Jenny had left the room, when Dulcie said, ‘Eric is so grateful – you can’t know how much … It’s Maria I worry for. Giving him up. That cannot have been easy –’
‘She seemed to care less than I would have thought. She even said to me, “I don’t want him, you know. He’s yours. I’m really grateful you and Uncle Eric have arranged all this.” ‘
‘And you believed her? Oh, Eleanor …’
‘How not? She’s only sixteen. To have her life ruined, an outcast, a millstone round her neck. How could she have kept him?’
‘I think, dearest,’ Dulcie’s voice was one of reproach, something so rare that Eleanor felt immediate shame. ‘I think it’s something I know a little of … Having travelled along the same road.’
‘Of course. Of course.’
She took the turning now towards the river and the beech woods. As she walked along the narrow path, the sunlight, filtered through the trees, danced. Dense ivy clung to the oak, knotted greasy tree-roots spread out near the path. Scent of the trees: a solitary pine, dry, scaly-barked. Ash and oak seedlings springing up between the great shadowing trees.
For her, during this walk, the late autumn beauty was all part of her deep, unexpected happiness. A man child. She had always known it would be a man child. She looked down at him, deeply asleep, rocked by the rhythm of the pram, not heeding the bumpiness of the path. The rooks had begun their evening cawing and from not far away there was the sound of rushing water. When she reached the iron footbridge, with a small waterfall cascading below, she was afraid. The bridge was high, too high. She could not wheel the carriage over. (Pattern of things to come, never again to think only of herself, never again to be without fear. Something could happen to him.)
In the fields the other side of the bridge, cattle were lowing. Soon they would be called in. (And then I shall be back, she thought, and it will be his feeding time. His evening wash. I shall hold him, play with him. Talk to Amy. Know that already he knows me.)
A rustle of leaves behind her, and she heard before she saw, hurrying towards her: Eric.
‘Eleanor dear, have I frightened you? I called at Park Villa –’
‘Oh, but,’ she began gauchely, colour flooding her face, ‘you aren’t expected till … It’s only Thursday today.’
‘I thought I’d arrive a day early and surprise my grandson – and you.’
‘And me,’ she said foolishly.
After he had looked a long while into the baby carriage: ‘That’s a grand lad we have there. We should be proud.’ He fell into an easy step beside her. ‘Shall I wheel the carriage?’ When, laughing, she refused, he asked, ‘How’s it all going, how are you managing? Elsie said this evening, people about are quite curious. But there’s no gossip, just interest and surprise – and I’ll wager, from what she says, not a little admiration.’
She stumbled on an outspread root. He took her arm. ‘My dear, be careful.’ She was precious to him of course because of the child. He said now, again, ‘Shall I wheel the carriage?’ Her heart thumped as she felt the pressure of his arm. It seemed she was touching his side, where his heart beat. How easy it would be to say now, ‘I love you.’
‘I wanted to tell you,’ he said, ‘how much as a family we appreciate what you are doing –’
‘But I love it, I love him, I love …’
‘Of course you do. But nevertheless – taking on at the very least twenty years of work and worry … We’ll say no more. I just wanted you to know.’ She felt the atmosphere tighten: ‘I should ask you – how was Maria?’
She told him, much edited, her impressions.
‘Ah, she’ll be all right,’ he said, as if brushing away a nuisance. ‘The young. They soon forget.’ But he did not sound convinced. They walked the way back, uneasily now. The sun was leaving the trees fast, the air growing damper. The scent of wet earth and tree bark was stronger. He asked:
‘Did you think I was hard, then – on her?’
‘A little hard. Yes.’
‘Can’t, couldn’t help it. Women, girls, they should be – it’s maybe dishonest, you might say hypocritical. But untouched, they should be untouched. Not leading lads on. I’d expected better of her – that’s all.’
A little later: ‘She should marry soon,’ he said. ‘That would be best for all concerned. A good marriage. The right person. Except what’s right, I sometimes wonder?’
‘The right person is the person you love,’ Eleanor said, ‘and who loves you.’
