The lawns were smooth and striped, and a rose arbour covered in yellow blooms gave the place an elegant look. Ella came pelting across the grass, her smocked dress billowing, James not far behind her.
‘Daddy’s angry,’ announced James grandly in his high-pitched three-year-old’s voice. Norman came across the lawn, yelling that the little menaces had pulled all the books off the bookshelves. Why could Kathleen not keep an eye on them?
‘I’m going out,’ he said, as if the horror of having children was forcing him from his own home. He was off to the Conservative club in town to get away from this bloody madhouse. He would have drinks with a couple of the chaps and wouldn’t be home until late.
Kathleen began deadheading a red geranium in a terracotta pot, with quick deft pinches, putting the papery petals in her apron pocket.
‘I should go,’ said Connie, getting up.
‘You don’t have to.’
‘Me too,’ said Birdie.
‘I can’t believe you are deserting me,’ said Kathleen crossly. ‘Well, never mind. At least take some jars of jam with you.’
They went into the kitchen, and with jars of jam in their hands Kathleen insisted they take a look at what the children had done.
‘Norman says I have let myself go since I had James,’ she said, pushing open the door to the study. On the floor were piles of books and she began to pick them up. ‘I know I should make more of an effort, but what’s the point? If I spend my days polishing up my good points, wearing a dress and doing my hair, then it just makes me feel worse when he looks at other women. And he does. I can’t see why I should lie to protect him. At least in my jodhpurs and old sweater I can still pretend that if I made an effort, it might change him. For heaven’s sake, he actually told me the other day that I should dress Ella better. You know, ribbons in her hair, like a dolly.’
‘I want a ribbon,’ said Ella loudly. ‘I want a new dolly and a ribbon.’
James crept round Birdie’s legs and ran to his mother.
‘Naughty!’ he yelled, kicking a book.
‘Exactly,’ said Kathleen. ‘What am I to do with you?’
‘Throw us in the river and drown us like kittens!’ yelled Ella, and Kathleen scooped her daughter into her arms.
‘Ding dong bell,’ she sang, turning in circles with her children. Birdie and Connie began to laugh too, all of them shaking off the embarrassment they had felt over Norman’s anger. The women cleared up the books and the children sang, ‘Ding dong bell, pussy’s in the well,’ over and over. Birdie sang with them, and then Kathleen insisted she sit at the piano, a mahogany baby grand in the drawing room, and play for them.
Birdie played nursery rhymes she had learned as a girl, hitting a few wrong notes every now and then, making a joke of it as her uncle had done whenever she made mistakes. ‘You’re a natural,’ George had said, sat beside her at the pub’s upright piano, teaching her to play ‘Little Boy Blue’. She’d been five years old. Her mother and father had come into the bar to listen to her.
‘Don’t go,’ Ella said to Birdie at the back door, as she left. The child’s face was flushed from dancing.
‘I’ll come again,’ said Birdie, smiling. She touched the child’s head. ‘And when I do, I’ll bring you a present. What would you like?’
The girl giggled. ‘I don’t know. I’ll ask Mummy.’
‘I tell you what,’ said Birdie. ‘I’ll bring you a red velvet ribbon for your hair.’
How nice it was to see the pleasure on the child’s face.
There was a letter waiting for Birdie when she got home. She put it on the mantelpiece and started peeling potatoes for the evening meal. After tea, she washed Framsden in the kitchen sink, sitting him naked on the draining board with his feet in a tub of warm water.
‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag,’ she sang as she dried him and dressed him in pyjamas. Sometimes she wondered at her younger self, the girl who had been so sure she would be a singer in a jazz band. What a silly dream that had been. She bent to do up his buttons and Framsden wriggled away from her, laughing and giggling. She chased him up the stairs to his bedroom, still singing to him, and he bounded onto his bed. It was Rupert Bear at the moment. That’s all he wanted, so the book was got out and the story read. She kissed him on the forehead and tucked him in.
Afterwards she sat on the top stair of the landing and opened the letter. It was from Aunt Lydia, who was in a home for the aged these days.
