Mother’s Boy, page 20
She took off her housecoat, fretted that she had somehow picked up a streak of flour on the front of her dress, decided there wasn’t time to change so pulled on her summer overcoat to hide it and was just wondering whether to take Wang as well, if he wouldn’t make her too slow, when she heard weeping from the spare bedroom.
‘Gertie?’
Laura walked back to the foot of the stairs and called up quietly, so as not to wake the baby. ‘What’s wrong, girl?’
The child opened her door and looked down, her pinched face all flushed, nose red, eyes puffed up.
‘Is Charles still there?’ she asked quietly.
‘No, dear. You missed him. He’s gone for his train. I was just going to—’
But her plan to catch him at the station was scuppered as Gertie broke down in fresh weeping.
‘Here,’ Laura said. ‘Hush now. Come on down or you’ll wake that mite of yours. I know he was up half the night.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be silly. Thin walls is all. I’ll make tea and you can tell me all about it.’
She made a pot of tea and set out bread, margarine and jam, which she had learned was Gertie’s main form of nutrition. She heard many women complain in the shop queues about their older evacuees being dirty or lazy or rude, but had realised early on in Gertie’s stay that problems arose when hosts tried to make their evacuees behave like them: rise, eat and wash when they did. Once it was clear that Gertie had a very different internal clock to her own, waking late and often coming down for a while in the middle of the night, Laura made it clear to her where to find food if she missed any meal. They agreed on bath nights and a laundry rota. Laura had Gertie’s ration book and the one for little Fred. She had made enquiries of the WVS and secured a bundle of baby clothes for him, and a pram so he could be taken out for walks.
The hardest part of having Gertie in the house was resisting the urge to take over the care of Fred entirely. Laura regularly pushed his pram out for slow strolls with Wang to let Gertie sleep, and tended to clean his nappies more often than not, as Gertie had a tendency to leave them piling up in the soaking bucket until they were pushing off the lid and stinking. But otherwise she had tried to act like a good mother towards her, gently showing her how best to wash and change the baby and helping to still his cries when Gertie’s impatience made the wailing worse. She said nothing about Gertie not coming to church, or appearing in her dressing gown when it was nearly lunchtime. She looked after the baby while Gertie went to the cinema, which Laura knew she loved, and taught her simple bits of cookery when they coincided in the kitchen, and the girl was in the mood to learn. But Gertie spent most of her days up in her room and was rarely talkative. She wrote no letters and received none, seeming utterly alone in a tiny family of two. Perhaps it was this that made Laura feel for her so. She appeared to have broken entirely with her parents since they had parked her in the mother and baby home.
Gertie had made an effort when she finally joined Laura at the kitchen table, had brushed her hair and put it back under a velvet band, and dressed in her nice frock with the daisies around the hem.
‘You look nice,’ Laura told her truthfully, and poured her some tea and cut her a slice of bread, which Gertie duly spread with margarine and bramble jelly.
‘Thanks,’ Gertie said.
‘What’s the matter?’
A piece of bread had been halfway to Gertie’s mouth. Her hand sank back to the plate.
‘You’ll think I’m so stupid,’ she said. ‘Promise you won’t be angry.’
‘Have I ever been angry with you?’
Gertie shook her head and looked down. She swore she was no longer a minor though she still looked barely more than fifteen. She was so thin still it amazed Laura she was able to nurse the baby.
‘He went without saying goodbye.’
‘Who did? Oh, Gertie, did you meet somebody?’
It was always possible. The town was so busy with soldiers now that even the homeliest girls were not short of dance partners if they wanted them. Laura had not managed to persuade Gertie to go to a dance yet, but she might well have met someone on a trip to the cinema. Last time she had gone with Aggie’s girl Heppy, who had lost her job as a maid and was already said to be proving a handful.
‘No,’ Gertie said. ‘I mean Charles.’
‘My Charles?’
‘Yes.’
