Lilly would be agog. Like any invalid, she was bored and it was rare entertainment for her, my stories of Elijah’s mother.
‘You’ll never guess what now …’ I said one afternoon as I dropped my bulk down onto the edge of Lilly’s bed. The bed-springs squeaked in protest. It was nearly March and I felt in my bones that my baby would be coming soon.
‘What?’ Lilly said, as she took the plate of fried potatoes I had brought over for her. I had put another plate on top of it, to keep it warm.
‘This is a great one, this is. Last night, we was all talking. Lijah was at home for once and we were seated at the table. I rose up to get a cup of water and my back twinged, as it does, and I gave a gasp. Well, Lijah’s mother jumps to her feet and orders Lijah out of the room. He’s about to go when I tell them both to sit down for heaven’s sake as it’s only my back, and Lijah’s mother starts questioning me. Do I feel peculiar in any way? Have I had a sudden urge to scrub the floor or anything? No, I say firmly, my baby’s not coming but I think it’s only a day or two if they want to know the truth. When Lijah leaves the room, his mother says to me, all confidential, that she’s sure it’s soon too as my bump has dropped down lower, but I shouldn’t really say such things in front of my husband as it was indecent to mention women’s matters. Honestly, all I’d said was the baby was coming soon. It wasn’t as if I went into any detail.’ Lilly was forking fried potato into her mouth while she listened. A small piece had dropped onto her bed shawl. ‘Anyway,
that’s not the end of it. This morning, I get up. She’s up before me as usual. She always is, no matter what time I rise. Sometimes I think she gets up in the middle of the night and goes out for her smoke just to make sure she beats me to it. Anyway, she’s downstairs this morning, and what is she doing?’
Lilly paused, fork halfway to her mouth.
‘She is draping scarves over the mirrors.’
‘What?’
‘This is her latest. I’m not allowed to look at myself now.’
‘Why not?’
‘She said the baby might come any minute, and I might walk past a mirror holding the baby on my shoulder and the baby might look into the mirror and lose its soul into it, or something. Oh, God knows, Lilly, the woman is completely batty and Elijah never says a word to her and what am I supposed to do?’
‘That big mirror that you’ve got over the settee, the one with the painted frame that looks like gilt?’
‘It’s covered with a black shawl with orange flowers on it, frame and all.’
Lilly frowned at the trials I was undergoing. ‘You can always bring that mirror round here, if you like.’
*
There was one aspect of having Elijah’s mother around which I have to confess was useful, apart from the work she did about the house. Elijah cut down on his drinking a bit.
It hadn’t really bothered me that much at first. Well, most men like a drink or two, don’t they? And growing up in East Cambridge I would have thought it a bit odd to have ended up with a man who didn’t partake once in a while. I was even fond of the occasional cup of cider myself sometimes, when we first moved into our house, and as the evenings drew in we would sometimes sit down together and share a jug and I would read aloud to him from
Ally
Sloper’s
Half
Holiday.
He loved Ally Sloper. Most Frequently
Kicked Out Man in Europe. ‘Only ’cos they’ve not met me yet!’ Elijah used to say, slapping his knee.
Then, as my pregnancy drew on, I realised I couldn’t really drink more than a cup without it making me feel sick and dizzy, but I still sat with him and read aloud. I remember those evenings fondly. And the baby hadn’t put me off intimacy with him, not at all.
But as I got fatter and more awkward, and more tired, Elijah started going out more and more and by the time his mother showed up in our lives it was already causing a bit of strain between us. But something became clear to me within a few days of her arriving – he was a deal more afraid of her than he was of me.
*
Then, one evening, just after the mirrors were covered up by Elijah’s mother, Elijah and I had an unpleasant argument.
It was a Sunday night. He had been out drinking the night before. At teatime, I asked him for the rent money, which was due every Sunday. He hadn’t got it.
Now, this had happened before, and Aunt Lilly’s friend that had the rental on the house had been very good about it, I might say. We had never fallen more than a week or two behind before Elijah got hold of it somehow, but even so it embarrassed me mightily as it was a friend of Lilly’s we were holding it back from, not some horrible Corporation man. I wouldn’t have given two hoots about being late on the rent to one of them.
