Spilt Milk Read online

  Amanda Hodgkinson

  SPILT MILK

  Contents

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Two

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Follow Penguin

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Amanda Hodgkinson was born in Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset and grew up in Essex and Suffolk. She currently lives in south-west France with her husband. Her first novel, 22 Britannia Road, is available in Penguin.

  For Little Pan and Kitty, with love.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  SPILT MILK

  Praise for 22 Britannia Road:

  ‘So convincing, completely gripping, admirable’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Powerful, stark and beautiful. Alive to the compromises, deceptions and passions that traumatic situations can demand’

  Marie Claire

  ‘An affecting story, extremely well told’

  The Times

  ‘A moving, powerful account of the day-to-day struggle for survival’

  Sunday Times

  ‘A most accomplished first novel. Powerful story-telling and entirely convincing in its evocation of post-war England’

  Penelope Lively

  ‘Gripping … a deeply felt debut’

  Helen Simonson

  ‘Harrowing, terrifying, heartbreaking, incredibly moving. Prepare to be left teary-eyed more than once’

  Stylist

  ‘A riveting historical novel, set in post-WWII England … crimes of love and war’

  Oprah.com

  ‘Convincing, touching’

  Independent on Sunday

  ‘A haunting debut’

  Easy Living

  ‘A moving WWII debut’

  Grazia

  ‘Readable and engaging throughout’

  Financial Times

  We step and do not step into the same river, we are and we are not.

  Heraclitus

  They were a mend-and-make-do kind of family and you had to love them for it. For their patchwork quilt of births, deaths and marriages, the mistakes and foolish regrets, and all the pretty little silken scraps of good things too. They had come together for a family picnic that day. Nellie sat in her deckchair in the shade of summer-green willows, watching them arrive.

  The slow procession of men, women and children made their way down to the riverbank, stepping through long grass, one after the other, their hands drifting through the day’s fragile bloom of field poppies, all the newborn crimson petals falling at their touch.

  The murmur of voices, the greetings and talk turned to seasons remembered, harvests and ploughing, the days of childhood. They discussed winters long ago gone, whose legendary harshness was in retrospect to be marvelled at and even doubted a little, particularly this deep in the year when the barley fields were pale gold and in the distance the village with its church spire and the tarmac roads beyond shimmered into the vagueness of a heat haze.

  Black and white farm dogs lay low, eyeing the Tupperware boxes of sandwiches and sausage rolls. The transistor radio announced cricket scores. A tartan rug was spread out by the bulrushes, and the baby in its frilly white knickers and matching bonnet wriggled and laughed while the women cooed over her. Sunburnt men sprawled in the grass with bottled beers, straw hats tipped low across their brows.

  Resemblances were strong among them, and Nellie often thought the missing ones, those who were absent today, would be no different. They would no doubt have inherited the stubborn streak that ran in the family, the same tendency to freckle in the sun, the same deep eyes and perhaps the overfull upper lip that must have come from her mother originally and had somehow found its way through generations of faces, so that some of the family shared what they called the ‘Marsh sisters’ look’.

  Oh, heavens, Nellie thought, eyeing the new baby. And how did I get to be so old?

  She looked at the river, its cool waters running through the fields. She longed to take off her shoes and stockings and dip her feet in its currents once again. A frog croaked and leapt in the reeds. As a young girl Nellie had known love by this river and too much sorrow to speak of. She knew its heart and what it guarded there, down where fish the colour of stones lurked like secrets in its dark and silted bed.

  A boat was pushed out onto the water. The oars splashed. Nellie listened to the talk around her, the baby babbling, the creak of the poplar trees. She could feel the earth gathering itself under her feet. The low buzz of things growing. The river that would run on into the future. She remembered the young woman she had once been. Go on, she urged her memories. Go on. Swim!

  Part One

  One

  Their eyes were the colour of the river. Grey as rain-swelled waters. It was how you knew the three of them were related. Nellie, Vivian and Rose Marsh.

  They lived miles outside the village, down by the river which curved like the blade of a hay sickle around their home. No children needed loving or scolding in their two-up, two-down thatched cottage, no men needed breakfasts cooked or work clothes mended, but there was still plenty to occupy the women.

  Rose believed in the glory of work and each morning the sisters left their beds as though their names had been called, rising to their chores before dawn. There was the rustle of skirts, the rough sound of boots on wooden floors, a chorus of coughing, sleep still thick in their lungs. The stove door slammed, water boiled. Chamber pots were emptied, the clank of the ash bucket handle ringing out in the silence that hung over meadows and woodland.

  Nellie rinsed the chamber pots under the water pump by the garden gate. This morning she had a feeling something was going to happen, and she wasn’t sure whether it was good or bad. She hoped it wasn’t bad luck stirring in the March wind. She would go in soon and tell Rose and Vivian what she felt. They’d probably roll their eyes. Rose might say she was a farm worker, not a fortune-teller.

