Mother’s Boy, page 6
Nothing had prepared Laura for the deep comfort and satisfaction motherhood had brought her. Beneath the daily exhaustion, beneath the sorrow for her mother and anxiety for Charlie and Stanley, which were like wounds forever made to bleed afresh, the pleasure she took in Charles was so intense that she felt it almost indecent, a thing she needed to hide. Her mother had warned her that a baby at the breast could hurt and her sisters spoke of nursing with a kind of revulsion, as a grim necessity to be borne with but brought to an end as soon as possible. So she was quite unprepared for the flushes of pleasure the baby gave her as he fed, not unlike the pleasure brought on in bed by his father. Unless it was his time for sleeping or she was out delivering or collecting laundry supplies, she had him near her constantly, either in his cot or strapped safely into a baby chair. He cried occasionally, of course, usually when she left him, but most of the time he just gurgled to himself and watched her, seemingly fascinated by her labours and any sounds they made: the splashing of water, the rubbing of sheet on washboard or nailbrush on collar, the hiss and clunk of the iron. And she talked to him, naturally, incessantly, glad of the company.
She had assumed she would stay put until Charlie came back. Perhaps the arrival of the baby had tempered a little his dreams of running a boarding house, for his last letter had asked her about work opportunities in Launceston, ideally involving horses. She was bringing in enough money to pay the rent on her own so with two of them working, they’d be able to afford somewhere a little larger, maybe even with a patch of garden. Despite the risk of flooding she liked the cottage for its view of the babbling water and proximity to the church, and having Em just next door so they could mind one another’s children if need be.
But then Laura came upstairs to wake Charles from his nap one afternoon and was horrified to see a great brown rat with horrible yellow teeth sitting on the beam directly over his cot, quite as though planning to jump in and make a meal of him. She saw rats all the time outside, especially in the summer. They were drawn to the bins of stomach-turning waste at the tanneries and slaughterhouse, and children made great sport of hurling stones at them if they saw them by the river. But to see one in the house, and so close to the baby, filled her with deep disgust and also a sort of housewifely shame. She shouted, waking Charles, of course, and hurled a hairbrush at it so that it scampered along the beam and disappeared through a hole into the space beneath the roof. Ignoring Charles’s cries for once, she stood on a chair and saw how the rat and its brood must have been coming in and out that way for a while, for the hole in the plaster was grey and shiny with the grease off their fur. She stuffed the hole tight with rags, although she knew rats would soon chew through those, stilled the baby, feeding him in a kind of fury, then set about finding them somewhere else to live.
She settled on a place barely two minutes’ walk away up Old Hill. It was quite different, being one of four flats in a tenement, but there was a second bedroom for when Charles was old enough for a bed of his own, and it was raised above the threat of rats but still near enough to the street for there to be a familiar sense of town bustle outside. She liked that she could think of it as hers and not her mother’s, and guessed that Charlie would as well.
Charlie was safe now. She thanked God for that in her prayers every night and remembered it every morning when she saw their wedding photograph as the baby woke her. She had lived with the dread for so long – had been shown the shockingly spare official commiserations other women received when their sons or husbands were killed – that her mind would not quite accept the good news and needed these constant reminders. There had been an unusually long wait since his last letter, to the point where she worried that continuing to write to him began to feel like nagging. Then she received a very short letter in an unfamiliar hand. It was from a nurse. Charlie had been hospitalised following a mustard gas attack. ‘He is mending fast,’ the nurse wrote, ‘and has his sight back, which is a relief. But his lungs are still weak. He sends his love to you and the baby and says he’ll write soon.’ Then there was a scribbled PS from Charlie, which looked almost as though he had been writing in darkness. This said only: ‘Invalided out! Hope to be home before much longer. Cx.’
But the weeks passed and no further news followed. Laura hoped that Charlie was right and that invaliding out meant he was spared any more fighting or danger, but of course now her restless mind fed off the few details. Mustard gas blinded and burned. He had his sight back but was he scarred? And what of his lungs?
She wrote to Maggie at once, of course, and for a few days her heart raced when she heard the upcountry train pull in. Then expectation was subsumed in routine and reason. He might need nursing for a few weeks yet, and as a mere invalid, not a hero on home leave, would be a low priority when it came to finding him a passage home.
It was only when Em came in to help her sort what to take with her or what of their mother’s few things she might want to give to a sibling that it dawned on her she had no possessions other than her Bible, prayerbook, suitcase and her and the baby’s (largely handed-down) clothes. And her wedding ring, of course, and a few necklaces and brooches.
Laura already knew all her new neighbours to chat to in the street and once they realised she had a brother who could get them cheap coal nobody complained at her needing to monopolise the washroom most days. One had a little girl only a few months older than Charles. Old Hill, or St Thomas Street as some called it, was effectively the town children’s playground, along with the ruined castle at its top. Outside the hours of the nearby National School, children played along its steep length all day. She could hear their chatter and shouts, songs and skipping games even from the washroom behind the tenement as she had always heard the river at Mother’s. It was hard now to imagine her baby as a harum-scarum little boy dodging the delivery carts to play cricket or piggy-in-the-middle, or to imagine herself being as relaxed as other mothers evidently were about letting her precious child out of her sight for hours at a time. But these houses were cramped and gardenless; where else could children let off steam?
