by Melvyn Bragg
Mary fled to hide in the cupboard.
‘I hid in that cupboard,’ she said again.
‘It was roomy.’
‘They both came into the house to look for me.’ Mary’s remembered distress began to seep into her expression.
‘But they didn’t find you,’ said John. ‘They didn’t know where you were.’
‘Mother Johnston would have known.’
John left it at that.
Mrs Johnston had pointed to the cupboard and smiled and whispered, ‘Little piggies have big ears.’ Then she cooed, ‘Mary! Mar-ee, where are you? Grace wants to talk to you. Where are you?’ The older woman smiled again at Grace, whose responding smile was strained. This was a game between Mrs Johnston and Mary, between the mother and her child, a game deeply planted in simple but loved hide-and-seek games in the child’s past, her child’s past, a game that was layered with experiences she would never have.
A terrible jealousy took hold of Grace, and all her lists and loving plans were thrown on to the bonfire of this possession by jealousy.
‘Leave her,’ she said. ‘I’ll come back another time.’
‘She’s a lovely little girl,’ said Mrs Johnston, smiling.
Grace walked out rapidly, not wishing to be impeded, not wishing to be calmed down, not wanting to be there.
It was like a firestorm. It raged through her, destroying her peace of mind, racking her sleep, impairing her work. Dr Fraser found no ailment but he recognised distress when he saw it. He prescribed strong sedatives and a few days’ rest. Grace resisted them. The routine was what held her together. Work worked, she knew that.
She remembered spasms of grief over the mother she had never known. This was even more fierce. The childhood of her daughter from which she had been banned. What sort of religion condoned and enforced that? What Immortal Invisible God Only Wise allowed that? And turned an apparently amiable village community into a hunting pack, after her blood, taking a sort of revenge on her for unpermitted pleasure, vengeance for a passion, condemnation for an accident.
Grace admitted to herself that she hated religion. She had gone to the Anglican church in Grasmere but only because not to have gone would have drawn to her the sort of attention she sought to avoid. So she went for that service of social solicitude, Evensong. Work could excuse her attendance at the Eucharist in the morning, when in any case the constant standing and sitting and kneeling, the creeds, the versicles and responses and the barbaric declaration that the congregation was about to eat the body and drink the blood of Jesus Christ offended her Spartan nonconformist inheritance. She had to cook the Sunday meal, to which Mr Logan always invited guests. She had adopted a similar tactic in Carlisle, although the minimally dutiful Dr Fraser and the clearly tokenistic visits of Agnes gave her a much looser rein.
So where did you turn if you had no God? She read from the Wordsworth selection Mrs Logan had given her. She found little there for the salving of the jealousy that had seized her. She walked, whenever she could, through the city and into the park, which reached into the countryside. She walked on the bank of the river Eden with no other purpose than to tire herself out.
The Frasers did not question her but they were well aware of the root of the unhappiness. They waited a while until Agnes said, ‘It’s gone on long enough. I’ll talk to her after lunch. You’ll be playing golf.’
Agnes suggested they go into the drawing room and Grace feared the worst. She knew her work had been less than satisfactory. She had caught the glances between them. She looked a sight. She was perpetually tired. She had a small but persistent and irritating scratchy cough. She needed this job.
‘I’m not going to pry, Grace. I can understand that might just make it worse. Some matters have to be seen through by ourselves alone. I fear you’ve had rather too much experience of that. Of course, if you chose to . . .’
Grace sat before her like a criminal, waiting for the sentence.
‘Would you like to work with me at the school?’ said Agnes. ‘I need help with the very little ones, the threes and fours. Some of them have a tough time on the home front. They need more attention than Mrs Dawson or myself can give them. I’ve talked to Dr Fraser. We think we can reorganise your work so that you can be at the school two or three afternoons a week from about one o’clock until three. Does it interest you? I’m sure you’re quite capable of doing it.’