I will tell you straight, Birdie. Your father is not my brother Henry. It is George. You have a right to know. My husband deceived me for years and now my son, my only remaining son, has put me away in this place where they serve salt on the porridge in the mornings. I ask for cream and they pretend not to hear me. I am lonely and your mother, who visits twice a week, does not stay long. Do not tell her I wrote to you. I am afraid she and Malcolm would be angry with me. I write because I know how well you and Roger got along. He always thought you should know the truth.
Birdie joined Charles on the verandah and shared a cigarette with him. Slowly the evening sky deepened to black. The fences and trees turned to charcoal silhouettes, smudged and vague, finally disappearing into a uniform darkness. The poplars rustled and shook down by the river. She thought of her mother and her aunt living here. Of how quiet their lives must have been. She and Roger had never been friends. Where did Aunt Lydia get that idea from?
‘Kathleen has sacked her nanny,’ she said. ‘I’ve offered to have the children for her.’
‘I heard Norman had a bit of a liking for the girl.’
‘The nanny?’
‘Yes. Fool of a man.’ Charles swung the kitchen door open and they went inside.
‘Who was your letter from?’
‘Aunt Lydia.’ She had thrown the letter away. ‘It was nothing. I think she’s gone a bit funny in the head.’
In bed, Birdie lay curled against Charles’s back. Downstairs, the jars of jam gleamed in the cupboard. They were perfect, as perfect as Kathleen’s life, if you didn’t know her. The clock in the room below chimed the hour. Outside, the wind rattled the windows. Birdie imagined the river, its dark waters winding past the house.
She would not talk of the letter to Charles. It was too shameful. Her mother and George betraying her poor father, all under the same roof. For the sake of her father, she would keep this secret.
Pa had been a difficult man, but he had not deserved this. How she had loved him! As a child she had been moved to tears by her father’s regular tantrums of melancholy, his cheeks red as apples, the dreadful scars all livid and damp. His heavy eyes had reminded her of Jesus’s martyred expression in her Sunday-school colour-illustrated Bible. Her young heart had been swollen with feeling for him. A man crying? Wasn’t that the worst thing a child could see? Tears were only for women and babies, surely. Her father’s misery had a religious purity to it that she had worshipped. She had admired his suffering. When she got older, a distaste for his tears and melodrama crept into her feelings. She distanced herself from him, scenting only male weakness where before she had seen strength. Now, in light of Aunt Lydia’s letter, she felt wounded and angry on her father’s behalf.
She would shut her mother and George out of her life. They were liars. She did not need them.
Charles turned over and kissed her. She pulled him to her. Maybe this would be the time she conceived. Another baby was what she wanted. A daughter to replace the one she had given up. She didn’t need her mother or her uncle. Birdie threw herself into lovemaking with a forcefulness that surprised them both.
Twenty
Vivian served teas and scones to an afternoon crowd in the dining room of her guest house. Her feet ached, and she thought she could do with a cup of something herself. Through the steamed-up windows she could see it was still raining outside. A silvery, wet kind of day that was bound to bring more customers in. She was putting down a tray of tea things when she saw Matilda Dunn – Vivian could never remember her
married name – standing by the door. She had a baby in her arms, wearing a little wool jacket with a pointed hood. Three boys in shorts stood beside her. They all looked like Colin: freckled, ginger hair, watery blue eyes. Their macintoshes were dark with rain, and their bare legs mottled red from the cold.
‘I’ve left him,’ said Matilda.
‘Go on into the kitchen,’ Vivian told her, shooing them down the hall. ‘Get the boys something to eat. You know where everything is.’
Vivian came back into the kitchen after she’d closed up for the day and found the boys sitting at the table eating bread and jam, Matilda feeding the baby by the stove. Around them it looked like sale day at Woolworths. There was a great heap of white and blue crockery by the sink, and cups and saucers littered the table.
‘I’ll have a bit of a clear-up for you,’ said Matilda. ‘Don’t you have a maid any more?’
