Authors: Barbara Vine
He put the letter into his pocket, reasoning that even if it was stolen or happened to fall out, not a word in it indicated that he and Bertie were anything but the friends any couple of young men might be. But his mind was full of the empty phrases Bertie
had written, repeating over and over sentences such as “life goes in much as usual” as if they were verses composed by Keats or extracts from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. His own letters often had quotations from these sonnets. Although no teacher had ever told him that Shakespeare might have been homosexual, he read inversion (as some people called it) in certain lines. Writing to Bertie back in November, John had told him that his was a face “by Nature’s own hand painted” and called him “the master-mistress of my passion.” In that instance Bertie did refer to the content of John’s letter, saying that he hoped John wasn’t calling him a woman.
Cycling along the narrow, deep lanes, the hedges white with hoarfrost, a precursor of the snow soon to come, John planned in his mind the letter he would write in response to Bertie’s. That Bertie should want to come here to see him, to be with him, was a delight and John had dared not suggest it. Now he longed for it but asked himself how it could be possible. He had begun to regret having told Maud of his sexual nature. If he had said nothing, instead of gritting his teeth and bringing himself to the agonising point of telling her, Bertie could have come to Bury Row and they could have shared the bed in John’s room without attracting comment. Men often did that. But now she would remember what John had told her and be horrified. She might say Bertie couldn’t come, and John, though he paid the rent and bought the food and was in her eyes and everyone else’s the master of the house, knew that he could never bring himself to defy her. He might be “queer,” as even homosexuals themselves called it, but he was always aware of the opprobrium in which ordinary,
normal
people held men like him and Bertie. Maud was one of those ordinary, normal people. He remembered too the promise he had made her, saying that what he had done when he lived in London would never happen again. Months before that, he had made a vow to
himself
that it would never happen again, he would
be chaste in thought, word, and deed. In thought that promise had already many times been broken.
A
PART FROM
John, Sybil was the only member of her family that Maud felt at all close to, so she had written to Sybil to announce the birth of Hope, enclosing a letter in the only Christmas card she sent. She asked her sister to tell their parents, then scratched out
parents
and substituted
my mother.
Having sworn never to speak to her father again, she hadn’t relented but clung to this vow. She wished him no harm, plotted no revenge even if such a thing had been possible, but knew that she would never rid her mind of the words he had spoken, that she could “contaminate” her sister, that she was to be sent away to a home “to work,” among many other dreadful things. Sybil hadn’t replied. Perhaps she had been told not to reply.
Maud bathed her baby in the scullery sink. It made a perfectly adequate bath. When Hope was dried and creamed and powdered in the way Mrs. Lillicrap had taught Maud, she laid her on one of the towelling squares John had bought in the shop in Ashburton (surely receiving many strange looks), folded it round her tiny but solid stomach and buttocks, and fastened it with a big safety pin. Hope cried little, perhaps because she was mostly in her mother’s arms or close beside her mother, but now she began to whimper for milk. When she had put the baby at her breast, she thought of writing again to Sybil. This time she would ask her to tell Rosemary Clifford about Hope. She couldn’t bring herself to do it, but surely Sybil would. Sybil could tell Rosemary and tell her too that this baby was Ronnie’s as well as Maud’s. Having driven him out of her mind for months, now Hope was born, she admitted him again. If he wanted to see his child, he could come to Bury Row. He could come, but she knew he wouldn’t. He might even say Hope wasn’t his, but Maud rather doubted this. You had only
to look at Hope to see his face was Hope’s, the face that had so attracted her in the first place, the dark blue eyes, the classically straight nose, the fair hair.
Maud was longing to take Hope out in the secondhand pram passed on to her by Mrs. Tremlett, but Mrs. Lillicrap said not yet. Give it another week. And only then if the weather was right. It was far from right at the moment, the white frost lying every morning on walls and hedges and five-barred gates and roof tiles. The leaves on the ilex in the churchyard, usually nearly black, were edged in fluffy whiteness. Mrs. Lillicrap said Hope must go to All Saints to be churched the first time she went out, and Maud thought she would abandon Methodism and go at least once to the Church of England. All the Methodists had done for her was be unkind and punishing, and she might as well try another kind of God she no longer believed in.
