Spilt Milk

by Amanda Hodgkinson

The white-painted Georgian house he lived in would suit her well. Marriage to the doctor was to be a consolation for the loss of Joe and her daughter, a prize for the years spent being a respectable widow, doing charity work and helping others.

  By the time they were nearly back at the promenade and awkwardly trying to dust the sand off their feet, Vivian had changed her mind. Bernard hopped about on one foot, trying to get grains of sand from between his toes. He could have asked for her arm or leaned against her, but instead he swayed around on the beach like a drunk, falling from one foot to the other. She began to laugh. Bernard Harding frowned at her, his polished brogues in his hand slightly down at heel, his darned socks balled up in one of them.

  ‘I can’t marry you,’ she said suddenly. ‘I’m sorry, Bernard. I am sure I sound very foolish, but I want to marry for love and I don’t love you.’

  The wind was blowing hard across the sea and it snatched Bernard’s trilby off his head, throwing it onto the beach below, where it skipped and rolled into the waves. He left his shoes with her and stamped across the sands to retrieve the hat from the water.

  ‘What is this about?’ he asked when he returned, his face mottled red by the exertion of his trek down to the sea and back.

  ‘Do you love me, Bernard?’

  ‘Vivian, what a strange question.’ He dusted sand off the brim of his hat. ‘At our age, don’t you think love is a little unlikely?’

  Maybe it was the wind chasing around her skirts that made her feel frivolous, but she had to fight a strong impulse not to grab his blessed trilby and throw it back in the sea.

  Later, in the steamy, glass-fronted conservatory of a tea room, she explained again. ‘My sister married for love. Twice. I realized just now that I do not want to marry for convenience. I want love. If not, I prefer to remain single.’

  Poor Bernard. He’d looked so shocked. As if he thought she had gone mad! And yet she felt very sane.

  ‘I wonder if you are quite all right,’ said Bernard as she left that afternoon. He had obviously been thinking a lot about their conversation. She saw it in his face. Heard it in his voice, that doctor’s voice he put on, the one full of professional certainty that crept in when he was unsure of a situation.

  ‘You will agree with me that over the years you have proved yourself a rather anxious female, Vivian. Let me just warn you. If you ever do find love, as you put it, don’t think that it will come without risk. You are in your fifties, my dear. We know each other so well. We are fair companions, aren’t we? If you want romantic love, I suggest you buy yourself some novels or go to the cinema and find it there.’

  ‘And if you want a housekeeper, Bernard,’ Vivian replied, surprised by the clarity of her words, ‘I suggest you put an advertisement in the Lady.’

  Vivian took her wedding dress out of the wardrobe. It was ivory satin with rows of satin-covered buttons. It had been a rather old-fashioned gown, even back then, but what she had wanted. Dear Frank had given her everything she desired except for a child. In retrospect, he had been what some women called a mummy’s boy. Kind, but always needing to be the centre of attention. He’d wanted to be the child, she supposed. That’s why he had never wanted to be a parent. Vivian lay the heavy dress down on the bed. The rippling satin spread across the counterpane, a creamy lake of fabric the colour of spilt milk. No use crying over it, either, she thought. You couldn’t get the time back once it was gone. She held the dress up to her. It would still fit. She had kept her figure very well over the years. If Matilda wasn’t such a big-hipped girl, she would offer the dress to her to wear when she married Charles Bell. Perhaps she still might. They could unpick it and make something new out of it. All that day, Vivian went about her chores with a sense of calm.

  Joan got Birdie a job within days. She came back from work with a bottle of red wine in her handbag, a present from her lover. She’d seen a sign for a kitchen hand at a tea shop down the street. The pay was low, just over seventeen shillings a week. She knew Birdie couldn’t get somewhere to live and afford to eat on that kind of wage, but it was a start and they’d throw in a daily dinner and a cup of afternoon tea.

  ‘We will keep this wine for when you get a promotion to waitress and we can afford to buy cream cakes for tea,’ Joan said, putting the bottle under the bed.

  They cooked meals on a small gas stove in the middle of the room and listened to big bands on the wireless every night at 10.30, watching the night sky from the window.