Eventually, the knock came at the door and I went to it and there stood Lilly’s friend, Miss Riley, and I said how sorry I was and how next week there’d be double, and she looked a little crestfallen, but then leaned in and said, ‘Don’t you worry, my dear, you’ve got quite enough on your plate as it is.’ She glanced behind me, to where Elijah’s mother was standing in the room.
I went back inside and said, ‘Well I hope you’re happy, Elijah. That’s Miss Riley’s week ruined. She buys her groceries with the rental from this place, you know.’
‘I thought you said she lived with a friend,’ said Elijah’s mother, although I had not been addressing her.
‘She does,’ I replied, ‘but that is hardly the point, Mother. We owe her that money fair and square and she’s been good to us.’
‘And made a pretty penny out of it. I can’t believe what you pay her to live in this box.’
Oh, a box, was it? A box that was good enough for her, for weeks on end, and with no word whatsoever on how long she might be with us. I could not be rude to her but my blood was beginning to boil. So I turned on Elijah. ‘I do think you might consider my feelings,’ I said to him. ‘You go off doing as you please but I deal with the womenfolk in this street and by tomorrow lunchtime everyone is going to know how we are taking advantage of Miss Riley.’
‘Well, she should hold her tongue, then,’ Elijah snarled. ‘What right has she got to be telling everyone our business?’
She wouldn’t, of course. She would tell Lilly, and Lilly would tell everyone else. He had a point, but that was not the point.
I’ve never been much good at arguing. It upsets me too easy. I say whatever comes into my head and make myself look foolish. ‘They are friends of mine,’ I said tremulously, ‘and … and …’
I looked from one to the other and saw how they were united against me. And I saw, moreover, that they would always be united against me in any sort of argument; that as soon as I disagreed with one, the other would be with them, and I would never win. I knew I would cry if I was not careful, so I left the room.
As I clambered up the stairs, I heard Lijah’s mother say, quite distinctly and with no effort to avoid me hearing, ‘How do you stand it …’
*
Lijah came up to bed later. I pretended to be asleep but he put his arm around me from behind.
‘Don’t bother yourself so, Rosie …’ he said in a low voice. ‘You
know I’ll get the money together by next week. I always do. You get in such a lather. Loads of folk are late with the rent, my chicken.’
‘You’re forgetting something,’ I muttered bad temperedly. ‘I used to go rent collecting myself, remember? It isn’t as easy as you think. And if someone doesn’t give you what they owe you it’s dreadful because you never know if you’ll get it or not and you never know if they’re going to give you no end of trouble.’
He let go of me and lay on his back. ‘You get in too much of a worry about such stuff. You’ll feel better later.’ He meant,
when
the
baby’s
come.
Oh no, I thought. I’m going to be much worse then. For surely, once we had a baby to worry about, being behind with the rent would be ten times as bad? And anyway, I had had quite enough of how anything wrong with me got put down to the fact I was carrying.
I lay on my back next to him for a moment, but I couldn’t do it for long. It didn’t feel right. I rolled over on my side again, but towards him this time.
‘What did she mean,
how do you stand it
?’
‘What?’
‘What did your mother mean?’
‘She ain’t used to houses, that’s all. It’s a bit cooped up for her here.’
Is that what she meant? I wondered to myself as, unusually for me, I began to fall asleep.
*
The next morning was a Monday and I got up early after sleeping quite well and checked and stoked the range. When it was firing up nicely, I left the door open so the air could help the flames along and I went out to the privvy. The garden was empty. As I came back into the house, I listened for Lijah’s mother moving about. All was quiet upstairs, so I knew that she was still asleep. I took a deep
breath. How nice it was to have the house to myself for a few minutes.
The fire in the range was burning up, so I closed the door and started making Elijah’s bacon and onion roll. I always rose extra early on a Monday morning and did it fresh, then we all had some. The rest of the week, his mother and I had bread while Elijah had a slice of the roll cold with his mug of tea. He always sliced it exactly so that there was enough to get him through to the following Sunday.
