Spilt Milk

by Amanda Hodgkinson

  In the mirage of late afternoon the children appeared softly blurred to Birdie. Lovely dancing limbs and sunburnt faces, freckled shoulders, polished cheekbones, their teeth white in their grinning faces.

  Weren’t they sweetness itself, these carefree water babies? Birdie looked down the river path and hoped someone might pass by, a stranger, a walker out with a dog. A witness to come upon them; that they might see them and think they were a family, two adults and three children. ‘Now, isn’t she the spit of her mother,’ the stranger might innocently say, comparing Birdie and Ella.

  And why not? Over the years there had been too many coincidences. Ella’s birthday was the same day as her daughter’s. She looked nothing like Kathleen or Norman. Kathleen, when Birdie had asked several times, was vague about the child’s birth. She couldn’t remember it very well. She hated talking about that kind of thing. Kathleen and Norman had been married for years before they had children. Why shouldn’t they have adopted Ella? They had a large house and lived locally. Aunt Vivian had said her baby had gone to a local couple. And yet Birdie’s thoughts were madness, surely?

  There was a cacophony, and Birdie looked up to see the sky filled with swans. She stood up, shading her eyes from the sun. They landed one after the other on the river. White feathers drifted down as though a dozen pillowcases had been torn apart and shaken out. Birdie and Ella joined Charles and the boys, watching them. There were as many as fifty of the big white birds. They squabbled joyfully, their long necks moving back and forth, their wings beating the air. The orchestra continued as the birds sailed past them. Charles put his arms around Birdie, whispering in her ear.

  ‘You know what they say about a swan chorus like that? If a woman hears the swans calling, she’ll be welcoming a new baby in the coming year.’

  Birdie stiffened. This was the kind of thing her mother might have come out with. Like suggesting she find a woman who was expecting a baby and borrow her shoes. That if she walked in them for a fortnight, she would be expecting by the end of the month.

  Charles hugged her and she relaxed. He had meant no harm. He, too, wanted more children. And he had never blamed her. She agreed with him, she said. The birds were beautiful and there were so many of them it was possible to see why people might believe they heralded some kind of magic.

  The swans’ calls became distant. Feathers settled on the water. The children watched them drift away and then they too began moving, picking up clothes and towels and dusty sandals. Birdie wished she could hold on to the afternoon. That it might go on for ever.

  Next month Ella would be starting boarding school. It would change her. Birdie knew it. She’d be different when she came back. Swimming in a muddy, weed-strewn river would not interest her any more. She would want her own kind: young ladies destined for good middle-class lives. And wasn’t that something to be proud of? To strive for better things?

  ‘Do you want to stay over?’ she asked Ella and James. ‘Shall I telephone your mother and ask if you can?’

  She was gratified when the children all cheered together and ran off up the path, towards the house. She had been lucky to have had these years with them all. Lucky to have had Ella for this long.

  My daughter, she said to herself, just to hear how it sounded.

  Twenty-two

  The farmhouse was always dark. Sometimes, coming in from outside in the sun, Framsden believed he had gone blind. Shapes blurred in front of his eyes. Slowly, his sight returned and he stood in the long shard of light that shone through the open door. He could make out the pattern on the lino floor, the wooden dresser with the chipped blue plates, the horse brasses dangling from a beam. The pile of boots and wellingtons by the kitchen door. Newspapers on the table were full of stories about the Suez Crisis. His father talked of that and nothing else at the moment. His mother came into focus at last, her curved shape over the sink where she was peeling potatoes.

  ‘Go and play,’ she said, looking over her shoulder, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘I’ve got a million things to do before we leave.’

  He studied her a while longer, wondering if he should console her in some way. Grandpa George had had a stroke ten days earlier and his mother had gone to stay with his grandmother. He’d been alone with his father. It had been strange, just the two of them here. Now she was back home, her presence reinstated, preparing for them all to go to Hastings.

  ‘Will you please go on out and play,’ she said to Framsden.

