Authors: Barbara Vine
“Aren’t you going to give me a kiss, John?”
Dutifully he bent down.
“Your father will tell you,” Mary said, and, making a grotesque dumb show in Sybil’s direction, indicated that no more was to be said about Maud in Sybil’s presence.
John tried and failed to say a cheerful “Hallo, Syb.” The words came out like a phrase in a foreign language, inadequately learned. He turned round to face his father, who was standing helplessly behind him. For the first time in his life John felt stronger than his parents, able to handle something better than they could, although he had as yet no idea what it was.
The two men went into the dining room, where the table was laid for the midday dinner, which would normally be served at this time. Neither man made any move to sit down. “Please, Father, tell me what’s happened to Maud.”
“She is in her room.” John Goodwin gave a heavy sigh. “We thought it best for her to remain there.”
“All right. She’s ill, is she? What’s wrong with her?” John had spoken in the abrupt, sharp tone which in normal circumstances would have called forth a stern rebuke. “Please tell me what’s wrong.”
Because his father turned his face away before he spoke, John failed to hear quite what he said or else the term he used was so old-fashioned John thought he must have misheard.
“She’s with what?”
“Your sister is with child, is what I said. Don’t make me repeat it.”
John pulled out a chair from the table and sat down. “You mean she’s going to have a baby?”
“Don’t.”
“I’d have thought she was a child herself, but perhaps I don’t know much about these things. I must go up and see her. Poor Maud.”
“You should say, ‘My poor parents,
her
poor parents.’ I don’t wish you to see her, John. Not yet, if ever.”
Sitting there, staring down at the white tablecloth, embroidered by his mother with a design of yellow daffodils and green leaves, John was thinking of his own situation. If this was how they reacted to a daughter of theirs becoming pregnant without being married, how would they receive being told of the appalling, outrageous, almost unthinkable conduct of their son as a pervert, guilty of the crime people—if they ever dared speak of it—called homosexualism?
Taking John’s silence for acceptance of a ban on seeing his sister, his father began outlining the arrangements which were being made for her reception into the Wesley Institute for Unmarried Mothers. Another three weeks must elapse before she could occupy one of the dormitories there, each shared by six young women. The child would be taken from her immediately after it was born and offered for adoption. If Maud remained here in this house and in her room during that month, leaving for the home with either himself or her mother and in a car . . .
Here John interrupted, “Do you know anyone with a car?”
“Of course. Grandma has a car, but I don’t wish Grandma to know about this. The shock of it could kill her. I shall arrange to hire one.”
“Does Sybil know any of this?”
“Your mother told Ethel as a married woman and asked her to tell Sybil. That has been done and now she is at home again with us.”
John got up. “I am going up to Maud now, Father.”
“No, John, no. I forbid it.”
“I am going to Maud now.”
A
T FIRST
John thought of simply taking her away with him, removing her from their parents and taking rooms for them in a boardinghouse until, if all went well, he had found a place to live near the Ashburton school. Within twenty-four hours he understood that his parents were bewildered. They had no idea how to handle the situation. His father might have made an arrangement with the Wesley Institute, they might have shut Maud away, leaving her food to be taken to her by “the maid,” but they were plainly terrified of the disgrace that would accrue to them if Maud’s condition became known. Both of them relied on John far more than usual. It was as if they had lost a daughter and gained a son, and John’s telling them that the Ashburton job was his to start at the beginning of the autumn term called forth extravagant congratulations. He realized that he could be in control if he wished to be. His stated determination to go straight up to Maud after his father had told him, his immediate mounting of the stairs, showed his father better than any arguing could have that their twenty-five-year-old son had made himself master.
His father’s pomposity almost disappeared that evening, as did his mother’s evasion of the facts. Once Sybil had gone out, allowed to visit her friend in the next street only after she repeatedly promised “not to mention Maud’s name,” only then did they begin on some letting down of the barriers and as much confiding as they were capable of. Mary Goodwin began by reverting to what she had said to Sybil. John must never speak of Maud to anyone. If anyone asked after her, he must say she had been taken ill and was to go away to stay with a cousin in Hereford. He never knew why Hereford, why the name of the town came into
his mother’s head. They had no relatives living there. His father spoke of their great shock, that they still hardly believed such a thing of a child of theirs. John saw that what both of them really felt was desperation at the possible loss of their respectable status.
