Spilt Milk (18 page)

The farm dogs ran and barked and jumped around them. By the time they had caught enough chickens, Christopher and Matilda were red-faced and weak from laughter and the dogs had gone to drink noisily from the big metal water troughs.

Charles held a hen in the brown dirt. He took a twig and pressed it against the hen’s beak. He drew a short line in the ground with the twig. Slowly he took his hands off the hen. She didn’t move. He took another hen and did the same thing.

Birdie squatted on her heels and held her chicken with one hand and did the same. Her chicken stared at the ground. It was as though somebody had glued it there.

‘Now what?’

‘Now nothing. You just have to watch.’

The farm dogs paused, ears cocked, puzzling over the stillness. The sunlight beat down, rough and insistent. Matilda was bent over, hands on her knees, watching the hens. Christopher stood beside Birdie. Charles came and stood the other side of her. He was close enough to her that he could feel the warmth of her arm next to his. Charles stepped away. He lifted his hands and clapped. Christopher and Matilda yelled and did a rain dance together. Birdie joined in, laughing. The chickens came out of their trance and ran away, squawking as if in disgust at being used as entertainment. The dogs barked. The day tripped forwards like a man stumbling out of his dreams.

Birdie washed her hair in the kitchen sink, going outside to dry it in the hot breeze. She did her make-up standing with a small compact mirror down by the poplar trees near the river. Red lipstick. Mascara. After the baby she had got skinny, and she still looked fragile, though the sun had tanned her and her nose and cheeks were covered in brown freckles.

She had brought one dress with her, a pale green cotton day dress with a pattern of hollyhocks rising from its hemline. She had on her wedge-heeled sandals with ankle straps and was bare-legged. She had rubbed her legs smooth and hairless with a pumice stone and then used the last of her cold cream on them. It was good to make an effort. To try and forget for a short while the emptiness she felt.

‘There’s not much to dress up for out here, I’m afraid,’ said Charles, walking towards her. ‘I warn you, a dance at the Parish Rooms is not going to rival London.’

Birdie said she didn’t mind. She liked it here. As she spoke, she realized she was pleased to have this moment with him alone. But Charles Bell was Matilda’s fiancé. He was a good ten years older than her, and a farmer. She’d been brought up in a working-class pub in London. They had nothing in common. Nothing at all. And yet, every time he stood beside her, she felt he made something right. He had a way of listening when she spoke, as if he was thinking very carefully about what she said. She saw how animals liked him. How the cows were not afraid of him and the farm dogs followed him loyally. He had a goodness that she half hoped might lend itself to her.

‘I’m looking forward to it,’ she said, as they walked up the grassy path towards the house. ‘It’s been a long time since I last danced. If you set up a gramophone out here, I’d dance on the riverbank.’

‘Ah, well, we’ll have to try that one day,’ said Charles.

‘Come on, Birdie!’ yelled Matilda, standing beside her bicycle, waving at them both over the hedge up by the farm track.

‘You have unusual eyes,’ Charles said.

She almost didn’t hear him, his voice was so quiet.

She looked back at him. ‘They’re plain, I think. Plain grey.’

‘They remind me of stone. Granite. Or children’s marbles. I’m not doing a very good job at complimenting you, but I mean to say they’re lovely. I’ve never seen anybody with eyes like yours.’

‘My aunt has the exact same colour eyes.’

Now he reddened, shoving his hands in his pockets and tipping his head on one side. ‘Does she? I must admit I have never noticed.’

They stood, considering each other.

‘Hurry up!’ yelled Matilda, and they both walked briskly towards her.

Outside the village hall, children played in the gravel. They had skipping ropes and a group of boys played jacks, kneeling in the dust. Inside the hall was a long row of chairs against the wall where old men and women sat motionless in their black Sunday best clothes and felt hats, their hands in their laps. She wondered if some of them might have known her mother and her aunt. She could not imagine either woman sitting with these immobile old people.

There was a flurry of hopeful-looking bunting hung over trestle tables where sandwiches and tea were being served. Raffle tickets were being sold. There were prizes of eggs, butter and jam, and a bowl of bright-skinned oranges that was being admired by a group of children. Women outnumbered the men in the hall. A few soldiers played darts, and a group of local men in corduroy trousers and hobnail boots stood staring at the soldiers with a look of open mistrust.

Birdie remembered the dance halls she used to go to, the familiar smell of hair oil and sweat and the edge of urgency, the heavy smoke-filled atmosphere, men and women pressed together, their bodies filled with the beat of jazz. She imagined Joan here, peeking in the door, sneering at the quaintness of this place and suggesting they make a run for it while they could still escape.

