GOOD DAUGHTERS Page 19

  Judith’s mind worked quickly as she assisted in the rescue. When a count had been made, and all the women found to be present, if not correct, she knew what was necessary. She asked the fishermen to direct the party to the nearest laundry – not for nothing had she spent years in chapel in ‘soap suds island’. They set off along the promenade. Mrs Immingham looked round for Guy, but he was nowhere to be seen. She experienced all the terror of the abandoned. What was she to do? Her inclination was to stay on the beach. This, however, would make her the sole female representative of this ill-fated band of women, and she could see from the discussion which was taking place between the owner of the Saucy Sally and the harassed officer in charge of the sea cadets, that negotiations were not going to be conducted in a congenial atmosphere. Already several sea cadets were applying to her as witness. ‘We never done nothing but push, did we, mum? It was them silly cows standing up what done it. You saw, didn’t you, mum?’ She had no alternative but to hasten in pursuit of the gaggle of half-drowned women. The wet sand in her shoes rubbed her tender feet, bringing up painful blisters, and she was uncomfortably aware of the tarred patch on the seat of her dress. As she staggered along, holding her parasol in one hand while she clutched alternately at her panama and the ruined dress, some dreadful schoolboy, egged on by giggling fellows, came up to her and said, ‘You are Mr Lobby Lud; I claim the News Chronicle prize.’ All in all, the progress along the promenade and through the streets of the town to the laundry was the most humiliating episode of her life.

  The staff at the laundry were sympathetic and anxious to be helpful. Their business, however was with clothes which usually arrived separated from their owners, and they had no changing facilities. This difficulty, at Judith’s suggestion, was ingeniously overcome. When Mrs Immingham arrived, she was greeted by the unnerving sight of long rows of up-ended laundry bales from each of which protruded, like the carving at the top of a Roman pillar, the head of a member of the Women’s Bright Hour. The atmosphere in the room was warm and the dousing in the sea had made the women feel tingly and, now that their wet clothing had been removed, remarkably healthy. Their good humour was restored, and they were singing, ‘Throw out the lifeline, someone is sinking today.’ The only person who appeared to have suffered real injury was Mrs Immingham, who had been abandoned by her beloved son, and whose expensive dress had been ruined.

  In half an hour, the Women’s Bright Hour – washed, ironed and refreshed by tea – emerged, rosy-cheeked, and made their way singing to the beach, where the sea cadets were still explaining in aggrieved tones that their intentions had been entirely honourable. The owner of the laundry was very impressed with Judith’s resourcefulness and had refused payment.

  Mr Fairley, waiting in full uniform on the arrival platform, could tell from the gloomy expression of his second-in-command that all had not gone well. The tale, when recounted, struck Stanley Fairley as inordinately funny, and he had the greatest difficulty in concealing his amusement.

  There was no mirth in the Immingham household that evening. Guy had failed to support his mother in her distress, and had even muttered on the way home, ‘Oh Mother, don’t fuss so!’ Nothing would reconcile her to the Fairley family and when, later in the week, Guy told her that he had been invited to spend a few days with them on holiday in Devon, it was made perfectly plain that on no account was he to accept.

  Mr Immingham pleaded his son’s cause. ‘Mr Fairley is a good sort of fellow, my dear, and quite a figure in Methodism.’

  ‘He teaches in an elementary school. And he has no control over his boys. You should have heard their language! What can they be taught in that school!’

  ‘I think all boys use bad language among themselves, my dear,’ her husband said gently. ‘It’s part of being a boy.’

  ‘Part of being a boy!’ She looked from one to the other of her menfolk. If this were true, then there was a part of her son which must be unknown and unknowable. She appealed to Guy. ‘I hope you don’t swear, Guy.’

  ‘Nothing very terrible. Mother.’

  ‘You’ve changed since you met Louise; I’ve noticed it for some time.’

  ‘Then I must have changed for the better,’ he said angrily and went out of the room.

