The Favourite Child (17 page)

Edward cast her a surprised but sympathetic glance as he and Jinnie hurried upstairs to wash their hands before supper. Bella went into the parlour and quietly closed the doors.

‘Good evening Pa, and how are you on this lovely June evening? I’m sorry I missed chapel this afternoon but it was far too nice to ...’

Simeon interrupted her. ‘Much as it pains me to bring the subject up, I’ve been speaking with Dr Lisle. As sidesman of a neighbouring chapel, he came to a meeting we were holding after the afternoon service to discuss this Mothers’ Clinic of yours. He had much to say on the matter, not least your involvement with it; the full details of which would have been better coming from you direct.’

Bella showed her surprise. ‘But you were well aware that I’d opened a clinic. I informed you in advance of my intention to do so. I also told you about the public meeting. Besides, you must have seen reports in the press.’

‘Happen I was too taken up with the health of your dear mother but the full significance of what you were about had not properly registered.’

‘Or perhaps, since it was women’s business, you didn’t properly listen?’

Simeon jabbed the air with his cigar. ‘The whole meeting was of the opinion that any woman will be brought safely through childbirth if she and her husband continue to live in faith and love and growing holiness, and with a little more natural self-restraint the numbers of children could easily be reduced.’

‘That seems to me to be a rather optimistic and decidedly unrealistic viewpoint.’

‘Are you saying that you don’t trust in the Lord?’

Bella closed her eyes for a brief second, to give herself time to gather breath and patience. ‘No, I’m not saying that at all. I’m merely pointing out that if two people love each other enough to marry, it is surely unrealistic to expect them not to engage in love making. Abstention could damage a marriage, could it not?’

‘And what would you know about the matter, miss?’ Simeon sharply responded, his neck flushed with anger, as if she’d touched a nerve.

Bella did not blush. She met the fury of her parent’s gaze with equanimity. ‘I hope that I understand something of life, Father, else how do I come to be here?’

Shocked by her response and momentarily lost for words, Simeon puffed out his reddening cheeks, then clenched his teeth furiously on his cigar and strode to the window in an attempt to disguise his embarrassment. He decided on a different tack. ‘Dr Lisle suggests that you deliberately attempted to keep the true import of your work from me. What you are doing is peddling pornography. You are actively promoting a sin against morality and, even worse, against the Will of God. Now that I understand fully what it is you are up to, I demand that you stop. At once.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Bella felt herself grow quite still. She couldn’t believe that her ever tolerant, mild mannered father had turned into this narrow minded bigot.

‘I will not have my own daughter involved with encouraging licentious behaviour. You must cease your impertinent preaching of sexual impropriety to the masses.’

‘Impertinent... Utter tosh! I teach nothing of the sort.’

Simeon now appeared to be turning purple before her very eyes. ‘You deny that instructing the young that unchastity can be safe, is not a sin?
How dare you
? I never thought to hear a daughter of mine attempt to thwart the law of propriety in such a manner. You are taking advantage of your mother’s ill health to run wild and
I will not have it
.’

‘I am of age, Father. I can do as I please.’

‘Not in
my
house!’

‘Then I’d best leave your house.’

‘Don’t you dare answer back to me, miss.’

Never, in all her life, had her father spoken to her in such a way and Isabella strove to hold on to her own temper. Certain that Dr Lisle had twisted the truth out of a peevish desire for revenge born out of her rejection of him, she attempted to put the matter right in as calm a manner as she could muster. She walked over to her mother’s chair and sat down. ‘Pa, I think you have got hold of the wrong end of the stick entirely. We are not, in any way, teaching birth control to the unmarried, nor turning any woman into a prostitute.’

‘Do not use that word in my...’

‘I’m sorry but I must call a spade a spade. Our purpose is to help those overburdened wives and mothers who already have more children than they can cope with.’ For all her voice was cool, even serene, the clenched fists in her lap told a different story. ‘And to prevent the very same sort of disaster happening to their own married daughters. Yearly pregnancies, or frequent miscarriages and stillbirths should not be accepted as the norm. The result is weakened offspring, even damaged children who are handicapped in some way, as well as an unhealthy mother who cannot possibly manage. It’s not right and must be stopped.’

‘
Not by you, miss
!’

‘Why not by me? Because I am your daughter, Simeon Ashton, manager of a fine cotton mill and person of standing in the community? Doesn’t that make me even more responsible since I have the time, intelligence and wherewithal to help?’

‘Welfare clinics have already been established for the poor, and that is quite sufficient. If something more needed to be done, don’t you think the government would have dealt with the matter?’

Bella was on her feet again, unable to sit still. ‘No, actually, I don’t. Working to alleviate poverty doesn’t win votes, does it?’

Simeon rocked backwards on his heels, smoothing his moustache in an attempt to maintain his temper. ‘I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal thinking, tolerant man who wants to provide for his family, but in my opinion it isn’t the job of a woman to interfere in matters more suitably left to her betters. If there are differences between folk, the class system as you call it, it must be there for good purpose. I see no help for it. There are some people incapable of organising their own lives.’

