Two
ON SUNDAY MORNING the baby woke up early. Jill was hauled out of her own deep sleep by the creak of the wooden cot as Ali climbed over its side, for the first time. After a pause – for sheer surprise, perhaps, at this brand new freedom, so easily attained – purposeful little steps came padding out onto the landing, then, after a hesitation, along towards Jill’s room. Jill was aware of calculating irresponsibly – in exchange for a few seconds more of warmth in bed – that if Ali could climb out of her cot, then she could navigate safely past the top of the stairs. The door of the bedroom was pushed tentatively open and Ali stopped on the threshold, in her sagging night-nappy and the blue pyjamas patterned with yachts that had belonged to Roland. She was staring solemnly, as if she wasn’t sure what she might find, in a world no one had prepared for her. Jill couldn’t help laughing at the round eyes and fat flushed cheeks: Ali’s fair hair was so fine that it hardly counted, she looked bald as an egg. She laughed back at her mother in pure pleasure.
— What do you think you’re doing, naughty? Why aren’t you in your cot?
Jill slipped out of bed then, to snatch the baby up and kiss her, scolding her in whispers, then listen at the door and quietly close it. As long as Ali hadn’t woken up the others, if Jill changed her nappy now and she had her morning bottle of milk – kept ready overnight on the dressing table – there was even a chance of her falling asleep again. Ali was the doziest and easiest of her three babies. With Hettie she had tried too hard to establish a routine, as the books instructed; Roland had frightened her with infantile convulsions.
— It’s still night-time, little chicken. You can have your bottle in bed with Mummy if you’ll go back to sleep. Shut your eyes now.
Jill held her in the crook of her arm, nestled under the blankets and eiderdown. At first Ali kept her eyes resolutely open as she sucked: brilliant with the joke of the whole occasion, fixed on her mother. When her grin spread irresistibly her mouth slid off the rubber teat of the bottle, milk trickling at its corner. Eventually the heavy eyes fell shut, flicked open, drooped again. Jill put the bottle on the bedside table and tried to go back to sleep herself. The sleeping baby was pressed close along the contours of her own body, burning with her heat, wispy hair blowing in her breath, the stuffy milky smell in her own nose – but in the hollow of her thoughts she was agitated and noisy, full of her argument with Tom as she hadn’t been when she went to bed. She saw things with finality in the grey light which developed inexorably around the heavy furniture in the room. From henceforward, she thought, he and she were fated to be enemies, set opposite each other at their different poles of experience. Once, they had been equal in their separate freedoms. They had set out to have children as lightly as if they were playing house, and now her necessarily domestic life bored him, and she was bound to it in her body and imagination. This imbalance was fated, built into their biology.
Jill was afraid for her free self, as if she saw a young woman receding on a road in the far distance. What use was her grown-up knowledge – acquired through such initiations, at such risk – in this world of infants, who had to be kept safe? Tom had said once that anyone could do motherhood: in fact, he added, the less complicated you were, the better mother you would make. This was probably true, but not consoling. The whole silly, flirting, furtive episode with Vanda was enraging just because it was so lightweight and shouldn’t have mattered – Tom went ducking and wincing with infuriating flexibility through his obligations, while Jill’s humiliation weighed her down. She thought about the Goods’ cottage in the woods. Perhaps she could find another kind of freedom, if she lived there. Looking out of those windows day after day, seeing nothing human, only the shifting screens of leaves between her and the sky – what a simplification! Drifting into sleep, she imagined a life alone in those tiny rooms, alone with the children.
