by Anne Berry
‘John Lewis.’ The name fell like a boulder between us. ‘What happened in John Lewis, Lucilla? You seem to have had one of the shortest careers in history with the prestigious firm.’ I fixed her edgily, but the sparkle I saw in her eyes reassured me.
I considered that it might be prudent to lie, but settled for honesty in all its bold simplicity. ‘I didn’t want to work there. My mother forced me to go,’ I blurted out. ‘They assigned me to the haberdashery department. Haberdashery! I hate ribbons and bows and buttons, and all that sewing clobber. I couldn’t stick it, not even for a day.’
‘I see,’ said Christina Foyle, and apparently she did because she hired me on the spot. I was to work in her book club. She had extensive offices from which she operated book clubs, she explained. And it would be my job to order and pack up all the books. I told my parents airily that being a shop assistant was not my style, that I had a vocation for literature. If not exactly relished, this deviation was palatable to them.
All this while, the romance between Henry and me continued … and flourished. My adoptive parents’ dislike of him had also burgeoned. By now they had abandoned all attempts at concealing how much they despised him. Our relationship was becoming as tricky to conduct as if I had been a Capulet, and he a Montague. One night my father came to my bedroom after I had gone to bed. Up reading, I was startled by his sudden entrance. Closing the door behind him, he made his way unsteadily to my bedside and sat down facing me. He was wearing his dressing gown. His face without his glasses looked strangely bare, like a wall blotted with rectangles of lighter paintwork where the pictures have been removed. He hardly ever left them off. He was leering at me oddly. His face had the hue of a steamed lobster, his hair was messed up and a sour taint hung on his breath, which I now recognised as whisky. My father had come hot foot from the shed.
I wondered if my supposedly teetotal father, chairman of the Sons of Temperance, was inebriated at some of the meetings he and my mother attended? Or was he living a double life? Dissolute at home; a paragon of virtue with the Sons of Temperance. If my mother had detected the not so subtle changes in the climate of my father’s demeanour, she was playing blind, deaf and dumb. What was that wartime phrase I had come across at school. Ah yes, I had it then, ‘Keep calm and carry on.’ That was exactly what my mother was doing. Keeping calm and carrying on. My father was just carrying on!
‘Dad, are … are you all right?’ I queried tentatively, setting my book aside.
He blinked slowly at me, owlishly. ‘Oh ye– yesss,’ he slurred. ‘I only came to say goodnight.’ His disposition of late had been markedly erratic. Now his eyes seemed to spider over me, scrutinising every plane and bump on view.
‘Good– goodnight?’ I tested. It was not a ritual I was used to.
‘Can’t a man come and kiss his daughter goodnight?’ he asked, his diction smeary as peanut butter. He winked at me lasciviously, and shuffled higher up the bed until I was within arms’ reach.
‘Of course you can,’ I said uncertainly, made uneasy by his proximity. My cotton pyjamas suddenly felt terribly flimsy.
He began to stroke my hair. ‘I know things have been a bit awkward lately, what with you being such a big … big girl now. And going out with your young man.’ He took hold of a few strands and lifted them, then sifted them through his fingers. ‘You’re a woman. A wooomaaan!’ He extended the vowels in a wet embarrassing croon.
‘Henry, his name’s Henry,’ I clarified, fighting the impulse to slap his hand away.
‘Henry. Yes, Henry.’ A volley of spittle landed on his chin and my cheek. His thigh was pressing on mine so I curled my legs away from him, underneath me. ‘You’ve changed, Lucilla.’ He ogled me blatantly, slewing words out of the corner of his mouth. I shrank back, pulling the blanket up over my breasts.
After that day when my mother sat me down at the kitchen table and proclaimed that she was not my mother, and that my father was not my father either, nothing had been mentioned again. Looking at my adoptive father, at the hollows and wrinkles in his face exaggerated in the twilight, it dawned on me quite how old he was. His entire hairline had receded so that it was level with his ears, like a wig that had slipped. There was grey steeling his crinkly hair. His brow looked like a rutted lane. And his complexion was all flab and pouches.
‘My daughter,’ he mumbled thickly. ‘My daughter.’ His hand had left off toying with my hair. It had slipped and now he was fingering my face.
I gave a pantomime yawn. ‘I should get some sleep now. Work tomorrow,’ I chirped up, willing him to go. I could smell his sweat, like the feral odour of tomcats.
