Privileged Children

by Frances Vernon

  Kate smiled very slightly.

  CHAPTER 9

  BRAMHAM GARDENS

  EARL’S COURT

  June 1916

  Alice was eight months pregnant with Anatole’s child. She knew now that Luke and James Bellinger had both been killed, Luke at Gallipoli and James on the Western Front. Re-reading the descriptions of the war which Kate gave in her letters, Alice had cried for them, although she had not loved them.

  Liza came into the kitchen, where Alice was drinking tea and reading the paper.

  ‘Really, Miss Molloy, in your condition you ought to eat more,’ Mr Tuskin was lecturing her.

  ‘Don’t fuss, Mr Tuskin.’

  ‘Alice, will you walk to school with me?’ asked Liza. It was half past eight.

  ‘Of course,’ Alice replied. Alice took a stick with her, because Anatole and Mr Tuskin were both convinced that this would make it safer for her to walk outside. She felt very comfortable in this pregnancy, and went easily along with the household’s insistences on how she should behave.

  Augustus and Clementina were living with them now; recently Augustus had lost a great deal of money, and he had been forced to sell the house in Gordon Square. Looking at Michael, who was now two years old, Alice thought that he had never seemed to be hers even when he was in her womb. He had come to resemble his adoptive parents in a remarkable way; he even had blue eyes like Augustus, and ginger hair like Clementina.

  Liza’s school, which was an endowed progressive school for girls under the age of fourteen, was in South Kensington. Jenny was there too. Alice and Liza walked through the small white streets and squares south of the dusty Old Brompton Road.

  ‘Alice, do you want a boy?’ asked Liza.

  ‘No, a girl. Certainly a girl. My own daughter,’ she said.

  Liza ran a little way ahead. She swung herself round a lamp post, and her skirt twisted up round her long, thin, black-clad legs. Alice watched her. Liza’s hair had gained a little colour recently, and now could be called blonde. The sun had taken away the bluish look which her tight skin had in the winter. Her skin had to be protected from even a weak sun, however, and she always wore a wide battered hat which was held under her chin with elastic.

  ‘I wish I’d had a sister,’ Alice said to her. ‘A younger sister.’

  ‘Oh, Alice, you couldn’t wish for anything so awful!’ said Liza. ‘People think Jenny and I ought to be close because we’re twins, but how could we be, when we’re so different? Jenny likes arguing and quarrelling. She’s always joking and teasing. I’ll never, ever understand her.’

  ‘Sometimes she’s as serious as you are,’ said Alice.

  They had reached the school. Girls, aged between five and fourteen, were running about on the lawn outside the large white house. The grass was worn bare by their feet. The smallest girls wore pinafores, the older ones short dresses with wide belts round their hips. Several were in mourning. Liza opened the gate and went in. She walked straight up the path into the building, greeting no one as she went. She looked odd amongst the others, in her long skirt and old, loose shirt.

  Alice stood awhile, watching the girls on the lawn. A few of the older girls were plump or had spots, but most of them had an ethereal look, perhaps because they were growing so fast. Their early youth gave to some of them, Alice reflected as she watched the laughing pale faces and lanky legs, a charm which they would never have again. By the time their parents considered them old enough to enjoy their beauty, the beauty might well be gone. Alice leaned on the railings, looking at their gleaming hair and tiny poking breasts, until the bell rang and the girls started to troop indoors. At that moment, Jenny ran up puffing, dropped her boots and hastily put on shoes over her filthy bare feet.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asked Alice in amazement.

  ‘I walked with Liza,’ said Alice, and walked away, as the mistress who was ringing the bell shouted to Jenny.

  It occurred to Alice that she was hardly older than the girls outside the school. She had never concerned herself greatly with her chronological age, even at Melton Balbridge. Until her first pregnancy, she had thought of herself as young. Since then, she had believed herself to be in middle life.

  At home, Anatole was in the kitchen. ‘I want to talk to you,’ he said. Alice sat down. He looked at the great mound of her abdomen. ‘Alice, if you care at all about me and our child, you must marry me. And yes, I say it is necessary that it should be legitimate. I was illegitimate. I would never inflict that on anyone else. Be quiet,’ he said as she began a familiar argument. ‘I know that our child will not suffer from a stepfather who loathes it. I know that being illegitimate will make no difference to its being accepted in our own circle. But I will not have my child suffer for it in the world outside.’