His thoughts went back to his meeting with Maud in her bedroom. She had been lying on her bed, got up, and threw herself into his arms. The siblings had never been encouraged to kiss or even touch each other, and he couldn’t remember the two of them ever before in such a close embrace.
“You don’t think I’ve committed a crime, do you, John? You don’t think I’m foul and dirty and disgraced, do you?”
“Is that what they said to you?”
She nodded and tears began to flow down her face.
“You mustn’t cry,” he said, “because if you do, I will and men don’t cry, do they?” He laughed when he said it. He sometimes cried and had taught himself not to be ashamed of it.
Still weeping, she said, “What did
my father
mean about a new law? He said there was a new law that meant women couldn’t get married till they were sixteen. What does it mean?”
John thought. “Oh, yes, I see. Up till this year, if you can believe it, the age for women getting married, if you could call them women, was twelve, and for men it was fourteen. This new law changed that to sixteen for both.”
She said nothing, only gave a little sob.
“Listen to me, Maud. I will look after you. I won’t let them ill-treat you. I won’t leave you alone either. I’ll be up here with you as much as I can.” He was thinking fast and thinking about things which he had never had occasion even to imagine before. “Maud,” he began, choosing his words with the greatest care, “Maud, your sweetheart who is the father of your baby, does he know? I hope you don’t mind my asking.”
“No, I don’t mind. Not when it’s you. He’s my friend Rosemary’s brother. His name’s Ronnie Clifford.” She wanted to say
Ronnie wasn’t her sweetheart anymore if he had ever been, but that would only lead to too many awkward questions. “Father told me I couldn’t marry him even if he wanted to because I’m not old enough. The baby will be born before I’m old enough.”
“I’ll tell him, though, shall I? He ought to know. Maud, remember, I’ll look after you.”
Now, talking to his parents, he felt surging through him that strength he hadn’t known when almost boasting of it to Maud. How he was going to look after her he didn’t yet know, but he could tell from the expressions on his parents’ faces and the tone of their voices that they recognized it too. They recognized it and were glad of it. If they could be relieved of responsibility for their daughter, put their burden on John’s shoulders, their former dull contentment that they called happiness might return.
“There’s no need,” he said, “for Maud to go into this home you’ve arranged for her. It’s not as if she has no family. That must be cancelled. I can do that.”
His father had coloured. He wetted his lips, said, “I haven’t in actual fact done anything about the Wesley Institute. I told her I had, but it was really that I intended to do so.”
You lied to torment her. John didn’t say this aloud, but perhaps he looked it. “She told me she prefers staying in her room. She doesn’t want to come down here. Sybil can see her there.”
“It’s not right for Sybil to see her,” his mother began. “Sybil is an unmarried girl.”
“So is Maud,” John said.
Not until the following evening did he finally make up his mind. He had been thinking of it all night and all that day, turning the plan he had come up with over and over in his head. At first it had frightened him, it was so
big.
It was so daring. He doubted he could handle it. Then he presented it to himself as the only possible thing to be done, the only thing that could be acceptable to Maud and satisfy his parents as far as it was known
to them. If anyone was to be sacrificed, it was he, and he would be. If it worked, and it must work, he would live a life of deception for years and it would be a life of celibacy and chastity, however it might look to the outside world. Maud could hardly object to it for it would save her reputation and give her dignity. Only he would be sacrificed, but he argued with himself that keeping the vow he had made in Bertie’s presence would in any case commit him to a single and sexless life. It would help him. One way of looking at it was to teach himself it was much for his benefit as hers.
This plan he was formulating would protect him, he must try to look at it like that. For no women would pursue him or try to ingratiate themselves with him, no men would suspect him of being an invert. At his new school the headmaster and his fellow teachers would wordlessly welcome John into the league of married men.
