The Child's Child (16 page)

All Bertie’s letters John burnt. It became a ritual, waiting for Maud to leave the kitchen, then moving quickly out there to open the door of the range and push the single sheet of paper inside. Bertie wrote in pencil on cheap lined paper. No doubt he didn’t possess a pen. John tried not to feel shame on Bertie’s behalf for the bad spelling, the little circles instead of dots over the letter
i,
the lack of punctuation, but it did nothing to lessen his love. In a way he was relieved to burn the latest letter because then he could
no longer see the illiteracies while holding in his memory the passionate expressions.

Bertie wanted to come and visit him in Dartcombe. Having made a kind of vow never to make love with him again, John had broken this undertaking almost as soon as the opportunity came. Bertie made it plain that he wouldn’t take any further protestations of celibacy seriously, though he put it in far cruder terms. John longed to see him and asked himself constantly if there was any way this could come about. If at last he could bring himself to confess the truth to Maud, would that make a visit from Bertie more or less possible? The trouble was—or the joy and glory was—that if Bertie came to No. 2 Bury Row, they would make love, and how could that even be imagined with Maud in the house? Whatever happened, he must bring himself to tell Maud before she had the baby.

She was big now, “as big as a house,” according to Mrs. Lillicrap. She commented approvingly when Maud said the baby was moving so vigorously that he or she had pushed a plate off her lap and sent it flying.

“It’s a boy,” said Mrs. Lillicrap, the expert. “You’re carrying him low, and that’s always a sign. Strong too. Girls don’t kick and shove like that.”

Maud thought it would be nice to have a girl because you could give her a pretty name. This was a proper way for a young wife to feel, Mrs. Lillicrap said approvingly, but unfortunately it was a boy.

“Best to be a man in this world. You want to think of it like that. And Mr. Goodwin will be pleased. A man wants his first one to be a boy.”

“He won’t mind what it is,” Maud said, and how could he when it wasn’t his?

She still estimated she had two weeks to go, but Mrs. Tremlett, who had had eight of her own against Mrs. Lillicrap’s three, said
it would come sooner than that. All the leaves had fallen by now and so had a great deal of rain. But the past two days had looked like summer, apart from the bare trees, the sky bright blue but the sun never far from the horizon and setting early. Maud no longer went out, she had become embarrassed by her bulky shape, and when she sat at the sewing machine, hardly knowing where to put her great belly, she gave that up too. A small wardrobe of garments suitable for either sex had been created not very skilfully, and now, sitting in an armchair with her feet up on a stool, she was finishing off the white shawl she was knitting.

At this stage of her pregnancy, John chose to tell her he had been and would always be, whether he practised his “vice” or not, a homosexual. He wasn’t being callous or insensitive, he told himself, it would mean little to her, she would not even be much interested, it was too alien from her even to concern her, but he had so driven himself, his mind racked by keeping this vital fact of his existence from her, that he felt he could no longer remain silent for another day.

When he first began, talking in a veiled way and with many euphemisms for relations between a man and a woman, she blushed a fiery red. She laid aside the needles and the white wool and, hanging her head, looked down into what remained to her of a lap.

“It can be like that,” he said, “when it’s not a man and a woman but two men together. Do you understand what I mean?”

She said nothing but shook her head vehemently.

“It is like that for me, Maud. That’s why I can never get married.”

Suddenly she burst out, “But it
can’t
be. It’s not possible. Men and women aren’t made the same.”

He shook his head. “That’s not the important part, that’s nothing.” Wasn’t it? Was it really nothing? “It’s love that’s important, isn’t it? Love like you had with—with Ronnie.”

A look came into her face he had never before seen there. It was compounded of anger and contempt. “You call that love? That wasn’t love, it was two animals in a field.”

It was his turn to blush. After that he didn’t know what to say. The silence was awful. If only she would ask questions, but she sat as if petrified in her chair, her belly filling all the space between arms and cushions while her arms and legs looked thinner than ever, her slender neck longer. She was all the child she carried, it had taken her over, and it was motionless now, waiting to be born and set her free. Inconsequentially, he thought he now knew for the first time what that phrase in the Bible about a woman’s being delivered really meant.