‘Well, give your father a hug and turn in then,’ he said. Uncomfortably, I leaned forwards, put my arms under his and laid my head lightly on his chest. His heart was racketing.
‘Goodnight, Dad.’ But when I pulled back, his arms tightened around me, an effective straitjacket.
‘This is pleasant, isn’t it?’ mumbled the father who wasn’t my father.
‘Mmm.’ Again I wriggled, wanting to extricate myself, when I felt his hands moving up and down my back. Then his hand dived beneath my pyjama top and his fingers started to knead my flesh. ‘Dad!’ I tried to shove him away but I couldn’t.
‘Just … stay … stay … still for … a minute,’ he puffed like a steam train climbing a steep hill. ‘Just let me … let me … let me …’ His wet lips mouthed my ear and, still pinioning me in position with one hand, the other burrowed into my belly, then higher and higher, until it was squirming between my breasts. I fought him off the way I would an attacker in the street, scratching aside his dressing gown, and clawing at his chest through the material of his pyjama top. With a gurgle, he fell back, then rose unsteadily. Reaching in his dressing gown pocket, he withdrew a hip flask. His roseate face was pimpled with perspiration. He fumbled clumsily with the screw top as he lumbered from the room. Within a quarter of an hour, I had barricaded my door. My wardrobe, my chest of drawers, my bedside table, all stacked up behind it, and standing sentry, Sammy, my balding Steiff teddy bear.
Not long afterwards, I left Foyle’s and changed jobs. As much as I loved books, I missed the outdoors and fresh air. I was taken on by Barnet Council as a gardener, working in their nurseries. My adoptive parents were predictably appalled and did all they could to dissuade me. ‘An outside job!’ my mother exclaimed, as if I would be labouring in among the naked writhing bodies of Satan’s fiery furnace. ‘An outside job gardening with men.’ In an armchair fortuitously, she did not fall down, but fell to fanning herself with her sewing.
‘We don’t like this business of you digging about in the land, ferreting around among grubs and worms and wiggling dirty things.’ Other wiggling dirty things popped irreverently into my head and I suppressed a smile. ‘Bending down and so forth, giving men ideas. Men can be filthy beasts, their minds cesspits of obscene images,’ my father warned me sternly, apparently unfamiliar with the concept of being a hypocrite. ‘You mind you cover yourself up, head to toe. And keep yourself to yourself,’ was his paternal advice. Reviewing his recent behaviour, I was sorely tempted to return this to sender, where it might be of more benefit.
My parents continued their daily diatribe against my chosen occupation, even after I had been gainfully employed in the fresh air for over a year. I came to dearly wish that I was Virginia McKenna in Born Free. I went to jumble sales and kitted myself out in desert boots and a safari jacket. I imagined how fabulous it would be to live in the African bush with an orphaned lioness called Elsa, how it must have felt to release her into the wilds of Kenya. I wanted someone to release me.
I was grateful therefore when attention shifted from my woeful shortcomings to my cousin Rachel, an undoubted success. She had met and fallen in love with a city banker, with everyone’s euphoric blessing. We had all attended the wedding at which Rachel Pritchard said I do and became Rachel Kirby. And we had all put on our glad rags, some of which I have to say, considering the ghastly dress I was
made wear, were notably gladder than others. And we had all taken exorbitantly costly taxis to the glittering reception in a posh London hotel. Older than herself by ten years, her husband already owned a basement flat in Fulham.
‘Oh, Lucilla, I’m in paradise,’ Rachel had gushed at me through layers of lace, which created the impression that she was large fish caught in a substantial net. ‘Shall I tell you a secret?’ she had added in a mouse’s squeak, before being hauled into the white limousine and ferried away.
‘If you like,’ I’d returned, fairly unreceptively I have to admit. My own dress also boasted some lace, Mother not wishing to be shown up or outdone, that was rubbing my underarms raw as a prime cut.
‘Quentin wants us to start a family immediately.’ She examined my face for an amazed joyous reaction, studied my lips to see if they would emit a jubilant whoop.
‘That’s lovely,’ I managed, wanting to scratch like an ape.
‘We’re going to start trying for a son … well …’ She emitted a shy giggle and cast her eyes downwards. ‘Well … tonight.’
