Spilt Milk

by Amanda Hodgkinson

  Vivian said Framsden had told her he did not want to come back to live at the farm. He liked town life too much. He’d been seeing a girl, but it hadn’t worked out.

  ‘A girl?’ Birdie asked. ‘What girl?’

  ‘I don’t know. A girl from the village, I think.’

  ‘A girl from here? I’ll ask him.’

  ‘No,’ said Charles, who had come into the kitchen to find the three women drinking tea together. He picked up his transistor radio off the table. ‘To listen to while I stack the straw in the barn,’ he said, and walked out of the door. ‘And leave Framsden be. Don’t interfere. It’s his life. If he wants us to know, he’ll tell us.’

  The women nodded and agreed. Here we are, thought Vivian, looking at her sister and her niece. Three women in the house by the river. Together. Just as we once promised Rose. The three Marsh women. Three women with eyes the colour of the river.

  The following winter the river froze over. Just before dusk, when the sun hung red in the sky, Charles and Birdie put on skates and stepped out onto the ice. They held hands and skated slowly. Charles pulled Birdie out to the centre. They turned at the bend in the river and skated back to the wooden jetty where Framsden tied his boat. A new boat, a wooden skiff, was up in the barn, waiting for the summer. Framsden had built it in his workshop and brought it to the farm at Christmas, when he’d given it to his parents. Aunt Vivian had let him clear out her old garage and set up his tools in there.

  It had been Connie’s daughter that Framsden was seeing. He and Judith had shocked the family by moving in together. Aunt Vivian had shocked them all even more by saying she was delighted to have them living with her. Judith was expecting a child in the spring. They were not married, but they said they’d get round to it after the child was born. Judith thought it would be nice for the baby to be part of the ceremony.

  A colour photograph of the two of them stood on the mantelpiece in the sitting room at the farm. Judith wore a silky-looking mini-dress that stretched over her belly. She was laughing, her long hair falling over her shoulders. Not so long ago, women had stayed indoors during their pregnancies. They wore large smocked dresses to cover themselves up. In the photo, Framsden stood beside Judith in jeans and a tight-fitting cotton T-shirt. His hand was resting casually on Judith’s belly. He needed a haircut.

  It wasn’t that other people’s attitudes had changed much, Charles told Birdie. There were still judgements made all the time. Even now, in the mid sixties, which were surely a time of change, he and Birdie had been shocked by the photograph. The length of his son’s hair made Charles want to take a pair of sheep shears to it. He could hear the farmhands now, cracking jokes about him. But it was possible to ignore the judgements of others. That was what Birdie had never understood before. That it didn’t matter what others thought of you if you had the support of loved ones. If you had people you could call family around you. Connie was proof of that. Unmarried all her life, and her family had always stuck by her and Judith. She’d married Alan Jacobs last month. He was glad for her. Jacobs had been an RAF pilot in the war. He had known Christopher’s squadron, so Connie said. They’d moved into a cottage in the village together.

  On the river, Charles and Birdie skated until the moon came up and the hoar frost deepened its hold on the trees and fields. Charles had not told Birdie he would have accepted her daughter as his own child. It seemed too late to say it. He wanted to tell her that he would have married her back in 1939, when it could have given them all another life, but then again, was he really being honest with himself? Perhaps, in truth, he would have hesitated to marry a girl who already had a child. And what was done was done. Birdie still believed her daughter might find them one day, and, if she did, then he’d see how things went between them.

  In the shadows their breath turned silver. It was hot work, skating. All this cold and their cheeks were burning hot. Charles held Birdie’s face in his hands. They would go indoors and talk of a coming grandchild, of a lost daughter who might find them one day, the danger of the ice, the coldness and how warm they had felt skating together. He would remember the sad beauty of the wind, like a child’s cry. The frozen river, held fast in time. He would remember the look on his wife’s face, the triumph in her eyes as she crossed the ice towards him.

  Twenty-six

  Sunday morning in late July and Judith was the only one awake in the old house. She was standing at the kitchen door in one of Framsden’s shirts, looking out onto the garden, listening to birdsong and the distant drone of the ring road, smoking a cigarette in peace before the baby woke up, demanding to be fed.

  It was going to be a hot day again. A good day to be down at the river, miles from anywhere. The house creaked as the sun began to heat up the day. Poor old house. There was so much to be done to it. It hadn’t been modernized since the late thirties, when Framsden’s aunt had electricity put in and redecorated the bedrooms. Aside from the rewiring that had just been done, Judith had painted a lot of the rooms white and thrown away all the awful, prim net curtains. She wanted to bring light into the place. She thought she might strip the dark stain off the stairs and take them back to the natural pine.

  There was the sharp sound of a baby crying upstairs. Judith threw the cigarette away and climbed the stairs. That awful brass pot full of dusty peacock feathers by the window would have to go too. She reached the landing and the baby went quiet.

  Judith sat on the stair, the sun pouring in through the window, warming her legs. They would have to have a lot of babies to fill up this house. Framsden wanted a big family. To make up for being an only child, he said.

  She heard a knock at the door and went barefoot downstairs. When she opened the front door, there was nobody there. It had been happening quite a bit lately. Kids playing Knock Down Ginger, she suspected. She tried to see if there were any children hiding between the parked cars. She could smell the newly tarmacked road beginning to melt in the heat. A woman stood on the other side of the road. She was well dressed, a good-looking woman with soft brown curls and grey eyes. She stared at Judith, and for a moment it looked as though she might say something. Judith lifted her hand in greeting and the woman nodded uncertainly, then walked briskly away. Judith had seen her a couple of times now, always on a Sunday morning, standing looking at the old guest house. Framsden had suggested she might be the grown-up child of one of the women his aunt had helped over the years.

