Yes, Mama. Helen Forrester
a fashionable vehicle, she preferred to put him in the wrong by being a martyr among her better-equipped friends. So, while Sarah and Florence sought to raise her spirits, she sighed and sulked, and looked forward with absolute dread to her husband’s return from his office in the city.
She had not seen Humphrey since the night of Alicia’s birth. As he had done for the past year, he had slept in the dressing-room next to their bedroom; in addition to the entrance to the bedroom, it had a door leading on to the landing, so he came and went without entering her room. Today, unless she feigned fatigue and returned to her bed, she would have to meet him at dinner. Later in the afternoon, Sarah and Florence would both go home and there would be no one present to make it necessary for him to control himself. The prospect made her feel sick, and she wondered what Andrew would do, if she ordered a carriage and fled to him.
As she drank her second glass of port and listened to Sarah and Florence talking about the joys of motherhood, she wanted to cry. Where was Andrew? He could have called or, at least, have sent some flowers from his wife and himself. He was her lawyer. He had every right to call on her. But in her heart she knew Andrew. He was in many ways weak; he would avoid a troublesome mistress as if she had the plague.
‘Babies are such darlings,’ gushed Sarah, none of whose nephews and nieces had ever been presented to her by their nannies, unless dry, fed and sleepy. She herself would not have known what to do with a sopping wet, hungry, howling infant, except to coo over it.
Florence was smart enough to realize this. She remembered her younger brother, Charles, with whom she had shared the nursery for a while; he had been anything but lovely. Clarence had told her flatly that they could not afford a nurse for their baby and that she must do the best she could with the aid of their cook – general and kitchen – maid. Because Charles was a boy, she had never seen him either bathed or changed. How did you change a small, wriggling creature like a baby? Or bathe it? Or put it to the breast? She hoped, rather frantically, that Mrs Macdonald, the midwife, would instruct her; she could not ask such vulgar questions of Mama. In some despair, she had made a point of arriving at her mother’s house quite early, during the past ten days, having taken the horse-bus from home, so that she could go upstairs to watch Polly struggling with Alicia.
II
Polly was herself learning on the job, though she knew much more about birth and babies than poor Florence did. Before coming to the Woodman household, she had received some strict advice from her mother and from her Great-aunt Kitty, herself a midwife to the slum women around her. The result was that, much as she protested, Alicia was scoured twice daily from head to heel. To Fanny’s irritation, the child was changed the moment she was damp; it was poor Fanny who had to carry the pails of dirty napkins, petticoats and gowns down to the cellar ready for the washerwoman.
‘All for nought but a little bastard,’ Fanny had muttered, as she heaved the heavy pails down the stairs.
To the Woodmans, Fanny was nothing but a quiet, little shadow responsible for all the coal fires in the house. As she went from room to room, she had become well aware of Andrew Crossing’s interest in her mistress; raucous jokes at his expense had been a real source of entertainment on quiet evenings in the kitchen, as the maids sipped their fender ale.
Fanny had also seen something of the bitter fights between Elizabeth and Humphrey. When she went through the house to make up all the fires and they heard her knock, they would stop their shouting and upbraiding and would stand rigidly staring at each other while she poked up the fire and added more coal; as soon as she was out of the door, coal hod in hand, she would hear them renew the battle.
It was Fanny who danced out into the street to find a cab to take Florence home. She took her time because it was so lovely to be out in the afternoon sun, and, when she found one, Florence gave her twopence for her trouble.
Florence was thankful that her mother had insisted on giving her the money to pay for the cab; otherwise, she would have had to take the horse-bus again. Though Elizabeth had great faith that the Reverend Clarence Browning would make his way upwards in the Church and would, in due course, be able to afford a carriage, Florence was acutely aware that he was far too outspoken, far too direct, ever to be recommended for high office. Florence herself was content to preside over the little vicarage they occupied, thankful that a man so intent on the saving of souls had managed, in spite of church politics, to rise to a vicarage. She asked no more – except for a nanny.
In order to conserve her strength for the coming confrontation with Humphrey, Elizabeth tried to take a nap in the afternoon, but she was so filled with anxiety that she returned to the morning-room in time to take tea and to receive Polly and Alicia.
Alicia was hungry and was screaming. Elizabeth inquired of Polly if she had everything she needed for the child and then sent her thankfully back upstairs.
III
When Humphrey bowled swiftly into the dining-room for dinner, his white-faced wife was already seated, and Maisie, the parlourmaid, was hovering over the laden sideboard.
Humphrey ignored both of them. He indicated that he was ready to be served by simply shaking out his table napkin and spreading it across his stomach. In complete silence, Maisie served them both.
Never a man to waste anything, Humphrey ate his way stolidly through soup, roast beef and steamed pudding. He knew, as his wife had already sensed, that this was the evening to make clear his attitude towards Alicia, who, like his wife, he had hoped would either miscarry or be born dead.
Impotent rage surged through him. Hemmed in by the constrictions of social propriety, he was certain there was not a great deal he could do about the situation without coming to grief himself, and this knowledge added to his boiling anger. He helped himself to hot mustard and cursed under his breath when the condiment stuck to its spoon. He banged the tiny spoon on the side of his plate and in the tensely quiet room it sounded like a pistol going off.
Elizabeth kept her eyes down and picked uneasily at her food. Her mind leaped wildly between fear of Humphrey and heartbreak that she had not heard from Andrew.
She jumped when Humphrey asked for a second helping of pudding and more wine. Really, the man ate like a hog. The only thing he seemed to notice in the house was when Mrs Tibbs’ cooking was not up to its usual standard.
Humphrey had, indeed, not noticed for months that his wife was pregnant. When he did, he had hastily checked his office diary. It told him with certainty that the child could not be his. Plump, comfortable Mrs Jakes kept him so exhausted that he had rarely slept with his wife. Elizabeth had not seemed to care about his neglect.
Elizabeth had been more than thankful to be relieved of her wifely duties. Her lifelong friend, Andrew Crossing, had been only too willing to meet her needs, since his wife was a useless invalid. As Maisie took away her untouched roast beef, she thought agonizedly of how she had rebelled against marrying Humphrey, how passionately she had loved her childhood playmate, Andrew. At nineteen, Andrew had had no money and had failed his first year at University; her father had been adamant that he was not suitable for her. In contrast, at twenty-five, Humphrey was already well-established with his father, in a brokerage business and, as the elder son, he was to inherit the entire enterprise. What her father had not realized, Elizabeth fulminated, was that Humphrey was not only physically repellent to her, but also had the hoarding instincts of a jackdaw; his ambition was to accumulate capital to invest in shipping or railways. He lectured her regularly, from the days of their unhappy honeymoon onwards, on the fact that capital accumulated by personal savings was the only sure way to expand a business. Money made in a business should be ploughed back in. He had rationed her and, later, poor Flo, to two pairs of black woollen stockings and one pair of white silk every winter of her married life; any extra ones had had to be bought out of the money left her by her father. And he still went over Mrs Tibbs’ account books with her each month and railed at her for waste.
It had taken twelve months of unmitigated pressure by her parents to make her marry him, twelve months during which no other young man had been allowed to get more than a single dance