*
With the twins safely tucked up in bed, I prepare Jonathan’s meal and take it to him. A sliver of light escapes his study door, promising the heat within; will we make love on his desk of papers, will he fling his photographs of Laura to the wall?
Laura. Did she carry her husband’s supper on a tray, like I do? Did she wait here, outside this room, shivering in anticipation of his embrace?
‘Come in,’ he says when I knock.
‘I’ve brought you some food,’ I say, setting down the tray. His back is to me; he faces the fire. For what seems like a long time, I wait, before at last he turns. His hands are steepled beneath his chin. His blue eyes shine in the flickering light. I feel stripped, of my clothes, my defences, of everything I had planned to say. Jonathan…
‘Sit down, Miss Miller,’ he says. I do.
‘If this is about Mrs Yarrow leaving,’ I say, ‘you needn’t worry. I can handle her role as well as my own. I know it could be an adjustment for us all but when I accepted this position I was aware there might be additional responsibilities—’
‘It isn’t about Mrs Yarrow,’ says Jonathan. ‘Although, on that note, I will be hiring a housekeeper: I believe it to be the best course of action on every front.’
‘Really, Jonathan, that isn’t necessary.’
His eyebrow lifts, unkindly.
‘You will address me as Captain, Miss Miller,’ he says. ‘Is that quite clear?’
‘Forgive me.’ I look to my lap, humiliation burning. I wonder if this is his idea of a game, an added spice to our dalliance. I should continue to observe his authority and address him correctly as such. I raise my head. ‘Forgive me,’ I say again.
‘Hiring a housekeeper is perfectly necessary,’ he says, returning to point. ‘These responsibilities are too much to manage on your own.’
‘But I wish to manage them.’
He narrows his eyes. ‘And I wish to hire.’ Promptly, he stands. ‘I fear you are forgetting your place here, Miss Miller. I do not abide my employees challenging my will, nor do I accept their speaking to me as if we are equals. You are my subordinate: you care for my children and that is where it ends. You are a governess, and you remain at Winterbourne only at my discretion.’ He clears his throat, gruffly. ‘Given what happened between us last night,’ he says, ‘I ought to dismiss you immediately. But my children are fond of you. I have enjoyed watching them respond to your teaching and I believe you have their best interests at heart.’
‘I do! But, Captain—’
‘So I will extend you this courtesy and allow you to stay. But the condition is this. We will, neither of us, speak of the madness that overcame us in the chapel yesterday evening. I am sure you are as regretful of it as I. I must certainly have taken leave of my senses and I apologise for the situation I put you in.’
‘There is no need to be sorry.’ My mouth is numb. My heart is numb. Jonathan goes to the window, where freezing rain slices against the panes.
‘A reckless illusion,’ he says, in a gentler voice, ‘that is all it was. Miss Miller, I mistook you for another woman. I mistook you for my wife. Truly, I am sorry.’
I long to object. You didn’t mistake me for her, you didn’t! Not the whole time! Not when you were looking into my eyes, you saw me, you did! But I stay where I am, fingers clasped, and all I can think about is his supper growing cold.
He said a new housekeeper would be the best action ‘on every front’. Does that include, then, implementing distance between us? Disgrace floods through me, imagining like a foolish child that he felt as I did when all along he was seeking out ways to avoid us being together. It would seem a horror to him to be at Winterbourne with just his children and me, where, to me, it would seem a heaven.
Stupid Alice, stop daydreaming! You silly, stupid girl!
‘Do you hear me, Miss Miller?’ he says softly, and turns to face me.
I only meet his eyes for a heartbeat before it becomes too painful. I can still feel his touch on my skin, and it is scarcely possible that this time twenty-four hours ago we were entwined, when now we are strangers. ‘Yes,’ I answer. ‘I hear you.’
Chapter 24
Alice, Surrey, November 1940
Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock…
The dining room was stifling hot. Fire roared in the hearth and my dress stuck to my back. I had never liked that clock, with its shagreen, lizardy casing and its way of spitting out seconds like someone trying to clear their mouth of orange pith.
