Mother’s Boy, page 5
The routine only let up at weekends. Saturdays were spent cleaning the cottage and baking bread – including the Communion bread for use in the church all week – shopping, which of course brought accidental socialising with it, a visit to the library, and cooking things like stew and heavy-cake to see the two of them through the week to come. Saturday night was bath night for them both, the tub drawn up cosily close to the kitchen range and the curtains tightly closed. Sundays truly were a day of rest, marked by wearing better clothes. There was church in the morning, and evening too if it was a notable feast day, a leisurely lunch, usually with one or other of Laura’s siblings and their family, and an afternoon walk if the day was fine. Sometimes someone might come for tea, especially if there was to be evensong, as they were so handily placed for the church that they could hear the organ start playing and know to start washing and drying the Sunday china. Sunday evenings were quiet. Mother invariably went to bed early so that was when Laura wrote her weekly letters to Charlie in France and to Stanley in Canada.
Her weeks had become so undifferentiated she’d have had no trouble remembering anything unusual to pass on, but all the same she had fallen into a habit at the Frasers’ of keeping a little pocket appointment diary in which she noted anything that happened. It not only served to remind her as she wrote letters but built up into an eccentric shorthand record of her year. ‘Tuesday – cow bolted. Wednesday – birthday. Thursday – bad egg at breakfast! Friday – Brenda Titmus fell in river.’
Her mother’s writing was not confident and a kind of shyness affected her when faced with a pen and a blank sheet, or when asked to do much more than carefully sign her name, but Laura always left her letter to Stanley unsealed so that Mother could add a sentence or two in the space she left for this on the last page. Stanley’s letters were even rarer and less informative than Charlie’s, but his last had horrified them both by announcing he had left his logging camp to sign up with the Canadian Expeditionary Force and was about to embark on basic training. Even kind people had become so ferociously, unthinkingly patriotic, egged on by stupid newspapers, that Laura found she was guarding her tongue, even at home. Neither woman dared put it into words but she knew they were both hoping the war would end one way or another before Stanley’s battalion put to sea.
There had been weeks of rain recently so the river was in spate and threatening to burst its banks and flood the ground floor. The noise of it sucking and splashing was constant and so loud, especially in the dead of night when the trains and local industries fell quiet at last, that it was hard to believe it wasn’t lapping at the foot of the narrow stairs. It did flood, of course, most years, but usually in the spring when the moorland could hold no more rain and turned the river the red brown of a Devon Ruby cow.
Charlie’s troop ship was delayed and then so were the trains, so he had spent two nights travelling and was so exhausted he was wordless and then quite overwhelmed by the array of pie and ham and cheese and pickles with which they walled him in at the lunch table. The smell coming off him, a mixture of slaughterhouse and farmyard, quite overpowered the spiced vinegar of Mother’s pickled onions, which he ate like plums. His uniform was so stiff with mud and blood and God knew what that his hands were too weak to unbutton it and Laura had to help him out of it. She was used to the smell of men from the things she had to launder, but this was a smell with no man left in it, though it sat at the table with them like an unexpected extra guest.
Mother had made him a queen of puddings, a spectacular one with a duck-egg meringue and bramble jelly, knowing it to be a favourite of his, but Laura found she could hardly taste it for the smell.
‘You’ll be wanting a nice long bath, my bird,’ Mother finally told him, with a careful glance at Laura as she donned coat and hat. Then she took herself off to her brother Richard’s for the night, where she had arranged to watch the grandchildren while Richard and Mabel went out for the evening.
Laura had supposed Charlie could smell nothing, like the women who worked long hours now in the tannery, but she was wrong, for he apologised repeatedly for it as she heated the water for his bath.
The comfort of the hot water loosened his tongue. She had been about to fetch his pyjamas and dressing gown and set his uniform to soak overnight but, like a child scared of the dark almost, he asked her to stay with him.
‘I like your letters, you know,’ he said. ‘I live for them.’