  By October, the cold weather had set in and the sky was lit up by guns and searchlights. The city stank of charred buildings and broken sewers. Bombed streets were roped off and houses ripped apart; here and there walls remained, wallpaper intact, mirrors still hanging on them, piles of brick rubble full of broken furniture. Birdie discovered the pub had been bombed. Her childhood home had disappeared into a mountain of rubble and fire-damaged walls. She climbed over the bricks and piles of debris and found that the elder tree was still alive in the backyard. She took a branch of it back to the flat, telling Joan that Mother had always said it was a good plant for keeping flies off food. She had forgotten how its leaves smelled like cat’s piss. Birdie had to throw it away. Joan made tea. Losing your home was a terrible thing, Joan said.

  Coming back from work, Birdie met the postman, who put two letters in her hand. They were both postmarked weeks earlier. He was sorry they had taken so long to arrive.

  She went inside and opened them. One was from her aunt Vivian, saying Matilda had eloped with a soldier and married him. His name was Colin Hume. He was one of the soldiers she had billeted in the summer. Did Birdie remember him? Poor Charles Bell had been let down horribly. Birdie couldn’t help but feel glad. It was selfish of her, but she had always been worried that Matilda might tell Charles why she had been staying with her aunt. That she might tell the sorry story of Birdie Farr and her adopted baby. She couldn’t bear the thought of Charles knowing that about her.

  She sat down on the bed and opened the other letter. It was from her mother. She and George wouldn’t risk coming to London, so it was up to Birdie to find some time to come and see them. Aunt Lydia’s husband, Walter, had gone off with a neighbour’s wife. Apparently they’d been having an affair for years. Nellie said Lydia was dealing with it all quite well now it was in the open. Malcolm had been to see them on leave. He had met a girl and married her. She was the daughter of a German woman and an Englishman. Lydia did not like the girl at all, but then Lydia didn’t like anybody, did she? If Lydia could just stop judging others, she’d be a happier woman. Did Birdie remember Peter, Roger’s friend? Now that was a sad story. He had been serving as a telegraphist on a warship. The ship had been sunk by gunfire in Norway.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I thought you knew,’ said Joan when Birdie read her the letter. ‘Malcolm told me. It happened this summer. Actually, I saw a little bit of Malcolm after you left. We went dancing a few times.’

  ‘Let’s get drunk,’ said Birdie, folding the letters up and reaching under the bed for the wine bottle Joan had put there when she’d first arrived. Peter had died never knowing he had a daughter. It felt so final. She had lost two strangers – because that was what they both were, Peter and her child. She had known them both better than anybody in her life, and yet had not had any time to know them at all. Both of them had touched her for ever, and now they were gone.

  ‘Did you like him very much?’ asked Joan gently when Birdie began to cry. ‘I didn’t know you knew him like that. Birdie, has something happened to you? You’re different since you went away. Ghostly somehow. You cry so easily. Maybe it’s this bloody war, but it’s hard to know what you’re thinking half the time.’

  Birdie shook her head. Was she ghostly? She pressed a hand to her chest. Certainly she felt vague and her heart was a dull thing, sluggish and slow under her fingers.

  ‘You’re right. I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s the war. It wears down my nerves. I keep thinking I’ll be walking along the street and a bomb will fall on m
y head.’

  She took a swig of wine and managed a half-hearted smile.

  ‘Let’s get drunk,’ she said again. ‘Absolutely bloody drunk.’

  In January, Joan declared 1941 would be the year of the bachelor girl. Her married lover had finished with her.

  ‘Good riddance,’ she said, waving her cigarette at Birdie for emphasis as she crouched over the gas stove, cooking cabbage and potato in a saucepan.

  She brought home a book entitled Live Alone and Like It. She and Birdie read chapters together on etiquette for the lone female and how to live a successful life without a man. They told each other things would be all right. Friendship was what mattered. Birdie hoped that was true. She still felt empty inside. When she saw small children with their mothers, Birdie turned away from them. And yet she saw clearly she could never have brought a child up alone. She could barely afford to feed herself. She had to accept her daughter was better off without her.

