowing river of warm motherly love that day. The child in the pram could have floated for ever on the golden currents of her well-being. She had smiled all the way home, thinking of gold-leaf statues of Mary and pink-painted plaster-of-Paris babies. A nursery with a rocking horse. Ribbons and bows.

  ‘Here we are, my little darling,’ she had said as she bounced the pram up the cobbled street to the guest house. ‘We’re home.’

  For two years she had cared for Birdie, and it hadn’t been easy, though she would never tell Nellie that. She would let her sister think Birdie had been well behaved, because she suspected Nellie had found it difficult to raise the child afterwards. She had been glad to think she struggled with Birdie. It hurt when Nellie took her back. She had wanted Nellie to understand that.

  Birdie had been a wild little child when she arrived at the guest house, and she left pretty much the same. She only ever ran. It was as if she did not understand walking. She darted around and was never still except when she slept, which was not very often. Most of the day she threw herself about with a frenzied energy. Vivian was fond of these memories now. What a pleasure to look back upon the daily struggle with a buttonhook to get Birdie’s leggings in place over her black boots while she fidgeted and wriggled. The child had refused to have her copper hair brushed out. Vivian remembered it had taken on a fuzzy look, as if Birdie had a sweep of autumn leaves dancing on her head. She had three words which she liked to shout as she careered around the guest house. No! Cat! Enough!

  When Nellie sent a telegram saying she was coming to get her daughter back, Vivian cut Birdie’s hair. She was frightened Nellie would see it tangled up and think she hadn’t cared for her properly. She and the child had both cried to see those skeins of copper-coloured hair all over the floor.

  ‘You shouldn’t have cut her hair,’ Nellie said when she saw her daughter. ‘You should have asked me first.’

  That had been the beginning of the argument. Vivian said the child’s hair had been knotted and in a dreadful state, and it had been the only solution. In any
case, the fashion for little girl’s hair had been to keep it short. Nellie was terribly old-fashioned, always insisting on Birdie having ringlets like they’d had as children.

  She had presented Nellie with a brooch. Inside it was a lock of Birdie’s curls. That had silenced her sister.

  Nellie sent a telegram a few weeks after she took Birdie back. Birdie was crying for Vivian. What should she do? After a brief moment of triumph – Yes, the child wants me! – Vivian had consulted Dr Harding and he said Vivian must not see the child until she had completely forgotten living with her. Otherwise there was a risk of personality disorder in a child split in her love for two mothers.

  So that’s what they did. They stopped seeing each other. Over the years Nellie, who was not much of a letter writer, sent photographs of Birdie and then, when she went to school, her school reports. A milk tooth was put in a gold clasp and sent on a necklace, and a small drawing of a black cat done by Birdie was sent in a brown wooden frame.

  Vivian looked across the wide River Thames where barges passed by on the lead-coloured water. Down on the mudbanks below them a group of boys was throwing sticks for a dog to retrieve in the water. The dog splashed in and out obligingly, brown as a river rat and not much bigger.

  Nellie cleared her throat.

  ‘I’m sorry I hurt you when I took Birdie back. I know it’s a long time ago now, but I still think about it. I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  ‘I wasn’t upset in the least,’ said Vivian, laughing as if the idea was ridiculous. ‘Not at all. I was glad Henry said his daughter could come home.’

  The brown dog the boys were playing with belted along the narrow shoreline and up a set of concrete steps onto the Embankment.

  ‘Perhaps it’s best if she gives the baby up for adoption,’ said Nellie. ‘I cannot think of what else she could do. How can she keep it? People would be cruel. I will not have anyone looking down on Birdie.’

  Vivian watched the dog disappear along the path, its tail wagging as it rounded the corner and was gone.

  ‘The child too. It would be an unlucky creature before it even took its first breath. We must think of the child.’

  ‘There’s a foundling hospital near the pub. They call it something else these days. An institution of some sort. I see girls taking their babies in there, and each time it makes my heart go cold. People look at those girls like they’re bad all the way through. I’ve seen a group of women spit at a young girl coming out of that place. I don’t want anyone ever treating Birdie like that.’

  Nobody must hurt Birdie, agreed Vivian. The child could be adopted. Birdie would be able to make a good marriage afterwards.

  ‘I could talk to Dr Harding and see if he can help.’

  The sisters linked arms, and for the first time in too long the years fell away. They both loved Birdie. They hugged and cried and were twins again, the sisters who lived by the river and who spoke another language nobody else could understand. They thought the same thoughts, their eyes filled with the same salty tears. There’s no choice for Birdie, their hearts said. No choice but to give up the child.

  Fourteen

  Vivian didn’t like the heat. Sometimes, at moments like this, when she had just had to deal with the second infestation of ants in the kitchen in a week, she thought she’d like to move to one of those Nordic countries where it snowed a lot. It was the first week in August and the heat was unbearable. She took a handkerchief and wiped a small trickle of perspiration from her brow. She adjusted her hairnet and put on her new straw hat bought for the occasion. She pulled on her gloves and explained to Matilda once again how she must put down salt around the doorway to stop the ants.

  She stepped outside and, yes, there was the taxi coming up the cobbled road.

  On the back seat, Vivian took off her hat and cradled it in her hands. It was a hat for a much younger woman. White Italian straw with red silk fuchsias around the brim. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that the shop assistant had made a fool of her. Would Mrs Williams think badly of her if she turned up hatless? It had been expensive too. She would give it to Matilda, she decided. And yet the hat was rather modern for Matilda. Perhaps Birdie might like it.

