Authors: Barbara Vine
Herbert Burrows called in the evening. He and John had met just once before. John thought he was a bit of a stuffed shirt but could see that his parents would approve of him. It was Friday, not Sunday, when Maud knew anything of the sort she proposed would be out of the question, but when she suggested putting a record on the gramophone and Ethel and Herbert and she and John dancing to it, their parents too if they liked, she was surprised when her father shook his head and, using a favourite Goodwin phrase, said it “wouldn’t be suitable.” Herbert too supported him and said, “Not a good idea,” in ingratiating tones. Maud had only suggested it for something energetic to do, something to take her mind off what was always on it, however much she tried not to think. Her grandmother Halliwell, a fit and vigorous old woman, who had come round for the evening, said young people ought to have a good time while they were young, but her opinion was ignored in spite of her wealth.
The parents were the first to go to bed, departing soon after Herbert left. Ethel hadn’t come back into the living-room after saying good-bye to him with kisses on the doorstep, and sharp at ten Sybil too went to bed. Grandma, as even her daughter and son-in-law called her, left soon after in her motorcar, driven by her “man,” the husband of her housekeeper. John and Maud were left. More than ten years were between them, but they had always been the closest of the siblings since Maud was a toddler and John the big brother who carried her or pushed her pram.
“I’m sorry they wouldn’t let us dance,” he said. “I’d like to dance with you, Maud, but perhaps it can never be in this house.”
She was desperate for someone to tell. It was too early to know, she knew that, but just to have someone to talk to about her fears would help her, someone to share her terror. Soon it would be time to go to bed, and in the night-time the worst of it would return to her, feeling the swelling of her body, the terror of someone’s noticing. Before that happened she might be sick in the
mornings. When she thought like that, lying in the dark, panic rose into her mouth and she had to stop herself from screaming. She could remember her mother when she was carrying the little girl they called Beryl, though she had lived only a day. If she had a baby and it lived only a day, that would be wonderful, a relief and a release. Better still if it came away first from her in a miscarriage, for then there would be no disgrace and no shame. She could bear the pain and maybe blood and pain, anything to be back where and who she was before this horror came upon her.
“You’re very quiet tonight, Maud.”
“I wasn’t quiet when I asked if we could have a dance.”
“That’s true. Afterwards when you hardly said any more, I thought you might be sulking, but you don’t sulk, do you? You’re usually a cheerful soul.”
“John. John, do you believe in God?”
He raised his eyebrows. “That’s quite a question in this house.”
“I know, but do you?”
“I don’t know, Maud. I used to think I did. I think the trouble is, if it’s a trouble, that I know too much science now to believe in a creator. There’s no need for a creator, it could all have happened without God.”
She said as if she were near to tears, her voice hoarse, “I don’t know about any of that. It’s just that I’m afraid it’s all lies. God
isn’t
love, He
doesn’t
answer prayers, He
isn’t
merciful.”
“Oh, Maud. What’s wrong? Come here.” John took her hands. In that household they didn’t hug or kiss. “There’s something very wrong. Won’t you tell me about it? You can tell me.”
She was sobbing by then. “No, I can’t. I can’t tell anyone.”
He handed her the clean, white handkerchief Mrs. Petworth had washed and ironed for him. Maud scrubbed at her eyes, but he took the handkerchief back and dried her tears tenderly. Even with her face crumpled and red from crying, she was the prettiest of his sisters, her eyes large and a clear greenish blue, her skin
pale yet flushed and quite unblemished. Of the family, through some throwback, she alone had long, elegant hands with tapering fingers. While he held her, gently patting her back, he thought she must have been rejected by a boy, some fool without taste or discernment. Or a bunch of schoolgirls, bitter with jealousy, had insulted and abused her.
“Don’t tell me I’ll feel better in the morning,” she said.
“I wasn’t going to. You’ll feel better one day, though. We all do that.” And we feel worse again, he said to himself, it’s the way life is.
She was sitting up straight now, her swollen eyes meeting his directly. “When will you come back here?”
