Spilt Milk Read online

  ‘She’s got a grip!’ he yelled, pretending Nellie had hurt his hand. He wore a signet ring on his little finger. He showed it to Nellie. A slab of silver and gold with a B engraved upon it. ‘Bertha,’ he said, waving his little finger at her. ‘Our dear mother, God rest her. Got to look after family, haven’t you? I’m heartily glad to see you both.’ He patted Henry on the back. ‘Who’d have thought an army man like you would marry? Let’s get you a drink, both of you. I’ll show you where you’re going to be living. It’s not much, Nellie, Henry will tell you, but I call it home.’

  There was a kitchen at the back of the pub. That’s where they would eat their meals. It smelled of mice, Nellie thought. Up a flight of dark wooden stairs, thirteen in all, were three bedrooms and a bathroom with a bath on claw feet that wasn’t plumbed in. ‘There is a box room too,’ George said, opening a door to reveal a narrow staircase and a soft blade of light coming from a window above.

  In the kitchen a long table was covered in newspapers and pots and pans. The cooking range was thick with grease. ‘The cleaning lady doesn’t like cleaning,’ said George apologetically. ‘Our sister, Lydia – oh, I told her you were coming, Henry, so beware of visits from her – says I should sack the woman.’

  Henry laughed. He told Nellie his dreadful, overbearing sister might just be right for once in her life.

  The big square sink under a dirty-paned window faced a yard out back. In the backyard was an elder tree. A tree of luck. In the country, every house had one in the garden. Its branches were black as coal, its leaves grimy and limp. It was as soot-covered as the railway arches outside. Nellie thought she might like to wash its leaves clean so she could see its greenery.

  ‘I’m busiest on Fridays and Saturdays,’ George said. ‘I lost a lot of our customers to the King’s shilling, but they’re coming back now, poor beggars. I’ve got their wives as customers too. The war brought them out on their own, and I say it’s all to the good. Women should be allowed to get out once in a while, hey? And don’t they love a sing-song. I play a bit of piano and do some of the old songs. Weekdays when it’s quiet, I offer a pinch of snuff and a look at the Sporting Life with every drink. That’s for the gents. But you’ll see. You’ll get used to the work. And having our very own Mrs Farr behind the bar will bring a touch of class. Oh yes, you’ll be very good for business, Nellie. I do hope you’ll like it here, both of you.’

  There was a loud rumbling sound and the dresser against the wall began to shake. Henry grabbed the edge of the table with both hands. Nellie moved towards him as he threw his arms over his head, dropping to the floor.

  ‘That’s a train going past,’ said George, pretending to hold a wall up with his hand. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

  The noise died away and the china on the dresser ceased its rattling. Nellie breathed in and then out slowly, as if testing the air. Henry was rocking quietly beside her. Sunlight broke through the clouds outside, and light filled the windows. A look passed between Nellie and George as they helped Henry into a chair. She could see George hadn’t expected his brother to be in such poor shape.

  ‘My dear brother, it seems you’ve got yourself an angel here,’ George said, his brown eyes bright with conviction.

  Her first night in London, Nellie hardly slept. She lay in her new bedroom, staring at the window. In the bedroom next door, her husband’s brother lay in bed. She could hear him snoring. In the room across the hall, Henry was stretched out. She hoped his sleep was dreamless. She heard a group of men and women walking loudly under her window, their voices rising in laughter. They sounded carefree. That’s how she would be from now on. No more back-breaking farm work to wear her down. She had moved to the city.

  She rose early the next morning, as was her habit, and at dawn in the backyard watched the city make itself solid, coming out of the darkness, its skyline firm against the spreading grey light. Henry limped outside and sat on a stack of beer barrels, his walking stick across his knees. Sunlight fell across dirty cobblestones. Dandelions flowered hopefully in dark corners. It wasn’t quite the Garden of Eden, Henry said, picking one of the small flowers and handing it to Nellie. But it was going to be home for them from now on.

