London Lodgings

by Claire Rayner

  Eventually she sat in her armchair again in front of the now vigorous fire and watched the way the light flickered on the ceiling, and made shadows and patterns which leapt and died and warmed her imagination so that she saw babies dancing among them and small four-legged creatures too, and it was so very pretty.

  She dozed between the pains and listened as the clock on Holy Trinity Church struck the hours. Three o’clock came and went and then four o’clock and then it was five and the pinging of the quarters seemed to her to be further and further apart, until she realized that it was the pains that had speeded up. She estimated they were now coming nine or ten times each quarter hour. Surely by now she should be able to detect some of the necessary stretching? Again with shrinking fingers she touched herself; and suddenly she was alarmed. Her body felt the same as it usually did there; there seemed to her to be no space through which her baby could emerge and she had a sudden vision of herself never being able to give birth. At the same time as this realization another pain came, and this one seemed so much deeper and harder and tighter and somehow noisier that she cried aloud, a great wail of sound that startled her; and she got to her feet and made for the door, holding her belly with both hands beneath the bump. If she didn’t, she thought, something dreadful would happen, and she felt the fear roll over her and could do nothing to control it.

  From then on it all seemed to change. She managed somehow to reach Eliza’s door downstairs beside the kitchen, and at her hesitant touch Eliza leapt from her bed and pulled on her print gown and shoes and then, muttering and exclaiming continuously, helped Tilly back up to her room.

  ‘Don’t you fret none now, Mum, it’s all right – the pains’ll go on a while yet – how often did you say? My Ma always says it takes longer with a first baby and it’s not till they’re every minute or so you need to fret, and even then not till the pushing starts.’

  ‘Pushing?’ Tilly clung to her and wailed again as yet another pain moved round her belly. Oh God, she thought. Dorcas, Dorcas, you said it would be so and it is: ‘What pushing?’

  ‘To get the baby out, Mum. You has to push it out – my Ma says it’s like passin’ a cannon ball – you got plenty of time now, Mum – just you be easy.’

  But she could not be easy. For the first time she began to understand how the actual birth would be. The pains had nothing to do with stretching her. She had to do that herself, and she felt the bump again and the smooth hugeness of it and tried to imagine pushing that out of her body and cried aloud.

  ‘Oh, please Mum, be easy,’ Eliza implored. ‘You’ll get that tired you won’t be able to do nothing. Be easy, and I’ll fetch you a posset.’

  ‘Fetch Mrs Elphinstone,’ shrieked Tilly. ‘I want to do this now and get it done with.’

  Eliza peered at her and shook her head. ‘It’ll come when it’s ready to, Mum, and not before. It’s no use a-fetching Mrs Elphinstone yet. You didn’t start the pains till after you’d gone to bed, did you? No – so there’s not above seven or so hours gone. It’ll be a while yet – you won’t want Mrs E here before you got to have ’er. She’ll cost you if you keep ’er ’ere too long.’

  From then on it was a blur. The pains seemed to come less swiftly, but they were bigger and noisier and infinitely worse than they had been, and she wept and shouted at Eliza, who seemed to grow in age and stature as the morning wore on. She was firm in all she did and paid small attention to Tilly’s rantings.

  ‘I’ll fetch Mrs Elphinstone for a look-see about nine o’clock,’ she promised, as she rubbed Tilly’s back in an effort to comfort her through one of the pains. ‘That’ll be soon enough, mark my words. I seen all this, many’s the time, so I ain’t fidgeting yet.’

  The Misses Knapp and Fleetwood tapped on her bedroom door as they came down, seeking their breakfasts, and Eliza told Tilly firmly that she had to go and see to them, but would be back directly, and for the next hour Tilly coped as best she might, alone.

  But it helped her, for she realized that Eliza was in fact right; nothing much seemed to be happening except the string of pains, and once she stopped shouting at Eliza, and demanding she do something, somehow, they seemed less unbearable. Certainly she was able to doze a little between each one and that helped a lot.

  It was fully daylight when at last Eliza returned and this time Mrs Elphinstone was with her. She was a tall thin woman, with a wide smile and a tendency to hiss through her teeth as she spoke, which was disconcerting, but oddly helpful. In trying to understand what she said, Tilly found herself able to ride the pain in her belly and back rather better.