  ‘Someone at the door?’ asked Framsden, putting his arms around her.

  ‘What? Yes. Well, no. Just kids playing again, I think.’

  ‘Come on,’ he said, kissing her neck. ‘We should get going. A day on the river sounds perfect to me.’

  On the long grassy bank beside the arching green willows, Birdie put out tartan blankets and umbrellas for shade. She watched the family flowing down the garden towards the river. Connie and her new husband, two of Connie’s brothers and their families, along for the picnic. One of the brothers was acting the fool, throwing sticks into the river for the farm dogs. Joan and Michael were there too, picking their way through the long grass in their city clothes, having driven from London to see the new baby.

  Judith and Framsden carried their daughter, Kay, in her Moses basket between them. Charles walked behind, a straw hat sitting on the back of his head, a blade of grass in his mouth, the black and white farm dogs dropping the sticks they had been thrown and racing up to him, following at his heels.

  ‘I think Kay’s a fine name,’ he had said when Birdie was shocked by the choice. To her it was a secret name, a name to whisper. She could see that to Framsden it was nothing of the sort. It was a name to be taken up and given to a child, a name his daughter would carry into the future, where one day she would be told that Kay was a name with a history to it: that of her father’s sister. A woman they never knew.

  ‘It’s a gift to you,’ Charles said. ‘You should see it that way.’

  Birdie’s mother and aunt sat in deckchairs by the river, the two of t
hem like ancient twins in their matching floral housecoats. They were gaga about the baby, always fussing over her. Nellie talked about teaching her to swim; Vivian wanted to teach her dressmaking.

  ‘Wait a while yet, ladies. She’s just a baby!’ said Framsden, and the old women cackled and laughed and said wasn’t he a terrible tease, and oh, but Judith was a lucky girl to have him.

  The baby was passed around into each person’s arms, warm kisses on her fine-boned head. Nellie held the little girl for a long time, pressing her to her shapeless bosom like a bag of shopping she didn’t want to drop, while she instructed Judith to take a little salt from the kitchen as a gift to ensure the child would grow up rich and prosperous.

  Birdie handed out drinks and sausage rolls. Framsden took his boat out on the river. The water sparkled. A frog croaked loudly, and grasshoppers sang in the long grass. Balsam seeds were popping in the heat, and the sound of cars on the road beyond the village was a distant hum. Finally the baby was passed on to Birdie.

  The child stared at her. Her eyes were blue, but they were turning grey, everybody said. A darling child. A much-loved firstborn. The baby drew her legs up, and her face creased in displeasure. She began to cry.

  ‘Oh, give her to me,’ said Judith, reaching out to take the baby.

  Judith was independent, part of a new generation. Anybody could see she wanted a life of her own with Framsden. Birdie had felt the same when she gave birth to her son, though she regretted keeping him from his grandparents. She had punished them for far too many years, not letting even his aunt have a share in him. If Judith felt like keeping Kay for herself, Birdie could not reproach her for it.

  ‘Unless you want to hold her while I fetch her bottle?’

  ‘Can I?’

  Birdie felt her heart soften in gratitude towards Judith. She trusted her with the child. And why shouldn’t she? For of course Birdie had to hold this baby. What else would anyone do with a baby except hold it close and love it?

  All afternoon, sun dappled through the willows and dragonflies darted back and forth over the water. Swans sailed downriver, as white as wedding gowns. Poplar seed floated on the breeze. By the small wooden jetty on the riverbank, an old woman sat on a deckchair, legs crossed at the ankle. She wore an old-fashioned straw hat and held a small stone in her hands, a creamy brown stone with a hole through it. She lifted it to her eye and squinted at it. Another woman stood beside her. She too was old, but tall and straight-backed, with a way of holding her head high as if she were listening to something far off. Together they linked arms and went to the water’s edge, where the ground was dry and dusty. The river flowed on, over silt and mud and memories. The land and the sky breathed easily. The sisters dropped the stone into the river and watched it sink down, down, until it was completely gone from view.

  Acknowledgements

  I am indebted to so many people who have encouraged and helped me throughout the writing of this book. To all my family and friends – thank you.

  Special thanks also to my agent, Rachel Calder, and my editor, Juliet Annan, for their trust and expertise. Gillian Hamer, for being on the journey with me; Lucy Floyd, for her heart-warming kindness; Emma Bird-Newton, Caroline Pretty, JJ Marsh, Catriona Troth and Chris Curran; David Barnett, for books, tea and the loan of his cottage in France; Kit Habianic, for her invaluable support; and Guy and our wonderful girls, for their love and patience.

  AMANDA HODGKINSON

  * * *

  22 BRITANNIA ROAD

  In war we sometimes lose ourselves …

  It is 1946 and Silvana and eight-year-old Aurek board a ship that will take them from Poland to England. Silvana has not seen her husband Janusz in six years, but, they are assured, he has made them a home in Ipswich.

  However, after living wild in the forests for years, carrying a terrible secret, all Silvana knows is that she and Aurek are survivors. Everything else is lost. While Janusz, a Polish soldier who has criss-crossed Europe during the war, hopes his family will help put his own dark past behind him.

  But the war and the years apart will always haunt each of them unless they together confront what they were compelled to do to survive.

  ‘So convincing, completely gripping, admirable’ Daily Mail

  ‘A powerful debut set in the aftermath of the second world war: a moving account of the day-to-day struggle for survival’ Sunday Times

  * * *

  www.penguin.com

  THE BEGINNING

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  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  First published 2014

  Copyright © Amanda Hodgkinson, 2014

  Cover: Front image © Arcangel Images

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  ISBN: 978-0-141-96499-7

  Table of Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Two

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

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