She climbed the stairs and went into her bedroom, pulling off her soaked clothes, thinking of Kathleen. How cruel the woman had been. Birdie had just tried to explain that she hadn’t wanted to give up her daughter. She had been young and had no money or any way of supporting herself. Back then, you didn’t have a choice.
Kathleen had been polite at first. Ella was too, when she came into the kitchen. She looked so grown up. It had shocked Birdie to see how she’d changed. Made her feel unsure of what she was doing suddenly.
‘Ella? I hardly recognized you,’ she said, the first thing that came into her head. Kathleen had already hardened herself against Birdie; was already wondering how to get rid of her, Birdie knew.
‘Hello, Mrs Bell,’ said Ella. She wore a navy-blue mini-dress with a white Peter Pan collar. Her blonde hair was shoulder length, an Alice band holding it off her face. Such a pretty young woman with her dark eye make-up and pale frosted lipstick. All the confidence in the world. Ella lit a cigarette. ‘I thought I heard voices. Do you need something?’
The three of them stood in Kathleen’s kitchen, the red horse rosettes dangling on the beams, moving slightly in the warm air coming off the stove. Kathleen leaned against the cooking range.
‘Just tell me the truth,’ Birdie asked. ‘I know this is difficult, but I have been sure of something for years. I think you know what I am talking about.’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t a clue. But do go on.’
‘She’s my daughter, isn’t she? You felt it too, didn’t you, Ella? Do you remember when you were small, how you wanted me to be your mother? I don’t want to cause trouble; I don’t want to claim Ella. I just want to know for sure. I gave her up and you adopted her. I know this is hard, but, Kathleen, you just have to say. You adopted her, didn’t you? I have no right to her. I’ll leave you alone, but I need to know because my son has a sister and he deserves to know the truth.’
A car horn sounded in the backyard at the cottage and Birdie jumped, imagining it might be Kathleen or, worse, Norman, coming to tell Charles his wife was insane. That’s what Kathleen had called her. Insane. She’d threatened to telephone the police if Birdie didn’t get out.
Birdie went to the window and saw a Land Rover splashing through the yard. She recognized the new garage owner in the village. Alan Jacobs. Charles and Framsden crossed the yard towards him, heads down against the rain.
‘I’ve been driving round helping motorists,’ she heard Alan Jacobs say when they came into the house, shaking their hats and coats in the hallway. ‘There’s a grey car stuck in the floods. I was worried there might be somebody in it. Nearly drowned myself wading out to check.’
Birdie sat on the top stair, hugging herself. A grey car? Ella had driven her mother’s grey car.
‘For God’s sake, Mrs Bell,’ the girl had said. ‘For God’s sake, Mother, tell her to go.’
Ella had driven past Birdie on the flooded road. She had not even looked at her.
‘The Hubbards have a grey Morris Minor,’ Framsden was saying.
Alan said he’d seen the keys still in the ignition. He thought the owner must have parked it up somewhere and then the floods floated the car away.
‘They’ll have a shock when they come back for it. Perhaps I’ll call by the Hubbards’ farm and see.’
‘I’ll come over with you while it’s still possible to get there,’ Charles said. ‘They’ve got a generator they might lend me. We’ve no electricity here.’
Birdie went back into her bedroom and watched Charles and Alan leaving in the Land Rover. It was over. Soon Charles would know. Framsden was heaving sandbags into place at the doors of the wooden barns. He looked small, crouching down in dark clothes, vaguely discernible against the black-soaked clapboard building, his body turning to rain, slipping through her fingers. If it wasn’t for the love of him, she would have gone out into the floods and let the river take her.
By late afternoon the river, so swollen and full of itself, had burst across the fields and encircled the house. Water started coming in under the back door. It washed in so fast that boots and shoes floated around the room, and Framsden and his mother went upstairs, taking food and flasks filled with hot soup. The farm dogs bounded up the stairs after them.