Sometimes there are acts of pure kindness that can change a life. This offer was to be one of those. Grace reined in her feelings and was outwardly calm but teaching those often under-nourished, under-loved children was to be like receiving a sacrament. She was, at last, able to be with, to watch over, to help and love children; and slowly the weight of grief in her was anaesthetised and replaced, to some extent at least, by the knowledge that she was wanted and that she could give what her life so far had barred her from giving.
Almost a year later, there was a brief note from Mrs Johnston. Could Grace come as soon as possible? Preferably on a Saturday.
Mrs Johnston immediately led her into the parlour, so little used that it had the atmosphere of being in constant mourning. There was an unplayed piano, a rarely sat-on three-piece suite, a polished fireplace emitting warmth no more than two or three times a year, and the smell of dust from the heavy carpets despite weekly beating. There had been no sight of Mary. Grace was still prey to so many fears that she lowered her top lip and pressed her teeth into it.
Mrs Johnston took one armchair, Grace the other.
‘I have to tell you this,’ said Mrs Johnston. ‘I think you are the only one who can do what is needful.’
Grace had to keep quiet. Was that the goal of all her effort? To wait?
‘She came back from school the day I wrote you that letter. She was in a state. I’ll not drag it out. Somebody in the schoolyard, some girl, they have separate yards, the boys and the girls, some girl had told her that she was . . . a bastard.’
Grace put her hand to her mouth to stop herself crying out. Her head leaned back as if reacting against a blow. She tried to swallow but her throat was too constricted. She waited.
‘She wouldn’t say who it was but if I find out . . . It seems that others joined in. When the bell went for school over, two of them followed her down the high street shouting out, ‘‘Mary is a bastard!’’?’ Mrs Johnston paused. Her anger was undiminished. ‘Poor little lass,’ she said. ‘Now then . . . Now . . . She wants to know what it means. She’s nearly eight now and she’s sharp. She can understand things. She wants to know what it means and you have to tell her. You have to tell her today. I’m going round to see her teacher later on this afternoon. There we are, Grace. She’s upstairs. I’ve said you’re taking her for a walk.’
Grace took her across Market Hill, along the Tenters, and at the bottom of Stony Hill she turned left on to the path that led through several fields to the hamlet of Kirkland. It was a calm walk: open fields were on both sides of the path; there was a picturesque copse of Scots pines in the pasture land belonging to the big house, fat cattle grazed, scarcely moving, the small soothing sounds of a sweet summer day.
‘We could sit here,’ said Grace. There was a small section left of the stone wall that had tumbled down.
Mary, who had been very quiet, aware that something important was going to happen, sat down obediently and clutched her doll tightly.
Grace had to do it.
‘Mrs Johnston . . .’ said Grace.
‘Mother . . .’ said Mary, quickly, and Grace knew that was not her.
‘Yes. She told me that somebody . . .’
‘I’m not telling . . .’
‘That’s not . . . that’s fine. That somebody had said you were a bastard.’
Mary was so very still and silent that Grace felt it like a force.
‘And they meant to be nasty,’ said Grace.
‘They were!’ Mary looked away.
‘A bastard means . . . it means that . . .’ It means that I should not lie.
It means that this is my legacy to my daughter. It means that I have to do it.
‘It means that people think you have no daddy and just a mammy.’
Grace thought that Mary’s stillness, if it were possible, intensified.
‘Well, that’s not true, Mary. You have a mammy. It’s a difficult, it’s not an easy story, but I am your mammy.’
‘No, you’re not!’
Still the girl did not turn to look at her.
‘And you have a daddy.’
‘Well, where is he?’
This was almost too much for Grace. For both of them. But Grace knew that she had to go through with it.
‘He went away. He was a soldier in the war. He was very brave but he was wounded. And then he went away. And I didn’t see him again.’
‘Why?’
Oh, yes, why? . . . Why?
‘It was the war. Terrible things happened in the war.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘I don’t know, Mary. I don’t know.’