I chopped the bacon and onions and set them on to fry, then I began rolling out the suet. It was then that the words I had heard the night before came back to me.
How
do
you
stand
it?
She wasn’t talking about the house. What did Elijah think I was, some kind of fool?
How
do
you
stand
it?
Me, she meant. How do you stand
her?
And suddenly it came to me, the malice in those words. She was clever, that one. She knew better than to say outright,
your
wife
is
awful,
for that would get Elijah’s back up, and he might tell her to mind her own business. No, she was smarter than that.
How
do
you
stand
it?
They were words to make him think how wonderful he was for putting up with me. The thought that I was something to be put up with would sneak in behind that other thought, but be planted in his head all the same.
It was a mean trick, to hide her dislike of me behind her love for Elijah. Mothers can do that – take any unkind thing they feel for another person and justify it to themselves by their love for their child. They can resent and resent, and twist their resentment into something noble. I’ve done it myself. When I coveted Mrs Herne’s new hat in which she paraded up and down the street at Christmas, I thought to myself,
imagine her spending that on a new hat for herself when her child goes about in his dad’s old shoes with newspaper stuffed into the toes. I’d never buy a hat like that when my child wanted for some
thing
.
So I went back into the house in a high dudgeon, congratulating myself on what a wonderful mother I was going to be to my yet-unborn baby, so much a better mother than Annie Herne. And it was only later when I calmed down that I admitted to myself that from what I’d seen of her she wasn’t a bad mother at all and loved her little boy dearly. It was just that I wanted her hat.
How do you put up with it? My poor lamb, my dear Lijah, when you deserve so much better than the wife you’ve got and here am I, your mother, to tell you so and to love you so much more and so much better than your wife will ever be able to.
Hatred: a small word, but one that holds so many different feelings all tightly packaged up into two short, hard syllables. Envy and meanness and resentment and plain old misery – a whole load of stuff, but spin them all together and what do you come up with? Let’s be plain speaking and call it by its name: hatred.
So, I thought, she hates me. I cried, of course. Bitter tears of self-pity ran down my cheeks and dropped freely from my face onto where the suet lay in a helpless lump on the rolling board. I had to stand still for a moment while I gathered myself, then wipe my face with my sleeve as my hands were sticky and I didn’t want to reach inside my apron pocket for my handkerchief. Fortunately, Elijah liked his suet rolls well salted. I heaved a breath.
Well,
Mrs
Smith,
I thought as I bent back to my task and pressed down on the rolling pin,
or
whatever
your
name
may
be.
The suet bulged like flesh beneath my efforts. It was sticking, so I reached for the open bag of flour.
Well, what you have forgotten is that I am going to be a mother too, and your equal, and if hatred is what you want to bring into this house, then you shall have it back as large as you like.
All my fierce thinking and kneading of the suet had distracted me and I had let the bacon and onions get too brown. I rescued them from the hot-plate and took the pan to the board, scattering them on top of the suet. Then I drizzled the cooking fat over the top and began rolling the whole thing up. It was then that it
happened – a feeling inside me, like something tearing. Water rushed down my leg. I stared at the puddle on the floor. I took a deep breath, and stepped backwards. Then panic overcame me.
I hobbled quickly to the bottom of the stairs, and shouted up, in a voice high and hollow, ‘
Mother
!’
A
nd then came Daniel.
We got rid of Elijah double quick, of course. Clementina went for Mrs Dawson. Lilly got wind of it and rose from her sickbed to come over and Mrs Dawson brought her two nieces along as they were in training. Our tiny house was suddenly full of women – although I registered them all only dimly as I was pretty far gone by then.
*
Afterwards, I held him, my Daniel, upstairs in our bedroom, while the others busied themselves. One of the nieces brought in strong tea with lots of sugar and toast dripping in lard, and I ate and drank with one hand as I couldn’t bear to put my baby down. I thought I would never put him down, ever, in my whole life.
