Mothering Sunday

by Noel Streatfeild

  There had been a long silence since Margaret’s last remark but it had obviously stirred memories, for she said suddenly, more to herself than to Freda:

  “Tony was the one for acting. He was simply marvellous. He liked dressing up. There was always a boy’s part.”

  That Margaret thought Tony a marvellous actor proved nothing. Margaret honestly thought the most abominable local performers marvellous. It was unusual to hear her talking of Tony so easily. He must, Freda guessed, be on her mind. She was perhaps planning what she would say to any tentative plans made for his future. Margaret was so natural a person it was not easy to say the wrong thing to her, but because she had spoken of Tony Freda was careful. She did not say what slipped at once into her mind, “but amongst other careers he was on the stage, wasn’t he?” For Margaret had told her this in Tony’s pre-black sheep days, and recalled now it might sound like curiosity.

  “I expect he was an asset. You’ve always told me what a good-looking boy he was.”

  Margaret moved as if to answer that, then obviously thought better of it. Freda sympathised. Even in her unhappy family circle when they met they avoided talking of Leonard. A lot of nonsense was talked about the strength of blood ties, but nevertheless a shared childhood was too binding to allow the sharers to dwell on an end at nineteen, dangling from a rope in a bedroom of a rather shabby cramming establishment. However little you cared for your family you had shared the magic belonging to childhood no matter how, in retrospect, unhappy that childhood had been. If they felt like that about Leonard how must the Caldwells feel about Tony? Tony was not dead, he was alive but presumably a nagging anxiety to them all, maybe secretly they all wished he was dead. Certainly his mother did. One day when Margaret had thought her out she had spoken to one of her family on the telephone. Freda had not known which, as, realising she was hearing something not intended for her, she had gone out again, returning noisily in ten minutes’ time. But before she could get outside the front door she had heard “It’s dreadful to think that Mother could hate Tony.” She did not want to close the subject of Tony, for it might help Margaret to prepare for the family gathering if she had cleared her thoughts by speaking freely to someone outside the family. She stuck to Jane’s theatricals, which would keep Tony in the wings, as it were, ready to make an entrance if required.

  “I suppose Felicity was the leading lady.”

  Margaret was clearly glad to get away from Tony. She laughed.

  “Good gracious, no. Felicity was only sixteen when Jane married. We were bridesmaids. Pink frocks. Felicity looked lovely in pink. You can’t think what I looked like; but she wouldn’t have been leading lady anyway because she never could remember anything. Sometimes Jane tried to make her. One awful year when the Women’s Institute did The Midsummer Night’s Dream she was Titania. I was covered in bits of bush and sat almost on the stage to prompt her. But it was no good. She kept turning round and saying, quite loudly, ‘Whatever comes next, Margaret?’ Nobody cared; she was fourteen then, but she never had a plain stage. I wish you could meet the family sometime. It’s such a pity we’re all so busy we hardly ever have a family gathering. I feel quite excited.”

  Margaret had often said she would like Freda to meet her family. Because she did not wish to meet the Caldwells, but found it useful to drive with her when Margaret went to see her mother, Freda had invented a sister who lived somewhere in the same direction. Margaret was completely without curiosity, unless they were poor patients, about the private lives of others. It never interested her where Freda went when she was not in the house. She had never troubled to ask which sister it was she liked sufficiently to visit on any occasion when she managed to spend a night with her mother. Freda had never touched on the subject of Lin. Margaret would either show distaste at having anything so personal forced to her notice or she would be shocked. “A married man! Oh, Dixon!” Freda knew nothing of Margaret’s innermost life. She could be having an affair with somebody in her surgery—nobody ever went in there when she was seeing patients—but it was most improbable. She suspected Margaret was one of those, to her incomprehensible, people whose work gave them a fulfilment which compensated in some way for the absence of sex life. She wished she understood it. Here was she going to spend a week-end with the man who for eight years had been her lover. She ought to be thrilled, it was so seldom they got a week-end; yet it was Margaret, who was merely going to a family gathering, at which much that was worrying would be discussed, whose eyes shone and who said in her singing, eager voice, “I feel quite excited.”

  Margaret had not noticed how long a silence there had been. She turned to Freda, happiness wrapping her like a cloak.

  “I’m going to slow down so we creep up to it slowly. Round the next corner is my lovely view.”