  She touched the rabbit’s paw in her pocket and decided it would be good luck. They deserved a change in fortune. Rose was in poor health again. The potato clamp was nearly empty, and mice had got at the flour bin last week when Vivian left the lid off.

  She was about to go in when she heard footsteps and in the dim light saw a man walking along the grassy track towards the cottage. He had a knapsack on his back, his hat pulled low over his ears, his collar turned up. He walked quickly, as though he might be carrying news. With sudden excitement Nellie imagined him stopping at the cottage. Perhaps he was a distant relative. Another family member long forgotten, come to change their lives and fortunes? She waited, watching. He had come for a reason, surely?

  He took the path down to the river away from the cottage, past the handsome black poplar trees which gave their cottage its name. As he walked away, Nellie felt a sense of disappointment that was so deep, it was as though she had suffered a great loss. She knew there was no sense in it – nobody ever visited them – yet she had been sure he was going to speak to her. He walked on, past the small wooden jetty where fishermen tied punts and boats in the summer
months. Nellie loved to swim there, a place where the river bed dropped down into deeper water. Even in winter, she braved its heart-stopping coldness.

  A flock of starlings shook themselves noisily out of the trees, streaming upwards into the turquoise sky. When she looked again, the man was gone and her sisters were at the door, calling her inside.

  All through breakfast there was much talk and discussion. It dispelled Nellie’s earlier low spirits, replacing them with a feeling of purpose. She had been the one who had seen the man. It felt like an important claim to make.

  ‘Was he tall?’ asked Vivian, pouring honey on her porridge and licking a drop of spilt sweetness from her finger.

  ‘Not terribly.’

  ‘Short then?’

  Nellie shook her head.

  ‘He was whistling. Though I didn’t recognize the tune.’

  ‘A whistler and a crowing hen will bring the devil from his den,’ said Rose briskly. ‘We should lock the door today.’

  Rose didn’t like a stranger coming so close to the cottage. She opened a newspaper and began searching for stories of escaped convicts or drunken soldiers absconding from barracks. Single men looked for wives around here. A woman could be bought for seven shillings and sixpence, the cost of a marriage licence. A married man got himself a better wage on a farm than a single one.

  Rose looked at Vivian eating porridge, twenty-three years old, her blonde hair swept into a bun. Nellie, fifteen months younger, sat beside her. Her shoulder-length dark brown hair was plaited in a tight style that pulled at the corners of her eyes. She was strong-looking. Moon-faced with the smooth features of a carved saint. She was the one who most closely resembled Mother.

  When their father died, Rose and Mother had lived in this cottage with the new baby Nellie and toddling Vivian. It had been a brief time of perfect happiness after the misery of losing Father. And then, just after Nellie’s second birthday, Mother caught diphtheria, brought to their East Anglian village by city children come from London to holiday at Hymes Court, the big estate fifteen miles away. Rose was seventeen when Mother died, just a child herself. The sense of abandonment burned within her even now, so many years later. There had been anger too, at the unfairness of being left to raise the girls alone. In those early years of bringing them up, working at the Langhams’ farm, struggling to keep them fed and clothed, Rose’s dreams had been filled with ways of losing the children. She’d imagined forests where she might leave them. She’d dreamed of market-day crowds, the girls in their straw hats, neat pinafores and button-up boots, motionless as pale stones, and she hurrying away from them, fast as rainwater rushing down a drain.

  Some nights when Rose had longed for sleep, after a day’s work at the Langhams’ farm, when the little girls suffered from illness and would not settle, she remembered the story of Moses. He was floated downriver by his mother and found by the Pharaoh’s daughter who then unknowingly employed the mother to care for the boy. As the children’s coughing and crying filled Rose’s exhausted hours, the story made more and more sense to her. She would float them down the river in the hope that some rich lady might find them.

  In the light of morning though, she always changed her mind. How could Moses’ mother have abandoned the child, knowing the river might take him for itself?

  ‘I suppose I am stuck with you,’ she told the girls. She remembered how their grey eyes had stared anxiously up at her. How they had clung to her skirts.

  Seasons came and went and came again, until one day Rose looked at the sisters and was shocked. They were young women, just as she had once been. Her fears over raising them were replaced by another fear. That they might leave her. So she had decided they would be spinsters, all three of them, and live here for the rest of their lives, together. Quietly. Hidden away from the world.

  Rose ran her finger across the newspaper pages, turning them carefully.

  ‘There’s nothing here about escaped prisoners or soldiers absconding. This man had a knapsack, you say?’

  ‘That’s right. And a black billycock hat.’

  ‘I’ll ask Mr Langham,’ said Rose, closing up the newspaper. ‘I believe he was taking on a new man at the stack yard. Maybe that’s who your stranger is. Just a nobody.’