Sophy looked after the baby while Jill went to church with the older children. Hettie and Roland felt as if they followed another mother when Jill led the way, in her coat and a hat – a pretty, neat, blue hat, borrowed from Granny, with a feather tucked into its blue ribbon – holding up a big umbrella over all of them against the drizzle. They processed through the keyhole gap between their garden and the churchyard which was their privilege, when all the rest of the congregation had to come in by the church gate. This other mother was more like the ones in books, stricter and yet more poised and equable than her everyday self, more remote. Inside the church Jill always knew confidently what to do, carrying off the mysterious act in such bold style, standing up and sitting down and kneeling even before anyone else did, singing hymns in a strong voice, hardly glancing at the words in the hymn book. They children felt their own disgrace as pagan city-dwellers, fumbling and mumbling their lame way after her. Roland after a while gave up pretending, preferring to stare into the church calmly in silence as if he’d got its measure. He attended to his grandfather’s sermon, about Hope, with detached interest. When his mother’s fingertips – seeming moved by an awareness quite separate to her own steadied attention to her father – strayed across his warm scalp, among his curls, he shifted away just perceptibly, not wanting the church to catch them out in any absence.
At least Hettie did know the Lord’s Prayer. She had learned it at school, and Granny had given them a Ladybird book which was an illustrated version. A dense passage in the middle wound around the trespasses whose very sound – as we forgive those who trespass against us – was vexed and bristling, and which were disconcerting morally because you might, Hettie had puzzled out, both inflict them and have them inflicted upon you. She was drawn to those pictures in shamed fascination: a boy put his hand in wet paint where his father was decorating, but it was his sister who had broken the boy’s toys, an aeroplane and a crane. Faces were stark with outrage and guilt and hurt. This moral ambiguity was associated, in Hettie’s vision, with the building of the church itself, whose stone shape, pierced with glass, soared upwards and yet remained where you could always smell damp earth beneath you. The great Gurney stove, with its iron fins spread like the fanned pages of a book, only ever gave out the faintest indication of heat: her grandparents despaired of it and the parish couldn’t afford to buy a new one, so no wonder the hymn books grew mouldy. In the coldest weather they plugged in an electric fire. The altar cloth their grandmother had sewn was the only sumptuous thing in the grave, undecorated place: yellow-haired angels blasted something against cream satin on long trumpets, turning their faces away from the stubby huge nails which they held out as if to prove something. You see? These nails looked like the fat wax crayons at school.
The congregation were few and mostly female, not young; distinctive – even if you also knew them as their weekday informal selves – in their padded, sculpted, decisive Sunday clothes, pinned-on hats or tied headscarves. If you were ever seized, to be embraced against a lapel pinned with a scratching brooch, these clothes gave off an odour of something chemical and hostile. Church was a place set apart, Hettie saw, for what in the everyday world had to be muffled and passed over. Death, for instance, was not dissimulated in the memorials on the walls or the floor of the church, any more than on the graves outside: she had been shocked when she first learned to make out what these matter-of-fact dates meant, attached to each name. It was no surprise that their father never came inside here. Hettie thought that he was against death, and all the burden of importance surrounding it. When the congregation gave themselves up to silent prayer, their mother sank her head impressively on her arms on the pew in front, and Roland sat open-eyed, looking around him. Hettie could hear rain buffeting against the church outside, beating on the roof, running down the window-glass, enclosing the still interior in its successive, insistent washes of soft sound.
At Sunday lunch traditionally, after he’d delivered his sermon, the minster drank a decent wine. He poured for his wife and daughter while Sophy dished up steaming bowls of watery vegetables in the kitchen, passing them through the serving hatch after
the roast chicken which was their treat because they had visitors. Jill had begun cutting chicken breast up into morsels for the baby, who was tied into her bib in Jill’s old high chair, pounding her spoon cheerfully in her fist.
— Charlie wore the shortest skirt that’s been seen in my church, her father said, teasing. — It won’t have gone unnoticed.
Jill shrugged. — It’s all I brought to wear.
— He doesn’t mind, Sophy explained, calling through the hatch. — He likes it. He wishes the church was full of young women in short skirts.
— But don’t tell the Bishop, Grantham said.
The atmosphere in the vicarage was exuberant, because the sermon was done for a week and because their daughter was home. Sophy laughed in the kitchen, as if she’d drunk her wine already.
