Female Friends (3 page)

As for me, Chloe, I killed my mother, sending her into the hospital to have a hysterectomy she never really wanted. The womb, that little organ, so small when not in use, in her case past functioning, was cancerous after all and not merely, as I insisted, plugged with fibroids.

And it is amazing how once the word is said, the disease, dormant until the moment of recognition, proliferates and spreads. It is as if the body catches an idea and then can’t get it out of its mind. Mother didn’t want to go into the hospital: it was my idea. I was irritated by her passivity; I felt it must have a physical cause, somewhere in the roots of her female nature. If they’d only cut it out for her, I thought, excise it once and for all, she would be better, would look after herself, stop suffering, stop forgiving and understanding me, my children, my husband, and my friends, and her own oppression.

But all my mother did was die, as if that tiny, useless organ was the very mainspring of her being.

I
NIGO DRIVES HIS MOTHER
Chloe to Egden station. He drives without hesitation or fear, calmly and sensibly, clearly regarding the machine as a useful tool and not as an outlet for any suppressed and disagreeable aspects of his personality.

She cannot think what she has done to deserve this paragon, with his broad shoulders and friendly eyes, smooth olive skin and glossy black springing hair, so like his father in looks but so unlike in temperament, who deals with her affectionately, and his father with a respectful deference only slightly tinged with mockery: who passes his exams, takes drugs in moderation, avoids his enemies and understands his friends, who are multitude; and now not only drives her to the station, but offers to.

Perhaps, she thinks, out of the flat Essex countryside, which to her is featureless to the point of oppression, ripe only for cabbage-growing, air-fields and urban development, Inigo has wrung whatever is calm and good: or else, more like it, has made his own pocket of grace and beauty in which to grow, since God has declined to do it for him.

Even the hedgerows of her childhood have gone now, uprooted in the cause of progress and cabbage-cropping machinery. The sun has gone in. The early promise of the day has gone. The few trees left stand brown and crusty with old creepers: the fields are untidy with the winter’s debris.

What fate, Chloe wonders, has condemned her to live her life in these few square miles of England? First, long ago, as Gwyneth’s daughter, in Ulden, with Marjorie and Grace for friends. Then, after a brief respite, as Oliver’s wife in Egden, ten miles down the railway line.

And where the Egden supermarket now stands, was the cottage-hospital where Grace was born, first and only child of Edwin and Esther Songford. Or so they assumed—Grace had a tendency to deny their parentage, and with it her duty towards them. And not without a withered shred of justification too—for a year or so after Grace’s birth the market town of Egden and its outlying villages rocked to a scandal which closed the cottage-hospital entirely, the elderly and eccentric matron having conceived a fresh scientific system of tagging new babies according to their toe prints, which resulted in confused nurses and almost certain mis-identification of the infants, and the necessary reallocation, more than three years later, of six children amongst six couples, on the strength of blood-tests, physical appearance, established temperament and, of course, parental instinct. To the delight of the press, both national and foreign. Six for sure, and how many others not for sure? It was Grace’s fancy to allocate herself in her mind, throughout her childhood and afterwards, to many a rich and noble couple. The belief that one has been switched at birth is common enough in little girls—and give Grace an inch, like a mad matron, and she’d take an ell, and never wash up for her mother, not even on the help’s day off.

The Songfords lived in Ulden, in a solid Edwardian house called The Poplars. It had a good-sized garden, a wind-break of poplar trees, a swing for the children, a tennis court, large attics, a gardener, a daily, a pantry full of bottled fruits and jams, living rooms with chintzy curtains and squashy sofas, Persian rugs, Chinese carpets, much bamboo furniture. Eastern bric-à-brac, mementos of the Indian army from which Grace’s father had been cashiered, and one small bookcase containing the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
in twelve volumes, some guide books, an atlas, two novels by Dornford Yates, and three thrillers by Sapper and the
Light that Failed
by Rudyard Kipling.

It was to this house that Marjorie was evacuated, in 1940, coming on a train which stopped in Ulden by mistake. As for Chloe, she was on the train by mistake and it was only by this first fortunate accident that she and her mother Gwyneth, on her way to a domestic job at the Rose and Crown, were able to alight at Ulden.

