Spilt Milk

by Amanda Hodgkinson

  It was not like river swimming. In a river, fish darted away and birds saw you and took flight. The sea just rolled on and on, taking everything in its embrace. The current ran in different directions, depending on which side of the high tide she was. On an incoming tide, the current ran from west to east, but on an outgoing tide it went the other way. One of the swimming-club members, an ex-navy man, had explained it to her, citing the pull of the moon and how the water in the English Channel was connected to the Atlantic Ocean. ‘Cause and effect,’ he had said. ‘Nothing happens in isolation.’ All she had understood in his talk was that the water was dangerous. You could never trust the sea.

  She swam on. Water got into her goggles and made her eyes sting. Even though she wore a thick black swim cap, the water seeped under it and turned her hair sticky with salt. She had mentioned it to Vivian in a letter, and her sister had written back suggesting beer and an egg massaged into the ends. That had helped a bit. She’d also suggested olive oil. Nellie had got some from the chemist, but it made her hair very thin-looking and was difficult to wash out. She didn’t like her hair much these days in any case.

  Vivian still wrote long letters about her cats, her housekeeping, the latest new cleaning product she was using. Nellie sent postcards with short messages. Joined a swimming club. The Sea Beavers. Not the oldest one there either!

  She’d sent her sister the hagstone recently. It had been sitting on a saucer between the African violets on her windowsill, and George had accidently knocked it out of the window. Nellie found it quite by chance, almost invisible in the grass. She’d been shocked to think she might have lost it for good, and decided to send it to Vivian.

  Vivian’s last letter had thanked her for the stone – she had it safe in her jewellery box. Her main news was that she’d taken Framsden out for tea. Vivian said he was a nice boy and the image of his father. A rather quiet eleven-year-old who was keen on fishing and had a dreamy way about him. Nellie told George, who went out and bought a book on fly fishing to send to the boy.

  Let Birdie get on with her own life. That’s what Nellie told George whenever he expressed sadness over the lack of contact they had with her and Framsden. ‘Do you think Charles doesn’t like us?’ George had asked her once, the high colour in his cheeks intensifying. He had never spoken to Birdie about it directly, and Nellie would have told him not to. She was afraid Birdie might speak about the child she gave up.

  ‘A love child,’ George had called Birdie when she was born. ‘A love child is special.’

  Birdie must remain special in his eyes. Perhaps she should have been honest with him when Birdie had told her she didn’t know the father of the child, but it was too late for confessions now. If this break between mother and daughter was what it took to keep Birdie special in George’s eyes, then that’s how it would be.

  They often visited Malcolm with his two little boys. That made George happy. And Nellie saw Lydia once a month, something George found too difficult himself. He could not bear to see how diminished she had become. She did not recognize anybody from her family these days. She only remembered Roger and became upset if Nellie said he was dead.

  George and Nellie had steady routines. They spent Saturday evenings at their local, a pub where Nellie sat in the snug and had a bottle of milk stout with a couple of old girls. Their next-door neighbour and his wife sometimes went with them. Jakey and Muriel both liked a drink. If George was in the mood and the crowd in the bar was older people – the younger folk tended to want music from the jukebox in the corner – George played the upright piano and they had a singalong like the old days.

  Oh yes, they had plenty to do. The bungalow had a back garden where Nellie kept a couple of hens and a vegetable patch, and she still made jam every summer, though she gave most of it away. She and George liked going to the pictures. They saw a lot of westerns, mostly. And they both liked walking on the beach.

  The buoy was in sight. The water moved differently around it, slapping at its sides as if the big green metal marker was a mosquito that needed smacking away. If she got too close to it, the waves would smack at her too. She trod water and then began her swim back to shore.

  She had been with the swimming club for a year before she decided to leave and swim on her own. She didn’t really like being part of a club. She swam because she could be alone in the water. If she needed company, she had George. She imagined him on the beach, looking at his watch now, expecting to see her.

  The sun was burning off the sea mist and the seafront began to materialize, rows of restaurants and shops and then houses, climbing up the hills, white with red roofs. The castle, on the top of a grassy hill, stood out against the sky. And there on the beach was a figure, waiting.

