The Child's Child (30 page)

I
N
M
ARCH,
Bristol suffered again. Maud made no attempt to find out what had happened to her mother, Sybil, and Ethel and her family. Plymouth had so far escaped the bombs, but suffered a two-night blitz on the twentieth and twenty-first, flattening the centre of the city and damaging suburbs. St. Andrew’s Church, Plymouth’s Anglican cathedral, was almost destroyed. Afterwards, for years, it bore on an arch left standing the single Latin word
Resurgam.
I will rise again.

Thirty thousand people were made homeless in Plymouth. One young woman, married to a serviceman, abandoned her now ruined house on Mutley Plain and, with her new baby in a sling strapped to her chest and her two-year-old in a pram, walked half across the destroyed city to wait for a train that would take her to Ashburton. She had once been a pupil of Elspeth’s and had heard that she lived in Ottery St. Jude. With another long walk ahead of her in the bitter cold, not until the dawn of the next day did she reach River House. Elspeth was pregnant with her second child, but she took Pauline Moran and her children in. Of course she did. She never thought twice about it.

News of their arrival soon reached The Larches. Hope brought it to her mother, not in bed at that particular time, but reclining on the old sofa, now reupholstered.

“We ought to have taken them. Elspeth’s going to have her baby soon, and they’ve only got Mrs. Grendon to help. Susan’s left and gone into the munitions factory. We’ve got two spare rooms, we ought to have taken them.”

“Please don’t be silly,” said Maud. “That sort of thing isn’t for you to decide. I’m the mistress of this house in case you’d forgotten.”

“Then I shall go up to River House and help whenever I can.”

“So long as you don’t forget your homework comes first.”

Hope was growing into a tall and good-looking girl. She wore her long, fair hair not in two plaits as was the fashion, but a single one, a thick, golden pigtail. Her eyes were a clear dark blue, her features classically regular, if the lips were a little too full for perfect beauty. She had become what Maud called (secretly to herself) the “spitting image” of Ronnie Clifford. Like most children, she had loved her mother dearly when she was younger. John Goodwin had never meant much to her nor she to him. But he had been there, he had been some sort of a companion, someone to talk to. These days her mother never spoke to her unless Hope spoke first. Sometimes she thought Maud wouldn’t notice if she walked out one day and never came back. Her love for her mother was receding fast and turning to contempt. What kind of a woman pretended to be ill when she was in fact well and strong? What kind of a
person
had no friends, rejected all offers of friendship, and had even begun to turn away from the one woman who had never deserted her in the face of all kinds of rebuffs?

Elspeth gave birth to her daughter, Dinah, after a long labour and a painful delivery, and Elspeth had to stay in bed for a week after it. Brave and resourceful, Pauline Moran had got her children out of Plymouth, had kept them warm in blankets, had walked for many miles with them, breast-feeding the baby on the way, but once at River House she had suffered a violent reaction, become feeble and frightened, unable to perform even the simplest household tasks. Hope took over. It was Easter, so there was no school, and she moved in.

“But, darling, you can’t do this,” Elspeth said. “It’s not right at your age.”

“A lot of nursemaids in Victorian times were no older than me and they managed fine.”

Hope too managed fine. Mrs. Grendon cleaned and changed beds and did the laundry. Guy showed an unexpected talent for cooking, much to his housekeeper’s disapproval. He even began making the bread, the wholemeal kind the government said everyone should eat. For two years now they had been growing vegetables in what used to be the flower gardens, keeping chickens and ducks and even a pig, which became a pet because no one had the heart—let alone the ability—to slaughter it when the time came. Hope looked after the babies, four of them, none more than two years and two months old. In January the meat ration had fallen to a new low level and stayed there, but Guy managed meals for Elspeth with eggs and vegetables, and Hope ran upstairs with them, sitting beside her while Elspeth fed Dinah, thinking but not saying, I shall do that myself one day.

“She is like another daughter to me,” Elspeth said to her husband.

When Hope finally went home to prepare for a return to school next day, Maud said she might have brought some eggs with her, the Hardings must have dozens, and when did they expect their first strawberries to ripen?

