Spilt Milk (27 page)

The spring of 1964 was mild, and blowsy with daffodils and blossom. Grey clouds rushed across the sky and the sun appeared and then hid itself. Yellow cowslips filled ditches. A line of electricity pylons stretched into the distance across the farmland.

Nellie and Vivian walked through the village together. It had grown bigger, with new housing estates on its outskirts. Cars and vans were parked along its high street, and women pushed prams and children ran along its pavements. Two bus stops and a twice-daily bus route into town had brought new life to the place. With the train station, it was a commuter’s paradise, Charles said. Nellie still felt it was on the edge of things, a village just out of reach of the rest of the world. She remembered too well the loneliness of the place, the summers when there wasn’t an ounce of shade anywhere, and too many gloomy winters where the wind came down the street like a panic of swallows, brushing her cheeks with wingtips of ice.

The White Horse Tavern had brown carpet on the floor. Nellie peeped in the public bar. There was a jukebox playing pop music, and a pinball machine surrounded by boys in tight-fitting suits. The sisters drank port and lemon in the saloon bar where horse brasses hung from the dark beams. They had never been in the village pub before.

The local store had a sign outside, hanging over the piled-up boxes of fruit and vegetables:
Self Service.
You had to get on and do everything yourself these days.

‘Ferier?’ said Birdie’s friend Connie when she took them in her car back to the farm. ‘I don’t know that name. It’s unusual. Perhaps the doctor has a patient with that name. I can ask him.’

Nellie shrugged. ‘Don’t bother.’

‘If you just had time to look,’ said Vivian.

Ark Farm was sold in July, and the neighbours that Birdie had so dreaded seeing again went away. The Hubbards had bought a house in Oxfordshire. The farmhouse was sold with a few acres, and the rest of the land merged into another farm.

‘Charles tells me you were too kind to those people,’ Nellie said to her daughter. ‘You looked after their children, and it was only normal that you felt like they were your own. Anybody with a heart would have done the same.’

Nellie wasn’t sure she believed her own words, though. She didn’t think she had ever fallen in love with other people’s children, only with her own family.

She was wading through the long grass in the orchard when she struck upon the idea of having her own place. It wasn’t that she didn’t like living with Birdie, but both of them were used to having their own space. Birdie was more like her than she had realized. They liked their own company, and she knew her son-in-law wanted his wife and house to himself. She stood looking at the wooden railway carriage in the orchard. It had dusty gingham curtains in the windows and a broken step up to the door, which hung open on its hinges. She went inside. There was a bedroom to the right, with a striped mattress that the farm dogs slept on. A dead bird’s feathers were scattered across the floor. The main living space had a table and three chairs. A bench ran along one side, with the window above it. Over the window was a shelf where Charles had stacked a few books. Perhaps to save them from the flood, she thought. She put her hand up and pulled one down, wiping dirt from its cover. It was a Bible. Wedged inside it was an old photograph of a woman in a wide-brimmed hat, holding hands with two little girls with ringlets and white pinafore dresses. Rose, Vivian and Nellie. It was the photograph Rose had kept by her bedside.

She nearly cried at the sight of it, those young faces from long ago, staring at her, three sepia maids in a row, eyes as dark as winter rain, paper-cut women all holding hands. She lay it down with a trembling hand. It was a sign. She would live out here in the orchard. How could the Bible and photo have got there, if not by some kind of magic?

‘Oh,’ said Charles, and scratched his head, frowning. ‘I found that Bible when I was knocking down the old cottage. There was a baby shoe too, and an ox bone in the roof space. People used to put those things in houses to bring luck. I stuck them in here when I built the farmhouse. I had forgotten all about the Bible and the photograph. And that’s you, is it?’

‘Let me see,’ asked Birdie. She held it up to the light. ‘And that’s Rose? I always wondered what she looked like. What a serious face she had. Ma, are you sure you want to live in the railway carriage? It’s a bit basic.’

‘I’ve got my beginnings in the orchard. I might as well make it the place to live out my endings. Old Anna Moats brought me into the world, and she put …’ She didn’t like to use the word
afterbirth
in front of Charles. But that was what had been buried in the orchard. Vivian’s too. ‘Anna said this was where I belonged,’ she said.

Nellie waded through the long grass, swinging a scythe back and forth, cutting a path.