‘Not for a while, no. I must admit, I get behind with the washing-up on rainy days. That’s when I am always at my busiest with customers.’
‘It’ll be like old times,’ said Matilda, getting up. ‘I’ll have this place looking shipshape in no time. Andrew? Take your brother.’
Andrew scraped his chair back and got to his feet, taking the baby with the suffering air of someone being asked to put their arms in a straitjacket.
Vivian watched Matilda bustling around the kitchen. Over the years, quite a few women had stayed with her and helped out in the kitchen in return for their keep. The last, a sharp-eyed girl called Minnie, a peroxide blonde with a tatty fur coat, six months pregnant and incapable of making toast without burning it, had left in the night, taking a whole drawerful of Vivian’s satin bloomers and the petty-cash tin. She’d had the locks changed after the girl left. She might be soft-hearted, but she wasn’t stupid.
For a long time now, since she had lost contact with Dr Harding, Vivian had been helping women. Ordinary women. Most of them were not like Minnie. Most were grateful to have somewhere safe to stay. She wasn’t sure how the word had got around, but somehow her guest house had become known as a place of shelter. Women came to her with infants in tow. Some came with suitcases. Others appeared empty-handed, shivering at her door, coatless, hatless, looking anxiously over their shoulders. The only rule was that no men were allowed.
She offered them a room for a few days or a few weeks, until they were ready to move on. If the women were frightened of being seen, then they worked in the kitchen. If not, they put on a white apron and a white mob cap and helped in the tea room.
Some left without saying goodbye. They were the ones who arrived coatless. They moved like eels in deep water, slipping from one shadowy place to the next. One minute they were there, the next they had gone, leaving a small pile of coins on the table or a stack of clean ironing on the ironing board in thanks. They were the ones Vivian thought about the longest. The ones who wanted to be invisible. They made her heart ache most, reminding her of herself as a young woman, the intense fear she had experienced, giving birth alone.
‘And Birdie?’ asked Matilda. ‘How’s she getting on? I always knew Charles Bell had a thing for her.’
There was still a trace of jealousy in her voice. Who could blame her? It had been clear that Charles had fallen in love with Birdie the first day he saw her. Matilda had not been blind to that. Was that why she had married Colin? Simply because he had wanted her and Charles had not?
‘Birdie is very well. Her son, Framsden, is a lovely boy.’
‘Just the one? That’s sensible. Lucky her. Colin only has to look at me and another baby comes along. I s’pose you see a lot of Birdie?’
Vivian remembered that Matilda knew about Birdie’s adopted baby. She hoped she wouldn’t mention it.
‘Not as often as I’d like to. There’s no time for anything these days.’
They listened to the boys running about upstairs, slamming doors, jumping on the beds, yelling and whooping.
Matilda said she’d go and stop them. Vivian shook her head. They were just being boys. Let them play. What harm could they do?
‘Quite a lot,’ said Matilda, sighing. ‘You’re lucky you never had kids, Mrs Stewart. Luckier than you can imagine.’
She called the boys downstairs to go and see if her father was home yet.
Matilda’s father, Stan, had known Mrs Stewart on and off for years. It had always seemed to him a tragedy that she had never remarried after her husband’s death at the end of the first war. Women like Mrs Stewart, with a big house and ladylike manners, didn’t usually stay widows for long. Stan too was on his own. He’d retired from his job as a lathe worker and did odd jobs and window cleaning to earn himself beer money these days.
‘You go and see her, Dad,’ urged Matilda. ‘That house is falling down round her ears. She needs a man about the place.’
He got a haircut at the barber’s, polished his work boots and put on a suit and tie. Then he went to ask if the widow needed a hand around the place.
She paid him to turn the vegetable gardens back into lawns and to fix a leaking tap. There was years of leaf mould in the gutters, and he cleaned them out and scrubbed the green-stained wall at the back of the house where the water butts overflowed and silvery mosquito larvae flourished. He found it romantic, this neglected old house, the lonely lady within it, his own capacity to help her. Vivian Stewart’s need of him was welcome. The house needed him too.