  He was too old to be spoken to like that. He was thirteen and at the new grammar school in town. It meant an hour-and-a-half bus ride there and back each day, and just that amount of journeying made him feel he already knew more of the world than his parents. They never left the farm, unless it was to go to the village or the livestock market in town. When he showed them his homework, they looked alarmed. ‘Latin?’ his mother whispered. She had learned sewing and home economics at school. At his age, she’d been getting ready to leave education for good.

  Framsden heard the farm dogs barking and wandered outside. His father had driven into the yard with his aunt. Visitors, even an old aunt, were a novelty out here, so far from the village. The Hubbards never came over now they were both at boarding school. Judith and he still went for long cycle rides, but not as often as before. Now she preferred the company of her girl cousins in the village. She had a hula hoop she would not be separated from.

  His great-aunt was wrinkled, her cheeks dusty with face powder. Her little brown hat had a pheasant feather in it. They saw her once every couple of years, and she never changed. Small, neat, nervous of the farm dogs. She liked to bring him toffees in a paper bag. They were always covered in cat hairs. His mother wouldn’t let him eat them. ‘Please just call her auntie,’ his mother had once said. ‘It’s not polite to call her “great-aunt”. It makes her feel old.’

  He slouched towards the car, head down, hands shoved deep in his pockets.

  ‘How’s my nephew?’ Vivian asked. ‘In long trousers now? What a big boy you are.’

  ‘I’m thirteen, Auntie.’

  ‘Already? Are you sure?’ she said, and strode off, calling his mother.

  The Bell family drove through the village in their large flatbed truck, all of them squashed up in the cab. Charles and Framsden were wearing black suits and moved like people who were afraid there might still be dressmaker’s pins left in the seams.

  ‘I married your mother in this suit,’ Charles told Framsden as they climbed into the cab. ‘A good suit lasts a lifetime. They’ll probably bury me in it one day.’

  His mother pushed a hat pin into the black pillbox hat she wore. ‘Charles, that’s an awful thing to say.’ She had on a tight pencil skirt with a waisted black jacket. Her cheeks were rouged and her lips red. ‘Sateen,’ she told Vivian, who was touching the sleeve of her jacket. ‘I made it myself.’

  Framsden was at the window seat. His aunt sat swaying beside him, grimacing as they bumped over potholes in the road.

  ‘Have a sweet,’ she said once they were on the main road, producing a creased paper bag, peeling cat hairs off a chunk of honey-coloured toffee.

  Framsden pressed his face to the truck window. They travelled along roads he knew nothing of. He had never been to Sussex. He looked at his parents, his father bent over the steering wheel, his mother with a map on her lap, tracing the route with a gloved finger. He had never been this far from home.

  There was a crowd in his grandmother’s house. A plump woman in a black velvet coat pulled him into a rattle of amber necklaces that hung across her chest, and kissed him with blubbery lips. He tried to be polite and bear it. He gave his grandmother a pleading look and she came to his rescue.

  ‘This is your great-aunt Lydia,’ his grandmother told him.

  ‘Come and sit on my knee, Roger,’ said the woman. She smiled and patted her knees.

  Framsden moved away. ‘I’m not Roger,’ he said. She had no teeth and he had no idea who Roger was anyway.

  His mot
her’s cousin, a balding man called Malcolm, and his stocky blonde wife said hello and shook hands with him. They had two sons at home. One day they hoped he might meet them. They wanted to know about grammar school. Would he try for university?

  Framsden lolled against the open back door. An old man in a charcoal pinstriped suit arrived with a brown and white terrier he called Whisky. He was a neighbour. He was telling Framsden’s father how he had recently lost his wife. ‘A tragedy the way we lose people in life,’ he said. ‘A tragedy. George was a marvellous man. A marvellous man.’

  ‘Have another glass of sherry, Jakey,’ his grandmother said. ‘Does Whisky want a biscuit?’

  Framsden bent down and patted the furry little dog.

  ‘Take him for a walk,’ said Jakey. ‘Go on, lad, he won’t hurt you.’

