Authors: Barbara Vine
They were infrequent enough, John thought, but still they
came too often for Maud. One morning, about a year after Bertie had been to stay, the baby Hope on her lap, she picked up the envelope he had set aside, delaying reading its precious contents until he was alone, and said she hoped he wouldn’t be inviting “your friend” to stay with them again.
“Certainly not,” said John with unusual sharpness. “I know and he knows he wouldn’t be welcome.”
“You broke your promise. You promised you wouldn’t do those disgusting things but you did do them, and I can’t forget it.”
“Evidently. You won’t let me forget it either.”
How she had grown up since the birth of Hope, quite suddenly becoming a woman, and the kind of woman common in their family, narrow, censorious, quick to pass judgment. The sweet innocent was gone, the young girl who respected and admired him as if he really were her husband.
Disgusting
wasn’t a word she would have used a year ago. She had sounded like Ethel. He remembered how wistfully she had spoken that day before Christmas when she had talked about the Age of Marriage Act and about a superstition that was a means of delaying a birth. He was disappointed in her rather than angry. Although he had never put this feeling into words before, not even in his thoughts, he had supposed that because she herself had transgressed and been punished for it, she would more readily understand transgression in others, would have become tolerant and forgiving. He expected too, if unwillingly, that she would feel some gratitude towards him for providing her with a home and financial support and a shield of respectability.
Knowing that going along this path would lead him to feelings he didn’t want to have, resentment, indignation, and worse, a sense of being unjustly treated, he took his letter and went upstairs to read it. There was more this time than usual. Bertie had at last succeeded in finding a job, serving behind the counter in an ironmonger’s shop in the Edgware Road. The pay was poor
and it was as well he was living at his mother’s because he couldn’t afford rent. He said he wanted him and John to meet and soon. They mustn’t go on like this, just communicating on paper. If his tone wasn’t exactly cold, the terms he used made it look as if he and John were business acquaintances who needed to meet to discuss some kind of policy. John’s house wouldn’t do because Bertie knew he wasn’t accepted by John’s sister. Perhaps they could have a
rendezvoo
in a hotel somewhere, but it was important not to delay too long.
John wondered why Bertie wrote in this fashion when he himself poured into his letters so much adoration and passion and promises of enduring love. The answer must lie in the awkwardness Bertie felt about writing, his inability to select suitable words and phrases. John knew he would think about this question of their meeting all day, while he was supposed to be teaching boys Boyle’s law, while he was marking essays, trying to find a way round this seemingly insoluble problem. Staying a weekend in a hotel was impossible. He couldn’t afford it, and Bertie certainly couldn’t. With Bertie’s poverty in mind, he wrote him a loving note and, not for the first time, put it into an envelope with two pound notes he took from the tin he kept in a drawer. Maybe it was less than two weeks’ wages to Bertie, but it would help. John took the letter with him when he left for school, and Maud, who was standing in the tiny hallway, stared at it and no doubt read the address.
L
IFE WAS
quiet and dull at No. 2 Bury Row. Events which enlivened it were, for John, Bertie’s occasional letters, and for Maud, Hope’s cutting another tooth or, now that she was approaching two, uttering her first words. Maud had hoped the first word of all would be
mama,
but in fact it was
dada.
Where she learned to call John that Maud never knew, only guessing that she had heard
Gladys Tranter’s little girl call her father Dada or perhaps some other one among her friends had encouraged Hope to give John that name. It was the only possibility open to them, but neither of them liked it, John because he saw it as teaching the child to lie, Maud because, secretly, she believed that at some time in the future she was going to have to tell Hope the truth of her parentage. And what would happen if there was ultimately a reconciliation between herself and her mother and Ethel? For her father, Maud still kept unchanged hatred and resentment. Or if Sybil, who quite often wrote to her, wanted to visit? She never spoke of these things to John, sure he would neither understand nor care.
Rosemary Clifford, not Sybil, was the first to come. The doorbell rang at No. 2 Bury Row one afternoon soon after Maud and Hope had finished their midday dinner and Maud had laid the baby down for her nap. She expected to find Daphne Crocker, her new neighbour at No. 4, on the doorstep. Instead, it was Rosemary, but a Rosemary transformed into a smart young lady, her hair marcelled, lipstick on her mouth, wearing a linen skirt and a black-and-white jumper, her feet in black patent shoes with double straps across the instep.
