Clover's Child

by Amanda Prowse

  Joan wasn’t sure if there was a magic potion that could cure a broken heart, but she trotted up the path of the doctor’s surgery nonetheless. She flicked through a copy of Woman’s Own until it was her turn. Dr Levitson beamed, seemed pleased to see her.

  ‘Ah, Joan, how are you?’

  ‘Oh you know, Doctor, bearing up.’

  ‘I expected to see you—’

  ‘Yes, I need a tonic or something for our Dot. I’m worried about her. She’s got no energy at all and she can’t go on like this, not eating, sleeping all the time.’

  ‘I am delighted that you are being so supportive, Joan. It’s not something I see every day and it’s a credit to you and Reg.’

  ‘Of course I’m supportive. I’m worried about her, tha’sall. She’s me daughter!’

  ‘Yes, she is and, once again, Joan, you are to be commended for your attitude, truly. It’s not something I see very often, I’m afraid. The good news is that the heavy fatigue and nausea, loss of appetite and so forth will all fade as she gets further into the pregnancy. It’s the first few months that can be the trickiest, I’m sure you remember!’

  The next sound was Joan Simpson’s body hitting the linoleum floor. She had fainted.

  7

  Dot was halfway up the stairs with a glass of water when she heard her mum’s key in the door. She turned and waited, ready to see if she needed any help with the tea. Her mum clicked the door shut behind her and stood with her back against it. Her skin was ashen, her eyes wide. Dot noticed the tremor of her hand as she removed her scarf. She fixed her daughter with a stare and it was in that single second that Dot knew her secret was out. Joan undid the top buttons of her coat as though desperate for air. As she slipped down and sat on the door mat, she looked broken.

  Approaching her slowly, Dot reached out to help her mum stand. ‘Mum, I…’

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ Joan managed beneath gasps. And then, ‘What have you done?’

  For Dot it was a full ten days of going through the motions. Working, sleeping and waiting. She spent hours sitting on her bed in the wee small hours, listening to her parents’ shouts and whispers, which came in alternate waves as they tried to figure out what to do for the best. Finally she was summoned.

  Dot trod carefully down the stairs, placing one foot after the other on the worn runner that ran up the middle of each step. She padded along the hallway and eased open the door of the back room. It felt incredible that she had known the room and the people in it – her family – her whole life. This was the room in which she had opened eighteen sets of birthday gifts, blown out the candles on eighteen home-made cakes and rushed in barefoot and breathless to find Father Christmas’s offerings on eighteen separate cold December mornings. Yet pushing the door open tonight, she felt no kinship. These people had become strangers and in its way this was more scary and lonely than being upstairs by herself, where she could pretend that there were people in the house that cared about her.

  Her dad sat in his vest and concentrated on rolling cigarettes ready to stack neatly inside his old tobacco tin. His braces hung down to his thighs. His flat, broad thumbs had a ring of black grease under the fingernails. He’d probably been fixing his bike. He did not look up from his task, content to let her mum talk on behalf of both of them. Dot noted how his fingers shook as he brought the sticky paper up to his mouth for its lick. Trembling hands that contained the anger and distress that he fought to control; for this she was grateful. He flicked his head occasionally, not to acknowledge her, but to get his long, brilliantined fringe out of his eyes.

  ‘Sit down, Dot.’ Her mum’s voice was soft. If there was the slightest bit of empathy in her tone, this was cancelled out by the set of her mouth and the narrowing of her eyes, as though having to look at something as unsavoury as her pregnant daughter revolted her. She pointed at the chair opposite Dot’s dad. Joan stood slightly behind her husband, with her hand resting lightly on the back of his seat. Dot drew a deep breath and opened her mouth, but then closed it again. It was a further minute before she finally found the courage to speak.

  Dot was unsure of the protocol and spoke as she would under normal circumstances, which of course these were anything but.

  ‘Is Dee all right?’ It had been ten days since she had seen her sister, who crept mouse-like along the hall and into her bed at night so as not to disturb her ‘poorly’ big sister.

