Spilt Milk (25 page)

‘You should keep your distance,’ said Connie when they drove home. ‘Some of our residents never have visitors. They latch on to people. One of the old men asked me to marry him the other day. He said he was doing me a favour. That he didn’t like to see an attractive woman like me living like an old maid. Cheeky sod! And then when I got home and told Judith, she said that while she didn’t see me marrying an old-aged pensioner, she did think it was a shame I hadn’t met anybody. I mean, really. I’ve done perfectly well on my own, haven’t I?’

‘Well, yes, you have,’ Birdie said. ‘You’re braver than most, I suppose.’

‘Don’t know if it’s bravery or that I’m too stuck in my ways. I’m sorry, Birdie. I’m talking about myself when you’re upset. Mrs Louisa Livet is known for being a tricky old girl. She drives some of the nurses mad, following them round, telling them her stories all the time. Actually, we’re having a chap come and interview some of the old folk for a book he’s writing. A history professor from a university. I bet she’s rehearsing for him. She loves a bit of attention, that one.’

Birdie cycled back from Connie’s in the dark. She saw the yellow glow of lights from the farmhouse and was glad to be home. She decided she would take her tea in the staffroom next time she played the piano for the residents at Hymes Court.

It rained heavily all through February and there was talk of flooding. Birdie’s mother sent a smelly frond of seaweed in the post, suggesting she hang it by the back door to predict the weather. It was bright with salt and grains of sand. Birdie threw it away. She didn’t need anything to predict the weather. You just had to look out of the window. The rain hadn’t stopped in days.

Framsden and his father traipsed across the meadows. They had moved the sheep into the barns, and now the farm dogs were herding the cows back home. The animals would not waver from the path they knew across the fields, the churned-up track that was a sea of liquid mud.

‘They say the river floods every fifty years or so,’ said his father, calling a dog to heel. ‘I was talking to an old boy in the pub and he tells me they had terrific floods round here in 1913.’

That evening, after they’d eaten, the electricity went out. The fire was lit in the sitting room and Framsden’s father sat in his armchair beside it, trying to read a farming magazine by candlelight. His mother sat on the sofa, knitting. She wore no make-up, and Framsden thought she looked younger without her mascara
and red lipstick. The fire crackled. They were unworldly, his parents. His father hadn’t even fought in the war. He was a pacifist who didn’t dare stand up and say what he was. And what did his mother believe in? A clean kitchen. Volunteering for flower duty in the church. Singing old songs to old people. There was a world beyond the farm that neither knew anything of.

Framsden woke late the next morning to the sound of running water. The drainpipes were overflowing, the rain slanting across the landscape, shutting down the view across the fields.

The breakfast plates were still out on the kitchen table when he went downstairs. His mother’s tea-coloured stockings hung on a line above the cooking range. His father’s socks dangled beside them, their heels darned and mended. It surprised him to see such a messy kitchen. He made some toast and ate it. He was washing up his plate when his mother came in through the front door, soaking wet, pulling off her coat and headscarf.

‘Are you OK?’ Framsden asked. ‘Did you fall in the river?’

She stood looking at him as if she didn’t know him. Her clothes were soaked through, her hair plastered to her head.

‘Mum?’

‘I went to see Connie over the back fields and got caught up in flooding.’

‘You look like you’ve been swimming,’ said Framsden. ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ she answered, clearing the breakfast bowls. ‘But the floods are terrible. Nobody is going anywhere today. We need to stay home. This rain is not letting up. Go and see if your father needs a hand with the sandbags.’

Birdie turned away from him, unhappy to be lying to her son. And yet she had done what she did for him. She had faced up to things for him. That had been the promise she’d made him when she first held him in her arms. A promise she knew she could not go back on now. That woman at the nursing home, Mrs Louisa
Livet, had made her realize she had to act on that promise. If Birdie was a cold fish, then it was only because her secrets had made her that way. And the secrets were gone now. She felt a sick fear over what she had done. A panic that crept up her spine and swam around in her chest. She had got things very wrong. She put a hand to the wall and tried to breathe calmly but still couldn’t catch her breath. Her chest heaved and her head spun.

She climbed the stairs and went into her bedroom, pulling off her soaked clothes, thinking of Kathleen. How cruel the woman had been. Birdie had just tried to explain that she hadn’t wanted to give up her daughter. She had been young and had no money or any way of supporting herself. Back then, you didn’t have a choice.

