Paying Guests (26 page)

Mr Cumming looked down at his hands, which had been resting on his knees which were akimbo. ‘As to that,’ he said after a moment, ‘I fear the problem with one of them will be solved for us. The infant is very sickly. I cannot see him surviving much longer.’

‘But surely not?’ Tilly cried. ‘While there is life all efforts must be made to –’

‘But who will make such efforts?’ Mr Cumming said reasonably. ‘The infant is an orphan. It would take a most devoted mother’s care to give the child the smallest chance of survival. And he has no mother –’

‘He has his sister,’ Tilly said heatedly.

‘But she will have her own living to earn!’ Mr Cumming said. ‘This infant will need constant care by day and night if it is to live.’

‘And it will have such care!’ Tilly said strongly. ‘From his sister. She seemed to me a sensible girl and much aware of her responsibilities. I shall take the girl and the baby and she will devote herself to getting him well. Then, in time, when the child has recovered – and I am determined he shall – we shall consider what we are to do for her in the future. How old is she?’

‘Fifteen,’ Mr Cumming said. ‘Hardly a child any longer, of course.’

‘Half starved as she is, you cannot call her a woman,’ Tilly said. ‘I never saw anyone in greater need of care.’

‘I grant you that,’ Mr Cumming said. ‘A poor specimen altogether.’

Tilly opened her mouth to protest at such a term used of a living person, but closed it again. Clearly, she thought, Mr Cumming was too imbued with the attitudes of the surgeons and physicians with whom he spent his working time to see matters as she did; a man who could speak so dispassionately of a fellow human being as a ‘specimen’ was hardly one who would comprehend the way her own mind bent; and she stood up and folded her hands on her gown and looked at him as firmly as she could.

‘I will ask then that you arrange tomorrow for the girl and her infant brother to come here,’ she said. ‘Or shall I come to fetch them?’

Mr Cumming looked at her and after a long moment shook his head. ‘You’re a very good, caring lady, Mrs Quentin,’ he said. ‘I knew myself to enjoy great comfort in your house and I had thought it all due to the efficiency of your manner of housekeeping, but I now see that much of it is due to the innate generosity of your spirit. I fear it will cost you dear one day, but I must admire it. Very well, I shall tell the hospital that the girl and the baby are to come to you. They will be glad enough not to have the responsibility, I dare say. They would have had to keep the child till it died, and to find a place for the girl. It is generally hard to get employment for
beggar girls – people are unwilling to take them on, you know! They have no education in domestic matters, and hardly keep themselves clean, and often their morals are sadly low, because of the way they have lived on the streets. That is why your good heart does you so much credit –’

‘Please,’ she said and turned away. ‘It is not specially good. It is surely only that any person with eyes in their head must see what needs doing. Thank you for your efforts, Mr Cumming. I am much obliged to you.’

He got to his feet and thrust his hands into his pockets, and stood there grinning at her, looking now much more like the young man she was accustomed to. ‘My pleasure. Ma’am. Only one thing I’d ask –’ He winked largely at Silas. ‘Make sure the infant’s housed well out of earshot of m’room! The bawling of the creatures goes on in my ears all day as it is.’ And he laughed heartily and turned to go, leaving Tilly standing beside her fire and staring down into the flames, with Silas sitting quietly in his chair watching her.

They were in her private morning room and it was warm and quiet in there and after a while he got to his feet and came to stand beside her.

‘My dear Tilly,’ he said and there was great warmth in his voice. ‘I will not embarrass you as that rather noisy young doctor did by expatiating on your virtues. I don’t need to, for they are there for all to see. But I must say how grateful I am to whatever fate it was that led me to make my home in this house. I had intended my stay to be a short one, while I looked about for something more permanent, but there is no question in my mind now that this house is my home and will be so as long as you inhabit it. For you lend a fragrance to the very air that we breathe here.’

‘Oh, pooh,’ she said after a moment, painfully aware of the way her colour had deepened, and to cover her confusion she bent over and seized the poker to attack the coals in the grate and send them flying into sheets of flame. His nearness was something she was very aware of and, she had to admit, liked. It was a strange way to feel, she told herself, very strange; while her secret private voice
jeered at her and told her it wasn’t strange at all, but the most natural thing in the whole world.

