by Fay Weldon
Dick, posted somewhere in Scotland to supervise the manufacture of Wellington Boots for the WRAC (the Women’s Royal Artillery Corps), can hardly object to anything. If Helen did not consult him before removing Marjorie from her school, neither did he consult Helen before joining the army. He just came home one evening, late at his own party, and said, ‘I’ve done it’ and the next day he was gone. What kind of conduct was that?
If Helen has put his books and papers up in the attics, where the roof leaks, then it is his fault for not attending to the attic roof (as she has repeatedly asked him to do) but going to political meetings instead. If she wants to be unfaithful on the library floor (dancing always makes her sexy, and they both know it) or even on his bed, or even in the corridors in front of the very servants, then she will, and he deserves it, and he knows it. For Dick slept with a friend’s wife—the second woman he’d ever made love to—the night Marjorie was born, and the friend’s wife, in a flurry of either guilty malice or boredom, told Helen. All this Dick knows, and so is helpless.
Dick scarcely knows his daughter Marjorie. First she had a nanny, then she went away to school. He assumes she will be all right. She is not pretty, and he is sorry for her, but now the Army is his life. He can fight Hitler. Helen he cannot fight.
As for Helen, she simply cannot think what she did, during all those lovely laughing years of childless marriage, to deserve Marjorie. Who is plain and who fawns, and at whose birth she lost her husband.
Now little Marjorie, labelled, rejected and forlorn, sits and stares at Chloe’s small gloved hand lying so securely in Gwyneth’s, and starts to cry. Chloe, longing for the safety of a label round her neck, sickened by the noise and the smell of vomit and worse, begins to cry as well.
Gwyneth begins to cry too. She takes her spotless handkerchief from her pocket and dabs her daughter’s face, and her own, and Marjorie’s too, seeing it to be there.
And so the train arrives in Ulden. It was, as we know, meant to go on to Egden, and only the relief train on Platform 6 to stop at Ulden, but the driver has misread his instructions.
twelve
ON THE PLATFORM, GRACE’S father Edwin heads the welcoming committee. He is a stout bald man with a braying laugh and what used to be known as a fine military bearing. That is, he stands with his shoulders back and rigid, and his chin high. Thus bold and brave, properly pulled together, showing no sign of weakness and distress, he held out his hand for the cane his father wielded when his school reports were bad—as they always were—thus standing he took the proud parades of his later life, and thus he stood when the Court Martial dismissed him from the Service he had been born and bred to. It is an unhealthy way to stand, thus rigidly, and his back is often bad.
Edwin is nearing fifty now, and has made, he believes, a good adjustment to civilian life, although still, sometimes, even after fifteen years, he finds it strange to wake in a chintzy house to soft female voices, and not to the clanking of boots and the rattling of weapons and commands. Then he will lie late in bed, desperate, waiting for death, with Esther clattering the breakfast dishes more and more frantically below.
His eyes are blood-shot, hooded and close together in a narrow face. His nose is long and thin: he has a handle-bar moustache which bisects his face with its sprouts of coarse reddish hair, and droops to hide the sensitivity of his mouth.
He is a busy man, though he is unemployed. Cashiered he may be—and the village knows it—but gentry he is, and he has his village obligations to fulfil. The flower shows, the fêtes, the sense of service, principles uttered in the pub. He has endless trips to London to make, to see the London lawyers who stand between him and an inheritance. He has his badly invested capital to worry about, and the problem of never eating into it, in the face of his wife’s alleged extravagance. He has his own quite violent fits of anxiety and depression to cope with. Now he has the Home Guard to organize. And every night, he has the Rose and Crown to visit, where he holds court in the Cosy Nook from eight-thirty to closing time. He holds his liquor well, like a gentleman. Or so he believes.
His wife knows otherwise, but says nothing. Grace is Edwin’s only child. It is a source of sorrow to both of them that there are no more children, but they have reached, these past years, such a state of sexual deadlock, so how could there be?