  This was the first rift between Mrs Immingham and her son, and she was alarmed. ‘That girl means to have him,’ she said to her husband. ‘You should have seen the way she flaunted herself on the beach!’

  Mr Immingham tried to comfort her. He believed in his wife’s goodness, because disbelief would have undermined the foundations on which their marriage was built. He was, however, too kind and thoughtful a man not to feel certain qualms, and early in his married life he had withdrawn from serious discussion with his wife.

  Guy had grown up in a house that was unnaturally quiet, as though it harboured an unseen invalid who must not be disturbed. Breakages aroused in his mother an almost superstitious terror. ‘You go,’ she would say when they heard a clatter in the kitchen. ‘I dare not look.’ When she cleaned out the china cupboard, the fragility of its contents terrified her.

  Once, when Guy and Louise had been going through articles for a jumble sale in aid of the dramatic society, Guy had dropped an imitation Chinese vase which had been given by Mrs Fairley. He had looked so horror-stricken that Louise had laughed, ‘It’s only a broken vase!’

  ‘But it belonged to your mother. She’ll wonder what happened to it.’

  ‘She won’t mind. It’s not as if you did it on purpose.’

  His dread of breaking china had been so great that he had never thought beyond the moment of breakage. And here was Louise, laughing as it were from the other side of disaster, holding out her hand to help him across.

  Now, pacing up and down his room, he equated this rift with his mother with the incident of the broken vase. It would all turn out much better than at one time he could have expected.

  Until now, there had never been any trouble between Guy and his parents. He loved his father, who was a gentle, moderate man, and he was grateful to his mother who looked after his creature comforts with such loving, if fussy, care. Perhaps there had been something missing, some indefinable thing which made itself felt in the exhilaration which he experienced when on the stage he expressed emotions and performed acts quite foreign to his mild temperament. His determination to go on the stage was not something which he had mentioned to his parents. His first consideration must be to win their acceptance of his friendship with Louise. Although he was confident, he could see that it would be wise to take a step at a time.

  He was unduly optimistic. There would never be a time when his mother was ready to share her son’s affections with another woman.

  The Fairleys went on holiday to a farm in North Devon and they went without Guy. Louise, looking forward to rehearsals, was more philosophical about this than was Guy.

  ‘It’s only a fortnight.’

  ‘It’s the principle. My mother can’t expect to dictate to me all my life.’

  He expressed himself more strongly to Louise than to his mother, because he was afraid that Louise might think him weak. Louise, however, did not think of him as weak or strong, but as a young man who aroused in her delicious sensations she had not known before.

  It was an uneventful holiday. There were no impressive adventures, no notable misfortunes, and only the most modest of pleasures to recount to friends on their return. The sun shone much of the time, but the farm was isolated and they were unable to get to the coast, so swimming costumes were never unpacked from the trunk. Yet, looking back, it seemed to the girls that this was the happiest holiday of their lives. There would never again be anything to compare with those meanderings along the Bagworthy Water, and the time when their father forded it carrying the lunch basket, and his family was prevented from joining him because the icy water, though not deep, ran swiftly over the stones; nothing so breathtaking as Exmoor lightly brushed with the first bloom of heather, stretching level to the horizon; no su
ch contentment as on the slow return to the farm, walking along dusty cart tracks, smelling the meadowsweet, too hungry to be saddened by any thought of summer’s end. Nor would plain food ever be more welcome, nor sleep as deep. None of the children had yet lost that excitement, half fear, half joy, which comes on waking in a strange room, sunlight on unfamiliar walls, momentarily unable to knit together the bits and pieces, curtains, chest of drawers, ottoman, and give an identity to the whole.

  ‘Aunt Patty’s,’ Claire said drowsily when she woke on the first morning.

  ‘We’re in Devon, silly,’ Alice said affectionately. She looked round the poky little room with its sloping walls and white-painted floorboards. ‘Isn’t it heaven?’

