Spilt Milk (13 page)

‘And?’

‘Henry wants you to be happy. He knows he can’t give you what a wife should have. I think you might be fond of me too. We can find a way to make this work, the three of us. If you’re willing.’

Nellie swayed beside him. She held her breath.

‘Darling girl,’ he said as a train rattled past. ‘It’ll be all right. Me and Henry, we’ll look after you.’

Nellie was twenty-nine years old. Ever since Joe kissed her seven years ago, when he destroyed her trusting nature, she had refused to think about how it might feel to lie in a man’s arms. From the lewd chit-chat of women in the pub she had an idea of what sex might be about, though those women who winked and giggled and laughed like crows made it sound as rowdy as
a village tug-of-war or a wrestling match carried out in the dark. Sex was something men wanted and women tried to wriggle out of.

And yet Vivian had not made it sound like that. She’d said she had been undone by her own desires. That she had been controlled by them. Nellie thought she understood that now. Her body ached for George.

And wasn’t it true that a tree could stand straight for years even as the soil under its roots might be ebbing away? When it fell, and who knew what would start that chain of events off, it fell heavily, suddenly, all its tons of weight and years of growth keeling over in a heartbeat.

George stroked the back of her hand with his fingertip. Nellie moved closer. In this new city, in this new peacetime, anything seemed possible.

It was a very small baby that arrived in May 1921, a month earlier than the doctor had said it would. The child had tufted red hair and a wrinkled, ancient look to her. She cried, a hiccuping sound, damp as a rain-filled gutter. She had a mouth that puckered and pouted, caught between a smile and a fluid tearfulness. Such a tiny scrap of a thing, and reliant on Nellie to care for her. ‘Don’t cry,’ Nellie whispered. ‘Please don’t cry.’ The baby’s arms and legs were skinny as wishbones. Nellie feared they might snap in her trembling hands. ‘I’m a bit clumsy,’ she told the baby. ‘I’m no good with fragile things.’

They called her Bertha after Henry and George’s mother, but the baby was so small, a fledgling creature, that George nicknamed her Birdie and it stuck.

‘She’s a dear thing,’ said George, peering at her in her Moses basket. ‘If you were the only girl in the world,’ he sang. Nellie heard Henry moving about in his room upstairs. ‘Sshh,’ she said, pressing a finger to George’s lips. It didn’t seem right to flaunt their joy over the child.

‘Am I your legal husband?’ Henry had asked Nellie when she first broke the news to him. George stood leaning against the sink in the kitchen. Henry sat at the table. Nellie stood by the door, wringing her hands, chastened and tearful. She was already five months pregnant and could not hide it any longer.

‘Yes, you are.’

‘So if I am your husband, this child will be mine whether I like it or not?’

‘Well, yes, but …’

‘I encouraged this,’ he said, and his face was hard and sombre. ‘I let it happen. It’s all right, Nellie. People will just think there’s still a bit of fire in the old wreck of a husband you have. When it’s born you’ll have to get a nurse for the kid, that’s all I ask. Stop crying now. I can’t bear to see it. Come on, chin up. I’ll stand by you, Nellie.’

Nellie could not look at him for the shame of it. Her face burned, and she wrung her hands together.

‘Thank you, Henry.’

‘Don’t thank me. I don’t give a whore’s gin ration what you and George get up to, but people have to know the child is mine. Nobody must ever think otherwise. For the child’s sake as much as for my own. We’ll have it fostered out when the time comes.’

‘Understood,’ said George, crossing the room and reaching for the rum bottle. ‘I’ll pick up the tab for that one. Leave it to me.’

‘You’re a good man, Henry,’ said Nellie. ‘I’ll carry the truth of this to the grave. I promise.’

Henry raised no further objections. When the baby was born he reminded them of the need to find a foster home, and when Birdie was two months old George saw to it that a Mrs White took the child.

For a year, Birdie lived three streets away. Mrs White had been born in Glasgow, and though she’d lived in London most of her life, her accent was full of her hometown. She had half
a dozen children in her care. She was an elderly nurse, thin-faced and humourless. The tendons in her wrists stood out, her hands were blue-veined and over-scrubbed, the nails cut so short the skin around them was red and sore-looking. Nellie wasn’t sure she wanted to hand her daughter over to her.

‘Now then,’ Mrs White said, ‘certain things about bairns. Condensed milk is best. Cow’s milk must be sweetened with sugar. Never breastfeed. A wee tot raised on the diddy will have a common, weak character in later life.

‘Never pick up your baby unless it is to feed or to change its nappies. Teach them there are rules. Avoid hugging. If you must, a kiss on the top of the head will suffice. Do not ruin children with gifts and sentimental nonsense.’

Mrs White waved Nellie away when she tried to talk about her daughter’s likes and dislikes.

‘She is a baby, Mrs Farr,’ the woman said, ‘and thus quite incapable of having likes and dislikes.’

At home, without the presence of Birdie constantly reminding them of their private arrangements, Nellie was relieved to find she and Henry and George slipped back into the easy way they had had before. They worked, ate, sat together, drank together, all their words slipping into the unanchored time between day and night when it didn’t seem to matter whose baby Birdie was, just that it was a surprising thing to have a daughter between them.

