A Winter's Child (6 page)

She had not been born in Faxby nor even educated there. Yet, when pressed to name the geographical location to which she accorded the status of ‘home', she could think of nowhere else. It was not the most thriving of Yorkshire's industrial towns nor the most impressive, its heavily populated acreage divided between the steep, cobbled alleyways of old Faxby, still bearing such names as Sheepgate and Millergate and Piece Hall Passage in tribute to the fleeces and the ancient water wheels upon which the town's prosperity had once depended; and the newer, bolder Faxby designed, in Queen Victoria's heyday, to suit the grand notions of her textile barons, a new elite created by the steam engines, the power looms, the automatic spinning frames of the Industrial Revolution.

These men had been concerned primarily with the construction of factories to house their machinery, competing with one another as to the height and elaborate stonework of their chimneystacks, the complicated scrollwork of their massive iron gates, surrounding these industrial palaces by countless, identical rows of low stone cottages with little concern for beauty and none for sanitation, each millmaster striving, in this instance, to squeeze in more human beings – more workers – per acre than his competitors. But, when the first feverish days of colossal fortunes riskily and ruthlessly amassed had settled into what seemed an eternity of steady profits, these manufacturers of fine worsted cloth had turned their attention to the improvement of their Metropolis, sweeping away a cobweb of old streets and derelict houses to form a square in which they sited their town hall – each one of them taking office as mayor in polite succession – with several broad thoroughfares leading from it, lined with offices, warehouses, banks, and named in accordance with the values of their occupants, Corporation Street, Providence Street. Perseverance Street, Temperance Road.

A concert hall and a general post office had been added to complete the splendours of Town Hall Square and two station hotels on opposite corners, appearing rather to ignore each other in the same way that the graceful, pale grey parish church with its high Anglican understanding of good living and good manners, managed not to notice the ring of squat, square Methodist chapels standing around the town like sentinels to guard the mercantile values of thrift, industry, teetotalism. All these establishments turning a faintly offended shoulder on the bustling Salvation Army citadel which had a cheerful nod and a wink for everyone.

From the window of Edward's car Claire noticed no outward changes although she knew that the war had been felt here, both in the profit it had brought to the factories and the appalling loss of its men. For this town, like so many others, had sent its street battalions to the front, its gallant company of, Fax by Pals who, brought up together in the same neighbourhood, had been slaughtered in the same trenches, on the same foggy morning, side by side. And to prevent her mind from connecting automatically, far too readily, with the agony in those streets on the day the telegrams came, when every house discovered it had lost at least one man, she turned brightly to Edward, thus considerably fraying his temper since he did not approve of – in fact could not manage – conversation while driving.

But Upper Heaton was only eight miles away, its old trees, its graceful Georgian squares, its quiet houses set within walled gardens appearing both untouched and unmoved by calamity, a little world apart where scholarly men like Edward Lyall sipped vintage port after dinner on fine, untroubled evenings and women like Dorothy – his wife, Claire's mother – still saw themselves as decorative, subordinate, naturally if pleasantly inferior.

‘Here we are,' said Edward.

‘Yes.'

Was she reluctant to go in? Was he reluctant to open the gate for her, to suffer once again the assault of her youth upon his solitude, the effect of her presence upon the total concentration he enjoyed from her mother? Very likely. A dozen years ago, a fastidious, highly conventional bachelor of fifty-three, he had succumbed most astonishingly to the charms of a fresh-complexioned, full-bosomed woman of thirty-two, a widow fallen on hard times who had taken employment as paid companion to one of his neighbours. He had wanted the mother, never the daughter. For the first eight years of his marriage, boarding school had taken care of that, then the war. What now? Claire swallowed hard, ran up the garden path, past the elderly stranger in starched cap and apron who opened the door, to the drawing room, where another woman, who should have been a stranger, awaited her.

‘Mother.'

‘Claire.'

They embraced self-consciously, finding it easier than talking to each other.

‘You look well, mother.'

‘Darling – take off your gloves and your hat.'

She did so, revealing her neat, gleaming, outrageously shorn head.