‘You really must not speak so!’ she said as lightly as she could. ‘It is quite absurd in you!’

‘Not at all absurd,’ he said gravely. ‘I am a free speaker as I am a free thinker, Tilly, and I demand the right to say to you what I believe and feel. And I want to tell you that –’

She caught her breath and turned and replaced the poker on its hook among the other fire irons with as much clatter as she could and cried, ‘No! I really would beg you, sir, to say no more. I have much to do in planning the arrival tomorrow of these children – and they are both children, no matter what Mr Cumming may say – and I really cannot stay here and chatter in this fashion. Do, please, return to the drawing room and amuse Sophie who must be languishing for some attention.’

He laughed, a little tightly. ‘Miss Oliver, I think, will be far from languishing, at least while your son is about to entertain her! But all I wanted to say was –’

‘No time!’ she cried, with an attempt to seem merry. ‘No time at all! Do please, go and entertain the others as well as yourself. I shall be about my business – thank you so much for joining me in this discussion with Mr Cumming. I wished you to be here because you, of course, were with me when we first met the children, and so knew of their pathetic situation. I needed you to encourage Mr Cumming fully to understand – and you were a great help, indeed you were.’ And she picked up her skirts and sailed for the door, almost forcing him to walk ahead of her to open it and let her escape.

She almost ran out and turned for the baize door that led down to the kitchen and Eliza’s domain; and gave him only a quick glance over her shoulder as she opened it and went through. He was looking after her with a quizzical expression on his face that she could not fully read, but she feared it meant more than she could bring herself to think about at the moment. Or did it? Perhaps she should not have reminded him of Sophie? Oh, she thought then with awareness of her own daring in even thinking in such language,
damn the man! damn me and my nonsense – I have more important things to do than think of him. So, for heaven’s sake, go and do them!

Do them she did. She and Eliza spent the remainder of the evening planning precisely how the house would be arranged to accommodate the newcomers. Eliza was particularly happy to hear the news of who was to come and when, admitting with the greatest of candour that her heart had quailed at the thought of boys coming.

‘For I remember all too well what varmints my brothers was and I didn’t relish the notion at all,’ she said. ‘Even our Mr Duff gave us a fair bit of runnin’ around when he was a lad, and imagine that multiplied by four and no sensible training from a good Mamma to stand them in good stead! No, I ain’t sorry and that’s the truth and I hope as you don’t think me selfish, Mum.’

‘No,’ Tilly said. ‘Not selfish. Just sensible, I suppose. I wish I were always the same. However, this time it has been forced on me. We shall have just the girl and the infant. Now, I thought that if we took the big attic room at the back, in the old house, and set the new maid to the one on the other side where the wall is extra thick and she need not be disturbed if the baby cries in the night, we could take in the spare bed from the third room on the other side.’

The following morning, by the time Tilly set out in a closed carriage, fetched from the livery stables, to collect the girl and the baby from St George’s Hospital, the room was ready.

They had furnished it, she and Eliza, simply enough, finding some old chintz curtains for the long attic windows, and a strip of red drugget for the wooden floor. There was a bed, a small and narrow one, but well found enough and well supplied with blankets and a pair of coarse linen sheets and a ticking pillow. There was a crib, the one that had been Duff’s and which had lain unused in the loft ever since he had graduated to a bed when he was five, also well found with blankets and specially cut sheets that Tilly discovered tucked away in the loft too, and a small table and a cupboard. Once a wicker chair with arms had been added, there was space for little
else, but the room looked snug enough and was indeed warm, for the heat of the house rose to it and kept it very cosy.

‘She’s a lucky girl,’ Eliza said, when the room was finished and she stood there admiring it. ‘To go from the streets to this – why, she’ll think she’s died and gone to paradise.’