  ‘You mean, if it carries my name it’ll be teased about being a bastard?’

  ‘No, I do not. I accept that you want a girl to carry your name. Alice, probably it’s only an obsession on my part, but please agree to marry me. I swear to God that I will resign in writing every single right that the law gives me over my wife.’

  ‘You’d better do that,’ she replied. ‘All right, I will marry you for Finola, on that condition.’

  ‘Finola?’

  ‘That’s what I’m going to call her. Finola Adèle.’

  ‘I don’t like Adèle. She can be Léonie. And what if it’s a boy?’

  ‘Oh, Seamus will do.’

  ‘But you will marry me‚’ said Anatole.

  ‘I said I would.’

  Anatole left the house. Alice picked up the dress she was making. She had done very little work during her pregnancy. She sewed very well, for at Red Lion Square she had earned money by doing the mending ever since she was seven. She sat there for a few moments, examining her conversation with Anatole. She remembered his waking up from nightmares, and whispering and crying to her in the dark. She got up and ran out of the house, and saw Anatole rounding the corner of the square.

  ‘Anatole! Anatole!’ she called.

  ‘Alice, don’t run for Lord’s sake —’

  She caught up with him and clasped him in her arms, hugging him so tightly that he gasped. ‘I’ll be happy to marry you! I’ll never let anyone hurt you again. I wish I could see your stepfather burning in hell,’ she choked.

  ‘Why should you, and how could you, truly understand what it means to have had a miserable childhood?’ Anatole gently loosened Alice’s grip and looked up into her sad and angry eyes. ‘It is because you have never been successfully bullied that I love you, I think. Come on, let’s walk to the tube together.’ Anatole paused. He stroked her thin arm softly and looked into her puzzled, flushed face.

  ‘I want to tell you something, my love. I murdered my stepfather. I don’t know quite why I’ve never told anyone before.’

  ‘Mother of God,’ whispered Alice, wide-eyed, a few seconds later. ‘When? How?’ She did not need to ask why.

  ‘You’re not horrified, are you?’ said Anatole. ‘… bien que tu sois croyante et pratiquante Catholique …’ He was almost sneering.

  ‘Of course I’m not. Of course he deserved it, if a quarter of what you’ve said is true.’

  ‘Well,’ said Anatole, ‘as to when I killed him, it was nine years after I ran away, when I was twenty-three.’

  ‘How did you do it, then? Did you shoot him?’

  ‘Oh, no. I wanted it to look like a suicide. I drugged him and his old servant, and then I hung him from a beam. He was quite a weight, you know, it was difficult to get him up there. I left France straight away. I didn’t care to go to the guillotine.’

  ‘It’s marvellous to have had the courage to do that,’ said Alice. ‘So he didn’t suffer, in that case?’

  ‘No,’ said Anatole, ‘alas he did not. And it isn’t courage, it’s having had enough hatred. I wish I’d killed him in a painful way.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘I wish I’d seen the fear and helplessness in his face that he’d seen so often in mine when I
was a child, when he came up on me with that stick.’

  Anatole’s face relaxed and grew nervous. He looked at Alice, and saw she thought it was the literal truth. It impressed him, and he went on a little ahead.

  CHAPTER 10

  BRAMHAM GARDENS

  EARL’S COURT

  April 1917

  Finola Léonie Molloy was born in the middle of July 1916 at Aunt Caitlin’s house in Oxfordshire, as her parents had intended. Anatole had been worried that Alice would be very unhappy if she did not have a daughter. In the event Alice had refused to feed Finola herself, saying that she had produced the child as she had promised: she had never promised to look after her. Anatole had struggled with bottles for a while as he had when Liza and Jenny had been born, but little Finola was a scrawny, ailing child and ate very little. At length Aunt Caitlin had made him agree to allow her to employ a nurse for the child. The only nurse whom Anatole thought tolerable would not go to London, so in August Alice and Anatole left Finola at King’s Norton. Anatole went to see his daughter whenever he could afford it.