  ‘Oh, this is all very nice, yessss – very nice,’ Mrs Elphinstone smiled widely and hissed at the same time. ‘Very nicesss.’

  ‘Is it?’ Tilly managed for another pain had started. ‘It does not seem to me –’ And then she was stretching her face into a grimace to prevent herself crying out, for to do so in front of Mrs Elphinstone would be, she felt, a most shameful thing.

  ‘Oh, yessss, fine and very nice,’ said Mrs Elphinstone and then nodded at Eliza. ‘A nice cup of tea, pleassse – that would be very nice too.’

  She sat and drank her tea happily, watching Tilly as she tried to control her desire to cry out and then smiled again and said, ‘Perhaps we’ll do a little checking now – Yessssss –’ She came to lean over Tilly and investigate her belly with large chilly hands. But they felt pleasant enough, pushing and prodding at her, and it gave her something else to think about other than the pain.

  ‘Yesssss.’ Mrs Elphinstone stood up. ‘Well, no need for me for a while yet. Call me, Eliza, when she starts the pushing.’ As she went Tilly reared up in the bed as best she could and shouted after her; but it was no use. Eliza and Mrs Elphinstone had disappeared and left her alone, and now she wept, angrily and childishly, hating all of them, hating the baby too, for making her feel so dreadful, and then hating herself most of all for being so hateful a person. Altogether, she felt horrid.

  And so it went on, all afternoon and well into the evening; until at last Mrs Elphinstone came back and Eliza was leaning over her and begging her to hold on to her hand and to stop pushing, for there was a need to wait. Tilly peered up at her in the lamplight and wanted to argue with her, tell her that she was not pushing anything. How could she be, here on her bed? And then it started again and she knew what Eliza meant; the huge shrieking pain and with it a desperate urge to push down on her own body as though she could turn it inside out. She felt her face redden as she held her breath and made a vast effort; Eliza was shouting at her not to do it, to open her mouth and pant instead – and at last she heard and understood and tried to obey; and Mrs Elphinstone, who was far out of sight, somewhere at the other end of the world it seemed to Tilly, cried, ‘Yesssss, wait now – yesssssssss – ssss,’ and Tilly could feel her fumbling at the other end of her body, so very far away and so foreign to her. But then the desire to push came back and she cried, ‘I must – I must,’ and at the same time Mrs Elphinstone cried, ‘It’s all right – it’s free – it’s free,’ and Eliza leaned over and bawled in Tilly’s ear, ‘You may push all you like now – push hard – the harder the better.’

  It was all over in a slither and a rush that took Tilly by surprise. The agony and the effort of the pushing all succeeded at the same moment, and Mrs Elphinstone was crying out in excitement and holding something aloft. All Tilly could see was a twirled greyish pink rope dangling and above it something large and also grey and strange held in Mrs Elphinstone’s wide hands; and she lifted her head to peer down the bed at the extraordinary scene.

  ‘Such a long cord!’ Mrs Elphinstone was hissing. ‘Sssso very long – no wonder it caught itself round itssss poor little neck – poor sssscrap – almost sssstrangled.’

  ‘Oh, Eliza!’ Tilly cried. Eliza was standing close to her and there were tears running down her cheeks as she looked down at Tilly and said huskily, ‘There, Mum. You done it. Can you see? He’s a fine big boy, Mum, a fine boy – oh Mum!’

&n
bsp; It was more than Tilly could bear. She too began to weep, great sobs which sent tears streaming down her cheeks, but it was a wonderful feeling. The tears were enjoyable, even comforting, and she abandoned herself to the luxury of it all.

  Mrs Elphinstone had been busy attending to matters at the other end of the bed, and now she came and leaned over Tilly and set a towel in her arms. Tilly frowned, puzzled at first, but then she looked more closely and saw the baby within it. Crumpled, angry red and streaked with yellowish grease of some sort, its mouth was wide open and as she closed her arms convulsively around the towel it shrieked in protest. They all laughed, Eliza and Mrs Elphinstone and even Tilly; and she lifted her head and looked at the other two women and then at the child again.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know it was like this.’ The baby lifted his creased eyelids and looked at her. The eyes were dark blue and looked weary in the wrinkled face, exceedingly old and exceedingly knowing, and he blinked once and then turned his head towards her, and she held him close in a sudden agony of adoration.