She smiled, shy of his steaming nakedness. Then she noticed his left hand. The little finger was entirely missing.
‘Oh my word,’ she cried out. ‘Charlie, your poor hand!’
‘Have you only just noticed?’ he said, holding his hand up a little proudly and turning it back and forth. ‘And there was I thinking you were being polite. Your mother was polite; I saw her notice when I took the spuds from her.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Not any more. Hurt like buggery at the time. Sorry.’
‘That’s all right. How did it happen? Charlie, was it shot off?’
‘Nothing so heroic. I was hitching up a horse to a gun carriage and a shell landed near enough to make him panic and somehow my finger got tangled in the harness. Doctor had to amputate it after a week as it went bad but, well, I’m just lucky it were only the finger and not the whole hand or you’d have me home again but useless.’
She thought of the legless veteran who sold matches from a little tray now, propped against the wall of the upcountry station. She had bought far more matches than she needed because she had learned he went to school with her and Em, yet she didn’t recognise him or know his name. Whenever she passed him, she told herself how many boxes he must have to sell to be able to buy even a loaf of day-old bread.
‘I can’t think how I didn’t see it,’ she said.
‘Too busy drinking in my handsome face, I expect.’ He smiled to himself as he fell to scrubbing the dirt from his nails.
‘Why didn’t you write about it at the time?’ she asked.
‘You’d only have worried.’
‘I worry anyway.’
‘I dunno. If I started to tell you even half of the things that happen, I wouldn’t know how to stop.’
‘But—’
He left off scrubbing and looked her full in the face, not smiling now.
‘Trust me,’ he told her, ‘it’d be like a scream on paper. These things are better in my head than yours.’
Unnerved, she took his uniform to the outhouse where she set it to soak with some soda. The clothes felt like him suddenly, even though they stank, a version of him she could reach and touch, and she wanted them clean and safe.
She heard him open the back door to tip away his bath water into the drain. By the time she had used the privy, washed her face at the sink, brushed her teeth and dabbed on a little rosewater, she had heard the floorboards creak as he settled into bed overhead.
He was asleep by the time she joined him but he woke just enough to reach for her before falling asleep again, leaving her wide awake and pinned in place. She lay there for a while until she felt sure she’d get cramp, but then a nightmare shook him awake with a gasp.
‘Mattress is too soft,’ he mumbled. ‘I’ll need to go on the floor again.’
She remembered what her friend Aggie Treloar had shocked her by saying, observing his first leave had not left her pregnant. ‘It’s no good waiting for ’em to offer, girl. Sometimes you just has to ask!’
‘That seems a pity,’ she said. ‘Why don’t we just try the mattress on the floor?’
There was just room, once they had moved the little nightstand out of the way. When she had turned off the light again she was surprised how bold darkness and determination made her. It was a fortnight to her next monthly so the timing was perfect. He was utterly shattered, she knew, but she also knew this was important to them both and found that a small, strong part of her didn’t care. What if he went back to Flanders and died? Or came back like the station match-seller or worse? She needed this now and in a curious way she felt it was her due.
When he realised she had no intention of sleeping just yet, he made love to her and, once again, lit her up from inside so that she had to bite her lip in the effort not to shout or laugh. As they fell asleep he left one hand cupped protectively between her legs, which continued to please her in little waves as he began to snore softly at the back of her neck.
The next morning he made love to her again, when she took him up a cup of tea as a hint it was time to get dressed for church, as though the nearby bells and murmur of his mother-in-law’s voice from the kitchen were not hint enough.
She tidied herself carefully before going back down but Mother said, ‘He’s happy to be home, you can tell,’ which meant she had heard.
Once again he had arranged to spend his last night in Trusham, but this time, before she needed to hide her disappointment, he was turning to Mother, asking if Laura could be spared for a day so he could show her off. And her mother was all smiles and said a wife belonged with her husband. Laura knew Monday was the hardest day of their week so started putting things to soak before they left, with his uniform clean but still damp on a hanger.