It was torturous. Waiting. Waiting. Beef fritter congealing on my plate, and it was the plate with the flaked rim that we had used to give to Grandma because she said it had ‘character’. I wished for character, then. I wished for bravery.
‘What’s the matter, girl?’ said my father. The three of us were sitting for lunch. It was Sunday, after church, and he held fort at the helm of the table, masticating bread pudding. I loathed the way he ate. ‘Food not good enough for you?’
‘I’m not hungry,’ I said, withering beneath my father’s glare. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock… Every second tormented me. Do it. Say it now.
‘I need a drink,’ said my mother, pushing back her chair and rising unsteadily to her feet. My father muttered something. I didn’t need to hear what.
Could I blame her for her depression? No, I could not. Trapped in this house with him, his demands and his put-downs, his subtle tyranny. And it was subtle. There was no shouting, no beating or bruising. Other women had it worse; she’d even said that to me once. It was difficult to know which had come first, his cruelty or her drinking. Each fed the other. For days my mother would take to her bed (they no longer shared a room) and the house would ‘fall to rack and ruin’. He wanted a diligent wife, one who took as much pride in her homestead as she did in her appearance. As I watched my mother shuffle from the dining room, hair unbrushed and a stoop to her shoulders, I wondered if he took other women. It was likely. And it would make his imminent demonstration of morality an even bitterer pill to swallow.
I could have benefited from alcohol as well, but of course I didn’t admit it. My father sliced his fritter, slopped out meaty gravy; I watched its brown gloop clinging to the neck of the gravy boat, before he caught it with a finger and licked it clean. The heat from the fire made everything fatter and more sickening, too close, too much.
I’ll do it when she comes back, I thought.
But she did come back, gin in shaking hand, and I stayed silent. So many times I had rehearsed the words, the order of them: some magical, elusive sequence that would mitigate my transgression, make it sound milder. It seemed impossible to embark on the confession, as unlikely as stepping off a tall building into thin air.
The girls at Burstead had mostly done away with their parents. At the start of term they had been dropped at the gates by an employee of their family, the girl’s own mother and father either too busy or else preoccupied abroad. There had been a collective sense right from the start, as we lay in our dormitories staring into the night, of necessary amputation. For me, aged ten, it had been a precise rejection – my parents didn’t want me, I doubted that they had ever wanted me – and if I was to survive then I would need to learn to fend for myself. For others it was less clear-cut; they might have been lavished with love and promised that Burstead was in their best interests, but the seed of resentment remained and grew. We had been let go. Our childhood was over. Our parents were breathing a sigh of relief.
‘I don’t care a bit for my lot,’ Ginny Pettifer had used to say, somewhat proudly, as she shirked lacrosse in favour of painting her toenails in the daygirls’ study room. ‘And they don’t care for me.’ Her family was like a group of people introduced at a party, she’d claimed, quickly realising they didn’t like each other but knowing they were stuck. Ginny was an only child, too. Plenty of Burstead girls were.
I could barely think of Ginny. Each hour she crawled and crept on the periphery of my imaginings, an incessant knuckle on a locked
door. I saw her in dreams; I met her in nightmares. Our year’s leaving assembly had been a hushed affair, an echo of the funeral that some of us would make and some of us wouldn’t. I didn’t go. How could I have? Instead I spent the day in bed, claiming a headache.
‘What is the problem with you women?’ my father said as he completed his meal and pushed his plate away. ‘This country’s at war and you let good food go to waste?’ He wiped his mouth with a napkin; I noticed the greying hairs on the backs of his hands, and the skin beneath, papery and thin. My father had always seemed old, even when he was young. ‘How about pudding, Maud?’ He trained his eye on his wife, that same hawk eye that had pursued me all my life, ever watchful, ever judgemental: nothing was good enough for that hawk eye; nothing was sufficient.