  ‘Put him to your breast, Mrs Quentin – yessss – that’sss what he wants – it will sssettle the afterbirth nicely – yesssss. Let him sssssuckle now.’

  Tilly did not quite understand, but Eliza did and with swift fingers she untied Tilly’s nightgown and set the baby’s cheek against one swollen breast. The baby opened his mouth widely, curling it towards Tilly’s skin and Eliza lifted him a little in Tilly’s arm so that the seeking greedy mouth was on a line with the nipple. He seemed to snuffle and to push his head even more urgently and seized the nipple and held on, hard; and Tilly gasped, for it sent a wave of sensation through her that was unlike any she had ever had before, exciting and wonderfully pleasurable. But it did not last, for the pain in her belly began again. Not as bad as it had been, but there all the same and Mrs Elphinstone said triumphantly, ‘Oh, here it issss then,’ and Eliza laughed.

  ‘It was the goats that taught me about that,’ she said loudly. ‘When they drops their kids the sooner they sucks the sooner the afterbirth comes. There, Mum. Isn’t that worth the trouble then? Isn’t he the best baby you ever saw?’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  ON AN EARLY afternoon in April, Tilly decided to venture into the garden. It had been warm and dry for almost a week and the garden, though sadly neglected, was attractive, being full of daffodils and lilac and some early tulips. She set the crib beneath the old plane tree near the summer house, halfway down the long plot, in such a way that the baby’s face was shaded by the branches but his body left out in the sunshine. She pulled the skirts of his baby gown back as far as his thighs, so that he could lie and kick, and hoped Eliza would not come out of the house and see, for she would be sure to scold. Eliza was very watchful of the baby, to the point of being possessive, and she was often scandalized by the way Tilly liked to break the rules of baby care with him. Like letting him lie on a rug in the bedroom before the fire, quite naked, so that he could kick to his heart’s content. Eliza found that deeply suspect, an invitation to the most dreadful of disorders and diseases; she would be even more alarmed at seeing him with bare legs in the open air.

  Tilly played with the baby for a while, cooing at him and repeating the new nickname she had devised for him. ‘Duff,’ she murmured. ‘Duff, Duff, Duff!’ He looked back at her with alert dark blue eyes and a wide toothless smile; but his only reply was a few excited squeals and burbles. But that didn’t deter Tilly. It was never too soon to learn, she told him solemnly. ‘Duff, Duff, Duff.’

  She had decided only last week to call him so, for however hard she tried, she could not bring herself to use his given names. She had had him christened at St Peter’s Church, a little further west along Brompton Grove towards the newly built Egertons – Gardens, Terrace and Crescent – having sworn never to set foot in Holy Trinity again. The vicar had been so determined, when he heard of the baby’s orphan status, that he would have his father’s name that she had been unable to resist him; he had managed to convince her that failure to give the boy his patronymic would be tantamount to orphaning him twice over, so she had succumbed and he had been christened Francis Xavier. But however hard she tried, Tilly could not manage to use either names; they would not pass her lips. That meant that for the first four months of his life her son had been called ‘baby dear’, or ‘little darling’, or some such; until last week when she had been bathing him and Eliza, on hand as ever to dote on him and coo at him and to hand over the necessary equipment, had said adoringly, ‘See how plump he’s got, Mum. Looks for all the world like one of my nice plum duffs, don’t he? As round and as bursting with goodness as may be!’

  ‘Duff he is and Duff he shall be!’ Tilly had cried delightedly, much struck, and Eliza, though she had protested at first, had decided that after all it was a nice enough nickname for a round plump baby and had given it her approval. Which would make matters easier for Tilly, undoubtedly.

  She had long ago given up any attempt to treat Eliza as a servant and to keep her distance. Ever since the baby’s birth she had been more of a working housekeeper and companion than a servant, young as she was. It was difficult, after all, to be remote with a person who has given you the most intimate care a woman can have, as Eliza had for Tilly in the weeks following the baby’s birth. So, pleasing Eliza was important.