As for Grace, standing on the platform, she is in a bad temper.
thirteen
GRACE DOES NOT WANT to share her home with an evacuee. And she is disappointed in her father for so meekly succumbing to the authority which says this is what she must do. She had hoped, moreover, to be sent away to boarding school when she was twelve. Now, with the advent of the war, and her father’s inheritance even less likely to materialize, and his shares tumbling, it seems she will never be allowed to leave home.
And if she has to attend the village school—and it looks as if she will—her humiliation, she knows, will be profound. She doubts her own scholastic capabilities, not without reason, and suspects the grubby riff-raff may well do better than her at sums and spelling.
Grace is a lean, pretty, arrogant child, with a wide face, regular features, green eyes, silky red hair and the creamy matt complexion which sometimes goes with it. She resembles neither her father nor her mother. Nervousness makes her rude, and frustration makes her desperate, and for as long as she can remember, she has felt nervous and frustrated.
Thus the conversation goes that morning, at The Poplars, over a breakfast lovingly if clumsily prepared by Esther Songford, Grace’s mother, Edwin’s wife. Esther serves porridge, eggs, bacon, kidneys, toast, mushrooms—she was up early picking them so at least they are fresh, even though they are over-cooked—and Jackson’s Breakfast Tea.
Rationing, of course, so far, affects only the mass of the urban proletariat. The well-to-do find their eating habits unaffected. It takes more than a paper war to alter the servile habits of grocers. The real one, presently, is to turn them into all-powerful tyrants, only too happy to be revenged upon their once mean and arrogant betters. In the meantime, it is not shortage of food but short tempers which makes breakfast at The Poplars an uneasy affair. Grace is pink with fury.
Edwin Stop sulking, Grace. We’re having an evacuee and that is that. We have to set an example.
Ester She’s not sulking, Edwin. She’s just a little quiet. Please don’t shout at her. Grace dear, eat up your porridge and don’t aggravate your father.
Grace It’s burnt.
Esther Only a little bit, dear.
Edwin (Sneering) Like the curate’s egg, I suppose. Good in parts.
Esther I’m afraid it’s the saucepans, Edwin. They’ve worn so thin. They really must be replaced. I’m ashamed to ask Mrs Dover to clean them.
Esther has been asking for new saucepans for seven years, in vain. Edwin controls the household money flow with stringent care. He is not so much mean, as fearful of sudden penury; living in dread of military, social or natural cataclysms which will sweep away pension, profits and property overnight. He fears the working classes, and the creeping evil of socialism, seeping under the doors of privilege like flood water.
And as Edwin walks the country lanes, swinging his blackthorn cane, the very model of a healthy-minded Englishman, he is not raising his face to meet God’s good sun, as you might think, but sniffing the air for the first scent of the enemy’s Poison Gas—expected to envelop Britain at any moment.
Edwin A bad workman blames his tools, Esther. I’m afraid new saucepans are out of the question now, of course. There’s a war on. The metal is needed for guns. I’m surprised you should be so unpatriotic as to suggest it.
Esther Oh dear. I didn’t think of it like that. I’m so sorry. I’ll eat your porridge, Grace.
And Grace pushes her plate over, without gratitude. Mothers, in her view, are born to scavenge, to incorporate the evidence of their culinary shortcomings.
Grace Me? Share with some snotty-nosed urchin from the East End! Molly (a friend) says they had evacue
es at her aunt’s and they brought fleas and nits and wet the bed and never take off their vests at night and smell. You can’t, daddy. Not in my house.
Esther Our house, Grace. We’ll manage somehow. Think how much you’ve got to teach them. You must pass on your good fortune. Poor little things, separated from their mothers. Some of them have never even seen a sheep or a cow, let alone a farmyard, in all their lives. Daddy’s quite right. We must all pull together, Grace dear, even the children.
Grace Why?
Esther To defeat Mr Hitler.
Grace Well I hope he wins.
Has she gone too far? Yes.
Edwin Grace, go to your room.
Grace But I haven’t finished my breakfast.
