A Mother's Love (21 page)

‘If we were to have the christening here,’ she said finally, unable to maintain her sulk any longer, ‘what about my parents?’

‘I imagine they’d enjoy being here,’ he said lightly, reaching for a liberal helping of home-made mayonnaise to drown his final bits of salad in. ‘Make a change from London, I should think.’

‘They might not want to come all this way.’

‘Not to see their own grandchild christened? Of course they will.’

‘It’s a long way, Matthew.’

‘A few hours by train – not all that long.’

‘Wouldn’t it be easier to have it in London? Dad does have his business to look after. He can’t just walk off.’

Matthew munched on the last of his salad like a contented cow. ‘Your brothers would most likely keep an eye on the place.’

‘They might like to be at the christening.’

He grinned sagaciously. ‘If I know young men, they’d have some other axe to grind. Isn’t John keeping company with a young woman these days? And you mentioned George was talking seriously about becoming engaged to that Alice – I don’t know her other name – of whom he has been seeing a lot these past eighteen months. Again, when do you ever see them?’ He chuckled and pushed away his empty plate. ‘I’m sure they’d rather be murmuring sweet nothings into the ears of their young ladies than attend some christening.’

She had no answer to that argument. Matthew reached for an apple from a silver dish of fruit. She watched him regard it, polish the red skin to a fine gloss against his waistcoat, then take an enormous bite.

In spite of herself, Harriet’s lips twitched into a smile of amusement. He was more like a boy sometimes, instead of a man of twenty-eight and a father, talking of George and John as though they were mere boys when they too were men. She didn’t hold with his mother’s decision at all, still felt annoyed for his ready compliance with the woman, but she loved him so very much. How could she hurt him, content with the decision made and believing she was too, by going against him?

The afternoon became pleasant with only themselves to please. But all that changed the moment Eleanor Craig emerged from her room. Harriet immediately crept into herself like a tiny tortoise, wishing she did have a shell to cover herself with. For all her apparently poor health, Eleanor overpowered her with that weight of dignity oozing out of her. It was a wonder she didn’t explode from it.

When Henry Craig returned home in the late afternoon, his large frame towering over her, Harriet’s misery was total. She longed for the refuge of the room she’d been assigned, even though it wasn’t with Matthew. But that was hours away: there was dinner to get through yet.

Dinner on a Saturday didn’t warrant such a sumptuous spread, surely. It was a formal affair, with Honeyford standing to one side, and a couple of female servants hovering, ready to serve or clear away under his direction. The meal commenced by Honeyford pouring a liberal measure of deep red wine into each crystal goblet – they had to be crystal, the way they glittered. In her growing uneasiness she drank most of it without thinking and had it immediately refilled. She had not eaten much at lunch, so had come empty-stomached to the dinner table, and the wine went instantly to her head. What made it worse was that although Matthew looked across at her, his parents seemed to go to great pains to ignore the incident.

She wanted to cry, flee from the table, but all she could do was pick at her meal, frightened lest she use the wrong knife or eat too fast or drop something on to the napkin across her lap. The wine had made her dizzy; fear had made her awkward, made her fumble too often. She had no idea what it was she was eating – some sort of soup, some sort of game, some sort of sickly pudding that refused to stay on her spoon.

Once it made a horrible sucking, gurgling sound at her as she made to prise a spoonful away from the serving on her dish. She giggled. It was the wine, of course, but all three stopped talking, while Honeyford delicately cleared his throat. Matthew asking if she was all right made it all the worse. She managed to mumble that she was perfectly all right and went on trying to eat the revolting souffle.

She was glad when dinner was over. But more torture was to follow: the ladies – she and Matthew’s mother – retired to the sitting room, as was the custom, while the men – Matthew and his father – lingered on to chat over after-dinner port and a cigar.

Getting through the half-hour cloistered with his mother until the men joined them was something like a nightmare. Still dizzy from the two glasses of wine, and fighting to fill hiatus after hiatus, her attempts at small talk struck even her ears as utter tosh. When they did join them, Matthew’s easy conversation at least left her free to sink, relieved, into a corner of the sofa beside him.

