Privileged Children

by Frances Vernon

  A fat, red-haired man, in a large apron which was none too clean and a boater hat which was too small for him, was walking along the pavement. Alice stopped swinging, closed the gate and stood behind it with her arms folded on the top bar. ‘Afternoon, Mr O’Leary.’

  ‘I want to see Mrs Molloy.’

  ‘Oh, you can’t see her today, Mr O’Leary. She’s got a sick headache because she’s so worried.’

  ‘She’s cause to be worried. This bill’s been owing for six months.’

  ‘Isn’t that a shame now, Mr O’Leary? Let me see the bill.’ Alice took it from his hand. ‘Ah, that’s shocking!’ She frowned and shook her head.

  ‘Let me in. I want to talk to Mrs Molloy.’

  ‘I told you, she’s got the sick headache. I’ll tell you what we’ll do, Mr O’Leary. You give her a month’s more tick, like the good Catholic you are, and she’ll pawn that lovely diamond ring of hers just as soon as she can, and then you’ll be paid with interest.’

  Diana had told Alice that she reckoned that the lord who was currently her keeper would be moving on within a month. The ring was a topaz, not a diamond. ‘Just a month, Mr O’Leary.’

  ‘She’ll get no more tick from me. I want cash down from you from now on. And if this bill isn’t paid within a month, I’ll have the law on her.’

  ‘Did you know it’s against the law to adulterate food, Mr O’Leary?’

  ‘To what?’

  ‘To put chalk in your bread.’

  He tried to slap her.

  ‘I’ll take the bill, shall I, and show it to her? I’m sure she didn’t know it was so much.’

  His little eyes crinkled up with suspicion. Alice watched. ‘You’d better do that,’ he said, and went away scowling.

  Alice sighed. She decided to go for a walk.

  ‘And I’ll be coming again tomorrow!’ he shouted at her.

  Alice trudged through the narrow Holborn streets. The day was hot and sticky. The windows in the shabbier houses looked black and very dusty. The smell of horse dung, rotting vegetables and tired, sweaty people was stifling in the heat. Diana had told Alice that summer in the country was the best season of the year, but Alice could not believe it. She imagined the country as a sort of endless Kensington Gardens, and you could smell London there.

  She thought of going to the British Museum, but she knew that they would not let her in looking as dirty as she did today. Longingly she recalled the cool, echoing rooms of the Museum. ‘I’ll have a dip,’ she said to herself. She took an omnibus to Bayswater Road and marvelled at the women on the top deck, who were wearing huge heavy hats, corsets, long sleeves and high-necked dresses even in this weather, just because it was daytime. A very small boy sitting opposite her was wearing more clothes than she wore in the winter. His face was scarlet, and he kept twisting and turning to see the streets below him.

  Alice went to the Longwater in Kensington Gardens. She idled on a shady path as a gardener walked past and a nanny shepherded her charges to the sunlight further down. As soon as they were gone, she climbed over the low railings and ran behind a willow tree, where she took off her dress and plimsolls.

  She groaned with bliss at the shock of cold water round her feet, walked a little further in and stretched herself out in the water, dipping her head in it. She wished she could swim. She had once tried to, two summers ago, and had had to be rescued.

  She had to hurry back to Red Lion Square, in order to help Tilly with preparing supper, for there were several people coming that evening.

  ‘You been in that lake again? One of these days the park keeper’ll have your guts for garters,’ said Tilly. ‘Oh no, my lass, you don’t peel potatoes in my kitchen when you’ve been in that filthy water. Go and wash yourself.’ Alice stuck her tongue out and went upstairs.

  Tilly turned to Bridget. ‘You’d best tell her today, Bridget, and get it over with.’

  Bridget bit her lip. When Alice had come downstairs and had peeled one potato, Bridget said, ‘Alicky, I’ve got something to tell you.’

  ‘Is it Sean Kelly you’re going to marry?’

  ‘Holy Mary, the child’s got her eyes and ears everywhere!’

  ‘I saw you kissing him on the area steps last night. But Bridie, you’ll not be leaving London?’

  ‘That’s just it, Alicky. We’re going to Limerick. Sean’s got a bit of savings, and we’ll be starting up a little shop there.’