As far as Laura knew, Charles had done nothing but complain about Gertie since her arrival the previous autumn. At least he complained about the baby’s crying keeping him awake or stopping him writing. And he often seemed to ignore Gertie entirely if they coincided for a meal, or to leave a room when she came into it. But now she remembered a couple of occasions where she had come in from doing laundry to find Gertie sitting at the kitchen table with Fred on her lap, listening as Charles played the piano next door.
‘I felt I should stay out of the way yesterday when you had family round to see him, but then you were both out at the dance all evening.’
‘Oh, and I could have babysat for you if I’d known you’d wanted to go. I’m so sorry, Gertie. You’ve never wanted to go before.’
‘No, no. Don’t be. It’s silly. All in my head, really.’
Upstairs the baby woke and started to grouse.
‘I’ll go,’ Laura said, standing. ‘You drink that tea and eat some more bread and jam. Get your strength up.’
The spare room was heartbreakingly tidy. Given the girl’s youth and chaotic background, Laura would have expected heaps of discarded or dirty clothes, but the space was as tidy as a nun’s cell, with everything put away, the inadequate cardboard suitcase with the broken handle tucked under the bed where Gertie had been using it as a laundry basket, and the stash of cinema magazines she never seemed to tire of examining neatly stacked by the tightly tucked bed. The magazines and the presence of the bawling baby were the only un-nun-like touches.
Laura scooped Fred up, stilling his cries by letting him wail then mumble into the warmth of her neck as she rocked him against her, delighting in the warmth of him and the indefinable smell, somewhere between rising dough and newly baked shortbread, coming from the top of his blond head. It was the smell she remembered from when Charles was that age, a smell nature had surely perfected for enslaving women over the centuries. Whenever she came across women who seemed offhand or even cold with babies, she always wondered if their noses were faulty.
She hugged the borrowed baby for a minute or two as his cries subsided to hungry gurgles, rocking slowly from foot to foot, holding him as she had missed holding Charles, and wondering if it would be so bad to acquire him as a grandson. She realised guiltily that she had never let herself imagine a wife for Charles in any detail, beyond being resolved to be a more welcoming mother-in-law than some she had watched at work. Her instinctive reaction was that Gertie would be quite wrong for him, too young, too uneducated; the child could barely sign her name. But what did she know? Perhaps Charles’s apparent impatience had all been a front and there had been long, late night conversations over cocoa and biscuits about the film stars they adored, while she slept oblivious overhead? Perhaps he liked the fact that she was from Hackney, not Launceston, and couldn’t tell a cow from a heifer or crimp a pasty to save her life? Perhaps he liked the thought that she had a passionate nature that had got her into trouble and saw himself as, somehow, her protector?
Fred had quietened but was plainly hungry, from the way he was mumbling at her neck, and he needed changing. She took him down, resolving to be supportive and hoping her face had betrayed none of her shock.
‘He wants his mum,’ she told Gertie, ‘and a change . . .’
Although she knew she could change him in half the time, she needed to let Gertie do it or the girl would never improve her technique. She had persuaded her not to feel she had to nurse him alone in her room – that it was cosier by the range, where they could both relax. The nuns who ran the mother and baby home she had escaped from had been ferocious about modesty, apparently.
Still red of eye and nose, Gertie settled to feeding Fred while Laura washed up the breakfast things. Then Laura plugged the iron in to heat so she could smooth yesterday’s wash. She turned the radio on as well as they both enjoyed it and Laura suspected Gertie was self-conscious about Fred’s occasionally vigorous sucking noises. The girl grew calmer and happier as he fed, which was a relief.
The placid sight of the two of them, Fred’s happily twitching toes, the delicious smell of hot linen as Laura began to iron and the happy music from the radio did not cast their usual spell, however. This young girl, for whom she had felt nothing but protective, even motherly sympathy since her wretched first appearance on the station platform surrounded by chattering children, now seemed sharp-faced to her, even feral. Where less than a day ago Laura had been looking around for possible work Gertie could take on once Fred was weaned, or at least able to be left with her and a bottle, now she found she could only think of how little she wanted her for a daughter-in-law.
She shocked herself. The poor girl had only admitted to what was almost certainly a hopeless and unnoticed crush.