Framsden hadn’t been in his parents’ bedroom since he was a child. It was a bare-looking room. Wooden floors. A chest of drawers and a dark wardrobe. A faded red rug and a pale green bedspread. The new Teasmade his parents had bought at Christmas was on a table, a crocheted doily underneath it, the edges hanging like heavy cobwebs. A pile of books was on the floor: his father’s reading matter – The Scarlet Pimpernel, Moonfleet, a book of Tennyson’s poetry. A vase filled with snowdrops from the garden on top of the chest of drawers.
His mother was convinced they’d be rescued and that he should look clean for their rescuers. She’d insisted he put clean clothes on. He’d been in his work jeans and old sweater, which smelled of sheep. He could see she was frightened by the floods. He’d given up arguing with her. Now he sat on her bed, knees up, in his best suit and tie. Bought at Burton’s in town for his eighteenth birthday. ‘Every man needs one good suit,’ his father had said.
There was a sudden loud bang downstairs. The dogs, who had settled under the bed, barked and growled. Framsden took the lamp and went on to the landing. He heard the sound of water rushing and swung the lamp to the stairs. The flood waters had broken a window. Water swirled halfway up the stairs now. The front door had burst open and an icy wind rushed towards him. Something large and dark slammed into the open doorway. For a second he thought it was a huge fish. A whale, a kind of monster trying to get into the house. He thought of his grandmother and her stories of river monsters. The tale of the giant pike that had come in through the door. He swung the lamp forwards and went down another step. Through the doorway the wind screamed and roared up the stairs.
‘It’s my boat!’ he yelled up to his mother. ‘I can see it. It’s caught on the verandah. Come here, take the lamp. I’m going to see if I can grab hold of it.’
He waded until he was chest-deep in water and the boat whacked his shoulder, sending him under, gulping dirty water, scrabbling to get a foothold somewhere. He rose to the surface and grabbed the side of it. His mother came down the stairs towards him.
‘We’re going to die,’ she was saying. ‘We’re going to die.’
‘Get in the boat!’ he yelled, and grabbed her hand as she stepped blindly down into the waters.
They sat together with the farm dogs at their feet. The boat rocked on the water. The rain had stopped, but the waters were still moving fast in the darkness of the night. The oars had been lost. As long as they floated in the open, they would be all right. If they hit a tree or got tangled up in the submerged hedgerows, then they might be tipped out. His mother clung to him.
‘I have done something terrible,’ she said into his ear, and he bent to her, putting his arms around her. ‘I saw Kathleen and Ella this morning,’ she said. ‘I told them I thought Ella was my daughter.’
Framsden wasn’t sure he’d heard her right.
‘You’re old enough now. It’s time you knew. You have a sister. I had a child before I met your father. She was adopted by a couple who lived locally. I always believed it was Ella. I told her. Kathleen threw me out of the house. Now I can see I have made a mistake. I’ve been so stupid. I’ve ruined everything. I’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake.’
A sister? Framsden wished he could get out of the boat. His mother was making no sense.
‘Ella Hubbard is my sister?’
‘No, no. Not her.’
She talked about a man called Peter. He tried to understand.
‘I have made so many mistakes,’ she told him. ‘I think I want to die.’
‘We might bloody die,’ Framsden said, ‘if this boat hits a tree.’ He told her to be quiet. He couldn’t bear to listen to her.
At dawn they floated up the village high street, passing a red pi
llar box. His mother was ashen-faced, lips blue with cold. Policemen waded out to the boat. The river left its silted mud everywhere; mud and shallow lakes of water, the wind rippling its surface. Framsden saw James Hubbard helping the rescue workers in the village. They both pretended not to know each other.
His father arrived at mid-morning. The waters around the farm were already going down, he said. He and Alan had put on waders and got to the farm on foot that morning. He’d found the house with the doors and windows smashed open and thought they’d been swept away.
‘And Ella?’ Framsden asked.
She was fine. She had left her mother’s car on the road and got a lift to town. She was safe.
‘Framsden, are you coming? I have to get back to the farm,’ said his father. He walked away with Alan.
‘Mum?’