  ‘You stay away from her, d’you hear me!’ Her dad’s tone made her flinch. Small flecks of spit flew from his mouth and landed on the rug between them.

  Dot swallowed to ease her own dry mouth. ‘I’m sorry… I just…’ She didn’t know what she was apologising for, her confusion made her stutter. She only wanted to know how her little sister was doing.

  He pointed a finger towards her face. ‘I’ll say this to you once: you don’t go near her. Do you understand? You don’t even talk to her. Is that clear?’ His top lip curled.

  Dot nodded.

  ‘I don’t want her mixed up in all this.’ This he addressed to his wife, who nodded in agreement and placed her hand on his shoulder as though that could calm his rage.

  Joan coughed, although the lump in her throat would not be so easily shifted. ‘Your dad and I have been trying to work out what’s to be done for the best. We’ve been over it night after night and have decided.’

  Dot looked at her mum. She wanted to comment that she had a right to be involved in the decision-making process, but knew it would only inflame an already intolerable situation. She kept quiet and waited for the verdict. Her bowels turned to ice and her stomach seemed to shrink around her intestines. She fought the urge to be sick.

  ‘You are not that far gone and so there are options…’

  Dot instinctively placed her hand on her stomach. No way, she would never get rid of this baby, never. They’d have to kill her first and if they were going to force her to have an abortion, then she’d rather be dead, so all good.

  ‘But Daddy and I respect our faith too much for that to be considered.’

  Dot exhaled. Relief.

  ‘You are going to one of the big houses. A mother and baby home in Battersea. But you can’t go there till you’re nearly ready to drop, so before that we’ll just have to think of a way to keep you hidden, once you start to show. I don’t want no one around here knowing anything about it. If you tell anyone, anyone at all, then you can’t come back here, Dot. Not ever. We’ll be finished, a bloody laughing stock and I will not have my house and my name disgraced. I won’t have people talking about me behind my back, knowing my business. But if you stay there until it’s born and it’s adopted out, you can come home and we’ll say no more about it. I’m sure you’ll be as relieved as we are to have a solution, Dot. It could all be much worse and if we do like we say, you can move on with your life and put it behind you with the least damage done.’

  Dot didn’t bother to try and stem the steady flow of tears that trickled down her face. Her cry was the almost silent whimper of the defeated. There was so much she wanted to say. Primarily she would have liked to point out that it wasn’t an ‘it’ but her baby. She also did not want to go to Battersea to live with nuns. But mostly, she did not want her baby, their baby, put up for adoption. She could not risk speaking up, incurring their wrath, in case they threw her out there and then. She had nowhere to go and no money. She considered telling Barb, but knew it would be the final straw for her parents if Mrs Harrison and the rest of the street were to find out; it wasn’t that Barb was disloyal, but she had never been able to keep a secret. Dot nodded, slowly blinking her swollen, red eyes and fighting the rising desire to scream. After a further minute of silence, she correctly assumed that she was dismissed. She made her way back up the stairs to the comfort of her room, where she began to digest the latest miserable development in the story of her life.

  Lying on top of the candlewick bedspread, she stroked her tummy and whispered to her little one. ‘I will fight them all the way. I will fight t
o keep you, baby; don’t you worry, darling, they will have to get through me to get to you and I am tougher than I look. Your daddy wasn’t interested, but I’ll make up for that, you just wait and see. So don’t you worry, no one is going to take you away from me.’

  Sol’s words drifted into her head as they did each hour, various phrases, utterances, promises, all made in deceit, all lies. She knew they were lies, but to recall them hurt just the same. ‘The idea of only having sixty-three years with you horrifies me, frightens me. Because it’s not enough, not nearly enough. How long would be enough? Eternity. I’d settle for eternity.’

  * * *

  Dot carried on working at Bryant and May for another month, then effectively spent the rest of the summer lying on the bed in her little bedroom. At first it felt like a nest, somewhere safe and undisturbed where she could sleep, think, and grow their baby. She revived the games from her childhood, then counted all the flowers within the stripes on the iridescent pink flock wallpaper. She pondered the water mark on the ceiling, from when a tile had blown off the roof and let the rain in, making the stain into as many animals as she could think of and then people and then buildings, although how it could simultaneously be an elephant, Karl Marx and Buckingham Palace, she didn’t know.