And to an extent that was precisely what the girl said when at last she spoke at all. When Tilly arrived at the hospital, to stand in the big central hall with its black and white floor tiles, trying to ignore the stink of the place, a queasy mixture of human dirt and blood and the ominous sickly sweetness that she knew denoted death, the girl was sitting waiting for her. The baby was tucked inside her shawl and could not be seen, and she had a small basket at her feet. She had been washed since her arrival, and her hair could now be seen to be a straggly pallid brown and her complexion pale. Her eyes were a deep green and she might have been handsome, Tilly thought, if she had had a better start in life. She stood up when Tilly came towards her and just stared at her mutely. Tilly held out her hands to her and said heartily, ‘Well, my dear? So you are to come to us! Are you pleased to do that?’

The girl nodded and then turned her head as Mr Cumming appeared at the other side of the hall and came hurrying across.

‘The baby is far from well today,’ he said in a low voice for Tilly’s ears alone. ‘If he lives another week, I’ll be amazed. I’ve given the girl instructions as to its medicines but I should not trouble it too much for it will hardly benefit so will lose little if it has none, to be truthful. If you can get it well fed, that will be a start.’

He turned to the girl then and said with a hearty brightness that grated in Tilly’s ears, ‘Well, Polly, are you not a fortunate creature? To have this good kind lady take you in? You must be very obedient and good, and mind all she says. She will do all she can to help you with the baby, but remember I told you it is not likely to make old bones. But Mrs Quentin will help you, whatever befalls. And you be grateful, now!’

The girl bobbed at the knees, still silent, and Tilly took her away, putting her into the carriage, where she sat very upright, still clutching the invisible infant beneath her shawl. Tilly sat beside her
as the coachman called up the horses and they set off, and said softly, ‘May I see the baby, Polly?’

Tilly essayed a smile and the girl looked back at her, her eyes deep and suspicious, but after a moment drew back the edge of the shawl. The baby, like herself, had been washed, and Tilly found herself looking down on the most pinched and wizened features she could ever remember seeing on an infant. He looked to be old, very, very old, older than time itself. The eyes bulged a little in the deep sockets, and still showed that rim of white where the lids had not fully closed, and the temples seemed to have collapsed. The small mouth was pursed in what could have been taken for a thoughtful moue, but there was no other sign of any life there. He was breathing, fast and shallowly, but that was all. There was no other movement, no other sign of any awareness, and Tilly leaned forwards and slid her gloved finger into the small fist that lay curled on the infant’s breast.

At last there was a reaction. The fingers relaxed as she put her own finger there, and then tightened around it, and suddenly it was long ago and she was sitting with Duff on her lap and letting him grip her finger in just that way; but Duff had been round and rosy and full of life, making faces, chuckling, crying and snuffling, as unlike this sad creature as it was possible for a baby to be; and Tilly sighed and extricated her finger and leaned back in the corner against the dusty squabs. Had she done the right thing? How would she help this girl beside her when the baby died, as inevitably he must? She could not imagine. And she too sat in silence all the way home.

Eliza took the girl’s little basket as soon as she arrived, and peered inside it. ‘Good,’ she said heartily. ‘They gave you some bits for the baby, then. I’ve found a few of the things our Mr Duff wore when he was a baby, Mum, and washed ‘em up ready, but it helps to have some that’ll fit this one. Mr Duff was a much bigger child altogether.’ And she looked at the baby in Polly’s arms and then at Tilly, a swift expressionless flash of her eyes that said all there was to say. She, too, clearly knew that this child could not possibly live.

They led the girl upstairs, stomping along between them and
Tilly heard her breaths come shorter and thinner and thought – she needs feeding up, poor thing. She has no strength in her – and at last they reached the very top and the attic that had been prepared.

It was Eliza who opened the door and showed the girl the way in and Tilly followed her. Polly stood in the middle of the little room and stared and then turned round slowly, looking at everything. And still she said nothing.

But then she unwrapped the baby and set him down on his back on the counterpane and knelt down beside the bed so that she could bring her lips close to his ears, and peered into his waxen and expressionless face.

‘There, Georgie,’ she said softly. ‘See? I told you it’d be all right, didn’t I? You’ll get well here, won’t you? o’ course you will. You’ll get better for your Polly, now. It’s all safe now, Georgie. Ain’t it all lovely, then? Ain’t it?’