The evening was interminable. After Jamie had been brought down to be cooed over prior to going to bed, there seemed to be little to stay up for. Except that Henry Craig deemed it opportune to toast the baby’s health with a drop of his best Madeira.

The wine was a good vintage, Harriet imagined, and strong, she was sure, but very nice and wanning, slackening her taut nerves. She had a second glass to help them on their way – and when tentatively offered a third, accepted readily. After that things didn’t feel so bad after all. Matthew’s mother was really quite nice, she decided, his father more a rough diamond than a hard nut. She was suddenly finding all sorts of things to talk about, most of which came out very wittily to her immense satisfaction. Suddenly it struck her that the journey here this morning was taking its toll. She stifled several yawns, found them funny; fell against Matthew’s shoulder giggling.

Vaguely she heard Mrs Craig’s voice with a frigid edge to it.

‘I think your wife is rather tired, Matthew.’ She was being helped up off the sofa, finding the process hilarious, and guided out of the room to the hall, up the stairs that seemed too steep for her feet. As she stumbled, Matthew picked her up bodily and carried her the rest of the way to her room.

Matthew was angry with her as he helped her out of her clothes and into a nightdress; the way he spoke to her as he got her into bed reduced her to maudlin tears but he didn’t stay to listen to her explanation about the wine, merely stalked out of the room. The excess of wine sent her to sleep quickly but woke her early, to be plagued by the last night’s events. Pre-dawn birdsong spoiled any chance of her going back to sleep and forgetting it all. The sound of the birds was eerie, and she was glad when daylight came.

She mentioned it to the maid who came in to wake her. The girl said, ‘Them’s robins, madam. Them do sing earlier than most. Coming into song, they are.’

Harriet sat up carefully, wincing against a jolting headache as her morning tea was handed to her. ‘But they were so loud.’

‘Good Lord, madam, that’s nothing. You should ’ear the dawn chorus in the spring. That wakes you up, that does, and keeps you awake. But it’s lovely with the dawn all rosy red and them singing away. Now if you want anything, madam, there’s a bellrope just beside you.’

The morning began in frigid silence, but for the odd obligatory exchange of words when need arose, delivered as briefly as possible. Her eyes heavy, Harriet mentally cringed from her mother-in-law’s averted gaze, her father-in-law being very obviously absent.

She overheard Matthew and his mother in some sort of heated argument after she had gone upstairs to see Jamie, voices harshly whispering. She knew it was about her. Soon afterwards, Matthew came up to tell her that they had a long journey ahead of them and it was best to start early, meaning straight away.

‘You’ve got your wish,’ he said stiffly as they waited for Miss Gilbert to bring her charges downstairs dressed for travel. ‘The christening’s to be in London after all.’

She was shocked. ‘But I didn’t mind it being here. What’s made the change?’

‘Don’t tell me you didn’t work all evening towards that end, Harriet. You disgraced me. You disgraced yourself. You intended for them to see you in such a bad light they would never want you here again. Do you know what you’ve done? How you’ve made me feel with my own parents? How you’ve divided us? It’s taken me years to get them to accept you. Now you do this. I’m ashamed.’

‘I didn’t intend anything. It was that sherry-stuff. That Madeira. I hadn’t eaten much all day because I was so strung up. It made me go peculiar.’

What did he mean, taken him years to get them to accept her? Who cared, anyway? They were just stuck-up, ignorant prigs for all their high and mighty attitude. But to see Matthew behaving like this towards her who had done nothing intentionally wrong – she was angry and hurt and blamed them utterly.

‘I didn’t do it on purpose, Matthew,’ she defended, but at that moment Miss Gilbert came down with the children, stopping any reply he might have made. And perhaps it was just as well.

The journey home was as silent as their leavetaking of his parents. The family brougham, protecting them from a thin morning drizzle, took them to the station. Matthew helped her down from it but it was a mere duty and there was no smile for her. She was too crestfallen by now to attempt to cajole him out of his mood.

It was no better arriving home. The wet afternoon had begun to draw in early, and the four-wheeler conveying them from Waterloo Junction rumbled through almost-deserted, rain-washed London streets, depressing her still further. Their musty smell, however, was infinitely preferable to that dank, woody odour of wet countryside, so full of a lingering loneliness that she still felt as dejected by that as by Matthew’s continuing moodiness.