  She thought of Anna Moats and the charm she had given her to protect her heart. The glass bottle they had floated down the river. A charm to shut her heart up tight like a walnut in its shell. Nellie had tried hard to keep that woody shell closed all her life and had never quite succeeded.

  ‘Nellie!’ called George as she strode out of the water. He looked relieved to see her. ‘You’re ten minutes over time, love! I thought a sea monster had got hold of you.’

  He rubbed her shoulders with the towel. She pulled her bathing cap off and her hair stuck out stiffly.

  ‘The only monster out there is me,’ she said cheerfully.

  The summer of 1954 was hot and humid, and Vivian and Stan drove to the East Anglian coast every Sunday, looking for sea breezes and freshness away from the heat of town. Down on the pebble beach, Stan took off his shoes and rolled his trouser legs up. He paddled in the waves and did a knock-kneed dance in the shallows. Vivian stood on the pavement above the beach, her orange fox-fur collar flapping in the breeze. She held her hat with one hand to stop it blowing away and watched Stan, sunlight warming her face, laughing at his antics.

  In the afternoon they sat in striped deckchairs, looking at the sea and the families on the beach, small children running to and fro, seagulls circling in the thermals. The blue sky was full of wispy white clouds.

  On the changing tide, they walked to the harbour and saw the shrimp boats coming in, the shrimps being sorted and boiled up on deck. A seaplane landed on the water, and a crowd gathered to watch it. Barefoot young women in colourful cotton dresses walked by, the sea breeze blowing their long hair, pressing their full skirts against their legs. Vivian remarked on the brightness of the light. The wide skies. She might like to live by the sea one day.

  ‘Would you ever consider marrying again?’ asked Stan.

  She pretended not to hear him, pointing out instead the black cormorants on the rocks.

  Why would she marry again? At sixty-four she was far too old to hope for children now. Her body had ceased to be fertile a long time ago, and thankfully she had lost the awful longing for a baby that had plagued her younger years. But her sense of romance had not diminished. She knew she was a foolish old woman, but all her life she had been waiting for Joe Ferier to return. That hope was as woven into her body as the wrinkles and lines that etched her face now. She had been the mother of his child. She’d had his daughter. She considered herself his wife.

  The weeks passed pleasantly with Stan. He put a Formica breakfast bar in the kitchen for her, and a new metal sink. In the evenings they tended to stay in their own rooms. Stan often listened to the wireless and she heard it drifting through the house, the distant sound of it like a conversation going on. Several times she stood at the bottom of the stairs listening, thinking perhaps Stan had come back from the pub and brought people with him.

  Vivian climbed the stairs, looking in on the bathroom. There were his shaving brushes and razors. He’d left a towel on the floor. She picked it up and folded it over the bath. Then she changed her mind and dropped it on the floor. She would not look after him. She was not his wife. She would not pick up after him.

  ‘Vivian?’ Stan stood at the door to his room. He wore black trousers and a white vest, his braces hangi
ng around his hips. He looked like he had been sleeping. He opened the door wider. ‘About what I said. Marriage? I meant it. I swear you’ve got an old man feeling like a young ’un again.’

  ‘Oh, Stan, no,’ she said. The house creaked. The clock in the hall downstairs struck the hour. She saw the anxiety in his eyes. ‘I was in love once, and perhaps that was enough for me.’

  ‘I reckon you’re the lucky one then,’ he said, leaning against the doorpost, his face earnest and sad. ‘I was too busy having a good time to think about love. And now here I am, finally found the girl of my dreams, and I’m a couple of decades too late.’

  They spent hours in the garden together that summer. They put in new flower beds and Stan pruned the apple tree and planted raspberry canes, wanting to taste the raspberry blancmange Vivian had told him she used to make as a young woman in the cottage by the river.

  When she looked up from weeding one day, catching sight of him putting down slug pellets, she felt dizzy with confusion, imagining not this town garden with its high brick wall and the sound of traffic beyond it, but a garden lost in time. A childhood miles from here with Rose, tall and lanky as a man, bent over, picking pea pods, and a brown-haired girl, stubborn, big-hearted Nellie, working beside her. She felt old and tearful suddenly. Why had she wasted all her years on a man she would never see again?