Birdie, Matilda, Charles and Christopher stood by the bar. One of the farm lads, a boy called Jeremy, was discussing what he’d like to do with Hitler if he ever got his hands on him. Everybody talked like that. Thinking up new tortures. She had got tired,
when the soldiers were billeted at her aunt’s house, of hearing how many times Hitler was going to get his backside kicked. Jeremy, who was seventeen and a skinny lad who could have passed for younger, recommended drowning him in a sack down a well. ‘Like my gran does with kittens,’ he said triumphantly.

‘You’d have to get him into the sack first, you little runt,’ said Christopher, pushing him in the ribs. Christopher was going into the RAF after the harvest was finished. He was enjoying swanking it over the other men, discussing his training and where he might be posted.

‘And you, Charles,’ said Matilda, ‘will you go and fight?’

‘Farmers get to stay home,’ said Christopher.

‘Home Guard,’ Charles said, putting down his glass. ‘I’m in a reserved occupation.’

The band started up, an old-fashioned waltz, and Birdie realized she longed to dance. Several women danced together, slowly, carefully, as if a strict dance teacher was calling the steps to them.

‘Birdie,’ said Christopher. He held out his hand to her and they joined the dancers. He had a decent sense of rhythm and managed not to tread on her toes.

‘There’s a girl over there,’ said Birdie. ‘The one with a blue dress. She’s staring at us.’

‘Ah,’ said Christopher. ‘That’s Connie, Jeremy’s sister. We’ve known each other for ever. We used to collect snails together in the playground. I asked her to marry me when I was seven and she was six. She said she would if I gave her my catapult.’

Birdie laughed. She could imagine him as a child.

‘And did you?’

‘I told her I didn’t love her that much. She has never forgotten it.’

‘I suppose you’ve hypnotized chickens with her?’

‘Oh, chickens, snakes, you name it. And she’s staring at me, actually.’ He moved away from her slightly as they danced. ‘She forgave me the catapult in the end. We’re getting married.
Connie has a dream of a particular wedding dress, and she’s saving up coupons to get enough fabric. I was hoping we’d marry before I go away, but she is adamant that once she has the dress, we’ll fix a date.’

Birdie smiled at the girl, who frowned back at her. Of course she didn’t like to see another girl dancing with her boyfriend. Why should she? Birdie was a stranger in this small village. Charles and Matilda stood together, looking like a married couple already. When the song ended, Birdie sat down on a chair beside the old people. She longed to see Joan. To be home, in the city, where she understood the rules and the way of doing things. She watched Christopher talking with Connie. Matilda was dragging Charles onto the dance floor.

When Charles came over and asked her to dance, Birdie knew he was just being gallant. Matilda smiled at her. They both saw how lonely she was. Matilda had probably begged him to ask her poor wallflower friend to dance with him.

‘Oh, I’m quite tired,’ Birdie said, getting up. ‘I think I’ll cycle back to the farm.’

Joking, managing to smile, she walked out of the open doors into the moonlight.

Moths danced in front of her wheels as she cycled, fluttering white moths that moved in the odd, random way snowflakes could move. The insects were lifted back and forth by the warm air, she supposed, as snowflakes could be whipped back and forth by east winds. She felt a moth brush her face and wished she had stayed to cycle back with Charles and Matilda. The touch of the insect frightened her, though it could do no harm except to itself, leaving its wing powders on her cheek.

At the farm she walked along the riverbank, but again she felt frightened. The water at night looked dangerous. It glistened and there were small sounds everywhere, a horrid rustling in the reeds, small hiccuping noises that could have been frogs or, in her vivid imagination, dangerous animals. The trees swayed and
creaked. Earlier she had stood here with Charles and felt perfectly safe. Now she was like a silly child, afraid of the dark, conjuring up ghosts in every small ripple of movement she heard in the black waters. ‘Charles,’ she said out loud, as if his name could protect her from her fears.

The weather broke the next day and summer rain fell. Birdie and Matilda had volunteered to whitewash the dairy walls before they left. They had buckets and wide paintbrushes and were wearing hessian sacks tied with string around their waists to keep their clothes clean. Small flecks of straw kept landing on the brushes and sticking to the walls.

‘I think he’s going to ask me to marry him,’ said Matilda.

‘Who?’

‘Who? Honestly, Birdie, who do you think?’

Birdie stopped painting.