‘Bonny. Bonny sentiments. You should have wed, Eleanor. Children of your own … Dick won’t marry where he ought, I see that coming. Nothing’s happening with the Carstairs lass. Nothing will, I fear … And his for the asking. Carstairs money behind him. He could go right to the top –’
‘He may not wish to.’
‘I did,’ he said simply. Silence, then he went on, sharply almost, but sadly too:
‘Married for money. Married, Eleanor, for enough capital to set myself up. And some standing, of course. The Rowlands, a family like the Carstairs, really. And the eldest daughter – not running after me like Nancy but not averse either. Maimie. No one else wanted her, you know. There’d been scarcely a nibble. Old man Rowland was quite crude. “I’d pay you, pay you to take her,” he said. And I suppose, really, he did.’
She wondered, trembling, why she was being confided in. Oh, don’t stop, she said inside. Tell me everything. You know you can tell me anything.
‘But then we’ve to live always with what we’ve done, eh, Eleanor? Lie on the bed we’ve made. But you know what? This’ll maybe shock you – I discovered there’s no obligation at all to lie on it. At least not with the original occupant. The ways of the world … I shouldn’t be telling you this. Do I shock you?’
‘No, please go on. If it helps. You know that with me, anything you say … Everything is safe.’
‘The ways of the world. The world is made for men, that’s plain. But easy as we have it, we can go very wrong. Enough to say that in leaving the marriage bed, in straying from it, I didn’t stray far enough.’
She said in a low voice, ‘I know a little of this. Dulcie –’
‘Dulcie, yes. I oughtn’t … But if Dulcie’s spoken. If anyone’s to know – and of course Jenny mustn’t – then I’m content enough it should be you.’
Guy half woke, making a fretful noise, small tongue darting between his lips. They were out of the woods now and on to the road. Where it wound upward to the village, a boy came towards them, rolling an iron hoop. He steered it deftly away from the perambulator. Eleanor said, ‘One day he, Guy, is going to be a boy with a hoop.’ She thought of all the days of future happiness.
‘Ida will be over to see him tomorrow. Dick maybe next week.’
The confidences were over, the tone light-hearted now. She was smiling to herself as Amy, in white apron and blue dress, came down the drive to meet them. It seemed to her she was always smiling now. Such happiness – she could not help it spilling over. Even Mother could not take it from her. Mother had lost her power.
10
‘What was it like at the office?’ Ida asked. ‘We’re dying to know. I’ve been thinking about you. We both have.’
My first day in an office, Maria thought. An office: just one of the many things decided for her. In those dead days last winter after the baby and the return from Italy, she had been someone who did as she was told, went where she was sent.
She had been sent to Miss Pritchard’s Secretarial College in London, just five minutes’ walk from Gloucester Road Tube Station – handy geographically since she was to live with Ida, and Ida’s friend Lettice. Both were training as teachers. She had thought it would be all right living with Ida, who would be kind, who would care about her without judging or criticizing. Lettice was a wartime friend. She and Ida had been WRAACs together in France in 1918.
‘I’ve heard so much about you,’ Lettice had said eagerly that first evening: cold dark November, nearly six months ago now.
She had one eye larger than the other, and a pinkish nose. Precise wavy hair. Her high voice, after Ida’s pleasant low tones, irritated Maria.
Now she said: ‘I expect you’ll want a wash. One gets so stuffy in the Tube.’
Perhaps I smell, Maria thought. Lettice was always washing, either her clothes or her person. Scrubbing away to keep that pristine neatness.
The office was a firm of leather importers in Holborn. Frognal and Harrison’s. She had been sent by Miss Pritchard for interview within a few days of passing a Pitman test. ‘Knowledge of Italian essential,’ said the advertisement.
She was interviewed by a Mr Frognal. Aptly, his face reminded her of a frog. His eyes popped out obligingly. She felt some fear. Suppose they didn’t take her? She had hated every day at Miss Pritchard’s. Winter mornings in a room so cold her frozen hands missed the keys of the heavy old Underwood. Shorthand, with its hooks and strokes and twirlicúes. In the end, painfully, tongue between her teeth, she had managed ninety words a minute.