  She’d imagined a life for Joe Ferier. She had envisaged him travelling the world, drawing, painting, that swaggering walk of his, crossing continents and oceans. Nobody sensible spent their life missing a man, did they? Yet she had, and she found solace in this. She could not change how she felt.

  ‘Everything all right?’ Stan asked, getting stiffly to his feet, taking his hat off, rubbing his head and then replacing the hat. ‘Shall I get us a cup of tea, old girl?’

  Vivian put her gardening gloves in her lap and watched him walk towards the kitchen, his hand brushing the lavender bushes. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured, and for just an instant he was Joe Ferier. Handsome Joe, walking away from her in the black hat she remembered so well, striding up the path to the house, to prepare tea for them both.

  Twenty-one

  White sheets and working overalls danced in the breeze. Birdie’s dresses hung beside them, and then Fram’s shirts and shorts, socks and vests. She stood back to admire the wet clothes. There was a whole story to them, like a family gathered together. A small gathering, but still a family. She would have liked to be gazing at long lines of girls’ and boys’ clothes, flapping from pegs like those paper-cut dancing maids she used to make for Ella Hubbard when she was small.

  Well, there was still time. Birdie dropped the peg bag into the wash basket. She hadn’t given up hope, even after all these years. She shook out the creases in a pair of grey flannel trousers. They were Framsden’s. He was eleven years old, a fact that shocked Birdie. It seemed lately that she had no need of calendars and diaries to mark the fast progress of the years. Her time was measured in Framsden’s shirtsleeves and shoe sizes. He grew out of both at an alarming rate. His collars got too tight, his shorts too short, his toes pressed against barely worn shoe leather. They bought new shoes so often the woman in Clarks shoe shop in town treated her like an old friend and Charles laughingly threatened to bind his son’s feet.

  Their boy was sprouting like a beautiful plant in her care. He openly adored her. When he fell over, which was often as he was growing so fast he had a tendency to be clumsy, he brought his wounds to her as if she alone could heal him. She washed grit from grazes and put cooling witch hazel on purple bruises. Only his mother would do.

  Birdie understood how Framsden felt when, without warning, he flung his arms around her waist and pressed his face to her skirts. Charles said the boy was getting too old for that kind of behaviour, but Birdie remembered she had felt the same desire when she’d been a child. Unlike Framsden, she had never dared throw her arms around her mother. That generation had not been demonstrative with their children.

  The Hubbard children, too, openly adored Birdie. Even Judith, Connie’s daughter – always so independent, just like her mother – leaned against Birdie when she read to them. Over the years the four children had crashed happily about the house. They’d stumbled up and down stairs, making dens with blankets and the dining-room chairs. Framsden and James made Airfix aeroplanes with heady-smelling glues and played cowboys and Indians. Ella and Judith spanked their Sarah Jane dolls for wetting themselves, swinging them by their arms at the top of the stairs, then hugging the dolls tightly, all forgiven, proclaiming them their darlings. What kinds of mothers would those girls make one day?

  Birdie’s life was her son and the children. It was seasons with them. Conkers in autumn, rose-hip syrup and cod-liver oil to see off winter colds. Skating on the river when it froze, the girls in their best coats and red tam-o’-shanters. The pretty ribbons she bought Ella for birthdays and Christmases, a small joke between them over the years. Ella had a box of them.

  She squinted up at the blue sky. Bees buzzed around the purple buddleia bushes. The dogs were flat out in the shade, snoring. A pink rose tumbled over the old privy at the bottom of the garden. She’d pick some of the blooms and put a vase of them on the hall table. She went to get a pair of secateurs and a garden trug and saw the Hubbard children swinging into view, the two of them on their bicycles, Ella’s blonde hair flying in the sunlight.

  She gave them glasses of orange squash and pulled a biscuit tin from the cupboard. This evening she might make them all dinner. Some boiled potatoes and slices of ham and salad and hard-boiled eggs. Then a treat of tinned peaches with Tip Top cream for dessert. Perhaps she would telephone Kathleen and say Ella and James could stay the night. After all, Kathleen was always delighted when she took the children off her hands.