‘Charles,’ said Matilda. ‘This morning I was telling him how I liked the rabbits he’s got in that pen out the back of the house. He asked if I had ever thought of being a farmer’s wife. I said yes. I thought it would be very nice.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘He said he thought I’d make a good farmer’s wife.’

Matilda splashed whitewash onto the walls.

‘And you think that was a marriage proposal?’

‘Well, yes. Don’t you?’

Birdie pulled off her hessian-sack apron.

‘What about Colin?’

‘He’s a soldier. You know what they’re like. They promise you everything and then ship out the next day. I’ve got my future to think of. I’m not getting any younger. You’re young, Birdie. I’m nearly thirty. It’s now or never for me.’

Birdie looked out of the dairy doors to the fields beyond. Charles was walking towards the yard with a couple of dogs at his heels. He lifted his hand and waved. She pretended she hadn’t
seen him. She was glad this had happened. It made up her mind for her. She had to get on with her own life. She would go back to the city.

Joan had cut her hair short and small curls rose up around the curved nape of her long neck. She was wearing a black beret and a wide-shouldered jacket that hung off her tall, skinny frame. She had a confident way about her that Birdie didn’t remember.

‘You’re going to love the bedsit,’ Joan said as they pushed their way through the crowds. ‘I have a wireless set. A kettle, a single bed, a sagging sofa, a red rug I got from a junk shop and an armchair that was already in the room when I moved in. I also have a job in a typing pool, a thriving community of cockroaches in my flat, too many to give names to, actually. And,’ she lowered her voice, ‘a married lover.’

They stopped outside a dirty brick house with black railings. Joan gave Birdie a grin and searched in her bag for a key. ‘You’re shocked, aren’t you? I knew you would be.’

They descended mossy steps, Joan pushing bottles and rubbish out of the way with the toe of her shoe. She let them into the basement flat, closed and locked the door, pulled the blackout curtains shut, pegged them in place and lit a gas lamp.

‘Home, sweet home,’ Joan said, and offered Birdie a place to sit on the narrow single bed. They had a cup of tea and a few slices of bread and butter. Birdie kicked off her shoes. The city had taken her back, and nobody would ever know why she had left it in the first place.

Vivian thought she should really replace the satin counterpane on her bed. The carpets were threadbare too. The cats had scratched everything over the years. Perhaps a new rug might help. A tabby cat sat on the bed, purring. It lifted its
head to her and slowly closed its green eyes, a blissful expression on its face as she stroked it behind the ear. He had been the one who liked Birdie best. Now she had gone, the cat had come back to Vivian.

She slipped off the bed and opened her cupboards, looking at the rows of clothes. She was going to have a clear-out and take some of her clothes to the charity centre in town. She and a group of women were cutting up old clothes to make new nighties and pinafores and shorts for evacuee children. She pulled out a few cotton dresses and laid them on the bed. Her fur coat and the shoes and hats in boxes would stay. And there, hanging in a paper covering, was her wedding dress.

Poor Bernard Harding. He had been so angry when she had refused his proposition. She’d known he had something on his mind when he suggested they skip the bridge game organized by his sister and walk together on the beach front. Bernard surely didn’t want to take off his shoes and socks, roll up his trouser legs and walk on the sands with her just for the fun of it?

Finally he had asked her to marry him, and she had said yes. At least she had not been wrong to think he would propose marriage one day. They had walked in silence along the beach, seagulls crying, the wind roaring in their ears, so wonderfully bracing and salt-edged. A fawn-haired child ran backwards, flying a small red paper kite that danced and skipped along the beach, touching the sands, lifting again, tugging against its line. Vivian had held her face up to the sky and breathed deeply, watching the kite’s sudden swoop into the air high above them.

The desire to be married again had carried her along for years. It had been a project and she realized she needed projects, pilgrimages, acts of faith, whatever she wanted to call these private ambitions that gave meaning to her life. Waiting for Bernard Harding had been an act of faith.

The white-painted Georgian house he lived in would suit her well. Marriage to the doctor was to be a consolation for the loss
of Joe and her daughter, a prize for the years spent being a respectable widow, doing charity work and helping others.

By the time they were nearly back at the promenade and awkwardly trying to dust the sand off their feet, Vivian had changed her mind. Bernard hopped about on one foot, trying to get grains of sand from between his toes. He could have asked for her arm or leaned against her, but instead he swayed around on the beach like a drunk, falling from one foot to the other. She began to laugh. Bernard Harding frowned at her, his polished brogues in his hand slightly down at heel, his darned socks balled up in one of them.