Nellie visited Birdie on Sundays and brought her home one weekend a month. One Sunday morning she turned up and found the babies in Mrs White’s nursery all bawling and screaming in their cots. Nellie picked up Birdie and the child cried even more. She clung to Nellie’s neck, smelling viciously of dirty nappies.

Mrs White was in her study, eating a plate of rollmop herrings.

‘The babies are crying.’

‘And I am eating! Your daughter is a naughty little minx who is
playing on your heartstrings, Mrs Farr. This is my dinner time and these children know it.’

‘But why is she crying?’

‘Babies cry. They do it for attention. Oh, the Lord save me from weak-willed mothers. I have rules. You need to stick to them.’

Nellie looked at Birdie, who suddenly stopped crying, seized her around the neck and kissed her cheek. ‘Mumma!’ Birdie gurgled, and began sucking Nellie’s chin.

‘What about your sister?’ asked Henry when Nellie arrived home with Birdie in her arms, saying she had removed her from Mrs White’s care.

‘Could she not live with us, Henry? I’m sure she won’t cry any more.’

‘I cannot have a baby in the house, Nellie. Vivian’s got a big house. Didn’t you say your sister always wanted kids? A life in the country would be much better for the child’s health. There’s my sister Lydia of course, but she’s got two boys and she’s a sulky creature. I wouldn’t want our daughter to go to her.’

Nellie looked at him and felt a flush of pleasure.
Our daughter
, he had said. He cared about the child after all. And who was she to argue with him? He had accepted Birdie as his own. It was up to him to decide the child’s future.

She wrote to Vivian, explaining that Henry was too sick to have a small child in the house. Birdie had a neat row of top teeth now, and she was affectionate and sweet. Would Vivian consider bringing up her niece? She must make sure not to spoil her and to keep to a strict routine.

Vivian wrote back immediately. She would have the child. Of course she would. They were sisters, after all. This was her niece. Nothing and no one could take that away from them.
I will love Birdie as I love you
, Vivian wrote in her sentimental way,
with all my heart.

When Vivian walked into the pub to collect the child, carrying a bouquet of chrysanthemums and a pair of baby shoes as gifts, Nellie realized she had missed her sister. Their lives, so far apart for so long, swung back together again.

Putting a photograph of her eighteen-year-old daughter in an envelope, Nellie Farr remembered a time many years ago when Birdie had been four. She had come home from Vivian’s six months earlier and still acted like she did not know Nellie at all.

‘She has forgotten who I am,’ Nellie had said over breakfast when Birdie sat eating her porridge in silence. George, trying to find something positive in the stand-off between mother and child, said Birdie was a bright kid to know how to upset her mother so well.

‘Will I be going home soon?’ asked Birdie, rattling her spoon in her bowl, kicking her legs against the chair rung.

‘This is home,’ Nellie said.

Birdie shook her head.

‘I want my real home.’ She frowned, as if she thought Nellie was having problems understanding her. She was a small, elfin child. Her voice sounded uncannily like Vivian’s.

‘I want Auntie Vivian,’ she said. ‘Please. Please may I have Auntie Vivian?’ She threw her spoon across the room.

How could a four-year-old child with a pursed mouth and a way of folding her arms make Nellie, a grown-up, feel this wounded? Nellie picked up the spoon and put it in the sink. A giant and a flea. She was the giantess, lumbering, unhappy, and here was Birdie, this little red-haired flea jumping around, biting her black and blue.

George had said it would pass. Henry said the child had spirit. He liked her contrary nature.

‘Two years she spent with your sister,’ he said as they watched Birdie playing with a skipping rope in the backyard. ‘She’s bound
to take a bit of time to settle in here. Mothers and daughters are always at each other’s throats. I remember Lydia was furious with our mother when we were growing up. I could never understand it. Mother was such a mild woman, God rest her soul. So quiet I used to forget she was there. In fact,’ he said, warming to his memories, ‘I only noticed her when she wasn’t there, if you see what I mean. Like one only notices a clock in a room when its ticking winds down and stops.’

Nellie tried being mild. She bore Birdie’s tempers and furies as if they were light breezes and she a steady sailing ship. When the mildness infuriated both of them, Nellie tried spoiling the child. She bought her roller skates and took her to the circus, she fed her doughnuts and bagels and gave her sherbet sweets to suck.

One afternoon a few months later, a sticky, airless day in September, Nellie took her swimming at the lido. The sun was hidden behind clouds, but the heat of the day was leaden. Birdie had red cheeks. Her head was as hot as a boiler plate.

‘This will cool us both down,’ Nellie told her daughter. She still hadn’t got used to having the child around all the time; was still surprised that this sulky-faced creature was her child. That it had come out of her.

‘I don’t want to swim. It’s too hot.’

‘That’s why we need to swim. To cool down.’

Nellie felt her patience leaving her. She picked up Birdie, which was easy as she was still a tiny creature.

‘Come on,’ she said, and descended the steps into the water, Birdie under one arm, struggling like a cat in a sack to get free. She let go and Birdie swam away from her.