  Nellie put the flower in her hair. Vivian would have laughed to see her. ‘Wet-the-beds’ they used to call the ragged yellow weeds. She was glad to be far away from her sister. She loved her but the weight of the past pulled at that love, making it awkward and complicated. The river burial still haunted Nellie, and she wanted to forget. Every time she saw Vivian it brought back thoughts of the baby. Joe Ferier’s baby. A creature born out of a betrayal; a secret to be hidden. Rose had brought Vivian and Nellie up as spinsters, not as potential wives and mothers. No wonder poor Josephine had died. They did not have the right maternal instincts, she suspected, either of them. She picked a dandelion, shook the soot from its petals and put it in Henry’s lapel. She bent again and picked one for George.

  Right off, Nellie loved the pub. The first few weeks serving drinks the customers laughed at her country accent and made her feel shy and stupid, but George told her to ignore them. His clientele were all a rum lot of foreigners and cockneys anyway. Her country accent was just one more to add to the mix. ‘You be yourself, Nellie,’ he said as he closed up for the night. He bolted the door and lifted his fists, dancing across the room towards her. ‘And if anybody gives you trouble, give me the nod and I’ll sort them out for you.’

  George poured them both a drink. A tot of rum for him; a glass of milk stout for her. ‘A respectable lady’s drink,’ he said. ‘Yes, you just be yourself,’ he said again, and she smiled at him, feeling a blush come to her cheeks. A lady. That’s just how he made her feel. He held her gaze for a moment before she looked away. The gas lights had been dimmed, and in the flickering golden light the mirrors behind the bar sparkled. She watched George shake a bucket of sawdust out on the floor. Its smell reminded Nellie of the pine trees back home. She breathed in the scent.

  ‘We wandered in the shadow of the pines, my love and I,’ sang George, and they both began laughing as he threw the sawdust up in the air and tap-danced through the falling dust.

  Henry insisted George take Nellie sightseeing. Just because his nerves meant he couldn’t go riding on buses and trams didn’t mean she had to stay home. George took her to music halls and theatres, fairgrounds and boxing matches. Big department stores, with mirrors everywhere and shining marble floors, delighted her. She thought of her childhood and her youth spent in the cottage, the quietness of her life. All that time, there had existed this city, utterly unknown to her.

  On George’s urgings she bought a pot of face powder, a lipstick and a white ostrich-feather scarf that she draped around her shoulders. And still, wearing all her new clothes, she walked, as Henry said fondly one night, like a farm worker coming over rough ground, hoping to get home before dusk.

  George took Nellie to cafés and market-stall vendors. She tasted foods she had never tried before. Jellied eels, hot salt beef, Dutch herrings and penny bagels, faggots and mash, doughnuts and cream cakes. Bright orange salmon eggs.

  ‘Our little country peasant,’ said George fondly. ‘I like a woman who eats well. Let’s go and have an Italian ice cream. I bet you’ve never tried pistachio before.’

  In bed at night, Nellie closed her eyes, a hand on her full belly, indigestion and wind making her draw her knees up. She dreamed vividly. There were people everywhere, swarming shapes of crowds, fast and fluid as grain pouring from a torn sack. She and Henry and George were pushing their way through city streets, the three of them linking arms. Then they were in the pub kitchen and she was preparing a mutton stew, explaining how her sister Rose had taught her to cook. Vivian appeared with a child in her arms and said it was Nellie’s. Henry said it couldn’t be. George laughed at the thought of it, his hand stroking Nellie’s cheek, offering her salmon eggs on a small silver spoon. The others disappeared and there were just her and George. He fed her and stroked her hair
. He poured the eggs into her mouth on the tip of a spoon and they popped on her tongue, silky, watery, and full of the memories of wide rivers. When she woke before dawn, she opened her eyes and lay in a sleepy state, trying to recapture her dreams.

  By Christmas they had become a tight little unit. No need for words a lot of the time. In the empty hours when the pub was closed up, Nellie cooked meals, conjuring up good things from scraps and leftovers. Henry poured gin. George tinkered on the piano and sang old music-hall numbers.

  When Henry was ill and his melancholic moods kept him in bed, hallucinating and ranting, Nellie and George cared for him together. They were resolute that no doctors should be called. There would be no hospitals or mental wards for Henry. That, Nellie had promised him long ago.