‘I can’t marry you,’ she said suddenly. ‘I’m sorry, Bernard. I am sure I sound very foolish, but I want to marry for love and I don’t love you.’

The wind was blowing hard across the sea and it snatched Bernard’s trilby off his head, throwing it onto the beach below, where it skipped and rolled into the waves. He left his shoes with her and stamped across the sands to retrieve the hat from the water.

‘What is this about?’ he asked when he returned, his face mottled red by the exertion of his trek down to the sea and back.

‘Do you love me, Bernard?’

‘Vivian, what a strange question.’ He dusted sand off the brim of his hat. ‘At our age, don’t you think love is a little unlikely?’

Maybe it was the wind chasing around her skirts that made her feel frivolous, but she had to fight a strong impulse not to grab his blessed trilby and throw it back in the sea.

Later, in the steamy, glass-fronted conservatory of a tea room, she explained again. ‘My sister married for love. Twice. I realized just now that I do not want to marry for convenience. I want love. If not, I prefer to remain single.’

Poor Bernard. He’d looked so shocked. As if he thought she had gone mad! And yet she felt very sane.

‘I wonder if you are quite all right,’ said Bernard as she left that afternoon. He had obviously been thinking a lot about their
conversation. She saw it in his face. Heard it in his voice, that doctor’s voice he put on, the one full of professional certainty that crept in when he was unsure of a situation.

‘You will agree with me that over the years you have proved yourself a rather anxious female, Vivian. Let me just warn you. If you ever do find love, as you put it, don’t think that it will come without risk. You are in your fifties, my dear. We know each other so well. We are fair companions, aren’t we? If you want romantic love, I suggest you buy yourself some novels or go to the cinema and find it there.’

‘And if you want a housekeeper, Bernard,’ Vivian replied, surprised by the clarity of her words, ‘I suggest you put an advertisement in the
Lady
.’

Vivian took her wedding dress out of the wardrobe. It was ivory satin with rows of satin-covered buttons. It had been a rather old-fashioned gown, even back then, but what she had wanted. Dear Frank had given her everything she desired except for a child. In retrospect, he had been what some women called a mummy’s boy. Kind, but always needing to be the centre of attention. He’d wanted to be the child, she supposed. That’s why he had never wanted to be a parent. Vivian lay the heavy dress down on the bed. The rippling satin spread across the counterpane, a creamy lake of fabric the colour of spilt milk. No use crying over it, either, she thought. You couldn’t get the time back once it was gone. She held the dress up to her. It would still fit. She had kept her figure very well over the years. If Matilda wasn’t such a big-hipped girl, she would offer the dress to her to wear when she married Charles Bell. Perhaps she still might. They could unpick it and make something new out of it. All that day, Vivian went about her chores with a sense of calm.

Joan got Birdie a job within days. She came back from work with a bottle of red wine in her handbag, a present from her lover. She’d seen a sign for a kitchen hand at a tea shop down the street.
The pay was low, just over seventeen shillings a week. She knew Birdie couldn’t get somewhere to live and afford to eat on that kind of wage, but it was a start and they’d throw in a daily dinner and a cup of afternoon tea.

‘We will keep this wine for when you get a promotion to waitress and we can afford to buy cream cakes for tea,’ Joan said, putting the bottle under the bed.

They cooked meals on a small gas stove in the middle of the room and listened to big bands on the wireless every night at 10.30, watching the night sky from the window.

By October, the cold weather had set in and the sky was lit up by guns and searchlights. The city stank of charred buildings and broken sewers. Bombed streets were roped off and houses ripped apart; here and there walls remained, wallpaper intact, mirrors still hanging on them, piles of brick rubble full of broken furniture. Birdie discovered the pub had been bombed. Her childhood home had disappeared into a mountain of rubble and fire-damaged walls. She climbed over the bricks and piles of debris and found that the elder tree was still alive in the backyard. She took a branch of it back to the flat, telling Joan that Mother had always said it was a good plant for keeping flies off food. She had forgotten how its leaves smelled like cat’s piss. Birdie had to throw it away. Joan made tea. Losing your home was a terrible thing, Joan said.

Coming back from work, Birdie met the postman, who put two letters in her hand. They were both postmarked weeks earlier. He was sorry they had taken so long to arrive.