She goes, all the same. She is frightened of her choleric father, especially at breakfast time. So’s Esther.
Edwin Esther, you have let that girl get totally out of control. Let’s hope an evacuee brings her down a peg or two. I’ve put your name down for a girl.
Esther Oh. I was rather hoping for a boy to help with the garden.
Edwin Garden! There isn’t going to be a garden from now on. There’s going to be a vegetable patch. I’m afraid this war’s put paid to your flower shows and your prizes, Esther. No time for your frills and fancies any more.
Esther reels.
For Esther, having more sense of future than her husband, spends much time working in the garden, which flourishes in her care. The soft lawns, the neat flower-beds, the many roses—which make Edwin wheezy—have been her concern, her territory, for many years. Now it seems that Edwin feels at liberty to invade it.
Invasion is most surely in the air. And indeed, throughout the war years, the battle is to rage to and fro across the garden, sometimes Edwin’s onions and carrots winning, sometimes Esther’s herbaceous borders.
Esther, this first morning of declared hostilities, is most upset. She goes into the kitchen and tries not to cry into the washing-up water as she scrapes the burnt porridge saucepan clean.
Who is this Esther, Edwin’s undoubted wife, Grace’s alleged mother, Marjorie and Chloe’s second mama? She is a vicar’s daughter. She has a sense of service, and the feeling that for the children’s sake, at least, she should remain brave, cheerful and uncomplaining. And like her husband she suffers from a sense of loss. He lost his pride and his career. She lost her faith, waking up one morning to the dour sense of her father’s dislike of her, the knowledge of his preference for his sons, and the feeling that God, even if He did exist, was certainly not good. These days it is Edwin, and only Edwin, who makes her unhappy, but he, like her father, is the fact of her existence, and she has become used to it.
She married late, at thirty, after her parents died and left her a little money. She has a faded prettiness, rather large, rather popping eyes, a lot of rather wispy hair, a lax skin. She works unceasingly, and inefficiently, about the house.
She sleeps apart from her husband because after Grace was born (and it was a difficult birth and she had hoped for a boy) intercourse was painful. Their physical union had been, at the best of times, distasteful to her, and difficult for him.
These days, just sometimes, when Edwin has drunk rather more than usual at the Rose and Crown, he will come into her bedroom and face both her distaste and his own probable inadequacy, and despise himself afterwards for his animal nature, and hardly be able to look her in the eye in the morning; the mother of his child so abused and debased, and he himself responsible for it. He would knock himself down, if he could, for the cad he is, and failing that, is ruder than ever to her.
Such a morning is this, and he hates her, and will grow carrots in her flower-beds, yes he will.
And she will not fight him, she will merely weep into the washing-up water. There is such a virtuous obstinacy about her, such a gentility in her bulky tweed skirts and shapeless twin sets, such an unawakened beauty in the body beneath them. This sense of his wife, so unused, drives him to great heights of irritation. He is apopleptic, sometimes. He thinks his heart will stop. As for her, she knows perfectly well that she wrongs him with her niceness, her sweetness and her moral supremacy. But what can she do? Sink to his crude masculine level? Never. She is too angry with him on such mornings.
She will grow roses and make him sneeze and wheeze.
So the day does not start well for Grace, or Edwin, or Esther. Now, at the station, Grace holds her father’s hand—not because she has forgiven him, but because, amongst so many milling women and children, any male is valuable and must be seen to belong to her.
fourteen
ULDEN STATION IS USUALLY a quiet and orderly place. It seldom sees more than five passengers at a time, and the station master, Mr Fell, a patient and domestic man, has both time and inclination to cherish it. The platform is clean and tidy, the name of the station is spelt out in flowers against a well-trimmed, grassy bank, and the Victorian waiting-room is lit by gas and warmed by a coal fire. Technically, the waiting-room is for the convenience of First Class passengers only, but in the winter months Mr Fell opens it to Third Class passengers as well.