  Then Joan’s married man turned up with a bouquet of flowers and Joan forgave him. Birdie got her coat and went walking alone.

  ‘Please don’t call him my married man,’ said Joan when she got back. ‘His name is Michael.’

  Birdie saw a notice for a waitress in a hotel. The job came with accommodation. A tall man with a face as low-looking as the weather offered her the position. She bought a second-hand pair of flat lace-up shoes and, with Joan’s dressmaking scissors, cut her hair short. Then she sent off letters to her mother and her aunt giving them her new address. Joan made a last supper for them both. She said it was for the best really. She hoped there would be no hard feelings between them.

  Charles folded the newspaper shut. If a bomb or a stray bullet didn’t actually kill you, then reading about the war just might make you give up the ghost. Everywhere was doom and gloom. Take this London hotel he was in. There was no hot water for a bath, and when he’d asked about it he’d been treated like an enemy spy trying to deplete the nation’s riches. He’d not been to London in years. Not since his brothers and his father went to fight in the first war and he and his mother had travelled to see them off on the train to France. He’d been a child then and overwhelmed by the city. He was not much changed. The city still felt alien. His eyes were too accustomed to the colour green. All these grey buildings, the dark paved roads, the ceaseless traffic, the jostling crowds. He was a man who liked hay meadows and all the secret moments of the countryside. Seeing a kingfisher fly over the river, its flash of blue so vivid it shocked his heart. That was worth living for. The earth under his feet was what mattered to him. His fields and his animals. He’d been a child who had liked roaming across the fields more than the streets of the city he’d grown up in.

  His heart lurched at the sight of Birdie coming into the room. Her neat black dress and white collar suited her. Her red lipstick made her look like a film star playing the role of maid. Her legs were slender, and the darned stockings she wore brought out a tenderness in him. He worried she might not be right for a farmer’s wife. He tried to imagine her in the cow barns before dawn, helping milk the cows. Would she laugh at his suggestion that she give up her city life?

  He had come to London on an impulse. He’d been walking his fields in icy rain, carrying hay to the sheep out on the high meadows. The rain slanted sideways and dripped down his neck. He pulled his hat down and walked on across his fields, carrying the bale of hay across his shoulders. Under an oak tree, noisy with the shake and pelt of rain, he dropped the hay bale and leaned against the tree in the lee of the wind. The tree creaked. The sky was dark and low. The farmhouse in the distance was all but gone in the sweeping rain clouds. He remembered the summer and, as he often did, he thought of Birdie Farr, her red-gold hair catching the sun, standing in a green dress by the river, getting ready to go to the village dance.

  He split the hay bale and left it for the sheep to come and find themselves.

  In his kitchen, a recent letter from Vivian Stewart was on the table. Matilda had eloped with a soldier and moved to Manchester. Mrs Stewart wanted him to know how sorry she was. She hoped he would visit her again soon.

  He was embarrassed by what had happened with Matilda. There had been some vague talk of marriage and he had not known how to back out of it all. He was relieved Matilda had found herself a husband.

  He told Connie Smith, Christopher’s fiancée, when she called by to offer him an apple pie made from some of the apples from his orchard. She’d known Matilda wasn’t the woman for him. ‘That other one. The Londoner. The one with too much red lipstick. She liked you.’

  Why hadn’t he spoken to Birdie about how he felt when he had the chance? He made tea and sat warming himself by the stove, watching the dog sleeping at his feet, its legs moving rapidly, running away from its dreams.

  When he picked up a farming magazine and saw an advertisement for a public lecture in London about the use of new artificial fertilizers and the possible increase in yield for cereal crops, he had decided to go and see Birdie.

  And now Charles could not take his eyes off her. She moved around the dining room, smiling politely at the other diners, and as she neared his table he straightened his tie and swallowed hard, preparing to speak.

  ‘Miss Farr?’ he said, and she turned to the sound of her name.

  ‘Charles? What on earth are you doing here?’