  Framsden shook his head politely. He was too interested in watching these people.

  He stayed behind when they left for the funeral and watched horse racing on the television set. They didn’t have one at home.

  In the evening, the family sat in the sitting room and played Monopoly. His mother said it had been a very nice service. Grandma Farr put a metal urn on the mantelpiece. She would have to think what to do with George’s ashes. She still had Henry’s urn in the wardrobe. She wanted to mix the two together, but she feared spilling them.

  Framsden eyed the metal jar. It had dates in neat writing on one side: 1885–1956. He hoped she would take it away with her. He didn’t fancy sleeping on the sofa with that looking down on him.

  His mother rolled up the sleeves of her cardigan and sat at the piano. She began to play a syncopated, lively tune, banging out the notes.

  ‘Birdie performed in the pub every Friday night,’ his grandmother told him. ‘She had the voice of an angel. She could have been a professional.’

  ‘These foolish things,’ his mother sang, her voice sweet and strong.

  When she sang ‘Sister Susie’s Sewing Shirts for Soldiers’, Aunt Vivian came in wearing a pink dressing gown buttoned up to her chin and a hairnet over her curlers. She sang along too, sitting next to his grandmother, waving her hands back and forth, giggling like a girl.

  ‘You must take the piano home,’ said Grandma Farr. ‘George wanted you to have it.’

  She began to cry, and so did his mother. Aunt Vivian said she’d make them cocoa.

  The adults talked of the pub and the old days. The King’s death, Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, the scandal of Princess Margaret and the divorced Peter Townsend. England beating Australia at cricket and retaining the Ashes.

  Aunt Vivian remembered the end of the Great War and the influenza epidemic that took her husband. Framsden’s parents talked of the end of the Second World War. They had not seen any of the celebrations in the village, but they’d gone down to the river and Charles had taken Framsden swimming.

  ‘Nellie is a great swimmer,’ said Vivian.

  ‘What about Framsden?’ said his grandmother.

  ‘He’s a good swimmer,’ said his mother. ‘Charles taught him.’

  ‘He’s lucky to have a father. We never had one, did we, Nellie? Our sister Rose brought us up. Of course, she never married. She didn’t want us to either, truth be told. Our parents passed away when we were babies, and Rose took their place.’

  ‘I don’t think Rose ever went far from the cottage in her lifetime.’

  ‘She didn’t even like going into the village, I remember.’

  ‘So you were orphans?’ Framsden blurted out. He had never thought about where his grandmother and great-aunt came from. They were just there. Permanent and old as churches, the pair of them. It hadn’t entered his head that they must have had parents and been children.

  ‘Framsden, don’t be nosy,’ said his mother.

  Vivian waved her hand at her. The boy could know a bit about his family, after all.

  ‘Our father worked as a coprolite miner. He was hurt and died of his injuries. We didn’t have the medicine you have today. He got a bad cut in his leg and it went nasty. Blood poisoning. And then mother was taken by diphtheria. We’d have been sent off to the poorhouse and split up if it hadn’t been for our sister Rose. She was a mother to us.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say she was like a mother,’ said his grandmother. ‘She was loyal, but I don’t think she expected her life to turn out like it did. Now, Framsden, is that a wart on your thumb?’

  She told him to get string from the kitchen drawer. He fetched it and a pair of scissors and came back. She cut a short length, wrapped it around his thumb and closed her eyes for a moment.

  ‘Right,’ she said, unwinding the string. ‘You go outside and you bury that nice and deep. The time the string takes to rot down in the ground is the time that wart will take to fall off. You’ve got to believe in the magic and it will do its job.’

  ‘But it’s dark out.’ He looked to his parents, imagining they might say something.

  ‘Come on, boy. I’ve never been afraid of the dark. Do you want me to go out there and do it myself? At my age?’

  Framsden crouched in the garden and dug a hole with a kitchen fork. The fork wasn’t really up to the job, and its handle bent in his hand. He dropped the string into the hole, covering it up. He could see his family at the window with the curtains open, the light from the house spilling across the grass.