Even though it was cold and wet out, the train carriage was well heated and it was good to be able to lean into him and hold his hand as they rattled along. Her mother’s house only had chairs facing in politely from opposite corners. Maggie had no sofa either. Laura had never thought of it until recently but had begun to suspect that sofas were for the better off as their upholstery didn’t last as well as that of armchairs. There was an oak settle at Trusham, though, across from the fire, from which Maggie evicted poor Lewis so they could sit together.
‘Just look at you two,’ she kept saying with a smile. ‘Just look at you!’ She knew Laura was pregnant days before Laura did, apparently. She said she was witchy that way. ‘Dora can tell if it’s going to rain, I can tell if a baby’s coming and Lewis, well, whatever Lewis’s gift is he keeps to himself!’
Naturally Laura wrote to Charlie once she was really sure. Her happiness was so intense she felt she ought to rein it in when writing to him – the state of his hand, the bloodied filth in his uniform, the violent gasps that persistently ruptured his dreams, told her all she need know about the grim weeks he was living through. Mother read her mind, though, and pointed out it was precisely the sort of news that would help him pull through. So Laura didn’t hold back but told him everything, how sick she had been, how Maggie had ‘known’ on seeing them together, and how, if it was a boy, she thought it should be Charles after Charlie but a bit more serious. He took a while to write back, of course, or his letter took a while to reach her, but he had somehow found her a funny Belgian postcard picturing a bouquet of roses under the words ‘mon amour’.
‘You make me happier,’ he wrote, ‘than I feel any man deserves to be. All my love, Charlie.’
That was all. Just two sentences on a postcard, but she knew it would be in her handkerchief drawer until her dying day.
She knew she ought to think of girls’ names as well, and entertained possibilities as her mother and sisters tossed names this way and that, mainly girls’ names they had always wanted to use and for which the opportunity had never arisen. But Laura knew it was a boy. Even before Mother had dangled her wedding ring over the still tiny bump on a piece of Laura’s hair.
Pregnancy suited her as she had always known it would. The bouts of morning sickness soon passed, helped on their way by Mother’s ginger fairings, and she found herself stronger and healthier than ever, proof against the almost constant hard labour of laundering and one of the harshest winters anyone could recall. But not against the cruelties of fate, for Mother died, without warning or illness, one evening in March.
Mother had insisted on being the one to go out on a filthy evening of driving rain to fetch down a basket of dirty linen from one of the larger houses in town. Nobody lived in the poorer part of Launceston without being used to climbing hills and if ever Mother heard someone complain about it she would repeat the saw that if you could survive childhood there, Launceston’s hills would see that you lived to a healthy old age. The basket was one of the bigger ones, it turned out, like a wicker trunk, which she carried over her shoulders, held in place by a stout old leather strap one of the tanners had made her for just such tasks.
She hated fuss but she let Laura lift the hamper off her back for once and carry it out to the washroom while she slid the kettle on to the front of the range to boil for their tea. Laura was sorting the linen into the usual piles according to fineness of cloth and any stains needing special treatment, when she became aware the kettle was whistling persistently. Thinking that perhaps Mother had left it boiling while she took a message next door to Em, she went to make the tea herself only to find Mother slumped in her wooden armchair.
She had hung up her wet coat and scarf to dry, then sat down and had a heart attack on the spot. Laura hurried to tell Em, who worried the shock would make her lose the baby so promptly took control, getting word to Willie, Ellen, Richard and Sam, and to the doctor and vicar. It was left to Laura to write to Stanley telling him, longing for him to say he’d come home for the funeral, though she knew that was quite impossible.
There were two surprises in the days that followed: that Mother had already paid for her own coffin and, a thing that had somehow been kept from Laura and Stanley growing up, that both she and their father had been born in Launceston workhouse, fathers unknown. The two were closely linked, Willie explained. Mother had a dread that any of them should fall into poverty, which must have seemed all too possible for her when their father was killed in the town quarry, and it would have been a point of pride in her to have died with all bills settled and enough money set by to pay for her funeral and headstone.