And now Grace looked away over the field at the tall pines, wishing that her life and Mary’s life could have been different – as simple, as aching and as impossible a wish as that.
The child did not speak. Grace had to do it.
‘So. It isn’t true, you see. What they said is not true. You are not . . . that word.’
And where would the lie later fall?
Mary stood up, so troubled, Grace thought, so unfairly troubled. The girl searched into Grace’s expression. Grace held her gaze. She stood up and they waited in silence for a moment, and then Mary held out her hand and they walked back into the town.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Perhaps some things were better left unsaid, Grace thought, as she looked out of the bus window at the familiar landscape. How strong was Mary? Would this knowledge help her or make her more bewildered? Grace was uneasy. Mary had taken her hand and they had walked close together, treading lightly, Grace thought, thin ice. A new path? But as soon as they had reached the house, Mary had let go and, in a rush, gone to Mrs Johnston and clung to her, hiding her face in the broad apron: she made no sound but dug her head in deep. Mrs Johnston looked satisfied and stroked the little girl’s hair. Grace thought that it was she who should have done that. Why hadn’t she? She felt breathless and it was with difficulty that she said, ‘We talked about it. I told her that she did have a mammy and a daddy.’
She paused. She said, ‘I told her I was her mammy, and her daddy had gone away after the war. That he was a brave soldier.’
Again she paused. Knowing that her words were addressed to the child.
‘I should have said more. I should have said that you were looking after her now and for a while. I should have said that you were being her mother now while I . . .’
‘You’d not been well,’ said Mrs Johnston, uninterruptedly stroking the child’s head.
‘That’s true. I’ve not been well.’
‘And you come whenever you can.’
‘Yes.’
‘And we’ll see what happens.’
‘We will,’ said Grace. ‘I think I’ll go now . . . Mary?’
The child released herself and looked at Grace and then at Mrs Johnston. It was a very serious look, she gave, her eyes unstained by tears.
‘I’ll see you again soon,’ said Grace.
Mary nodded and pressed the doll to her chest.
‘There you are, then,’ said Mrs Johnston. ‘It’ll all get over.’
But she kept a close eye on the girl. Mrs Johnston believed that you had to meet your troubles head on. Certain matters were private, certain information was rightly secret. But once the devil surfaced you had to fight him and destroy him or he would never go away. It was years since she had attended a chapel service – she was a Congregationalist – but the basic notion that the world was divided between the good and the bad, that the devil would get you unless you were on your guard and that when you saw him at work you had to fight him off, was rooted in her. Little girls calling Mary a ‘bastard’ was the work of the devil. He had to be faced down and the strongest weapon was truth. And if not truth . . . ?
There was close observation. Mrs Johnston watched over Mary in the subsequent weeks and she was not reassured. It had set her back. Previously, on most mornings, soon after Mary woke up, she would start singing. Mrs Johnston thought it was the loveliest sound there was, the sweet little bird voice piping the old schoolroom songs that she, too, had learned and in the same schoolroom years before. It gave the house a blessing, she thought, it heralded the day, that sweet voice; it was her own dawn.
Now there was silence. Mrs Johnston felt helpless and nervous at the morning silence. At first she poked her head into the cubbyhole of a room in which the girl slept. She would be awake, quietly playing with the doll or looking through one of the children’s books Grace had bought her. She would offer up a smile and Mrs Johnston would say, over-roughly, ‘It’s time you were up and about,’ and the girl would get out of her bed instantly, take off her nightgown and begin to dress for the day.
‘Have they stopped calling you that word?’ she asked, a few weeks on.
‘Yes,’ Mary replied shortly.
The schoolteacher had been distressed at Mrs Johnston’s report and promised that she would ‘stamp it out’, which she had done. But for Mary it hung around in the playground, like a placard around her neck. It never quite went away; even the years to come did not totally dispel it. For Mary that playground had lost the perfection it had once held, as a place of unique happiness, the girls, her friends, singing skipping songs, playing hopscotch in the chalked squares, running around in giddy games of tiggy in the flagged yard, a never failing pleasure mid-morning, mid-afternoon. Now she walked out circumspectly at break times, a film of fear about her but steeling herself not to show it.