  They all agreed there was nothing to compare with a small room tucked away beneath the rafters. Even the lattice window that could not be adjusted without the fear of bringing down the eaves had an enchantment, and as for the basin in which Alice washed dirty socks one morning so that there was no clean water for the rest of the day, in years to come they had only to see a similar ewer and basin to be overcome with nostalgia.

  Once, they went out long after their parents were asleep.

  ‘If we’re caught, we can’t all say we’ve been to the privy,’ Claire protested. ‘We ought to have stayed in and had a midnight feast.’

  But Louise needed something more daring than a midnight feast to stir her imagination.

  They walked down the farm track into a meadow where they stood close, listening to the distant hooting of a barn owl, a scurrying in the grass at their feet, their own breathing. Louise longed for Guy, and for the first time she became aware of an insistent ache in her belly, and she thought, ‘I didn’t know I could miss anyone so much.’ Although the pain brought tears to her eyes, she was pleased by this proof of suffering. Now she knew that she was really in love.

  For Alice and Claire it was all quite different. Although they were growing up, they had not yet achieved the complete separateness of human beings from the natural world. Here in this darkness in which there was only the mass of earth and the enormity of sky, they could experience a sense of mystery and vastness, and yet be aware of the miracle of tiny things close at hand, glow¬worms like stars in the grass. Their breath came light and shallow: they felt themselves embraced in the mystery and were full of wonder and a primitive fear.

  Alice’s hearing was so sharp she felt she could discern the movement of each blade of grass. Beside her, Claire whispered, ‘Doesn’t everything smell? Even the earth smells.’

  When they returned, Louise said, ‘We won’t tell Mummy and Daddy.’ She and Alice looked at Claire. Claire made no objection.

  Their parents thought how well they all behaved. Claire did not complain unduly when she was bitten, Alice did not grumble too often about not being able to swim, and Louise was a good-natured companion to her sisters, and chased the moths out of their bedroom. Stanley said to Judith how blessed they were in their daughters. Only Judith wondered whether this might be the last holiday they would have together as a family. The children had no thought of last things, confident that everything lay ahead of them. Yet, as though unconsciously reluctant to leave childhood behind, they lingered in the lanes, leisurely exploring hedgerows; and the older girls spent hours lying in the meadow, chewing grass and talking. ‘What do they think about?’ Judith thought as she watched Alice and Louise. ‘Lying there for hours on end, just talking and doing nothing.’ If there had ever been a time when she could do nothing for hours, she had forgotten it.

  The holiday represented to the children, and particularly to Alice, a kind of simplicity, not a part of their own childhood but of some other idealized country childhood.

  On their way home, they broke their journey to visit relatives in Sussex, and here Louise one afternoon wandered into a country church. There had been a festival that week, and the little building was full of cheerful, if not always harmonious, colour. The work of decoration had obviously been done by many hands, and Louise was pleased to think that her mother would have made a better job of the altar vases. One person, however, had an outstanding gift. Beneath a neatly written inscription, ‘a Magdalen’, there was a trite little verse, but there was nothing trite about the decoration of the window itself. The container was not visible and the flowers seemed not to thrust upwards, but to have a downward movement, giving the appearance of a robe in which one colour gradually shaded into another. A pale, waxy pink warmed to apricot and then the flamboyant beauty of poppies with their dark centres yielded to a damask rose, and the rose deepened to crimson folds which fell in drifts of amethyst and violet and came to rest in the fullness of deep purple. Louise was much moved. This was the way to speak; they could throw away all the texts and sermons! ‘This says it all,’ she said to herself ecstatically, although in fact she had very little notion of what it was that the flowers were saying. She thought perhaps that she could sketch it, and then she thought that being a rotten artist, she would only spoil it by attempting to translate it to paper. She would sit and look, making no attempt to capture it. And this she did, emptying her mind so that she experienced an intense reality in which all the complex, quivering strands of life came together and were contained in the one still image. She felt enriched when eventually she walked out of the church and stood in the sunlight, watching sheep grazing in the graveyard.