The sewing machine John had bought her Maud had used for only a few months. The rebuff she had received from Mrs. Imber remained with her always, and the sewing machine symbolised it. Every time she looked at it, even under its cover, she remembered Mrs. Imber’s words or constructed words Maud imagined the woman had said. The real words had been swallowed up in a series of insults. Maud’s life since Hope was born had become so sheltered and protected that she had never learnt to take criticism and perhaps profit from it. She had never understood that what she did might be less than perfect, or that any woman in her situation, if she wants to live a contented life, must show the society
she moves in that in spite of her past she is worthy of respect. She dealt with even the smallest problem by taking to her bed and brought up her child by inflicting precepts on her while giving her no example to follow.

Noblesse oblige, Mrs. Imber had said to her, Maud had taught herself to remember, meaning that upper-class people owed it to themselves to be condescending to what she had heard John call the proletariat. The work she had done, making that dress for the child who had died, hadn’t been up to Mrs. Imber’s standards. The woman had refused to allow her daughter to come to play with Hope. From making Maud indignant, this rejection had rankled over the years until it had now reached a peak of bitterness and resentment. In her memory Alicia Imber’s words had been so distorted that Maud now remembered her saying that the smocking on the dress was poor and far below the standard she expected; she wouldn’t “dream” of allowing Charmian to come to play with a lower-class child such as Hope.

“I hope you’ll never mention those people in this house,” Maud said to Hope. “Don’t you realise how grossly that woman insulted me?”

“It wasn’t Christian and Julian who said those things to you.”

“If you went to church like you should, you’d know that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, and that means mothers too. Or in other words, those boys are chips off the old block.”

Maud never went to church herself. The congregation was composed entirely of residents of Ottery St. Jude, the occasional guest of one of them, and now the influx from Plymouth. Setting foot inside St. Jude’s on a Sunday morning or evening would mean talking to her neighbours or even getting to know them. Hope never went. When the rector called—he said he was “looking in”—Maud told him she had gone back to being a Methodist. She was still shocked when her daughter said she was an atheist.
Hope lost her belief in God when He did nothing to stop the bombing of Plymouth but let the Germans make thirty thousand people homeless and left refugees from the stricken city, mothers with small babies, to wander about Dartmoor in the bitter cold of the night.

“You’ve been listening to that Pauline” was Maud’s only comment.

A
LICIA
I
MBER
married again. Her new husband was the widowed father of a boy Christian and Julian had been at school with. The big wedding was at All Saints, Dartcombe. The Hardings were of course invited and, to her surprise, Maud with Hope.

“Not that I would dream of going,” said Maud. “Fancy marrying a man called Brown, it’s almost as bad as Smith.”

“I’d like to go. You could wear your pink dress.”

Maud had used all her annual allowance of clothing coupons on it, fearing, as the rumour had it, that a range of hideous garments called Utility, with no trimmings, pleats, or cuffs, would appear in the shop. A year was to pass before this happened, but she was taking no chances. The dress had a full skirt and a tight bodice with tiny buttons from neck to waist. Twenty-five pearl buttons, she noted. Maud sometimes put it on when she was alone and wore silk stockings and high-heeled shoes with it. Once or twice Hope had come home and found Maud dressed like that with one of the best china teacups on a tray and the silver teapot.

The first time this happened, Hope was relieved that her mother, as she saw it, had at last had a friend to tea.

“No, I’ve been quite alone. Can’t you see there’s only one cup?”

But in the late summer of 1941 Maud had a visitor, unexpected of course, as anyone coming to The Larches must be. Maud’s first thought on seeing her sister Sybil on the doorstep, even before either of them spoke, was how much Sybil had aged. Still a couple
of years under forty, she had the lined face and round shoulders of an elderly woman. Quite a lot of grey was in her hair.

Maud was wearing the pink dress and the high heels, and this she thought a lucky chance. “What brings you here?” she said, but, because she was pleased with her appearance in contrast to Sybil’s, rather more graciously than usual.

“It’s so long since I was last here. Mother would have come with me but she’s not well. She wanted to know how you were getting on. But I see you’re expecting company.”

“Oh, no. I hope I don’t only dress properly for visitors.”