‘If you’d like to write to Charles,’ she made herself tell Gertie, ‘it couldn’t be easier. We could always put your letter in the next one I send him. Or even just a picture of you and Fred? We could go up to the Square and have your picture taken together at—’
‘No. I don’t think so,’ Gertie cut in. ‘He’d think it was odd. I don’t think he noticed me really. I was just being silly.’
‘Of course you weren’t,’ Laura said. ‘I bet he thinks you’re lovely.’ What are you thinking, woman? she told herself. Hold your tongue!
Gertie changed Fred soon after that, then, saying he was sleepy and that she was too, took him back up to her room. Laura turned down the volume on the radio only to hear her softly crying again. On and on. Combined with Charles’s departure it brought on a creeping feeling of desolation that entered her like a chill and would not be shaken off. Finally, noticing the time, she unplugged the iron, folded away the cloths she used to turn the kitchen table into an ironing surface, hung up her housecoat and went to her room to put on a coat and hat.
‘Gertie?’ she called softly across the landing.
‘Yes?’ The response was characteristically limp. That’s what was wrong with the child: she lacked vim. She sucked the energy from a room simply by entering it.
‘I’m just heading up the hill to Mary Magdalene. I’ve remembered there’s evensong today and I thought it would make a change. Do you want to come? We could leave Fred’s pram just inside the porch.’
‘Better not,’ Gertie said.
There was a pause. A long pause.
‘I’ll see you later, then,’ Laura said eventually. ‘Lancashire hotpot for supper. It’s all made so we can eat whenever you like after I’m back. And carrots from the garden.’
A stupid thing to say, but she felt she had to say something. She had never felt awkward with Gertie before, or felt the need to make conversation.
Walking would do her good; it usually did. She took the less direct route into town as there was time to kill, up the hill past the National School and the allotments that were always busy with Sunday gardeners since the command to dig for victory, and then turning left around the castle and along Castle Dyke to the church.
Laura loved evensong, even though its frequent references to rest and nightfall tended to make her think of death. Charles liked to say it was a poem from beginning to end, provided nobody spoiled it with a sermon. Attendance that night was high, as it had been in St Thomas’s at early Communion that morning, because people were worried, she supposed, and in need of comfort. There were a surprising number of soldiers from the camps that were springing up on the edges of town. Miss Bracewell was there, looking sadly aged suddenly and walking with two sticks. She had been in hospital until just recently after a nasty fall, and Laura had not been to work for her for a few weeks. Miss Bracewell didn’t see her; Laura was sitting near the back, by the memorial to the two men who had variously drowned in the West Indies and ‘suffered a worse fate at the hand of ignorant savages’. That was a favourite of Charles’s. She was always a little shy on the rare occasions she met Miss Bracewell out. They were friendly enough when Laura was collecting her laundry or cleaning for her, but on the street the differences between them inhibited them both.
Laura hoped her hip wasn’t still too painful. She seemed to be walking with such difficulty it was hard to imagine her coping for much longer in a house with so many stairs. Perhaps she would move out to a bungalow on the edge of town, or even somewhere with a sea view, like Polzeath or Widemouth Bay? When all but the last collects ended and there was a moment to pray for others, Laura prayed for her, and for Charles and then for Gertie and Fred. And she prayed that she would not feel awkwardly towards Gertie for what the girl, in her sincerity, had blurted out.
As she was returning, coming by the more usual route down Angel Hill and past the top of the Zig-Zag, she heard the last London train of the day set off. It was a perfect late summer evening, the light golden, swallows on the wing. She saw the train’s steam as it headed off and the second shrill of its whistle drew over her the Sunday evening sadness that the spell of evensong had briefly held at bay.