  Joan had a new job at the Queen’s Head and things appeared to carry on as normal for the other members of the Simpson family. The noises of the house were familiar: the dull echo of the radio from the back room, as though the presenter and all musicians were speaking and performing through a pillow; the flush of the loo and then the hiss as the cistern refilled itself, the sharp snap of the bolt on the bathroom door. The bang of her mum’s big saucepan as it hit the bottom of the sink, usually after the spuds or greens had been drained, as though her wrist had finally tired of carrying the heavy weight. The occasional shriek of laughter from her mum or little sister, probably at something funny her dad had done or said, which might be anything from an impression of Mrs Harrison to putting a tea towel on his head.

  After a week, however, these distractions felt like a taunt to Dot’s whirring brain. The sounds of normal life seemed strangely magnified, until they deafened her. Every time there was a creak on a floorboard or stair tread, she jumped, waiting to see who or what was approaching. It was usually no one.

  One day her mum came up, stood in the doorway and informed her, quite casually, of the grand plan. She had decided to tell the neighbours that Dot had got a job on a farm in Kent, the same one where they as a family had picked hops years before. The farmer’s wife was unwell and they had asked if Dot might be available to help out with the kids, cook dinner, that kind of thing. It was certainly a step up from Bryant and May. She overheard her mum and Mrs Harrison chatting one day, heard their neighbour pause from dragging on her fag to comment, ‘All them fresh apples, country air and home-cooked food, why wouldn’t you? Lucky girl.’

  That’s me, thought Dot, such a lucky girl.

  Once or twice, keeping her head low, she peeked through the tiny gap in the lace curtain and watched the kids playing in the street. It felt like an age away that she had been similarly amused by nothing more than a stick and a scruffy tennis ball. The kids were innovative, resourceful, changing the game to keep everyone interested. One minute you could touch the third lamppost along and be safe, but two turns on, touching it meant instant disqualification – hence the howls of the little girl at Number 26, who could not keep up with the new rules but very definitely did not want to be out. Dot smiled as the little waif called her big brother a ‘poo-poo shit head’ before stomping off to the kerb with her arms folded high across her chest, sulking at the injustice of it all.

  It felt strange that life went on as normal for those around her, while her own world was held in limbo.

  When the days were hot, Joan would march in and climb up on the window sill to open the top window. There was nothing suspicious in a mother airing the bedroom of her daughter who was working on a farm in Kent. The metal arm would stick out, pushing the net curtain into a V that would catch any breeze and flutter all day long. This could fascinate Dot for hours, especially the patterns on the wall as the lace filtered the rays and fell back against the glass. On the warmest days, the sound of clicking heels and heavy soles on the cobbles was replaced by the light tap of rubber sandals and the pat and squeak of sneakers. No rain or wind meant that birdsong was louder. People seemed to laugh more, happy to feel the warmth creeping into their bones, driving out their aches.

  Sometimes she heard voices she recognised. When it was Barb and her Aunty Audrey, usually chatting about nothing in particular, Dot had to sit on her hands to stop herself from jumping up and banging on the glass; she would have so liked her mate’s company.

  Dee was kept inside for much of the summer as well, poor little mite; it was almost punishment by proxy. The neighbours had been told that Dot had gone to Kent and when Dot did eventually leave, this would be the story Dee would get told too. Joan and Reg figured that any inconsistency with dates would be attributed to a little girl’s confusion. They distracted their youngest daughter with stories, the making of fairy cakes and the colouring in of pictures from her book, which, once completed, were ripped out and stuck on the fireplace with Sellotape. They hoped that she would forget that her big sister was being held hostage in the front bedroom and, for most of the time, she did.