‘I can do that,’ said Charles, following behind her. ‘The scythe is sharp, Nellie.’

‘I know what I’m doing. I was a farm girl once,’ she replied, watching the grass fall at her feet.

Vivian visited once a week. She’d thought of selling the guest house and moving into the railway wagon with her sister. They had always promised to live together by the river when they were old. And now they were certainly old. They were silver-haired, both of them. Vivian’s hair had gone feathery and as soft as the
lining of a bird’s nest. Nellie’s hair was thick still, a long rope of a plait hanging down her back.

Each time Vivian visited, Nellie asked her if she would be coming home soon. But with Framsden living with her, it seemed difficult for Vivian to imagine going home just yet. She was enjoying being his aunt, fussing over him. He was a good-hearted young man, and she adored him living in her house.

‘So you
do
think this is home?’ asked Nellie. ‘You said you were not ready to come
home
.’

‘This is where Josephine is, and where you are, Nell.’ Vivian looked at her sister, meeting her grey eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for hurting you. I loved Joe, and I was blind to the pain I caused you.’

Nellie turned her mouth down slightly. She waved a hand at Vivian, as if she was batting away a fly.
Too late
, she wanted to say.
It’s far too late for this.
They sat on the swinging seat on the verandah of the farmhouse, looking out to the river beyond the vegetable gardens, the two of them silenced by their own thoughts of the past.

‘Josephine might have lived if she had been born at another time,’ said Nellie. ‘They have medicines today that we never had.’

‘We didn’t even get a doctor to see her.’

‘The doctor was drunk in the pub, if I remember. We did what we could.’

‘And what about the hagstone?’ asked Vivian. She felt it in her pocket. ‘Has it really kept Josephine’s grave safe all these years?’

‘I believe it has,’ said Nellie. She cleared her throat. ‘I missed you, you know. I can’t think now why we spent so much of our lives apart.’

Vivian looked away. ‘Neither can I,’ she said.

Vivian would not mention having cared for Birdie as a baby for two years and then the dreadful hurt, the resentment really, of giving her back to Nellie, who had never known what it was to yearn to have a child. There was no point in going over that. Or
that Vivian still returned in memories to a brief moment in her life, hardly a blink of an eye, a few short days in a summer long ago when she’d been young and Joe had loved her. She had kept such faith in his declaration of love that she had managed, like a thrifty housekeeper with few ingredients, to make meal after meal out of them. She still sucked on the bones of his words and found goodness in them even now.

‘Joe Ferier was a bad lot,’ Nellie said, and made a tutting sound.

The farmhouse’s corrugated-iron roof creaked as the day cooled. Sunlight spread across the last hours of the afternoon, a burnishing glow that made the trees look like they were full of tiny dancing flames.

‘I still think of him,’ said Vivian.

‘I know you do,’ said Nellie, reaching across to take Vivian’s hand. ‘I know.’

Framsden drove Vivian to the farm on Sundays. He had an apprenticeship with a furniture company and went to college one day a week. His mother suggested they clear out a barn for him to start his own business, but Framsden said he was thinking of taking a job with the furniture company after his apprenticeship had finished. When he came to the farm, he walked along the riverbank or he took his boat out, fishing for trout for a few hours until Vivian wanted driving home again. He didn’t avoid his parents, but he was quiet with them. Some days he went off into the village and came slouching back, hands in his jean pockets, whistling a pop song.

Vivian said Framsden had told her he did not want to come back to live at the farm. He liked town life too much. He’d been seeing a girl, but it hadn’t worked out.

‘A girl?’ Birdie asked. ‘What girl?’

‘I don’t know. A girl from the village, I think.’

‘A girl from here? I’ll ask him.’

‘No,’ said Charles, who had come into the kitchen to find the
three women drinking tea together. He picked up his transistor radio off the table. ‘To listen to while I stack the straw in the barn,’ he said, and walked out of the door. ‘And leave Framsden be. Don’t interfere. It’s his life. If he wants us to know, he’ll tell us.’

The women nodded and agreed. Here we are, thought Vivian, looking at her sister and her niece. Three women in the house by the river. Together. Just as we once promised Rose. The three Marsh women. Three women with eyes the colour of the river.