Nothing was said for a moment.
At last Rosemary said, “Can I come in?”
“It’s not very tidy.” Maud thought immediately that this was a stupid thing to say, but she made it worse with “It’s a bit of a mess really.”
Rosemary laughed. “I knew you lived here. I mean, in Dartcombe. Sybil told me. But not exactly where. My auntie Joan lives in Dartwell Magna, and I’m staying with her, so I begged a lift from Mrs. Imber—my mother knows her—and asked at the Red Cow, and they sent me here.” Rosemary laughed again, apparently from sheer happiness, and sat down in the middle of the sofa. “Where’s the infant, then?”
“She’s asleep. She has an afternoon sleep.”
“And you live here with John?”
“Yes.”
“What’s she called?”
At this moment a wail came from upstairs. Maud sprang up. “I’ll fetch her.”
She could have carried Hope down at once, but she wanted her to be seen at her best, so she hurriedly dressed her in the latest frock she had made, pink and blue flowers on white winceyette, elaborately if a bit unevenly smocked. Hope had white socks on and pink shoes with straps.
“Hold Mummy’s hand and we’ll walk down.”
They got to the fourth step from the foot, and Hope put up her arms and said, “Mummy, carry.” She was shy of the strange lady.
“Her name is Hope,” said Maud.
“That’s a good choice. I expect you needed all the hope you could get.”
The little girl looked as if she might cry, but she didn’t. Perhaps she was fascinated by Rosemary’s scarlet mouth and matching fingernails, or perhaps by the way the strange lady was staring into her eyes and smiling.
“I thought as much,” Rosemary said. “I wondered as soon as Sybil told me, and now I know. She’s exactly like Ronnie.”
Maud blushed a fiery red. “Yes. She’s his. There was never anybody else.”
She would have liked to tell Rosemary everything, the way her parents had wanted to put her into that Methodist home, the things her father had said to her, how he had threatened her with the adoption of her baby. Above all, she would have liked to talk about her feelings, her misery, her dread, the temptation of suicide, the loneliness until John came to her rescue. But she couldn’t. It was impossible. In some play somewhere, when she was in school, she had read the expression
I cannot heave my heart into my mouth,
and that was exactly how she felt. Not just to Rosemary but to everyone who hoped that she would confide in them, even John, particularly John. Talking about her feelings, even weeping while she spoke of them, had once been possible, but no longer, and John and Bertie together had, so to speak, by what they had done, shut her emotions up inside her just as if they had taken hold of a full bottle of water and pushed a cork tightly into it.
To Maud’s amazement, Hope had climbed onto Rosemary’s lap and was sitting there playing with the contents of her black suede handbag. Clever Rosemary had understood that if there is anything a two-year-old going on three likes to play with, it is the powder compact, the comb, the lace handkerchief, the purse, the lipstick, and the cigarette packet she finds in a lady’s bag. Rosemary had her cigarettes in a case with her name cut into its silver surface, and now, having first offered it to Maud and been refused, she took one out and lit it.
Hope said, “Hope have cigarette.”
Rosemary laughed. Had she always laughed so much? “Not till you’re grown-up.” She put Hope on the floor with the bag and its contents, excepting the compact and the lipstick. “You don’t want sticky red stuff all over your furniture. I’m going to tell Ronnie. Is that all right?”
“He won’t believe you.”
“Yes, he will. He’s come down from Oxford now and he works in a bank. I don’t mean behind a wire cage like those people who hand out money when you give them a cheque, I mean something called a merchant bank. Would you like to see him?”
Maud said, “I don’t think so.”
“Oh, why not? He’ll be thrilled when he knows this little sweetheart is his.”
“I doubt that.” Maud’s friend was so sophisticated and so clever, yet Maud thought she knew more about men than Rosemary did. Maud had been through more, she had lived.
“We could all have tea. You could bring her and we could have tea in that nice hotel in what’s it called? Newton Abbot.”
This time, Maud laughed, a harsh, metallic sound. “I think I will have that cigarette,” she said, though it would only be the third one she had ever had in all her life.