Daniel. I stared at his shiny little cheeks, the smear of blood on one of his eyebrows, the slick of dark hair on his head. His eyes were clamped tight shut, like he was saying to us,
I’ve got a lot to get used to so you’re all going to have to give me a bit of time.
‘It was you in
there,’ I whispered to him. ‘All that time, I was walking around and I didn’t know who was inside me. And all along it was you.’
When I had finished my tea and toast, the niece came back with a hairbrush and began to brush my hair firmly. ‘Aunty says you’re to tell me where to find a clean nightgown to put on you. We’ve to get you tidy, so we can let your husband come in.’
Husband …? Oh, yes, I thought, Elijah. I carried on gazing down at Daniel while I let Mrs Walton’s niece pull at my hair.
I suppose I had better show you to your father, hadn’t I, my little one?
When I had been got ready, they all left me alone. Daniel still had his eyes clamped tight shut and I was still looking down at him, when I became aware of a shape in the doorway. I didn’t lift my head, but whispered, ‘Come in quietly, Elijah. He’s asleep.’
*
I was the Queen of Paradise Street, for a while. No boys had been born on our street for some time, so he and I were fussed over something rotten. The stuff we got given – Mrs Herne bought a green lace bonnet from Peaks. It was the oddest thing you’d ever seen in your life, with a little tuft on top, like he was a pixie, but I could tell it cost a fortune. Mrs Walton made us rhubarb crumble twice a week for weeks on end – said I had to keep my strength up – and I’d quite liked rhubarb up ’til then but, after a while, the very smell made me feel ill and to this day if I smell rhubarb I come over a bit poorly. Every child in the street came round and begged to be allowed to take Daniel out in his pram. We belonged to everybody. I had never been so important, or cosseted. It was the best time of my life.
*
Then, one night, I was awoken. I had no idea what time it was, but I stirred to see my husband standing on my side of the bed. He had been out all day and evening and I had gone to bed early.
‘Move over, Rosie,’ he said, his voice slurry and affectionate.
Daniel was on my other side.
‘I can’t,’ I said sleepily, ‘the baby’s …’
‘Move the baby then!’ His tone had changed completely. I sat up on my elbows.
I knew what he wanted, of course, and I didn’t think it unreasonable as it had been several months and it was a side of our lives that had been quite important to us before. It came to me that I hadn’t paid Elijah any attention at all since Daniel had been born. More than one woman in our street had whispered to me that I mustn’t forget my husband’s needs if I didn’t want him to stray.
My head was in a fog. I had fed Daniel not an hour before and had been in one of those deep, drugged sleeps you get after feeding, but I roused myself and picked Daniel up. We didn’t have a Moses basket for him yet; that was the one thing we hadn’t been given. Elijah had said he would weave one and I was still waiting for it. I didn’t want to put Daniel on the floor, so I opened the top drawer of the chest of drawers in the corner and laid him gently down among my underthings. He didn’t stir.
I got back into bed, lay on my back and hitched up my nightie.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like it. It just felt wrong. When he touched me, I couldn’t escape the thought that he was stealing something that belonged to Daniel. He was gentle enough, on account of it being my first time since, but I was still a bit out of sorts down there and could hardly feel him. He managed it, but I didn’t get the feeling he enjoyed it all that much either.
Afterwards, he drew away from me and sat up. I rolled over and eased myself to the other side of the bed.
He came round his side after a moment or two, undressed himself properly, and got in. I picked Daniel up from the chest of drawers and put him back between us, and could not prevent myself from giving a satisfied sigh as I snuggled down next to him. Bless him for not stirring that whole time.
Maybe Elijah heard my sigh and understood it. Maybe he realised that, for the time being, he was something to be endured.
After a short silence between us, he said awkwardly, ‘How’s the little fella been today, then?’
‘All right,’ I said, drifting back towards sleep. My last thought was, well, at least you can’t get pregnant when you’re feeding a baby already.
Turned out, I was quite wrong about that.
