Spilt Milk (20 page)

Nellie sat in a pew at the front of the church, George one side of her and Lydia the other. It was a gloomy little building. Made of a dirty-looking stone with a dark-wood-striped alcove that she imagined the inside of a whale’s ribs might look like. She disliked churches. Hatch, match and dispatch, that’s all they were good for. And they were always cold. A smell of damp walls permeated the air. She knew the smell. Not just in church. You found it where? Ah yes, the smell of earth, of the damp earth where the nettles grew along the riverbank of her childhood.

It was comforting to think of Birdie living so near to the river. As if she had become the guardian of the past. Though she would never know it, she was the keeper of Josephine’s resting place. And now she had a baby son, he might grow up to keep watch over her river too. Nellie thought she’d like to teach the boy to swim one day.

Malcolm in his army uniform, and his new wife, Lucy, stood at the altar. Her nephew was losing his hair. He’d be bald in later life, like his father. He looked tired and anxious and was only home on leave from the army for a few days. Lucy held their baby in a long white christening gown and a little white bonnet. Nellie glanced at Lydia. She had a pained look on her face. She was probably thinking of Roger. He’d always been her favourite.

Nellie had never wanted to live near Lydia, but after they sold the pub, George had wanted to go home, back to where he had grown up. Lydia still lived in the house their parents had owned. She was sixty years old, and frail these days. She had become untidy-looking. Her skirt hems trailed. She had butter stains on
her gloves. When Nellie visited her, a duty she carried out for George’s benefit, she found her sister-in-law sitting in a chair in the cluttered front room full of her late mother’s ornaments, the chink of light from the closed curtains playing patterns over her ageing face. The doctor said she had mental illness. Lydia had long ago stopped talking of the importance of truth and her own psychic talents that allowed her to have a special, clearer view of the world than anybody else. She refused to talk of the war or of her ex-husband. Roger she spoke of often, but as if he were still alive and living with her.

After the baptism was over, they traipsed back to Lydia’s house for tea and sandwiches. George and Malcolm stood in the kitchen, discussing selling the house. Lydia could not live alone any longer. George had found a private home for distressed gentlefolk. Nellie thought they might want to lower their voices. Sitting in Lydia’s front parlour with Lucy and her parents, they could all hear their earnest discussion.

‘Is this Roger’s child?’ Lydia asked, pointing at Malcolm’s baby. Nellie watched Lucy’s face cloud with upset.

‘Mother,’ Malcolm called wearily from the kitchen, ‘he is my son. Mine and Lucy’s. You know what happened to Roger.’

They managed another half-hour before Lydia ended the party.

‘Of course, my brother married his brother’s wife,’ she announced loudly. ‘Because they already had a daughter together.’

George and Malcolm stopped talking. The room fell quiet.

‘That’s enough, Mum,’ said Malcolm.

‘It’s not nearly enough. The correct behaviour for families and marriage, and what they do in private, are very different things, Malcolm,’ Lydia said, raising her voice. ‘Look at my husband, respectable and quiet as the grave, but he was carrying on with that other woman right under my nose! To think of it! I could murder him and be happy, but he’s a coward and won’t come near me. And my brother with her over there, no better. I saw them once, carrying on, thinking they were alone. The two of
them on the stairs. My brother Henry’s wife and my brother George. Do you hear what I’m saying to you? They were carrying on. Is Birdie your daughter, George, or Henry’s?’

There was a silence and Lydia began dabbing at her face with a handkerchief, as if she were exhausted by her outburst. Lucy’s parents left, saying they had a train to catch, and Malcolm and Lucy left with them.

‘So, are you pleased with yourself?’ George asked his sister afterwards. ‘Why did you have to talk like that? Why’d you have to be so bloody rotten?’

Lydia began to cry. ‘Why shouldn’t I call you out for what you did? It makes my skin crawl. You’re just like my ex-husband, going behind people’s backs.’ Her voice droned on, petulant, whiny and accusing, until she fell asleep, slumped in her chair.

Nellie went outside, craving fresh air. She stood in the front garden by the low wall where yellow hollyhocks grew out of the brickwork. The wind gusted across the sea and raced inland, ruffling her clothes. Nellie could taste sea salt on her lips.

‘You all right?’ asked George.