Kathleen had been polite at first. Ella was too, when she came into the kitchen. She looked so grown up. It had shocked Birdie to see how she’d changed. Made her feel unsure of what she was doing suddenly.

‘Ella? I hardly recognized you,’ she said, the first thing that came into her head. Kathleen had already hardened herself against Birdie; was already wondering how to get rid of her, Birdie knew.

‘Hello, Mrs Bell,’ said Ella. She wore a navy-blue mini-dress with a white Peter Pan collar. Her blonde hair was shoulder length, an Alice band holding it off her face. Such a pretty young woman with her dark eye make-up and pale frosted lipstick. All the confidence in the world. Ella lit a cigarette. ‘I thought I heard voices. Do you need something?’

The three of them stood in Kathleen’s kitchen, the red horse rosettes dangling on the beams, moving slightly in the warm air coming off the stove. Kathleen leaned against the cooking range.

‘Just tell me the truth,’ Birdie asked. ‘I know this is difficult, but I have been sure of something for years. I think you know what I am talking about.’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t a clue. But do go on.’

‘She’s my daughter, isn’t she? You felt it too, didn’t you, Ella?
Do you remember when you were small, how you wanted me to be your mother? I don’t want to cause trouble; I don’t want to claim Ella. I just want to know for sure. I gave her up and you adopted her. I know this is hard, but, Kathleen, you just have to say. You adopted her, didn’t you? I have no right to her. I’ll leave you alone, but I need to know because my son has a sister and he deserves to know the truth.’

A car horn sounded in the backyard at the cottage and Birdie jumped, imagining it might be Kathleen or, worse, Norman, coming to tell Charles his wife was insane. That’s what Kathleen had called her.
Insane
. She’d threatened to telephone the police if Birdie didn’t get out.

Birdie went to the window and saw a Land Rover splashing through the yard. She recognized the new garage owner in the village. Alan Jacobs. Charles and Framsden crossed the yard towards him, heads down against the rain.

‘I’ve been driving round helping motorists,’ she heard Alan Jacobs say when they came into the house, shaking their hats and coats in the hallway. ‘There’s a grey car stuck in the floods. I was worried there might be somebody in it. Nearly drowned myself wading out to check.’

Birdie sat on the top stair, hugging herself. A grey car? Ella had driven her mother’s grey car.

‘For God’s sake, Mrs Bell,’ the girl had said. ‘For God’s sake, Mother, tell her to go.’

Ella had driven past Birdie on the flooded road. She had not even looked at her.

‘The Hubbards have a grey Morris Minor,’ Framsden was saying.

Alan said he’d seen the keys still in the ignition. He thought the owner must have parked it up somewhere and then the floods floated the car away.

‘They’ll have a shock when they come back for it. Perhaps I’ll call by the Hubbards’ farm and see.’

‘I’ll come over with you while it’s still possible to get there,’ Charles said. ‘They’ve got a generator they might lend me. We’ve no electricity here.’

Birdie went back into her bedroom and watched Charles and Alan leaving in the Land Rover. It was over. Soon Charles would know. Framsden was heaving sandbags into place at the doors of the wooden barns. He looked small, crouching down in dark clothes, vaguely discernible against the black-soaked clapboard building, his body turning to rain, slipping through her fingers. If it wasn’t for the love of him, she would have gone out into the floods and let the river take her.

By late afternoon the river, so swollen and full of itself, had burst across the fields and encircled the house. Water started coming in under the back door. It washed in so fast that boots and shoes floated around the room, and Framsden and his mother went upstairs, taking food and flasks filled with hot soup. The farm dogs bounded up the stairs after them.

Framsden hadn’t been in his parents’ bedroom since he was a child. It was a bare-looking room. Wooden floors. A chest of drawers and a dark wardrobe. A faded red rug and a pale green bedspread. The new Teasmade his parents had bought at Christmas was on a table, a crocheted doily underneath it, the edges hanging like heavy cobwebs. A pile of books was on the floor: his father’s reading matter –
The Scarlet Pimpernel
,
Moonfleet
, a book of Tennyson’s poetry. A vase filled with snowdrops from the garden on top of the chest of drawers.