“If I get the job, and I think I will, I’ll leave at the end of the term, that’s late July. I’ll have to come back here and live here until I can start at my new school in September and find a place to live nearby.”
Suddenly her face took on a look of deep seriousness. “If things aren’t better by then, if this thing that’s worrying me hasn’t gone away, I’ll tell you.” She got up quickly after that and ran away up the stairs to bed.
H
E STARTED
to do what he had never before done. He began writing to Maud. Letters to his mother he had always written, but never to any of his sisters till now. In the first letter he told Maud that he had got the job. She need not tell his parents because he was writing to them too. He was still at Mrs. Petworth’s but would leave in the last week of July. How was she? He had been worried about her. She had seemed so sad and anxious. Would she write back, please? He needed to know how she was and if she was better. She didn’t reply. The true cause of her trouble, that she was
in
trouble, as people said, never occurred to him. Such things never happened in families like his. He wrote again in the middle of May, telling her that he would be teaching at the Grammar School in a town in Devon called Ashburton, south of Dartmoor. The countryside was so beautiful he longed for her to see it.
The next time he wrote she meant to answer his letter. She knew what he said already because her parents had told all three girls. He would like to come home on Saturday the twenty-seventh of July, be in Bristol for Ethel’s wedding, go back to London to pack up and fetch his things, then return to Bristol until September the second. By then he hoped he would have found himself a cottage to rent in one of the villages near Ashburton. His father and mother were immensely proud of him. At only twenty-five he had succeeded spectacularly, his was an intellectual
triumph. They boasted about him in a modest kind of way to the chapel congregation.
“Fancy asking if he could come home,” Mary said to her husband. “As if we wouldn’t be happy to have him, our only son!”
Maud wrote him a noncommittal letter. It took her a long time. At first she meant to tell him what had happened to her because to write it seemed easier than to confess it to him face-to-face, but after trying, she found she couldn’t put the words on paper. So she wrote that she had been ill with a stomach complaint—that, she thought bitterly, was literally true—but was better now. It would be good having him here for the wedding in the middle of August. She didn’t much want to be a bridesmaid, she told him, but couldn’t say no. Her letter occupied only half of a sheet of paper.
She said nothing about her thoughts of drowning herself. One evening, when it was dark, she could jump into the Bristol Channel like the charwoman’s niece. She couldn’t swim, none of them could, so she wouldn’t be tempted to save herself. She would sink and die, first seeing her whole life pass before her closed eyes, as they said it did. The baby would die with her, and for the first time she felt a pang at that, at her unborn child dying, instead of looking forward to its possible death with joy. One evening at twilight, before it got dark that summer night, she stood looking down at the water and was too afraid to jump. She found that she was more afraid of death than of pregnancy and disgrace.
The stomach complaint she wrote about to John had been morning sickness. The first few times it occurred, she tried to conceal it from everyone, but with only one bathroom to be shared by five people, all of whom had to get up at much the same time, this was impossible. When she threw up on the bedroom floor and refused to say anything, Ethel told their mother that Maud had food poisoning. The prospect of going to Dr. Collins, who, she was sure, would on sight know what was wrong with her, was
terrifying. The doctor had a surgery in his own large and rather gloomy house in the next street. Maud and her mother sat in the waiting room, which was full of mahogany chests of drawers and tables and chairs with shabby green velvet seats. One of the two pictures, one on the wall opposite the window and the other on the wall opposite the door, was of a drooping maiden with a wreath on her long hair. She looked as ill as Maud had felt the week before but felt no longer. The other picture was of a single cow standing in long grass against a background of blue hills.
Three weeks of vomiting had made her thin, for which she was glad. In her box-pleated school tunic no one would have dreamt she was expecting. Dr. Collins came into the waiting room, said good-morning, and ushered them into his surgery. He took her temperature, looked down her throat, and asked her about her bowel movements. Then he gave her mother a prescription, which she was to take to his dispensary, where it would be made up. Years later she often wondered about Dr. Collins. Had he known? Had he guessed but said nothing? She had no reason for thinking this way except for one small thing. As they were leaving the surgery, her mother going first, she had looked up at him to say thank-you as her mother said she should. The words were never said for Dr. Collins caught her eye and, giving a slight shake of his head, smiled at her a slight indeed, tiny half smile.