  She had lipstick smudges on her teeth. Her face was tired-looking, her grey eyes questioning. His hand trembled a little when he held it out to her. She was such a pretty woman. If he had been a different kind of man, he would have kissed the back of her hand as she placed it in his.

  ‘I’m attending a farming lecture,’ he said, shaking hands with her and letting go reluctantly. ‘Not exactly the best fun, but interesting enough for me.’

  ‘But here? This hotel?’

  ‘I saw your aunt. She said you were here. I had to stay in a hotel, so I booked this one. I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘No, no, I don’t mind. Of course not. I’m glad to see you. How are you?’

  ‘Things are all right. The government are building an airfield nearby and ruining the roads with their heavy machinery, but other than that I have no news except that Matilda is married. Not to me. To a man named Colin.’ He looked into her grey eyes. ‘I came to see you, Birdie. You left so quickly. I never got a chance to say goodbye.’

  He rearranged the knife and fork on the table and smoothed the tablecloth with his broad palm.

  ‘I’m no good at this kind of thing, but I mean, look, I’m steady. Probably too steady. Boring, most likely. I’m trustworthy. I work too hard and I’ve two left feet when it comes to dancing. I lost my brothers in the Great War. I have very little feeling of patriotism, and I don’t think war is a good or a noble thing. I don’t want to fight for my country. If that makes me a coward, so be it. I just want to run my farm and live a quiet life and have a wife and maybe some children.

  ‘My mother died of cancer. My father killed himself shortly afterwards. He went under a train and everybody said it was an accident, but I don’t believe it was. I was a bank clerk, but I had always wanted to work the land. I sold my parents’ home and bought some farmland at auction. It was a dream of mine. I’ve been on my own a long time, Birdie, and I didn’t mind that until I met you. I just want to be straight about this. I want you to know everything about me, and, well, that’s all there is to know.’

  ‘Miss Farr?’ The head waiter came over, crossing the room in long strides. ‘Any problems here, sir?’

  ‘Everything is fine,’ said Charles, trying to read the look on Birdie’s face, realizing he had talked too much. ‘I was asking the waitress if she knew the best route to the Imperial College.’

  ‘I can get you a map, sir. Miss Farr, I think there are other tables to serve,’ said the head waiter, and Birdie turned so abruptly, moving away to attend to other tables, that Charles did not get a chance to see what effect his words might have had.

  The head waiter watched Birdie all morn
ing. Every time she stopped work, he had another job for her to do. She put on a white apron over her black uniform, took a broom, some dusters and a pot of wax polish, and went into the dining room to clean. In the corner of the room, the head waiter was seated, a big pile of cutlery in front of him. He said he was doing a stock inventory because he was sure somebody was stealing the knives and forks.

  She left him to it and swept the brown parquet floors, working from the corner nearest the door to the kitchens across to the big bay windows that looked out on the grey street. Rain hit the windows and condensation formed on them. Birdie stopped sweeping and wiped her sleeve across the glass, looking out on brick buildings and cars and buses. She was still going over what Charles had said. Still getting over the shock of seeing him again. She finished sweeping and cleared away the dust and crumbs into a dustpan. As she emptied it into the ash bucket by the chimney, the double doors to the dining room opened.

  Charles stood in the doorway. His hair was wet from the rain, and it curled and sprang up around his ears even as he pressed a hand to it, trying to make it lie flat.

  Birdie looked over her shoulder. She could see the head waiter at the far end of the room. He was dozing with his legs stretched out in front of him. Charles leaned against the wall, his arms folded.

  She would certainly lose her job if she stopped work to talk to him. She’d already had a warning. She decided to ignore him. She spread wax over wood and polished the furniture, her body swaying, her arm making wide arcs, rubbing back and forth. Right now the only thing that made sense was the shine coming up off the wooden tables. She moved quickly, turning chairs upside down and stacking them, dusting them as she went, thinking back to the farm, a world she often returned to in her head. She remembered the dark kitchen with the dogs sleeping under the table, a sound of creaking beams, clouds of moths dancing in the warm night air.

  The tables in the dining room were glassy like mirrors; sweat was stinging her eyes. She stopped and stood, hands on hips, her breath coming in short gasps.