‘I wish Birdie could know you are her father.’

‘She’s Henry’s girl. That’s what we have to stick to.’

Seagulls soared in the sky overhead, calling loudly. Time was passing in any case. Did the truth really matter? Nellie thought Lydia was pleased to have spoken out, despite her tears, but really, what had it done for her? Lydia’s son and his family hadn’t cared to hear her accusations. They had been horrified by her outspokenness, turning from her words the way they might have looked away had she undressed in front of them, her outburst as shameful as dropped underskirts, slipped buttons, undone corsets. Things nobody should witness.

At the window upstairs in the farmhouse, looking out at the flat landscape and the track to the farm, Birdie watched and waited.
Any minute now, the old farm cart pulled by the grey horse would be coming into the yard, bringing her mother and Uncle George to see her son. She took a deep breath and looked in on the nursery where her baby was sleeping in his cot. He was four months old and looked like his father. Perfectly, completely like his father.

He had weighed seven pounds at birth and had lain peacefully in Birdie’s arms, as if he had always been held by her. Her son made a small grumbling sound and Birdie hushed him. She was disturbing him, standing over his cot. She stared at him sleeping and wondered when she would feel love for him. All she felt was a kind of relief that he wasn’t going anywhere. That she did not need to keep him a secret from anyone.

Framsden rubbed his hands against his face. His tiny fists were encased in small white mittens that the midwife had said were important because babies sometimes scratched themselves. If his fingernails needed trimming, Birdie must very gently bite them with her teeth.

‘Don’t cut them with scissors until he’s at least two years old or they’ll grow with a sharp edge.’

Birdie thought of the letter her mother had sent her after his birth. A great long list of things she must and mustn’t do with a baby. In it she had given her the same advice about the baby’s fingernails, except she had warned that cutting a baby’s nails with scissors meant he would grow up to be a thief. Charles had laughed at the idea of it.

He really was a lovely boy. So docile and sweet-natured. He rarely cried and Charles absolutely adored him. That alone filled her heart with a deep, warm joy.

She supposed that the couple who had adopted her daughter must love her very much too.

Kay and Framsden. Her daughter and son. Kay was lucky. She had two mothers. Or was that unlucky? Twice the amount of problems that mothers could bring?

It was an odd kind of sorrow she felt over Kay. An itch, like the sense of frustration that comes from wanting something a little out of reach. With every passing hour, day, week, her daughter grew and changed yet Birdie remembered her only as a new baby. That’s how she would stay in her memories for ever.

Nellie looked cheerful when she got down from the trap. She was wearing a pair of brown flannel slacks and a red-checked shirt. Birdie had never seen her in trousers. Her tall figure was just right for them. Life by the sea obviously suited her.

Birdie looked at the tea tray and the neat triangles of meat-paste sandwiches. There was a vase of cornflowers on the table. She remembered her mother didn’t like flowers indoors. Quickly she ran into the kitchen and tipped the water down the sink, the flowers into the bin. She felt diminished, childishly trying to please her mother like this.

‘Birdie!’ said Uncle George when he stepped into the hall and she came out to meet them both. ‘How’s my darling girl? Where is he then? Let’s see him! Where’s our little lad?’

Uncle George gave her a bear hug and Birdie kissed his cheek.

‘He’s sleeping for the moment.’

‘Babies are at their best when they are asleep,’ said her mother. ‘Are you going to bring him down?’

She looked so pleased, Birdie almost weakened.

‘Not yet,’ she said firmly. They’d have tea and then she’d get him. She had a routine and she had to keep to it. The baby had to sleep for at least another half-hour.

‘Quite right,’ said Uncle George. ‘Mother’s absolutely right.’

‘Yes,’ said her mother. ‘Of course. Yes, let him sleep.’

They sat in the living room and her mother laid a brown paper bag on the low coffee table. Inside was a blue crocheted jacket for the baby.

‘Nellie made it herself,’ said George.

‘I’m no good at crocheting. I don’t really have the patience for
it. It was something to do in the evenings while George listened to the wireless.’

‘Nell, don’t be modest,’ said Uncle George. ‘Have you seen the little buttons, Birdie? She spent ages making it for him. Lucky kid to have a grandmother like Nell.’

