The Juniper Tree (3 page)

Her car was parked beside the Green and we carried out her purchases and put them in the boot wrapped in dark army blankets to protect the glass. The little chair was placed beside her on the front seat. ‘I don’t want it to be shut away in the dark,’ she said as if it were a living thing. As she drove away in her expensive-looking car I realized I did not know her name. I hoped she would return. It was as if she were already part of my life.

In the evening, when I cleared the till, there was her cheque amongst the paper money, clean against the soiled notes. It was signed Gertrude Forbes and the Richmond address was on the other side. ‘Gertrude,’ I said out loud, ‘Gertrude,’ and the second time I said it, I liked it better.

A few days later Gertrude Forbes telephoned and said her husband was pleased with the frames and that she was delighted with the child’s chair and thought we might be able to do quite a lot of business together. Then she asked me to lunch to meet her husband the following Sunday. She didn’t even know my name and called me Miss Meadows as if I were the owner of the shop. I explained my position and that I was the mother of a child who would have to come with me and she said it was no problem, she and her husband both adored children, ‘particularly now’. I said, ‘Yes, of course,’ although I didn’t know what she was referring to, perhaps something to do with the Year of the Child. What would they think of my dark-skinned daughter? I wondered.

Marline was the child of a man I didn’t know. I met him at a party given in Bayswater by people I didn’t know. I drifted there with a flat-mate, a wild Australian girl. The man I’d been living with for over two years and I had parted, in fact he practically turned me out of the flat we shared and I was living in a wreck of a house in Cleveland Square. I shared a basement flat with three untidy girls, mice and some very small but penetrating cockroaches. At the time I was too miserable to care where I lived if Stephen wasn’t there. In my heart I knew it was a good thing that we had parted, if I’d had more pride I would have left months ago. Looking back on our relationship, I don’t think he had ever felt deeply for me, except perhaps for a short time after the accident. I was the one who loved and he alternately petted or teased me and was sometimes really spiteful, as if to see how much I could take. He complained about my dresses mingling with his suits in the wardrobe, the books I was reading lying about the flat. He said my belongings made him feel hemmed in, ‘trapped’, yet it was he who persuaded me to leave home and move in. We shared the expenses, too, so I cost him very little, the occasional meal or drink out, petrol for the car, the odd taxi, that sort of thing. At times there were painful quarrels over the weekend shopping and it often ended in me paying far more than my share. Meanness over money was a kind of game with him and sometimes he could be unexpectedly generous. It was money that finally broke our relationship, money and the scar that disfigured the left side of my face. Although Stephen was driving at the time, he blamed me for the accident and the loss of his licence for a year for careless driving. He said I distracted him, although I was asleep when the accident occurred. I awoke to find myself lying on the road-side with blood pouring from my nose and face, the blood such a deep brown colour and salty on my lips. Someone was attending to me in the kindest way and I said, ‘My blood, it’s not red any more’, and they said something about the street lighting and not to worry. Then I was in hospital surrounded by strangers humped up in bed, some crying out in pain and others as if dead. I wondered why my face was so bound up because the only pain I felt was in my forehead; the other pain came later. Stephen, in a petulant mood, came to see me with his arm in a sling. I was glad his handsome face wasn’t damaged.

When I’d been in the hospital for a few days and was clearer in my head, my mother came to visit me. I was surprised to see her bitter face again because we had hardly seen each other since I left home. She produced a large cake I’d never be able to eat, but I could see she had gone to some trouble making it, all iced as it was. Before she left she showed me my face in a small mirror from her handbag and all I saw was a lot of bandages and one black eye. She said in her old spiteful way, ‘What would your father think if he could see you now? Bella, indeed!’ But father was thousands of miles away in Canada and unlikely to see my damaged face. The worst time in the hospital, and perhaps in my whole life, was when they took the bandages away and I first saw the purple seam decorated with stitch marks, the half sneering mouth and leering eye. I’d had no idea that under the bandages my face was like that. When Stephen saw me slinking round the ward with this leering face marked with a purple scar like a centipede he sat on my bed and cried in a stranger’s voice, ‘Oh, my God! I’ve done this to you,’ and tears were running down his face. I think he really did love me then. He took me back to the flat and loved me for at least a month. Even my mother was touched by his devotion. It was almost worth having the disfigurement to be so loved. He bought me beautiful scarves that I could drape over the left side of my face. One was made of black muslin with little gold stars on it and another orange and gold, and there were silk squares like the Sloane Rangers wear. I still have some of them stored away.