He made himself go on. “I made up my mind when I came here with you that I would never be like that with a man again. That has to be over for me—well, for ever.”

She seized upon that one word
again.
“You mean you did that while you were in London? What you said a man could do with a man? You did that?”

Instead of replying, he said, “I promise I never will again.”

“I don’t understand what it was you did.” Turning her face away, she said, “I don’t want to. I don’t want you to tell me any more.”

It had been dark for hours but was still only eight in the evening. The silence that had fallen was like a physical barrier between them, a wall. John thought he had never in all his life felt so lonely, not when he first went to live in London, not when he told Bertie they must never make love again. This kind of loneliness makes you feel you will never again speak to a living soul, never feel a human touch. Maud picked up her knitting to put it away, the way women do, rolling up the finished work, placing the two needles side by side, and pushing them through the ball, before tucking the little parcel it made into her red-and-blue crocheted
knitting bag. She got heavily to her feet, one hand in the small of her back.

“I think I’ll go up now.”

“Maud, Maud, wait a little while, please.”

“No, I’ll go up now.”

As the people who lived in these cottages and these villages had done since time immemorial, she put a light to her bed candle and lumbered upstairs with it. There was no gas in Dartcombe, and while Dartcombe Hall and the rectory and one or two other houses had electricity, most residents used oil lamps downstairs and candles on an upper floor. Maud, who had learnt these things quickly, carried her candle in its blue enamel holder in her right hand, shielding the flame with her left. This meant she couldn’t hold on to the banister.

“Let me help you,” John said.

“I shall be all right on my own.” Her voice was cold and tremulous.

He understood that she didn’t want him to touch her. His touch would be a contamination. He sat down there, deep in thought, for half an hour, then another half hour. What was he to do? The fire died to a red glow, then to grey ash with a spark at the heart of it. He fed it with small pieces of coal just in time, having no wish to go to bed himself, the strange idea coming to him that he would be even more alone up there, even lonelier. The way Maud had reacted was not at all as he had expected, though he hardly knew what he had expected. Perhaps he had thought that she would say it was all right, things weren’t the way they used to be, the world was changing. “You fool,” he said to himself. “She’s a child, she’s
fifteen.
You have shocked her to the core. . . .”

As if summoned by his words, which he had spoken aloud, she appeared at the top of the stairs, this time clinging to the banister. Her candle she must have left in her room. In a ballooning white
nightgown she had a ghostly look, half-lit by the light from the single oil lamp on the table in front of him.

“John, it’s started, the baby’s started.”

He sprang to his feet. “Oh, Maud, it’s all right. I’m here.”

“I’ve had an awful pain and I’m having another one now.” She would have doubled up her body if she could have. “How long does it go on?”

He forgot about loneliness, forgot despair. “I don’t know. How would I know? I’ll go and fetch Mrs. Lillicrap.” The absurdity of this woman’s name struck him now and not for the first time. “I’ll fetch her. You must go back to bed.”

“All right. I’m sorry I was so horrid to you, John.” She stumbled back into her bedroom. “I wish you hadn’t told me, though. I really do wish that.”

A
SET PIECE
carried in John’s mind was of a man pacing up and down a passage while on the other side of a door hung with a white sheet a woman was screaming. His mother’s labour was nothing like that, even if he had been in the house to hear it. Perhaps he hadn’t been in the house but he and Sybil were sent away to an aunt or grandmother, he couldn’t remember. Pacing wasn’t possible outside Maud’s bedroom door, the space was so small he would likely have fallen downstairs. Nor was a sheet hung over the door and she wasn’t screaming, but a soft moaning reached him from behind the door. Still fully dressed, he sat downstairs where he couldn’t hear those sounds, drinking tea.

