Only a Mother Knows

by Annie Groves

  ‘Yes, I’m Agnes, and you must be Mr Weybridge?’ My father, she thought, although she didn’t say so when she held out her hand, which he ignored. She hadn’t expected him to look so stern and forbidding. If she was honest, Agnes wasn’t sure what she had expected.

  ‘Must I now?’ the old man said, looking her up and down. ‘Well, that’s where you’re wrong, see.’ He dragged his feet to one of the four doors in slow, painful steps and silently beckoned her to follow.

  ‘Mr Weybridge is in ’ere. You’ll do well to wait until he speaks to you first. And keep your ’ands to yourself, you never know as what folk ’ave on theirs.’ Agnes shuddered; she had a good idea what the old man was talking about, this being a farm.

  Agnes was led to the room opposite and her surprise on entering was evident in her low gasp. She hadn’t expected to see a gleaming, oxblood leather sofa and matching high-winged leather chairs in the richly furnished room, nor the highly polished sideboard and occasional tables. It was the kind of room a gentleman would use, she thought, not the kind of room a farmer would live in.

  ‘We don’t live like animals just because we rear them,’ said a low voice from the vicinity of the winged chair near the roaring fire. Agnes turned quickly.

  ‘Thank you, Darnley,’ said the man who was sitting near the blazing fire, his thinning white hair damp as if not long combed down with water, his legs hidden beneath a plaid woollen blanket.

  The solicitor had subsequently given her more information in a letter about this man whom she presumed was her father. Apparently he had fought on the Somme and had been injured; perhaps that was why he needed the blanket whilst sitting in front of a roaring fire, she reasoned as Darnley shuffled out without saying a word. On closer assessment she realised that Mr Weybridge was much younger than she first assumed. However, her thoughts were curtailed when he gave a low chuckle.

  ‘I keep Darnley on instead of a guard dog,’ he said, not rising from the chair, directing Agnes with a wave of his hand to the other chair opposite his own, whilst a portly woman of indeterminate age brought a tray of tea things.

  Before any conversation resumed, the woman filled the cups, cut two slices of rich-looking dark fruit cake and headed for the door. Agnes felt her tension mounting as the man sitting opposite took it all in and said nothing until the door was well and truly shut. Then, lifting his cup and saucer with the delicacy of a man holding a new-born kitten, he said in a kindly voice, ‘So, you are Agnes?’ Although his face had a yellowish hue and his hair was white as snow, Agnes could see that in his youth he must have been a very handsome man. She nodded, unable to speak, as she watched her father hold the bone china cup and saucer so carefully in his amazingly clean hands, and wondered if he had ever held her with so much care. And at once she felt awkward sitting here in the sitting room of a farmhouse she couldn’t even remember.

  ‘We called you Angela, your mother and I,’ he said, looking at her now with a mixture of curiosity and something else she could not fathom. Angela, Agnes thought, she liked the name. She would have been proud to be known by such a name given the chance. This was indeed a revelation. She didn’t know she had even been given a name before being left on the orphanage step.

  Her curiosity was reaching fever pitch now, and she longed to ask if he had married her mother, yet no matter how hard she tried Agnes could not bring herself to be so forward. Instead, she hung onto every word this man was now saying, whilst all the time plucking up the courage to ask the questions spinning in her head.

  ‘What I am about to tell you must not be breathed to a soul, do you hear me?’

  Agnes nodded, realising he must think she was struck dumb; she had not yet said a word.

  ‘Before I go any further, I will put you out of your misery, as I am sure you are eager to know the truth. I can now tell you that your mother and I were married. But that is between you and me. The hired hands don’t need to know – if they did … Well, suffice to say, they don’t need to know.’

  ‘Oh, that is such a relief,’ thought Agnes, sighing, even whilst she wondered why the hired hands did not need to know. The question almost sprang to her lips but her sense of propriety stopped her. Her silence encouraged Mr Weybridge to continue.

