A Little Death (8 page)

Roland and Louisa and I sat round that kitchen table and stared at those lumps of bread and jam for hours— perhaps it wasn’t hours, but certainly it felt like a lifetime. The kitchen maid shut up all the doors and windows, and pulled the blinds so that we couldn’t see what was happening outside. The half-light made the bread and jam look grey. I thought perhaps it was going to be some kind of
test
, to see if we were able to eat it or not. Roland and Louisa were sitting opposite me, and they had servants standing behind their chairs, and when I looked round, there was someone behind my chair. I could hear Louisa crying, but no one spoke to
her. The servants didn’t look at us. They were all looking at the floor so I did, too.

Nurse came to my chair and bent down, and mopped my knee where I’d fallen over and put a bandage on it. She tilted up my head to see the bruise on the side of my face where mad Jenny had kicked me, but she didn’t put anything on that. Then she said, ‘Open your mouth,’ and gave me something to drink. I didn’t want it because it tasted vile and she pinched my jaw open with her hand as they do to horses when they want them to take medicine. Louisa and Roland had it as well. I think it was something soporific, because they fell asleep in their chairs and I think I must have done too, because I don’t remember anything after that.

There is a dream I have had, many, many times, always the same. We’re sitting at the kitchen table, but I get up and leave the room. The servants try to stop me—they stand in my way, but they can’t touch me, I can move through them as if they don’t exist. I go outside to the privy, except it isn’t really the privy anymore, but another part of the garden with flowers and proper grass, and Freddie’s there, but there’s no blood on him. He’s wearing white clothes, like his sailor suit, but all white, and his hair is bright and clean, and he’s smiling at me. And I feel happy. But then I wake up and it’s gone.

The next morning I asked Mrs. Mattie if I could see Freddie. She said she would go and see about it—she went off and it was the first time I’d been left on my own to get dressed. I didn’t know if I could do it, so I said to myself, ‘If I can tie my laces, Freddie won’t be dead; if I can do up all my buttons, he won’t be dead; if I can tie my hair-ribbon he won’t be dead,’ and so on. By the time I’d finished, I was convinced I’d done so well that Freddie would be fine, just a bump on the head
or something. But then Mrs. Mattie came back and said I could see him, and she took me and, of course, when I saw him he was dead.

He did look quite lifelike, because they’d washed the blood off and put on clean clothes. ‘Doesn’t he look happy?’ I asked Mrs. Mattie. I remembered the dead baby in the photograph my father had shown me. ‘It must be nice to be dead. Dead people always look happy.’

‘You should go to your room now, Miss Georgina.’

‘Yes, but may I see the photographer?’

‘Photographer?’

‘So we can put Freddie’s picture in the album, with the other one.’

‘There isn’t going to be any photographer, Miss Georgina.’

‘Then may I see Roland?’

‘Miss Louisa and Master Roland have gone home. Now come back to your room and don’t upset yourself.’

I didn’t go to Freddie’s funeral, nor did Edmund. Edmund didn’t come home at all that summer. He told me afterwards that our father had written and had him sent straight back to school. Father came to live at Dennys permanently and at first I hoped that he might come up to the nursery to see me, but he never did and Nurse wouldn’t let me go downstairs. They used to leave our meals outside the door—big mice with big feet, coming and going, but I never saw them. I remember trying to hide lumps of mutton under my dolly’s skirt, but Nurse was always watching and of course it went straight back on to the plate. Mrs. Mattie came up eventually. It was a very hot summer and perhaps one of the maids told her about the bad smell. She pushed the door wide open and made all the plates topple over. Nurse didn’t
stay long after that. When Mrs. Mattie saw us I knew that she would be sent away, so I got up from the table and lay down on the bed in my room and she didn’t try to stop me. I stayed there for a week and the other servants looked after me, and then Nurse came in to tell me that she was leaving. She said she had ‘gladsome tidings’, except I thought she said ‘gladsome tidyings’. I only remembered that a few weeks ago and I told Edmund about it. He was tickled pink. He said, ‘That must be what Ada does when she’s happy.’ Nurse told me she was going to the Belgian Congo or somewhere, to be a missionary for her church. I hope they were cannibals and put her in the pot.