  The next morning his grandmother asked to be left alone, so they went into town and ate potted shrimps and bread and butter in a café. Aunt Vivian bought him a stick of pink rock and a gobstopper the size of a hen’s egg. He and his father climbed the steep hill to the castle and went on the dodgem cars at the funfair. His mother bought postcards of the East Hill funicular and sent one to Connie and Judith and another one to Ella Hubbard at her boarding school.

  ‘Do you want to write a note?’ she asked Framsden.

  He shook his head. He wished his mother wasn’t sending Ella a postcard. It was a stupid thing to do. The Hubbards’ farm was much bigger than theirs. They had new machinery. Huge fields of wheat. Norman Hubbard thought their little farm was a joke. He could imagine Ella laughing at the postcard, explaining to her schoolfriends that it came from her old nanny, a farmer’s wife who wore too much make-up for a woman of her age. Who would want a postcard from somebody else’s mother?

  Nellie saw the family off that afternoon. She watched the noisy farm truck, its exhaust belching black smoke, disappear from sight, then she went in and sat in George’s chair by the fire. The mantel clock tick-tocked, steady as a dripping tap. Time dragged. Perhaps she should have asked Vivian to stay on with her? But Vivian had her gentleman friend now.

  Nellie thought she had done a good job of looking happy when they all left. Charles had been desperate to get back to his farm. They all had their own lives. Even the boy. She would have liked to have kept the boy with her. They could have gone to the beach every day. She had yet to see him swim.

  All right, old girl? she heard George’s voice ask her.

  ‘George?’

  Fancy a port and lemon? I could do with a beer myself after all we’ve been through today. What a cracking grandson we have. Framsden’s a fine-looking boy.

  When the door knocker rapped loudly and she saw the shadow of Jakey through the half-closed venetian blinds, she sat very still and waited for him to go away. She wanted to keep the silence in the house. Only then could she hear George’s voice.

  Framsden thought it odd that the only holiday they had ever taken was to go to his grandfather’s funeral. Other families went camping or hop picking together. Why couldn’t they be more like other families? Why couldn’t they go to Butlin’s, like Connie and Judith did? And Connie didn’t even have a husband to go with.

  Now, after a few days back at the farm, it was as if they had never been away. He wandered down to the river and stood by the water, staring at the wart on his thumb. It was definitely getting smaller. His grandmother’s charm was working.

  The poplar trees rustled loudly and then fell s
ilent. He gazed into the water. Shadowy fish swam past. A newt dived down into the depths. Beside him a gang of sparrows flew out of the bushes, taking their quarrelling chatter with them, and he watched them tumble in the air. What if his gran was a witch? It was quite an exciting thought.

  A fish leapt for a fly, and he was spooked by the sudden movement. He saw a rippling flicker of silver rising up into the air. The fish snatched at the fly, twisting, flopping back into the river. It was gone from view, the mirror surface of the water settling again to a pure reflection of the sky and the clouds and the trees. Framsden was filled with a sense of magic. It shocked him to see a fish leaping, defying its watery life, plunging upwards into his world.

  Moments later, a brown hare ran across the fields on the other side of the river. It paused, crouching, flicking its great ears back and forth. He saw its amber eyes, the dark inky tips of its ears. Then it bounded away. Had it stared at him? His grandmother would have said it had. She had been born here, like he had been.

  ‘You and me, we share our beginnings,’ she’d told him, a secretive finger pressed to her lips. ‘We’re river children.’

  Twenty-three

  The days over Christmas 1963 were wet and grey, merging into each other, short hours of gloomy daylight. There was a smell of woodsmoke coming from the chimney. The corrugated-iron roof of the house was shiny with rainwater. Birdie, in a waterproof cape over her good clothes, sang a line of a song under her breath as she cycled out of the yard and up the farm track. Charles had recently covered the track in concrete and she picked up speed, cycling easily over the smooth surface. She lifted her voice and sang out loud to the dripping hedgerows.