  ‘George is a good man,’ Henry said when he went down with bronchitis again, his lungs forever weakened by the wartime gas. ‘He’ll look after you, Nell. I can’t. George’s got a soft spot for you. Fallen for your country charms, like I did. If I die I don’t mind because I’ll have ended my days here with you.’

  ‘Get along with you,’ she scolded. ‘You should be on the stage.’

  ‘I am serious. You must marry George when I’m gone.’

  ‘Now that is ridiculous!’ she said, pulling his bedcovers straight. ‘What melodramatic nonsense you come out with, Henry Farr.’

  More and more, Henry had become self-pitying, and she wasn’t sure how to treat him so she was brisk with him, hoping that was right. She wiped his brow and bent to kiss his cheek. There were tears at the corners of his tight-closed eyes.

  On Sundays when the pub was closed, George and Nellie went to the cinema. Afterwards they acted out the films for Henry. Charlie Chaplin’s film The Immigrant had them all in stitches.

  ‘You’re the best tramp I’ve ever seen,’ said Henry from his chair by the fireplace. He was in good spirits again. Robust in his humour. Quick-witted, as she liked him to be. He adjusted the blanket over his knee. ‘George, show me the penny trick again.’

  George put some music on the gramophone. A new American tune he loved, ‘Shine on, Harvest Moon’. He grabbed a bowler hat from the hat stand and explained he was the little tramp in the story, finding a penny, giving it away, getting it back again. He shook his trouser leg and opened his eyes wide, dropping a coin on the tiled floor. He picked the coin up and dropped it again and lost it to Nellie, who was playing both the waiter and the girl in the film. She laughed too much and forgot which character she was.

  ‘And does he get the girl?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Of course he gets the girl,’ said George. He swung his arms around Nellie and spun her towards Henry. ‘It’s a hard job getting to kiss the leading lady,’ he laughed, letting go of her.

  ‘That’s my job,’ said Henry. Nellie leaned over him and pressed her lips to his forehead. The music rolled over them and when the record ended they played it again, none of them wanting the moment to end. ‘Shine on,’ George sang in a deep, bass voice, taking Nellie in his arms and dancing her around the room. The three of them sang lustily together. ‘Shine on, harvest moon, for me and my gal.’

  One night in the spring, Nellie woke with a start. She got up, tiptoeing downstairs in her nightdress, her long hair in plaits. It was pleasant to go out into the backyard and stand barefoot on the cobbles, watching the city sky. She liked the smog and the pale yellow bowl of light that hung over the buildings. It made her feel she was part of something vast and constantly changing. Fog licked around her ankles, and her flannel nightie clung to her body. Noise moved differently in the night. A girl’s high-pitched laughter might come from the house next door or from far over the dirty Thames river. The creak and groan of machinery could be near or miles away. How her life had changed. She could hardly remember the woman she had been when she first arrived in London, a silent creature, shocked by the dense stirrings of a city. She still remembered nights by the river, so empty and silent the papery flutter of a bat’s wing had made her flinch; the click of her boots on a country lane when she walked in moonlight, the loneliest sound she knew.

  Candlelight flickered in the kitchen window. The kitchen door opened. In the rim of a beer barrel, the reflection of a gold signet ring caught her eye, the flash of it like a winking star.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’

  ‘I hope I didn’t wake you.’

  ‘I heard you pass by my door. We’re a nice little family, you, me and Henry. But, well, I confess I don’t know what to do. You’ve got me thinking things I oughtn’t be thinking, Nellie. I’m an honest man and Henry is too. Me and him have had a talk.’

  ‘You’ve talked about me?’

  ‘Nellie, I won’t lie to you. I’ve had my share of romances. I’m not going to pretend I haven’t. But I’ve come a cropper with you. So, yes, me and my brother have had a chat.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Henry wants you to be happy. He knows he can’t give you what a wife should have. I think you might be fond of me too. We can find a way to make this work, the three of us. If you’re willing.’

  Nellie swayed beside him. She held her breath.

  ‘Darling girl,’ he said as a train rattled past. ‘It’ll be all right. Me and Henry, we’ll look after you.’