  Mrs Williams was going to adopt Birdie’s baby. Vivian had sent Nellie a telegram to say Bernard Harding had found a couple to adopt the child when it was born. Right now, Birdie would be getting a train. Everything had been arranged as quickly as possible. In just two weeks, she reflected, so much had been achieved. Her back ached and her ankles were swollen by the heat, but she sat up straight, ignoring the desire to kick off her shoes and stretch her toes, content to endure her suffering, bolstered by the certainty of her mission.

  Mrs Williams lived in a big house which sat in a slight valley. As the taxi rounded the higher country lanes, dipping down to a long gravel driveway, Vivian sat back in her seat and admired the property. It was a splendid-looking house. The lawns were mown and wide. There was a red-brick walled garden with honeysuckle and Russian vine scrambling over it. Inside the walled garden there would be espaliered fruit trees and lines of soft fruit. Raspberry canes and gooseberries. A beloved child could pick all that it wanted, choosing only the best, the softest.

  Mrs Williams was a plain-looking woman. Vivian judged her to be in her late twenties. She wore a green day dress made of a soft cotton. Her brown hair was tied back loosely in a velvet bow. Vivian followed her into the hallway, the sound of their heels clicking on the polished floor. The parquet shone, though the woman immediately apologized for the scratches on it. The house had been rather badly damaged during the Great War, she explained. It had been requisitioned as a hospital. If you cared to look, there were men’s names scratched into the wooden panels and etched on windows. People always wanted to leave a trace of themselves everywhere they went, she supposed.

  A wide sweeping staircase led the eye upwards, and Vivian knew she was being allowed a moment to take in the size of the entrance hall; that Mrs Williams, when she apologized for the state of her home, was also drawing Vivian’s attention to the grandeur of it all.

  ‘Come on through to the drawing room, Mrs Stewart. Would you like tea? I’m afraid it’s just us today. My husband is at work and Mrs … well, the woman who comes in from the village is not here today. Go on through and I’ll be with you in a moment.’

  The living room was a delight, a cool, elegant room with a white marble fireplace and a large gold-framed mirror hanging over it. Two sofas faced each other across the room, upholstered in a floral glazed cotton. A vase of flowers glowed in the hazy light, a generous display of blue and pink delphiniums and lupins. Some letters were under the white china vase. Vivian glanced at them. On a slip of blue-lined paper, poking out from an opened envelope, she read the name ‘Dorothy’.

  Mrs Williams brought a tray of tea in and lit a cigarette.

  ‘So now,’ she said, and gave a little shrug of her shoulders. ‘When do you think … that is, the baby, when do you think we might …’

  Vivian cleared her throat.

  ‘We estimate February or late January, though one can never be sure of these things. I cannot say exactly. Before then, I suggest you stay indoors as much as possible. Make sure you tell your friends that you are resting because the doctor insists on it. Perhaps you could go away for a while? Somewhere where nobody knows you?’

  ‘I will do that. You’re so very kind. And I must tell you I am not Mrs Williams. That is my maiden name. My husband thought I shouldn’t give you my married name.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter,’ said Vivian. ‘All this is confidential, after all. What matters is that you have my name. Mrs Vivian Stewart, as I said earlier. Here …’ She produced a white card. ‘This is my address should you ever need to find me.’

  ‘Mrs Stewart, thank you. I’m so glad this is all going to be handled with discretion. Can I ask about the birth certificate? My husband wants to know what will happen with that. Nobody must ever know the child is adopted,
you see. My husband will not take the child unless that is the case. He’s worried about the parents. They might be, I’m sorry to be so blunt, but they might be worthless sorts. You do hear of people being blackmailed over this kind of thing. At least my husband tells me he does. As a lawyer he tends to see the grim side of life.’

  ‘A lot of new parents are worried about this kind of thing, my dear,’ said Vivian. ‘Dr Harding will look after all the details. He will make sure the birth mother does not feature on any adoption papers. The mother will sign a paper for the court, but she won’t see your name on the paper. The court keeps an original copy of the birth certificate, and you get one which names you both as the parents. After that the baby is yours.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  Vivian nodded.

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘It’s sudden, you see. My husband and I, we’ve been trying for so long and now it’s really happening I wish I could meet her, the mother. I wish I could tell her how grateful I am.’

  Vivian was exhausted by the hope this woman poured upon her. She reached for her cup of tea and took a sip. Her hand shook and she could feel a headache coming on. ‘I happen to know the mother is a most lovely young woman,’ she said. ‘I’m sure she’s grateful to you too.’

  On the way home, Vivian thought of the large framed oil paintings hanging on the walls. Men in uniform, and women standing with children or sleek dogs at their feet. Mrs Williams had said she hated the paintings. That they were too serious. She wanted to hang something more colourful on the walls – landscapes, or perhaps some modern abstract paintings. But she had inherited the portraits with the house and she didn’t feel she had the right to take them down.

  The portraits stayed with Vivian. The richness of the colours. The way the people had posed, straight-backed. Full of ownership and entitlement. She could not stop thinking of a relative of hers joining them. She thought of her own baby. The memory of her was always there, close to the surface. Josephine would have been twenty-five years old now. She’d have likely been married with children of her own. But what kind of life would she have had as the daughter of an unmarried woman? Vivian hoped Birdie, when the time came, would understand what a wonderful chance in life she was giving her baby. It would be different for Birdie. She would know her baby was loved and cared for. Vivian would have given her own darling baby up for adoption without a second thought if somebody could have offered her that.