Authors: Barbara Vine
Nor did Mrs. Tremlett ask when she came in to see if everything was all right—it was so unlike Maud to go out in the evening leaving Hope with her.
“Quite all right,” Maud said, understanding that if the news was to circulate in Dartcombe, it hadn’t yet reached her neighbour.
The sofa was still disarranged with blanket and eiderdown. Elspeth had gone into the kitchen to wash. “An overnight visitor, I see,” Mrs. Tremlett said.
“Just a friend from John’s school.” As soon as the words were out, Maud wondered if she had said too much, but Mrs. Tremlett seemed to accept it without question.
T
HE MILK
no longer arrived in a jug from the churn but in bottles. Maud hesitated before going out of the front door to fetch it. No one was about in Bury Row when she picked up the single milk bottle, but as she returned, Daphne Crocker came out of No. 4, looked her in the eyes, and turned back, slamming the door behind her. It had begun.
“Don’t leave me,” Maud said again when Elspeth came out of the kitchen in Maud’s dressing gown.
“I must. I’ll go back to Ashburton and fetch some things—including a toothbrush. When I’ve locked up again, I’ll come
straight back and I’ll fetch the shopping so you won’t have to go out if you don’t want to.”
“I shall never want to again,” said Maud dolefully.
“All right, but I shall have to go back to school. It won’t be as bad as you think. You’ve made a great drama out of it, but these people are only ordinary country people. They’re not fiends, they’re not witch-hunters. Maybe some of them will turn their backs, but does that matter so much? My mother says you need to have a broad back in this world.”
“Only I haven’t,” said Maud, not liking to be told she had made a drama, as if taking things seriously hadn’t been justified.
Elspeth brought clothes to change into, but less than half the number Maud would have packed for herself. Elspeth did the shopping by herself, took Hope to school, though the child was quite old enough to go on her own, saw the policeman again, and managed to get him to tell her that a body had been found, a man had drowned in a canal in London. More than that he wouldn’t say and said he would have preferred to tell anything that had to be told to Maud herself. But Maud didn’t want to speak to him, didn’t want to listen to what he might have to say. She received some curious looks from neighbours, and women who had passed the time of day with her in the past no longer spoke. Two days later Elspeth went back to Ashburton, but with many promises to return at any time Maud might want her.
P
LUCKING UP
her courage was an effort of will Maud had never been good at. But one fine morning in early spring, when the garden and the lane were growing green and the blackthorn had burst into its tiny white flowers, the weather raised her spirits, as it does everyone’s. She would go out. If she met a neighbour who turned away from her, she would plant herself in front of her and force her to listen while she explained. Mrs. Tremlett hadn’t
been near her since she commented on Maud’s overnight visitor; Gladys followed her mother’s example in everything, so she too hadn’t been seen. Mrs. Paine in the village shop was coldly polite to Maud but that was all, and after a single visit Maud hadn’t gone there again. But now she felt that everything could be explained, and she would do it even if it meant confessing Hope’s illegitimacy. Maud still had to learn that while to resolve is easy, to enact that resolution takes rehearsal and practice and even the kind of will she didn’t possess.
John was probably dead. He was likely the drowned man they had pulled out of the canal. She didn’t know and didn’t want to know. She asked herself if she felt any sorrow for her brother and told herself she didn’t. He had forfeited any grieving for him she might have had by his shameful behaviour. Now she had money, she could forget him, begin again with Hope, perhaps in a new place. Then, after Elspeth had been gone a fortnight and Maud had managed to avoid seeing the looks she got in the street and being ignored, another letter came with a Bristol postmark. This time, though, the address was in Ethel’s handwriting.
She remembered the only other time Ethel had written, and that was to John.
Dear Maud
. . . How strange that people always began letters like that; even when they would never call you dear to your face, even when they had never met you, were writing a business letter or one that held a series of insults. You were always “dear” to correspondents.