“You always were one for nice clothes,” said Sybil, and then, her gaze travelling from Maud’s hair, done in fashionable “victory rolls,” down across the pink silk to her feet in black patent shoes, “You look lovely, Maud, really beautiful.”

Enormously pleased, Maud said an enthusiastic “Well, thank you, Sybil. One has to do one’s best, don’t you think, hard though it is.”

Tea was over and the seedcake, homemade but not expected ever to be cut, had been half-eaten when Hope arrived home. Sybil made the requisite remarks about how she had grown and how was she getting on at school. Youngish people ought to remember how much they hated this comment and this enquiry when they were themselves young only a few years before, but it never deters them from forcing such challenges on adolescents. As Maud knew Sybil would as soon as she saw her, Sybil asked Maud to come to see their mother.

“I suppose you’ve forgotten what happened when I did come.”

“Can’t you be more tolerant? Can’t you be more forgiving?”

“I never forget and I never forgive,” said Maud.

She had forgotten Hope was within earshot. “You’ve never forgiven Mrs. Imber, have you, Mother?”

Maud said, “Go upstairs, Hope, and get on with your homework.”

“Okay, I will. I just want to say that I’ll be going to the wedding. Elspeth says I can go with them.”

“We’ll see about that, and don’t say
okay.
”

In the evening, after Sybil had gone to catch her train back to Bristol, Maud went upstairs and changed out of the pink frock, not for some other daytime garment, but into nightdress and dressing gown. She walked into Hope’s bedroom and told her that if she went to “that woman’s” wedding, she need not think she could come back to The Larches. This turned out to be an empty threat, even though Hope passed an almost sleepless night worrying about it. Where was she to go? What was she to do? Elspeth told her it wouldn’t happen, and Elspeth was right. She told Hope that if that happened, she always had a bed at River House. Hope had a lovely time at the wedding in a dress of Elspeth’s, as her own wardrobe was rather sparse. She particularly enjoyed seeing Christian take his mother up the aisle and give her away to Mr. Brown. England was passing through one of its food-deprived times of the war, and despite plenty of spirits, sherry, and wine at the reception, little was available to eat, skimpy brown-bread-and-tomato sandwiches—there was a bumper crop of tomatoes that summer—hard-boiled eggs, and gooseberry fool.

Guy drove Hope home to The Larches and waited ten minutes outside in case Maud turned her out. But Maud was in high good humour. A young farmer who had been bringing her eggs and cream and an occasional chicken unasked had called and asked her to marry him. After enquiring how he dared, Maud answered him with a bald no. Young Mr. Greystock was unwise enough to ask why not, and Maud said she would never marry. The truth was, she knew that if she said yes to him or to anyone else, in the banns she would be called “a spinster” instead of “a widow of this parish,” as if it were still possible to deceive the village as to her status. Jack Greystock said she didn’t mean that and he would try again. The following week he brought the eggs and cream as
usual and a rabbit too and a guinea fowl. It thrilled Maud that she had given the man what she called his “comeuppance” and she even asked Hope how the wedding had gone.

Hope said quietly that it was nice. She often used this phrase to her mother, about anything. It could be applied to How was school? How was Elspeth? What did you have to eat? Was it cold? Was it hot? But Maud questioned her less and less. Maud wasn’t interested in the answers she might get for she never made an enquiry of any importance.

As to Jack Greystock, she wouldn’t say she liked him, but she tolerated him because he seemed never to have heard the gossip about her in the village, or if he had, he didn’t care. She put everyone she knew to this test: Did they look down on her because of her ruined reputation?

R
EADING AN
account of Bertie Webber’s trial in the morning paper, Guy walked down to The Larches to tell Maud the outcome, that Bertie had been condemned to death for the murder of John Goodwin. Guy and his wife were strongly opposed to capital punishment, but both felt Maud would be in favour of it, would rejoice at the verdict.

She wasn’t pleased to see Guy. She was never pleased to see anyone. Hope let him in and called out to her mother that Guy was downstairs.

“You should call him Mr. Harding,” Maud replied, but she came downstairs, stood a yard or two from Guy, and said, “Hallo,” and that most frosty of greetings, “What brings you here?”