She finished the feeding, realising that Hope would need changing again. She didn’t mind. Washing for her little daughter was a pleasure. Lifting her up in her arms, looking into Ronnie’s eyes, she talked to her as she often did, telling her the things she could tell to no one else.
“My darling, I love you so much, more than I’ve ever loved anyone. You are my treasure and my precious. I am so glad to have you, I’m happier than I’ve ever been. When I think how I hoped you weren’t inside me and I longed for you not to be, I think I must have been mad. Oh, my darling little Hope, I do love you so much.”
A long dribble of curds and spit trailed out of Hope’s mouth. Maud laughed. Everything her baby did, even regurgitating her feed, Maud thought amazingly clever.
U
NDERSTANDING HOW
a woman feels with her first baby, that her whole life is bound up with that baby and all her thought processes
are concerned with her, completely eluded John. It eludes most men. If he thought of it at all, he supposed that Maud felt about Hope much as he did: she was getting used to having a baby in the house, the “maternal instinct” made her look after Hope and care for her, but as with him the crying rather exasperated her and like him she was glad when Hope was put to bed upstairs. He had no idea of her total involvement with Hope and her passionate love for her. Therefore he thought that when he broached the subject—if he did—of Bertie’s coming to Bury Row, even just paying a daytime visit, his sister would immediately recall every detail of his confession and would behave as she did the night before Hope was born and run away from him, disgusted by his revelations.
But still he made plans for how Bertie could be accommodated. If he asked Mrs. Tremlett or one of Mrs. Tremlett’s daughters, Gladys or Bertha, or the Lillicraps or all of them whether they could put Bertie up for a few nights in one of their homes, wouldn’t they wonder that his friend couldn’t stay in John’s own house, where they knew he had a spare room? Perhaps they need not be brought into it. He could make himself a makeshift bed on the living-room sofa and give Bertie his room upstairs. It was a possibility. After all, he had sworn both to Maud and himself that he would never again make love with a man, and he hadn’t, except in his thoughts. He could spend time with Bertie but never touch him. This way, if they slept far apart, they would never be alone together, and that was for the best.
That night, sleeping in the room he would give up to Bertie, he dreamt of him in this bed. He had shown him to the room and was lying on his not-very-comfortable couch downstairs, but he got up and climbed the stairs as quietly as he could, listening to the baby crying in Maud’s room but not allowed to cry for more than a moment when he guessed Maud had begun to suckle her. He got into bed beside Bertie, and the touch of his naked body
was so overwhelming that something happened which he had never before experienced in Bury Row. He ejaculated so explosively that he awoke with a groan. Slime that Bertie called spunk was all over the sheet, mercifully only the bottom one. He pulled it off the bed and rolled it up, not daring to leave it for Maud or Mrs. Tremlett to find.
That sheet became a curse to John. Curiously, it seemed to take on a life of its own, eventually haunting Maud as well as himself, though he was to know nothing about that. It was like the white sheet a ghost wears, a figment of his dreams, never again to be looked at but never to be destroyed either. The household at No. 2 Bury Row was not so well-off that he could afford to sacrifice a nearly new item of bed linen that was not, in any case, their own, but had the initials
MT
embroidered on it. Maud might not know what that stiff stain was, but Mrs. Tremlett, the married woman, certainly would. She too would ask herself and maybe ask Maud why “Mr. Goodwin” was sleeping in the spare room instead of with his wife. In answer to that, John imagined a whole drama in which “Mrs. Goodwin” refused her husband marital relations for six weeks after the baby was born, so he was obliged to sleep in the spare room, where, unable wholly to restrain his lust, he indulged in solitary self-abuse. Or perhaps she would simply say that her husband needed his sleep away from a crying baby. This second explanation left out any accounting for the stain. Afford to or not, he would have to destroy it.