‘Oh!’ I exclaimed, not sure quite what spin to put on my response to this.
‘Well?’ Her shiny pink lips smacked on a petulant pout.
‘That’s … that’s smashing. Good news soon … soon then,’ I stammered.
‘Yes, and you’ll be the first to know,’ she told me, as if pitching her bridal bouquet directly at me.
‘Great!’ I succumbed to a fit of violent underarm scratching that would have won me a leading role in Tarzan – as a gorilla!
The baby was now due in six months, though with the fuss Rachel was creating you would have thought it was five days. My mother embarked on a campaign of aggressive knitting in preparation (possible I promise you), the click, click, clicketty-click, as grating as grinding teeth. Though now I come to think of it, Mother’s teeth could not be relied upon to grate vindictively, slab toffee had seen to that. I resisted repeated attempts to tutor me afresh in the joys of needlecraft in honour of my cousin’s condition, lingering at work until I was forcibly evicted. The giant greenhouses were situated beside a sewage plant, the same plant that had so offended my schoolgirl sensibilities at Hillside. Henry quipped that I was back where I belonged. Ginger Tom was our tall lanky foreman. I worked with Louis, who, despite chronic rheumatism, sped to and from our glass Eden on a scooter. He became my teacher, growing the most gorgeous carnations I think I have ever seen.
I tinkered about hardening off primulas, and coaxing the closed butterfly wings of pansy buds into flower. I strolled through labyrinths of feathery green ferns. I dawdled in the altogether steamier microclimate of the exotic palms. I sprinkled seeds, pricked out spindly cuttings and tended the bulbs that bugled the end of winter. And I kept my dipsomaniacs well watered with the hosepipe and huge silver watering cans provided. At lunch we all came together outdoors sitting on plastic tubs of fertiliser. We munched our sandwiches companionably, sniffed the acrid sewage and beamed amiably at one another. Life was full of shit and I was content – even if I was only earning the princely sum of £8 weekly.
But it seemed that toiling among all that fecundity carried its risks. As I concentrated on nurturing seeds in their tiny pots, a seed of another kind was taking root within me. While my parents had attended a temperance meeting, Henry and I had given a demonstration of intemperance up against the apple tree in the back garden. Ginger Tom was the first to notice.
‘Think p’raps you should go and see a doctor, Lucilla,’ he advised in a low growl one Monday lunchtime.
‘And why should I do that?’ I retorted bemused, blithely unaware of the changes that my green-fingered colleagues had detected.
Louis chewed and spat. Cogitating, he stared into the heart of a modest blushing carnation. ‘Might be prudent,’ he said, adding his vote in his violin squeak.
I gave a chuckle at their joshing. ‘I don’t need to see a doctor. I’m perfectly well.’
Ginger Tom exchanged a charged look with Louis. ‘Your baby might disagree with that,’ was his only remark, nearly causing me to tumble off my tub.
‘I can’t be pregnant,’ I protested, still chuckling but hollowly now.
‘’Course you can’t,’ agreed Ginger Tom with a sarcastic wink. ‘You’re another Virgin Mary.’
Louis gave his chopped-teeth grin. ‘Immaculate conception?’ He glanced at Ginger Tom for his input, and they both nodded sagely.
‘Happens every day,’ affirmed Ginger Tom, as he tapped out a cigarette with nicotine stained fingers.
I snorted. ‘Think you’re the two wise men of Finchley, do you?’ The mayonnaise in my sandwich was making me feel sick so I set it aside with a sigh, and sipped my bottle of water decorously. As the weeks drifted by, I had to concede that Ginger Tom’s hunch had been correct. I was pregnant. A double irony. As my mother had conceived me out of wedlock, so too had I conceived this baby, boy or girl, daughter or son. Although not reckless, unprotected sex between Henry and myself had taken place. Only seldom mind, as we usually managed to skirt the main event. However, full rapturous intercourse had taken place three times: once in Coldfall Wood, once in Cherry Tree Wood and once up against the apple tree in our garden. This I suspected might have been our Waterloo. The temptation of the apple tree. After all it did for Adam and Eve.
It had been, I recalled, a disquieting night because we were given to believe that my parents were at a temperance meeting and would not return home until after 11 pm. And yet post that delicious night a peculiar little note was slipped under my door.