She got to the other side of the pool, far away from Nellie, and then screamed and cried, whirling her arms like washing-machine paddles. People stared. A swimmer tried to help the child, but she screamed even more.

Nellie swam over to her and slapped her.

‘That’s enough!’

She put her arms around Birdie and carried her out of the water, ignoring the pity and scorn in the eyes of the skinny-hipped girls that lounged on the grass in bathing costumes, smoothing their short bobbed hairstyles.

‘I don’t like swimming,’ Birdie said in between sobs. ‘I want to go home.’

It seemed such a simple request that, finally, Nellie thought it was time to give in.

‘All right. But it’s a very long train journey. It will take us he rest of the day to get there. I will have to send a telegram to Vivian.’

‘I want to play the piano.’

‘In the pub? That home?’

Nellie sat on the grassy banks of the lido with the child wrapped in a towel. She had been holding her tight in it, the way you might hold down a large wild bird, pinning its muscled wings with the cloth.

She loosened the towel, feeling her daughter’s limbs relax too.

Big drops of rain began to fall. Though it could not possibly have had anything to do with a woman in a black swimsuit and rubber bathing cap, Nellie felt as if the weather was sympathetic to her and her miserable child. She tipped her face to the sky, feeling a cool breeze pick up.

‘We’d better go home then,’ she said.

It seemed incredible that all that had happened nearly fourteen years ago. That Birdie had forgotten her time spent with her aunt and had also, it seemed to Nellie, forgotten those difficult days.

Nellie put the photograph in an envelope. A recent one of Birdie standing outside the pub. She wrote very carefully on the back in pencil.
Bertha ‘Birdie’ Farr. 1939, aged eighteen years.

For many years, since Nellie took Birdie back, she had sent Vivian photographs and school reports. It was, she always felt, the least she could do.

Vivian’s latest letter to Nellie lay on the bar top. Nellie had read
it with interest. A farmer called Charles Bell had been coming into Vivian’s tea room for some time now. She had discovered he had built a farmhouse on the site of their old cottage.

Five years ago, in 1934, the Langhams’ farm had been divided up and sold off as parcels of land, and Charles Bell had bought 100 acres at auction. More precisely, and Vivian was always precise in her letters, he had paid two pounds an acre for some scrubby land and water meadows that had been left fallow for years. With the land came their old ruined cottage, which had given the farm its name. Poplar Farm. He was a pleasant man who knew little of the region. He had come from Exeter because farming land was cheaper to buy in East Anglia.

He was only briefly interested to find I had lived in the cottage. Our lives are just ancient history to others,
she wrote.

Her letter went on for several pages. She had fallen in love with cats and bought herself two blue Persians she intended to breed from. She talked of the charity work she did with her doctor friend, helping young women who had got themselves into trouble. A whole page was devoted to whether or not she would marry Dr Harding if he proposed to her. She was sure he was going to ask any day soon. She was forty-nine years old now. She had been waiting for the man to make up his mind for nearly twenty years. Was she being terribly foolish? Nellie thought that if the doctor had wanted to marry her, he would have asked her years ago. Vivian’s desire for him was unfathomable, except that her sister might like the idea of being a small-town doctor’s wife. That she would be taking another step up in her social world.

Vivian’s letter had come with a package. Several pink cotton handkerchiefs with a silk-embroidered B, for Birdie, and wrapped within them the hagstone. Vivian believed Nellie should keep it now. She thought it was the stone that had led this Mr Bell to her, reacquainting her with their old home. She was still afraid that her baby’s grave might be discovered one day, perhaps if there was a drought and the river dried up. Or equally a flood might
leave the remains of that tiny life on the riverbank for somebody to discover. Vivian could not bear the idea of this. She believed the stone should be with the sister furthest away from the Little River.

Nellie held it in her hand, cool and brown as a fish’s belly with a cream colour swirling through the round hole in its side. Between them the stone had taken on a deep importance. They had given it a place in their lives by keeping it. The stone was the only link they had to each other, apart from her daughter. She would keep it safe. That didn’t seem too difficult a thing to do.

Over the years she had thought to take Birdie back to see Vivian. She’d imagined her spending summers with her aunt, but always there was the worry that it might upset them all. Birdie had forgotten entirely the time she had spent with Vivian. It was best to keep it like that. Too complicated to explain the giving away and taking back of a child.

You know how it is
, Nellie wrote, and hoped Vivian could understand how it was to see a child grow into a young woman.

Time goes by and you don’t see anything changing. Children seem as though they will stay children for ever. That they will always need their hair setting in ringlets and will forever wear pinafore dresses. And then suddenly here I am sending you pictures of Birdie and she’s eighteen years old. A young woman who will no doubt soon enough meet a man, marry and have her own family. I want no spinster life for my daughter, Vivian. I want her to be happy. I know too well that years and years have gone by, but still, it seems like yesterday she was just a child. Just like yesterday too, Vivian, when I last saw you and yet that was many years ago now. One day soon, we must find the time to see each other again. And I will keep the hagstone safe, you can be sure of that.