  Chapter Twelve

  The cane-mender sat in the gutter mending one of the dining-room chairs, and Claire and Judith watched him. He came from near Wrexham, where there had been a bad colliery disaster in September.

  ‘Closed up the pit and left all those men down there; sealed it up and left them to die,’ he said.

  ‘Wasn’t gas coming up the shaft?’ Judith asked.

  He looked at her, his face beneath his blue cap hard and wrinkled as a walnut. ‘Ay, so they said.’

  ‘I don’t think they would just leave men to die, would they?’

  ‘If you’d seen the things I’ve seen, you wouldn’t say that.’

  Claire wondered what else he had seen. The man’s mouth was tightly pleated, and he went on with his task as though she and her mother were not there.

  Alice was sitting at the kitchen table looking at pictures of Princess Marina’s trousseau. When Claire tried to talk about the colliery disaster she looked up, keeping a finger on a woollen coat with a draped collar of astrakhan, and said to her mother, ‘When are we going to have another dog?’

  Claire went upstairs to their bedroom. The conversation had upset her, not only because of the men who had been left to die, but because it reminded her of Maisie, whose uncle was a miner. What was Maisie doing now that she did not want Claire’s friendship any more? Probably she was out with her new friends, the slum girls who shouted coarse words at Claire when she and Alice went to Lyons in Shepherd’s Bush Green.

  When Maisie suddenly turned against her, Claire had run home and, flinging open the kitchen door, she had cried bitterly. Her mother had offered practical comfort. ‘Let’s walk down to the pet shop and see if the tortoise is still there.’ Claire, needing a major modification in human behaviour, had been angry at being offered a tortoise.

  ‘You’ll have to come to terms with small comforts, or you’ll be very unhappy when you grow up,’ her mother had said. But Claire would not accept this, and so had lost both Maisie and the tortoise.

  How unfair life was! Alice, who had so many friends, had only been in her new form a few weeks before she had made another friend, Irene.

  She heard Alice’s footsteps on the stairs and squeezed out a few tears; but Alice walked straight past her to the chest of drawers. ‘Cheer up,’ she said, without turning her head to look at Claire. ‘Mummy says we can have a dog, but we’ve got to take it out for walks and not always leave it to her.’

  ‘I don’t want a dog. I want Maisie.’

  ‘Do you? I’d much sooner have a dog.’

  Alice took a sanitary towel from the top drawer and went out of the ro
om. She had had her first period the day after the family came back from the summer holiday. On her return to school she had joined those in her form who were excused swimming once a month. She was surprised that this sign of womanhood should come to her before Daphne.

  She wrapped the soiled sanitary towel in newspaper and took it downstairs to burn in the kitchen stove. Her mother was turning out a brawn and she said, ‘Here, take Princess Marina upstairs. I can’t have all this clutter in the kitchen. Show the pictures to Claire, or play a game with her.’

  ‘I’m sick of Claire.’

  ‘And don’t forget to dust your bedroom.’

  Alice was beginning to feel obscurely different; but if this was the maturing process, then it seemed she was maturing into a rather nasty person. For one thing, she was increasingly resentful of all the moral duties which were imposed on her, and she had recently made one small, mean rebellion. Each year the school assembled to consider the disposal of the money which had been collected for charities. The staff, although present, Miss Blaize presiding, took no part in the allocation process. Speeches were made urging the merits of particular charities, and the girls then voted. As a result of this exercise in democracy, the Holloway Prisoners’ Aid Society regularly topped the list because the girl who spoke for it, as well as being articulate and persuasive, had no little gift for drama. For several years, Alice had spoken for the Sunshine Homes for Blind Babies. This year, she had refused to speak. She admitted that no blind baby could be held in any way responsible for the moral pressures which so irked her, that to abandon blind babies was an act for which there could be no pardon: nevertheless, she had abandoned them, and it was no thanks to her that they improved their standing, a more eloquent speaker taking up their cause.