Today the station is noisy, crowded and confused, and Mr Fell is suffering from an attack of asthma and gasping for breath in his office. The church bell rings out a kindly and welcoming peal—the last one for some time, since the Government is the next day to ban all bell ringing in case it assists the Germans in some way; the train which should never have stopped (as only Mr Fell knows, and he is too breathless to say), lets off steam; the Evacuation Officer reads out, undaunted, the names of children who do not exist.
Children cry, adults protest, dogs bark.
Edwin Songford, as is his custom, takes over. He silences the Evacuation Officer, the bells and the steam. He administers brandy from a hip flask (silver and leather, lined with glass) to Mr Fell, and establishes what is long since obvious, that either the train has stopped at the wrong station or contains the wrong children.
Evacuees had been expected from Hackney, in the East End. These children come from Kilburn, in West London.
Undaunted, indeed encouraged—for the reputation of the East End evacuees, who cannot tell an armchair from a WC, and who are followed everywhere by cunning, foul-mouthed, ferocious mothers, whom neither manners, lack of a bed, nor Government decree can keep away, has already spread amongst the more respectable classes of England—Edwin instructs the assembled villagers and gentry to select their own West London children according to taste. There is a rush for the strongest boys, and the most domestic looking girls.
Marjorie is left.
Grace, looking at her, sees the child most likely to depress her mother and irritate her father. She tugs Edwin’s arm.
‘Let’s have that one,’ says Grace.
‘We’ll have to,’ says Edwin. ‘It’s the only one left.’
And wham, bam, so our lives are ordered.
But perhaps, if we look deeper, people are nicer and fate is kinder than we at first assume. Perhaps Grace did not choose Marjorie from spite, but because she perceived a child who expressed outwardly what she herself felt inwardly, and she wanted to help.
And perhaps it was not cupboard love which drove Chloe to choose The Poplars as her second home, and Esther as a second mother, and Grace and Marjorie as her friends, but her recognition of their grief, and their inner homelessness. It was not that she used them, or that they used each other, but simply that they all clung together for comfort. Well.
fifteen
ULDEN STATION IS CLOSED now, axed by Dr Beeching’s axe. The railway track is used by ramblers. An amazing collection of wild and garden flowers grows along it, memorial of that long dead eccentric who once travelled the length and breadth of England’s railways, scattering flower seeds by sackfuls, feeding them out of the carriage window into the rushing Edwardian wind.
Egden station, down the line, remains. Here Inigo leaves the adult Chloe, and she catches the train to London with two minutes to spare.
Inigo said sh
e would.
Chloe arrives punctually at the Italiano. Marjorie does not. Marjorie is late, having, no doubt, important matters to delay her. Chloe is not sure whether to be glad for Marjorie, or irritated on her own behalf.
Marjorie, as a child, is all too anxious to please. If she is brave and good, she thinks, and does not complain, and is unfailingly helpful, her mother, whom she loves, will come and take her back home. It is a direct challenge to God, but God does not appear to notice, although Marjorie goes to church with Esther on both Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings. (Grace, an early atheist, refuses to go to church: or at any rate faints whenever she does, which comes to the same thing.)
And still Helen does not come, to claim her child and take her home.
Marjorie, it is soon acknowledged by all, and whatever her motives, proves a better daughter to Esther than Grace, her natural daughter, ever was.
Marjorie makes the beds, appreciates the cooking, runs Edwin’s bath, skips in and out of rooms prattling and eager, learns the piano, comes top in examinations, buries her head in Esther’s lap when she is miserable, brings her wild flowers when she is happy, asks for advice about what to wear and what to say.
And still Helen her real mother does not even write a letter, let alone come to take her away.
Marjorie is frightened of Edwin, but masters her fear sufficiently to learn the disposition of the allied and enemy forces, and so be his companion as, year in year out, he follows the progress of the war through Europe. Africa, Asia on the maps on the library table.
And still Dick, her real father, does not come to take her away. How can he? He is in France, and if he writes to her, care of her mother, who is to say whether the letters arrive at their destination, or whether her mother simply forgets to forward them?