When we are children, so much happens by mistake. As we grow older, and see a pattern to things, we are obliged to agree that there is no such thing as an accident. We make tactless remarks because we wish to hurt, break our legs because we do not wish to walk, marry the wrong man because we cannot let ourselves be happy, board the wrong train because we would prefer not to reach the necessary destination.

As for a train which stops at the wrong station, disgorges sixty children at the wrong place, and changes the course of all their lives, what are we to say to that?

P
ICTURE THE SCENE NOW
, that autumn morning in 1940, as the train which carries Marjorie and Chloe approaches Ulden. Grace is waiting at the station with her father who is uncrowned king of the village, a princess dressed like a prince, in trousers and sweater, contrary to her mother’s spoken request, but in accordance with her mother’s deepest wishes. Her mother wanted a boy.

Chug-chug, puff-puff, across the flat fields. It’s like a scene from Toy Town. The day is hot, and calm, and blue. There’s panic in London, but not here. War clouds may be lowering somewhere over to the South East, but here they’re nicely silver-lined with protected farm prices and agricultural subsidies. Full employment in the area at last, laying run-ways for Spitfires on Ulden Common. And out of that cloud, clear into the sunshine, comes the train with two coaches. Its white smoke drifts prettily over the fields, where they’re taking out the daffodil bulbs and laying down potatoes.

Inside the Toy Town train, the picture is not so pretty. The coaches (all that could be spared) are crowded with terrified, weeping, rioting, vomiting and excreting children. There are no WCs. The floors are aswill. These are the evacuees from London. They have been briskly labelled and sent off for their own safety, out of the way of Hitler’s bombs. Many haven’t been able to say good-bye to their parents, most don’t know what’s happening to them. Quite a few would certainly rather be dead than here.

Little Chloe, of course, sits well-behaved and upright amidst the uproar, with her hand firmly in her mother Gwyneth’s. Mothers are clearly a precious commodity on this particular train. And as for Gwyneth, she is feeling quite faint with distress. She is surrounded by misery and filth and deprived of her usual tools for coping—water, soap, bucket, and cloth.

Moreover, being on this train by accident, having mistaken Platform 7 for Platform 8, Gwyneth has been separated from two trunks in which are all her worldly possessions, neatly packed, folded, and interlarded with tissue. What now most preoccupies her is that in the elasticated silk pocket of the smaller trunk, along with the birth certificate and the careful roll of her husband’s tiny landscapes, is his medical record card. This she stole from the hospital where he died, and this she is always fearful will be discovered by someone in authority and used as evidence of her crime. All the same, she has not been able to bring herself to destroy it. Now she wishes she had. Supposing the trunk is searched, the card found, and herself sent to prison? What will happen to Chloe?

What will happen to Chloe? It has been the theme song of Gwyneth’s life for the past ten years.

Gwyneth resolves to destroy the card the minute the trunk reaches the Rose and Crown. She is starting a new life as barmaid and general domestic help, in return for board and lodging for herself and Chloe, and five shillings a week pocket money.

It is as well Gwyneth is so fond of cleaning, for being a widow with a child, this is the direction in which her future clearly lies.

O
PPOSITE CHLOE AND GWYNETH
, sits a plain, thin, tearful child, with pale, deep-set, slightly squinty eyes peering out from beneath a creased brow. Marjorie. She has a mass of frizzy hair, which is kept back from her forehead by a battery of brown metal hair clips. She is not accustomed to the language and behaviour of the other children in the coach. Until recently Marjorie has lived a protected life. Then her father Dick upset everyone by volunteering for army service and her mother Helen took her away from her private school in the country, and enrolled her in the local state school which promptly closed. Now, re-opened for just one week, the school has been evacuated, and Marjorie with it.