“That nice hotel” in Newton Abbot was the one Bertie had seen after arriving at the railway station. That was what John thought of when Maud told him as much as she wanted him to know of Rosemary’s visit. He and Bertie had seen each other a few times over the past two and a half years, meeting in London in the school holidays for just an afternoon, once in a boardinghouse in Reading because it too was on the Great Western main line. Bertie had remembered the nice Newton Abbot hotel, but it was well beyond their means. In the boardinghouse Bertie had told John without shame, or even supposing John would be hurt, that he sometimes went cruising on Hampstead Heath, picking up young men, or found a guardsman in one of the London parks who would “do it for cash” though he wasn’t “queer” himself. These confidences had brought John savage pain and jealousy, but when he protested to Bertie, all his lover said was “I daresay I’d give it up if you and me shared a place down where you live.”
John was ashamed of his reaction to Maud’s news; his heart had leapt when he’d heard that Rosemary intended to tell her brother Maud had his child. Ronnie had failed to answer John’s letter telling him of Maud’s pregnancy, but he was older now, they all were. Maybe he had changed. This might lead to Ronnie’s offering to marry John’s sister, taking her away and thus leaving John free to live with Bertie. It was a giant leap to make—but was it? It rather depended on what kind of a man Ronnie Clifford was, and John hadn’t high hopes of him after he had had no answer to his letter. If it were me, John thought, I would be so excited at being a father, I would rush off at once to see my sweetheart and my daughter and after that . . . But
he couldn’t imagine doing what was necessary to father a child, couldn’t imagine wanting to do it. He had never made love to a woman and knew he never would.
Regularly he burnt the letters he had from Bertie. He was afraid Maud might find them if he kept them to read and reread. Because he pressed Bertie for a photograph, he finally sent one, a picture of himself with his mother in a tiny garden with a wire fence round it. Bertie’s mother wore a crossover, flowered overall and bedroom slippers and looked as old as the hills—well, more like seventy than fifty-five. This John refused to burn, but he cut Bertie’s mother off it. He looked at it every night, wishing it were of Bertie on his own. By day he hid it, firstly in one of the drawers in his bedroom, then, realising that Maud or Mrs. Tremlett opened this drawer to put his clean shirts inside, in one of the pockets of his overcoat. But truly, nowhere was safe from these women. He often lay awake at night, asking himself but never getting an answer, why the world was so horrified by Uranians and so furious with them, when in fact they harmed no one by what they did.
Another disturbing thing was happening to him. He had begun to think that he had been wrong or, rather, unwise to set up this little household with Maud and Hope. When he first thought of it, the arrangement had seemed so good to him, the answer to every dilemma: his homosexualism, the trap Maud had got herself into, where they were to live and how they were to live, the illegitimacy of Hope. Moving in here and pretending to be husband and wife had indeed solved these difficulties, but it depended on his celibacy; that which he had believed would be easy enough to stick to had turned out to be nearly impossible. He was now daily brooding on how he could escape from this situation of his own making, asking himself if he could afford to keep up two homes, one for Maud and the child and another for himself and Bertie. It pained John that every time Bertie wrote these days, he
asked for money. John was afraid of losing Bertie if he refused and now found himself regularly making a contribution to Bertie’s expenses, which amounted to doubling his wages.
W
HETHER
R
OSEMARY
had ever told her brother about his child, Maud didn’t know. Time went on, Hope was three years old, and no letter came either from Ronnie or from his sister to say she had told him. This caused Maud no distress, only resentment. All her feelings were for Hope, whose father seemed to have no longing to see her, so sweet and beautiful as she was. When the doorbell rang, Maud half expected to see Ronnie there, as if making surprise calls on people you hadn’t seen for years might be a family trait.
It was years too since she had seen Sybil, though they wrote to each other. Then her sister invited herself to visit and stay the night if Maud was happy with that. Maud wasn’t happy, but, as she put it to herself, she could put up with it. She cleaned the house from top to bottom, baked a Madeira cake for tea, changed the sheets on her own bed for Sybil to sleep in—Maud would sleep on the sofa—and dressed Hope in the new dress she had made for her, white lawn, trimmed in pink and with pink smocking.