  ‘Duff,’ Tilly said again but he was bored now and had closed his eyes and drifted into sleep and she stood above him a little longer, tracing with her eyes the line of his round jaw and his soft mouth, amazed at his perfection. There had never been so beautiful a baby and there never would be.

  She turned to drift around the garden, looking at the state of it. It badly needed some attention and she would have to consider becoming something of a gardener herself, for she could not afford to pay one, unless she found herself another lodger or two. She thought about that possibility often, for the Misses Knapp and Fleetwood were of small trouble to anyone, and there were the attic rooms available, after all. But new lodgers would have to be most carefully chosen, for it would never do to upset the Misses K and F (as Eliza often called them, much to Tilly’s disapproval) and anyway, would the attic rooms attract the Right Sort? When she had ventured to discuss the possibility with the lady teachers, they had made a good deal of fuss about the importance of ‘Choosing the Right Sort’ which Tilly had found dispiriting, and quite enough to put her off the whole idea. Again.

  She sighed and decided to think no more about the matter at present. Concentrate on the garden, she told herself. Get a man in once a week or so to scythe the grass and root out the worst of the weeds. The rest she could perhaps deal with herself, tending to the plants and even growing a few vegetables. It could be an agreeable occupation if she had time left over after caring for Duff.

  He cried suddenly and she hurried across to him. He was lying staring at the branches of the plane trees and chewing his fist, and she thought indulgently – Ah, he’s hungry. He often was, seeming to have as vigorous an appetite as any baby possibly could have, and she bent and picked him up and held him close to her face, hating to hear him miserable.

  At once his head turned into her cheek and he began to search urgently with his mouth and she chuckled softly. There was something very special about this trick of his; it was almost as though his eagerness added to her pleasure in satisfying him. Feeding him gave her great delight, so much so that sometimes she felt almost guilty about it; surely doing her duty as a mother should not make her feel quite so – well – aware of her body? She felt her breasts tighten and the nipples tingle as his hunger made him cry more loudly.

  She should, she knew, take him into the house and feed him in privacy, but an imp of mischief seemed to have entered her, itself fed by her body’s clamour to give Duff what he was demanding. There was the summer house, after all, dilapidated indeed, but nicely hidden from the windows of the house by an overgrown rose bush, and it was so set that the afternoon sun was pouring into it. The old
basket chair at the back looked sturdy though, and surrendering to her impulsiveness, she stepped into the small building and pulled the chair forwards and settled herself in it. The baby whimpered as she unbuttoned the bodice of her gown.

  It was as agreeable a feeding as she had ever known. The baby lay with his downy head against her skin, both of them warmed by the spring sunshine, and she rested her back against the comfy cushions of the chair, watching her baby with half-closed eyes. His own eyes were equally half-lidded as, with one hand starfished against the naked skin of her breast, she felt him drawing hard on her nipple, and her whole body crept with pleasure. Dear Duff. Dear sunshine. Dear everything.

  Quite when she became aware that there was someone else present, she did not know. When she looked up and saw the tall figure standing there she was certainly not surprised, so she must have realized she was no longer alone. But she didn’t care, even though the curve of her right breast was clearly visible and the baby’s mouth clamped to her nipple was making the sort of sounds that told the entire world within hearing what was happening.

  ‘I should have fled as soon as I realized what you were doing,’ he said in a low voice. ‘But I could not. I have never seen anything so wonderfully beautiful. I was rooted here. Please forgive me.’

  She lifted her chin to squint at him against the sun and saw that indeed he was moved; there was a glitter of tears in his eyes and she bent her head, far from being embarrassed as she knew she ought to be, and lifted Duff’s shawl. With a gentle movement she arranged it over herself and the baby so that he could continue to feed, but could not be seen.

  ‘I am surprised to see you here,’ she said at length. ‘I told you, did I not, that we – that our friendship was at an end.’

  ‘I know,’ Freddy said. ‘And I accepted my congé. Or I thought I had. But when it came to it, and I was leaving – I could not bear to go without seeing you. And then to intrude so upon you – I am devastated. I should go at once.’