It worried him disproportionately. He dared not leave the rolled-up sheet to be discovered, but hid it in a paper bag stuffed into the basket on his bicycle handlebars. After school he went into the Ashburton linen draper’s and bought the cheapest single sheet they had. The cold weather continued for another week, and then it began to grow mild. After several nights without frost, John announced on the Saturday morning that he intended to do some gardening. He had no tools but borrowed a spade and fork
from Mr. Lillicrap at the Red Cow and started work on the soft, wet earth. When he had dug a sizeable pit, he buried the sheet in its paper bag and covered it with a layer of soil about six inches deep. The new one went into the drawer to await the time when it would replace the one that was at present on his bed. One of his fellow teachers at school had been reading a detective story and, every day in the common room, regaled the rest of the staff with bloodcurdling details that included the secret burial of the murderer’s wife’s corpse in the garden. Maybe his neighbours, watching from their bedroom windows, would credit him with similar concealment of a crime.
A
FTER THE
burial was over, he went on digging, rather enjoying this activity while his mind was occupied with thoughts of Bertie and how to have him to stay without distressing Maud.
“Can I ask you something?” John had come in from the garden and washed his hands at the scullery sink.
Maud was sewing. Concentrating on keeping the thin, tissue-paper pattern and the material perfectly flat, she simply nodded.
“I’d like to ask a friend of mine to stay for New Year’s Eve and maybe a few nights after. Would you mind?”
She didn’t look up. “A friend that’s a man?”
He realised that he was responding with the same sort of embarrassment that a “normal” man would feel if he had been asked if his friend was a woman. “Yes. He’s a man.”
She lifted her eyes, still holding a pin between the forefinger and thumb of her right hand. Was she going to make the connection with what he had confessed to her? Apparently not. “Where will he sleep, John?”
“In my room, I thought. And I could sleep down here on the sofa.”
She nodded. “Will I like him?”
“I think so.” John didn’t really know. “His name’s Bertie. Bertie Webber.”
“So I’ll call him Mr. Webber.”
“Maybe to start with.”
Perhaps she had forgotten what he had told her. He had read somewhere about amnesia and how people forgot what had happened just before an accident. It might be true that women forgot what they had been told just before labour pains started. There was no one he could ask.
He had written to his mother, an apologetic letter, telling her he would not be returning home for Christmas. Her reply, which arrived on Christmas Eve, was an enclosure inside a card with a picture on it of a robin perched on a fir tree, signed
from Mother and Father,
though John had not mentioned his father in his letter, just as his mother didn’t mention Maud in her cold letter. John was beginning to feel about their father much as Maud did, not wanting any contact with him. A card also came from Ethel and Herbert and, to be treasured, one from Bertie, wishing John
the seasons’ greetings
and accepting the invitation to come to Bury Row on December 31. Managing to ignore the position of that apostrophe, John slept with Bertie’s card under his pillow.
I
T WAS
the day after Maud’s sixteenth birthday, and Bertie was coming. Some aspects of his visit John had not foreseen. He had looked forward to Bertie’s coming in a breathless fever of anticipation, all of which he had had to conceal over Christmas as best he could from Maud. Fortunately, she was too occupied with making Christmas perfect for Hope, who was too young to notice, to pay his feelings much attention. She had decorated the living-room with paper chains for Hope and acquired a tiny Christmas tree from Gladys Tranter’s husband for Hope. John’s longing for Bertie went little further than how ecstatically it would be gratified when John watched his train come in and his lover step out of it onto the platform. He would be happy then as he hadn’t been since the last time he and Bertie met in London. How Bertie would feel about the weather, colder and wetter than London,
how he would see the village and, come to that, Maud and the baby, John hadn’t considered. If John had thought about Bertie’s reaction at all, he supposed that his lover would feel as he did, that meeting again was enough, and every difficulty, if difficulties there were, was lost in the rapture of once more being together.
The morning of Bertie’s arrival was cold, and John was afraid that if it snowed, the bus to Newton Abbot might not run. Anxiously he watched the sky for that ominous yellowish greyness in the clouds that would foretell a heavy snowfall. But none came, the clouds parted a little, and John set off absurdly early, soon after their midday dinner, to meet a train that wasn’t due till four.