I dreaded returning to the antique shop where I was working although I’d been happy there. Instead, I became a telephone girl and worked on a switchboard, where no one except my fellow workers could see me – and they soon became used to my ruin of a face. Sometimes I heard them talking about me: ‘She must have been beautiful before the accident, lovely skin she has,’ or, ‘It’s a pity about the mouth, her mouth is sort of lop-sided.’

When I’d had two operations, the sneer was hardly noticeable and the eye gradually improved. Then the scar shrank and became quite white, but to me it was a fearful disfigurement, particularly on days when I was feeling depressed, and it was then I developed the habit of turning my face away when I spoke, so that people found it difficult to hear what I was saying except when I was on the phone.

I worked with telephones on and off for nearly two years, and after Stephen and I parted I went home at night to dirty flats in dirty houses. Most of them were in the Bayswater district and were overflowing with South Americans and Filipinos, many of them illegal immigrants who worked in hotels. The houses were large and the streets wide and many passers-by appeared to be Arabs. On warm afternoons they sat on carpets in their front gardens, sipping coffee. Sometimes the garden railings were hung with glowing carpets until rain or darkness fell. I never saw the carpets being hung or taken down, they just came and went at appropriate times. They could have been magic carpets.

I moved around the district, Leinster Gardens, then Ladbroke Grove, then back to Bayswater – to Cleveland Square, which I became rather fond of. I think I had three different flats there – if you could call them flats. They were really large bedsitting-rooms with kitchenette and use of bathroom and sometimes a small balcony looking on to the square. I had one with a balcony soon after Marline was born and she lay there in the sun, if there was any, when the weekends came and we were at home together. During the week she spent her days in a nursery, rather far from the square but near the telephone exchange where I worked. I suppose it wasn’t a very good life for a baby but she thrived. Just before we left the flat an albino mouse appeared and he became quite tame and we fed him from dolls’ plates. We wanted to take him to Twickenham with us but I felt he wouldn’t be popular in an antique shop because he used to gnaw wood at night,

The cottage in Twickenham was the first real home we had had and life seemed perfect, and although it was winter, every day was lovely. With no rent to pay I was quite well off. My largest expense was the day nursery, but my child was well looked after there and I got a discount because we were a one-parentfamily. There was a child allowance too, so we were really quite comfortably off and for the first time for over two years I was able to buy new clothes and have my hair cut and shaped by a good hairdresser. I also had five thousand pounds in a building society, which brought in a small income.

For a time this money seemed a curse to me, yet I wouldn’t share it with Stephen. It was the insurance money paid for my damaged face. We thought it would be six thousand pounds, but eventually, when my claim was settled, it was only five. For some reason Stephen thought we should share it, although he was responsible for the damage. I asked him, would he have wanted to share it with me if it had been the other way round and he was the one all scarred? We quarrelled bitterly over this money. I didn’t receive it until my daughter was born and we had parted, but it couldn’t have come at a better time and I was glad I hadn’t got to hand half of it to Stephen. Even after we parted he visited me in my first Bayswater lodging and continued the fight. When I told him I was pregnant he suggested an abortion, but eventually went away rumbling like an exhausted thunderstorm. Then I changed my job and address and we didn’t see each other any more. He could have traced me if he had wanted to but the prospect of a baby must have scared him. It would be worse than my dresses mingling with his suits. Actually he wasn’t the father of my baby but I didn’t know that at the time.

I’d almost forgotten my unknown lover. I led a lonely life and had no real friends, just the people I worked with and the illegal immigrants who came and went and seldom opened their doors to strangers, but accepted me. They did things to my meters so that they didn’t consume so many coins and they gave me expensive tins and packets of food which I felt hadn’t been paid for. A girl from the Canaries unbuttoned her blouse and gave me one of the steaks that were plastered there and I couldn’t refuse to take it when they were so kind to me. They were always offering to baby-sit, only I had nowhere to go while they sat.