Charles had surely crossed London by now and would be heading out to the eastern coast again. Her sense of geography beyond Devon and Cornwall was imprecise but he had showed her Skegness on the school atlas at home, shown her the route the succession of trains there would take. She knew he couldn’t keep sending her his laundry once he went to sea. He had explained how sailors were all expected to clean their own clothes, that laundering was inexplicably called dhobeying after the Hindi for washerman, and had asked her to demonstrate some techniques. She showed him how a nailbrush was his friend, how a nailbrush scrubbed first on a bar of soap would lift most marks before laundering. She told him to be sure always to rinse and wring three times, that rinsing not only lifted the last of the dirt but the last traces of soap as well, which might otherwise bring his delicate skin out in a rash. She taught him that woollens should only be washed in cold water, however dirty they were, to stop them shrinking or losing softness. Her last blessing to him was the trick of slipping a matchstick between button and fabric when sewing a button back on a coat or jacket, to keep it loose enough not to pinch and distort the garment. It had touched her to feel him paying her closer attention in the few minutes of these lessons than he had done in years.
The house was silent when she let herself in. Perhaps after their troubled night both mother and baby were sound asleep. Laura turned the radio on fairly low, thinking to wake them gently with it in time for supper, slid the stew to the front of the range to heat and chopped carrots and set those to boil too. Thanks to advice from neighbours she now had a good row of parsley outside. (The trick, strangely, had been to pour boiling water over the seeds in their narrow trench, something she’d assumed would have cooked them.) She went out to pick a small handful to chop over the carrots when they were ready. Gertie hadn’t been used to vegetables when she arrived, and Laura had taken to making a special effort with them in order to tempt her. Young mothers needed iron, she told her, and vitamins, especially when nursing. With butter rationed to only two ounces each a week, and margarine and lard to four ounces, she tended to use marge for spreading, lard for baking, and butter, in tiny quantities, for making things like carrots and cabbage more tempting. She was seriously considering keeping a few hens for the extra eggs, as she yearned for sponge cakes and fluffy baked puddings. Heavy-cake and flapjacks no longer felt like an indulgence when they were all she could bake. Several people in the neighbourhood were doing this, while some enterprising lads had started keeping ferrets to catch rabbits for the pot. Leaving church just now was the second time she had been asked if she’d care to take out shares in a pig someone was fattening in their backyard, but she had demurred as she wasn’t sure of the legality of this and had a horror of breaking the law.
She stirred the hotpot. It smelled good, if not very summery. She had carefully lifted off the disk of hard yellow fat from it before reheating, as that would do for roasting potatoes. Mutton fat had a stronger taste than most, but it didn’t do to waste it.
There was still no sign of Gertie. Some woman on the radio was singing along with a band: songs by Ivor Novello. Laura found it a bit treacly but knew Gertie would love it. She responded to anything sad or sentimental, which was odd given how life had taught her such tough lessons so early. More than ever, Laura wished she could make contact with the girl’s mother, partly to reassure her that mother and child were doing well but also, she knew, to shame her a little. But Gertie had balked at her repeated requests for an address. Laura couldn’t bear to involve the Netleys so she had left well alone beyond making sure Gertie knew where paper, envelopes and stamps were kept, in case she wanted to write to her parents or to anyone else under her own steam.
‘Gertie?’ she called. ‘Supper’s ready.’
There was silence. Usually Gertie responded at once, even if only with a sleepy mumble. Laura climbed the stairs. She would look in, she decided, and let them sleep on if they were sleeping.
They had gone. The room was as tidy as she had seen it earlier, but the cot was empty and the little suitcase had vanished. She checked and found nothing in the chest of drawers or wardrobe. The girl must have left the house minutes after Laura had, presumably for the London train and with Fred bundled in a blanket in her arms as the borrowed pram was still in the hall. All she had left behind was a handful of nappies soaking in the bucket in the washroom.
It was only when Laura finally drew up her chair to eat a solitary supper, having turned off the radio as the music was making her more upset, that she saw the little card propped up against the small posy of wild flowers they had picked on a walk along Underlane in honour of Charles’s leave. It was a postcard of Bude that Gertie must have bought earlier in the year, when buses were laid on to take the evacuees there for a day trip to the beach. The handwriting was uncertain and impossibly small. ‘Thank you for everything,’ was all it said. ‘Gone home think thats best Gertie’. There was no punctuation and the line of writing trailed downhill as though mimicking the writer’s weighed-down mood.