  ‘We could not marry until your mother was long into her pregnancy. You see, my first wife, Sarah, had been ailing for a long time; she was struck down by a seizure of the brain. For fourteen years she had been bed-bound. Your mother, Peg, was her nurse.’ He paused. ‘My life was very lonely out here before Peg came to nurse Sarah …’ He cleared his throat, obviously troubled by the raking up of old memories, and he stared into the fire as if gathering his thoughts whilst Agnes patiently waited for him to resume. A few moments later, composed now, he reached to the table beside his chair and said in a firm, somewhat impatient voice, ‘But none of that matters now. This is what you want to see, I am sure.’ He held out the certificate Agnes had so longed for all these years. Taking it she read the perfect copperplate handwriting on the official document telling her who her mother and father were.

  Agnes could clearly see that the revelation was causing him considerable distress. And even though she was eager to know all she could about her mother, she could not, for some strange reason, bear to see him so upset.

  ‘Not only this … Mr Weybridge,’ she said tentatively, ‘you will let me come back another time when we have both had time to …?’ Agnes, too, was quite overwhelmed.

  He nodded before taking a sip of his tea, and then, replacing the delicate cup onto the matching saucer, he looked at her and smiled before saying contemplatively, ‘You are very much like your mother.’

  Agnes felt her heart soar as she had noticed immediately on entering the room that the difference between her and Mr Weybridge was stark, she being so slight and delicately fair, whilst his withered body had obviously once been large and strong. His weather-beaten skin was yellowing now but she could see he had been a handsome man.

  Agnes sighed, knowing that even though she desperately wanted more information from him, she couldn’t press him because he looked so exhausted, and despite the curiosity burning inside her she could not put him through any more strife. It was enough for now that she had the proof of her birth, which clearly showed who she really was.

  ‘I am so glad you were able to come and collect it yourself,’ he said when she could not take her eyes from the precious document that showed she was not illegitimate, no matter how close the wedding was to her birth.

  ‘I would have come here sooner … had I known.’ Agnes felt a new, self-assured spirit.

  ‘We had six precious weeks together as man and wife,’ her father said in a low, faraway voice as if talking to himself. ‘We had a terrible time bringing you into the world, and afterwards … .’ His voice trailed off briefly before he resumed. ‘You took all of Peg’s strength, you see, and she never recovered. I couldn’t even look at you.’ There was a catch in his voice and Agnes assumed he was still grieving. Did he mean that her mother’s death was her fault?

  ‘You see, I blamed you for her suffering …’ He looked into the blazing fire again and the spitting, crackling flames were illuminated in his eyes as he returned in his mind to another time. ‘The last word she spoke was your name, Angela.’ He didn’t look at Agnes. ‘That was the finish of me; I knew I would never be able to bring you up and so handed you to old Bertha and told her never to bring you back again.’

  ‘Is she the woman who brought in the tea?’ Agnes looked towards the door.

  ‘No, that’s Darnley’s wife, she came up from the village afterwards; oh, don’t look so stricken, I had my reasons.’ His words were growing weak and he finished with a racking cough that caused him to gasp for breath and turned his once-sallow complexion the colour of a ripened plum. Agnes took the cup and saucer from his juddering hands in case he dropped them.

  ‘As you might have guessed,’ he sighed when the spasm passed, ‘I am dying. I have a disease of the lung …’ H
e paused to get his breath back, and then his mood seemed to brighten a little. ‘I don’t want to go to your mother and get an ear-bashing for not having provided for you.’

  ‘It is a bit late to realise that now,’ Agnes said, her strong sense of right and wrong reasserting itself, ‘twenty years too late.’ Then, regretting her outburst she realised that he was trying to make amends at least, and he probably felt remorse enough. ‘Maybe this was all I ever wanted,’ she conceded, raising the birth certificate. Strangely, she wanted him to feel a little of the hurt he had forced upon her by not giving her the upbringing every child deserved. But, looking at him now, weak and infirm, Agnes knew she could not sustain her anger; it wasn’t in her nature to be horrid or unkind – even to the man who had given her away all those years ago. ‘I know who I am and where I come from now, and so maybe that is enough for me.’