At the college she hadn’t made friends (why bother when she came home each evening to the almost suffocating care of Ida and Lettice?) She wondered if she would make them now? Miss Hailey, the senior typist, was a reminder that this was a firm of leather importers. Dark hair in a bun shone greasily above a skin tanned like hide. Her small mouth was disapproving, especially of Maria. The other typists, Betty and Gladys, had been together for five years, but seemed welcoming enough.
The flat was small. The best room was the sitting-room with its white balcony overlooking the street. The very small dining-room had in winter scarcely any daylight at all. Tonight, Maria felt she’d prefer just to hide in her own room and eat from a tray in bed. Sardines, cheese – something savoury and simple, on toast. But a meal (she could smell it), was all ready. Mrs Riley, who housekept for the previous tenants, after cleaning up each morning left them a simple meal to be reheated. She was reminded of the Pensione Cafferkey: the watery cabbage, the mutton stews, tasted to her of darkness and disaster.
‘Come in and eat at once,’ Lettice said. They sat, but only for a little. Food was for eating, Lettice said. Ida, who, legs wide apart before the fire at Moorgarth, would eat an enormous tea of scones and parkin and fat rascals dripping with butter (she would end as large as her mother), might have made more of it alone with Maria.
But they weren’t alone. And it wouldn’t be possible to criticize Lettice without hurting Ida. Often when Maria had gone to bed early, she would hear them laughing and talking in the sitting-room before disappearing to their bedroom. Theirs was the larger one, with a double bed and a view to the street below. Maria’s looked out on to the backs of the houses. She thought she would prefer to have slept with Ida. It would have been like the old days at Moorgarth when Ida had been the consoler of nightmares (the Lusy torpedoed and she not rescued. Mamma lost. The Ricciardis …)
She wept alone at night, sometimes when she first went to bed, sometimes at two or three in the morning. Often a bad dream woke her. She would know then with dreadful finality that everything was as terrible as it seemed, that life would never become any better. What had been, was all there was. For they – Uncle Eric, Eleanor, the nuns, Father Grierson, all of them, had taken her baby away.
My baby. My son.
When on that June evening the convent gates had clanged shut on her, she had thought nothing could ever be so bad again. Her despair: I must learn not to care, she had told herself. Yet her flight to Sicily: the nuns told her she had done it only because she didn’t care. ‘If you thought more for others. The unborn child too …’
‘What can Miss Dennison have felt?’ The deceptively gentle, dry voice of Father Grierson. She could not bear to talk to him at all. The nuns were pained and distant. She was to be watched all the time, for her own good, Sister Ignazio said. When she wished to visit Fiorella’s family then both must show themselves to Sister Giuseppe and travel together.
Confession. At least she did not have to confess to Father Grierson. Since she spoke Italian she could go to the convent chaplain, Father Bevacqua. The nuns watched as she went up to the box. She had sinned dreadfully: ingratitude, selfishness, deceit. But the priest had been gentle, telling her that what mattered was did she regret the distress she’d caused?
Yes, yes, she thought, I regret. I regret everything. Being raped, giving in to everyone else’s ideas, trying to escape because it is worse now that I am back. I regret telling Rocco, because he could have been proud of his sister, living and working in London.
The week after her return was the feast of St John the Baptist. The city, illuminated at night, could be seen from the higher windows of the convent. Fiorella’s family took her to the Carraia Bridge to see the fireworks. But the flashes, sparks, streaming into the air, rising, falling, now alive, now dead – frightened her. She wanted to escape. When the first rocket went up, the baby lurched, drumming its legs against her belly. She felt nausea and lack of love, resentment at the intruder.
She seldom went out in the afternoons now. Instead she would sit in some cool part of the garden. Earlier, she’d avoided the Naples laurels with their odd-smelling white flowers. Now it was another plant whose clusters of small bell-shaped flowers resembled the daphne in Eleanor’s garden. Its cloying scent brought on sickness and a special heavy sadness.