‘Because they’ve never been given the opportunity, or the education to enable them to do so.’ Bella could feel her control slipping, her patience being swamped by a red hot rage that matched Simeon’s own. ‘Who cares whether the likes of Mrs Stobbs or Mrs Blundell has one too many children so that it kills her? Certainly not the government. The conservatives exercise conventionally narrow-minded and misguided objections to birth-control and the socialists believe, again misguidedly, that having the poor produce more and more children will somehow provide them with the fodder to fight against the established order. Nobody, beyond women such as Marie Stopes, Mary Stocks and her ilk, seem to appreciate that the application of birth control is essential in creating a just and healthy society. Absolutely essential.’

Simeon ground out his cigar and strode, stiff-backed to the door. Here he paused, hand grasping the polished brass knob and turned a bland, flat calm, expressionless face to his daughter. ‘You will close your clinic tomorrow. First thing in the morning. Then we’ll say no more on the subject.’

Needless to say Bella did not close the clinic the next, or on any other morning. She did, however, pay a call upon Dr Nathaniel Lisle at his surgery and told him, as bluntly as she dared, to keep his nose out of her affairs in future. ‘I would be obliged if you did not attempt to stir up trouble between myself and my father by feeding him emotive and inaccurate arguments against birth control. Your task is to tend to my mother who, I believe, is fitter than she admits, rather than interfere in how I spend my time.’

‘It may suit your conscience to believe your mother to be better than she actually is but as the unmarried daughter of the house, the duty of her care is entirely in your hands. You should be at her side night and day, not playing at politics and misguided good works.’

Bella did not demean herself with further argument but stormed out through the waiting room, scattering leaflets advertising her Mothers’ Clinic to his patients as she went.

Dr Syd’s advice was to take it on the chin. Jinnie assured Bella that she was indeed doing something worthwhile and even Edward offered his support, saying that their father was always quick to lose his temper if he felt his good name was under attack. The result was that father and daughter were barely on speaking terms. It was a sad and depressing state of affairs but Bella grew determined not to give in. She refused, absolutely, to close her precious clinic.

In retaliation Simeon decided that his prospective daughter-in-law was the one who now deserved his care and attention and there came a veritable stream of obliging helpers to the house. A girl to cut and dress Jinnie’s hair, a dressmaker, bootmaker, milliner and anyone else who had the faintest idea how to make a silk purse out of a cow’s ear, as he jokingly put it. Jinnie accepted it all with surprising equanimity, even submitting herself to weekly elocution lessons where she recited endless little ditties about Susie selling sea shells or ragged rascals running around rocks. The two shillings an hour appeared to be wasted, however, as she continued to recite the poems in a resounding Lancashire accent.

Bella watched and listened to all these activities and improvements with wry amusement and considerable pleasure, despite finding herself more and more left out in the cold. One evening Simeon invited both Jinnie and Edward to accompany him to the theatre but Bella was not included in the party. He merely cast his most disapproving glare in her direction and said that he assumed she would be far too busy with her “patients” to spare the time for such trivialities.

‘I shall sit with Mother,’ Bella tartly responded, determined not to react to this loss of favour.

Emily, however, seemed less than grateful for the extra attention and whatever Bella did for her, she objected to it. When Bella brought her supper, she said the soup was cold. When Bella read from
Wuthering Heights
, she asked for
Jane Eyre
instead. If Bella tucked in her sheets or drew up her shawl, Emily would try to slap her hand away. Yet if she did not, she would complain of a draught on her neck.

‘This en - engagement - is - all your - f-fault,’ Emily informed her, dragging the words out with pained difficulty.

Bella never made any comment about this irritating habit which came and went at will. She simply went along with the masquerade. ‘I know, I know. I brought Jinnie here but not for a minute do I regret doing so. I love her dearly, as does Edward, and he is surely free to marry her if he so wishes.’

‘I’ve heard all about your licentious behaviour. Utterly shocking.’

‘Licentious? Oh, for goodness sake Mother, don’t you start. What I do at the clinic is important to me. Why can’t anyone care about how
I
feel? I surely deserve my freedom too.’

‘Why? I never had any. Why should you be allowed to do as you please?’ Emily peevishly responded in ringing tones, revealing the bitter jealously she harboured against her more liberated daughter.

‘Because there are too many women needing help.’

‘Let them suffer. I had to watch your father curb his natural instincts because we could not afford children in the early days of our marriage, why should not others suffer?’ And then as if realising she had perhaps revealed too much, or else remembering her supposedly precarious state of health, Emily sank dramatically back upon her pillows, fluttered a hand to her throat and let out a tremulous sigh. ‘You behave in this way only to vex me. It’s time you were m - mirrored.’

‘Mirrored?’

‘Mirrored. Dr Lisle - w-wed you timorrer.’

‘Oh God, you mean
married
! You want me to marry Dr Lisle? I think not, Mother. I doubt he’s my type.’ Bella almost laughed out loud at the very idea and later that day when Dr Lisle himself appeared, offering again, in his simpering, condescending manner, to personally escort her to the theatre should she have a wish to go, Bella almost got a fit of the giggles. With commendable restraint she thanked him for his kind offer and said she really had a great deal of paperwork to do.

He looked peeved, as if she didn’t properly appreciate the great honour he did her. Bella merely smiled and sailed out of the room, saying she would leave him with his patient as, with no qualifications herself, she was quite unsuitable to assist in medical matters. It was an unkind remark she later came to regret.