  FELICITY

  Nannie packed Virginia’s suitcase. Virginia, curled upon the bed with her dachshund, Slipper, in her arms, supervised. As always nowadays when she was with Nannie, Virginia was conscious that things were not quite right between them. She loved Nannie. Up to about six years ago Nannie had been by far the most important person in her life. It had not disturbed her in any way when, at the age of five, she had been taken to live alone with her in an hotel in Wales. Where Nannie was there was cosiness, warmth and security. The moment Nannie set foot in the two rooms that were to be theirs in the Welsh hotel the rooms became as nearly as possible replicas of the night and day nurseries in the London house. Nannie’s lightest word had always been law and Nannie’s ways and turns of speech Virginia’s ways and turns of speech. It was when they came back to London three years later that the possibility that Nannie was not infallible dawned. It was not a sudden dawning, Nannie’s hold was too all-enveloping for that. The London house, seen again after three years, had been like a strange house to Virginia. The top floor where the pre-war nurseries had been was closed, and a spare bedroom, which she had never entered, was the day nursery, and the night nursery was the room in the basement which had belonged to the butler. Nannie, after the peace of Wales, must have found London in 1942 hard to understand, and perhaps, while grappling with a new way of life, for a day or two she let her grip on her charge relax, and in that brief time Virginia was able to discover that she had a mind. Certainly, after the return to London, she used her brain to puzzle in secret about the many surprising things around her. At first, as she had always done, she spoke of what she thought to Nannie, but she found there were things which Nannie did not understand and could not discuss. Virginia had seen her mother and father at intervals during the three years in Wales. Never together. Her father, after Dunkirk, had been stationed for a time in Ireland and had managed to spend odd days with his daughter, either coming on or returning from leave. Virginia knew each time he was coming because for days before his arrival Nannie made remarks such as, “Must finish everything on your plate, dear. Must have pink cheeks for Daddie to see,” or “If it’s fine you must take Daddie to see the baa-baas when he comes next week.” Her mother’s visits were unexpected, like a patch of sunshine on a wet day. Virginia would be going for a walk or having a meal and suddenly her mother would appear, surprised that Nannie was surprised to see her. “Didn’t I tell you I was coming? I’m sure I wrote.” Meeting her parents, at such a receptive age, only as visitors, Virginia knew them as people with all their time to spend on her. Her father who, before she went to Wales, had been somebody who visited her every evening when she was in bed, became a companion with all time for her. He told her about Ireland and a little about being a soldier, and always a lot about her home and what they would do after the war. Each visit he paid her his plans for after the war grew. “After the war you and I and Mummie . . .” became the beginning of almost everything he said. Her mother had always been a sudden and exotic visitor to the nursery. Before Wales Virginia remembered a flurry of scents, soft clothes and presents and unexpectedly being popped into a car to visit her grandmother. In Wales she knew a differe
nt mother. There were still lovely scents and clothes, and always presents, but at first no flurry. They would go for walks and her mother would take deep breaths, saying, “Lovely.” In the summer she would lie on her back staring at the overhead birds. She talked a lot about Grandmother who, much to Virginia’s surprise, seemed to have children living with her, and, in the early days in Wales, about the house in London and a little about her father. Virginia, walking or sitting beside her, prattled of daily doings, and if her father had visited her recently, of “After the war.” The last part of the time in Wales the flurry had come back but Virginia still knew a different mother to the dimly remembered London one. The deep breaths and the murmured “Lovely” and the lying on her back bird-watching went on, but only for short periods. Two deep breaths and she would say, “Come on, Virginia, let’s run,” or “It’s lonely out here. Let’s go down to the village where there are people.” And when she lay on her back, apparently half asleep, she would suddenly spring up: “Come on, Virginia. Mummie is getting morbid lying here. You don’t know what that means, do you? It’s when all birds start looking like aeroplanes.” During the last part of the time in Wales her mother had not allowed Virginia to repeat what her father said about “After the war.” She was always gentle, speaking in a teasing voice: “After the war! After the war! Virginia, you’re a little parrot.” Yet somehow Virginia had known she was not teasing and in the end she stopped saying “After the war” to her mother and instead talked about it to Nannie. “After the war Daddie and Mummie and me are going on a boat.” “After the war Daddie and Mummie and me are going to have a cottage in the country,” and Nannie usually replied cosily, “So you will too, dear. After the war it’ll all be Sir Garnet Wolseley.”