  ‘You’ll be miserable,’ said Alice confidently. ‘You don’t come from Limerick, You don’t know anyone there.’

  ‘It’s not so far away from Tralee as all that, Alicky,’ began Bridget, and then she noticed that Alice’s mouth and eyelids were trembling.

  ‘Now, ducks, don’t take on like that. You’ll still have old Tilly,’ said Tilly.

  Bridget drew Alice on to her lap. ‘It’s torn in two I am, Alicky. I want to stay with you nearly as much as I want to go with Sean. But a girl must get married and have children, and you know I’ve been homesick for a long time too.’

  ‘It’s selfish of me to cry,’ said Alice, and she cried even harder. Fairly soon she stopped, and peeled more potatoes with determination. ‘Tilly,’ she asked, with a vigorous sniff, ‘do you feel homesick for the North ever?’

  ‘Not I,’ replied Tilly. ‘The Five Towns is the ugliest place in the world. I spent a year glazing pots, and that was enough for me. I’d sooner be anyone’s cook than that.’ Tilly pushed her small spectacles back on her red nose. She was a broad but thin woman, with greasy black hair.

  Bridget was so pretty, Alice thought. She would be beautiful if her face weren’t so round. The smell of lemon-scented soap, Bridget’s pet extravagance, always clung to her. That scent was the first of Alice’s memories, that and Bridget’s low Irish voice telling her sinister fairy stories. Bridget had taught her to speak. When she was very young, Alice had seen little of Diana.

  *

  An hour and a half later, Alice was sitting on the window-seat in the library. Diana’s friends were grouped round the empty fireplace, talking. It was dusk now, but the library curtains were still open and the lights had not been turned on. Alice took off her shoes and swung her legs through the open window so that the first breeze of the day could wash round her feet. She gazed out into the grey square. Soon she felt tears tickling behind her eyes as she watched, and ceased to listen to the conversation, and thought of Bridget’s leaving.

  ‘Darling,’ said Diana gently. ‘If you’re bored, you can look bored facing us, but to turn your back is going to extremes.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Alice, and she left the window-seat and came to join the others. Diana pulled forward a footstool, and put it beside her chair. Alice sat down on it. Diana took away from her the mug of beer which Alice was holding, and held her hand.

  ‘I know you’ve inherited your father’s head for drink, Alice, but don’t have any more or you’ll be having the vin triste,’ she said, smiling briefly and returning to her conversation. She still held Alice’s small chapped hand in her long soft white one. Alice looked for a while at Diana’s hand and then she too turned back to the group; but she held on to Diana.

  Most of the guests were familiar to her. Standing by the fireplace, with his elbow resting on the mantelpiece, was Augustus Wood. He was about forty years old and produced plays. He was a short, pot-bellied man with a round pink face. The top of his head was bald and the shining bald spot was surrounded by an overgrown fringe of blond hair. He was dressed in an old suit. His collar was unstarched, and his waistcoat was half unbuttoned. His wife, Clementina Wood, who was sitting almost opposite her husband, had frizzy pale ginger hair scraped back in a bun, and her grey eyes were covered with small round spectacles. She was always dressed in tweeds, which she might have worn for shooting had she led a different sort of life. Like Diana she was a poet, but she spent more time on writing than did Diana.

  On Diana’s right sat Henry Johnson, who was her lover; a very beautiful, dark young man of twenty-seven. />
  Of those present, only these three knew that Diana was a professional kept woman as well as a poet.

  Rose Pembridge, a slim, pretty young woman, was perching on the fender. She wore a mustard-yellow djibbah with an embroidered yoke, which made her look a little sallow. She had spent a month in prison for disturbing a political meeting in the cause of women’s suffrage. Next to her sat Leo Shaffer, an enormous, bearded, theatrically dressed man, who was in his late forties and looked far younger. He ran an art gallery, and also painted.

  Diana, dressed in a crimson Directoire frock which would have been the height of fashion had she been wearing stays beneath it, sat on one side of Alice, and on Alice’s other side there sat a strange man: a protégé of Clementina’s called James Bellinger, who was a struggling young actor of twenty-one. He was a lanky man, with big, lightly covered bones. He had a thin beaky nose and unbrushed blond hair. His eyes were large and green and he had hollow cheeks. Alice thought he looked like a wounded knight from one of the illustrations in her mother’s copy of the Morte d’ Arthur. He was chain-smoking cheap cigarettes.