  Nellie watched Rose scanning the newspaper. Her elder sister wasn’t interested in the latest stories of suffragettes and Lloyd George’s hatred of them. Rose didn’t want to read about Home Rule in Ireland or polar explorers in lands of snow and ice. The sinking of the Titanic the year before, in 1912, meant nothing to her. Ships can do two things, she said. They can float or they can sink. Where’s the news in that?

  Rose loved stories closer to home. Reports of vagrants stealing food from honest tables, their knapsacks bulging with other people’s belongings. The local gazette was her preferred reading. It was full of dreadful stories that made them lock their door at night and fear the creaking sounds of the isolated house.

  Since childhood, Rose had regaled Nellie and Vivian with other scandalous tales of commercial travellers preying on young women. Men who stole kisses and more from ignorant country girls hankering after romance and feathers for their hats. According to Rose, these men courted lonely countrywomen, offering love like a sleight of hand, a card trick, a gift they gave and took back, leaving behind bitter husbands and unwanted children who looked nothing like anybody else and grew up with roving ways. The stories were meant to frighten Nellie and Vivian, but secretly they were thrilled by them.

  Nellie longed to glimpse the salesmen who brought their hand carts into the village, their footsteps quiet as falling snow. The sisters’ cottage was too far from the village for them to come calling. She wanted to be sold ribbons and dainties and pills for ailments. To be persuaded to buy miracle cures for disorders of women, for rickets and palpitations of the heart.

  Nellie watched Rose close up the newspaper and fold it neatly, adding it to the pile on the dresser. Had their elder sister been their carer all these years, or their gaoler?

  ‘He didn’t look dangerous to me,’ she said.

  ‘They never do,’ replied Rose.

  Nellie glanced at the sky through the small kitchen window. It was going to rain. That’s what she had felt earlier. Not luck. Just a change in the weather. The disappointment she’d felt when the man turned away from the cottage settled on her once more.

  It poured for three days, curtains of rain that shut down the landscape. Rose went to work in the Langhams’ farm kitchens and came home at night with news that the river had flooded in the next village. The mystery of the man was solved. He was a hired hand come to take the place of a lad who’d been kicked by a carthorse a few weeks earlier.

  Nellie and Vivian exchanged disappointed glances. They had discussed him at night in their shared bed, another one of their sweet, mad, whispered conversations. They’d imagined him as a rich man, then a poor man, or a travelling magician pulling rabbits from his hat.

  Vivian, who read as many romance novels as she could persuade the vicar’s wife to lend her, had decided he was a man betrayed by his sweetheart. Nellie, always warm-hearted, imagining his sorrow, said he must be walking the length of Britain to forget her. By the time he got to Scotland, she was sure he would not be able to recall her name.

  ‘Oh no,’ Vivian had said, pressing her hand to her breast. She was the kind of girl who tended to brood on things. ‘Oh no, you’re completely wrong, Nellie.’

  He would remember his sweetheart for ever. For eternity. True love was like that. It could never be forgotten in a lifetime.

  ‘A farmhand?’ Nellie asked Rose. ‘You are sure it was him?’

  ‘That’s right. A hired hand.’

  Nellie and Vivian pulled glum faces. There was nothing remotely interesting about a farmhand.

  On the fourth day the rain hadn’t stopped and Rose asked Nellie to dig out the ditches by the house. Rose coughed and spat a bloom of redness into a handkerchief. ‘Mr Langham will be sending a farm boy over with san
dbags. Put them across the door.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ said Vivian. ‘Stay home today, Rose. You should rest.’

  Rose breathed in, a wheezing sound. She waved her hand to bat Vivian away. ‘Don’t fuss over me. I’m staying at the farm tonight as Mrs Langham’s son has been taken poorly. I’ll be back tomorrow.’

  Nellie fetched a clean cambric hanky for her. Lavender scented, its edges rolled and stitched by Vivian. Rose was worn down by work and ill health but she would not rest. Vivian wrapped a scarf around Rose’s neck and stood on tiptoe to kiss her cheek.

  They watched her go along the riverbank. Always the same in her old black coat and short-brimmed hat. Today she had a grain sack around her shoulders, a small protection against the driving rain. She was as tall as a man and bony, with hunched shoulders. She disappeared into the storm with the funny stiff-legged gait she had, her wispy plait the colour of bonfire smoke. What colour her hair had once been was unknown. Blonde, perhaps? She was a private woman who rejected any gestures of affection between them. Rose was loyal and yet unknowable, a mystery just as much as a fixture in Nellie’s life.

  All morning, Nellie dug ditches. Rainwater dripped in her eyes and off the end of her nose. Her hat flapped wetly against her face, and her skirt clung to her legs. By the afternoon, as the wind slanted the rain sideways, she was tired and shivering. She climbed out of the ditch and went inside.

  ‘I’ve prepared a bath for you,’ said Vivian, hurrying her in, helping her out of her wet clothes, undoing the hooks and eyes on her dress, the laces on her hobnail boots.