I heard my mother move from her chair. Opposite me, the empty side of the table was charged with absence. What might it have been like to have a sibling? Where would the power have lain, then? For that was the word I associated with him. Power. He had the power to crush me, not physically but with words, with criticism.
Often I questioned why they had gone ahead with a child at all. Once or twice my mother had admitted I’d been a mistake, only to retract it at a later point. As if such a thing could be retracted. When my grandmother died, they came into money. My father, in his arrogance, spent it quickly, and one of his indulgences was my Burstead education. At last we can get rid of her, I imagined him saying. Perhaps he hadn’t said that, but I could hear it as immediately as if he were speaking it now.
Outside, in the garden, a robin hopped across the barren lawn. It paused and dipped its tail, seeming to look in at me. I wished to be that bird. I longed to fly away. But then there would be no Robert, I reminded myself, and my heart lifted in hope.
I will fly away, I thought. We will fly away together. That was the reason I was here. Robert was the reason for everything. And if we had a chance of a future together, I would have to be strong. My parents had to be told.
‘It’s burned.’
My mother came back in with a pear crumble.
Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock…
‘I’m pregnant,’ I said.
My mother dropped her glass. I dropped with it. I had jumped. Thin air beneath me, the ground hurtling up.
‘We’re engaged to be married,’ I said, the ground rushing closer. ‘We love each other. I’m moving to London. We’re going to start our lives together.’
I met my mother’s gaze, insipid with shock and gin and dismay.
Then my father started laughing. I had braced myself for wrath, for thunder, and to hear his snicker was sinister and shocking. It was a reedy, cruel laugh, a laugh so pitiful and mean that the justifications and defences I’d prepared evaporated.
‘Presumably you’re getting rid of it.’
I shook my head.
My father’s fist struck the table, with such impact that the china shuddered.
‘I am going to ask you that question again, Alice, so think very carefully.’
‘We love each other,’ I repeated. It was all I could say, all that meant anything. I kept thinking: As long as we love each other, nothing else matters.
‘If you suppose for one moment that I will stand for my name to be dragged through the gutter by some local delinquent—’
‘He isn’t local.’ But I couldn’t say who he was. Robert had forbid it. I agreed, if for nothing else than to avoid making worse an already scandalous confession.
‘Then who is he?’
‘Nobody you know.’
‘Tell me now, girl,’ my father roared.
‘I cannot.’
‘Wrong. What you cannot do is pursue this situation.’
‘I am keeping our baby, whether it suits you or not.’
My father’s quietness was the most horrifying thing of all. I searched the garden to find my robin but she had gone; only the murky yellow lawn stared back at me, mulched with autumn’s leaves. I sensed his panicked mind working, piecing it together, the disgrace, the illicit affair, until he arrived at the most reprehensible act of all – the impossible pregnancy, its inescapable fact and inevitable conclusion, a conclusion that would affect not just me (for what did he care for me?) but his own repute. The shame of a daughter who would commit such a felony! My mother whimpered, sitting in front of her burned pear crumble. I looked to her, hoping for support, for in what other aspect of life should a mother be closer to her daughter? But I saw only fear. Her fear of her husband was greater than her love for her child.
I knew then that I should never have come back. It had been futile to imagine they could offer me anything. I had held fast to a blind hope, close to desperation, that they might have opened their arms and told me they would help me and that everything would be all right. Robert would return from the war. He would survive. We would be married. Our baby would arrive safely and there was nothing to dread.
It turned out I was the fool my father always told me I was. A desperate fool, because this was the end of my ideas, this hurtful house and these hurtful people my last remaining options. In London, I had told no one. Bombs were falling. The city was frightening. I had a life inside me, tentative and precious, but I was terrified. I felt utterly alone. If they did not help me, I didn’t know what I would do.
‘If you think this man will stay with you, Alice, you are wrong.’ My father stood from the table. There was no bang, no explosion, just a silent uprising. ‘He’ll swear to you that he will. He’ll promise you marriage. He might even remain at your side until the child arrives. But after that…’ His eyes met my mother, her head bowed, silent tears flowing. ‘We all know what having a child does to a woman.’