  *

  Kate walked up and down the platform at Dover station, holding her coat close round her body in an attempt to keep warm. She had waited an hour for the train already. Oh, for the hot fug of the trains which had taken her family, when she was a child, from Edinburgh to Ullapool every summer! Kate remembered the damp banana sandwiches which they had eaten on the train, the itching of her best summer clothes in which she had alway insisted upon travelling, and the brown of the moors in a dry summer, before the heather was in flower.

  Kate went into the waiting room, where pre-war posters still advertised excursion trips, and where there was a tiny oil heater. She stood so close to it that she was in danger of burning her clothes, but it did little to warm her. She occupied herself with more warming memories.

  Kate was thirty-three. She had been born Kate McQuillan. Her parents, a Scottish father and Jewish mother, had lived in a detached villa in an Edinburgh suburb. They had had one maid and six children, of whom Kate was the youngest. Her parents had believed in the higher education of women, but when Kate had failed to enter university they had suggested that she marry Arthur Jennings. Kate had never known their judgement to be unsound before.

  When the train came in, Kate got into an icy-cold smoke-filled carriage. On the way up to London, she found that she could not avoid thinking about Bramham Gardens, about what Anatole had told her in his letters, which had begged her to leave France.

  Everyone was up to greet her at Bramham Gardens, though it was two in the morning when she arrived. They had some food ready for her, and Kate ate it gratefully although she was very tired. She noticed that Anatole and Alice did not exchange a single word while she was eating. Alice’s face was yellow and drawn. She looked at least thirty. Her hair hung in greasy tails, and her nails were bitten to the quick. Her unwashed clothes stank of smoke.

  ‘Did you hear that Harry refused to do any war-work at all, and they put him in prison?’ Jenny was saying as she stood by Kate’s shaking elbow. ‘That’s why Christopher’s not here. He’s moved into rooms near Pentonville to feel close to Harry. Little advantage that must bring him, though, from one angle.’

  ‘That’s enough, Jenny,’ sighed Kate.

  That night, Anatole slept in her bed for the first time in four years. He did not make love to her.

  ‘Won’t Alice have missed you?’ asked Kate in the morning, when he was getting dressed.

  ‘I haven’t slept with Alice since we came back from Caitlin’s,’ he replied. ‘And I haven’t made love to her for longer than that, because I couldn’t when she was pregnant. She tired of me the moment I married her, Kate. I have had two wives who have grown to hate the sight of me and have rejected my children. And as well, she is sleeping with Leo Shaffer at the moment — or she was a few weeks ago, anyway. She has found a better lover than me. She actually dared to say so! Do you know she once promised me that she would never let anyone hurt me again?’

  ‘Hate the sight of you, indeed! I never heard such nonsense. Last night she was looking at you like a lost dog, though she’s too proud to talk to you, of course, silly little fool.’

  ‘Whatever else she is, she is not a silly little fool, Kate.’

  ‘She was longing for you to forgive and accept her, Anatole, I’ll swear she was. I bet she’d have Finola back if you approached her right.’

  ‘I have cajoled and wept and flattered and threatened but it is always no, no, not until she is a year old. The excuse is that the child ought not to be entrusted to our haphazard care till then, because she was so weak at birth.’

  ‘Has it not occurred to you, Anatole, that she might really think that?’

  Anatole pulled his shirt down and looked straight at her. ‘Do you honestly think it could be that?’ he sneered.

  ‘No, I don’t. But look, Anatole, a lot of women are very depressed after they’ve had babies. You men are all the same. You think that you’ve got a right to abhor the napkins and the yelling but that a mother ought to think her baby’s pure joy.’

  ‘Did I ever mind napkins and screaming?’ Anatole screamed. ‘Did I?’

  ‘No, you didn’t. I’ll admit. But just because you love children, that doesn’t mean Alice has got to, or will.’

  ‘Her own baby, though! She’s such a beautiful litle girl now, Kate, you don’t know. Just because she was red and wrinkled when she was newborn, Alice said she was a monster.’