She was not often hungry now. On the feast of Saints Peter and Paul they were served lamb and rosemary and she surprised herself by eating greedily. Then she saw her neighbour’s plate, the fat on the side grown cold and white, and the nausea returned. The nuns served hard yellow peaches soaked in red wine, the flavour sour, astringent. Occasionally she craved these. Yet she must be eating enough, for she grew and, she supposed, the baby grew too.
She made odd friendships. Silvio, the big white Maremma sheepdog, convent watchdog, on his chain in the garden. In the afternoon she’d sit beside him, talking to him of Trimmer. He would allow her to ruffle his coat. She had seen him prowling at night, teeth yellow and fanged, ready for tearing.
And Arturo the gardener. He worked in the cool of the morning, trimming and tying back the lemon plants in the courtyard, tending the terracotta pots of magnolia. They greeted each other shyly always. He was a wizened old man who kept himself to himself. One afternoon she came in earlier than usual. He was sitting in the shade of a tree near the shed, a cloth bundle beside him. He offered her something at once, courteously. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘I’ve already eaten.’ She was a little shocked. She had supposed that the nuns fed him.
‘Ah no,’ he said, ‘why should they? I have always brought mine. Thirty-five years now.’ A hunk of dry bread. A leather bottle with the pale fluid made from water poured over used grape skins. She felt ashamed of the meals she refused daily – and yet she craved his. Bitter. Simple. I could live like that. She asked what he ate in the evenings, feeling the sudden tug of memory, the child who had known hunger. Some pasta, he told her, very occasionally saltfish. No, never meat. How could they eat themselves what they might sell to buy wheat?
The weather grew still hotter. Watermelon stalls appeared in the street. Wedges of the pink-green flesh rested on vine leaves while thick discs of the fruit hung from the framework above. More vine leaves, covered by water, lay in an earthenware bowl with the coins for change.
In the heat she became more uncomfortable. The baby formed a great jutting shelf. Her ankles were swollen, her bar shoes cut. All through August, temperatures in the hundreds, she longed with a deep frightened longing for Thackton. October evenings by the fire, Dulcie reading or sewing, Elsie bringing in the tea tray, while outside the wind bent the heavy branches of the elder and rain lashed the last of the convolvulus in the hedgerow. Never, never again. She felt the dry weight, hopeless. The air heavy, oppressive as before a storm.
And the storms came. In the middle of the night, the convent buildings illumined, unearthly. The next morning Arturo bemoaned the young chrysanthemums irreparably damaged in their pots.
She
had a dream. So real was it, that in it she called out, ‘This isn’t a dream …’ Summer, and she sat on a chair in the flagged yard of Moorgarth, alone. In the field behind her she heard Eulalia whinny, then the clatter of the gate. But she didn’t look round. Perhaps because she knew. A lion, magnificent, tawny-maned, glittering as he was caught by the late afternoon sun, strolled into the yard. Half terrified, half happy, she thought to call someone from inside.
‘Oh, lovely lion,’ she said. ‘Golden lion …’ But then the dream went all wrong, for she was back in the linen chest. Six years old again, covered in dust, she could hear outside the banging, the heavy breathing, prowling. And voices:
‘They’re asking about Minicu – I need to know.’
‘Where’s the body?’
‘Ask the vultures –’
There was a scuffling sound. She froze with terror. She was too big for the chest: there was no room in it for a sixteen-year-old girl with child. A violent griping pain began in her belly. She knew she must get out, whatever the danger. I must be silent, must not scream. The pain grew and grew, and then died down. She must get out before it returned. ‘I will, I will!’ she cried, throwing her weight against the lid.
She burst into daylight, falling, it seemed, into her bed. Sunlight through the blinds. A single bell tolling for Mass.
She lay trembling, the terror of the dream still inside her. And then the pain returned, coming from her back, rising in a great wave so that she clenched her fingers, her teeth, pushed her bare toes against the iron bed end. Then it was gone again. She got up slowly and dressed. She thought: How stupid I am. My time has come.
All the rest of that day she lay in bed in the small hospital of San Damiano. The Franciscan nuns who ran it were gentle, matter of fact. They brought her fruit to suck. She floated in an ocean of pain, lying there with weary resignation as if she were forty not sixteen – as if generations of peasant stock had taken her over.
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