The range was bigger than the one at the cottage, with a cool as well as a hot oven, so she could easily make rice pudding, bake potatoes or turn stale bread into rusks. It also had a useful rack built in above it, perfect for airing piles of laundry as she finished ironing it. If there was a part of the laundry routine that gave her any pleasure still, it was ironing. It was less hard work physically, provided she avoided burning herself it was kinder to her skin, and she liked the smell of hot linen and won a deep satisfaction from smoothing out wrinkles with heat and starch and seeing the steady transformation of a half-dry bundle to a crisp stack. And now, of course, she liked ironing because it brought her back into her own house, whereas the washroom, being shared, felt more like a workplace than the old one she and Mother had had to share only with Em.
She was there now, working her way through a small hill of napkins for the White Hart, letting the baby sleep on because he had troubled both their nights with a touch of colic. The upstairs neighbour was singing to herself as she swept. She had a stormy marriage. Laura had been made party to muffled arguments and yet, left alone, the woman invariably sang untroubled, even complacent love songs. She was still quite young, much younger than her husband, and always showed a noisy interest in Charles if they passed on the steps; perhaps childlessness, not lovelessness was the issue. Her singing was accompanied by rhythmic thumps from her broom. By the light, by the light, by the light of the silvery moon thump thump thump! It was odd to be doing housework in the afternoon. By an unwritten rule, Launceston’s women seemed to do housework in the morning and then somehow change pace or even clothes for a more elegant afternoon, or at least remove their aprons or housecoats. Even the poorest households, and she knew of a couple that still had earth floors and had to fetch in water from the public pump, retained crockery and perhaps a teapot for best, in honour of some mythic teatime entertainment that never came.
Laura heard the sharp ping of a bicycle bell down below and set the iron safely back alongside the other reheating on the range before going to open the door. She was ever hopeful of letters from Stanley or Charlie, and had noticed how their letters often seemed to arrive in the afternoon post not the morning one.
Only it wasn’t the postman but the telegraph boy. Well, they all called him the telegraph boy but the actual boy was away fighting and his stand-in was an austere, grandfatherly figure who somehow retained the strength in his shanks to ride his bicycle up the hill into town without either standing on the pedals or getting off to push.
‘Telegram for Mrs Bartlett,’ he said, respectfully removing his cap, his eyes the blue of a cold morning.
‘She died,’ Laura said.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It takes a while for news to get upstairs to the ministers. They make a lot of mistakes like this. Awful really.’
His voice was just like her father’s, with the naturally querulous quality of the local men. She wondered if he had ever lived more than five miles from Mary Magdalene church. Perhaps he was old enough to have fought against the Boer?
She became aware he was holding out something to her and took the little envelope off him.
‘I’ve never had one of these before,’ she said, seeing her mother’s name and last address typed on it. ‘Well,’ she added with a nervous laugh, ‘I still haven’t, I suppose, since this was for my mother. Thank you.’
She turned to go in but he cleared his throat. Was she meant to pay him something?
‘I’m meant to wait while you read it,’ he said. ‘In case there’s a reply to take.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and, flustered now, wiped her hands on her apron because they had become sweaty. She opened the envelope and smoothed out the little folded sheet of paper from the Post Office. It was hard to make out at first. It was carefully written by hand but the words were separated out into four columns rather than run together, presumably to ensure they remained legible. The first were ‘Regret to inform you’. Her eyes misted over and she had to lean on the door jamb.
‘There’ll be no reply,’ she blurted. ‘Thank you. My husband’s dead.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ he said, and made a sort of bow as she struggled out of his sight to close the door again.
The gas damage must have been worse than they thought, or he had succumbed to an infection. She had made herself face the all too likely possibility of him being blown apart by a shell, kicked to death by a terrified horse or downed by sniper fire. Charlie had told her sometimes you didn’t know you were being shot at until you saw the undramatic little flick to the mud beside you as a sniper’s bullet missed its mark. But the thought now of him dying in a clean, even comfortable hospital bed but far from home, with only some unknown nurse to witness his death and say a quick prayer under her breath if he was lucky, was almost worse than her battlefield nightmares.
She fell into a chair and made herself spread the thing out on the kitchen table, made herself read it properly. And of course it wasn’t Charlie who had died, or it would have been addressed to her, to Mrs Causley, not to Mrs Bartlett.
‘Regret to inform you, Stanley Bartlett, Railway Construction Corps died Thurston Harbour Hospital influenza and pneumonia 23.10.18.’
She read and reread the telegram as it dawned on her that Stanley had never even made it to the front. She and her sisters had been worrying about him all these weeks and he had come no closer to the battle than a harbour in Vancouver, to be laid low by an invisible enemy. She drank a glass of icy water at the sink to relieve the constriction in her throat. She could not let herself cry in the street. Then she pulled on her coat and a headscarf and was out on the steps before she remembered the baby. She turned back, ashamed. Having him with her would make breaking the news a bit easier.