There was a freakish spring, with really heavy snow over Easter that blighted the fruit blossom. The hurried thaw that followed brought the Kensey over its banks for the second time that year and saw Laura, big with child by now, lugging chairs and rugs upstairs out of harm’s way. The landlord agreed to her taking on her mother’s tenancy. With Charlie away at the war and everything so uncertain but the looming fact of motherhood, it made no sense to move and it was a comfort to have Em in the cottage next door and have to walk only yards to put fresh flowers on Mother’s grave.
The households that had given their washing to Mother now gave it to Laura. She even took on her mother’s weekly duty of baking the Communion bread for St Thomas’s. She had loved her mother and liked to think they shared a special bond by virtue of being so similar physically, and thanks to her having spent these last years living and working alongside her, but when she and the family had gathered to honour her after her wintry funeral the consensus was that her legacy to them was not love but work.
‘Or perhaps,’ she wrote to Stanley afterwards, ‘hard work was how she expressed that love.’
With Charlie still away at the front and her brothers and sisters all occupied with their own work and families Laura often felt as though her life was simply turning into Mother’s, a harsh, unrelenting calendar of soaking, scrubbing, starching and pressing. Since that one high point of his floral postcard, Charlie’s letters expressed so little of his hopes and dreams they did nothing to dispel this. What helped was the baby beginning to stir and kick, to become an insistent presence apart from herself. His daunting insistence on change helped.
And, harsh though it could be when her lower back ached or the soapy water scalded where she had already burned herself on the iron, there was an odd consolation for her grief in labour so intimately associated with her mother’s voice and advice. There was barely a stage of her laundry routine that didn’t call to mind a piece of motherly instruction and Laura became aware, as she had not been when her mother was still living, that in everything she did she still sought her mother’s approval or judiciously measured praise. She continued to feel close to her again at church services, just as she had done in Teignmouth.
Charles arrived – because of course he was a he – on a deliciously balmy August day, the twenty-fourth, St Bartholomew’s Day. Laura managed to give birth at home, assisted by Ellen and attended by the old midwife from St Stephen’s, who claimed to have delivered both of them in Father’s old cottage in Langore. Charles roared when the midwife smacked his bottom but thereafter he proved an easy baby, a good feeder and regular sleeper, and much given to contentedly staring about him. It was impressed on Laura by both sisters and sisters-in-law how very lucky she was – most of theirs having been terrors at first, fretful or sickly or bad feeders. Em said it was because she was calm; that calm mothers had calm children. Laura thought it more likely that the baby was calm because he and his mother were so rarely apart. She went back to work as soon as she felt able and always had him in his cot where she could hear or see him unless she had to slip out for supplies, collections or deliveries. The advice was to set him to sleep at regular, strictly timed intervals, which she did in her room upstairs, where he had the sound of babbling water to soothe him and seemed to like the play of watery reflections on the ceiling when the sun was out.
And he was christened for the two men she loved best: Charles for her Charlie and Stanley for his uncle. There was no lack of aunts and uncles to serve as godparents. She asked Maggie to be a godmother, not just because she liked her so, but because some instinct told her neither she, Dora nor Lewis were likely to become parents themselves. By way of a Christmas present, she had a photograph taken of her with Charles on her lap, and sent small, portable copies to Charlie and Stanley.
This had not struck her as remotely strange until one of her sisters-in-law – Mabel – broke off from admiring the picture and how solemn and intelligent Charles looked in it to say that Laura being the only parent in it and wearing mourning still for her mother made it look as though she were a war widow. Silly woman. Her thoughtless words stung Laura and came back to her whenever she looked at the picture afresh, so that she moved it from the dresser downstairs to her bedroom, where no one else should look or comment on it.