*
Mehitable was born just before Christmas that year. Mehitable Smith. She was early; a tiny, scrawny thing, with folds of dark skin and a head of jet-black hair. She slipped out easy as anything but was a nightmare to feed – completely different from my Daniel. She was that restless on the breast, as if it made her uncomfortable in some way. She would toss and turn her head – while staying clamped on to me, mind – and kick her thin, little legs. It hurt me in a way that feeding Daniel never had. She was colicky as well. That was a trial. I thought it was only boys got the colic but I was soon put right about that.
*
Just after teatime it would start, the screaming, and it would go on for hours and hours, and the only thing that kept her quiet was feeding and that only worked for as long as she was actually doing it.
I thought it would never stop, the screaming. I couldn’t think what I had done to produce such an unhappy baby. It drove us all near demented.
Well, I say all. What I mean is me and Mother and the poor, unfortunate neighbours at numbers twenty and twenty-four. Elijah was never there. Things were not going too well between me and him.
Elijah’s mother had been gone for the whole of the summer – where to, I do not know – but she had taken off somewhere doing whatever it is her sort do in the summer. I wish I could say Elijah and I were happier with her gone but we weren’t. He was twitchy
and bad tempered the whole time she was away, and once I snapped at him, ‘Oh for heaven’s sake, why didn’t you go off with your mother?’ He gave me a look so dark it made me frightened.
Come the weather turning colder, she was back. Daniel was glad to see her. She spoiled him rotten. It was quite nice to have her around the first few days, helping out, and I thought maybe it will be all right this time. Then, she started. Why was Elijah out so much and coming home with so little lovah to show for it?
Lovah
? You know, cash.
Don’t ask me, Mother, he’s your son. I haven’t a clue what he gets up to in the evening
. Was Daniel maybe getting a bit squinty? Had I been taking him out in the wind too much? Didn’t I know it was bad for a baby’s eyes?
Mother, Daniel’s fine. He’s the healthiest baby in the whole of Cambridge
. Was that Empers woman still getting poorly and taking to her bed? Her poor husband.
Actually, Mother, Lilly nearly died in July. Samuel was beside himself
.
I didn’t say any of these things, and perhaps that was my mistake. I thought to myself, just let it all wash over, you know what she’s like. So all the things I would have liked to have said to her piled up inside me, month after month. I would lie awake at night – bigly pregnant and unable to sleep, yet again – and I would rehearse in my head my smart retorts to all her snide remarks.
Of course, what I really wanted to say was, if you don’t like it round here, Mother, then why don’t you
ife
? Oh, I’d picked up a bit of their cant, right enough, even though they usually only talked it to each other when I was out of the room. I wasn’t near as daft as they thought.
Then Mehitable came along, and everything went downhill from there.
I think, in my head, I thought I would be spoiled again when I had another baby. It was so short a time since Daniel I could still remember how everyone came around and how even Elijah would hold him and sing songs and tell me I was a clever Rosie to have produced such a handsome boy. What I didn’t know was that, with
baby number two, everybody just assumes you’ve done it once, you know the ropes, and what’s the point of making a fuss of you? Which in my case was something of a disaster, as I needed far more help than I had ever done with Daniel.
Two weeks after she was born, I left them both with Elijah’s mother and said I was going to walk to the street and back, just for a breath of fresh air, and to see the candles lit up in people’s windows. It was nearly Christmas and I hadn’t been out of the house in a fortnight. It was almost dark. I had just got to the end of the road and was turning to come back when I saw Mr Winfield pass on the other side of the street, on his way to his evening shift at the brewery, probably.
He raised a hand to me. ‘Evening, Mrs Smith. Hoping for a Christmas baby, I expect?’
He went on his way and I waddled home with my spirits so low. All right, it was dark, and I was still huge and had a shawl on and he couldn’t tell I’d had my baby already – but with Daniel the whole street knew the minute he was born. They almost hung bunting out the windows. With Mehitable, a lot of folk didn’t even notice, let alone care, and that’s the truth.
Then the colic started. They knew I’d had the baby then. Ha, that told them. Mehitable Smith made her presence felt loud and clear, then.