  The boys headed off to the barns together, and Birdie took Ella to pick roses. Ella, at fourteen, was too old to play with James and Framsden now. In September she was finally going away to boarding school. Now James was due to start boarding, Kathleen had insisted Ella must go away to school too.

  ‘How is your mother?’ Birdie asked.

  ‘She got a new horse yesterday,’ said Ella, pulling the petals off a rose.

  ‘Another horse? What a lovely present. Your father is very thoughtful.’

  ‘Oh no. Mummy bought it without asking. Daddy was very angry with her. She used his money without permission. He says she doesn’t need another horse when she can’t even look after us.’

  Birdie cut a pink rose on a long stem and pinched off the thorns and leaves. ‘I’m sure he didn’t mean that.’

  ‘He did.’ Ella’s face looked tight and angry. ‘He’s right. Mummy is bored with looking after us. She prefers her horses. Can I live with you, Mrs Bell? I don’t want to go to boarding school.’

  ‘Oh, Ella, my dear girl.’

  Birdie thought she might cry. She stood with the roses in the trug, wanting to drop it and pull the girl into her arms – to tell her she didn’t belong with Kathleen, in any case. ‘We’ll put these roses in a vase,’ she said, not knowing how to respond, fearing she might voice her dangerous thoughts. ‘Chin up. Come on. Let’s get your face washed and stop these tears. Your mummy and daddy love you very much, I’m sure.’

  In the afternoon, they turned windrows of hay, filling their lungs with the smell of sun-warmed grass. Ella worked with Birdie behind the tractor, tow-headed, her limbs brown against the white cotton of her dress, while the boys chased the farm dogs and found nests of mice in the cut hay. Birdie wondered why Framsden and James delighted in exposing those helpless pink babies. The boys were filled with such quickly changing energies. Depending on their mood, they might carry a nest of mice home in the hope of saving them, or let the farm cats feast upon them. Charles allowed the children to do what they wanted. He said they would only learn justice by being free themselves. A country upbringing would teach them all they needed for adult life.

  ‘Boys,’ said Ella to Birdie, as if she knew what Birdie had bee
n thinking. Her voice sounded grown up and she gave Birdie an understanding smile. Birdie smiled back.

  At the end of the afternoon, when they were all dusty and tired and Birdie was only thinking about the quantity of sharp thistles that had cut her arms, Charles said they should swim in the river.

  Ella wore a red seersucker bathing suit. The boys were skinny in their underpants, hugging themselves as they waded into the cold water. Charles wore a pair of old trousers rolled up to the knees. His farmer’s tan cut his lean upper body into shapes. His outstretched arms were russet-tanned to the elbow, his neck a deep V of colour, the rest of his naked torso sunless and pale, his watery shadow spilling over the children as they splashed around him. Birdie sat on the shore, watching them all.

  Framsden did a handstand in the water, surfacing in a rush, coughing, wiping his face.

  ‘Did you see me?’ he shouted. ‘Were my legs straight? Did I do it?’

  ‘Watch me,’ Ella yelled, and dived under the water. Her legs swung up, straight, toes pointed. She surfaced, grinning, hands above her head. ‘Ta-dah!’

  Birdie surprised them then, wading out into the water, swimming to the other bank and then coming back, circling Ella and doing a handstand herself. As the Hubbard children swam round her excitedly, she saw Charles further away in the middle of the river. Framsden was next to him, the two of them treading water. Onlookers, they seemed to Birdie, and she swam to them, aware that she had been disloyal in some way, wondering if they felt this too. She put her arm around Framsden, pretending not to have noticed.

  The sun dropped slowly in the sky, but the day was still hot. Dragonflies like emeralds flashed back and forth. Birdie and Ella sat on the bank, rubbing themselves with striped terry towels. In the shallows, Framsden and James held an old pickle jar and a shrimping net on a bamboo cane. Serious as scientists, they captured jet-black beetles, and mottled newts that moved like wet silk ribbons in the water. They held the jar up to the magnifying purity of the sun, fingers splayed on warm glass, squinting at their treasures, then submerged the jar again, watching the river creatures wriggle down into the mud-stirred water.