His mother was convinced they’d be rescued and that he should look clean for their rescuers. She’d insisted he put clean clothes on. He’d been in his work jeans and old sweater, which smelled of sheep. He could see she was frightened by the floods. He’d given up arguing with her. Now he sat on her bed, knees up, in his best suit and tie. Bought at Burton’s in town for his eighteenth birthday. ‘Every man needs one good suit,’ his father had said.

There was a sudden loud bang downstairs. The dogs, who had settled under the bed, barked and growled. Framsden took the lamp and went on to the landing. He heard the sound of water rushing and swung the lamp to the stairs. The flood waters had broken a window. Water swirled halfway up the stairs now. The front door had burst open and an icy wind rushed towards him. Something large and dark slammed into the open doorway. For a second he thought it was a huge fish. A whale, a kind of monster trying to get into the house. He thought of his grandmother and her stories of river monsters. The tale of the giant pike that had come in through the door. He swung the lamp forwards and went down another step. Through the doorway the wind screamed and roared up the stairs.

‘It’s my boat!’ he yelled up to his mother. ‘I can see it. It’s caught on the verandah. Come here, take the lamp. I’m going to see if I can grab hold of it.’

He waded until he was chest-deep in water and the boat whacked his shoulder, sending him under, gulping dirty water, scrabbling to get a foothold somewhere. He rose to the surface and grabbed the side of it. His mother came down the stairs towards him.

‘We’re going to die,’ she was saying. ‘We’re going to die.’

‘Get in the boat!’ he yelled, and grabbed her hand as she stepped blindly down into the waters.

They sat together with the farm dogs at their feet. The boat rocked on the water. The rain had stopped, but the waters were still moving fast in the darkness of the night. The oars had been lost. As long as they floated in the open, they would be all right. If they hit a tree or got tangled up in the submerged hedgerows, then they might be tipped out. His mother clung to him.

‘I have done something terrible,’ she said into his ear, and he bent to her, putting his arms around her. ‘I saw Kathleen and Ella this morning,’ she said. ‘I told them I thought Ella was my daughter.’

Framsden wasn’t sure he’d heard her right.

‘You’re old enough now. It’s time you knew. You have a sister. I had a child before I met your father. She was adopted by a couple who lived locally. I always believed it was Ella. I told her. Kathleen threw me out of the house. Now I can see I have made a mistake. I’ve been so stupid. I’ve ruined everything. I’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake.’

A sister? Framsden wished he could get out of the boat. His mother was making no sense.

‘Ella Hubbard is my sister?’

‘No, no. Not her.’

She talked about a man called Peter. He tried to understand.

‘I have made so many mistakes,’ she told him. ‘I think I want to die.’

‘We might bloody die,’ Framsden said, ‘if this boat hits a tree.’ He told her to be quiet. He couldn’t bear to listen to her.

At dawn they floated up the village high street, passing a red pillar box. His mother was ashen-faced, lips blue with cold. Policemen waded out to the boat. The river left its silted mud everywhere; mud and shallow lakes of water, the wind rippling its surface. Framsden saw James Hubbard helping the rescue workers in the village. They both pretended not to know each other.

His father arrived at mid-morning. The waters around the farm were already going down, he said. He and Alan had put on waders and got to the farm on foot that morning. He’d found the house with the doors and windows smashed open and thought they’d been swept away.

‘And Ella?’ Framsden asked.

She was fine. She had left her mother’s car on the road and got a lift to town. She was safe.

‘Framsden, are you coming? I have to get back to the farm,’ said his father. He walked away with Alan.

‘Mum?’

‘You go,’ she said, and turned her face away from him.

Framsden saw Alan put his arm around his father’s shoulders, as if he needed consoling. When Framsden looked back, Connie was sitting beside his mother. He stood still for a moment, unsure of what to do. But Connie shook her head and waved him away. He turned and followed his father.

At home, Framsden’s father worked day and night, cleaning out the rooms, stripping the wallpaper off the flood-damaged walls, setting bonfires of spoilt hay and straw that sent thick, billowing clouds of smoke across the yard. A generator was set up in a barn and they had electricity again. An abattoir lorry came for the dead farm animals. Framsden’s mother did not come home, and neither of them spoke of her or of the sister Framsden was meant to have.