I tried not to let his words touch me. But they did. I didn’t want to be like my mother, to sit here defeated, yet the insinuation that her unhappy state was my fault, was a result of my very existence, was hard to bear. It wasn’t true. It was my father’s cruelty. But I also knew that that same cruelty was responsible for my own so-called affliction: my ‘nervous disposition’; my urge to hide in daydreams, to invent worlds that I could inhabit, worlds where I mattered and I was loved. I had none of that here.
Robert didn’t know about the pregnancy. He had left to fight before I knew for certain. But I wasn’t going to tell my parents that. I wasn’t going to hear my father crow about how Robert would abandon me as soon as he discovered it. I knew that Robert wouldn’t. A voice whispered inside me: Do you? Do you really? Because if Robert knew about Ginny – if anyone knew about Ginny – it would all be over.
My father tried a different tack. He leaned in close, conspiratorially. ‘You have every reason to put an end to this,’ he said. ‘I know a man who can do it.’
‘I can’t,’ I said.
‘He’s a vet. It isn’t so different. You’ll be in and out in a day.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘You have no choice.’
I looked at him. ‘Yes, I do,’ I said firmly. And even if that choice sent me rushing into the abyss, which I surely knew it would, for no girl in my position could possibly make it work, not here, not now, not unmarried at the turn of a new decade with no money or means of support, at least it was a choice I had taken away from him. I knew the reasons why I should not proceed, too many to count, and maybe if I had loved my parents and been afraid of losing them it might have made a difference. But I believed in Robert more. I believed in us. I believed in my reveries about our future together. Content. Secure. I believed that everything would work out.
And I had paid a price for this. I had protected our affair at the highest cost.
My pregnancy was one life in exchange for another. It was my retribution, my chance to forge something good from the turmoil I had created.
My father picked up his plate and hurled it against the window, where it smashed and left a brown smear across the panes. ‘I always knew you were impressionable, Alice, but this…’ He shook his head. ‘You idiot child – this man of you
rs doesn’t love you. You’re nothing but a silly toy he picked up. After what happened to that girl in your year, you’d think you might have more sense, learn to behave, look after yourself. But no, not you.’ His voice grew quiet. ‘At first we thought there was something the matter with you. If you’d been a boy, you’d have had more sense. Less time to waste getting caught up in your nerves, you’d have been doing, building, fixing.’ He delivered this with such hostility that I watched the empty side of the table again, wondering. ‘But no,’ he said, ‘it was just you. And now you’re doing it again. Residing inside these pointless fictions that will get you nowhere. Imagining you can survive this. You won’t survive this.’
‘It isn’t fiction. It’s real.’
‘I’ll tell you what’s real,’ he said savagely. ‘The war on our doorstep is real. Wake up, little girl. These are difficult times. Have you thought about the outcome of your choice? When your precious lover deserts you – because he will, make no mistake about that – what are your plans, then? Have you thought that far ahead?’
‘We’ll find a way to stay together. We’ll always be together.’
‘You’re a damned fool!’ He struck the table.
‘Please, Charles—!’ begged my mother.
But I didn’t need her. I had the shiver of a shadow of something wonderful inside me, deep inside where he couldn’t touch it. I pushed back my chair with a scrape and met my father head-on. I hadn’t realised until that moment that I was taller than him, not much, but a fraction. He appeared pathetic, small, tragic.
‘How would you know what I am? You don’t know anything about me.’
‘I know you’re a silly, stupid girl and I’m ashamed to call you my daughter. Do you know how ashamed I am?’
‘Your shame can drive you to the grave, for all I care.’
My mother started crying.
‘I’m sorry, Mother,’ I said, pulling open the door and refusing to look behind, ‘but I fear I will not see you again. Please understand my decision.’
‘Charles, stop her!’
The Woman in the Mirror: Page 20