Because Grantham Fellowes had been beautiful when he was young – and despised that, even as he took for granted the power it conferred – he had never lost the habit of commanding a room. A great deal of his spiritual agony had come out of his circular pursuit of his own vanity, which he thought was only intellectual arrogance, not noticing how women yielded to his physical presence, basking in it – and some men too – and how he responded with unthinking entitlement. Only Sophy didn’t flutter, among the little group of middle-class women huddled around him in the parish, whom he mostly treated fairly badly, de haut en bas. A few of the men hated him. His face now was brown as wood, chiselled with deep trenches, assertively and shamelessly old – he was seventy, and perhaps looked older. Yet still there was something jaunty and haughty in the slanting bones and far-off blue of the small eyes, eloquent with all the punishment he’d inflicted on himself. Jill was susceptible to changes in her father’s expression, as if his moods were fastened into her awareness, tugging at her, although she had set her back to him years ago, and sailed in a contrary direction.
When he had carved, they passed around the gravy boat and discussed the sermon. — I knew what it meant, Roland said. — When you hope for something you might get something else instead, which is more useful.
His grandfather was gratified. — From the pulpit I was aware of those sceptical specs, trained on me in critical scrutiny. The boy really was listening! Well done, Childe Roland.
— And I was listening, said Hettie.
— You were a little fidget, her mother said, — twisting your head around to stare at everything.
— I heard it, Hettie said, looking around the table defiantly, trying to be funny, eyes glassy in her flushed, hasty little face. — Grandfather’s sermon about a nasty old mouldy-warp.
— An old mouldy-warp, darling? Sophy was bemused and pleased. — I’m sorry I missed that one!
— Take no notice, Jill said. — She’s only showing off, talking nonsense. Can’t bear anyone else to have the limelight.
— Forgiver us from evil. For thine is the daily bread.
— There you are, you see, said Sophy. — She was listening.
— Not very carefully.
The minister had finished the small portion on his plate. Overlooking Hettie’s performance, he spooned chopped carrots into the baby’s mouth. Even Ali felt his condescension, working the orange mass around in her jaw obediently, dumbstruck. — And what’s your opinion, Roland? he asked. — Do we just have to make the best of this useful thing we never hoped for in the first place? Or is that pusillanimous?
Roland was shovelling vegetables with his knife and fork: his mother had warned him that he had to eat them. — Pusillanimity, she added quickly, — is not doing something because you’re afraid of it.
Roland considered, twitching his glasses into position. — It would depend on what you got, he said. — The thing you got instead of what you wanted. Whether it really was any use.
His grandfather gave a bark of laughter, approving; his grandmother relieved Roland of his cabbage when no one was looking. Jill knew that her father wanted her praise for his sermon now – and in fact when she had been sitting listening to him, contained inside his voice, in the stark little church washed with wet light that was the core of her childhood and her past, his words had unbound an overwhelming emotion inside her. Putting her head on her arms to pray, she had been afraid for a few moments of falling out of her own control, collapsing to the stone floor or heaving with unseemly sobs – terribly un-Anglican. Grantham had based the sermon on a short Herbert poem, ‘Hope’. The limpid, measured words of this poem, and her father’s judicious explication of it, had seemed in their moment sufficient to her experience: everything outside them was obliterated. It was peculiar, as she had been so moved, how reluctant she was now for her father to know it.
— What the poet wants, she said to Roland, — is a ring. But God won’t send it.
— Why a ring? Hettie asked, too loudly, but genuinely bemused. She would like to own a ring herself, but couldn’t imagine a man wanting one.
Jill made strong efforts, overcoming her own contrary will. — You were good, Daddy. It was a beautiful sermon.
She’d have been the only one in the church, Grantham pointed out with sour irony, to recognise the Herbert. He always shook praise off like this, as if it was below the mark he aimed at; yet his wife and daughter knew from experience how he hungered for it, and was capable of sulking if it wasn’t forthcoming. Tom thought he was all vanity, and wouldn’t listen to Jill when she said vanity didn’t matter, it existed in a separate part of the self to writing. Anyway, weren’t all writers vain?