‘You go,’ she said, and turned her face away from him.
Framsden saw Alan put his arm around his father’s shoulders, as if he needed consoling. When Framsden looked back, Connie was sitting beside his mother. He stood still for a moment, unsure of what to do. But Connie shook her head and waved him away. He turned and followed his father.
At home, Framsden’s father worked day and night, cleaning out the rooms, stripping the wallpaper off the flood-damaged walls, setting bonfires of spoilt hay and straw that sent thick, billowing clouds of smoke across the yard. A generator was set up in a barn and they had electricity again. An abattoir lorry came for the dead farm animals. Framsden’s mother did not come home, and neither of them spoke of her or of the sister Framsden was meant to have.
A fortnight later, Framsden put on wading boots and made his way across the fields. Where the river looped around the house, down where his boat used to be moored, the land was muddy. The field opposite was still flooded, a wide lake as grey as a milk churn, with the reflections of clouds and trees and pale sky mirrored across its surface. Framsden stood on the riverbank. If it wasn’t so awful, all this might be beautiful to behold.
His mother had given up a daughter. He had a sister. His mother had believed Ella Hubbard was her daughter. There was no sense to it, only a bruised hurt that made his shoulders ache. He hung his head and kicked the ground with the toe of his boot. At his feet something caught his eye, and he bent down, picking up a smooth fragment of what looked like bone. It was very thin, curved like an eggshell, and green staining patterned its fissured surface. He cupped it in his hand. It was bone. Part of a skull, he thought. A small animal, perhaps. He wasn’t sure. He was sure, though, that it had been in the river for a long time. The flood must have thrown it up on the bank here.
A flock of wild geese descended and landed nearby, pecking at the blades of grass. Framsden turned the bone over in his hand and considered keeping it. As a child he had liked collecting things: feathers, sloughed snake skins, oak apples. But he wasn’t a child now and he had nowhere to put found objects in any case. All that was behind him. He took a step forwards and dropped the scrap of bone into the river, back where it had come from, back where he thought it belonged.
‘There you are,’ his father said, when he went into the house. He had a tall bottle balanced on a table made from lambing crates. His father never drank.
‘I found it floating in a cupboard,’ he said. ‘It’s a bottle of port your late grandfather sent me for Christmas years ago.’
‘When is Mum coming back?’
‘She’s not coming back.’
‘So you didn’t know either? She lied to you too?’
‘You’re young,’ his father said, staring at the glass in his hand. ‘Everybody has things … things that don’t need talking about. That’s not having secrets, son, that’s life.’
He finished his drink and poured himself another.
‘Are you drunk, Dad?’
‘Not yet. But I will be. I’m going to sell up. I’m selling the farm at auction. That’s how I bought it. That’s how I’ll sell it.’
‘You don’t mean that.’
‘I do,’ his father said, slapping his knee with his free hand, as if he were sealing the deal right there and then.
Early next morning, Framsden heard him go out, calling the dogs, the front door banging shut. He realized he would always connect his father with the vague half-light of early mornings. Framsden watched him trek across the yard, the familiar hunched shoulders, the long, loping walk that covered miles each day. His father would never sell the farm. It was his life.
Framsden walked to the end of the farm track. The water had blocked the road in places, but he jumped over it and with dry feet caught a bus. If he could have chosen, he would have gone to his grandmother’s house, but he didn’t have enough money for the coach ticket all the way to Hastings. On the bus, he realized how easy leaving was. The thought of it had seemed impossible before. He had believed he was deeply rooted here. A river child, as his grandmother had once said. But he wasn’t. He could go anywhere.
He got off the bus at the station and walked over the bridge, up the hill, past the church and up the cobbled road where the stones were dark after a fresh shower of rain, wet and shiny as eels.
The guest-house windows had net curtains covering them, and the sign beside the door advertising electricity in all guest rooms was flaked and faded. He wondered why it was still there when his aunt had not run the property as a guest house for years. He knocked on the door.