  Alice studied everyone’s appearance, and noticed the way in which they spoke and moved, but she did not listen very hard to the conversation. She did listen when Diana read out, in a flattened voice, a poem which she had written about her childhood. Diana had told Alice very little about her early life and Alice had presumed that this was because Diana’s childhood had been especially unhappy.

  Diana’s poem was called ‘Ignorance’, and it seemed to be saying, Alice thought, that the innocence of childhood was a bliss comparable to the false paradise of Limbo to which unbaptised babies went — until the innocence was ended, when it became a torment.

  Diana had grown up in a large country house in which, with the exception of one governess, everyone had been kind to her. She had not sensed, then, how bored she was, because she knew no other possible way of life than her own in the nursery and school room. Only after her coming out had she wanted to go to university, to learn about all the things of which she was so ignorant. Her affectionate parents had comforted her, teased her, grieved about her and refused to send her. At twenty-two she had married a man twenty years older than herself, a former Fenian who had been imprisoned for his politics, and who lived on an allowance from an aunt. Her parents, who had violently opposed the marriage, took no further notice of her. Proudly she had set out, after her husband’s death, to drown her sorrows in work and to be a true New Woman; but she had discovered, once she was penniless, that her happy childhood had prepared her to be nothing but the most old-fashioned kind of professional woman.

  ‘When women get the Vote,’ said Rose Pembridge hoarsely, ‘your sort of experience will be impossible.’

  ‘I wasn’t attacking the position of women, so much as …’ began Diana, but she was interrupted.

  ‘But Diana,’ said Leo, ‘the fate which ought to have befallen you didn’t happen, did it? By your own talents and efforts you did, in fact, manage to support yourself by writing — a marvellous achievement in itself.’

  ‘I’d forgotten,’ murmured Diana, glancing down at the last few lines of the poem.

  ‘Of course,’ continued Leo, ‘I quite agree that, with the class structure and the position of women being as they are, the Honourable Diana Blentham, eligible débutante, would — as the penniless widow of an Irishman — become an entirely suitable kept mistress for the men who’d asked to marry her before she fell from grace. But a woman of your stamp doesn’t necessarily follow that natural course — and I don’t think that you should finish that autobiographical poem with a generalisation, even if it’s a wise one.’

  Diana looked straight through him and said, ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right.’

  Henry Johnson and Alice were gazing up at her. Diana saw her, stroked her head and smiled at her. Alice imitated the mildly interested, unaware expression which was on both the Woods’ faces.

  ‘Unlike Leo, I admire the sense of your poem immensely,’ said Augustus. ‘It’s the form I object to. Why write poetry if you’re going to make it as like prose as possible?’

  ‘You love all things purple and complicated, don’t you, Augustus?’ teased Clementina. ‘You just think that all poetry should be versification of Walter Pater’s prose.’

  ‘My dear, I’m not so very out of date as all that,’ said Augustus.

  ‘But you’re not a poet,’ finished Clementina.

  There was a pause. Diana poured herself a very stiff whisky and drank it quickly. It was quite dark in the room now, but she did not tell Alice to turn on the lights and they sat in the mauve gloom still.

  ‘As I was saying, Rose,’ said Diana, ‘I wasn’t so much attacking the position of women as attacking the institution of childhood.’

  ‘What do you mean — the institution of childhood?’ said James Bellinger suddenly. He had said nothing all evening. ‘Surely childhood is — er — a physical and mental condition, not an institution?’

  ‘It’s not a mental condition,’ said Diana. ‘Or perhaps it is. It’s a state of mind produced by living under arbitrary rule. Parental rule is usually a benevolent despotism, of course, but it’s arbitrary, absolute rule just the same, and it creates a lifelong fear of independence. If you want adults to be free, really free, you must let children think and experiment for themselves. If you do want them to be free,’ she added.

  ‘Yes of course,’ someone murmured.

