“A child of this age looks nice in anything.”
For the trip to England Mother had clothes made.
“It will probably be ghastly cold, and will rain three days out of four. As far as I remember, the Winsters are never out of mackintoshes, but you may as well have a few civilised clothes, in case you get an opportunity to wear them.”
As it happened, Judith arrived in lovely April weather, so the civilised clothes were worn. Charles was charmed. He had always liked being seen with a well-dressed woman, and a pretty well-dressed daughter gave him almost more of a kick. Whenever he got a chance, he dragged in the fact that Judith was his daughter.
“Is my daughter down yet?” “Give the menu to my daughter, and see what she feels like eating.”
When she was alone Judith worried. Mother had never said she was not to like Father, it was just sort of understood she was sure not to like him. What would Mother think if she could see the sort of things she and Father did and know, in a way, she enjoyed them. Even to herself Judith did not admit she had never before enjoyed herself so much. Mother would not say much, but she would use her special surprised voice. Even nearly seven hundred miles from Mother Judith could hear her surprised voice saying: “Really, Judith?” and she squirmed.
Charles told Judith he would like to be called Daddy.
“All the cousins, you’ll meet them at the wedding, call their Fathers Daddy. So if you don’t mind we’ll stick to the pattern.”
Judith did not mind, but she had heard Mother and the Uncles on diminutives. Publisher Uncle Herbert describing a book as “a dancing-in-the-dew Daddy-Mummy novel.” Or Mother saying of someone she had met: “A dreary woman surrounded by a flock of children, mewing Dad-ee Mum-ee.”
Father saw Judith had some reason for disliking the word “Daddy”.
“Got a thing about it, old lady?”
Not to hurt Father, Judith tried, keeping Mother out of the picture, to explain. Before she had time to think, she was giving imitations of Uncles Ambrose, Herbert and Angus, and Father, ignoring the other diners, was roaring with laughter.
“You’ll kill me. You must imitate them for your Grandmother. I had forgotten them. Oh don’t! Spare me! I can just see Ambrose, morning trousers and all.”
Presently, when Charlotte and Edward, the doctor she was marrying, came in, Judith was made to do her imitations again. Many of them were not the things the Uncles had said, but that Mother had said, but they were all a wild success. One part of Judith felt terrible, mocking at the sacred Uncles! The other part of her was thrilled, making fun of the Uncles was like rushing along in a high wind.
But when she was alone in her bedroom, the exhilaration faded, and fear took its place. What was happening to her? Suppose Mother was told what she had said. Daddy was only a visitor, he lived in America, he had left her and Mother. She mustn’t count on him, for he would be going away. She ought to be hating him for being beastly to Mother, but how difficult it was to hate a person who was so nice to you, and seemed so glad to be with you.
The most difficult part for Judith of being with Father was letters. As she talked so much about Mother, both Father and Charlotte took it for granted she would want to write to her every day, if not a letter at least a postcard.
“We must get a postcard of that, your Mother will like to have it.”
But Mother despised postcards, and would not want a daily letter. Miss Simpson had told Judith a nicely written letter once a week would be right.
“I wish it could have been written in French or Italian, dear, but without me to correct it, better not.”
Right away deceit had been needed. The postcards had gone to Miss Simpson, and so had all the letters but one. Equally there had to be pretence about the incoming post. Three letters had arrived from Miss Simpson, and none from Mother. They were delivered with Judith’s breakfast, and so pretence was easy. Judith found it easy to make up the kind of letter she dreamed of receiving.
“Mother is missing me awfully, but she is hurrying up to finish her book while I’m away, so we can have a lovely time together when we get back. She goes out a lot, but she says it’s just to fill up time, she’d rather be in doing things with me.”
Miss Simpson’s letters gave ideas.
“A child came into the tea-shop yesterday. She was just about your age, and so like you that for a moment I thought it was you.”
Judith translated this to her Father.
“Mother saw a child so like me, for one moment she thought it was me. She says that minute while she thought she was me was the most gorgeous she has had since I left.”