Chapter Three

W
hen Marline, who later became Tommy, was born I could hear the nurses exclaiming and I thought the baby was deformed in some way, but later, when they put her in my arms, I saw what had caused the surprise. The baby was coloured. She was a dear little thing, but I handed her back to the nurse and said, ‘You have made a terrible mistake. This couldn’t possibly be my child, all dark like this. She’s beautiful, but she isn’t mine.’

The nurses insisted that she was. There were three of them now, all standing round my bed, and a tall thin sister was advancing towards us as if expecting trouble. They showed me the identity bracelet she wore on her wrist and they insisted that I held the little thing and, as I held her and looked down at her darkness, I felt a bitter rapture because in spite of her colour I knew she was mine.

I had been shutting my mind to something for months, something I couldn’t face. It happened soon after Stephen and I parted, when I went to a party given by unknown people in an unknown house not far away from where I was living. I went there with this wild Australian girl I have mentioned before, and drank too much or mixed my drinks unwisely and felt sick and unhappy. It was a horrible party, with people lying around the floor, a few dancing like zombies, and queer women wearing evening dress and heavy make up who turned out to be men. There was one woman naked to the waist slumped over a chair with a syringe hanging from her arm.

I was talking to a young negro wearing a crimson velvet jacket. He smelt of dusty velvet and sweat, but he was gentle and kind and, before I became drunk, we had danced a strange dance together. Later on he was telling me all his problems and he seemed to have a great many. We left the party together and I couldn’t have been as drunk as I thought because I managed to walk down five flights of stairs without falling. It was wonderful to be in the quiet square with the sleeping cars humped outside the houses like sleeping animals, elephants perhaps, one could almost hear them breathing. The young negro put his arm round me and we walked to the dirty house where I lived and went upstairs together and into my cold room. I remember he kindly put money in the meter and lit the gas fire and I think I made us some instant coffee and we huddled on the divan talking about our problems and there may have been some lovemaking which I can’t recall, but I do remember waking in the darkness and finding this negro there and the strong smell of dusty velvet. The next time I woke he wasn’t there any more. I never saw him again, although I believe he came round looking for me after I’d moved.

The nurses thought I might reject my dark baby and kept standing within earshot saying things like ‘Have you seen Bella’s baby? She’s the prettiest in the ward.’ Then to me, ‘Have you noticed her lovely cheek bones and the shape of her little face?’ A German nurse who was studying English and nursing at the same time used to call her little Marline or Marlinchen and when the man came round to register the babies’ births she somehow became Marline although I didn’t care for the name much and later changed it to Tommy, which suited her very well.

Actually she wasn’t very dark, just a nice golden colour like ginger snaps, but her lips were rather pronounced and her hair was dark and woolly. Otherwise she was very like some of the South American children who ran in and out of the basement flats of the houses where I had lived. Sometimes ill-bred women remarked about her in buses and shops. They always started with something like, ‘What a pretty child! Is she yours?’ and, when I said, ‘Yes,’ they’d smile spitefully and say something like, ‘Pity about the hair. She could almost pass for white if it wasn’t for the hair.’

One actually remarked, ‘It’s lucky she didn’t inherit that mark on your face. A scar, is it?’ I remembered these remarks because they hurt me, but most people loved Tommy and quite rightly thought her beautiful. The nurses need not have worried that I might reject her because, after the first shock, I adored her and wouldn’t have had her any different although I couldn’t help worrying a little about her future.

Tommy and I both wore new clothes the Sunday we went to lunch with the Forbeses, casual clothes, but new. I had the feeling that it was a momentous day in our lives, that the Forbeses would have a great influence on our future and help in some magical way. We were a little late when we arrived at their Richmond house because it was further away from the station than I remembered. When we did reach it and I was dealing with Tommy’s folding pram, she saw the carved bear in the front courtyard and insisted on riding on its back with her skinny legs in their scarlet tights sticking out either side and such a look of joy on her face. That is how the Forbeses first saw her when they came to the hall window, and if they were surprised to see that she was coloured, they never showed it.