‘Would you like to take a drive in the country?’ she asked him one morning. It was raining heavily. They stood in the garage watching a blackbird taking a bath in a puddle on the bright green lawn. Vivian wore a grey dress with a full skirt, a pattern of red cherries at the hem and the cuffs. Her figure was trim for a woman of her age. He tried to imagine her as a young girl. He thought she must have been beautiful once. Water ran noisily through the cleaned gutters. He said he had planned to work in the garden. She handed him her car keys, suggesting he weed the flower beds on a drier day.
The tree-lined driveway was just as Vivian remembered it. A sweeping line of lime trees either side of a rutted gravel driveway leading to the big red-brick house. A chain was hung across the entrance, and she got out and saw it was padlocked. The driveway was at least half a mile long. They set off on foot. The rain had eased off, and clouds chased each other across a damp blue sky. The meadows, grazed by white cattle with black eyes and black-tipped horns, gleamed in the sunlight.
They stopped halfway down the drive and sat on an old wooden bench under a tree. There was a brass plaque on the back of the bench commemorating a Captain Williams of the Suffolk Regiment, ‘14th March 1918, Age 42’.
He’d have been a relative, she supposed.
The house was shut up. A large pile of bricks was outside the front door, along with a few piles of sand and a cement mixer. The green lawns in front of the house were bright with daisies. A yellow rose bloomed over the door. The rose beds had been freshly weeded, and a large concrete car park had been laid to one side of the house.
Stan walked off whistling, peering in the shuttered-up windows. Vivian had no clear understanding of why she had come, except that she needed to see if Birdie’s daughter was still here.
‘It’s going to be a home for the aged,’ said Stan, coming towards her from the other side of the building. ‘There’s some workmen out back. They said the place has been empty for years.’
It was a relief really. What on earth would she have done if the daughter had been the one to open the door?
As they drove away, Stan asked her what she had wanted to find at the house. Vivian didn’t reply. What was it she wanted? Some kind of forgiveness, she supposed. But surely not from the family who had once lived in Hymes Court? She wondered what life might be like now for Birdie’s daughter. What it must have been like to have grown up in that big house. To walk in the footsteps of that old family, thinking she belonged to them, loved by people who had buried all knowledge of her origins.
She looked at Stan. His face was deeply lined. He
limped slightly. He thought he had found a home with her. She recognized waifs and strays very quickly these days. Their watchful ways, their desire to belong somewhere. The patience of their neediness. Stan thought her a good woman. People said it in town too. The generous widow at the old guest house.
Every day she thought about Joe Ferier. Over the years she had developed a pure sense of the power and endurance of love. Stan, she could see, was imagining a kind of love between them. And why not? He was a caring, careful kind of man. But he was not Joe. Perhaps love was not what she desired any more in any case. Forgiveness was surely what she craved. And only Nellie and Birdie could give her that.
Nellie liked the feeling of the beach under her feet. She wore black plimsolls, but they were thin and allowed her to feel like she was barefoot. She began to jog a little and then run. She felt liberated from her age as she took long strides, skipping over shallow creeks of water. Women of her age – she was sixty-three years old now – didn’t run. Her legs were still good though. Long and lean and strong-looking. She had no varicose veins and she put it down to exercise. Her legs were her vanity. She was proud of them.
The tide was an early one, and a hazy mist hung over the beach. She had already lost sight of George, who stood somewhere on the sands waiting for her with a towel, her clothes, a blanket and a flask of hot tea. For several years now this had been their routine. Rising early and going down to the sea.
The sound of the waves was delicious, a rushing and then a great pulling back, like a thirsty giant taking huge gulps of water and then sighing with delight. A foamy wave rushed towards her. Her legs were engulfed up to the knees, the sands pulled and sucked at her feet. She ran on, into the waves, up to her waist, her chest, and then, head down, she dived.
Nellie swam in a concentrated way, out to a buoy that marked a shallow channel for yachts and boats to avoid, and then back to the beach. It would take her forty minutes if she swam without stopping. An hour if she decided to tread water a while.
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