Letters to Miss Simpson were hard to write. It was difficult to sound lonely, and as if you were counting the moments until you came home, when you were having so good a time. But it was imperative Miss Simpson should not know she was having a good time. One day Father would go away again, any day something might go wrong, and if that happened Miss Simpson must be ready. Not for one minute must she feel less needed. She might not be needed this minute, but she would be. Much of Judith’s enjoyment of the present rested on the thought that Miss Simpson was waiting for her when this interlude was over.
The day before Judith and her Father were to leave for Grandmother’s house in Kent, there was to be a final fitting of her bridesmaid’s dress. Charlotte was to have taken her to the dressmaker’s, but at the last moment Edward got some time off, and they decided to go to the flat they were taking, and see how the decorating was getting on.
“You drop her at the dressmaker’s, Charles,” Charlotte said. Then she turned to Judith. “The frock is ready, they only want to put it on you. Be tough with them if there’s the slightest thing wrong and make them alter it.”
Judith felt cold inside. Go alone to the dressmaker’s! She had never been alone anywhere. Tell the dressmaker if there was anything wrong! How could she? She licked her lips, the eyes she fixed on Charlotte were wide with fright.
“I can’t go alone. I shouldn’t know what to say. And who’s going to take me home?”
Charlotte was amazed. Judith’s conversation was so spattered with “When we were in Lisbon,” “That winter in Malaga,” “That time in Bordighera,” “When we were travelling to Ceylon,” “That Christmas in Jamaica,” that she had appeared a most experienced traveller. When they had questioned her about her journey from Nice, she had amused them by a quotation from Mother: “Aeroplanes have their uses.” That a child who took that tone about flying alone from Nice, and who had moved about as Judith had, could be scared to go to a dressmaker on her own, was nonsense.
“Don’t be such a goose. Judging by your clothes, you are quite used to dressmakers.”
Charles liked women who needed support. He put an arm round Judith.
“Your Father is not much of a hand with dressmakers, but I’ll come with you, old lady. We’ll lunch out afterwards, and pick up our luggage on the way back.”
Charlotte’s mind was so full of her own affairs that she had not much attention to give to Judith. But she was puzzled by the happiness and relief on the child’s face as Charles led her away. While she and Edward were on the way to the flat, she spoke about her.
“What an odd mixture Judith is. She seems such a self-contained competent little thing, and then she makes a fuss about going to a dressmaker alone.”
Edward, in spite of his absorption in Charlotte, had now and again cast a speculative glance at his future niece.
“I don’t think she is as self-contained as she makes out. I think she’s a clinging little thing. These kids from divided homes are generally a bit complex.”
“I expect she’s too much mothered. Every third sentence starts ‘Mother and I . . .’”.
“Could be,” Edward agreed, “but she strikes me as overdoing that Mother talk. If she was mine I’d send her to a boarding-school. I think she needs to develop her
own personality, and to learn to stand on her own feet. Miserable life for a child, jogging round the earth with a Mother and a governess.”
“But she’s not our problem, thank goodness,” said Charlotte. “If she ought to go to a school, I expect my Mother will spot it, and perhaps write to Avis and suggest it.”
* * * * *
In spite of discovering “Auntie Charlotte” of the flyleaves of books was not old, but young and pretty, Grandmother had remained in Judith’s imagination Miss Simpson’s “Poor old lady. She will be very lonely I am afraid after your Aunt marries.”
Grandfather Winster had been a stockbroker. His fortunes had fluctuated during his lifetime, but fortunately when he died they were on the up-grade, so he left his wife Alice, and his little daughter Charlotte, as he supposed, with a large enough income to enable them to live as they had lived during his lifetime. He died before the second world war, so never knew that a standard of living possible in the thirties needed three times the income to be possible in the nineteen-fifties. Alice Winster had never greatly cared for her large stockbroker-Tudor home at Esher, and had been quite pleased when she had sold it, and could carry out a long-felt wish and live in the country. When war broke out she had been grateful her new home was too small to become the family evacuation centre. Her sons, Charles and Bruce, joined the Army, and her daughter Beatrice’s husband, Basil, the Air Force, and had she still been at Esher, it would have been natural for Charles’s Avis and Beatrice, both of whom lived in London, to have been sent to her. It would have been a mistake, she had thought, for Avis had never cared for her, and Beatrice, who was the type to be at her best in a war, would have thankfully dumped her baby on her Mother, and gone off and been splendid in one of the Services. As it was, the little house in Kent was so inaccessible, once petrol was rationed, that neither Avis nor Beatrice came near it. After the war Alice wondered, if she had made a home for Avis, if things would have been different. She never knew what happened, why Charles, whose business was with cars, on being suddenly moved to the New York office had not taken Avis and his baby daughter with him, or why, soon after he had left, Avis had sued for divorce. Charles did not defend the action, so it was not reported in the papers, and Alice, of course, did not attend the hearing, so she never knew the details, in fact never tried to learn them, turning away with the same squeamish feeling which made her turn her head from an unpleasant sight.