The following winter the river froze over. Just before dusk, when the sun hung red in the sky, Charles and Birdie put on skates and stepped out onto the ice. They held hands and skated slowly. Charles pulled Birdie out to the centre. They turned at the bend in the river and skated back to the wooden jetty where Framsden tied his boat. A new boat, a wooden skiff, was up in the barn, waiting for the summer. Framsden had built it in his workshop and brought it to the farm at Christmas, when he’d given it to his parents. Aunt Vivian had let him clear out her old garage and set up his tools in there.

It had been Connie’s daughter that Framsden was seeing. He and Judith had shocked the family by moving in together. Aunt Vivian had shocked them all even more by saying she was delighted to have them living with her. Judith was expecting a child in the spring. They were not married, but they said they’d get round to it after the child was born. Judith thought it would be nice for the baby to be part of the ceremony.

A colour photograph of the two of them stood on the mantelpiece in the sitting room at the farm. Judith wore a silky-looking mini-dress that stretched over her belly. She was laughing, her long hair falling over her shoulders. Not so long ago, women had stayed indoors during their pregnancies. They wore large smocked dresses to cover themselves up. In the photo, Framsden stood beside Judith in jeans and a tight-fitting cotton T-shirt. His hand was resting casually on Judith’s belly. He needed a haircut.

It wasn’t that other people’s attitudes had changed much, Charles told Birdie. There were still judgements made all the time. Even now, in the mid sixties, which were surely a time of change, he and Birdie had been shocked by the photograph. The length of his son’s hair made Charles want to take a pair of sheep shears to it. He could hear the farmhands now, cracking jokes about him. But it was possible to ignore the judgements of others. That was what Birdie had never understood before. That it didn’t matter what others thought of you if you had the support of loved ones. If you had people you could call family around you. Connie was proof of that. Unmarried all her life, and her family had always stuck by her and Judith. She’d married Alan Jacobs last month. He was glad for her. Jacobs had been an RAF pilot in the war. He had known Christopher’s squadron, so Connie said. They’d moved into a cottage in the village together.

On the river, Charles and Birdie skated until the moon came up and the hoar frost deepened its hold on the trees and fields. Charles had not told Birdie he would have accepted her daughter as his own child. It seemed too late to say it. He wanted to tell her that he would have married her back in 1939, when it could have given them all another life, but then again, was he really being honest with himself? Perhaps, in truth, he would have hesitated to marry a girl who already had a child. And what was done was done. Birdie still believed her daughter might find them one day, and, if she did, then he’d see how things went between them.

In the shadows their breath turned silver. It was hot work, skating. All this cold and their cheeks were burning hot. Charles held Birdie’s face in his hands. They would go indoors and talk of a coming grandchild, of a lost daughter who might find them one day, the danger of the ice, the coldness and how warm they had felt skating together. He would remember the sad beauty of the wind, like a child’s cry. The frozen river,
held fast in time. He would remember the look on his wife’s face, the triumph in her eyes as she crossed the ice towards him.

Sunday morning in late July and Judith was the only one awake in the old house. She was standing at the kitchen door in one of Framsden’s shirts, looking out onto the garden, listening to birdsong and the distant drone of the ring road, smoking a cigarette in peace before the baby woke up, demanding to be fed.

It was going to be a hot day again. A good day to be down at the river, miles from anywhere. The house creaked as the sun began to heat up the day. Poor old house. There was so much to be done to it. It hadn’t been modernized since the late thirties, when Framsden’s aunt had electricity put in and redecorated the bedrooms. Aside from the rewiring that had just been done, Judith had painted a lot of the rooms white and thrown away all the awful, prim net curtains. She wanted to bring light into the place. She thought she might strip the dark stain off the stairs and take them back to the natural pine.

There was the sharp sound of a baby crying upstairs. Judith threw the cigarette away and climbed the stairs. That awful brass pot full of dusty peacock feathers by the window would have to go too. She reached the landing and the baby went quiet.

Judith sat on the stair, the sun pouring in through the window, warming her legs. They would have to have a lot of babies to fill up this house. Framsden wanted a big family. To make up for being an only child, he said.