I was ill for a long time after that and I don’t remember much about it, except the dream I kept having about Freddie. The doctor gave me sleeping medicines, which I think were stronger in those days, so that one would sleep longer and have more dreams. I never get the chance to dream nowadays because the wretched sleeping pills don’t give me more than a couple of hours most nights. But since I’ve taken them all my life, they’ve probably stopped having any effect. I take handfuls of the things, but they never work properly. I said to Edmund, ‘Give me a whack with the fire tongs, that’ll put me to sleep!’ He went downstairs and told Ada to make me a cup of cocoa instead.

But I don’t mind the not sleeping anymore, not really. I don’t need much of anything now—not much sleep, not much food—only cocktails. A cocktail for breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner, that’s what I need. But at that time… well, I wanted to be asleep. It was because I thought I must be wicked. When I was awake, I was wicked.

I remember Father arriving very clearly. From the nursery window, I could just see one corner of the carriage
and the top of his hat. I thought, now he will come up and visit me, but he didn’t. Every day I asked God to make him come and visit me, but he never did. I tried to make explanations to myself about why he didn’t come—they were excuses, really, I was trying to make excuses for him. Because it may be different now, but in those days fathers didn’t come into nurseries, not in families like ours. I think there were one or two occasions when my mother was alive, but we were usually taken downstairs to see him. Years later, Edmund told me that Father’s visits to the nursery reminded him of Queen Victoria inspecting a tribal delegation from a very remote and insignificant colony. Anyway, I told myself all sorts of nonsense—Father hardly ever came to the nursery so he wouldn’t know the way, that sort of thing. I suppose this carried on for two or three weeks and then he suddenly appeared.

I was asleep when he came into the room, so I don’t remember that part of it. But he stood at the end of the bed and looked down at me. His shoulders were folded up the way angels’ and birds’ are before they spread their wings, and he had his hands folded over the brass bed rail. His head was bowed as if he was saying a prayer. It made me think of the poem about the angels who stand around the child’s bed, one to watch and one to pray and one to bear my soul away. I couldn’t see his face properly because the room was quite dark, but for some reason I did have this sort of wild, stupid hope that he’d come to give me a blessing. You know, ‘Father, give me thy blessing…’ I suppose these sorts of ludicrous misunderstandings must be part of everybody’s childhood.

Father stood there for a long time without speaking. Then he walked around the bed and stood beside me. His expression was the most… well, to put it bluntly
he looked disgusted, as if he was seeing some excrement or some vile thing and not me at all. He said, ‘You know why I have come to see you.’

‘No, I don’t know.’ Immediately I knew it was something I had done, but I couldn’t think of anything.

‘You know what you have done.’ His hands were shaking. My mind was whirling round like a speeded-up clock, trying to think of what it might be. I didn’t know if he wanted me to answer him or not. I don’t think he knew himself.

I said, ‘Is it about Nurse?’

‘Don’t try to trick me by blaming other people. You can’t expect the servants to be responsible. You are responsible.’ I felt as if my mouth had been locked. ‘You allowed this to happen. You deserted your brother.’ His anger encircled my chest like an iron band and I couldn’t breathe. It was Freddie, something to do with Freddie.

Then he said, ‘I am not going to say any more. There is nothing I can do, but I will not come back. I will not see you.’

He left the room. I couldn’t move or speak. His anger made the air shake, and I saw again and again the flash of Freddie’s red hair between the branches of the trees while I crouched silently amongst the brambles… I watched him go. I couldn’t change it. Father thought I was being cunning, but I wasn’t. Freddie died because I didn’t go after him and Father hated me.

Edmund came to see me, of course. I sometimes think that he is the only person in the world to whom I haven’t been a disappointment. I never told him what Father had said—how could I? I knew Father wanted him, but I had to keep him for mine. I suppose you could say I made him choose sides. But that wasn’t difficult, because Edmund had always been rather afraid of
Father, certainly more than I had, and I don’t think Father ever knew how to make him feel at ease. But the two of us had the most gorgeous times when he was on holiday from school. Apart from my mornings with Miss Blacker—she was a retired schoolmistress from the village my father engaged to teach me, but I don’t suppose she’d been much of a teacher even in her heyday and I certainly didn’t learn a great deal—Edmund and I spent every moment together. I made Ada help me pin up some sheets to make a sort of tent in my room, and we sat inside it and played games. I remember my bed used to get terrifically uncomfortable, counters and cards and crumbs all over it, more bumps and lumps every time you turned over. Ada used to come up in the evening to say good-night and shoo Edmund off to his room, but he’d always come creeping back when she’d gone.