It was when, soon after the divorce, Avis went abroad taking baby Judith with her, that Alice’s conscience began to nag. She had been at the baby’s christening, and given the right presents, and when she was in London she had dined with Charles and Avis, and seen Judith in her cot. But Avis had an unfortunate effect on her. She was charming, but Alice had never been at ease with her. Alice had been born shy with a tendency to an inferiority complex. A happy marriage, and a solid position together with self-discipline, had so far effected a cure that, until Charles’s marriage with Avis, she had almost forgotten what it was like to be gauche and unsure of herself. Under Avis’s amused eyes she became, as she told herself angrily, as awkward and shy as she had been as a schoolgirl. She, who was adept at keeping conversation rippling, became tongue-tied, and when she did speak had a tendency to blurt. The maddening thing was it was nothing Avis said which caused this metamorphosis, just a lifted eyebrow, or a faint twitch at the corner of her lips when she admitted ignorance of some matter, or expressed an opinion. The last summer Avis was with Charles, Alice’s branch of the Women’s Institute had taken part in a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Alice had been startled when she heard Puck say: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” That, she had thought, is exactly what Avis thinks when she talks to me. But as her conscience, when in a nagging mood, pointed out, being thought a fool was no excuse for neglecting a daughter-in-law. Perhaps, if she had tried harder, Avis would have come, if not to like her, at least to have suffered her, and that might have meant that even though she divorced Charles, they would have kept in touch, and she might have been allowed to have Judith on visits.
It was Alice’s nagging conscience which had brought Charles from America. First she had talked Charlotte into expressing a wish that Charles could be at her wedding, and his daughter a bridesmaid, and then into writing a nice letter putting these wishes on to paper. As soon as Charles agreed to come over for the wedding, and wrote he would try and arrange for Judith to be a bridesmaid, she wrote a letter, not to Charles, but to Marion. She had never met Marion, but on paper she felt she knew her fairly well. Marion expected to like her English Mother-in-law, and wrote regularly, warm letters full of news that might interest her. From these letters Alice knew that Marion had what she called “right ideas”. Marion respected marriage, she wanted babies. As well she did things at the usual times, planning a proper summer holiday, which she called a vacation, and what Alice supposed was spring-cleaning, though she called it “having the apartment made over”. In fact Alice felt certain, if only they could meet, she and Marion would get on splendidly. The letter to Marion was mostly about the wedding, but she added a carefully thought out paragraph: “I do wish you could have come over for the wedding too, as of course we all want to meet you. But I have another reason for wishing you could be here. As you will know, Charles has the right to see his daughter, but he never has seen her since he left Avis, and neither have I, and I think it is high time we did. As you already know, Charlotte wants Judith to be one of her bridesmaids, and Charles is going to try and arrange for this, but those few days will not be enough for a Father to get to know his daughter, will they? If you could have been here with Charles you might have persuaded him to make a really long visit, and you could both have got to know Judith well.”
Marion fixed everything just as Alice had supposed she would. Charles must certainly get to know his daughter. He would take two months’ vacation right away, instead of in the summer. She wished she could come over. She was longing to meet Charles’s family, and of course just crazy to know little Judith, but her Mother’s health made it impossible.