‘Come in, my dear boy,’ his aunt Vivian said, as if he often called to see her.
Twenty-four
Nellie stood in the doorway to the spare bedroom, watching her daughter sleeping. Birdie was such a tiny woman. Nellie could never understand how she had given birth to such a delicate person. She’d not been the right mother for Birdie. She should have been Vivian’s child. Nellie left her to sleep, shutting the door behind her.
That first day that Birdie arrived, straight off the coach with not even an overnight case in her hand, no hat or gloves, her eyes red from crying, she slept for hours. She woke briefly to drink the hot milk and brandy Nellie insisted would do her good. She slept through Nellie’s neighbour popping by for a cup of tea, and she slept through the evening when Nellie made herself sardines on toast, eating it on a tray in front of the television, wondering what had happened to her estranged daughter.
In the morning, just before dawn, they were both up, yawning and crumpled-looking.
‘Women in this family have always been early risers,’ said Nellie. She set a bowl of warm water on the kitchen table and put out a flannel, soap and two clean towels. Birdie made a pot of tea while Nellie stripped down to her vest and washed, flannelling her arms and her neck and face. ‘Do you want me to boil the kettle?’ she asked, blinking water from her eyes. ‘Or will you use the bathroom? I can never get used to having one. I always wash here. I hope that doesn’t bother you. That’s a new bar of Imperial Leather. I only just took the wrapper off it.’
‘I’ll use the bathroom later,’ said Birdie.
She drank tea and smoked cigarettes and went back to bed again.
‘Come down to the beach with me,’ said Nellie a few days later. She thought Birdie must have caught up on her sleep by now. ‘I need to swim.’
Birdie looked out of the window.
‘You swim in this weather?’
‘I have to find somebody who will stand on the shore and watch me. George made me promise I’d never swim alone.’
At around eight the next morning, Nellie changed into her black swimsuit and put on a pair of elasticated slacks and a blouse and pullover. She handed Birdie a bag with towels, a flask of hot soup, a bar of Kendal Mint Cake and a blanket. ‘Don’t fall asleep on the beach,’ she instructed her daughter. ‘You have to watch out for me.’
Nellie headed down to the sea, wading out into the waves, feeling the shock of the cold water washing over her shins, the surprise of it flooding between her legs, probing at her. Then she was in over her stomach, the worst was done with and she swam. A numbness covered her, and she knew
she would have to swim hard to warm herself. She felt as though she didn’t have any body parts. She was seventy-two years old, she reminded herself. She had to be careful not to get too cold.
She turned to check Birdie was still there. She was a lonely figure on the deserted beach. Something had happened with her husband, Nellie was sure. She suspected Birdie had told him what she should never have told anyone. Didn’t her daughter understand that some secrets were not to be shared? When she got back to the shore, Birdie was curled up on the beach, asleep again.
Nellie insisted Birdie come out shopping with her. She didn’t like her sleeping all the time. There was a long list of things to buy. Nellie had been surviving on snacks – tinned food, cheese and crackers – but with Birdie there she decided to get into the habit of cooking meals again.
Nellie prepared the kind of food they’d eaten when Birdie was a child: tripe and onions, liver and mash, eggs in aspic, beef tea, calves’ foot broth, stewed rabbit in milk, oxtail stew, sardines on toast with plenty of butter and pepper. She spent long hours in the steamy little kitchen. Birdie didn’t eat much. She sat at the table, looking out on the small back garden, her face still and pensive.
‘This is good food,’ said Nellie. ‘Eat.’ She was exasperated by Birdie’s silence, but she didn’t know how to break it.
In the afternoons they played Monopoly and Sorry and watched horse racing on the television while the March wind outside whistled and wailed. Birdie talked about things that were in front of them. The Monopoly board. Whether she preferred being the iron or the top hat. How long it would take to walk to the newsagent’s to get another packet of cigarettes.
At the end of March, Birdie got a letter from her husband. She read the letter, handed it to her mother and went to bed again.
‘Everything has fallen apart,’ she said as she slipped out of the room.
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