Father has asked me to write to you and tell you what follows. As you must understand, he is unable to perform this task himself. The police came to Mother and Father and then to us to tell us about the truly horrible discovery they made in a canal in London. Someone was needed for the dreadful task of identifying the body they found. Father could not possibly do such a thing so
they asked my husband. Being a very courageous and resolute man, Herbert agreed.
He has just returned from London, where he looked at the remains and identified them as our brother John. Herbert may have to go back to attend the inquest. This is involving us in great expense. I must say I think that if you had reported John missing earlier than you did and had gone to London to see the body yourself, you would have saved your sister and brother-in-law, apart from the financial consideration, a great deal of pain that will endure for a long time.
You should realise that your expenses are minimal. You are now a rich woman with no one but yourself to spend your money on. Living in the country has not changed you, Maud. You are the same childlike creature you were when you ran away and broke Father’s heart all those years ago.
Your affectionate sister,
Ethel
Maud was learning that the widely held belief that the people whose judgment you don’t value can’t hurt you is not true, or not true in her case. Ethel’s censure caused Maud disproportionate distress. She was particularly indignant at being referred to as living on her own as if Hope had never been born or should be treated as nonexistent.
Instead of going out as she had planned, Maud went back to bed. It was the start of a habit of a retreat from life, an escape from trouble into oblivion. Although she had slept well the night before, she fell asleep almost immediately and was still asleep when Hope came home from school at half past three and when she opened Maud’s bedroom door, she worried that her mother must be ill. Maud got up and scolded her for making a fuss. Hope
had given few signs that things had changed for her since the man who might have been her father or else her uncle had disappeared. She had become a much quieter child who was pleasant and affectionate to her mother, but noticeably never confided in her. How she might be getting on at school, what she was learning, who her friends were apart from George Tranter and Maureen Crocker, Maud was told nothing about. So the abusive epithet must have gone deep with Hope for her to tell her mother that evening, “What’s a bastard, Mummy? Trevor Pratt called me a bastard.”
Maud burst into tears. Instead of explaining, all she could say was “It’s just a bad word, Hope. You don’t have to know what it means.”
But the insult to her daughter decided her. They must leave Dartcombe. She must rent or even buy a house in Ashburton or another village. She decided she would be incapable of doing this herself, but Elspeth could do it for her. Elspeth had said she would return anytime she was wanted, and she was wanted now. She could find estate agents (or whatever they were called), she could write to removal people—wasn’t there a firm called Pick-ford’s? Elspeth would know—she would know what needed to be bought for the new house. She would see about Hope’s leaving the village school here. Elspeth could be to her what John had been and could now no longer be.
The spring term was halfway through for Elspeth. Maud wrote to her, begging her to come. Maud’s own needs had become paramount to her. Perhaps they had always been. That Elspeth might have a life of her own with friends and occupations of her own hardly occurred to Maud, but Elspeth recognised Maud’s helplessness. One of the worst things that could happen to a young girl had happened to her, but having a child without a husband, instead of strengthening her, had made her more dependent on others. When Elspeth arrived in Bury Row on the Friday afternoon,
she found Maud in bed with Hope sitting beside her and a tray of tea things on the eiderdown between them.
Now her friend had come, Maud said she would get up, but getting up didn’t mean putting on clothes, and she came downstairs in her dressing gown. Maud soon made it clear to Elspeth that she intended to do nothing towards finding and buying a house except paying for it, nothing towards furnishing it or choosing it somewhere convenient for the school Hope would go to after (and if) she had passed the entrance exam taken at the age of eleven. These were to be Elspeth’s jobs. Maud complained about suffering from that invisible and unprovable illness, recurrent headaches, but when a visit to the doctor was suggested, she said it was well known that nothing could be done to cure migraines.
Elspeth had long thought it strange that Maud possessed no wireless. Electricity had come to Dartcombe three years before, and central lights hung in all the rooms. But the only way for national and international news to come into the house was by a newspaper bought in the village shop, where Maud never went. Elspeth’s own wireless was too cumbersome to be brought with her. She suggested that having this now nearly indispensable adjunct to a household might improve Maud’s quality of life, even restore her happiness, and Maud rather reluctantly agreed. Elspeth went into Ashburton next day and bought a wireless in a veneered wood-grain case, which the shopkeeper delivered that afternoon. She also visited an estate agent, listing her friend’s requirements: a house, not a cottage, a big garden, at least three bedrooms. Maud had no idea how much she should pay, and knowing how much she had inherited and invested, Elspeth suggested she could afford up to four hundred pounds.