  One morning, though, not long after school had started again after the summer holidays, Dot was woken by the creak of a floorboard on her bedroom floor. Her mum usually waited until she was asleep before tip-toeing in, bringing glasses of milk and ham sandwiches that Dot would sip and nibble when and if the fancy took her. Dot opened one eye and was pleased to see Dee’s smiling face and not her mother standing there in stony-faced judgement as though the very sight of her daughter was enough to renew the anger, the shame she felt at the situation.

  ‘Hello, Dee! What a lovely surprise. Are you all right, darling?’

  Dee nodded. She had been told to stay out of Dot’s room and was nervous. She flicked the ear of the stuffed bunny under her arm.

  ‘School all right?’

  ‘Yep, I’m doing tables.’

  ‘You never are! Which ones d’you know?’

  ‘I don’t know none yet, but I’ve got a book.’

  Dot smiled. ‘That’s brilliant! You’ll have to learn them all, Dee, and then you can do any sums you want to. You’re such a big girl now.’ It was true, her little sister had grown in the weeks that Dot had been confined to her bedroom.

  ‘Are you feeling better, Dot? Mum said you’ve got tonsils.’ Dee looked sheepish, she didn’t know what ‘tonsils’ was, but if it meant that her sister was banished to her room and wasn’t to be spoken to, she knew it must be bad.

  ‘I tell you what, Dee, seeing you has made me feel a lot better, honest.’

  ‘Mum and Dad are having a nap in the front room. They had some beer and now they’re asleep.’

  ‘Beer?’ It wasn’t like her parents to be drinking in the afternoon.

  ‘Yeah, they had a dance and they were having beer because of the rent.’

  ‘Because of the rent?’ It made no sense, Dee had probably got the wrong end of the stick, bless her.

  Dee nodded. ‘They got a letter saying that they don’t have to pay no rent. Not just now but not never ever, not until they die!’ Wide eyed, Dee delivered the last word with drama.

  ‘That can’t be right, darling.’ Dot shook her head at her sweet little sister.

  ‘It is right Dot! Dad said it was a bleeding good job cos your shenanigans meant that we were nearly bleeding starving anyway! But now they’ve got no rent and mum’s got a coupla shifts up the Queen’s Head in the kitchen, he says we’ll be all right.’

  Dot gave a small laugh, hearing the words ‘shenanigans’ and ‘bleeding starving’ coming from the mouth of her little sis, although in truth it was far from funny.

  ‘I’ve got to go now, Dot, but I hope you feel a bit better
. I miss you. I liked it when you had your dinner at the table with us.’

  ‘I liked it too, Dee.’

  ‘I gotta go now. I don’t want to get tonsils.’

  ‘Ooh no, you don’t. But don’t worry, tin ribs, you’re a bit too little for tonsils!’

  Dee crept forward and kissed her sister on the cheek. It was the sweetest kiss Dot had received in a very long time and made her tears pool instantly.

  ‘Thank you, baby girl,’ she whispered through her tears.

  Dee poked her head through the door before finally leaving. ‘Dot?’

  ‘Yes, darling?’

  ‘Tonsils has n’arf made your belly fat!’ With that she clicked the door shut and plodded off down the stairs.

  Dot promised herself every day to try and put Sol out of her head, but it was like trying not to breathe. She divided her time between thinking about the time they spent together and imagining what life might be like if he were still here. She spoke to her bump, rubbing at the stretched skin of her stomach and filling in all the little details that she thought her baby might like to hear.

  ‘We used to go to a little cafe that wasn’t flash, but your dad said it was perfect. We’d sit for hours and hours talking about nothing much really. I was very happy to watch him and listen to him. He’s beautiful, you see, and he told me stories of a place far, far away that sounds like paradise. I thought I’d live there too one day, but it wasn’t to be. I expect if he was still here now, we’d be going for picnics and enjoying the sunshine; he hated to be cold.’ Dot got off the bed as she remembered something. She opened the wardrobe door and there behind a couple of jumpers and skirts that she could no longer get into was her summer frock, a cotton tea dress with big fat roses all over it. She pulled it from the hanger and remembered the day she had sponged it, making sure it would be lovely for the summer. Her tears spilled at the memory of that day, she could never have envisaged that this was how she would spend her summer.