Her marks in the class, which had been high, dwindled to the middle range. The teacher was disappointed. She had hoped Mary might surprise them all. But she resisted coaxing. She had ‘gone into herself’, Mrs Johnston wrote to Grace, and she wondered if she had done the right thing. ‘I blame myself,’ Mrs Johnston wrote, and added, ‘Maybe some things are best left alone.’
As the bruises came out, bruises from the blow of the word and the revelations from her new mother, Mary was to find that many questions were let loose that troubled her and could not be answered. These continued over the years and over much of her life. An intense interiority began, a sadness that she disguised with skill and fought unremittingly because sadness made you conspicuous and people asked you questions about it and she had so much to be thankful for. But they were there now and they would never go away, the questions: why had she not been with her real mother all the time? Why did her real mother not go and find her father? Why did she want another mother when she had Mrs Johnston? She looked around at her playmates: was she the only one?
She had to watch out for herself now.
And yet . . . the growing older, the shucking off of old skins, the intimacies in the small town, the early and later the uncompromised and unbroken ‘love’ (a word she always stumbled on) for her boyfriend, her fiancé, her husband, Harry, clever, funny Harry, from a big family that absorbed her, the arrival of John, her own child . . . At some stage she escaped and put it behind her, somehow in the strange complexity of life both forgetting and remembering it, now a pressure, now a shadow, now no more than a faint scent.
A few months on after that meeting with Grace, Mrs Johnston stopped work in the early-morning kitchen and looked to the ceiling and felt a deep release of relief as Mary sang, ‘Polly put the kettle on, Polly put the kettle on, Polly put the kettle on, We’ll all have tea.’
Grace knew that she had lost but she would not yet give in. She spoke to Agnes.
‘What she wants is quite impossible,’ said Agnes, later, to her husband.
‘Let’s take a little time to talk about it.’ He was not keen on the last whisky of the day being accompanied by gunf
ire.
Agnes all but bit on the cigarette as she took a quick puff.
‘She’s become very valuable to us,’ George continued. ‘And we are both very fond of her.’ He pinged the crystal whisky tumbler with the nail of his forefinger. ‘Number one’ – ping! – ‘the house is spick and span, the meals are on the table when they should be. Second point’ – ping! – ‘she’s sorted out my office – with help from me, I admit, but only at the start. She soon got the hang of it. I’m better organised than I’ve ever been.’ Ping! ‘Last, but not least, you tell me she’s a Trojan at the school.’
‘All true,’ said Agnes. ‘But,’ another deep pull on the cigarette, ‘I do not think it would work were we to have a small child in this house day and night. We’ve done that. Grace couldn’t help being distracted. We can both guess how much she would dote on the child – and she would want her friends to come here – and why not? – and the interminable illnesses . . . I feel bad about it but I also refuse to feel bad about it. We didn’t agree to that.’
‘It means a lot to her.’
‘I know. I know! Don’t make me feel like the wicked witch. She is very good with the children. She has the knack of teaching them to read, even the urchins. She reads them stories and makes up stories for them about life on a farm. They draw cows and pigs and horses. How much more will she be devoted to her own daughter? And when the boys come home. And when they start to bring their friends – it’s all too complicated and I am sorry, George, but I don’t want it to be complicated. I’m selfish, I know, and uncharitable . . .’
‘No, no . . . you’ve reasoned it through, that’s all.’
He allowed himself a second dash of the Bell’s. ‘So how will you tell her?’
‘I hoped you would do that,’ said Agnes. ‘I’m no good at tact.’
‘It would be a great shame to lose her.’
‘I’m sorry. But I refuse to carry all that guilt. It’s too much to ask of me.’