‘Good Heavens,' said Dorothy, biting her lip, her hand going automatically to the heavy coils of her own waist-length tresses. But she had expected this, had read of it in the newspapers, heard of it in other families, had warned Edward. They had discussed it at some length and he had agreed – or at least she hoped he had agreed – not to make a fuss. For as Edward had pointed out, with some wit she had thought, hair
grows.
But she was flustered, nevertheless, and quite shocked to find her daughter looking not in the least boyish as might have been expected but, on the contrary, so very female. Sophisticated. That was the only word she could apply and it would be too much to hope – far too much – that Edward would like it.

‘Tea,' she said, retreating to familiar ground. ‘Everything is ready.
Do
sit down.'

And as she obediently took her place at the table Claire wondered how many times she had already witnessed this scene, how many times she would witness it again, her mother waiting with her tea kettle, biting her lip and frowning over the consistency of Edward's jam and – in this still meagre postwar world – spreading on his toast her own share, and the maid's share, of the butter.

‘Mother, how lovely to see you.'

Yet there had never been any real closeness between them. Throughout the whole of Claire's life Dorothy had been too preoccupied for motherhood, first with the problem of Claire's feckless, spendthrift, gypsy-dark father: then with the hardships and humiliations of a debt-ridden widowhood: then with Edward. She had never regarded maternity as a joy in any case, only as a responsibility and she would have found difficulty in relating to Claire, who so very definitely had her father's eyes – and therefore might just possibly be tainted with his disposition – even if Edward himself had managed to care for her.

He had not.

Perhaps – and then only perhaps – had she resembled her mother, he may have found her more acceptable. But the sight of his golden haired, pink and white Dorothy beside her dark almost foreign looking daughter never failed to make him uneasy.

‘Now, just who do you take after, little girl?' certain ladies of Upper Heaton had been fond of asking, their arch manner reminding Edward so forcefully that his Dorothy had once enjoyed intimate relations with another man that he began, without fully understanding the reason, to exclude Claire whenever possible from outings and invitations, discouraging her from attending the suburban church where – his health permitting – he often played the organ. Boarding schools, he sometimes felt, had been the salvation of his nervous system, his digestion and his marriage.

Whenever the school holidays permitted her return to Upper Heaton, Claire had moved carefully and quietly in the shadow of Edward's resentment, his strained nerves, his weak chest, his murmurs of the heart and congestion of the lungs, a hundred devices of the jealous lover, the hypochondriac, to divert attention from an intruder to himself. She had had no hope and, therefore, no thought of pleasing him and, despite the excellence of her school reports and her own naturally good manners, had never done so until, to everyone's surprise, she had married Jeremy Swanfield.

The Swanfields had always meant a great deal to Edward, not merely as his most important clients, but as a family worthy, in his view, of the highest esteem. Yet when Miriam, as a kind gesture, had invited Claire to a tennis party his first reaction had been to forbid her to go.

‘I cannot take the risk,' he had told Dorothy. ‘The girl will let me down.'

But the even greater risk of offending Miriam by a refusal was more, in the end, than his nerves could bear and having reduced Claire to mulishness and then to tears by his warnings and his commands and the enormous fuss he had made about her hair and her shoes, he had taken her to the carefully manicured garden where she had met Jeremy.

She remembered it now: a drowsy summer afternoon which had barely warmed the chill of Edward's disapproval and then the miraculous excitement of a handsome young man staring at her, whispering ‘I must see you again', wanting her. But that young man whose May time gaiety had won her heart and to whom very probably she would have remained faithful had he lived, still had no face. She could neither see him nor hear him. He had gone.

‘Tea without sugar, and no cake, you see,' said Edward archly, ‘which goes to prove that we on the home front have suffered too. Although, in this case, it hardly matters since we are dining at High Meadows this evening.'

‘Are we really?'

Had the spoken sharply? Her mother raised a warning eyebrow conveying the old message ‘Don't upset Edward'. But if she had been a little abrupt then Edward himself chose to ignore it, the prospect of High Meadows, of an afterdinner cigar with Benedict, a dimpling smile from Miriam, delighting him far beyond malice.