He had woken already and was straining to look about him. Seeing her approach, he cried out with something like a laugh and reached a hand towards her. She kissed his tiny palm, then scooped him up, furling him in her shawl to hold him against her shoulder where he sucked noisily at her neck. She rocked gently from foot to foot, loving the warm weight of him against her.
‘You,’ she said. ‘Oh, you.’
PENNY BUNS – 1922
Charles was only five but had already seen enough of other families to know that his father wasn’t like the others. Other fathers were usually out doing things that made them smelly or dirty or cross when they came home. He had uncles who delivered coal, painted houses, forged metal. Charles’s father was generally clean and tidy and was there all day, either in bed or on the bed or sitting at the kitchen table, or at the top of the steps if it was sunny or by the range if it was cold. He got so hot by the range that his tweed coat began to smell of wet dog and if you climbed on his lap, his jacket buttons were hot to touch. Sometimes he did useful things very slowly, like black-lead the range or polish the brassware.
He was home because he was not well. And it wasn’t not well like when Charles suddenly got all hot and vomity, or woke up with a snotty nose or itchy spots. This was not well that made the other grown-ups either talk in whispers or, usually, talk loudly about other things.
Nobody was allowed to name it. He knew that, although he couldn’t remember ever having to be told. He knew it the way he knew not to bang on the privy door when it was closed or never to say what he really thought in church. He knew the name nobody said aloud because it had only two letters and he was slightly obsessed by numbers and the alphabet at the moment.
Mother sat him on her lap sometimes to read him Bible stories from a book with pictures, and Father regularly sat him on his while he read the newspaper. It amused him to read Charles stories from it or the best bits.
‘Look, Charles. “Woman murdered husband with smoothing iron.” Fancy that, eh? That’d take some doing. Or maybe not, if she was very cross.’ Or ‘“The six to one favourite, Darcy’s Fancy, was left far behind by plucky outsider Pirate Flag.” And there’s a picture, see? Pirate Flag. Lovely bit of horse, he is. He’d take you for a ride, eh? You’d like that?’
The pictures were interesting, as was having Father so close, but Charles found it was the letters that intrigued him, their patterns and repetitions. And then he found that he could read them sometimes, which made Father so happy he did it for him some more.
‘Horse,’ he said one day, and pointed at the paper.
‘That’s right,’ Father said, and he pointed at the picture of a horse.
So Charles pointed again and said, ‘Horse.’ And again, somewhere else. ‘Horse.’
It took Father a while to see he was pointing at the word ‘horse’ and he fetched Mother to show her. She was cross, because she was busy. She was always busy unless she was asleep, although she was excited, too. Also a little bit frightened, he thought.
‘What does that say, Charles?’ she asked, pointing at another smaller word.
‘“From”,’ he told her, and she smiled and kissed him, and something shifted in the air between the three of them to make Jack, their little terrier, bark a quick question from his basket.
That night, washing him with a sponge as he stood in the sink, Laura taught Charles the alphabet song to the same tune as ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’. Combining a melody with letters was almost too exciting and he had trouble sleeping afterwards because the circular song was like a roundabout going just too fast to get off. It helped, though. Now the letters hung on a sort of washing line in his mind, each a pinging note like a little bell, so when one of his older cousins, showing him off to a friend, said,‘Go on, Charles. Spell her name. Spell Bridie,’ he saw B R I D I and E in his mind and heard their little notes ring out as he picked each one.
So then, of course, he began to read every word he saw, even when he didn’t know what it meant and even though he was still overwhelmed by whole lines of them. He liked the big letters best, the ones on the outsides of books or on packets of soap flakes or salt.
‘Saxa,’ he told Father urgently. ‘Oxo.’
Charles had heard the muttered letters ‘TB’ said out of Father’s hearing by his aunts during a picnic and pictured them as ill-matched garments – a long sleeved vest and a bulgy b word garment like ‘bodice’. The little book his parents kept had a long word on the front he couldn’t make out, as nobody had said it aloud, but it was a bit like another word, ‘consume’, which he knew from church and which he liked for the funny thing it did to your lips. He made the link when he realised there were blank pages at the back with little boxes where Mother wrote down a number twice a day when she put the thermometer in Father’s mouth for a minute while nobody spoke, especially not Father, then glared at it, turning it this way and that to catch the light before writing the number down. That was the first really long word he learned and it stuck in his head because it was said one way and written another.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked his mother, although he’d watched her doing it lots of times before.
‘I’m taking Father’s tempritcher,’ she said. ‘Look. We have to write it down here in these columns. “On waking. After lunch. After exercise. On retiring.” See them? Tempritcher.’ He looked as instructed and saw tem-per-at-ure, which you counted on four fingers whereas tempritcher took only three. But normally she shooed him off any involvement in this side of his father’s life so he didn’t risk asking. Every now and then she had underlined a number.
‘What happened there?’ he asked, and she sighed.
‘Book says I must do that whenever it goes over where it should be – ninety-seven and a bit – and if it does that twice in a row I should call Dr Hart.’