  When they returned to London it was her mother who first caused Virginia to query Nannie’s infallibility. Felicity was not at home much for she worked at a soldiers’ canteen, and when she was in she was almost impossible to see, which hurt Virginia after having known her undivided attention in Wales. At first she spoke her thoughts to Nannie. “I heard Mummie come in. Do you know what she was doing, Nannie? She was walking up and down the drawing-room as if she was out for a walk, but she said, ‘Run away now, darling, I’m busy.’ I don’t call walking, busy, do you, Nannie?” “I wish I could go and say good-morning to Mummie in bed like I did in Wales. Why does Mummie say she only starts to go to sleep in the morning, Nannie? Why doesn’t she sleep all the night like we do?” Nannie had no cosy, warm answers. No favourite sayings like the one about Sir Garnet Wolseley. She made aggravating, inappropriate replies. “Little girls can’t know everything.” “What a Miss Why I’ve got in my nursery this morning!” There were days when her mother was almost like she had been in Wales. Days when she would run into the nursery, “Get yourselves dressed, Nannie. A friend’s car has got to go near my mother’s.” Exquisite days. Grandmother just as Virginia remembered her. The children who had stayed with her were gone, and lovely, half-recalled things, gnomes in the next door garden, and in the drawing-room a little house which, when you shook the glass ball in which it lived, miraculously became nearly buried in falling snow, were still there but, met again, had the magic of things seen through a mist. Once in the first months after they came back to London her mother took Virginia to stay with her grandmother and, as a matter of course, Nannie came too. Virginia loved the visit but she felt with her new perceptiveness that it had not what Nannie called “worked.” Virginia did not remember the maids who had been there before Wales and she liked Miss Doe, who helped look after the house, but Nannie, in speaking of Miss Doe, always used “that” before her name, and spoke to her in the special voice which she kept for people who she said did not know which drawer to fold themselves into. She used the same voice when she met Mr. Pickering, who owned the gnomes. Virginia did not remember Mr. Pickering from the days before Wales, but as a new acquaintance she had taken him to her heart. The voice Nannie used when speaking to Mr. Pickering was the cause of Virginia’s first defiance of Nannie. Nannie said, “Don’t be such a Miss Fidget. I’ll take you out all in good time.” Virginia had flared resentfully, “I’ll go out by myself, thank you. I’m going to talk to Mr. Pickering,” and though her heart had beat extra fast and her cheeks had turned very pink at such daring behaviour, talk to Mr. Pickering she had, and she had said nothing but shut her mouth in a thin, tight, angry line when Nannie, fetching her in to wash for lunch, had said, “I know somebody who’s getting altogether above herself. The sooner we get back to our own nursery and our own ways the better.”

  It was some time later that the thing happened which made her home queer—a queerness which had gone on ever since. Her father was coming on leave. As in Wales, Nannie prepared Virginia for this. “We’ll keep this clean for Daddie’s leave.” “If this weather keeps up it will be nice for Daddie’s leave.” On the day when the leave was to start, Virginia dressed in her best coat and hat, drove with her mother in a taxi to the station to meet him. She was so excited that she had to keep bouncing on the taxi seat as an accompaniment to a flow of conversation, each sentence beginning, “Do you think Daddie . . . ?” So excited and talkative had she been that she gave her mother little chance to answer, and it was only just before they arrived at the station that she asked, hardly knowing why she framed the question, “Aren’t you pleased, Mummie, that Daddie’s coming?” Her mother seemed not to hear her at first; she came back into the taxi as if she had been a long way off. “Of course, darling. Of course.” At the station they waited with a crowd of other people for the leave train to come in. It was Virginia who first saw her grandmother. She tugged at her mother’s sleeve. “Look, Mummie. Grannie’s come to meet Daddie, too.” They left the crowd at the barrier and talked to Grandmother by the bookstall. Grandmother gave Virginia money and told her to buy herself a book. It took time to choose one and when she had bought it and returned to show it to her mother and grandmother the something had happened. A something so frightening that she had cried out, “What’s the matter, Mummie? What’s the matter? “It was Grandmother who answered. “Nothing, darling. Nothing. Come along, Felicity dear, the train is just pulling in.” Odd, unexplained behaviour by grown-up people was, Virginia learnt, terrifying. She had never seen it before. Her mother had a special extra loving face and voice for Grandmother; now suddenly it was gone. She said with the sort of belonging-to-nobody voice used for announcing things on the wireless, “Oh, yes. The train.” Virginia clung to Grandmother. “Aren’t you coming to meet Daddie, Grannie? Please stay with us, Grannie,” but she got no answer. She stood beside her mother on the platform. She tried to concentrate on looking for her father, but her eyes continually came back to her mother’s face; it wore an expression which was to haunt her childhood and give her a phobia about masks all her life. Then suddenly she saw her father’s khaki figure pushing through the crowd and with a scream of “Daddie, Daddie!” which had in it as much of a plea for protection as of happiness, was in the blessed safety and normality of his arms. Her father hugged her but, even as he kissed her, she knew he too had changed; she no longer had his attention as she had known it in Wales. He was scarcely thinking of her and said, “Where’s Mummie?” in the same breath as he said, “Hallo, darling,” and seeing her, put Virginia from him and hurried forward, calling, “Felicity. Felicity!”

  Driving home in the taxi, Virginia sat on her father’s knee and was encouraged to talk. All the talking there was came from her father and herself, her mother never said one word. Back in the house her father sent her at once to the nursery. “Tell Nannie I’ll be up presently. Come on, Felicity, what about a drink?”