*
I should probably explain something about the children’s names. It was not my doing. Turned out Elijah’s mother had pretty firm ideas about that, like she did about everything else.
When Daniel was about four weeks old, she put him on her shoulder one day and said she was taking him out for a bit. I hated the way she used to tie him to her with a shawl – we had a perfectly good pram that we’d borrowed from the Field family, but she never used it. I had had a rough night feeding him, however, so I said okay. Elijah was out, as usual, so I thought I could get a bit of rest.
Little did I know what she had in mind. A couple of hours later, she’s back, and she’s telling me about how she thought it was going to rain on the way home but it didn’t, then she adds, as relaxed about it as you like, ‘Oh, by the way. I got him registered. I called him Adolphus.’
I stared at her in disbelief. I was sat on the settee, and she was standing picking bits of fluff off her hat. ‘
What?
’
‘Adolphus. You was saying last night we’ve got to get him registered, it’s the law, so I thought I might as well do it while I was out. There wasn’t any queuing up or anything. I took him in and said I’ve come to get the baby registered. And they said, what’s his name?’
From her tone of voice, I gathered that this question had surprised her.
‘So I said Adolphus. Adolphus Smith.’
‘
Adolphus
!’
She looked at me irritably. ‘Yes, that’s what I said, weren’t it? Adolphus.’
For once, I could not restrain myself. ‘What sort of name is that? For heaven’s sake, Mother! How could you do that? What kind of name is that?’
She stopped picking fluff off her hat and her eyes narrowed. ‘It’s a perfectly good name, a very respectable name.’
‘We’ve been calling him Daniel for weeks!’
‘I know that,’ she said crossly, ‘what difference does that make? It doesn’t matter what name you tell the registration folk, does it? You could tell them his name is Lemon Thyme. It’s got nothing to do with anything, does it?’
Exasperated and shaking her head, she went into the kitchen.
*
When Mehitable was born, I stared down at her, but nothing came into my head. In truth, I had been convinced it was another boy. I’d been carrying low, exactly the same way as I was with Daniel. I was
planning in my head how I would register this one myself and his name, in life and on paper, would be something nice and normal like Frederick or William or George.
I didn’t have a single girl’s name in my head. I suppose I should have named her after my own mother, but my mother always hated her name.
‘What’s your Christian name?’ I asked Elijah’s mother, as she busied herself at the foot of my bed, gathering the soiled sheets.
‘Clementina,’ she said without looking up. ‘But most folk calls me Lem.’
Oh well, that’s out, I thought.
I glanced back down at my poor, scrawny little girl. I wish I could say I felt overwhelmed with love and protectiveness, how I had with Daniel, but I felt nothing much – just a strange, dull emptiness inside.
Elijah’s mother came and stood by the side of my bed and looked down at her too. There was a long silence as we stared at her, as if all three of us were, quite calmly, contemplating the difficulties that lay ahead.
‘Mehitable,’ Clementina said simply.
I turned my head away. ‘All right.’
*
It upsets me to think about the next few years in Paradise Street. What came later was hard, but those years were hardest because they had started off so well, me and Elijah happy together and me full of what a good wife and mother I would be; and I was, to start off with, I swear I was.
It is hard, when a child is sick on you. It is hard not to blame yourself and then to blame the child, for you cannot bear the thought that if you’d done something different it would have been all right. That doctor that we got, eventually, I felt like he was blaming me. You never stop being wrong when you’re a mother, I soon discovered.
Elijah started disappearing, for days on end sometimes. Daniel
took it stoically enough, but Mehitable would cry and whine for her father something rotten. I remember one day, Mehitable had been crying and moaning all day. Elijah had been gone a couple of nights and we’d run out of everything. I had borrowed and borrowed from everyone in the street, and we had a reputation now, and even Lilly was getting fed up with it. I didn’t even want to show my face outside that day, so ashamed was I, so Mehitable and I were cooped up together. Clementina was off somewhere. Daniel was old enough to go to school in the mornings.