She went inside and opened them. One was from her aunt Vivian, saying Matilda had eloped with a soldier and married him. His name was Colin Hume. He was one of the soldiers she had billeted in the summer. Did Birdie remember him? Poor Charles Bell had been let down horribly. Birdie couldn’t help but feel glad. It was selfish of her, but she had always been worried that Matilda might tell Charles why she had been staying with
her aunt. That she might tell the sorry story of Birdie Farr and her adopted baby. She couldn’t bear the thought of Charles knowing that about her.

She sat down on the bed and opened the other letter. It was from her mother. She and George wouldn’t risk coming to London, so it was up to Birdie to find some time to come and see them. Aunt Lydia’s husband, Walter, had gone off with a neighbour’s wife. Apparently they’d been having an affair for years. Nellie said Lydia was dealing with it all quite well now it was in the open. Malcolm had been to see them on leave. He had met a girl and married her. She was the daughter of a German woman and an Englishman. Lydia did not like the girl at all, but then Lydia didn’t like anybody, did she? If Lydia could just stop judging others, she’d be a happier woman. Did Birdie remember Peter, Roger’s friend? Now that was a sad story. He had been serving as a telegraphist on a warship. The ship had been sunk by gunfire in Norway.

‘I’m so sorry. I thought you knew,’ said Joan when Birdie read her the letter. ‘Malcolm told me. It happened this summer. Actually, I saw a little bit of Malcolm after you left. We went dancing a few times.’

‘Let’s get drunk,’ said Birdie, folding the letters up and reaching under the bed for the wine bottle Joan had put there when she’d first arrived. Peter had died never knowing he had a daughter. It felt so final. She had lost two strangers – because that was what they both were, Peter and her child. She had known them both better than anybody in her life, and yet had not had any time to know them at all. Both of them had touched her for ever, and now they were gone.

‘Did you like him very much?’ asked Joan gently when Birdie began to cry. ‘I didn’t know you knew him like that. Birdie, has something happened to you? You’re different since you went away. Ghostly somehow. You cry so easily. Maybe it’s this bloody war, but it’s hard to know what you’re thinking half the time.’

Birdie shook her head. Was she ghostly? She pressed a hand to her chest. Certainly she felt vague and her heart was a dull thing, sluggish and slow under her fingers.

‘You’re right. I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s the war. It wears down my nerves. I keep thinking I’ll be walking along the street and a bomb will fall on my head.’

She took a swig of wine and managed a half-hearted smile.

‘Let’s get drunk,’ she said again. ‘Absolutely bloody drunk.’

In January, Joan declared 1941 would be the year of the bachelor girl. Her married lover had finished with her.

‘Good riddance,’ she said, waving her cigarette at Birdie for emphasis as she crouched over the gas stove, cooking cabbage and potato in a saucepan.

She brought home a book entitled
Live Alone and Like It
. She and Birdie read chapters together on etiquette for the lone female and how to live a successful life without a man. They told each other things would be all right. Friendship was what mattered. Birdie hoped that was true. She still felt empty inside. When she saw small children with their mothers, Birdie turned away from them. And yet she saw clearly she could never have brought a child up alone. She could barely afford to feed herself. She had to accept her daughter was better off without her.

Then Joan’s married man turned up with a bouquet of flowers and Joan forgave him. Birdie got her coat and went walking alone.

‘Please don’t call him my married man,’ said Joan when she got back. ‘His name is Michael.’

Birdie saw a notice for a waitress in a hotel. The job came with accommodation. A tall man with a face as low-looking as the weather offered her the position. She bought a second-hand pair of flat lace-up shoes and, with Joan’s dressmaking scissors, cut her hair short. Then she sent off letters to her mother and her aunt giving them her new address. Joan made a
last supper for them both. She said it was for the best really. She hoped there would be no hard feelings between them.

Charles folded the newspaper shut. If a bomb or a stray bullet didn’t actually kill you, then reading about the war just might make you give up the ghost. Everywhere was doom and gloom. Take this London hotel he was in. There was no hot water for a bath, and when he’d asked about it he’d been treated like an enemy spy trying to deplete the nation’s riches. He’d not been to London in years. Not since his brothers and his father went to fight in the first war and he and his mother had travelled to see them off on the train to France. He’d been a child then and overwhelmed by the city. He was not much changed. The city still felt alien. His eyes were too accustomed to the colour green. All these grey buildings, the dark paved roads, the ceaseless traffic, the jostling crowds. He was a man who liked hay meadows and all the secret moments of the countryside. Seeing a kingfisher fly over the river, its flash of blue so vivid it shocked his heart. That was worth living for. The earth under his feet was what mattered to him. His fields and his animals. He’d been a child who had liked roaming across the fields more than the streets of the city he’d grown up in.