Or, as the lovely, highly-principled Aryan Helen, Marjorie’s mother, wrote to her handsome, tormented, highly-principled Jewish husband, Marjorie’s father, only the night before:

‘We’re all in this together. It’s best for Marjorie to take her chance with the others. I believe she’s going somewhere in Essex. The country air should be good for her spots—I’m afraid London aggravated them shockingly. I’ll be down to see her as soon as possible, though you know what the trains are like, and actually I’ve offered the house as a hospitality centre for Polish Officers and am acting as hostess, so you can imagine how busy I’m going to be. Don’t worry—I’ve packed all your books and papers safely away in the attics—and cleared the library for the dancing. Poor fellows—what a dreadful business this war is: they deserve all the relaxation they can get.’

Dick, posted somewhere in Scotland to supervise the manufacture of Wellington Boots for the WRAC (the Women’s Royal Artillery Corps), can hardly object to anything. If Helen did not consult him before removing Marjorie from her school, neither did he consult Helen before joining the army. He just came home one evening, late at his own party, and said, ‘I’ve done it’ and the next day he was gone. What kind of conduct was that?

If Helen has put his books and papers up in the attics, where the roof leaks, then it is his fault for not attending to the attic roof (as she has repeatedly asked him to do) but going to political meetings instead. If she wants to be unfaithful on the library floor (dancing always makes her sexy, and they both know it) or even on his bed, or even in the corridors in front of the very servants, then she will, and he deserves it, and he knows it. For Dick slept with a friend’s wife—the second woman he’d ever made love to—the night Marjorie was born, and the friend’s wife, in a flurry of either guilty malice or boredom, told Helen. All this Dick knows, and so is helpless.

Dick scarcely knows his daughter Marjorie. First she had a nanny, then she went away to school. He assumes she will be all right. She is not pretty, and he is sorry for her, but now the Army is his life. He can fight Hitler. Helen he cannot fight.

As for Helen, she simply cannot think what she did, during all those lovely laughing years of childless marriage, to deserve Marjorie. Who is plain and who fawns, and at whose birth she lost her husband.

Now little Marjorie, labelled, rejected and forlorn, sits and stares at Chloe’s small gloved hand lying so securely in Gwyneth’s, and starts to cry. Chloe, longing for the safety of a label round her neck, sickened by the noise and the smell of vomit and worse, begins to cry as well.

Gwyneth begins to cry too. She takes her spotless handkerchief from her pocket and dabs her daughter’s face, and her own, and Marjorie’s too, seeing it to be there.

And so the train arrives in Ulden. It was, as we know, meant to go on to Egden, and only the relief train on Platform 6 to stop at Ulden, but the driver has misread his instructions.

O
N THE PLATFORM, GRACE’S
father Edwin heads the welcoming committee. He is a stout bald man with a braying laugh and what used to be known as a fine military bearing. That is, he stands with his shoulders back and rigid, and his chin high. Thus bold and brave, properly pulled together, showing no sign of weakness and distress, he held out his hand for the cane his father wielded when his school reports were bad—as they always were—thus standing he took the proud parades of his later life, and thus he stood when the Court Martial dismissed him from the Service he had been born and bred to. It is an unhealthy way to stand, thus rigidly, and his back is often bad.

Edwin is nearing fifty now, and has made, he believes, a good adjustment to civilian life, although still, sometimes, even after fifteen years, he finds it strange to wake in a chintzy house to soft female voices, and not to the clanking of boots and the rattling of weapons and commands. Then he will lie late in bed, desperate, waiting for death, with Esther clattering the breakfast dishes more and more frantically below.

His eyes are blood-shot, hooded and close together in a narrow face. His nose is long and thin: he has a handle-bar moustache which bisects his face with its sprouts of coarse reddish hair, and droops to hide the sensitivity of his mouth.

He is a busy man, though he is unemployed. Cashiered he may be—and the village knows it—but gentry he is, and he has his village obligations to fulfil. The flower shows, the fêtes, the sense of service, principles uttered in the pub. He has endless trips to London to make, to see the London lawyers who stand between him and an inheritance. He has his badly invested capital to worry about, and the problem of never eating into it, in the face of his wife’s alleged extravagance. He has his own quite violent fits of anxiety and depression to cope with. Now he has the Home Guard to organize. And every night, he has the Rose and Crown to visit, where he holds court in the Cosy Nook from eight-thirty to closing time. He holds his liquor well, like a gentleman. Or so he believes.