  ‘Anatole, pull yourself together. I’m tired and I can’t take any more histrionics. Listen to me. One, Alice took absolutely no notice of Michael when he was born, and hardly saw him, so that’s what she’s used to. Two, it’s quite often the mother who needs mothering after she’s had a baby. Three, it’s you who ought to be looking after her, without even mentioning Finola. At the moment the poor child — and she’s only nineteen, Anatole — must feel that you only value her because of her cargo. She’s got to be your perfect wife and mother before you’ll accept her. But she won’t be. She’ll only ever be Alice — though Lord knows it’s difficult enough to accept Alice for what she is,’ Kate added with a sniff.

  ‘There’s no need to insult her!’

  ‘Oh, I see, it’s only you who’s got a right to reject and criticise her, is it? And how you could criticise her for infidelity I don’t know. My god, you and your love affairs have plagued me all these years …’

  ‘Oh, be silent! And don’t suggest that you haven’t had affairs.’

  ‘That’s as may be. I’m just telling you at the moment that if you want Alice — and Finola — back, you’ve got to look after her. And I’m not going to quarrel with you now, Anatole. Please hurry up and leave me alone. I could sleep all day.’

  *

  Kate did not go back to France. She went to work in a London hospital. She and Anatole persuaded Alice not to try to paint (for she had produced nothing which she found satisfactory for a long time) but to do some other kind of work, to occupy her and to stop her from brooding. Alice refused to nurse. In the end, Anatole found her a job as a clerk in the War Office through Lady Caroline Fawcett, the mother of one of his pupils; and Alice worked there until the middle of 1919.

  When Anatole next raised the issue of Finola, in May, Alice agreed to her return, scarcely voicing her private thought that the child would be better off where there were no zeppelin raids and rations. She took no notice of Finola when she came back, though, and Finola herself hated anyone but Anatole to touch her until she was two and a half years old.

  CHAPTER 11

  BRAMHAM GARDENS

  EARL’S COURT

  March 1918

  ‘THE GERMANS ON THE MARNE,’ Anatole read in the newspaper. He frowned peacefully, read the first few words and turned over the page.

  Upstairs, Finola was screaming.

  ‘Anatole, I can’t bear it’ moaned Jenny. ‘Why don’t you go and shut her up?’

  ‘Because I have to leave in three minutes
and I shall be late in any case.’

  Jenny stared. ‘Liza won’t go, you know.’

  ‘Liza will go once Finola has screamed enough.’

  Firmly he opened the paper at the centre pages and looked at the leading article. He must be imagining that Finola’s screams were getting louder. He waited.

  Anatole crumpled up the paper and went upstairs. He galloped up the last flight. There was Finola, in her cubbyhole of a nursery next to his bedroom, purple in the face. She was still in her nightdress, sitting on the floor surrounded by bedclothes which she had pulled off the bed. It had been Kate’s turn to wake Finola and give her breakfast today, but Kate had forgotten and Finola could not yet walk downstairs: she could only yell. ‘Hush, hush, je te donnerai ton petit-déjeuner,’ said Anatole, scooping up the child, who was tiny for her eighteen months. ‘I thought Kate had taken you back upstairs, you see, darling. There, hush.’ She let herself relax and be carried downstairs.

  Finola could not be left in the kitchen if no one had the time to watch her, for she was at an age when she put everything small enough into her mouth and clambered over everything large enough. In her own room there was nothing to endanger her, so she was sometimes left there for fairly long periods. In the intervals, two or three people at once would play with her, talk to her and cuddle her. There was not enough money to pay a nanny, although shortly after Finola’s return it had been decided that she needed one.

  Anatole put her in her high chair in the kitchen and started smashing eggs for her breakfast.

  ‘Do you realise that Liza was just upstairs and she didn’t even go to see whether there was anything wrong with the child? That bitch Kate didn’t feed her,’ said Anatole to Jenny.

  ‘I can get her breakfast,’ said Jenny. ‘You go off. It doesn’t matter if I’m late for school; they don’t even notice me being late any more, I’m late so often.’

  ‘She’s not going to have to eat your scrambled eggs after she’s had no food since yesterday, my dear Jenny,’ said Anatole, slamming the saucepan down on the stove.