None of this was communicated to the family. Gaining some of his bullying cockiness, his father said, “Since you’ve interfered with my arrangement and stopped her”—he never used Maud’s name—“being suitably catered for until her confinement—”
“There was no arrangement,” John said. He was losing the excessive respect he had once had for his parents, and with it a lot of his affection.
“No, well, since you put an end to that, have you thought where she is to go? She can’t stay here.”
The door opened and Sybil walked in. “I’ve been upstairs with Maud.”
“You were told on no account to go in there and talk to her.”
“I’m a grown woman, Father. Maud says she doesn’t want to stay in this house.”
Mary Goodwin started crying.
Her husband sent her a glance of contempt. “It doesn’t matter what she wants. She has forfeited all rights to choice.”
John ignored him. “I shall find somewhere for her and me. She will live with me.”
“Oh, John,” his mother wailed, showing more emotion than he ever remembered, “oh, John, don’t make me lose you too.”
Ronnie Clifford made no answer to the letter John sent him, telling him that Maud was expecting his child and could they meet? It was a gentle, polite letter, containing of course no threats and no demands for money, but no surprise to John that it wasn’t answered, and he asked himself what use a reply would have been. He had obtained the address from Maud, the post was reliable, and he had no doubt his letter had reached its destination. The boy was likely afraid and believed that if he let this news pass unnoticed, it would go away. Even if he could be made to marry Maud, it could not be until after the child was born, and anyway, Maud had told John she didn’t want to marry Ronnie.
Would she want to marry, or appear to marry,
him
?
I
T WAS
ten days later. He had told Maud nothing of his plan. He took the train to Exeter St. Davids and thence to Newton Abbot. A Western National bus took him to the village of Dartcombe, where, having answered an advertisement in one of the papers he’d bought when last in Exeter, he was due to look at a cottage that was to let in a few weeks’ time. The bus took him along narrow lanes between banks lush with flowers, the primroses and violets long over by this time, but buttercups and heartsease, campion and meadowsweet, and, on the edge of a little stream, yellow musk in full bloom. Green hills rose behind them, some dark with woodland, others divided into little patchwork fields where red-and-white cows were pastured. The villages of granite cottages, churches with tall spires, and one or two “gentlemen’s” houses differed from one another only in the arrangement of these dwellings, in the beauty of the little gardens, the predominance of thatched roofs, and the size and antiquity of their church. Dartcombe was one of the prettier places, made so by the height of the wooded hills which enclosed it on three sides and the ancient oaks on the village green.
No. 2 Bury Row, the street so called, John supposed, because of its proximity to the little churchyard that was adjacent to the church of All Saints, wasn’t one of the prettier houses, being the second in a row of terraced cottages not much more than twenty years old. Its owner lived at No. 1, and while wondering if
this would be a disadvantage, he knocked on the door, met Mrs. Tremlett, and was shown over the four rooms and kitchen of the cottage she referred to as “next-door.”
He felt a mild embarrassment, a kind of guilt, at the lies he had to tell, even though they were told in a good cause. He had been telling himself for a long time now that the end can never justify the means, and now he was discovering that adhering to this principle was not so simple as it sounded. Mrs. Tremlett was assuming that the larger of the two bedrooms would be shared by “Mr. and Mrs. Goodwin,” and he let her assume it. The other bedroom, she suggested, would become the “nursery” used by the child John had told her his “wife” expected at about Christmastime. There was no bathroom, but in the scullery beyond the kitchen, a strange innovation had to be explained to him. Under a wooden cover was a hip bath shaped like an armchair and fed by a cold tap. You heated water on the range, which, added to the cold contents of the bath, made sitting in it tolerable.
Better than nothing, John thought. The house had a garden full now of flowers, asters and dahlias and early Michaelmas daisies. He decided that he might enjoy gardening after he came home from school, though he had never tried doing any. An outdoor lavatory, clean and freshly whitewashed, adjoined a small toolshed. John said he would take the cottage and paid the first month’s rent, though Mrs. Tremlett requested payment by the week. Would it be all right for him to stay the night, this coming night? As far as she was concerned, Mrs. Tremlett said rather suspiciously, but where was his wife?