In the beginning, we used to walk down to the village, but I stopped doing that after a while because there were too many people. I preferred it when it was just us. Edmund had a funny way of speaking at that time, I suppose they all did it at school: Everything was either jolly awful or awfully jolly. I used to tease him about it, but he never minded. Every evening at eight o’clock he used to go downstairs to have dinner with my father in the dining room. I love twilight in the summer, it’s the time when I used to stand at my bedroom window and wait for Edmund to finish his dinner and come back up to me. I used to watch the shadows growing longer and longer across the grass, and the wood getting darker and darker until you couldn’t make out the individual trees any more, all the different greens greying in the dusk and then black. I must say you don’t get
quite
the same effect looking down the Exhibition Road, but it’s still my favourite time of day.

On summer evenings I make Edmund wait until the sun’s gone right down before he switches on the electric light.

Edmund came up to my room one night after dinner and explained to me that our father was a drunkard. Ada must have known about it, but she didn’t tell me. She wasn’t a tale-bearer in those days. Quite right too. Really, that woman’s character has deteriorated beyond belief. Edmund was just about to go up to university and he’d been in London all week having a terrific lot of hoopla with lawyers about money. That night, he said to me, ‘You’ll have to go away from here.’

I thought he’d gone mad. ‘Don’t be silly, where would I go?’

‘Georgie, you can’t stay here. Father drinks. There are bottles all over his study. That’s why he never lets Ada go in there. Besides, he hates us.’

‘He hates everyone, doesn’t he?’

‘He likes Thomas.’ Thomas was the gardener, the only servant we had left apart from Ada.

‘Why would he like Thomas and not you?’

‘Simple. I’m alive—we’re alive—and Mother and Freddie are dead.’

‘Thomas is alive.’

‘Yes, but he doesn’t count. And Father drinking brandy all the time makes it much worse. He’ll never be cured of it, he doesn’t want to be. He trusts Thomas. He thinks everyone else is against him. And now, Thomas is going and he blames us for that.’

‘Well, it’s true. About me, anyway. Thomas seems to hate me almost as much as Father does.’

‘That’s why you’ve got to go. You can’t just be stuck away here forever or you’ll end up like someone’s mad old aunt.’

‘I’ll just have to be a mad old aunt then, because I haven’t got any choice.’

‘You could get married.’

‘How on earth am I supposed to do that?’

‘Honestly, Georgie, all you’d have to do is meet someone. You’re beautiful, even I can see that.’

I was completely taken aback when he said that. I didn’t
feel
beautiful and nobody had ever told me I was. Well, how could they? Nobody ever saw me and anyway, my clothes were an absolute fright. I remember thinking if I am beautiful, perhaps I can make a man fall in love with me. Then he’ll buy me lovely dresses and emeralds and diamonds, and I’ll be like the ladies in the fashion plates.

‘Look, Georgie, it can’t be that difficult, other people manage it.’

‘Yes, but we aren’t other people, Edmund. Well, you nearly are because of going to school, but I’m not.’

‘You can learn. You just watch the other people and what they do, and then you do it. I did it at school, it’s easy. Everyone does it.’

‘But even if I could, the only men I know are you and Father. I can’t marry you, so whom am I going to have for a husband?’

Well, of course, Edmund had no answer to that, but he was right; I did have to get away from Father and marriage was the only way to do it. And, much to my surprise, I found that it was really rather easy.

If someone had told me that that was how a woman came to have a baby I’d have said they were having me on. Anyway, how would you begin to describe something like that, there weren’t any words—well, I suppose I knew there must be some words somewhere, but I certainly didn’t know what they were. I thought: that must be the cause of babies and of course I started to worry in case I suddenly got one. I kept looking in the mirror to see if I was getting fatter, because that was the only way I knew to tell. It scared me, because they’d put you away if you had a baby and no husband. That used to happen all the time and with some of them, they never let them out again. The way they treated those girls, as if they were dirt—which a lot of them were, I don’t deny it. But not me. Yet there I was, one of the good girls at school—that was before my father took me out of it to put me to work—worrying that I might have a baby from a man who’d never said so much as one word about marrying me! I was far too scared to say anything to William. It sounds daft now, but I was more embarrassed about saying it to him than I was scared of the baby coming. William left Dennys within a couple of weeks. He’d been polite enough after, but nothing special, no more kisses when no one was looking. And I wasn’t going to go making up to him, not likely!