On hearing Marion was arranging everything, Alice’s conscience, for the first time for years, stopped nagging. Avis could, and had, refused to let Judith visit her, not unkindly—Avis would think unkindness uncivilised—it had just been impossible to arrange, but Charles had rights, and Marion would insist on them.
The letter Marion composed and Charles sent to Avis was tactful. Charles felt one long get-together with his daughter was better than an occasional short visit. If Avis felt two months too long he must manage to come over more often, and he could of course come to wherever she was living. If, however, the two months now, could be managed, he felt he would know Judith really well, and it would not matter if two or three years passed before he saw her again. The reply from Avis arranged for Judith to stay the two months.
“I guessed it might,” Marion said to Charles. “I wouldn’t imagine she would fancy you settling in like a mole under her front lawn.”
Alice felt it was putting too great a strain on Judith if she was expected to meet all her relations at once. For that reason she had arranged for Charles to bring her to stay with her some days before the family gathered for the wedding. In spite of this precaution, it was rather a nervous, strained Judith who arrived at her Grandmother’s house. Her experience with Grandmamma Stratford-Derickson had not led her to expect to like Grandmothers. Grandmother Winster would not wish her to recite in German or French, but she had never known any really old people. Vaguely she pictured a jutting chin, gaps where teeth had been, and a bent body leaning on a stick, a mixture of the witch who caught Hansel and Gretel, and Miss Simpson’s poor old lady.
The poor old lady in an old tweed suit and a faded darned jersey was forking manure into a flower-bed when Charles drew his car up at her gate. Immediately she dropped her fork, and accompanied by three barking dogs, jumped the flower-bed and ran to greet them.
“Charles! There you are!�
� She waited while Judith scrambled out, then pulled her to her. “At last! Oh, my dear, you’ll never know how glad these old eyes are to see you.”
The eyes fastened on Judith looked anything but old. They were very blue, and as alive as the eyes of a child. Nothing in fact about Grandmother looked old. She had short grey hair, curling over her head, and her body, though shapeless in the awful suit and jersey, was certainly not bent.
Charles gave his Mother a hug.
“How are you? Do you know, Judith, not having seen me for years, your Grandmother nearly refused to come to London to meet me, in case the dogs would miss her. What would you do to your Mother if she cared more for three dogs than she did for you?”
The dogs, a retriever, a wire-haired terrier and a dachshund, were attempting to get into the car. Alice pulled them out.
“Bad boys.” She gave each an affectionate slap. Then she returned to Judith. “I hope you like dogs, darling. The retriever is called Shem, the terrier’s Ham and the dachshund Japheth, nice and easy to remember. Come along, and I’ll show you your room. You’ll have to bring in the luggage, Charles, it isn’t a day the gardener comes.”
The house was very small, but quite delightful. Cream paint, oak beams, all the best and smallest pieces of furniture and pictures from Esher, and flowers everywhere. There was a double spareroom, with a minute dressing-room off it. Grandmother opened the dressing-room door.
“You’re sleeping here for the moment, and I’ve put your Father into the double room. Next week your Uncle Bruce and Aunt Daphne will have the big room, and I shall put a cot up for your little Cousin Helen. Her brother Hugh will sleep in here, he’s six now. Just tidy up, then come straight down, tea’s ready.”
Left alone Judith looked at the room. The yellow chintz curtains, the matching bedspread, the tulips in a vase on the dressing-table, but, though the prettiness pleased her, she was not really taking it in. She felt almost as if she were not real, but part of a dream. How could an old Grandmother look like that? She had jumped over the flower-bed! Grown-up people did not jump, only children jumped. Shem, Ham and Japheth! Those were the names of Noah’s sons. You did not call dogs after people in the Old Testament. She had never known a dog intimately, but the ones she had met had names like Marcel or Otto. How pleased Grandmother was to see her. If she had always wanted to see her why hadn’t she invited her to stay before? How strange everybody was. It had been startling enough to find Father so fond of her, and Charlotte so nice, but that Grandmother was so loving and so pleased to see her really was most confusing. Why did Mother think the Winsters queer? Was it queer to make you feel loved and wanted? Was Mother’s and the Uncles’ way of treating her ordinary and the Winster way unusual?
Judith Page 3