Dear Lucilla,
You may have been spied on the other night, you and Henry, in garden, under the apple tree. Your father didn’t go to the temperance meeting after all. Your mother went alone. I spotted him going into the shed before you arrived. I wanted to warn you but I didn’t know how. I’m sorry. Be careful.
Your friend from across the landing.
Mrs Fortinbrass
It was upstairs Mrs Fortinbrass, bless her. A true friend. To have a peeping Tom was upsetting, but to having a peeping father was far more dire. However he said nothing, so I assumed that he was too embarrassed by his own voyeurism to confront me. Nevertheless, it gave me pause, and we avoided the lovely fruitful apple tree following this, and became far less promiscuous. Unfortunately, the damage was done by then, the apple proving far too luscious for us both. Now it seemed banishment might lie in wait. Leaving my adoptive parents would be the attainment of a lifelong ambition. But society too might banish us, and what then? Frequently during this period, I considered the parallels between my birth mother’s life and mine. For whatever reason she was not tough enough to outface fortune. Was I?
It was autumn. I had a definite bump now, though small and neat enough to be easily disguised. Actually it was a triple irony, because about this time Rachel went into early labour giving birth in a toilet in Selfridges. Saddest of all, the baby, a scrap of only six months’ gestation, lived for just a few days. I went to see her in hospital. She was pale as a peeled onion, speaking in a hushed frenzied tickle of disjointed sentences about how she would take her son home. They were to call him Russell. They were planning an enormous christening party and would I come. She had so much to do, so much to buy for Russell. She had to get organised. I leaned over and kissed her lightly on her sweat-slicked forehead, and that was when I saw the eerie glint of madness in her chalk-green eyes. Naturally I said nothing of my own pregnancy, and the nagging swelling problem of my inconvenient conception.
As my winter-flowering pansies blossomed in an array of oranges and purples and yellows and blues, I did the very thing I suspect my own true mother did all those years ago on the farm. I made believe nothing was happening, nothing, that I wasn’t pregnant, that all I had to do was tread water till the rough seas calmed.
Come Christmas my neat bump had become a barrel, a barrel that my Mary Quant miniskirt was woefully inadequate at concealing. I told Henry. I rehearsed several times how I might gently
apprise him of the fact that our lives were about to change beyond all recognition. I would say, I informed my director the moon, sitting on the windowsill in the middle of the night, ‘Henry, my love, I am with child.’ This muted truth had a biblical ring to it. The words inferred that the child was in tow, trotting happily and neatly behind me, rather than invading my body with symptoms that, like the rules of engagement, were becoming increasingly brutal.
In the end, however, I opened my mouth and let a tiger not a cat out of the bag: ‘Henry I’m pregnant.’
We were shivering in the graveyard of a nearby church, the moon again providing sympathetic lighting, gentle illumination I was grateful for, considering the shock that registered on Henry’s face. ‘You mean you’re going to have a baby?’ said Henry rather stupidly, propping himself up on the grave of Lance Traherne, whose life spanned 1838– 1873, the epitaph reading, ‘In loving memory of a selfless father’. As Henry’s eyes flicked over the inscription, I saw him calculating the lifespan of poor Lance, and wondering if fatherhood was the very thing that had finished him off.
‘Yes, I am Henry. I’m going to have a baby.’ In the same forthright style much to the moon’s horror (she would have far preferred the lyrical poetic approach), I went on. ‘Are you going to stick by me or ditch me?’
‘Ditch you?’ Henry echoed.
‘Oh for goodness’ sake, Henry, it’s a simple question requiring a simple answer.’ Actually I was so scared, so fearful that my Henry would turn his back on me and walk away that I was trembling, my shoulders locked with tension, my quick breaths misting on the cold air. The wind rustled the trees, and the lights of habitation pried over the heads of the gravestones eyeing our performance. A faint backing soundtrack was also discernible consisting mainly of London traffic. It had a party’s over theme running through it.
‘Are you going to keep me in suspense for ever?’ I cried, with more combativeness than I felt.
Henry clutched the gravestone cogitating, possibly on the fate of Lance. Then, like a man who determinedly casts off his crutches and takes his first tentative steps, he pushed himself off his stony prop. His face lifted in a slow easy smile and his chest puffed out. Another two steps and he seized hold of my icy hands and dragged me close, closer, closest.