‘They must naturally wish to see you,' said Dorothy quietly; and Claire, giving in far more easily than she liked to her mother's unspoken plea of ‘You have only been in the house ten minutes.
Please
don't cause unnecessary fuss', obediently murmured, ‘Yes. So I imagine.'

Neither one of them had referred directly to her service in France, to the war which had maimed a generation or to the uncertain peace in which Claire could see no guarantee for the future. Very abruptly, the room began to stifle her, the dark velvet curtains and the heavy oak panelling to close in, an air of distance to arise, not for the first time, between herself and these people – any people – who had not directly endured the constant likelihood of violent death.

‘Do you realize,' she had already been told several times, ‘that we almost starved in England in 1918.'

Do you know, she might have answered, that in 1918 I died in France. There were times when she believed she had.

She knew, without needing to be told, that her mother had spent the war catering to Edward's fastidious stomach, going from shop to shop with her market basket to stand in patient line with Miriam Swanfield's cook whenever there was Sugar or anything amounting to a delicacy to be had. Claire knew the miles her mother had been prepared to walk, the farm tracks upon which she had hazarded her reputation and her feet, the insults she had endured for Edward's fresh eggs and his illegal portion of extra cream, the coals she had carried to light his study fire when the sturdy young maid had gone off to make bullets and shells.

But Edward had always preferred Dorothy to prepare his meals herself, trusting her as he trusted no one else with the correct balance of his diet. And cheerfully, with no thought of praise, she had performed miracles of ingenuity, while the German blockade had lasted, to tempt his appetite. For he had needed a clear head and an untroubled constitution to cope with the work of Faxby's military tribunal which, from the start of conscription in 1916, had sat in judgement on those who wished to be excused from answering their country's call to arms.

An arduous task, he had made Dorothy well aware of it, and by no means a popular one. For these conscripts, after all, were not being sent out to die on the distant shores of our imperial territories in India and Africa, allowing the wounded – who would be professional soldiers in any case – plenty of time to heal on the long sea voyage home.
This
war was being fought next door, as it were, in France, a matter of a few hours away at most and the sight of those hospital ships constantly discharging recently and gruesomely maimed men into our ports had been intensely distressing to everyone.

‘Yes,' murmured Claire who, having loaded those ships, could think of nothing else she wished to say. Nor could she really be expected to appreciate the pain it had cost Edward to fetch her from Faxby Station that day since one of the porters, refused exemption by Edward's tribunal, had lost both legs somewhere near Bethune and was often to be found in the station yard propelling himself in a wooden box on wheels and begging. Edward could never look at him without a shudder.

‘How terrible,' said Claire.

‘Dreadful,' agreed Edward although they were very far from meaning the same thing.

But one point, at least, could brook no argument. The war was over. That much was quite certain and Edward, in common with many others who had lost nothing by it, believed it best forgotten.

‘My dear, why speak of it? What can be gained by dwelling on what – thank God – is past? One must look forward, not back, and I cannot tell you how much it delights me to see butter again. Although when one might expect to lay hands on a decent
foie gras
or a ripe
Camembert
I dare not imagine.'

Claire smiled and lowered her head.

‘I will help you unpack,' said Dorothy. And they went upstairs together to the rose pink bedroom Dorothy had decorated to suit the tastes of her own girlhood and in which Claire had never felt more than a guest.

‘Heavens – what terrible luggage.' But Dorothy was a practical woman who had never been able to afford the luxury of squeamishness and went down on her knees at once, undoing straps and buckles with large capable hands, perfectly at ease with Claire when their relationship remained at the level of undergarments, the stitching of frayed hems, train timetables, the roughness or smoothness of a Channel crossing. Slowly, deftly, she sorted her daughter's possessions into neat piles as she had always done on her return from school, one for the laundry-maid, one for the sewing room, one for the local jumble sale. And if it shocked or surprised her that the starched cotton camisoles and petticoats with which she had sent Claire away had been discarded in favour of what could only be called by the new and decidedly wicked word
‘lingerie'
she gave no sign, simply whisking those flimsy garments of silk and lace and
crepe de Chine
quickly away before – Claire supposed – the maids should see them.