  ‘You don’t know what it means to me to hear you say that.’ He gave a painful smile. Then he looked at her for a long while and Agnes felt he was trying to make peace when he said, ‘Thank you very much for coming to see me. It makes things much easier now.’

  Agnes didn’t know what he meant nor what to say.

  ‘You will never know how sorry I am that I rejected you.’ He lowered his head. ‘The shame and the guilt I have carried around for the last twenty years have eaten me alive, and this is my punishment now.’ He waved a feeble hand. ‘I never should have abandoned you.’

  ‘Did you never feel the need to come and find me before now?’ Agnes did not know where she found the courage to ask such a thing as she watched him shake his head.

  ‘I was punished for loving your mother when my first wife was dying,’ he said simply.

  ‘You can’t be punished for truly loving someone,’ Agnes said. ‘Her death was not your fault.’

  ‘It is a comfort to hear you say that, Angela.’ He paused, almost causing Agnes to correct him, but then she understood for the last twenty years he’d agonised about the child called Angela whom he had given away – a child who was now a grown woman called Agnes and whose forgiveness he desperately sought before his final hour. ‘I adored your mother, she was the light of my life and when she died I felt I’d killed her.’ He looked up when he heard Agnes gasp.

  ‘I couldn’t bear to watch you grow up, possibly resembling her and finding fault with me for not having the skill to save her.’ His eyes were glassy now with unshed tears. ‘You see, before I married my first wife, whose father owned this farm, I was the village doctor … Can you believe that?’ He gave a short, scornful laugh. ‘Yet I could do nothing for the women I loved.’

  Agnes was shocked to the very core of her being. All her life she had been belittled, treated like an unpaid skivvy, brought up in an orphanage and wanted by nobody and taught never to question or condemn, but she didn’t blame him any more for abandoning her; instead she had an overwhelming urge to hug him. It was pure instinct that made her go over and put her arms around him, feeling his tears upon her face. She had to let him know she had forgiven him, believing now it would have been difficult beyond endurance to see her every day and be reminded of the woman he so dearly loved.

  ‘He summoned a woman from the village to take care of me,’ Agnes told Olive when she came out of the farmhouse a short while later. ‘When he didn’t come for me weeks later she took me to the orphanage near her sister’s house in London … Times were hard, he said.’ Agnes was surprisingly unemotional about the whole experience, Olive thought.

  ‘The woman from the village didn’t leave my name when she left me on the orphanage step. She told him where I was only a couple of years ago when he knew he was dying, he got in touch with solicitors to find me and by that time I had moved from the orphanage and come to live with you,’ Agnes said, then a little way into her explanation the brittle veneer began to crack and Olive was relieved to see the young woman’s natural caring nature come to the fore.

  ‘He’s had people looking for me ever since.’ Her voice was full of anguish. ‘He didn’t know where I was or what had become of me. And now he is dying!’ The stinging tears at the back of her eyes could be restrained no longer and she sobbed until she thought her heart would break.

  ‘Shh,’ was all that Olive could manage as she held Agnes close in the cold, wintry half-light that barely illuminated the farmyard. They were quiet for a while until Olive could summon up the courage to speak without the threat of her own tears. Finally she asked, ‘Will you ever go back again?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Agnes answered. ‘He’s not long for this world and I’m not sure I have the courage to get to know him …’ There was a sob in her voice as fresh tears flowed down her face.

  ‘I think you know him already,’ Olive said softly, ‘but, you’ve got what you came for.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Agnes, holding on tightly to her birth certificate without revealing to Olive the name her mother had given her, ‘I got what I came for.’

  Agnes accepted a clean cotton handkerchief from Olive to dry her eyes as the sound of Archie’s motor-car engine could be clearly heard starting up and she realised they had been standing there for quite some time.

  ‘We’d better be going,’ she said as bittersweet feelings raged inside her, then turning she took one last look at the farmhouse, thrilled and saddened that she had met her father at last, yet knowing now her parents loved each other just as much as she and Ted.