— Didn’t you choose the poem, Sophy suggested enthusiastically, — just because Jill was staying with us?
Grantham disdained this with a little moue of irritation. — I base any number of my sermons on poetry, with no expectation of anybody noticing.
Carefully, Sophy ate a cold mouthful of cabbage. She loved poems but easily forgot them, and she only half-listened to her husband’s sermons anyway. This wasn’t exactly because she wasn’t interested. But part of the oddity of marriage, she thought, was in how unwise it was to attend too intently to the other person. This was the opposite to what she had naively imagined, as a girl. To the unmarried, it seemed that a couple must be intimately, perpetually exposed to each other – but actually, that wasn’t bearable. In order for love to survive, you had to close yourself off to a certain extent.
The card had gone from the window of the wool shop when Jill was next in town, and when she went inside, the manageress – bustling and bland with thick lipstick, her spectacles inset with little chips of cut glass – hastened up to explain herself. It was obvious that Jill’s interest in the job had caused some consternation, and that a pale new girl, with nervous rabbit eyes, had been manoeuvred into place behind the till, to forestall the embarrassment of having to turn Jill down.
— We’ll keep you on our books, the manageress reassured her insincerely. — In case anything else comes up.
The idea of spending more than a few minutes in the airless, hot little shop, packed tight with wool-balls, was suddenly a nightmare – how could Jill have imagined it would work? These shops weren’t like the shops in London, with a perpetual flow of customers coming and going. She would have died, if she’d been stuck in here with someone like this rabbit-girl for days on end, forced to make conversation, helping old women choose patterns for twinsets and car-coats. Yet she couldn’t help feeling a twinge of humiliation, because they hadn’t wanted her. — Don’t worry, she said with breezy charm, knowing she wouldn’t be forgiven for it. — I noticed it because I was looking around for something for a few hours a week. But it’s not really the kind of thing I’m used to.
The estate agents would be more suitable, she thought; with her intelligence she would surely be able to pick up the work quickly. She wondered if they needed anyone. As she pushed the door open, a woman looked up from where she was bent over the Gestetner copier, churning out details of properties. Mikey Waller came out of the back office when he heard Jill’s voice. — It’s all right, Rose, he said. — I’ll deal with Mrs Cra
ne.
Jill had the impression that Mikey was pleased she’d called in. He offered her coffee: in one corner of his office he kept an electric kettle, with a jar of Nescafé and mugs on a tray. She imagined suggesting that they went across the road to The Bungalow – but perhaps she should tread carefully, not knowing whether he was married. He set about spooning the Nescafé into two mugs, stirring it to a paste with the dried milk. It still seemed wrong to Jill, finding him confined to this office whose partitions were so flimsily provisional. She could remember when the place was an enchanting chemist’s shop: they must have ripped out all the old mirror glass, and the drawers and shelves of polished mahogany. Mikey was too substantial to fit in here, he ought to have gone into some career better suited to his bulky physique and clever, careful hands. The way he concentrated, stirring two spoons of sugar into his cup, reminded her that at school he was always the one the teacher counted on to be sensible, to collect up the litter at the end of sports day or clean the blackboards during playtime. She and he had both been prefects, in the last year of juniors. It must be awful for him having to sell things, show people round depressing houses and talk them into buying. Perhaps he would call in and see her, once she’d found a place to rent. When she enquired about the Goods’ cottage, he was incredulous.
— You mean that old place in Cutcombe woods? You couldn’t live there. It isn’t suitable.
— Why not? The Goods lived there for years. Isn’t there still water in the well?
— In the well? He laughed at her. — Nobody gets their water from a well any longer. Not to mention that there’s no bathroom or toilet, no electricity – and no access by road.
She hadn’t properly thought about the toilet, and had no idea how you dealt with an earth closet, or whatever arrangement the cottage had. Probably Mikey would know how. — People manage without those things.
— Well, maybe you could manage it, he said. — You always were a bit different.
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