She heard a knock at the door and went barefoot downstairs. When she opened the front door, there was nobody there. It had been happening quite a bit lately. Kids playing Knock Down Ginger, she suspected. She tried to see if there were any children hiding between the parked cars. She could smell the newly
tarmacked road beginning to melt in the heat. A woman stood on the other side of the road. She was well dressed, a good-looking woman with soft brown curls and grey eyes. She stared at Judith, and for a moment it looked as though she might say something. Judith lifted her hand in greeting and the woman nodded uncertainly, then walked briskly away. Judith had seen her a couple of times now, always on a Sunday morning, standing looking at the old guest house. Framsden had suggested she might be the grown-up child of one of the women his aunt had helped over the years.

‘Someone at the door?’ asked Framsden, putting his arms around her.

‘What? Yes. Well, no. Just kids playing again, I think.’

‘Come on,’ he said, kissing her neck. ‘We should get going. A day on the river sounds perfect to me.’

On the long grassy bank beside the arching green willows, Birdie put out tartan blankets and umbrellas for shade. She watched the family flowing down the garden towards the river. Connie and her new husband, two of Connie’s brothers and their families, along for the picnic. One of the brothers was acting the fool, throwing sticks into the river for the farm dogs. Joan and Michael were there too, picking their way through the long grass in their city clothes, having driven from London to see the new baby.

Judith and Framsden carried their daughter, Kay, in her Moses basket between them. Charles walked behind, a straw hat sitting on the back of his head, a blade of grass in his mouth, the black and white farm dogs dropping the sticks they had been thrown and racing up to him, following at his heels.

‘I think Kay’s a fine name,’ he had said when Birdie was shocked by the choice. To her it was a secret name, a name to whisper. She could see that to Framsden it was nothing of the sort. It was a name to be taken up and given to a child, a name his daughter would carry into the future, where one day she would
be told that Kay was a name with a history to it: that of her father’s sister. A woman they never knew.

‘It’s a gift to you,’ Charles said. ‘You should see it that way.’

Birdie’s mother and aunt sat in deckchairs by the river, the two of them like ancient twins in their matching floral housecoats. They were gaga about the baby, always fussing over her. Nellie talked about teaching her to swim; Vivian wanted to teach her dressmaking.

‘Wait a while yet, ladies. She’s just a baby!’ said Framsden, and the old women cackled and laughed and said wasn’t he a terrible tease, and oh, but Judith was a lucky girl to have him.

The baby was passed around into each person’s arms, warm kisses on her fine-boned head. Nellie held the little girl for a long time, pressing her to her shapeless bosom like a bag of shopping she didn’t want to drop, while she instructed Judith to take a little salt from the kitchen as a gift to ensure the child would grow up rich and prosperous.

Birdie handed out drinks and sausage rolls. Framsden took his boat out on the river. The water sparkled. A frog croaked loudly, and grasshoppers sang in the long grass. Balsam seeds were popping in the heat, and the sound of cars on the road beyond the village was a distant hum. Finally the baby was passed on to Birdie.

The child stared at her. Her eyes were blue, but they were turning grey, everybody said. A darling child. A much-loved firstborn. The baby drew her legs up, and her face creased in displeasure. She began to cry.

‘Oh, give her to me,’ said Judith, reaching out to take the baby.

Judith was independent, part of a new generation. Anybody could see she wanted a life of her own with Framsden. Birdie had felt the same when she gave birth to her son, though she regretted keeping him from his grandparents. She had punished them for far too many years, not letting even his aunt have a share in him. If Judith felt like keeping Kay for herself, Birdie could not reproach her for it.

‘Unless you want to hold her while I fetch her bottle?’

‘Can I?’

Birdie felt her heart soften in gratitude towards Judith. She trusted her with the child. And why shouldn’t she? For of course Birdie had to hold this baby. What else would anyone do with a baby except hold it close and love it?

All afternoon, sun dappled through the willows and dragonflies darted back and forth over the water. Swans sailed downriver, as white as wedding gowns. Poplar seed floated on the breeze. By the small wooden jetty on the riverbank, an old woman sat on a deckchair, legs crossed at the ankle. She wore an old-fashioned straw hat and held a small stone in her hands, a creamy brown stone with a hole through it. She lifted it to her eye and squinted at it. Another woman stood beside her. She too was old, but tall and straight-backed, with a way of holding her head high as if she were listening to something far off. Together they linked arms and went to the water’s edge, where the ground was dry and dusty. The river flowed on, over silt and mud and memories. The land and the sky breathed easily. The sisters dropped the stone into the river and watched it sink down, down, until it was completely gone from view.