  ‘My dear Diana,’ said Augustus, ‘I’ve discussed this once before with you, I think, and I agree that physical child-abuse is rife and ought to be stopped and that it’s ridiculous to extend childhood to eighteen or twenty-one as we do, but all the same children do have to be guided and looked after and surely you wouldn’t have some sort of institution doing that rather than parents? Goodness, the things I’ve heard you say about public schools!’

  ‘I don’t have to be looked after,’ said Alice. ‘Not by anyone. I don’t need anyone to take care of me,’ she quavered, ‘I can take care of myself.’

  ‘Because your mother’s taught you how,’ said Clementina. ‘If you hadn’t been taught how to, you wouldn’t know how to. Children do have to be guided, because they haven’t any experience.’

  Alice was silent.

  ‘Alice can look after herself: Alice has experience: Alice is eleven years old: an eleven-year-old is a child: a child cannot look after herself: a child has no experience. Question: is Alice a child or not?’ mocked Diana.

  ‘Answer:’ sniffed Clementina, ‘Alice is old beyond her years because she’s been made to be.’

  ‘I feel like a vivisected rat,’ said Alice and everyone laughed.

  ‘I do apologise, Alice,’ said Diana, stopping the laughter with her apology. ‘I really do. And I admit that if you were a little older I wouldn’t have been so oblivious of your dignity. I’m afraid these habits persist.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Alice.

  ‘Yes,’ said Diana, looking down at her daughter, ‘you haven’t been shut up in a nursery, you haven’t been purposely deprived of experience, but all you really have experience of is a little bohemian circle. It’s a sort of grown-up nursery, and I don’t think it’s a good thing.’

  ‘But I’ve been all round London,’ said Alice. ‘Into the slums and everything.’

  ‘You’re as much an outsider there as a slumming duchess, whatever you look like, my darling,’ said Diana, ‘because you can’t imagine life on less than three hundred a year. And neither can I.’

  ‘When you say “can’t imagine”, Diana,’ said Leo, ‘I think you’re wrong. You just mean that you — that none of us, for that matter — have ever lived on much less than that. Very well. But if you just make up an imaginary budget of a pound a week you can imagine what it’s like.’

  ‘I think,’ said Diana, ‘that it’s very arrogant to say that you can imagine the full misery of living six to a room in a leaking slum when you’ve never had any such experience.’

/>   ‘You may be right,’ said Leo, ‘but then, why are you a Fabian? Why do you believe that such things are evils, curable evils, if you can’t imagine these evils?’

  ‘I’m a Fabian,’ said Diana, ‘because the doctrine of gradualism was specially designed for the conscience-stricken upper-middle-classes who don’t want Utopia to arrive until they and their tidy annuities are safely buried together,’

  ‘If gradualism weren’t inevitable,’ said Rose, ‘if the Marxist class war came tomorrow, I know which side of the barricade I’d be fighting on.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Diana, ‘so do I.’ And she looked very polite. Only Augustus gently laughed. Henry Johnson turned on the lights, and they all blinked.

  ‘Well,’ said Diana, ‘what a good thing we’re having a cold supper. Let’s go through, shall we?’

  ‘The potato salad must be absolutely crawling with flies,’ said Alice, ‘I forgot to cover it.’

  ‘Not so loud, my darling. Some of us believe in germs, you know,’ said Diana.

  For a few moments, Alice was alone in the library with James Bellinger, for they were the last two to leave the room.

  ‘Your mother’s a wonderful woman,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, she is, isn’t she?’ agreed Alice.

  ‘You’re not very like her, are you?’ he said.

  Alice surprised him by fetching a chair, putting it in front of the fireplace and standing on it. She looked at herself in the dirty glass above the mantelpiece, and she saw her own reflection, rather than just a face, for the first time. She looked hard and then turned round on him.

  ‘All right, so I’m ugly,’ she said, ‘but I’ve got a mouth like hers, and a face shaped like hers.’ She scowled and looked most unlike her mother.

  ‘Honestly, I didn’t mean to be rude. And you’ll be awfully handsome one day, you know. You’re just too young for your looks,’ he said and he saw her relax a little.

  Looking at her more closely, he also saw that he had inadvertently spoken the truth.

  CHAPTER 3