The medicine was a clear liquid with a white sediment. Because, as Mary Goodwin said, Maud was “a big girl now, nearly grown-up,” she was left to give herself her twice-daily doses. If Dr. Collins had guessed the true nature of her “illness,” as she sometimes thought he had and sometimes was sure he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have given her anything that would harm her baby. But surely he hadn’t or he would have said something. To her mother if not to her. A strange thing was happening to Maud. Much as she dreaded her condition’s being detected, much as the idea of giving birth to an illegitimate child horrified her, she didn’t want
to take anything that would hurt the baby. Though she thought of a woman someone at school had told her about, who had drunk Jeyes Fluid, and sometimes of doing the same thing herself, that would be the end of both of them but not of her alone or her baby alone. As to the medicine, she sometimes saw a man in the street who had a humped back and a woman half of whose face was blotched with a birthmark, and although she had never thought about it before, now she wondered if these disfigurements had been caused by their mothers’ taking medicine that poisoned their babies before they were born.
July came in, it was four months since what had happened in those fields, and she noticed she had begun to lose her waist. Her skirt placket refused to do up. Her mother was already making Ethel’s wedding dress, and she and Sybil would make the dresses for the bridesmaids. Maud was in a sweat of fear. If her mother measured her for the dress, what she saw when Maud was in her slip would only add to the vague suspicions she already had. She had asked Maud why the towels she used at the time of her monthlies hadn’t been put to soak in the covered bucket of cold water that stood inside the cupboard under the scullery sink. Mrs. Goodwin knew to the day when her girls menstruated and expected to see the bloodstained squares of towelling floating in the reddening water.
“I washed my own,” Maud said.
“There was no need for you to do that. The maid always boils them to be sure they’re really clean.”
“I got them clean enough.”
“Well, I’d rather you didn’t do it again.”
R
ONNIE SHE
had never seen since that second time. She saw his sister, Rosemary, almost every day, and Rosemary had told her he had been working for his university entrance. The idea of telling
Ronnie was horrible, but perhaps the time would come when she must. Or someone in her family must, and the only possible one was John. She longed for John’s homecoming at the end of the month. She would tell him and consult him. He knew what to do about so many things.
The Goodwin household was in a fever of activity about the forthcoming wedding. Maud told her mother there was no need to measure her as she was the same size as she had been for the last dress Mary Goodwin had made her: she still had a thirty-six-inch bust, a twenty-four-inch waist, and thirty-eight-inch hips. That was what she said, but it wasn’t true. Her bust—none of the family, indeed no woman they knew, spoke about
breasts
—had increased by two inches and her waist by three. Her stomach had been flat, but now it had grown into a little dome. A week before John was due to come home, Maud told Ethel she couldn’t be her bridesmaid.
“What do you mean? Why not?”
“Don’t ask me. I just can’t.” Maud could think of no excuse. Why couldn’t she? The true reason was impossible to say. “You’ll have Sybil and you’ve got Wendy.” Wendy was a cousin, their father’s sister’s daughter. “I don’t see why you want three. Everyone only has two.”
“What’s Mother going to say?”
“I don’t see it matters what she says. It’s your wedding.”
Ethel, of course, told her mother.
“I don’t understand you,” Mary Goodwin said to Maud. “I don’t know what’s come over you. Your father says it’s a dreadful unkindness to poor Ethel. He’s very disappointed in you.”
What would he say then when he knew she was expecting an illegitimate child?
She always walked to school, and now when she was out in the street, she seemed to see pregnant women everywhere. Of course they did their best to conceal it, wearing loose smocks over their
dresses, wearing baggy skirts and double-breasted jackets far too big for them. But Maud could tell. Her condition had made her ultrasensitive. It was high summer so no one wore gloves. She also looked at these women’s left hands. They all wore wedding rings. Was she going to have to wear one, maybe a curtain ring?