  As she made her way to Archie’s car the old man, Darnley, came scurrying out of the farmhouse on bowed, arthritic legs and in his gnarled and weathered hands he was carrying an unfamiliar object. As he drew near she could see he was holding out an enormous, dead goose by its legs, its head dangling in the frosty air.

  ‘He said to give you this,’ said the cantankerous old man with a hint of puzzled resignation, ‘and he said to make sure to tell you: have a happy Christmas.’

  ‘Wish him all the joys of the season,’ said Agnes, grimacing as she took the dead goose, ‘and your family too.’

  But the old man was already heading in the opposite direction and gave a bah-humbug wave of his hand as he shuffled back to the house without another word.

  Agnes hadn’t told her father about Ted, nor did she tell Olive that she had her own name, which had been given to her by her mother, whose name was Peg Weybridge. And she was Angela Weybridge, doctor-turned-farmer’s daughter. As she watched the fields and meadows pass by through the car window, she wondered if, like a million times before, she was dreaming again? And then, grasping her birth certificate more tightly, she knew for certain that this was a dream. A dream come true.

  Only a Mother Knows

  TWENTY-TWO

  ‘After all I’ve done for you, Ted Jackson!’

  Mrs Jackson bashed and banged the plates in the tiny kitchenette, although she didn’t bash and bang them enough to break them, Ted noticed, just enough to make a racket. ‘You are so ungrateful,’ she continued. ‘I’ve been on my hands and knees scrubbing this flat already and I’m feeling bone weary. What thanks do I get for slaving for you lot? None, that’s what thanks I get!’

  Ted, hands in pocket, had his back to his mother as he looked out of the little window to the street below where a few children were knocking on doors and singing Christmas carols. Fat lot of good it would do them, he thought sardonically, knowing some of them had come back from evacuation for Christmas as there hadn’t been many raids in London over the past few months and many mothers considered that the worst was nearly over now.

  ‘I give you nice nutritional meals after trawling the streets looking for good food to eat when you get in from work, I make sure you have a nice clean bed to come home to of a morning, and this is how you pay me back. Don’t you know I have enough to do!’

  ‘Mum, I only asked Agnes to come for tea, I didn’t ask her to move in with us,’ he said, thinking that if his mother’s face turned any redder it would explode.

  Ted hadn’t seen much of Agnes since her trip to Surrey with Olive last
week as they were on different shifts. It had been such a pity that she’d got back too late to come to tea as they had arranged, and because of that he thought it might be nice for her to come instead on Christmas Eve.

  ‘Move in! Move in, you say? How dare you speak like that in this house! Your sainted father would turn in his grave. I have never heard anything so disgusting in all my born days.’

  ‘Then you’ve never lived,’ Ted wanted to say, but of course he didn’t. He would never dare! His mother would have burst into a thousand apoplectic smithereens right where she stood. ‘Look, Mum, I know you are finding it hard, what with rationing and all that, but everybody is in the same boat and I’ve given you extra housekeeping money to cover tea and Agnes doesn’t eat all that much. It would do the girls the world of good to get to know her a bit better.’

  ‘Why on earth would they want to get to know a … a foundling, tell me that!’

  ‘Don’t you say that again, Ma.’ Ted could not hold his tongue and knew how to enrage his mother by calling her something as common as ‘Ma’, even though he thought it sounded just as endearing as ‘Mum’. But, if he was honest with himself, he was almost past caring what she liked and didn’t like any more. He was having a right time of it trying to keep up with her likes and dislikes – why couldn’t she be as easy-going as his Agnes?

  His mind went back to the debacle the other week, when he could have had a cosy night in with Agnes in front of the fire, relaxing with the wireless on and, best of all, they would have been alone – just the two of them in Mrs Robbins’ lovely front room, bright with electric lighting, unlike his own home that was lit by dull gas mantles that gave off hardly any cheer at all. The thought of it made him shake his head, remembering that when it was too late for him to go to see Agnes, his mother refused to go out after all – and it wasn’t the first time either. Oh no, she’d stopped him seeing Agnes on a few occasions with one excuse or another of late. As he opened his mouth to tell her she was going too far he was stopped by his mother’s look of self-righteous indignation.