It had been half past nine when Maud had told him her pains had started, and it was now two in the morning. Mrs. Lillicrap, a mountain of a woman but light on her feet, had set water to boil on the kitchen range and lit a fire in the bedroom grate. She had emerged several times from attending to Maud to tell him all was well, been up and down stairs, gone back into the room, emerged again, and said there was nothing to worry about. Keeping his own fire going—he seemed always to be carrying scuttles of coal these days—he thought of what he had told Maud and how she had said to him that she was sorry for being horrid to him.
Horrid,
that schoolgirl’s word. Would they raise the subject again, he or she? In his experience of his family, when something unpleasant had been spoken of or even discussed, it would be put away and,
if not forgotten, never mentioned again. So it had been when a young man of Sybil’s had got engaged to someone else, and a similar silence had prevailed when a second cousin of his father’s had been divorced. John’s confession might meet with the same fate. Would it be so bad if it did?

A different sort of sound upstairs brought him to reality and to his feet. Not a scream but a long howl such as a cat or a dog might make. Silence followed, then a steady whimpering, and he returned to his seat and another half hour of self-questioning and self-reproach passed before the bedroom door opened and Mrs. Lillicrap came out.

“You have a lovely little daughter, Mr. Goodwin. Would you like to come up and see your wife?”

Suddenly exhausted, though he had done nothing, he climbed the steep little staircase and went into Maud’s room.

She was sitting up in bed, resting against pillows and holding the baby in her arms. “Oh, John, look what I’ve done. Look at my little girl. I’m going to call her Hope.”

“Maybe her daddy would like a say in that,” said Mrs. Lillicrap, laughing.

“It’s Maud’s choice.”

In that woman’s presence there was nothing to be done but kiss Maud, lay a gentle finger on Hope’s cheek, and utter the biggest lie of all, that this was the happiest day of his life.

I
N THE
second week of December when Hope was a fortnight old, Maud sat downstairs in the armchair where she had sat when John told her of the life he had led, holding the child to her right breast. Because John was in the room, she had covered herself in a voluminous white shawl so that modesty might not be offended. The confession he had made to her had never been mentioned by either of them again, though he was constantly aware that he had made it and of her reaction to it.

“You told me,” said Maud, “that up till less than a year before Hope was born girls could get married at twelve and boys at fourteen? Is that really true?”

He said it was. He took an interest in acts of parliament and the law.

“Then they made it so that everyone had to be sixteen. Why did they have to do that?”

“I expect it was something to do with women getting the vote the year before.”

She said nothing for a while but stared beyond the lamplight into the dark corners of the room. “People used to believe that you could stop a baby being born by tying knots in things. I read that somewhere. If you had a bed with curtains, you tied knots in them and you tied knots in your stockings.”

“It’s just a superstition. It wouldn’t work.”

“No, I don’t suppose it would. But I was thinking, suppose it
did, I could have tied knots in things and made Hope not be born till New Year’s Day, and Ronnie and I could have got married the day before and she’d have been a legitimate child.”

If that swine had been willing, John thought, you could have, if he could have been found and run to earth, but in the long run whose happiness would that have led to? He remembered what she had said about two animals in a field and thought how that had shocked him as much as his telling her about him and Bertie had shocked her. He watched the small upheavals inside the wooly folds of the shawl as Maud gently shifted the child to the other side and asked her if she’d like a cup of tea before he left on his bicycle for the last day of term. She nodded, smiled at him, a rueful smile as she reflected what a difference to her life that change in the law had made. John would bring his Christmas present to her back from Ashburton that afternoon, the promised dress-length for her to make herself a frock. On his way out he picked up from the doormat the letter that had come from Bertie.

He would treasure it, read it several times before it met its inevitable fate, the fire or the kitchen range. Keeping such letters was more than he dared do, even though they were innocuous compared with his to Bertie, dull letters of the “hope you are keeping well” and “mild for December” kind. This one, which he read in the shed where he kept his bicycle, was typical, but it was all he had. It ended, though, on a different note, Bertie asking when they could meet. He had a week’s holiday due to him. When could he come down to Devon and to Bury Row? Bertie said nothing about the baby, Hope, though John had mentioned her birth the last time he wrote.