  Nellie was twenty-nine years old. Ever since Joe kissed her seven years ago, when he destroyed her trusting nature, she had refused to think about how it might feel to lie in a man’s arms. From the lewd chit-chat of women in the pub she had an idea of what sex might be about, though those women who winked and giggled and laughed like crows made it sound as rowdy as a village tug-of-war or a wrestling match carried out in the dark. Sex was something men wanted and women tried to wriggle out of.

  And yet Vivian had not made it sound like that. She’d said she had been undone by her own desires. That she had been controlled by them. Nellie thought she understood that now. Her body ached for George.

  And wasn’t it true that a tree could stand straight for years even as the soil under its roots might be ebbing away? When it fell, and who knew what would start that chain of events off, it fell heavily, suddenly, all its tons of weight and years of growth keeling over in a heartbeat.

  George stroked the back of her hand with his fingertip. Nellie moved closer. In this new city, in this new peacetime, anything seemed possible.

  It was a very small baby that arrived in May 1921, a month earlier than the doctor had said it would. The child had tufted red hair and a wrinkled, ancient look to her. She cried, a hiccuping sound, damp as a rain-filled gutter. She had a mouth that puckered and pouted, caught between a smile and a fluid tearfulness. Such a tiny scrap of a thing, and reliant on Nellie to care for her. ‘Don’t cry,’ Nellie whispered. ‘Please don’t cry.’ The baby’s arms and legs were skinny as wishbones. Nellie feared they might snap in her trembling hands. ‘I’m a bit clumsy,’ she told the baby. ‘I’m no good with fragile things.’

  They called her Bertha after Henry and George’s mother, but the baby was so small, a fledgling creature, that George nicknamed her Birdie and it stuck.

  ‘She’s a dear thing,’ said George, peering at her in her Moses basket. ‘If you were the only girl in the world,’ he sang. Nellie heard Henry moving about in his room upstairs. ‘Sshh,’ she said, pressing a finger to George’s lips. It didn’t seem right to flaunt their joy over the child.

  ‘Am I your legal husband?’ Henry had asked Nellie when she first broke the news to him. George stood leaning against the sink in the kitchen. Henry sat at the table. Nellie stood by the door, wringing her hands, chastened and tearful. She was already five months pregnant and could not hide it any longer.

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  ‘So if I am your husband, this child will be mine whether I like it or not?’

  ‘Well, yes, but …’

  ‘I encouraged this,’ he said, and his face was hard and sombre. ‘I let it happen. It’s all right, Nellie. People will just think there’s still a bit of fire in the old wreck of a husban
d you have. When it’s born you’ll have to get a nurse for the kid, that’s all I ask. Stop crying now. I can’t bear to see it. Come on, chin up. I’ll stand by you, Nellie.’

  Nellie could not look at him for the shame of it. Her face burned, and she wrung her hands together.

  ‘Thank you, Henry.’

  ‘Don’t thank me. I don’t give a whore’s gin ration what you and George get up to, but people have to know the child is mine. Nobody must ever think otherwise. For the child’s sake as much as for my own. We’ll have it fostered out when the time comes.’

  ‘Understood,’ said George, crossing the room and reaching for the rum bottle. ‘I’ll pick up the tab for that one. Leave it to me.’

  ‘You’re a good man, Henry,’ said Nellie. ‘I’ll carry the truth of this to the grave. I promise.’

  Henry raised no further objections. When the baby was born he reminded them of the need to find a foster home, and when Birdie was two months old George saw to it that a Mrs White took the child.

  For a year, Birdie lived three streets away. Mrs White had been born in Glasgow, and though she’d lived in London most of her life, her accent was full of her hometown. She had half a dozen children in her care. She was an elderly nurse, thin-faced and humourless. The tendons in her wrists stood out, her hands were blue-veined and over-scrubbed, the nails cut so short the skin around them was red and sore-looking. Nellie wasn’t sure she wanted to hand her daughter over to her.

  ‘Now then,’ Mrs White said, ‘certain things about bairns. Condensed milk is best. Cow’s milk must be sweetened with sugar. Never breastfeed. A wee tot raised on the diddy will have a common, weak character in later life.

  ‘Never pick up your baby unless it is to feed or to change its nappies. Teach them there are rules. Avoid hugging. If you must, a kiss on the top of the head will suffice. Do not ruin children with gifts and sentimental nonsense.’