Birdie’s mother shook her head.

‘George, stop it. You know I’ve got two left thumbs. It’s probably too small for him anyway. I made it months ago.’

The clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly, and Birdie knew they were both waiting for the baby to be brought downstairs. Though there was still ten minutes to go before she should wake Framsden, Birdie gave in and went to get him.

‘Is this my grandson?’ her mother asked as she came downstairs with him. She lifted her hands, cupping them as if she were already holding the child.

Nellie took the child in her big strong hands.

‘I have him safe,’ she said, though she looked nervous. ‘Don’t worry. There. Now, shall we go outside? I want to show my grandson the orchard. I kept bees. Did I tell you, George?’

Birdie and George followed her mother out of the house and across the orchard. Then her mother took the path down towards the river.

‘It’s a shame your father isn’t here to see the little fellow,’ said George.

‘Did you never want children, Uncle George?’ she asked as they walked towards the river. ‘I mean, I just don’t know why you never married and had a family?’

‘What a question!’ said George. The high colour in his cheeks darkened and he quickened his pace, stumbling over the uneven ground.

‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have …’

‘No, no, quite all right. I was always a bachelor, I’m afraid. Not now of course. Now I’ve got a wife, and I’m lucky to have her. Nellie and you are my family, Birdie. You’re very special to me.
Like a daughter.’ He began to hurry away. ‘Nellie? Nellie, wait up!’

They reached her mother, and the three of them sat on the grass with Framsden between them. Birdie watched her mother and Uncle George cooing over the baby. She regretted having spoken to her uncle like she had. She should not have been so personal. The poor man had been mortified.

It was just as Aunt Vivian had said it would be. She had given up her daughter and nobody would ever know. And if, like her mother, they did know, it was clear they would never speak of it.

Aunt Vivian came a week later. She brought a hand-stitched christening gown she had made herself. A soft cotton gown with lace at the collar and cuffs, and pin pleats on the shoulders, embroidered white swans along the hem. Birdie folded it in her lap and sat smoothing the fabric.

‘Did you like living here?’ she asked. ‘When you were a child, I mean? I saw Rose’s gravestone in the churchyard the other day. I liked the inscription.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.
And my grandparents’ headstones too. It’s strange for me to come here from London and find I have family already in the churchyard.’

‘Nellie and I had promised Rose we’d stay together, but so much happened to us after her death. Now you are here, I think Rose would have been pleased. We didn’t even have the money to give her a proper funeral, you know. It was Mrs Langham who paid for everything. She was a good friend of your mother’s. Mrs Langham was the one who gave Mother and Rose the cottage rent-free after Father died. I don’t remember our parents, but Rose loved them. Their ghosts were very present in our childhood. It must be fate that brought you here, Birdie.’

‘And what was Rose like? Ma doesn’t like to talk about her, I think.’

‘She was harsh but fair.’

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Yes?’

‘I know you can’t tell me the names of the people who took my daughter. I know that, but can you tell me where she went? Just so that I can imagine her somewhere.’

‘Rose never married,’ said her aunt, as if she had not heard her. ‘That was our fault. She dedicated herself to us.’ She was looking intently at Framsden. ‘I do think women need to be married. Whether it’s for love or companionship …’

‘My daughter.’

‘Did I tell you I spoke to Matilda on the telephone the other day? She sends her regards. She has a baby son. A little lad called Andrew.’

‘And my daughter?’

‘You don’t have a daughter.’

‘I just need to know where she is.’

‘Birdie, you cannot do this. I can tell you that the child went to a couple near here. They were grateful to you. I can’t tell you more than that.’

‘Thank you,’ said Birdie softly, gently, grateful to her aunt. Hoping she could stop now with her wondering and questions.

Birdie stood in the nursery, looking out of the window. Her aunt was in the orchard, by the old railway wagon. Had it been cruel, forcing her to talk about it? She had not wanted details. Just something to help her when she imagined the little girl. Now she could think of her growing up somewhere nearby, a house somewhere in this wide landscape. There was so much space here. Huge skies and open fields, deep ditches, flint and stone churches and dispersed farmhouses. Her daughter would be part of this place. She saw her in her mind, a small blonde child running through cornfields, stopping to wait for the shadowy couple who walked behind her.