I
F
M
AUD
gave much thought to poor dead John, she said nothing about him to Elspeth. He was gone and she had forgotten him.
Elspeth thought that now Maud had money of her own, John’s value in her life as a provider was in the past, and whatever affection she had had for him when first they lived together, all that was over now. She never spoke of him, but Elspeth believed that he was there in the back of her mind as a vague threat, someone who, beyond death, might yet affect her through the kind of life he had led.
It was a cold, wet spring, a horrible April. But Elspeth had found a house for Maud, and Maud, persuaded to visit it, liked what she saw and agreed to the price of 375 pounds. The house was mid-Victorian, redbrick, double-fronted with a slate roof. The garden was walled with fruit trees and shrubs but no flowers except when Maud first saw it, when the trees were a mass of white and pink blossoms swept by gales and rain. It belonged to a man of about forty who lived in a fine Georgian house on the edge of Ottery St. Jude and owned several properties in the village.
Elspeth had come to stay over Easter, and Maud took it for granted she would be with her every weekend. In the evenings the two women listened to the wireless and heard about the war in Spain and the prospect of a war with Germany. Maud had never before taken any interest in international events, but Elspeth was politically minded and took the side of the Republicans while Maud favoured Franco. But even this was a departure for Maud, who barely knew that England had had three kings in one year in 1936 or that Edward VIII had abdicated.
It was Elspeth who had to tell Mrs. Tremlett that Maud wished to terminate her tenancy. Such news as hers can’t be kept secret for more than a day or two in a village such as Dartcombe, and Maud’s neighbour already knew that she and Hope would be leaving.
“I know most of the people here have it in for her, but I have never been like that,” said Mrs. Tremlett. “Poor thing, she was only a child when she had a child.”
Gratified, Elspeth hastened to tell Maud of these kind words,
but Maud only said that how she lived was no business of the neighbour wife’s and Elspeth should wait and see when Mrs. Tremlett tried to charge Maud for damage to the interior of No. 2 Bury Row.
“You haven’t damaged it, have you?”
“Of course I haven’t, but you try telling them that.”
But other residents of Bury Row no longer acknowledged Maud’s existence and shut themselves up in their houses when the Pickford’s van came to take the furniture to Ottery St. Jude. On their first evening in The Larches, the man who had sold Maud the house walked up from River House, bringing with him a bottle of champagne, something Maud had never before tasted and Elspeth had only tried once. He told the two women he was a writer of fiction and a journalist who wrote for the
News Chronicle
. Elspeth asked him if he thought war was coming and, if so, would they be safe in the Devon countryside.
“I think the Germans will bomb Plymouth,” Gabriel Harding said. “It will be an important target for them because of the dockyard. But I’m sure you’ll be safe here, though we may all get refugees—if that’s the word—from Plymouth taking shelter with us.”
Maud seemed horrified at the prospect, and Elspeth noted their visitor’s tolerant yet amused eyes on her. After he had gone, they went back to tidying up, making beds and putting away kitchen utensils and the food they had brought. While Maud was spreading the new pink eiderdown on her double bed—she had passed the old one on to the spare bed—she asked Elspeth if she would give up her tiny, two-room flat in Ashburton and come live with her. Remembering her friends in the town, a man who was becoming more than a friend, her job, and the five-mile distance from Ottery St. Jude, Elspeth said she would think about it. In bed that night, just before sleep came, she thought about the writer, a widower as she had learned, a comfortably off, nice-looking man. Had that glance he gave Maud meant not that he
believed her ignorant and selfish but rather that he admired her? Certainly, at twenty-five she was a beautiful woman. If he was looking for a wife . . . But Elspeth was asleep.