Edgy, she turned on Sara as they came into the house, railing at her for getting under her feet. It was a natural reaction and didn’t warrant him saying what he did.

Very well, she had raised her voice in irritation, but Matthew had no need to turn on her, telling her she had little to shout about after the way she’d behaved, with Miss Gilbert overhearing it all. It was unfair, and she snapped back at him, very close to tears, telling him so in no uncertain terms. Miss Gilbert, James clutched in her arms, hurried Sara before her up the stairs as both parents glared at each other, snapping like small dogs, finally breaking off to sweep separately into different rooms.

In the parlour, dreary in the fading wet light, she lit the central gas lamp and furiously swished together the heavy curtains. She remembered the glow that had stolen over her after those three glasses of madeira and wished she could feel that way now. There was no Madeira but there was some brandy in the corner cabinet. Pouring herself a small glass was satisfyingly like defying Matthew and she found a certain pleasure in that private gesture. She took a tentative sip, grimacing at the taste, but it took away some of the hurt, and she drank a little more.

The second glass tasted much better. It made her feel better, too. When Matthew eventually came into the room to apologise for his conduct, his naturally fair nature enabling him after a while to see both sides, she was quite ready to accept his apology with magnanimous grace, the bottle now safely back in its cabinet, and the glass hidden.

Jamie wasn’t proving as robust as his start in life had predicted. Those first months produced a crop of baby illnesses: croup, then a persistent ear infection, and one cold after another.

Horder, whom Matthew had engaged as the family practitioner when they’d first moved into Victoria Park Road, was a constant visitor, and a boon to Harriet, whose ever-present fear was of Jamie becoming a sickly child.

‘He’ll grow out of it – be as strong as a lion by the time he’s britched,’ he reassured her, his own ample proportions radiating strength, and she was grateful for the comfort his words gave her.

But that Jamie was never going to be a sturdy lad was obvious. He was so like Matthew, fair-haired, but blue-eyed now the baby hue had settled, tall for ten months and thin, his first baby fat already dissipating. It gave an overall impression of a delicate constitution and, consequently, without realising it, Harriet tended to over-mother him. She was still breastfeeding him at ten months, though little milk was left, whenever he turned towards her, which was now from habit more than anything, but she believed it indicated a need for sustenance. And she had become irrationally over-protective, especially where Sara was concerned.’

‘Keep away from Jamie! I can see what’s in your mind.’

Matthew said her fear of Sara going too near him was unreasonable.

‘She can’t harm him. She only wants to love him.’

‘She’s jealous of him. You can see it in her eyes.’

‘You’re just imagining it, my sweet.’

‘Kids do all sorts of things when your back’s turned. Say she poked his eye, or pinched him, or bit him? You wouldn’t be so cocksure then, would you?’

‘I think you’re being … over-cautious,’ he said, himself cautious.

Sara looked on, learning. Babies, even as they grew bigger and sat up almost on their own, were apparently not to be touched except by grown-up people, in case it damaged them. But when her mother wasn’t there and Miss Gilbert had Jamie to herself, she was allowed then to hold those soft, podgy little hands, kiss those velvety cheeks.

Once, Miss Gilbert had let her hold him, sitting her on the floor on a cushion and putting him in her arms. He felt unexpectedly heavy, not like her dolls, and she held him tight so he wouldn’t fall. She was four now, Miss Gilbert said, and becoming a big girl.

Being four was a wonderful time. She’d had a birthday. Daddy had bought her a doll’s house and she had been given a party at her nanna and granddad’s, and lots of aunts and uncles had come. There had been a heavy fruit cake, though she didn’t like its bitter-sweet taste, but she liked the sugar icing on it; and jelly and cream and pink blancmange, and shrimps and winkles – she liked shrimps but the grown-ups enjoyed the winkles, attacking them with pins and chewing the gritty top ends with relish. But she had preferred the ham and tongue.

Everyone had made a fuss of her, especially Great-Aunt Sarah, who, she was told, was one of her godmothers. Daddy had made more fuss of her than anyone else, but Mummy had gone all sulky and wouldn’t talk to him. And as she lay in bed that night she heard them arguing and Mummy crying, but she didn’t know why, for it had been such a lovely day.